Sunday, March 11, 2007
Archive for March 11, 2007
Creepy factoid
“Yet spiders kill at an astonishing pace. One Dutch researcher estimates that there are some five trillion spiders in the Netherlands alone, each of which consumes about a tenth of a gram of meat a day. Were their victims people instead of insects, they would need only three days to eat all sixteen and a half million Dutchmen.”
From “Spider Woman,” by Burkhard Bilger in The New Yorker.
Additional item worth noting: “Tucson — perhaps the spider-bite capital of the United States . . .”
3 CommentsBest conferences
The Pac 10 is sending six of its ten teams to the NCAA Tournament, 60%. The ACC is sending seven teams, but that’s just 58% (seven of twelve). The Big 10 is sending six of its eleven teams, 55%.
No other conference has half or more of its teams among the select this year.
104 teams won 20 or more games.
Bracketology
1. No No. 16 seed has ever beaten a No. 1, so just forget about those games altogether and advance the No. 1s on to the second round.
2. Don’t go putting all your No. 1 seeds in the Final Four. They might be the best teams on paper, but since 1979, it has never happened. The closest it ever came was in 1993, when three No. 1s and a No. 2 made it. Plus, do you really want to be the person in your office that picked all the top seeds? We here at CBS SportsLine.com always make fun of that person.
3. Pick your upsets carefully. It’s inevitable that a No. 12, 13 or 14 seed will win in the first two days, but trying to pick which one is almost impossible. Look for a team that has a veteran starting five. . . .
4. There is no such thing as “Team X is due.” Just because Washington State has never won the NCAA Tournament, it doesn’t mean they are going to run through the bracket and win it all.
5. Watch out for injuries. If a team’s star has a serious injury, it would be wise to keep that team out of the Final Four. . . .
6. OK, we know you are a big Texas A&M-Corpus Christi fan. You love your Islanders and are excited they are in the NCAA Tournament. That’s great. Now, don’t be a homer and have the Islanders facing UCLA in the final. Be objective.
7. Don’t underestimate the familiarity factor. If two teams already played this year, take a look at what happened between those two teams in the regular season and whether or not they faced off in their conference tournament. It’s rare that a team can beat another three times in the same season.
8. Have fun. This is the NCAA Tournament! The greatest sporting event in the history of sports!
NewMexiKen adds that nine seeds often beat eight seeds, though not in the Midwest bracket this year.
Best line of the day, so far
The argument about the identity of the Jerusalem tomb focussed on a question of names and their frequency. The tombs were marked with the names Jesus, son of Joseph; Joseph (possibly a brother); Mary (conceivably a mother); Judah (perhaps a son); and Mariamene or Mariamne, who is alleged to be Mary Magdalene. Skeptics hold that these names occurred about as frequently in first-century Jerusalem as the names Emma, Jacob, and Dylan do on the Upper West Side today; believers insist that this spray of names would almost never show up by chance, particularly with the unusual form of “Mary” thrown in. “It’s like finding a John, a Paul, and a George, and you don’t leap to the obvious conclusion…unless you found a Ringo,” [producer James] Cameron remarked triumphantly.
Too few good men
Those not familiar with fired New Mexico U.S. Attorney David Iglesias might be interested to know:
“In 1986, he was one of three JAGs who represented Marines accused of attempted murder for a hazing incident that their lawyers argued was encouraged by commanders at Guantanamo Bay. The successful defense helped the Marines avoid serious penalties, and the case inspired the hit Broadway play ‘A Few Good Men’ and the later film. Iglesias was not consulted during the production of the play or movie.”
From a profile in the Los Angeles Times.
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Filed under Albuquerque & New Mexico and Issues of the Day on March 11, 2007
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Filed under Albuquerque & New Mexico and Issues of the Day on March 11, 2007
Semper Fi Museum Style
Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:
Yesterday we went to the National Museum of the Marine Corps, which opened last November. Man, museums are so much better now than they used to be. The whole trend of presenting the experience, rather than just the facts, is done really well there. There are several “immersion experiences” — you can go into a booth and hear drill instructors screaming at you, one of the rooms about Korea is freezing and full of fake snow, while in the Vietnam section you suddenly walk onto a transport plane with the engine running underneath, and when you get off it is hot and there are explosion sounds.
Additionally, artifacts are no longer just lined up behind glass. Now every tank is displayed in a giant set and every gun with sandbags and foliage, etc.
There may be museum people who sniff, but I can tell you that it makes it all a lot more interesting for six- and three-year-old boys.
They have the actual Iwo Jima Suribachi flag (the second one) there. But you can’t take photographs. The guy who was working there told some other folks not to do so or they’d be dealing with “one pissed off Marine.” I guess we got immersed a little bit there, too.
. . . I recommend the museum, which is free to attend, free to park, and empty of donation canisters.
Click each of Jill’s photos for a larger version.
Best line of the day by someone born on this date
“Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”
Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy. Adams was born on March 11, 1952. He died from a heart attack in 2001.
Influenza
It was on this day in 1918 that the first cases of what would become the influenza pandemic were reported in the U.S. when 107 soldiers got sick at Fort Riley, Kansas.
It was the worst pandemic in world history. The flu that year killed only 2.5 percent of its victims, but more than a fifth of the world’s entire population caught it, and so it’s estimated that between 50 million and 100 million people died in just a few months.
Historians believe at least 500,000 people died in the United States alone. That’s more than the number of Americans killed in combat in all the wars of the 20th century combined. Usually, the flu would have been most likely to kill babies and the elderly, but the flu of 1918 somehow targeted healthy people in their 20s and 30s. And it was an extremely virulent strain. In the worst cases, victims’ skin would turn dark red, and their feet would turn black.
No one is sure exactly how many people died, because it wasn’t even clear at the time what the disease was. World War I was currently under way, and there were rumors that German soldiers had snuck into Boston Harbor and released some new kind of germ weapon. One of the strangest aspects of the pandemic in this country was that it was barely reported in the media. President Woodrow Wilson had passed laws to censor all kinds of news stories about the war, and newspaper editors were terrified of printing anything that might cause a scandal.
So as the flu epidemic spread across the country. In large cities, people were dying of the flu so rapidly that undertakers ran out of coffins, streetcars had to be used as hearses, and mass graves were dug. The newspapers barely commented on it. In the fall of 1918, doctors tried to get newspapers to warn people in Philadelphia against attending a parade. The newspapers refused. In the week after the parade, almost 5,000 Philadelphians died of the flu.
Corruption-dusted mesas
We’re now well past the point where anyone can pretend that Iglesias wasn’t fired because he refused to use his office to advance the interests of the New Mexico Republican party by indicting Democrats. The evidence, at this point, is overwhelming and beyond dispute. Indeed, it’s not even being disputed, as you can glean pretty clearly from tomorrow’s stories in the Times and from McClatchy. Rather than continuing to deny it, state party leaders are giving on the record interviews in which they make the case for the rightness of their attempts to get Iglesias fired for not indicting enough Democrats.
Here’s the New York Times story, which begins:
The snow-dusted mesas and million-dollar adobes look enchanting as ever, but the political landscape here has shifted sharply since the Justice Department ousted a onetime Republican darling as United States attorney in New Mexico after party loyalists complained that he was not tough enough on crooked Democrats.
David C. Iglesias is the man out of a job. But political experts here are also assessing the damage to New Mexico’s two most powerful Republicans, Representative Heather A. Wilson, who won a re-election squeaker on an ethics platform in November, and the state’s six-term senior senator, Pete V. Domenici, Mr. Iglesias’s original champion and the man New Mexicans often call St. Pete.
McClatchy’s report begins:
Presidential advisor Karl Rove and at least one other member of the White House political team were urged by the New Mexico Republican party chairman to fire the state’s U.S. attorney because of dissatisfaction in part with his failure to indict Democrats in a voter fraud investigation in the battleground election state.
New Mexico Lawmaker Petitions to Restore Pluto’s Planet Status
The state of New Mexico could effectively secede from the astronomical community if a resolution to call Pluto a planet is passed.
Joint House Memorial 54 was introduced by representative Joni Marie Gutierrez, who represents Dona Ana County. It states that Pluto, the recently demoted object, “be declared a planet and that March 13, 2007 be declared ‘Pluto Planet Day’ at the legislature.”
Pluto was stripped of its planet status last August when a group within the International Astronomical Union voted to call the diminutive, far-flung world a dwarf planet. The decision was immediately and widely criticized by astronomers, many of whom have said it might not stand over time.
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Filed under Albuquerque & New Mexico and Strange News on March 11, 2007
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Filed under Albuquerque & New Mexico and Strange News on March 11, 2007
Founding actors
At such moments, [Amazing Grace] offers a dream of perfect articulateness—superbly trained actors delivering expertly phrased remarks with ease and force. . . . In this country, we have great actors, but not these kinds of great actors—men and women who can play historical figures and hold to formal syntax without losing their sense of play. Our founding crew of statesmen and intellectuals were no less gifted than Pitt and Wilberforce, but, despite an endless number of best-selling books about them, there isn’t a single good movie devoted to their efforts. At this point, no one can look at an American in a powdered wig without laughing. Popular culture and the democratization of taste and style have made our history irredeemable as entertainment—which is a loss, though I don’t suppose anyone will do much about it.
