Grammy Awards

Is it just me or is watching the Grammy Awards telecast a lot like listening to Top 40 radio? One song, one award, eleventeen commercials and station breaks.

Clang!

Michael Sokolove has an interesting and provocative essay on what’s wrong with the NBA in the The New York Times Magazine. The whole article is worthy, but a couple of excerpts:

Many others over the years have seen basketball as jazz, an apt comparison when the game is played well — as an amalgam of creativity, individuality, collaboration, improvisation and structure. Much of what makes basketball interesting is the give and take, the constant tension, between individual expression and team concepts. On the best teams, players take their turns as soloists, but not at the expense of others in the quintet.
…

But I do hope that college and high-school basketball will again ban dunking, so that players on the way up have some chance of acquiring something other than a repertory of slam dunks.

The three-point shot is another matter altogether. No reason it should not just disappear. ”The dagger!” announcers sometimes call it, as if it were the shock-and-awe of the hardwood, a weapon that brings opposing players to their knees. The three-pointer is a corruption of the sport, a perversion of a century of basketball wisdom that held that the whole point of the game was to advance the ball closer to the basket. If its intent was to increase scoring, the three-point shot definitely has not done that, and if it was to make the game more wide open and exciting, it hasn’t accomplished that either. The unintended consequence of the three-pointer has been to make the game more static as players ‘’spot up” outside the arc, waiting for the pass that will lead to the dagger.

The un-Hollywood ending

Frank Rich’s column is about the assinine controversy surrounding Million Dollar Baby. Along the way he includes this:

As Mr. Eastwood has pointed out, advance knowledge of the story’s ending did nothing to deter the audience for “The Passion of the Christ.” My own experience is that knowing the ultimate direction of “Million Dollar Baby” - an organic development that in no way resembles a plot trick like that in “The Sixth Sense” - only deepened my second viewing of it.

Big oops!

From AP via The New York Times:

INGLESIDE, N.C., Feb. 12 (AP) - Larry Green stepped out of the darkness so suddenly that the car that hit him did not leave skid marks. He ended up beside a trash-strewn ditch, where he was examined by paramedics and declared dead.

Over the next two and a half hours, Mr. Green’s bloody body with a gaping head wound was zipped into a black vinyl bag, taken to the morgue and slid into a refrigerated drawer.

There was one problem: Mr. Green was alive.

Two weeks after that shocking discovery, Mr. Green is in a hospital intensive care unit, paralyzed.

Wind power

From an article in The New York Times:

With every turn of the giant blades of the 136 windmills here on the edge of a mesa, the stiff desert breeze is replacing expensive natural gas or other fuel that would have been burned in a power plant somewhere else.

Wind energy makes up a small fraction of electric generation in this country, but the rising price of natural gas has made wind look like a bargain; in some cases, it is cheaper to build a wind turbine and let existing natural gas generators stand idle. Giant, modern wind farms like the New Mexico Wind Energy Center here may become more common if prices continue to rise.

The center, 150 miles east of Albuquerque, opened in the summer of 2003 and is one of the largest in the country. The power is bought by the state’s largest utility, Public Service of New Mexico, and provides about 4 percent of that company’s electricity over the course of a year. In March, when demand is low and winds are usually strong, the project generates 10 percent of the electricity the company supplies.

Reading list

For its 50th anniversary issue, American Heritage assembled the “definitive guide to the greatest books about our past.”

So here it is, certainly the most challenging editorial task we’ve ever attempted—and one of the most rewarding. We have drawn on the knowledge and enthusiasm of leading historians, writers, and critics to offer a compendium of the very best books about the American experience. Divided into both chronological and subject categories ranging from the rise of the Republic to sports, from the years of World War II to the African-American journey, each section presents the writer’s choice of the 10 best books in a particular field, along with lucid, lively explanations of what makes them great. The result, we believe, is both a valuable reference work and an anthology of highly personal views of the making of our country and our culture that is immensely readable in its own right.

The essays are in the printed edition only, but the 20 booklists can be found online. There’s a list alphabetically by title here.

Netflix

Six days after mailing two DVDs back to Netflix neither had been received (Netflix sends you an email), so NewMexiKen thought it was time to let them know. In a few steps I told them when each DVD was mailed and from where.

Within minutes I received an email:

We’re sorry to hear that Friday Night Lights was lost in the mail. Unfortunately discs do go missing during shipment from time to time, so it is our policy to accomodate for the occasional disc lost during shipment. …

If you’ve requested a replacement copy, it will be shipped to you as soon as possible, otherwise, your next movie should be on its way soon. We apologize for the inconvenience.

“We apologize for the inconvenience.” Meanwhile carpet decorator lady hasn’t contacted me to apologize for her errors during a purchase hundreds of times larger. In fact, more than 24 hours after the shortage was identified by the installers, she still hadn’t contacted the supplier when I did. Don’t buy carpet from Costco in Albuquerque.

UPDATE: The DVDs showed up at Netflix the next day.

Class act

A nice column about Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson from Mike Waldner at the Daily Breeze. The following is an excerpt:

Olson put on a coaching clinic Saturday after UCLA expanded a 39-38 halftime lead to 47-42.

Just when the Bruins thought they were in control, he called a timeout and cleared the cobwebs in the heads of Channing Frye and Ivan Radenovic, his two big men, with more than a few choice words.

He wanted Frye, who is 6-foot-11, to remain inside on offense. He wanted 6-10 Radenovic to move his feet and help out on defense.

How clear the message was is seen in the manner in which Arizona immediately took charge.

“It wouldn’t stop,” a frustrated UCLA coach Ben Howland said following the game.

What would not stop was the 19-0 Arizona run to settle the game then and there.

Olson has 301 Pac 10 victories, second only to John Wooden with 304.

The respect Wooden has for Olson is demonstrated in a trip he plans to take to Tucson.

“Coach Wooden is coming out to practice at our place on the 22nd,” Olson said. “That’s going to be a great thrill for our guys.”

Don’t underestimate how much Olson is looking forward to the day with Wooden.

“I might have him put together the practice plan for the day and run the practice for us,” he said.

Link via College Basketball.

Ray (2)

Perhaps as remarkable in the film Ray is the performance of C.J. Sanders as the young Ray Charles Robinson.

Chico and the run

Remember the article about the 73-year-old marathoner mentioned here yesterday, well he’s already a has been. ESPN has the story of Chico and the run. Chico is 93. The run is up the 1,576 steps of the Empire State Building.

Hath he no shame?

“I can’t believe that Jose Canseco has written a book so that he can profit from telling of his misdeeds while he played the game of baseball.

“Sincerely,

“Pete Rose”

Reader Joe Gutierrez to Morning Briefing

Frosty

The view of Sandia Crest from NewMexiKen’s this morning. The towers are called the “Electric Forest,” and are about three miles (in a direct line) from my home. The Crest is 10,678 feet (3255 meters) above sea level.

And chimichangas, too

“A bill to limit the public’s right to sue the food industry for obesity or other medical conditions moved through a [New Mexico] Senate committee Friday.”

According to a story in The New Mexican, the bill is called the “Right to Eat Enchiladas Act.”

Black Eagle

From The Santa Fe New Mexican:

Black Eagle, a drum group from Jemez Pueblo, is making history today at the 47th Annual Grammy Awards.

According to the group’s producer, Tom Bee, the musicians will be the first American Indians in history to perform at the Grammys, which celebrates artistic achievement in pop, jazz, blue, rap, classical, folk and other musical recordings.

The group is scheduled to be the opening act at the ceremony, which begins at 1:30 p.m. at Staples Center in Los Angeles. [But not part of the telecast.]

The Jemez drummers, who have been nominated each of the last three years, won a Grammy in 2004 in the Best Native American Music Album category. Their album Straight Up Northern is up for a Grammy this year in the same category. …

[Last year] OutKast’s Andre 3000 and his backup dancers performed the song Hey Ya! clothed in neon-green outfits and wearing feathers, fringe and war paint. To many American Indian viewers, including the Black Eagle drummers, the performance came across as a derogatory portrayal of American Indian culture and suggested American Indian music is sung with only the words hey ya.

Sign of a really “half empty glass” person

The new carpet makes me feel so good, I’m depressed I didn’t replace the old stuff sooner.

Chuck Yeager …

first person to break the sound barrier, was born on this date in 1923.

Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, reportedly with two ribs broken two nights before in a drunken horseback ride. The plane, Glamorous Glennis, is hanging from the Air & Space Museum ceiling. Glennis was Mrs. Yeager.

Yeager is the basis for the character played by Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff. Glennis was played by Barbara Hershey.

In his wonderful book The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe explains that West Virginian Yeager is the reason why all airline pilots talk with a drawl — to be like Yeager, “the most righteous of all the posessors of the right stuff.”

Planetary scale

Composite photo of the planets worthy of a click — The Solar System - Planetary Scale

Two bits

To most people, that Wisconsin quarter jingling in our pockets or purses is worth exactly 25 cents.

But to coin collectors, it could be worth $500 or so if there is an extra leaf - or a flaw that looks like a leaf - on the cornstalk pictured on the tail side of the quarter.

Report in Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has photos.

Link via Kottke

I may not have much hair yet, but I have more than Grandpa