Fine and Mellow

Despite the rube doing the introduction, one of the great performances ever.

Lost Town Blues

Good insight as always from Timothy Egan. He writes here about the real plight of small town America.

“People who live in small towns that have been passed over don’t need to be told that they’re bitter, or heroic. They’re stuck, is what they are.”

They don’t get it even when they get it

David Bohrman, who oversees all of the political coverage at CNN, took particular issue with the lapel-flag question, which was posed to Mr. Obama by a voter appearing on tape. Mr. Bohrman said he would have instead had the moderators ask each candidate about their stance on a possible amendment to the Constitution banning flag-burning. “That’s a legitimate flag question,” Mr. Bohrman said. “I think the voters are expecting more from us.”

Reported in The New York Times.

The bone-bending, ergonomic hell of economy class

Ask the pilot, Patrick Smith talks about airliner seats:

When carriers offer improvements, the focus, all too often, is on legroom. The various souped-up economy cabins out there — marketed as Economy Plus, Premium Economy, etc. — emphasize legroom as their biggest selling point. I can’t speak for everybody — I’m under 6 feet tall — but among the least of my concerns is the lack of space for my legs. A bigger issue is the inability to lift my legs.

What he talks about is actually kind of interesting for anyone who flies, including something I’ve never thought about before — why no cup holders?

Late night best lines

• Actually, one really embarrassing moment — you see this on the news? When the Pope blessed the crowd with holy water, well, some of it splashed on Dick Cheney, burned his skin.

• Some news from Iran. The chief of police in Tehran, who is in charge of fighting vice and bad morals, was found naked with six hookers. His name, Ahmed Spitzer.

— Jay Leno

• Well, big news, ladies and gentlemen –- the Pope is in the United States, flew into Washington, D.C. Hillary Clinton declined to meet the Pope at the airport. You know, she was worried about sniper fire.

— David Letterman

The Cougar Ace

A fascinating article from “Wired” about righting a capsizing ship off Alaska with $100 million worth of new Mazdas on board. Worthy of the click if only to peruse the photos.

High Tech Cowboys of the Deep Seas: The Race to Save the Cougar Ace

I gotta find another way to spend my time (rather than blogging)

Here’s the top four search strings in the past few hours here at NewMexiKen:

katrina campins 306
virgen de guadalupe 13
warning sign 11
“katrina campins” 9

Katrina Campins was among the first group on the Apprentice. It’s no doubt her photo they want now. I’m guessing this is the one.

I feel used. I’ve never posted that photo or linked to it before. The one I have that gets the traffic headed this way is, I suppose, this one from four years ago.

It’s a good day to love the whole world

Why do so many pro baseball players have August birthdays?

“Since 1950, a baby born in the United States in August has had a 50 percent to 60 percent better chance of making the big leagues than a baby born in July. The lesson: If you want your child to be a professional baseball player, you should start planning early. Very early. As in before conception.”

Greg Spira has the details at Slate Magazine.

The storyline

That has been the dominant media theme for the last two decades in our political discourse, and particularly in our national elections. Leave policy and ideology to the side. Just ignore it. What matters is that Democrats and liberals are weak, effete, elitist, nerdy, military-hating, gender-confused losers, whose men are effeminate, whose women are emasculating dykes, and who merit sneering mockery and derision. Republican right-wing male leaders are salt-of-the-earth, wholesome, likable tough guys — courageous warriors and normal family men who merit personal admiration and affection.

From an excerpt of Great American Hypocrites, newly published by Glenn Greenwald.

Best irony in a line so far, today

“The debate also touched on Iraq, Iran, the Middle East, taxes, the economy, guns and affirmative action.”

The Washington Post

Also. Touched. On.

H/T to Glenn Greenwald for the idea.

The Disgusting Debate

In my ideal political world, both candidates would have told Charlie Gibson and George Stephanopoulos to shut up and change the subject.

Rustbelt Intellectual

An hour into the latest Democratic Debate and overwhelmingly, the consensus is that ABC is doing a fine job… of completely ignoring the issues that concern Americans and focusing on minutia that is hurting the race, the Democratic party and the American electoral process.

Crooks and Liars

At the end, Gibson pompously thanked the candidates — or was he really patting himself on the back? — for “what I think has been a fascinating debate.” He’s entitled to his opinion, but the most fascinating aspect was waiting to see how low he and Stephanopoulos would go, and then being appalled at the answer.

Tom Shales

After the first forty minutes of last night’s Democratic debate, it was clear we were watching something historic. Not historic in a good way, mind you, but historic in the sense of being something so deeply embarrassing to the nation that it will be pointed to, in future books and documentary works, as a prime example of the collapse of the American media into utter and complete substanceless, into self-celebrated vapidity, and into a now-complete inability or unwillingness to cover the most important affairs of the nation to any but the most shallow of depths.

Congratulations are clearly in order. ABC had two hours of access to two of the three remaining candidates vying to lead the most powerful nation in the world, and spent the decided majority of that time mining what the press considers the true issues facing the republic. Bittergate; Rev. Wright; Bosnia; American flag lapel pins. That’s what’s important to the future of the country.

Daily Kos

An open letter to Charlie Gibson and George Stephanapoulos

It’s hard to know where to begin with this, less than an hour after you signed off from your Democratic presidential debate here in my hometown of Philadelphia, a televised train wreck that my friend and colleague Greg Mitchell has already called, quite accurately, “a shameful night for the U.S. media.” It’s hard because — like many other Americans — I am still angry at what I just witnesses, so angry that it’s hard to even type accurately because my hands are shaking. Look, I know that “media criticism” — especially when it’s one journalist speaking to another — tends to be a genteel, collegial thing, but there’s no genteel way to say this.

With your performance tonight — your focus on issues that were at best trivial wastes of valuable airtime and at worst restatements of right-wing falsehoods, punctuated by inane “issue” questions that in no way resembled the real world concerns of American voters – you disgraced my profession of journalism, and, by association, me and a lot of hard-working colleagues who do still try to ferret out the truth, rather than worry about who can give us the best deal on our capital gains taxes. But it’s even worse than that. By so badly botching arguably the most critical debate of such an important election, in a time of both war and economic misery, you disgraced the American voters, and in fact even disgraced democracy itself. Indeed, if I were a citizen of one of those nations where America is seeking to “export democracy,” and I had watched the debate, I probably would have said, “no thank you.” Because that was no way to promote democracy.

Will Bunch at Philadelphia Daily News. There’s more.

Bunch, a journalist himself, says: “Although, to be blunt, I would also urge the major candidates in 2012 to agree only to debates that are organized by the League of Women Voters, with citizen moderators and questioners. Because we have proven without a doubt in 2008 that working journalists don’t deserve to be the debate ‘deciders.’”

A-fucking-men.

Movie Spoiler T-Shirt

A very cool T-shirt design.

Some sobering stories

These kinds of stories keep appearing.

Holy Macanoly!

It’s snowing at Casa NewMexiKen!

It was 80º yesterday.

April 17th ought to be a national holiday

Today we celebrate the birthday

. . . of Olivia Hussey. Sixteen when she played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, she’s 57 today.

. . . of Nick Hornby. He’s 51.

The book was called Fever Pitch (1992), and it came out at a time when football fans were generally looked down upon by the British upper class. But the book became something of a phenomenon in Great Britain, selling hundreds of thousands of copies, making it one of the best-selling books about sport ever published in the English language. Part of what made the book so popular was that it captured the way people can rely on a sports team to give their lives drama and meaning. Hornby wrote, “The natural state of the football fan is bitter disappointment, no matter what the score.”

The Writer’s Almanac

. . . of Liz Phair. She’s 41.

. . . of Jennifer Garner. She’s 36.

J. P. Morgan was born on this date in 1837.

[Morgan] began his career in 1857 as an accountant, and worked for several New York banking firms until he became a partner in Drexel, Morgan and Company in 1871, which was reorganized as J.P. Morgan and Company in 1895. Described as a coldly rational man, Morgan began reorganizing railroads in 1885, becoming a board member and gaining control of large amounts of stock of many of the rail companies he helped restructure. In 1896, Morgan embarked on consolidations in the electric, steel (creating U.S. Steel, the world’s first billion-dollar corporation, in 1901), and agricultural equipment manufacturing industries. By the early 1900s, Morgan was the main force behind the Trusts, controlling virtually all the basic American industries. He then looked to the financial and insurance industries, in which his banking firm also achieved a concentration of control.

The American Experience

Karen Dinesen was born on this date in 1885. We know her as Isak Dinesen.

[S]o she decided to write about her experiences in Africa. Instead of writing an ordinary memoir, she wrote about her time in Africa as though it was a half-remembered dream in her book Out of Africa (1937).

She wrote, “Looking back on a sojourn in the African high-lands, you are struck by your feeling of having lived for a time up in the air.”

And, “[I watched] elephants … pacing along as if they had an appointment at the end of the world … [and I once saw a] lion … crossing the grey plain on his way home from the kill, drawing a dark wake in the silvery grass, his face still red up to the ears.”

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

Nikita Khrushchev was born on this date in in 1894. Khrushchev was Soviet Premier from 1954-1964. The New York Times has posted its lengthy obituary from 1971. One of the more infamous moments at the United Nations took place when Khrushchev visited there in 1960 and reportedly banged his shoe on the desk in a protest. Or maybe he didn’t. Read what NewMexiKen posted about this incident in 2004.

Thornton Wilder was born on this date in 1897.

As a boy, he lived near a university theater where they performed Greek dramas, and his mother let him participate as a member of the chorus. He never forgot the experience, and he decided then that he would try to write for the theater someday. He got a job at the University of Chicago and began to write a series of experimental one-act plays that used a minimum of scenery and props, and often included an all-knowing character called the Stage Manager. Then, in 1938, he produced the play for which he is best known, Our Town, one of the first major Broadway plays to use almost no stage scenery, so that the audience had to imagine the world in which the characters lived.

Our Town is about the New England village of Grover’s Corners, where the characters George Gibbs and Emily Webb grow up, fall in love at the soda fountain, and get married. When Emily dies in childbirth, she gets to relive the day of her 12th birthday and realizes how little she cherished life while she was alive.

The Writer’s Almanac

William Holden was born on this date in 1918. Holden was nominated three times for the Best Actor Oscar, winning for Stalag 17 in 1954. His other nominations were for Sunset Blvd. and Network. Holden is probably as well known for his portrayal of Hal Carter opposite Kim Novak in Picnic and as the leader of the demolition team intent on destroying Alec Guiness’ Bridge on the River Kwai.

But, most importantly, Emily, official younger daughter of NewMexiKen, was born on April 17th. Happy birthday Emily!