There are worse ways to spend two minutes and four seconds.
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Some interesting background on Obama the author from The New York Times. The article includes this:
The books have defined Mr. Obama’s public image in a way that few books by politicians have done. Reporters paw through them for insights into Mr. Obama the candidate, supplied by Mr. Obama the author. Out of his story, he has also drawn the central promise of his campaign: if a biracial son of a Kenyan and a Kansan could reconcile the seemingly irreconcilable in himself, a divided country could do the same.
His memoir is, as one publisher put it, “the single most vetted book in American politics right now.” Written at a time when Mr. Obama says he was thinking less about a career in politics than about simply writing a good book, it leaves an impression of candidness and authenticity that gives it much of its power.
“Eat food. Not too much. Mostly plants.”
Michael Pollan, author of In Defense of Food: An Eater’s Manifesto, quoted in The Last Bite an article asking, “Is the world’s food system collapsing?”
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The G Spot has four videos of the great gospel singer and guitarist Sister Rosetta Tharpe.
Sister Rosetta, who died in 1973, is probably best known as an important precursor to early rock and roll. With her virtuoso rocking guitar playing, she pioneered an original sound all of her own. Musicians from Elvis Presley and Jerry Lee Lewis to Bob Dylan to Isaac Hayes and Aretha Franklin have cited her as an influence, and both Little Richard and Johnny Cash have said she was their favorite singer.
“Among today’s larger corporations,” Webb writes, “the average CEO makes more than $10 million a year at the same time his or her workforce receives the lowest compensation package, as a percentage of national wealth, in American history.
“What did these people do to earn these fabulous sums? Did they invent the light bulb? Did they discover the Internet? Did they provide the world with a vaccine that would eliminate some dread disease? No, they examined trends, analyzed data, made phone calls and decided where their clients should risk their assets in buying or selling a stake in the international marketplace.”
Senator Jim Webb, from his new book, A Time to Fight: Reclaiming a Fair and Just America, and quoted in The Virginian-Pilot.
NewMexiKen finished Tony Horwitz’s A Voyage Long and Strange: Rediscovering the New World. As always, his descriptions and conversations with people he meets along the way are fascinating. The history is revealing if you aren’t terribly familiar with what was going on in America before the Pilgrims.
Horwitz has a brief video about the book at Amazon.com.
I’ll be turning my attention to Chuck Klosterman’s Killing Yourself to Live: 85% of a True Story later today. It was the one book of his that the library had on the shelf.
Dennis Hopper is 72.
Sugar Ray Leonard is 52, as is Bob Saget.
Jim Nance is 49.
Enya is 47.
Jane Parker (Tarzan’s Jane) and Mia Farrow’s mom was born on this date in 1911. That’s actress Maureen O’Sullivan.
One of the brightest of ingenues, the actress appeared in more than 60 films, from ”Tugboat Annie” to ”Pride and Prejudice,” starring with everyone from Robert Taylor to the Marx Brothers. But she was always identified with the lovely, legendary Jane, teaching the niceties of civilization and romance to the yowling Tarzan, Edgar Rice Burroughs’s King of the Jungle. It was a notable pairing of opposites.
Her other movie successes included ”The Thin Man,” ”The Barretts of Wimpole Street,” Greta Garbo’s ”Anna Karenina,” ”A Day at the Races,” ”A Yank at Oxford,” ”The Crowd Roars” and ”David Copperfield” (with W. C. Fields).
At its core, a website such as this (a blog) is generated from three sets of files — a database that holds all the content, some template files that manage the layout, and some code files that fill the layout with the content when a reader clicks on the site. I guess somewhere in those files for NewMexiKen there was a bug, because late Wednesday I used up more than my allotted share of the server (for the third time) and the company that hosts the site shut me down. (It surely wasn’t due to too much traffic.)
For the past two days then I have been scrambling to find a suitable landing place and then getting the unresponsive former provider to redirect the URL newmexiken.com to the new server. They made the switch overnight last night (early Saturday morning).
And so I am back, but in a limited way — I don’t have to worry about any bugs, but I can’t do much with the look and I can’t restore the archives.
So I’ll just blog here while I figure out what I want to do.
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This play by Manny Ramirez the other night in Baltimore is worth a click. He makes the over the shoulder catch running full out, gives a high five to a fan, and doubles the runner off first.
“White House to Obama: You’re so vain, you probably thought that speech was about you…Don’t you, don’t you?”
(The White House denies the President’s speech to the Israeli Knesset included a veiled reference to Obama. Mostly it was Carter.)
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