“To all the presidential campaigns trying to claim that the atrocity in Pakistan somehow proves that they have the right candidate — please stop.
“This isn’t about you; in fact, as far as I can tell, it isn’t about America.”
“[O]fficials are exploring the possibility that one of the three people who were attacked climbed over a fence and dangled one of his legs or another body part over the edge of the moat, somehow helping the tiger across.”
More than half of the U.S. population (51%) resides in the nine most populated states.
Just about everyone knows that California has the most people of any state (36.55 million, 12% of the whole country).
Can you name the seven other states that have more than 10 million people? And then name the next state (ninth most populated), which has 9.5 million people?
(Based on July 1, 2007, estimates released by the Census Bureau today.)
This video was developed and produced by Mudhouse Advertising to help raise awareness about issues of homelessness. For every unique viewing, Mudhouse will donate $1 (up to $10,000) to support ArtStreet programming.
This is a Christmas season perennial here at NewMexiKen. Go ahead, read it again. It makes everything about the season seem simpler yet more precious.
Merry Christmas!
The Gift of the Magi
by O. Henry (William Sydney Porter), 1906.
One dollar and eighty-seven cents. That was all. And
sixty cents of it was in pennies. Pennies saved one and two
at a time by bulldozing the grocer and the vegetable man and
the butcher until one’s cheeks burned with the silent
imputation of parsimony that such close dealing implied.
Three times Della counted it. One dollar and eighty-seven
cents. And the next day would be Christmas.
“Christmas is a time when people of all religions come together to worship Jesus Christ.”
— Bart Simpson
Thanks to The Sonoran Son.
A crisp winter morning in Albuquerque, the scent of breakfast burritos wafting from local restaurants, unwary drivers zipping through red lights, and suddenly – whoosh.
A White House-sized object descends from the skies, creating a fireball with hurricane-force winds that knock over buildings and blow out windows for miles around.
The article tells how Sandia National Laboratories researchers have estimated that such an event is more common than previous expected. Well, not Albuquerque precisely, but on Earth in general.
Chicken Little was right!
Spain’s “El Gordo” lottery awarded over 3 billion dollars worth of cash prizes Saturday. That’s “B” as in Brobdingnagian.
Yahoo News has details.
Today is the birthday
… of Hector Elizondo. Better-known perhaps for Chicago Hope, NewMexiKen remembers this fine character actor best as the gracious hotel manager in Pretty Woman. He’s 71.
… of Steve Carlton. Lefty is 63.
Steve Carlton was an extremely focused competitor with complete dedication to excellence. He thrived on the mound by physically and mentally challenging himself off the field. His out-pitch, a hard, biting slider complemented a great fastball. He won 329 games – second only to Warren Spahn among lefties – and his 4,136 strikeouts are exceeded only by Nolan Ryan. Lefty once notched 19 strikeouts in a game, compiled six 20-win seasons, and was the first pitcher to win four Cy Young Awards.
… of Diane Sawyer. She’s 62. Another person NewMexiKen once met; in Sawyer’s case while she worked for Richard Nixon after he resigned the presidency. It was 33 years ago, but I can still remember the moment and thinking that I wanted to be a former President when I grew up so that women as attractive as she would be on my staff.
… of Robin Gibb. The twin of Maurice (d. 2003) and brother of Barry and Andy (d. 1988) is 58.
… of Ralph Fiennes. The actor, twice nominated for the best actor Oscar, is 45.
Claudia Taylor Johnson was born on this date in 1912. NewMexiKen worked at the Lyndon Baines Johnson Library in the mid-1970s where I met and occasionally chatted with Mrs. Johnson. She was a warm, impressive and attractive woman.
Savannah, Ga., Dec. 22. [1864]
To His Excellency, President Lincoln:
I beg to present you as a Christmas gift, the city of Savannah, with one hundred and fifty heavy guns and plenty of ammunition, and also about twenty-five thousand bales of cotton.
(Signed.) W. T. Sherman, Major-General
The headline in The New York Times the following day read: Savannah Ours.
1900-1909 Crayola Crayons
1910-1919 Raggedy Ann Dolls
1920-1929 Madame Alexander Collectible Dolls
1930-1939 View-Master 3-D Viewer
1940-1949 Candy Land
1950-1959 Mr. Potato Head
1960-1969 G.I. Joe
1970-1979 Rubik’s Cube
1980-1989 Cabbage Patch Kids
1990-1999 Beanie Babies
2000-Present Razor Scooter
Here are the details from Forbes, including other notable toys of each decade. (Article is from 2005.)
The sign is at the beginning of eastbound I-40 in Barstow, California.
“The new energy bill signed this week makes it official. When 2012 hits, stores can no longer sell the cheap but inefficient incandescent light bulbs that are fixtures in most homes.”
Light Emitting Diodes (LEDs) are the answer. They are nontoxic (no mercury) and last 50,000 hours compared to 1,000 for incandescent bulbs and 6,000 for compact fluorescent lights. Alas, so far they can’t make them give off white light.
“Who is your favorite author?” Aleya Deatsch, 7, of West Des Moines asked Mr. Huckabee in one of those posing-like-a-shopping-mall-Santa moments.
Mr. Huckabee paused, then said his favorite author was Dr. Seuss.
In an interview afterward with the news media, Aleya said she was somewhat surprised. She thought the candidate would be reading at a higher level.
“My favorite author is C. S. Lewis,” she said.
Note: According to the ole scorecard there on the right this is post 12,000. I am one sick puppy.
Top three:
Juno
No Country for Old Men
Before the Devil Knows You’re Dead
The only film I’ve seen from Ebert’s top 10 is the wonderful Away from Her that might snag Julie Christie a second Oscar just 42 years after her win for Darling. (She has two other nominations.)
Many of the toys tested over the weekend contained lead levels far beyond safe levels. A red plastic roof piece from a Lincoln Logs set tested at 1488 parts per million for lead (or 37 times the AAP standard). A small plastic Fisher Price Sesame Street Bert figure tested at 5346 ppm (or 133 times the standard). A Tinkerbell pink rolling backpack tested at 533 ppm for lead, while a Cinderella princess backpack tested at 474 ppm. A Winnie the Pooh placemat contained 985 ppm.
The highest lead level was found was in a Fisher Price Flip Track crane from a plastic train set that was owned by Burner’s own 5 year-old son, which tested at 10,600 ppm, or 265 times the AAP standard.
During the two days of testing, some important patterns came to light. All of the children’s character placemats tested contained high levels of lead or cadmium; Dora, Spiderman and Winnie the Pooh all tested positive. Cooler-style lunchboxes and soft coolers tended to have high lead content as well. Parents may want to consider keeping such items in their own homes away from their children.
Overall, the campaign conducted 798 tests on 479 toys and children’s items that were brought in for testing from across the district. 56 items tested positive for lead, and of those 47 items – 10 percent of the total – contained excessive lead levels above the American Academy of Pediatrics recommended maximum of 40 parts per million. Nine items tested positive for cadmium, another toxic element.
In 2007 | Funny Video Animation by JibJab.
Thanks to Dwight Perry for the link.
Admitting that he didn’t see the march with his own eyes, he said, “I ’saw’ him in the figurative sense.”
“The reference of seeing my father lead in civil rights,” he said, “and seeing my father march with Martin Luther King is in the sense of this figurative awareness of and recognition of his leadership.”
“I’ve tried to be as accurate as I can be,” he continued, smiling firmly. “If you look at the literature or look at the dictionary, the term ’saw’ includes being aware of — in the sense I’ve described.”
The questioning did not relent. “I’m an English literature major,” he insisted at one point. “When we say I saw the Patriots win the World Series, it doesn’t necessarily mean you were there.”
Indeed, I missed that particular World Series.
The background to this is that what Mitt says he “saw” — his father George Romney marching with Martin Luther King — has been shown to have never happened.
The Solstice is at 11:08 tonight Mountain Time.
Today is the birthday
… of Joe Paterno. The football coach at Penn State is 81.
… of Phil Donahue. The talk show host is 72.
… of Jane Fonda. The two-time Oscar-winning actress is 70. Miss Fonda has been nominated for the best actress Oscar six times, winning for Klute and Coming Home. She was also nominated for best supporting actress for On Golden Pond.
… of Carla Thomas. Gee Whiz, she’s 65.
… of Michael Tilson Thomas. The director of the San Francisco Symphony is 63.
… of Samuel L. Jackson. Mace Windu is 59. Jackson was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Jules Winnfield in Pulp Fiction.
… of Chris Evert. The tennis hall-of-famer is 53.
… of Jane Kaczmarek. Malcolm’s mom is 52.
… of Ray Romano. Raymond is 50.
… of Kiefer Sutherland. He’s 41.
… of Julie Delpy. The actress, who was nominated for a writing Oscar for Before Sunset, is 38.
Frank Zappa was born on this date in 1940. He died in 1993.
The singer, songwriter, and composer was born in Baltimore, Maryland (1940). Zappa’s father was a meteorologist in the Army who studied the effects of weather on explosions and poisonous gases. The gas masks and chemical paraphernalia his dad brought home were some of young Zappa’s first toys. When Frank Zappa started playing atonal classical music on his electric guitar, he said that his goal was to make sounds that would cause people to run from the room the moment they heard it. He was also a political activist, and he once proposed that the United States form a fourth branch of government devoted entirely to creativity.
Joseph Stalin was born on this date in 1879. This from his obituary in 1953:
Joseph Stalin became the most important figure in the political direction of one-third of the people of the world. He was one of a group of hard revolutionaries that established the first important Marxist state and, as its dictator, he carried forward its socialization and industrialization with vigor and ruthlessness.
During the second World War, Stalin personally led his country’s vast armed forces to victory. When Germany was defeated, he pushed his country’s frontiers to their greatest extent and fostered the creation of a buffer belt of Marxist-oriented satellite states from Korea across Eurasia to the Baltic Sea. Probably no other man ever exercised so much influence over so wide a region.
From the best Christmas album ever, Vince Guaraldi, A Charlie Brown Christmas.
Scientists are growing more excited about the possibility of witnessing, for the first time, a celestial pool shot that would do Fast Eddie Felsen proud: An asteroid they first spotted last month may slam into Mars on Jan. 30.
The estimated odds of a hit are steadily improving — originally 1 in 350, upgraded Thursday to 1 in 75, tremendously high by space standards. Astronomers have their fingers crossed. Though they’ve seen bits of a busted comet rain down on Jupiter, they’ve never observed an asteroid-planet collision and are thrilled with what they might learn.
The hunk of rock in question, which scientists have whimsically named 2007 WD5, is about 160 feet across, roughly the size of the one that caused the “Tunguska event,” flattening millions of trees and killing wildlife over hundreds of square miles in remote Siberia when it blew up in the atmosphere in 1908 with a force equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb.
The Lede has more.
Functional Ambivalent gives Circuit City an appropriate seasonal greeting.
(A greeting suitable for all seasons, in fact.)
Here’s the cockpit of a Boeing 737-85C.
How realistic are those scenarios where someone over the radio guides an inexperienced pilot to a safe landing? .
Ask the pilot’s Patrick Smith says not at all.
He also has some interesting information about pilots’ salaries.
A friend writes in his Christmas letter that his high-school-age son named a file reallylonghomeworkblahblahblahblah.doc.
“In less than 14 months, any traditional television set still connected to its antenna will receive nothing but static, as the broadcasting industry cuts over completely to its new digital frequencies.”
Did you know this? Does it matter to you (that is, do you have any analog TVs without cable)?
In the survey, Republicans with a college degree were substantially more skeptical about global warming than Republicans without one. Democrats with a college degree were significantly more convinced global warming was a problem than were Democrats who didn’t go to college.
I like to be in America!
O.K. by me in America!
Ev’rything free in America
What a load of stuff that now is.
A young blonde Icelandic woman’s recent experience visiting the US.
Link via Digby.
Dick Wolf, the producer of the Law & Order shows is 61 today.
Author Sandra Cisneros is 53.
It’s the birthday of the poet and novelist Sandra Cisneros, born in Chicago in 1954. When she was growing up, her Mexican-born father would often have bouts of nostalgia for the home country, and he would force the whole family to go back there for a few months.
She went on to college, and she later said she was lucky to be a girl, because her father didn’t care what she studied. He just expected her to meet her husband. So she was free to study an impractical subject like English. She kept writing, and one of her professors encouraged her to apply to the Iowa Writer’s Workshop.
But once Cisneros got there, she felt totally out of place. She said, “My classmates were from the best schools in the country. They had been bred as fine hothouse flowers. I was a yellow weed among the city’s cracks.” One day, her class was given an exercise to think about the houses they’d grown up in. Cisneros’s family had only owned one house, an ugly red bungalow. Listening to her classmates describe their childhood homes, she realized that she had grown up in a completely different world. She said, ” It was not until this moment when I separated myself, when I considered myself truly distinct, that my writing acquired a voice. … That’s when I decided I would write about something my classmates couldn’t write about.”
The French colors were lowered and the American flag raised in New Orleans on this date in 1803, signifying the transfer of sovereignty of Louisiana from France to the United States. Arguably the transfer was one of the two or three most defining moments in American history.
As ultimately defined, Louisiana Territory included most of the U.S. west of the Mississippi River, east of the Rocky Mountains, except for Texas and New Mexico; that is, parts or all of Louisiana, Arkansas, Missouri, Iowa, Minnesota, Oklahoma, Kansas, Nebraska, South Dakota, North Dakota, Colorado, Wyoming and Montana.
“All season long football fans have asked the question: How would a team with the ninth-best record in the Southeastern Conference fare against a team with the seventh-best record in the Big 12?”
Steve Harvey lists the ten worst bowl games.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.
Powered by WordPress.