Double Stuf Lick Racing

Join the action at the Double Stuf Racing League.

Surgeons Hone Skills

Interesting item from The Wall Street Journal Health Blog: “Don’t worry about that guy about to operate on your gallbladder. He trained on the Wii.”

Youngest Oscar-winning Actress

If Ellen Page (”Juno”) wins best actress, she’ll set a new record for youngest actress. Who holds that distinction today? Your options: Joan Fontaine (”Suspicion”), Janet Gaynor (”Seventh Heaven,” “Street Angel,” “Sunrise”), Audrey Hepburn, (”Roman Holiday”), Marlee Matlin (”Children of a Lesser God”).

Quiz from The Envelope, which has the answer.

Messy Desks

What warms me to Obama in this instance isn’t just his messy desk. It’s that when he was asked a human question (”What’s your greatest weakness”), he answered like a human being. … As Obama pointed out today on NPR, Edwards and Clinton both gave almost freakishly political answers. (Edwards: my greatest weakness is that I care too much. Clinton: I get impatient with people who don’t care enough about the children!) Come on, if you were interviewing someone for a job, and you asked ye olden “greatest weakness” chestnut, what would you think of the kinds of answers that Clinton and Edwards gave? I’d immediately think I was talking with someone who was both phony and unimaginative.

Timothy Burke

NewMexiKen has always admired people with messy desks, being congenitally unable to live like that myself (e.g., God forbid the pen be placed with its clip facing left rather than right).

How many books do you have?

NewMexiKen always looks around whenever I visit a home for the first time to see where the books are, what they are, and how many there are. I try not to judge books by their cover, but I often — though certainly not always — judge people by their books. (By “judge” I simply mean, get an impression.)

Not counting cookbooks, I have books in five bookcases in four rooms, around 700 altogether I believe.

How about you?

Let it snow, let it snow!

“There are two times a year it should absolutely, positively snow: Christmas Eve and during a playoff game at Lambeau Field.”

Chris Erskine, Los Angeles Times

Cooper: The other Manning

 
 
The other Manning

Manning showdown born of same backyard

Best line of the day, so far

“Rudy Giuliani promises to make homeowners insurance cheaper in Florida, because you shouldn’t have to pay more just because you live in a hurricane bullseye, that’s, like, so unfair”

FARK.com

And while we’re on the subject of Florida, NewMexiKen is wondering if we really need 50 states anyway?

Best lines of the day, so far

“Obama truly is a genius at talking in a manner which makes you think he’s saying what you hope he’s saying.”

“But Obama isn’t stupid, so he clearly is no Reaganite.”

tristero at Hullabaloo

Imagine

Imagine (sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”)

Imagine there’s no Apple,
No products that begin with “i,”
No monthly iPod models,
No Apple stores to get you high.
Imagine all the people
Finding other things to do!

Lyrics by David Pogue. Click to sing the other verses.

Poor sports

Eli Manning enjoys “Seinfeld” reruns.

Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Many NFL players have far worse vices.

But Jay Zollar, general manager of WLUK, a Fox affiliate in Green Bay, this week made it clear that he, not the Giants quarterback, is the master of that domain.

On a video on the station’s Web site, Zollar points at the camera and says, “Eli, no ‘Seinfeld’ for you!”

Yup, the station has pulled its regularly scheduled 5:30 p.m. Saturday “Seinfeld” rerun in an attempt to disrupt Manning’s preparation for Sunday’s NFC Championship Game against the Packers.

Newsday.com

I’m thinking Eli can probably afford a portable DVD player.

Sibling Underlings

In honor of youngest brother Eli Manning making it to the championship round (and not older brother Peyton), Mental Floss has a quiz about siblings.

But the quiz is grossly incomplete. They forgot Ron Howard’s Brother.

January 17th

Today is the birthday

… of Betty White. The character actress, who first appeared on television in 1949, and most famous now for The Golden Girls, is 86. Miss White has been nominated for 15 Emmy Awards, winning four times.

… of Eartha Kitt. Santa’s Baby is 81.

… of James Earl Jones. The voice of Darth Vader is 77. Jones has been in more than 130 films and appeared on more than 50 television programs. He was nominated for the 1971 best actor Oscar for The Great White Hope.

… of long-time baseball coach Don Zimmer, now 77.

… of Muhammad Ali. The Champ is 66.

… of Bangle Susanna Hoffs, now 49.

… of Jim Carrey. The actor is 46.

… of Kid Rock. He’s 37.

… of Dwayne Wade. He’s 26.

And it’s the birthday of Al Capone, born in Naples, Italy, in 1899. Here’s some of the background from his obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1947 at the age of 48.

Alphonse (Scarface) Capone, the fat boy from Brooklyn, was a Horatio Alger hero–underworld version. More than any other one man he represented, at the height of his power from 1925 through 1931, the debauchery of the “dry” era. He seized and held in thrall during that period the great city of Chicago and its suburbs.

Head of the cruelest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War I hand grenade.

His infamy made international legend. In France, for example, he was “The One Who Is Scarred.” He was the symbol of the ultimate in American lawlessness.

Capone won great wealth; how much, no one will ever know, except that the figure was fantastic. He remained immune from prosecution for his multitudinous murders (including the St. Valentine Day Massacre in 1929 when his gunners, dressed as policemen, trapped and killed eight of the Bugs Moran bootleg outfit in a Chicago garage), but was brought to book, finally, on the comparatively sissy charge of evasion of income taxes amounting to around $215,000.

For this, he was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison–serving first at Atlanta, then on The Rock, at Alcatraz–and was fined $50,000, with $20,000 additional for costs. With time out for good conduct, he finished this sentence in mid-January of 1939; but by then he was a slack- jawed paretic overcome by social disease, and paralytic to boot.

America’s Founding Uncle

Benjamin Franklin was born on this date in 1706.

As his most recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, states:

[Franklin] was, during his eighty-four-year-Iong life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and cleanburning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.

But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.

Benjamin Franklin: An American Life

Best lines of the past 302 years, so far

• The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money.
• He is not well-bred, that cannot bear ill-breeding in others.
• You may talk too much on the best of subjects.
• A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
• All would live long, but none would be old.
• One today is worth two tomorrows.
• Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
• Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
• Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
• Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
• Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.
• Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
• I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
• If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
• I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

All the above from Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston on this date in 1706.

Best line of the day, so far

Rudy in Florida:

“IF ELECTED, I’LL EXTEND THE ‘EARLY BIRD SPECIAL’ TO BETWEEN THE HOURS OF ‘9′ … AND ‘11′.”

Satirical Political Report