As you can see, a few manufacturers have even reached and surpassed their numbers from back in February 2007 and 2008.

• Hyundai-Kia had a negligible gain compared with 2/07, but a 9 percent gain compared with 2/08 sales figures.
• Subaru saw gains of 42 percent compared with 2/07 and 40 percent improvement over 2/08.
• Volkswagen Group increased sales by 4 percent over 2/07 and 6 percent over 2/08.
• Despite its challenges, Chrysler appears to have held its own. However, Automotive News reports that 58 percent of Chrysler sales this February went to fleets, rather than consumers. These are low-margin sales that are not sustainable.

In contrast, the major manufacturers with hyped February 2010 sales figures are still down significantly compared with February 2007 and 2008 sales:

• Chrysler–down 52 percent and 44 percent, respectively
• Ford–down 32 percent and 28 percent
• General Motors–down 54 percent and 47 percent
• Honda–down 27 percent and 30 percent
• Toyota–down 47 percent and 45 percent

As a whole, the industry is down 38 percent compared with 2/07, and down 34 percent compared with 2/08.

The Well Blog has more.

Video shot by the Columbus Dispatch from [Tuesday's] Honk and Wave in Support of Health Care at Congresswoman Mary Jo Kilroy’s district office contains a segment wherein the teabaggers mock and scorn an apparent Parkinsen’s victim telling him “he’s in the wrong end of town to ask for handouts”, calling him a communist and throwing money at him to “pay for his health care”.

Progress Ohio has the video.

John Sebastian is 66.

Oscar-nominee (for Forrest Gump) Gary Sinise is 55.

Rob Lowe is 46.

Mia Hamm is 38.

Author Gary Paul Nabhan is 58 today.

He dropped out of high school, but he ended up going back to college and studying environmental science and botany. He said that coming from an Arab family, he was attracted to the desert, so he moved to Arizona when he was 19. And he was fascinated by all the ways that food was a part of life there — for ranchers, Native Americans, immigrants.

Excerpt from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Author Penelope Lively is 77 today. According to The Writer’s Almanac, she is “the only writer who has ever won both the Carnegie Medal (for outstanding children’s books) and the Booker Prize (for fiction written for adults).” Lively’s The Ghost of Thomas Kempe won the Carnegie Medal. Her Moon Tiger won the Booker Prize.

It’s the birth date of two greats who died young — Nat “King” Cole (1919-1965) and Rudolf Nureyev (1938-1993).

Bobby Jones was born on this date in 1902. This from his obituary in 1971.

In the decade following World War I, America luxuriated in the Golden Era of Sports and its greatest collection of super-athletes: Babe Ruth and Ty Cobb in baseball, Jack Dempsey and Gene Tunney in boxing, Bill Tilden in tennis, Red Grange in football and Bobby Jones in golf.

Many of their records have been broken now, and others are destined to be broken. But one, sports experts agree, may outlast them–Bobby Jones’s grand slam of 1930.

Jones, an intense, unspoiled young man, started early on the road to success. At the age of 10, he shot a 90 for 18 holes. At 11 he was down to 80, and at 12 he shot a 70. At 9 he played against men, at 14 he won a major men’s tournament and at 21 he was United States Open champion.

At 28 he achieved the grand slam–victories in one year in the United States Open, British Open, United States Amateur and British Amateur championships. At that point, he retired from tournament golf.

A nation that idolized him for his success grew to respect him even more for his decision to treat golf as a game rather than a way of life. This respect grew with the years.

The New York Times

The facts about St. Patrick are few. Most derive from the two documents he probably wrote, the autobiographical Confession and the indignant Letter to a slave-taking marauder named Coroticus. Patrick was born in Britain, probably in Wales, around 385 A.D. His father was a Roman official. When Patrick was 16, seafaring raiders captured him, carried him to Ireland, and sold him into slavery. The Christian Patrick spent six lonely years herding sheep and, according to him, praying 100 times a day. In a dream, God told him to escape. He returned home, where he had another vision in which the Irish people begged him to return and minister to them: “We ask thee, boy, come and walk among us once more,” he recalls in the Confession. He studied for the priesthood in France, then made his way back to Ireland.

He spent his last 30 years there, baptizing pagans, ordaining priests, and founding churches and monasteries. His persuasive powers must have been astounding: Ireland fully converted to Christianity within 200 years and was the only country in Europe to Christianize peacefully. Patrick’s Christian conversion ended slavery, human sacrifice, and most intertribal warfare in Ireland. (He did not banish the snakes: Ireland never had any. Scholars now consider snakes a metaphor for the serpent of paganism. Nor did he invent the Shamrock Trinity. That was an 18th-century fabrication.)

David Plotz – Slate Magazine (2000)

There’s much more; follow the link.

Paul Krugman

Salem Maritime, the first National Historic Site in the National Park System, was established to preserve and interpret the maritime history of New England and the United States. The Site consists of about nine acres of land and twelve historic structures along the waterfront in Salem, Massachusetts, as well as a Visitor Center in downtown Salem. The Site documents the development of the Atlantic triangular trade during the colonial period, the role of privateering during the Revolutionary War, and the international maritime trade, especially with the Far East, which established American economic independence after the Revolution. The Site is also the focal point of the Essex National Heritage Area, designated in 1996, which links thousands of historic places in Essex County around three primary historic themes: colonial settlement, maritime trade, and early industrialization in the textile and shoe industries.

Salem Maritime National Historic Site

Man treated after attempting to nail himself to cross

NewMexiKen wasn’t going to post this lunacy until I saw the money quote:

When he realized that he was unable to nail his other hand to the board, he called 911,” Boucher said.”

Read the story from the Portland Press Herald [link no longer valid].

There is a reason why they call the area at the top of Sandia Crest the “Electric Forest.”

The Sandias are always more dramatic looking down from the Crest than they appear from Albuquerque looking up. Photo taken at 10,678 feet above sea level.

WSJ.com

Charles Pierce