So, how will The Apprentice go this week?
The promos make it look like the board room comes down to Nick and Amy. Could it be? This soon?
Those who commented here last week had these predictions for the final winner:
On Monday night, David Letterman showed a clip of the President giving a speech. Behind the President was a young teenage boy clearly not too involved in what the President had to say. The film is edited to show the boy’s yawns, his stretches, his all but falling asleep. It’s pretty funny, but not exactly newsworthy.
On Tuesday night, Letterman showed a clip of a CNN anchor woman reporting that according to the White House the kid wasn’t at the speech. Letterman calls this a lie. Then he showed another clip of CNN saying that the White House now says that the kid was at the speech, but not where Letterman shows him, i.e., directly behind the President. Letterman calls that a lie, too.
You can see both Letterman clips at Over/Spun.
All of this was brought to NewMexiKen’s attention by Atrios at Eschaton.
From AP via the The Indianapolis Star:
Officials have banned pink clothing for the remainder of the school year out of concerns that the color has become associated with gang activity. …
“There is no evidence of gang activity. But because of the growing use of the color pink we decided to be proactive. Girls and boys are supposed to avoid wearing pink,” Berta said Monday.
None of the district’s 6,500 students have been disciplined for wearing pink, he said.
In case you were wondering, the two “regular season” games played in Tokyo were Yankee road games, Tampa Bay home games. (They split the series 1-1).
The MLB season opens on this side of the Pacific on Sunday evening, Boston at Baltimore.
From Wired News: Net Hoaxes Snare Fools All Year
Particular favorite of NewMexiKen: “the Alabama Legislature had changed the value of pi from 3.14 to the biblical value of 3.0.”
The incredible Gordie Howe is 76 today.
Gordie Howe is referred to as simply “Mr. Hockey”. World War II had just ended when he first entered the National Hockey League, and when he played his final NHL season 33 years later, Wayne Gretzky was playing his first. Over those five decades, Howe didn’t just survive, he was dominant - on the scoring lists, in battles in the corners, on game-winning goals and when the year-end awards were handed out. He was a big man, though by modern standards no behemoth, but what set him apart was his incredible strength.
Read more from the Hockey Hall of Fame.
March 31st is apparently a good date to open on Broadway.
The Rodgers and Hammerstein musical ”Oklahoma!” opened on Broadway on this date in 1943.
”The Glass Menagerie” by Tennessee Williams opened on Broadway on this date in 1945.
President Johnson, 36 years ago tonight.
Read Johnson Says He Won’t Run from The New York Times.
Listen to LBJ. [107KB wav]
A couple of items from the Los Angeles Times Morning Briefing today.
Different recollections: A number of readers e-mailed in response to an item about Bill Walton’s 21-for-22 effort against Memphis State in 1973, disputing reader Cy Bolton’s claim the one miss was actually an illegal dunk.
Some thought the one miss was because of an “offensive basket interference” call, but we’ll go with older brother Bruce Walton’s version. He and a few others said Walton did miss a shot in the first half — a tip of a lob pass from Greg Lee that rimmed out.
Added Bruce Walton, “He was called for offensive basket interference four or five times in the game. Without those ‘bad calls’ he would have been 25 for 26 or 26 for 27, which would have been even more incredible.”
A torch of irony: Regarding the status of Olympic Stadium in Athens, Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle writes, “If everything goes smoothly, the torch relay will end at the opening ceremony when the last torch bearer runs into the stadium and welds the roof in place.”
On Sunday, NewMexiKen posted Tax Cuts 101 (or one way of looking at it). Today, an individual commenting wrote, “the phd from georgia says that he didnt write the example on taxcuts.”
NewMexiKen contacted the person who commented and he replied with a copy of an email from David Kamerschen, the professor to whom the story is attributed. Kamerschen wrote, “I DID NOT WRITE THE TAX STORY AND I DO NOT KNOW WHO DID.” The email is dated today.
Three Bed Two Bath has some nice words —
NewMexiKen has officially moved over to Movable Type. Go to his site and congratulate him, and feast at a site that is like the ultimate page-a-day calendar.
Three Bed Two Bath was the first blog to link to NewMexiKen!
Backpacking Destinations - Paradise Found — An excellent, reasonably balanced article on Glen Canyon and Lake Powell from Backpacker Southwest Editor Annette McGivney. Drought has reduced water levels 100 feet so “that it’s suddenly possible for backpackers to explore arches, alcoves, and Anasazi art that has been underwater for a generation.”
Link via Ah, Wilderness!. Thanks!
This item (and the two just below) are from Dave Barry’s Blog.
OK, I have a question, based on something that happened to me yesterday.
I was at a tennis tournament, and I went to get some pizza for my daughter. There were three people ahead of me in line for pizza: a guy at the front of the line, and two women together behind him. So the guy at the front of the line — we’ll call him Guy A — turns around and sees that he knows the guy behind me — Guy B — and tells him to come to the front of the line.
Guy B is reluctant, because he realizes it might be rude. So Guy A says to the women behind him, “Do you mind?” They say no.
I say nothing.
So Guy A says to Guy B, “Come on! They (meaning the two women) don’t mind.” Then, looking at me, he says: “HE minds, but he’s not saying anything.” Which was correct: I minded.
So Guy B goes to the front of the line.
Dave has a similar manners question today.
From Brigade Quartermasters Ltd. “the world’s first load-bearing necktie.”
From Wired News —
When Intel said last week that it plans to stop using gigahertz figures to market its microprocessors, analysts said it was about time. A chip’s clock speed is almost irrelevant in determining the overall performance of a computer.
But while Intel won praise for the move, industry analysts in the same breath said it’s now even harder for consumers to shop for computers that fit their needs — mainly because none of the chipmakers can agree on how to measure performance.
are needed “to recoup the shortfall from a bone-dry March” in Colorado according to a report from the Denver Post.
From the Los Angeles Times: Morning Briefing —
Of Bill Walton’s 21-for-22 performance against Memphis State in the 1973 NCAA championship game, reader Cy Bolton recalled that the one miss was a made basket that was disallowed because it was ruled a dunk. Dunks were not allowed in 1973.
From The Seattle Times: Sideline Chatter —
Scott Ostler of the San Francisco Chronicle, on why he’s not surprised that players are dragging their feet on the steroids issue: “One side effect of steroids is that they tend to shrink the very things you need in order to stand up to a misguided union leadership.”
Van Gogh was born on this date in 1853. View image.
What television quiz show debuted on this date in 1964?
The show was hosted by Art Fleming in the 60s and 70s, and of course, by Alex Trebek since 1984. The original dollar values for the questions were $10, $20, $30, $40 and $50. They’re worth 10 times that now.
Frankie Laine is 91 today.
Warren Beatty is 67.
Astrud Gilberto (The Girl from Ipanema) is 64.
Eric Clapton is 59.
Norah Jones on the other hand is just 25 today.
From the San Francisco Chronicle — Dolby possible IPO.
The name of Ray M. Dolby, chairman of Dolby Laboratories Inc., has been synonymous with high-fidelity sound for four decades.
The noise-reduction method he pioneered in the mid-1960s is used today to record the sounds of nearly every movie, professional music performance, and radio and television broadcast in the world. Technology made by Dolby Labs, headquartered in San Francisco since 1976, has been built into more than 1.4 billion consumer electronic products sold — including everything from car stereos and cassette decks to DVD players and high-definition TVs.
Now, 40 years after founding a singularly successful private company inspired by a dream, Dolby, 71, is preparing for another first, one he can’t talk about. As The Chronicle first reported in December, people familiar with Dolby’s plans expect the company, almost wholly owned by Ray Dolby, to initiate an IPO worth about half a billion dollars by the end of this year.
Dolby agreed to speak with The Chronicle on the condition that he would answer no questions about any possible IPO plans. “My lawyers would kill me,” Dolby joked as he sat down with a Chronicle reporter in the Presidio Golf Club Cafe on a breezy, cloudless Friday in March.
From Wired News:
Today, more than 4,400 GPS-toting travelers have participated in the Degree Confluence Project, covering nearly all the easily accessible points in the United States and Western Europe, and putting a sizeable dent into other populated portions of the globe.
In recent months, hard-core trekkers have ventured to remote areas from Antarctica to the jungle of East Timor to Svalbard, an Arctic territory bordering on the Barents Sea.
In all, project coordinators estimate that about 3,000 confluence points — the intersection of whole-number latitude and longitude lines — have been visited, out of a total of 16,000 global confluence points located on land and meet the goal of the project. If one includes intersections of latitude and longitude lines at sea, about 64,000 confluences exist worldwide.
Always interesting, Dahlia Lithwick discusses Monday’s Supreme Court hearing on Norton v. Southern Utah Wilderness Alliance.
Of all our bizarre advertising conventions, perhaps the oddest is this: Whether one has just purchased a new Ford Explorer, Volkswagen Touraeg, or a Jeep, the good folks in Advertising Land would have it that the first thing one does is high-tail it to the desert, careen up the side of a red rock canyon, and park that now-filthy new vehicle on a precipice overlooking the Utah sunset. True, most of us just choose to celebrate the purchase of a new car with imprudent sex in the back seat. But as far as American advertisers are concerned, we are sexier, thinner, and happier when off-roading it in the vast western wilderness.
I mention all this because today’s Supreme Court case ostensibly concerns the effects of off-road vehicles on potential wilderness areas. Which sounds like it might make for some glorious, wind-blows-through-your-hair oral argument. But this case is ultimately just about statutory construction, and the only thing blowing through your hair at the high court today is the sound of Justice Antonin Scalia’s infinite follow-up questions. I also mention all this because—try as I may—I can’t understand the appeal of buzzing around the wilderness in an ATV, digging up the fragile cryptobiotic crust, eroding the delicate soil, and polluting the rivers. But someone will enlighten me, I am sure.
Astronomy Picture of the Day tells about the X-43A.
Using oxygen from the air itself, a NASA experimental jet propelled itself past Mach 7 in the atmosphere above the Pacific Ocean this weekend. The small automated X-43A Hyper-X craft was dropped from a huge converted B-52 bomber and then accelerated by a standard Pegasus rocket. At Mach 7, seven times the speed of sound, the X-43A separated and the novel scramjet kicked in. Atmospheric oxygen was then scooped up, combined with onboard hydrogen, and combusted in flight to propel the X-43A to record air speeds during maneuvers over the next 10 seconds.
Even at 5,000 miles an hour you can’t get very far in 10 seconds (14 miles).
From the [Akron] Beacon Journal, an article on The Apprentice and Donald Trump including a Q&A with Trump. One answer:
A: It’s irrelevant to me, because my job is to pick the best people. It was Omarosa’s time to go, and I’m sure you agree with that (laughs). She was good television but it was her time to go. And it was Sam’s time to go. We have a lot of interesting characters left, but if I were going purely for entertainment value, I would’ve left Sam and Omarosa for the finals. But I can’t do that. I don’t let the entertainment value enter into my decision at all.
AAA has a fun calculator. Enter your starting point and destination, and the make, year and model of your car, and the AAA Fuel Cost Calculator will calculate the cost of gaoline for the drive, one-way and round-trip.
The PowerPoint version from Slate.
And don’t forget the Gettysburg Address in PowerPoint.
Political Animal (Kevin Drum) has a brief, thoughtful take on Clarke’s Against All Enemies.
Maybe not, but let’s try to sort out what Clarke actually says and why he says it anyway, because I don’t think it’s entirely obvious just from the snippets we’ve seen on TV over the past week. The story is a little more complicated than it appears.
Roger Ailes expresses it well.
Howie the Putz explains how those humorless, ungrateful military families just can’t take a joke:
I was at the Radio-TV Correspondents Dinner Wednesday when Bush did some slide-show shtick that includes some jokes about WMDs. I remember thinking this was pretty sensitive ground for the president to be trodding on, but it was in the spirit of good humor, and most people laughed. It’s since become a hot talk-show topic, with some members of military families upset about the lightheartedness, even though Bush was poking fun at himself.Did he poke himself hard enough to earn a Purple Heart, Howie?
Some pretty photos — 50 States.
Thanks to The Coyote’s Bark…. for the link. He has some nice photos of his own … remember his photos of White Sands?
Colorado Luis reminds us it’s César Chávez Day and posted this quotation.
“People who have lost their hunger for justice are not ultimately powerful. They are like sick people who have lost their appetite for what is truly nourishing. Such sick people should not frighten or discourage us. They should be prayed for along with the sick people who are in the hospital.” — César Chávez
From The Arizona Republic, some new thoughts on the Tucson mountain lions. An excerpt:
Ironically, the source of the problem isn’t animal behavior. When people in urbanizing areas near the Sabino Canyon Recreation Area began feeding the wildlife, it led to an unusually large prey base compared with similar habitats that are not sliced by the urban edge, say Game and Fish biologists.
The prey attracted the lions that became a problem, and new lions will move down the mountain to replace any that are removed - unless people stop feeding prey animals, such as javelina.
It’s the people who need to be managed and, unlike the old Game and Fish constituency of anglers and hunters, these people do not have an outdoorsman’s understanding of wildlife. Nor do these city folks foot the bill. Game and Fish is funded almost entirely through the sale of hunting and fishing licenses and federal excise taxes on sporting goods.
was born in Detroit, Michigan, on this date in 1936. The Writer’s Almanac tells her story:
[Guest's] written three novels, each of them about adolescent children who have to deal with a crisis in their family: Second Heaven (1982), Errands (1997) and, most famously, Ordinary People (1976).
She didn’t begin writing seriously until she was in her thirties, after all of her children had begun school. She finished the manuscript of Ordinary People in 1974 and sent it to Viking Press without the usual cover letter and plot synopsis. Viking hadn’t published an unsolicited manuscript in over twenty-five years, but an editorial assistant happened to read Ordinary People and recommended it to her publishers. It was published two years later, and it became a bestseller. In 1980, Robert Redford made it into a movie, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.
NewMexiKen has migrated from Blogger to Movable Type, a more comprehensive blogging software. You can see in the left column that there is a listing of the most Recent Entries and a listing of Categories. There is also an effective search tool for all of NewMexiKen.
Comments are now integrated into the Entries. When you click on a single entry — in the Archives or the Recent Entries or on the Posted line — the comments will appear with the orginal posting.
Comments made before now, however, have not been migrated.
There are problems with a few of the entries going back to August; some 1,626 postings. I will repair them as I can and identify Categories.
Please let me know if you come across any bugs or issues with the new software. Thanks.
Update: A section listing Recent Comments has been added and comments made during the past week have been posted to the new database.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
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