Month: March 2005

It’s the birthday

… of Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Mike Stoller. He’s 72.

Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller have written some of the most spirited and enduring rock and roll songs: “Hound Dog” (originally cut by Big Mama Thornton in 1953 and covered by Elvis Presley three years later), “Love Potion No. 9” (the Clovers), “Kansas City” (Wilbert Harrison), “On Broadway” (the Drifters), “Ruby Baby” (Dion) and “Stand By Me” (Ben E. King). Their vast catalog includes virtually every major hit by the Coasters (e.g., “Searchin’,” “Young Blood,” “Charlie Brown,” “Yakety Yak” and “Poison Ivy”). They also worked their magic on Elvis Presley, writing “Jailhouse Rock,” “Treat Me Nice” and “You’re So Square (Baby I Don’t Care)” specifically for him. All totaled, Presley recorded more than 20 Leiber and Stoller songs.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

Leiber wrote the lyrics. Stoller wrote the music.

True to form

Billy Packer on CBS saying he didn’t think a last-second game-winning shot by Wisconsin was good, saying he wasn’t going to argue about it with Jim Nance while he was doing just that, and then being proven wrong by the replay.

Not so million dollar baby

Some insight into women’s boxing — “Battered Women ” by Benjamin Wallace-Wells, who says, “I’ve been to more than a dozen women’s fights since that first one, and nearly all were just like it, 45-second bloodfests.” Here’s his description:

The worst male fighters know how to play defense, but these girls looked like they’d never been trained. They didn’t even try to protect themselves. There was no effort to dodge, no shifting of weight, no clever, calculated movement of feet. Both girls just kept charging, swinging both fists at the same time. It was like watching six-year-olds fight before they’re old enough to realize that they might be hurt: All you want to do is make it stop. The action in the middle of the ring was an inchoate tangle of limbs and fists. Thirty seconds into the whirling, Angie fell down, striking the mat violently, as if she was attacking it. Jessica waved her arms above her head chaotically—a caricatured Rocky gesture—a huge grin on her face. I thought to myself that these two must be the worst girl fighters in the world. But it turned out that six months earlier, Jessica had placed second in her weight class at the National Golden Gloves—this was as good as it got.

They never should have let Angie back in the fight, but they did. She wobbled out to the center of the ring, too hurt to lift her hands above her waist. Jessica whacked her right in the nose; Angie went down, a series of limbs hitting the canvas in a successive heap. The nervous white girl from Lancaster started dancing around, and it was “Sweet Ass Jessie”? this time, her reward whistles and hooting. Angie was out for 15 minutes, white-cloaked medical personnel bending ominously over her.

Best line of the day, so far

“For 50 bucks, you can buy yourself an armchair seat on a balcony ringing the room, from which you can peer down over the room. These, however, are always filled with older Italian men, the Unindicted Co-conspirator set, fat and inert in their little chairs, each one looking like a marshmallow stuffed into a shot glass.”

Benjamin Wallace-Wells in an article on women’s boxing, “Battered Women.”

Bracket busters

From the bottom of the bracket to the top of Class 3A girls basketball: The Santa Fe Indian School Lady Braves took their fanatical fans on a ride to remember.

SFIS, a school with an enormous fan base but until now, no state championships, finished their improbable climb through the State Tournament field with a 42-37 win over two-time defending champion Portales on Friday night. SFIS won its first title in its first season as a member of 3A. The Lady Braves were in 2A for years but moved up this year as their enrollment increased.

From AP via The New Mexican

And they did it in front of 14,000 at The Pit.

Guys

From Dave Barry:

So I took my daughter to soccer practice this evening, and another dad and I were talking to one of the moms, whom we both know and whom we have both seen roughly once a week for the past six months. After we talked for about 10 minutes, a second mom showed up, and immediately said to the mom we’d been talking to: “YOU HAD YOUR BABY!” And then they hugged, and the new mom got out baby pictures. And the other dad and I looked at each other and realized that not only had we failed to notice that she’d had a baby, but we had been at most only dimly aware that she had been pregnant. We apologized, and she assured us that it was no big deal. Women are accustomed to the cluelessness of guys in these matters.

The thing is, if she had shown up carrying a cool new cell phone, we would have noticed that.

Library Shuffles Its Collection

From Wired News:

Checking out a new iPod now applies to more than shopping trips or web browsing. This week the South Huntington Public Library on Long Island, New York, became one of the first public libraries in the country to loan out iPod shuffles.

For the past three weeks, the library ran a pilot program using the portable MP3 devices to store audio books downloaded from the Apple iTunes Music Store. They started with six shuffles, and now are up to a total of 10. Each device holds a single audio book. …

In addition, the library has the potential to save a great deal of money. Latini said that most titles on CDs cost the library around $75, whereas in MP3 format, they range from $15 to $25.

Google Montage

From David Pogue:

Today’s time-killing waste of bandwidth: the Google Montage.

Type in a name or a subject, click Search, click Create Montage, and presto—a full-screen collage, built from Googled photos of the subject. You can point to one of the “tiles” to see where it came from, or click one to visit the Web site from which it came.

Most people probably start by typing in “Tom Cruise” or “Salma Hayek,” but you can come up with some pretty interesting, less obvious montages. Try “goatee,” or “daffodils,” or “Palm Tungsten.” It’s fun for the whole family!

NewMexiKen thought “Salma Hayek” was an excellent suggestion, but “Grand Canyon” proved good, too. “Grandpa’s Sweeties” was the best!

Update

There’s actually been a lot going on in NewMexiKen’s life this week. Furthermore, it all coincided with one of my periodic “why am I doing this moods.”

I think all should return to a more normal blogging routine soon.

Not that my normal blogging is anything worth holding your breath waiting for.

50 Best Places to Live

From Men’s Journal:

Start packing. There’s a town in the following pages for every interest — and for every budget. And this year we made great strides in how we came up with our rankings — including more data (almost 50 variables in all, from stress levels to the number of bars per capita), newer data (from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, the Census Bureau, and other official sources), and a greater emphasis on active living (we’ve weighted certain variables, such as the amount of wilderness nearby, more heavily). But a few things remain the same: The west still dominates; college towns sure rate highly; and, if you move to anyplace on this list, you’ll have no excuse for getting bored.

Number one overall: Boulder, Colorado (Flagstaff, Arizona, is second.)
Best big city: San Diego
Best adventure town: Bend, Oregon
Least stressful: Santa Fe
Healthiest: Portland, Maine
Smartest: Minneapolis

Resurrection Eggs

Eggs.jpg

Lead your kids on a fun, faith-filled Easter egg hunt this year—one that will teach them about Jesus’ death and resurrection! Each egg carton is filled with a dozen colorful plastic eggs. Pop them open and find miniature symbols of the Easter story inside. An easy-to-understand booklet features Bible stories explaining the significance of each object. Ages 5 and up.

Resurrection Eggs

Link via Jesus’ General

Pill no talk

From a report in The New York Times:

Regular use of low-dose aspirin does not prevent first heart attacks in women younger than 65, as it does in men, a 10-year study of healthy women has found.

The participants in the Women’s Health Study who took 100 milligrams of aspirin every other day were no less likely to suffer heart attacks than the participants in another group who took placebos. Each group had about 20,000 members.

But aspirin did appear to help protect the women against one kind of stroke – something the drug has not been found conclusively to do for men.

Choices

From an editorial in The New York Times:

We certainly look forward to Mr. Bolton’s confirmation hearings, and, after that, his performance at the United Nations, where he will undoubtedly do a fine job continuing the Bush administration’s charm offensive with the rest of the world.

Which leaves us wondering what Mr. Bush’s next nomination will be. Donald Rumsfeld to negotiate a new set of Geneva Conventions? Martha Stewart to run the Securities and Exchange Commission? Kenneth Lay for energy secretary?

Holy water

From the Arizona Daily Sun:

Coconino National Forest Supervisor Nora Rasure has approved snowmaking with reclaimed wastewater at Arizona Snowbowl, setting the stage for a legal showdown with 13 American Indian tribes that hold the San Francisco Peaks sacred. The proposal gives the owners of Arizona Snowbowl permission to make snow on any part of the ski area’s 777 acres of Forest Service land, which accounts for about 1 percent of the San Francisco Peaks area. Flagstaff’s City Council has approved up to 1.5 million gallons of reclaimed wastewater per day to be pumped to the ski area. The artificial snow will be spread on an estimated 200 acres. …

“This is appalling to Arizona tribes,” said George Hardeen, spokesman for Navajo Nation president Joe Shirley. “It’s as great an affront as can be visited upon the native people short of termination.” Hopi Chairman Wayne Taylor Jr. said in a statement he was “deeply disappointed.”

Sue the bastards!

From the Farmington Daily Times

The New Mexico Senate voted unanimously Tuesday to sue Texas for the return of 603,485 acres along the north-south boundary.

The Senate is referring to a 144-year-old land dispute involving a three-mile wide, 320-mile long strip of land along the west Texas border that technically belongs to New Mexico. The original 1859 survey posts were marked too far west.

Buy American, Buy Earth

Dan Neil writes about the one-world of automobile manufacturing. He begins:

Cadillacs built in Sweden and sold in Bavaria. Chevrolets built in Korea and sold in Romania. The big bruiser Chrysler 300C built in Austria and sold wherever asphalt needs a good spanking.

Never mind the 200-mph Bugattis and stretch Rolls-Royces. The story of the 2005 centennial Geneva Auto Show (through Sunday) is one of vast global alliance-building as car companies go lean, cut development costs and reach out to new markets. Last week, to cite one example, production of the new Toyota Aygo minicar commenced in Kolin in the Czech Republic; the tiny town car is being built alongside the Citroén C1 and the Peugeot 107 and the threesome will vie for sales in the emergent Eastern European market.

Neil’s discussion of the fallout from the weakening dollar is informative.