“I am the kind of person who would remain aloof and uncommunicative with the guy next to me on an airplane even if we were in the final moments of a vertical dive.”
Joel Achenbach, in a column on parenting
The Best of PhotoJournalism 2005. Lots and lots of great photos to click.
I was going to comment earlier but I was too busy merging my “to do” lists. When that was complete, I had to reorder and generally revise the master copy, which to be honest ended up a total rewrite. First item, as always, “organize”.
Then I had to spend some time rethinking how I categorize my password list. (For the curious, my current scheme goes by service; for example, email portals, financial accounts, shopping websites, utility accounts, etc. Within service, it gets tricky. For shopping, it’s further broken down into book stores, travel sites, auction sites, so forth. Yes, it bothers me that “travel sites” doesn’t have a better fit than with “shopping”, but I just can’t nail down a universal solution. Alphabetical is so 1993.)
Of course, I’m joking about all this. Ha ha.
Jason, first posted as a comment
Walter Mossberg reviews photo-organizing programs:
These programs differ from traditional photo-editing software like Adobe’s Photoshop. They place less emphasis on tweaking and perfecting each picture, focusing instead on organizing your hundreds or thousands of photos and helping you share them with others. They do have basic editing tools, but they are mainly designed to help you manage your digital-photo collection.
Two of the best photo organizers have just been updated, and I have been testing them on my collection of more than 10,000 digital photos. One is Picasa 2, which runs only on Windows and is now a free offering from Google, which purchased Picasa last year. The other is Apple Computer’s iPhoto 5, which runs only on the Macintosh. It comes free on every new Mac.
• John Salley, co-host of FSN’s “Best Damn Sports Show Period,” on reports of steroid use by NFL players in the 1970s: “Who cares? Their job is to entertain us and go back to their cages.”
• Comedian Argus Hamilton, on the Yankees’ Derek Jeter and Hideki Matsui — not Jason Giambi or Gary Sheffield — being chosen for random drug tests this week: “By this logic, the Nuremburg trials would have indicted General Eisenhower and Bob Hope.”
The annoucement in English said baggage for the flight would be on Carousel 11. In Spanish it was on Carousel seis.
It’s pretty bad when the comments are getting to be a lot more fun than the blog.
The New York Times reports:
An eye surgeon in Germany has discovered the world’s largest known prime number - or at least his computer did. …
The number, rendered in exponential shorthand, is 225,964,951-1. It has 7,816,230 digits, and if printed in its entirety, would fill 235 pages of this newspaper.
You too can join the search for more prime numbers.
From The New York Times:
In Kenya, a 10-year-old elephant named Mlaika seems to think she’s a truck. At least she has been heard imitating the low rumble that trucks make on a nearby highway.
Mlaika’s mimicry is described in the journal Nature, along with a report of an African elephant that lived in a Swiss zoo with Asian elephants and learned to imitate the chirping that only the Asian species makes.
The two findings show for the first time that elephants - like primates, birds, bats and some marine mammals - are capable of vocal learning. The discovery has important implications for understanding how elephants communicate.
Audio clip of elephant sounding like truck (sort of).
The weather this morning in Albuquerque is best described as yucky. Snow, rain, sleet wind and hail. About 40°F.
Which brings me to Weather Watcher, a nice little program self-described as:
Freeware, adware-free, spyware-free, hassle-free, desktop weather. View the weather information for over 77,000 cities world-wide!
Recommended by Ed Bott who just updated his favorite software list.
An enormous ice dam formed at the source of the Niagara River on the eastern shore of Lake Erie on March 29, 1848. Just after midnight, the thunderous sound of water surging over the great falls at Niagara came to a halt. The eery silence persisted throughout the day and into the next evening until the waters of Lake Erie broke through the blockage and resumed their course down the river and over the falls.
Today in History from the Library of Congress
At last count, 11 comments on the obsessiveness of NewMexiKen and some of his children and grandchildren. My god, we’re even having former colleagues chiming in.
Yes, it’s true at CYO camp as a 10-year-old, while others were winning awards for swimming, or softball, or even beadwork, I got the neatest camper in my tent award — and true to form I still have the felt insignia they gave me nearly 50 years ago.
Did I inherit this, or was it the doing of years of Catholic nuns?
When I was a kid the nuns had little clickers. When we went to church before class they would click so that we all could genuflect in unison, or stand in unison. Even in high school, I remember we were lined up by height to kiss the bishop’s ring and receive our diploma.
Interestingly enough though, I come out a strong “P” on the Myers-Briggs Personality Type. [A Perceiving (P) style takes the outside world as it comes and is adopting and adapting, flexible, open-ended and receptive to new opportunities and changing game plans.] I test so strongly as a “P” that I was once singled out with a couple others during an experiment.
So, “How come,” I asked the instructor after, “if I am such a strong P, I alphabetize my CDs (within each genre) and have most of my books shelved according to Library of Congress call number?”
“Were my parents opposites?” he asked. [The opposite of P is J (Judging), one who approaches the outside world with a plan and is oriented towards organizing one's surroundings, being prepared, making decisions and reaching closure and completion.]
“No, I think they were P too,” I replied.
“Did I go to Catholic school?”
His point was that the stong P of my parents (especially my mother) conflicted with the strong J of most nuns. Hence, I was confused.
Coincidentally the person who told me that is mentioned in Sunday’s New York Times in an article about early risers:
“I’m an early riser, I’m achievement driven, and oh, my, has it served me well in the business world,” said Otto Kroeger, a motivational speaker and business consultant in Fairfax, Va. Mr. Kroeger, who says he routinely rises at 4 a.m., preaches about the advantage of getting up before dawn to audiences and clients. “For 13 years,” Mr. Kroeger said, “I never allowed myself more than 4 hours in any 24-hour period. It was all ego driven. My psyche was saying, ‘I can do it, I can outlast.’ It’s a version of the old Broadway song from ‘Annie Get Your Gun’: ‘Anything you can do, I can do better.’”
Which type do you think he is?
“Valet of the Dolls”
The name of an all-woman parking service in Los Angeles as reported in The New York Times
NewMexiKen’s 17-month-old granddaughter checks out the latest “toy,” a Sony PSP (PlayStation Portable), which only came on the market Thursday.
Eat your heart out!
on this date there was some pretty good stuff on NewMexiKen: Three Mile Island, the battle of Glorietta Pass, Henry Rowe Schoolcraft, August Anheuser Busch, Jr., and Jason, official youngest son of NewMexiKen, whose birthday is today. Happy Birthday Jason!
NewMexiKen will get off the basketball kick here soon. Nothing else much caught my imagination today — and the item below confirmed my own thinking about the last play of the Arizona season — but I will move along here shortly.
If you want, you can read about The Biggest F***ing Bastard on the Face of the Earth at The American Street.
That would be Tom DeLay, of course, but you knew that.
Oh, Dianne Wiest is 57 and Reba McEntire is 50.
Fantastic Four - Best basketball weekend ever: Comebacks! Overtimes! Bad coaching! By Robert Weintraub. An excerpt:
Still, these questionable moves are small beer next to the plays “drawn up” in the endgame by Kentucky’s Tubby Smith and Arizona’s Lute Olson. Two coaches who have won national championships. Two graduates of the Andy Reid School of Clock Management and Game-Ending Infamy.
Don’t rail against Olson because the Wildcats blew a 15-point lead in the span of a single TV timeout. Perhaps owing to a home-court edge the tournament supposedly eradicated years ago, Illinois won late-game favor from whistle-swallowing referees who allowed the final minutes to turn into an episode of The Shield. Even with the historic comeback, Arizona still had the game in its hands with seconds left. So, what does Lute draw up? A clear-out for Salim Stoudamire, who was off during the game but hit game-winners in the regular-season finale and 48 hours previous against Oklahoma State? Perhaps a simple two-man game with Stoudamire and big man Channing Frye, who dominated inside all night? Nope, he put the ball in the hands of Hassan Adams, a brilliant offensive rebounder who can’t pass or sink outside shots. Adams should’ve been crashing the boards to tip in a potential Stoudamire miss. Instead, he heaved an off-balance chuck—and this crazy shot didn’t come close to going in.
Even The Arizona Republic, not exactly the bastion of so-called liberal media, thinks the Republicans are out of control.
Duck. Hide. Or run for cover if you’re anywhere near the Legislature.
Some of our Republican lawmakers are throwing monkey wrenches right and left.
Well, to the right, anyway.
Now that conservative Republicans have an edge at the Legislature, they can’t resist trying to gum up projects and agencies that are humming along just fine, thanks.
…
Every legislative session sees its share of misguided proposals. But this year they have gone so far that you have to wonder, what’s next?
Take the asphalt away from the Department of Transportation?
Make the Highway Patrol go on foot?
Save overhead by merging Game and Fish with the Department of Gaming?
Functional Ambivalent has an exceptionally insightful post on the coming war between Libertarian Republicans who believe that business should be allowed to do pretty much whatever it wants, and Theocratic Republicans, who want to use government to enforce a single interpretation of the Bible. An excerpt:
So now we have something called a “pharmacists’ rights movement.” This movement seeks to protect the right of pharmacists to refuse to fill prescriptions they don’t approve of. Laws proposed in several states make it difficult or impossible for pharmacy operators to fire pharmacists who won’t do thier jobs, so long as theyr’e not doing their jobs out of a deeply held, conservative Christianity.
You can’t protect just one religious group, under the law, so any success at protecting Theocratic pharmacists will inevitably broaden to protect lots of other deeply-held beliefs. Vegitarians working at grocery stores, for example, could refuse to let people buy meat. Sporting goods store clerks could refuse to sell bullets to hunters and car salesmen could, with impunity, refuse to sell gas-guzzlers when what everyone really should be buying is gas-electric hybrids. Let’s let everyone anywhere enforce their own morality in any business environment, and take away the businesses ability to cope with these rogue moralists!
How dumb are the people who run Division I-A football not to decide their championship on the field of play the way college basketball does, with teenagers and barely twenty-somethings doing unpredictable, inexplicable, sometimes wonderful but also very human things one night after another in March.
They’re very dumb; world class dumb.
NewMexiKen promised to link back to Thinking ahead to the Final Four, but was so discouraged by Arizona’s loss I forgot.
I said that in Chicago, the winner of the Arizona-Oklahoma State game would go to St. Louis. I was wrong, it’s Illinois.
In Albuquerque, I said it would be the winner of the Louisville-Washington game, and it’s Louisville.
In Syracuse, I thought North Carolina would win, and that was correct.
For Austin, I predicted the winner of the Utah-Kentucky game would emerge, but Michigan State defeated Kentucky.
Two for four.
Louisville and Michigan State showed great desire, winning in overtime and double overtime respectively, but my choice to win it all is Illinois, which showed they would not be denied. If not, may Roy Williams of North Carolina finally win a championship.
“I think it’s a game that will be shown many, many times,” said Weber.
Not in the greater Tucson area, it won’t.
Jason, official youngest son of NewMexiKen, called it on Wednesday: “Illinois over Arizona (in the best game of the tourney)”
like NewMexiKen is, but Michael Wilbon appreciates In Overtime, an All-Timer.
From a report in the Miami Herald:
A federally funded watchdog group is investigating the recent deaths of four disabled Floridians amid an aggressive campaign by the state to cut millions of dollars from programs that provide medical care for disabled people in community settings.
Two developmentally disabled adults who lived in group homes in Brandon, and two others under the care of The ARC in St. Lucie County, have died since October 2004, a month after the state required the operator of the two Brandon group homes to change the way residents received nursing care.
A woman at one Brandon home developed such a severe infection at the site of her feeding tube that she has been hospitalized in intensive care since Feb. 13.
Link via Discourse.net
Ojibwe Indian David Treuer writes that “Red Lake is like Cuba: proud, poor, troubled, and independent.”
Bloodshed is what put Red Lake on the map. When my Ojibwe (Chippewa) ancestors arrived in Red Lake in the mid-18th century, the area was occupied by the Dakota. The Ojibwe orchestrated a surprise attack on a flotilla of Dakota canoes heading into the lake from a small tributary. The Ojibwe fired from the steep banks onto the canoes below. The Dakota fell into the water and swam for shore, but none of them made it. There were so many dead that their blood stained the water red far out into the lake, and the Ojibwe named the river Battle River and the lake Red Lake: Miskwaagamiwizaga’iganing.
An interesting and important essay.
NewMexiKen never thought of it this way before, but the very informative and useful book Photographic Composition (Tom Grill and Mark Scanlon) describes photo composition as the grammar and syntax of the visual arts.
A language without any rules or conventions is unintelligible. In the verbal medium, the applicable rules and conventions are called grammar and syntax. Effective communication requires that all parties involved know and employ the agreed-upon grammar and syntax patterns. …
In the language of the visual arts, grammar and syntax are called composition, which we define as the controlled ordering of the elements in a visual work as the means for achieving clear communication.
The authors believe that visual communication was much more primary until the invention of the printing press and that since humans have unlearned much of their ability to express themselves visually.
Or maybe NewMexiKen is just getting too old. It used to be I couldn’t remember all the passwords. Today I was editing my password cheat sheet and I found I couldn’t even remember what some of the passwords were for.
A lovely little snowstorm at Casa NewMexiKen this morning; nearly perfect. Maybe an inch of lovely white covered everything — but none stuck to the streets and walks, and it was all gone by noon — every trace except on the mountains above.
And its 50° now (early afternoon) and golfing weather tomorrow.
Update (an hour later): I wrote too soon. It’s snowing again and the temperature has dropped to 40°.
Still predicting 60s tomorrow and 70s Monday though.
The boss of a big company needed to call one of his employees about an urgent problem with one of the main computers, dialed the employee’s home phone number and was greeted with a child’s whisper.
“Hello.”
“Is your daddy home?” he asked.
“Yes,” whispered the small voice.
“May I talk with him?”
The child whispered, “No.”
Surprised, and wanting to talk with an adult, the boss asked, “Is your mommy there?”
“Yes.”
“May I talk with her?”
Again the small voice whispered, “No.”
Hoping there was somebody with whom he could leave a message, the boss asked, “Is anybody else there?”
“Yes, “whispered the child, “a policeman.”
Wondering what a cop would be doing at his employee’s home, the boss asked, “May I speak with the policeman?”
“No, he’s busy”, whispered the child.
“Busy doing what?”
“Talking to Daddy and Mommy and the fireman,” came the whispered answer.
Growing concerned and even worried as he heard what sounded like a helicopter through the earpiece on the phone the boss asked, “What is that noise?”
“A hello-copper” answered the whispering voice.
“What is going on there?” asked the boss, now truly alarmed.
In an awed whispering voice the child answered, “The search team just landed the hello-copper.”
Alarmed, concerned, and even more then just a little frustrated the boss asked, “What are they searching for?”
Still whispering, the young voice replied along with a muffled giggle:
“ME.”
Thanks to Amy.
NewMexiKen has ordered a new camera and is reviewing the online literature in preparation for its delivery next week. I thought this was pretty good advice:
When using the viewfinder
When operating the diopter adjustment control with your eye to the viewfinder, care should be taken not to put your finger in your eye accidentally.
Joel Achenbach looks at Barry Bonds from another direction:
No one has ever done what Barry Bonds did at the plate. Even in a league rife with steroids he has stood out as leaps and bounds better than everyone else. That’s why he has to go into the Hall even if people think that he’s a steroid cheater. We judge athletes against their competition. Even steroids don’t let your average superstar win seven, count ‘em, seven MVP awards. If steroids make such a big difference than how come Jose Canseco never reached 500 home runs for his career? Canseco never managed to hit 50 home runs in a season, much less the 73 that Bonds hit to set that all-time record. Bonds has inspired more fear in pitchers than Canseco, McGwire and Sosa combined. He became, in his late 30s, so dangerous at the plate that he deformed the basic principles of pitching. Last year he walked 232 times, which is absurd, and by far the all-time record, but what’s stunning is that, of those, 120 were “intentional” walks, meaning the pitcher didn’t even pretend to want to pitch to him. Pitchers basically gave up.
Even if we believe that Bonds took steroids and that by doing so betrayed the game, the fact of the matter is that Bonds has been at the center of the steroid controversy not because he abused them in any special way. It’s because he’s a lot better than everyone else.
While none of the doctors are really involved in stem cell therapy, it was discussed at great length by each of them. Perhaps one of the few agreements between these experts is that stem cell research is currently at the experimental stage and is years away from being accepted either medically or politically. It would not appear from the testimony that this is a viable treatment option at this time.
But could it be in the future? Aren’t the people and organizations (and politicians) that protest the removal of the feeding tube the same as those opposing stem cell research?
Pointer and idea from Hesiod at The American Street.
State attorneys general in New Mexico and New York are quizzing radio personality Don Imus about his San Miguel County ranch.
Imus and his wife, Deirdre, opened the 4,000-acre ranch between Santa Fe and Las Vegas, N.M., in 1999 as a summer camp for sick children.
But the New York-based charity’s multimillion-dollar annual budget and the Imus family’s use of the ranch’s well-appointed facilities have drawn scrutiny from government officials. …
The nonprofit ranch spent $2.6 million last year while hosting only about 100 children, The Wall Street Journal reported in a front-page story Thursday. The newspaper said experts consider that an unusually high dollar-tochild ratio for a charity.
NewMexiKen supposes that too many rug rats might really mess up the “14,000-squarefoot adobe mansion, swimming pool and billiard hall” and its “Asian and American Indian rugs, rustic chandeliers and an outdoor shower designed to look like Aztec ruins.”
Update March 26th: New York Attorney General Spitzer has closed his inquiry into the Imus Ranch without finding any impropriety The New York Times reported Friday.
My best blogging buddy, Functional Ambivalent, refers to the University of West Virginia - University of Louisville game tomorrow as the “NewMexiKen Regional Final of the NCAA Men’s Basketball Championship.” (It’s the game in Albuquerque.) I suppose after such kindness I’ll have to root for his team, the Louisville Cardinals, who are anything but “Ambivalent” about winning.
Functional Ambivalent has also posted — after a lengthy lapse — one of his funny — but totally distasteful — sex day essays. (I have to include the “distasteful” disclaimer in case Sister Baptista, or Sister Mary Francetta, or any of the others who prayed me through ten years of Catholic schools are reading this.) Of course, I only view Functional Ambivalent for the photos.
NewMexiKen wrote in December that the local high school, La Cueva, had won its second consecutive state football championship and gone 26-0 over the two years.
I learned Thursday that the La Cueva baseball team has gone 67-0, not losing a game since May 2002. On Tuesday they will play for their 68th consecutive win and a chance to tie the national record winning streak. (Archbishop Molloy High of Briarwood, N.Y., went 68-0 from 1963-1966.)
It must be the water.
1 Comment | Show Comment | 
Print This Post
is 63 today. I Never Loved A Man, Respect, Baby I Love You, A Natural Woman, Chain of Fools, Think, The House That Jack Built, I Say a Little Prayer, Bridge Over Troubled Water — all great, but for NewMexiKen give me Aretha Franklin’s version of You Are My Sunshine.
From the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:
Aretha Franklin, the “Queen of Soul,” remains one of the preeminent vocalists of the age, a singer of great passion and control whose finest recordings define the term soul music in all its deep, expressive glory. As Atlantic Records co-founder Ahmet Ertegun observed, “I don’t think there’s anybody I have known who possesses an instrument like hers and who has such a thorough background in gospel, the blues and the essential black-music idiom….She is blessed with an extraordinary combination of remarkable urban sophistication and of the deep blues feeling that comes from the Delta. The result is maybe the greatest singer of our time.”
Franklin was born in Memphis in 1942 and grew up in Detroit, where her father, the Rev. C.L. Franklin, was the pastor at the New Bethel Baptist Church. Aretha began singing church music at an early age, and recorded her first album, The Gospel Sound of Aretha Franklin, for the Checker label at age 14. Her early influences, however, included secular singers like Dinah Washington, Sam Cooke, LaVern Baker and Ruth Brown. She signed with Columbia Records in 1960, having been brought to the label by legendary talent scout John Hammond. However, her tenure at Columbia was an inconclusive one that found her dabbling in pop and jazz styles. In Hammond’s words, “Columbia was a white company who misunderstood her genius.”
With her switch to Atlantic Records in 1966, Aretha helped usher in an era of fresh, forthright soul music. It commenced with her first single for the label, “I Never Loved a Man (the Way I Loved You),” a salty, importuning number that unleashed the full force of Franklin’s voice upon the world. Her next triumph was “Respect,” a fervent reworking of an Otis Redding number that can in hindsight be seen as an early volley in the feminist movement and a signature statement of racial pride. Working under the tutelage of producer Jerry Wexler, engineer Tom Dowd and arranger Arif Mardin, Franklin rewrote the book on soul music in the late Sixties with a string of smash crossover singles that included “Chain of Fools,” “Think” and a memorable rendering of Carole King’s “A Natural Woman (You Make Me Feel).”
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Powered by WordPress.
