Best line of the day, so far

“Da’Tara wins the Belmont at 38:1 odds, but who do they interview when it’s over? Big Brown’s jockey.”

Debby, official sister of NewMexiKen.

Class

NewMexiKen is just an old bleeding-heart liberal, but both Clinton and Obama showed a lot of class today. This is from the Obama website.

Her speech:

Omnivore’s Dilemma

NewMexiKen has finished Michael Pollan’s The Omnivore’s Dilemma: A Natural History of Four Meals and highly recommends it to anyone interested in food. It was one of The New York Times 10 best books of the year in 2006.

This isn’t a cook book or a health book. It’s well-done journalism, reporting facts, history and trends, while profiling various people and places. The omnivore’s dilemma is that because humans can eat almost anything, we are easily confused (and manipulated). Pollan thinks we need to be better educated about the source of our foods so that we can make more informed choices. He sets out to increase his (and the reader’s) awareness about what we eat and where it comes from. He does so without grossing you out or trying to convert you (well, maybe a little). Pollan is not a vegetarian or animal rights absolutist.

[Pollan] embarks on four separate eating adventures, each of which starts at the very beginning — in the soil from which the raw materials of his dinners will emerge — and ends with a cooked, finished meal.

These meals are, in order, a McDonald’s repast consumed by Pollan with his wife and son in their car as it vrooms up a California freeway; a “Big Organic” meal of ingredients purchased at the upmarket chain Whole Foods; a beyond-organic chicken dinner whose main course and side dishes come from a wondrously self-sustaining Virginia farm that uses no pesticides, antibiotics or synthetic fertilizers; and a “hunter-gatherer” feast consisting almost entirely of ingredients that Pollan has shot dead or foraged himself.

The New York Times Book Review.

Here’s a lengthy adaptation from the final (but perhaps least interesting) section of the book — The Modern Hunter-Gatherer.

Best line of the day, so far

“If you spent as much time carefully thinking about the world’s problems as you waste dissing me and other liberals, perhaps you wouldn’t be so utterly, totally, irrevocably, and completely, wrong about everything.”

tristero

Camera thieves caught on camera

A woman who had her camera stolen got a close-up of the thieves when photos they took of themselves were automatically uploaded to her computer.

Alison DeLauzon had her digital camera stolen while she was on holiday in Florida, meaning she had to accept the loss of many treasured family snapshots.

But not only did she get those images back, she also got a few new ones – of the men who stole her camera posing with their prize, totally oblivious to the fact the pictures were being transmitted via cyberspace.

Equipped with a special memory card with wireless Internet capability, DeLauzon’s camera had not only automatically sent her holiday pictures to her computer, but also uploaded photos of the miscreants who swiped her equipment bag after she accidentally left it behind at a restaurant.

Metro.co.uk

Eye-Fi Card, Wireless 2 GB SD Memory Card

Daniel Boone

… first looked west from Cumberland Gap into what is now Kentucky on this date in 1769. The Kentucky Historical Society celebrates June 7 as “Boone Day.” Boone was not the first person through Cumberland Gap; he wasn’t even the first European-American. He was, however, instrumental in blazing a trail, which became known as the Wilderness Road. According to the National Park Service:

Immigration through the Gap began immediately, and by the end of the Revolutionary War some 12,000 persons had crossed into the new territory. By 1792 the population was over 100,000 and Kentucky was admitted to the Union.

During the 1790s traffic on the Wilderness Road increased. By 1800 almost 300,000 people had crossed the Gap going west. And each year as many head of livestock were driven east. As it had always been, the Gap was an important route of commerce and transportation.

NewMexiKen photos 2006. Click image for larger version.

What do brain surgeons know about cellphone safety that the rest of us don’t?

Last week, three prominent neurosurgeons told the CNN interviewer Larry King that they did not hold cellphones next to their ears. “I think the safe practice,” said Dr. Keith Black, a surgeon at Cedars-Sinai Medical Center in Los Angeles, “is to use an earpiece so you keep the microwave antenna away from your brain.”

Dr. Vini Khurana, an associate professor of neurosurgery at the Australian National University who is an outspoken critic of cellphones, said: “I use it on the speaker-phone mode. I do not hold it to my ear.” And CNN’s chief medical correspondent, Dr. Sanjay Gupta, a neurosurgeon at Emory University Hospital, said that like Dr. Black he used an earpiece.

NYTimes.com

Hit and run

Hartford, Connecticut, May 30th.

The victim is 78. Notice the good Samaritans rushing to his aid.

He was jaywalking but the cars that hit him were both on the wrong side of the street!

W

Poster for W from Oliver Stone. Click image for larger version.

Thanks to Byron for the tip.

Gas goes boom

Just a little math.

Nearly 60% of the price of a gallon of gas is the cost of oil. (The percentage has been increasing.) At $138.54 a barrel (today’s closing price) the cost of crude is $3.30 a gallon (138.54 divided by 42 gallons per barrel).

Even if the price of oil gets to be two-thirds of the cost of gasoline, that still means $5 gas is very near.

Tom Friedman last week:

I was visiting my local Toyota dealer in Bethesda, Md., last week to trade in one hybrid car for another. There is now a two-month wait to buy a Prius, which gets close to 50 miles per gallon. The dealer told me I was lucky. My hybrid was going up in value every day, so I didn’t have to worry about waiting a while for my new car. But if it were not a hybrid, he said, he would deduct each day $200 from the trade-in price for every $1-a-barrel increase in the OPEC price of crude oil. When I saw the rows and rows of unsold S.U.V.’s parked in his lot, I understood why.

Crude oil was up $9 $10.75 a barrel today, so your SUV just lost $1800 $2150 in trade-in value.

64 Years Ago Today

NewMexiKen outsourced D-Day commemoration to Functional Ambivalent.

June 6th

Levi Stubbs is 72. Stubbs was and is the lead vocalist of The Four Tops. It’s Stubbs who sings:

Now if you feel that you can’t go on
Because all of your hope is gone
And your life is filled with much confusion
Until happiness is just an illusion
And your world around is tumbling down
Darling reach out
C’mon girl
Reach on out for me
Reach out for me

Tennis Hall of Famer Bjorn Borg is 52.

Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti is 41. He was nominated for his supporting role in Cinderella Man. Giamatti’s father was professor of Renaissance literature at Yale, president of Yale, and Commissioner of Baseball.

Nathan Hale was born on June 6th in 1755. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” he said when hanged by the British in 1776 as an American spy. Hale had volunteered to report on British positions in New York. He was caught when Karl Rove’s ancestor revealed Hale’s covert identity to Robert Novak.

It’s a gas

The average U.S gallon of regular was $3.98-something yesterday and the price of crude oil jumped 5% today to $134 6.5% today to $136.60 8% today to $138.54 a barrel.

I know I’ve been stocking up. It isn’t safe to re-use plastic bottles for water, but I’ve been filling them with gasoline and storing them on a shelf in the garage. I must have 30 or 40 gallons out there by now. I’m prepared.

Here’s a list of current average prices. I see Albuquerque is among the lowest in the U.S. (I paid just $3.71⁹ earlier this week.)

This is pretty cool

Click image for larger version and to learn more. Once at APOD, be sure to move cursor over photo.

Best line of the day, so far

“You don’t spend your life fighting for women’s rights and then vote for Sen. McCain.”

St. Paul mayor and Clinton supporter (until Monday) Chris Coleman quoted by the MinnPost.

Stupidest line of the day, or any day

“The overall policy question for the Board is whether it is good policy for Seattle Parks to continue public beach fires when the carbon … emissions produced by thousands of beach fires per year contributes to global warming.”

Seattle Post-Intelligencer quoting Seattle parks department staff report.

Best line of the day, so far

“Barack Obama spending the evening at Hillary Clinton’s house. Agenda to include a pint of Ben & Jerry’s, a good cry, and a spirited pillowfight”

Fark.com

Edison, Make Way for the L.E.D.s

In case you didn’t know it, Thomas Edison’s invention, in use for more than 100 years to illuminate virtually everything, is quickly heading for the exits. What will eventually take its place is the light-emitting diode (L.E.D.) bulb, made up of tiny light sources the size of a head of a pin that use a fraction of a regular light bulb’s electricity, produce little heat, and last for tens of thousands of hours of use.
. . .

L.E.D.’s are not widely used today because of their high cost: An L.E.D. bulb can run as high as $90. Even if they would save money in the long run, few people are willing to spend that much up front.

But costs will come down, and when they do, expect to see the end of what is in essence an interim technology: the compact fluorescent bulb. Fluorescents, while using much less power than incandescent light bulbs, are sometimes too bulky, often can’t be dimmed and produce light that is less pleasing than incandescents.

Bits

Christian License Plate Law Approved

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R) yesterday allowed legislation authorizing a Christian-themed specialty license plate to become law without his signature. This means that the state Department of Motor Vehicles may issue a controversial new “I Believe” plate that displays a cross superimposed on a stained glass window.

TheNewspaper

Exciting new NewMexiKen poll

From an article at Salon — Who will Obama choose as veep? Nope, you’re wrong:

Almost half the time over the last 40 years, in fact, the vice president has been a national embarrassment — or worse. For the last seven and a half years, we have had a power-hungry megalomaniac, radiating visible contempt for democratic norms, as our vice president. Throw in Mr. Potato Head (Quayle) and Spiro Our Hero and you end up with quite a rogues’ gallery. The losers take some explaining as well, from Tom Eagleton (who was driven from the 1972 Democratic ticket when it was discovered that he had received electroshock treatments as a mental patient) to Geraldine Ferraro (who embarrassed Walter Mondale by not revealing her husband’s shady real-estate dealings before she was named as his 1984 V.P. choice). And with each passing day, Joe Lieberman seems to have been an increasingly incongruous running mate for Al Gore in 2000.

Fascinating

Another event from early 1992, still reverberating today: On January 10, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Strange Maps has more.

Breaking

The endgame of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination took an unexpected turn today as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, updated his status on a popular social networking site.

Visitors to Mr. Clinton’s profile page at Facebook noticed that minutes after Mrs. Clinton suspended her campaign, President Clinton updated his status from “Married” to “It’s Complicated.”

The Borowitz Report .com

Golf We Can Believe In

“Here’s a screen capture of the front page of McCain’s website as of 3:55 PM this afternoon with the four tabs across the top apparently signaling McCain’s top four agenda items … ”

Talking Points Memo

NewMexiKen verified the page was still the same at 4:05 PM MDT. Click the image for larger version.

Electoral Enchantment

Urban and wild define the New West — fast-growing cities nestled in Wallace Stegner’s “geography of hope.” The art, the history and the food of New Mexico have been commoditized, for obvious reasons. But many of its special places are intact, and owned by every American because of the Wilderness Act, which dates to the fertile years of Stewart Udall’s reign as the emperor of the outdoors.

Mark Udall has climbed every one of Colorado’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet (and has come within 3,000 feet of the summit of Everest). Tom Udall is the driving force behind legislation that saved the spectacular Valle Vidal in northern New Mexico from the predations of Dick Cheney and his allies.

From a longer piece by Timothy Egan on the Udalls and Democrats in the Southwest. Egan is one of the very best contemporary writers on the West anything.

Books Recommended by Warren Buffett

Business pundit lists Ten Books on Investing Recommended by Warren Buffett and Five (or Six) Political Books That Warren Buffett Recommends.