End the Beguine

From the Los Angeles Times:

Artie Shaw, who rose to fame as one of the Swing era’s finest band leaders and most innovative clarinetists before slamming the door on the music business with a Shakespearean flourish, died today. He was 94.

Unwilling to compromise and play just what the audience wanted (the same stuff), Shaw retired at age 44 in 1954. He never again played or recorded publicly.

Shaw was married eight times, including to Lana Turner and Ava Gardner, and he reportedly had affairs with Betty Grable and Lena Horne.

The title for this post stolen unabashedly from dangerousmeta!. Begin the Beguine was Shaw’s most famous hit recording.

Ten Best for 2004

Roger Ebert’s list (he also has a worst 10):

1. “Million Dollar Baby”
2. “Kill Bill, Volume 2″
3. “Vera Drake”
4. “Spider-Man 2″
5. “Moolaade”
6. “The Aviator”
7. “Baadasssss!”
8. “Sideways”
9. “Hotel Rwanda”
10. “Undertow”

Another reason

David Pogue on security experts have now unveiled an even more insidious hole. Phishers (people who try to intercept your Web passwords and private information) can now make any text they like appear in the address bar. They can, for example, make it look like you’re viewing the Web page of PayPal or eBay; when you “log in,” you’ll actually be sending your account information straight into the phishers’ databases.

So what should you do? If you ask me, you should switch immediately to the free, infinitely superior browser Firefox (if you use Windows or Mac) or Safari (Mac OS X). You’ll absolutely love its tabbed browsing, pop-up window stopper and other advanced features-and you’ll be safe from most of the security holes in Internet Explorer.

The Last Honest Man

The SportsProf has quite a bit on the BCS, the Cal-Texas scandal, etc., including Paterno’s vote for USC, Oklahoma and Auburn all as number one in the coaches poll.

Meanwhile, some people will scoff at Joe Paterno, say he’s the modern day Don Quixote, that he’s tilting at windmills trying to find his perfect world in the midst of the BCS madness.

And Coach Paterno is right, he may well be a voice in the wilderness.

And a powerful voice at that.

After all, his graduation rate exceeds the combined graduation rates of Utah (41%) and Pitt (31%), who are meeting on January 1 in the Fiesta Bowl.

Yet, it’s Utah coach Urban Meyer and Pitt coach Walt Harris who are moving on to “bigger” jobs, at Florida and Stanford respectively — who get rewarded, while Coach Paterno has been under siege at Penn State. True, his team’s on-the-field performance has been found lacking in the past five years, but, in the midst of all of the hypocrisy out there in BCS-land, Coach Paterno is a shining beacon of integrity and forthrightness.

Lennie

A collection of Briscoe one-liners.

Link via dangerousmeta!

One man’s retirement math: Social Security wins

From The Christian Science Monitor:

Just ask Stanley Logue of San Diego.

For 45 years, the defense-industry analyst paid into the system until his retirement in 1994. But with all the recent hoopla over reform, Mr. Logue, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology graduate, decided to go back and check his own records. Would he have done better investing his money than the bureaucrats at the Social Security Administration?

He recorded all the payroll taxes he paid into the system (including the matching amount from his employer), tracked down the return the Social Security Trust Fund earned for each of the 45 years, and then compared the result with what he would have gotten had he been able to invest the same amount of payroll tax money over the same period in the Dow Jones Industrial Average (including dividends).

To his surprise, the Social Security investment won out: $261,372 versus $255,499, a difference of $5,873.

Read more. Link via Michael Froomkin.

Embarassment

So far the aid promised to the Asian relief effort by our government approximates the funding for the inaugural ceremonies next month.

NewMexiKen just donated $100 to the American Red Cross (via Amazon).

What about you?

How to Help (washingtonpost.com)

The Command Post - Global Recon - Earthquake: How to Help [Updated 12/30]

Tucson joins the Union

James Gadsden, U.S. Minister to Mexico, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, signed the Gadsden Purchase in Mexico City on December 30, 1853. The treaty settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of El Paso, Texas, giving the U.S. claim to approximately 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona, for the price of $10,000,000.

Source: The Library of Congress

It’s the birthday

… of Bo Diddley. “One of the most original and fertile rhythmic intelligences of our time,” the Rock Hall of Famer is 76.

… of Russ Tamblyn. Riff is 70.

… of Sandy Koufax. The most dominant pitcher in the game in the early 1960s, the man who threw four no-hitters including a perfect games is 69.

… of Paul (Noel actually) Stookey. Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary is 67.

… of Fred Ward. The actor (Gus Grissom in The Right Stuff) is 62.

… of Monkees Michael Nesmith (62) and Davy Jones (59).

… of Patti Smith. Punk rock’s poet laureate is 58.

… of Matt Lauer. The Today show host is 47.

Politician Al Smith (he lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928) was born on this date in 1873.

Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1880.

Old men

LeBron James is 20 today. Tiger Woods is 29.

Rediscovering Lewis and Clark

A year ago NewMexiKen ran across this essay by historian Thomas P. Slaughter on the real significance of Lewis and Clark. I thought it worth repeating today:

The Lewis and Clark expedition did not matter two centuries ago. The explorers were not the first to make the transcontinental journey, as they well knew, having been preceded in both travels and publication by the Canadian Alexander Mackenzie. They followed Cook, Vancouver, and dozens of trading ships that made landfall on the West Coast and had ongoing contacts with Indians in the Northwest, just as French and Anglo-Canadian fur traders had already engaged Indians east of the Rockies.

And if Lewis and Clark didn’t get there first, neither did they achieve any of the major goals of their expedition: they did not find a water route to the Pacific, a Lost Tribe of Israel, or Welsh Indians. During the return leg of their journey, they met up with traders who had believed them dead and were proceeding west nonetheless. The explorers’ survival and the information they brought back with them were irrelevant to the westward course of American empire. They did not publish their journals in a timely fashion and eventually did so, after Lewis’s death, in an abridgement that achieved limited circulation. Quickly, the explorers and their achievements faded from public memory.

Lewis and Clark were rediscovered after the passing of the American frontier. Celebration of them is a twentieth-, now twenty-first-century phenomenon that reflects more on the creation of a national origins myth than it does the historical significance of the expedition in its own time….Lewis and Clark matter, then, because our nation needs their contribution to the multicultural and ecologically sensitive stories that we now tell about ourselves. They are central characters in the superficial “feel-good” brand of American history that catapults books to the top of nonfiction bestseller lists.

Slaughter is the author of Exploring Lewis and Clark: Reflections on Men and Wilderness (2003).

Best cars 2004

Dan Neil profiles 10 of the great cars of the year, but begins with this commentary:

Think of our relationship with the internal combustion engine as a roller coaster ride. We’ve had our ups and downs, but 2004 was the first year most people could see, clearly, that the tracks were out ahead. Californians saw gasoline hit $3 per gallon and not for the last time. American foreign policy is bloodily fixated on a region of the world whose single strategic value is oil. Even the Bush administration had to concede this year that there was something to all this talk of global warming. But automakers, suing to stop California’s new carbon-emission standards, are in greenhouse denial.

Whose air is it, anyway?

The future belongs to automakers who embrace change.

Tabbed browsing

One feature (in addition to security) that makes Firefox better than IE:

But my favorite aspect of Firefox is tabbed browsing, a Web-surfing revolution that is shared by all the major new browsers but is absent from IE. With tabbed browsing, you can open many Web pages at once in the same browser window. Each is accessed by a tab.

The benefits of tabbed browsing hit home when you create folders of related bookmarks. For instance, on my computer I have a folder of a dozen technology-news bookmarks and another 20 or so bookmarks pointing to political Web sites. A third folder contains 15 or so bookmarks for sites devoted to the World Champion Boston Red Sox. With one click, I can open the entire contents of these folders in tabs, in the same single window, allowing me to survey entire fields of interest.

Firefox

Walter Mossberg prefers Firefox:

Meanwhile, other people have been building much better browsers, just as Microsoft itself did in the 1990s, when it challenged and eventually bested the then-dominant browser, Netscape Navigator. The most significant of these challengers is Firefox, a free product of an open-source organization called Mozilla, available for download at www.mozilla.org. Firefox is both more secure and more modern than IE, and it comes packed with user-friendly features the Microsoft browser can’t touch.

Firefox still has a tiny market share. But millions of people have downloaded it recently. I’ve been using it for months, and I recommended back in September that users switch to it from IE as a security measure. It’s available in nearly identical versions for Windows, the Apple Macintosh, and the Linux operating system.