Month: December 2005

On this date

  • Illinois was admitted to the Union as the 21st state on this date in 1818.
  • George B. McClellan was born on this date in 1826. McClellan was the commander of Union forces in the east during much of the first two years of the War of the Rebellion. He loved to organize and feared to fight. McClellan was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1864, receiving 21 to Lincoln’s 212 electoral votes.
  • Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on this date in 1857. Born in the Ukraine of Polish descent, Joseph Conrad learned English in the British merchant marine in his twenties. He began writing in the 1890s and published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895. Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902) are his most famous works.
  • The first human heart transplant took place in Cape Town, South Africa, on this date 38 years ago (1967). The patient, Lewis Washkansky, survived 18 days before he died from double pneumonia, a result of anti-rejection drugs suppressing his immune system.

Daryl Hannah is 45 today.

Brendan Fraser is 37.

Go Lobos

The University of New Mexico’s nationally top-ranked men’s NCAA Division I soccer team advanced to the Final Four tonight. The Lobos defeated California 1-0 in OT to move on to the national championship finals in Cary, North Carolina, next weekend. New Mexico’s two previous wins in the tournament have also been in overtime, 1-0 over Cal State-Northridge and 2-2 (5-4) against Wisconsin-Milwaukee. New Mexico will face Clemson in the semi-final next Friday. Clemson has not been scored upon in four championship round games.

Stamp out Christmas

2006 Christmas StampContrary to what some people on the internets are claiming, it’s not more anti-Christian secularism. The real reason the Postal Service did not release a new Madonna and Child Christmas stamp this year is because they had an overstock of last year’s stamp and wanted to sell them before the price of postage goes up to 39 cents on January 8 and makes the stamp nearly obsolete.

There will be a new Madonna stamp (no, not that Madonna) next Christmas. Madonna and Child stamps had been released each year since 1966.

You may click on the image to see a larger version of the 2006 stamp based on a painting by 18th century Peruvian artist Ignacio Chacón. Feliz Navidad.

The ads

The Goooooogle ads have generated more than $9 in as many days. I’ll try not to spend it all in one place. The ads that appear on this, the home page are the most boring. I guess Google gets confused with so many varied topics and just punts. On some of the single entry or category pages though, the ads are kind of interesting.

Which isn’t to say I want you to go browsing around NewMexiKen just to look at the ads. Most visitors to this website do come in via the single entry or category pages.

And, after all, it doesn’t do any good if you just look. You actually have to click on an ad (or two or ten) for anything to happen to my bank account.

Best line of the day, Scrooge division

“[I]f shivering in the dark outside a Best Buy at 3:30 a.m. in frigid November drizzle waiting for a half-price deal on a cheap-ass Chinese-made DVD player isn’t the very definition of self-immolating karmic torture, I don’t know what is.”

Mark Morford in a column titled: “Eat My Holiday Cheer: Screw joy and togetherness. It’s all about retail, just like Jesus would have wanted.”

Top Ten New President Bush Strategies For Victory in Iraq

10. “Make an even larger ‘Mission Accomplished’ sign”

9. “Encourage Iraqis to settle their feud like Dave and Oprah”

8. “Put that go-getter Michael Brown in charge”

7. “Launch slogan, ‘It’s not Iraq, it’s Weraq'”

6. “Just do whatever he did when he captured Osama”

5. “A little more vacation time at the ranch to clear his head”

4. “Pack on a quick 30 pounds and trade places with Jeb”

3. “Wait, you mean it ain’t going well?”

2. “Boost morale by doing his hilarious ‘Locked Door’ gag”

1. “Place Saddam back in power and tell him, ‘It’s your problem now, dude'”

David Letterman

Best line of the day, so far

“The overthrow of Saddam Hussein was supposed to provide the world with a demonstration of American power. It didn’t work out that way. But the Bush administration has come up with the next best thing: a demonstration of American PowerPoint.”

Paul Krugman in today’s New York Times

Krugman goes on to conclude:

The point isn’t just that the administration is trying, yet again, to deceive the public. It’s the fact that this attempt at deception shows such contempt – contempt for the public, and especially contempt for the news media. And why not? The truth is that the level of misrepresentation in this new document is no worse than that in a typical speech by President Bush or Vice President Dick Cheney. Yet for much of the past five years, many major news organizations failed to provide the public with effective fact-checking.

So Mr. Bush’s new public relations offensive on Iraq is a test. Are the news media still too cowed, too addicted to articles that contain little more than dueling quotes to tell the public when the administration is saying things that aren’t true? Or has the worm finally turned?

‘They’re like a mob of dervishes, hysterical, freakish, ineffectual, deluded.’

Pharyngula tells us some scary stuff:

The program was called “Faith Matters”, and it’s not clear whether Nightline was going for high irony or was sincere. It’s about the Justice House of Prayer, an anti-abortion group whose strategy was to rent an apartment with windows facing roughly in the direction of the Supreme Court, where “interns” jump up and down and rant and pray towards the Court, apparently under the impression that they will have some psychic influence on the justices, or that their all-powerful god requires constant nudging and needs to be aimed in the right physical direction to have an effect. I get the idea they imagine their god as a vast, logy blimp without much consciousness, and if only they tug on his supernatural guidewires enough, they can position him over the court building—at which time he’ll reach down with fat, bloated fingers and diddle about in the brains of the people below him. It’s a strange, primitive theology, cult-like and absurd.

NewMexiKen isn’t quite certain how this kind of “prayer” is any less effective than any other kind, but it’s certainly more open to ridicule.

OneGoodMove has a video of the Nightline report.

Big bucks

ASTORIA, Ore. — A federal judge says the name “Sambuck’s” above a hole-in-the-wall coffee shop is too similar to coffee giant Starbucks and must be changed.

Owner Sam Buck opened the shop in 2000, naming it after herself.

She said today that she had few details of a ruling by U.S. District Judge Ancer Haggerty of Portland. She faces hundreds of thousands of dollars in lawyers’ fees.

“The judge said I willfully infringed on (Starbucks’) trademark, that I diluted their trademark,” she said.

She was faced with erasing all traces of the name, from coffee cups to the sign outside to business cards.

AP via The Seattle Times

Starbucks offered Ms. Buck $500 to give up the shop’s name; she refused and Starbucks sued.

Were they wrong?

Cloning around

At The Dilbert Blog, Scott Adams is thinking about cloning. Read all of what he has to say, but here’s his theological thinking:

The big question with clones is how they get their souls, assuming souls exist. If God gives them brand new souls, then they aren’t actually clones at all. They’d be fundamentally different. But it also makes God more of a soul gumball machine than the omnipotent creator of the universe. The scientist who makes the clone would, in effect, be controlling God by making him pinch out another soul to inhabit the clone. That’s disturbing on many levels, not the least of which is the way I phrased it.

But maybe your clone gets half of your soul, say 10.5 grams worth. That would suck too. I have enough trouble dancing with the little bit of a soul I allegedly have. If you cut that in half, I’m polka dancing.

If each of your clones has a new and different soul, but everything else is the same, we’d probably start assigning letters to keep them straight — A,B,C, etc. And that suggests the one best reason to not clone yourself: Everyone would call you an A-soul.

Philadelphia nurse overhears British plans to attack Washington

Legend has it that on the night of December 2, 1777, Philadelphia housewife and nurse Lydia Darragh single-handedly saves the lives of General George Washington and his Continental Army when she overhears the British planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army for the following day.

During the occupation of Philadelphia, British General William Howe stationed his headquarters across the street from the Darragh home, and when Howe’s headquarters proved too small to hold meetings, he commandeered a large upstairs room in the Darraghs’ house. Although uncorroborated, family legend holds that Mrs. Darragh would eavesdrop and take notes on the British meetings from an adjoining room and would conceal the notes by sewing them into her coat before passing them onto American troops stationed outside the city.

On the evening of December 2, 1777, Darragh overheard the British commanders planning a surprise attack on Washington’s army at Whitemarsh, Pennsylvania, for December 4 and 5. Using a cover story that she needed to buy flour from a nearby mill just outside the British line, Darragh passed the information to American Lieutenant Colonel Thomas Craig the following day.

The British marched towards Whitemarsh on the evening of December 4, 1777, and were surprised to find General Washington and the Continental Army waiting for them. After three inconclusive days of skirmishing, General Howe chose to return his troops to Philadelphia.

It is said that members of the Central Intelligence Agency still tell the story of Lydia Darragh, one of the first spies in American history.

This Day in History from the History Channel

The Alaska National Interest Lands Conservation Act

… became law on this date in 1980, more than doubling the size of the national park system.

Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve

According to America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents edited by Lary M. Dilsaver:

In the waning days of the Carter Democratic administration, Congress acted to further protect and expand preserved areas in Alaska, many rescued from exploitation two years earlier by presidential proclamation. This complex and lengthy act defines preserved parks, forests, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers, and Native American corporation lands and the degrees of preservation and usage for each. It prescribes timber, fish, and wildlife protection and use by Native Americans and other citizens.

New areas for the national park system included Aniakchak National Preserve, Cape Krusenstern National Monument, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Kenai Fjords National Park, Kobuk Valley National Park, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Noatak National Preserve, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The act also added new lands to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Katmai National Monument and Preserve, and Denali National Park and Preserve (renamed from Mount McKinley National Park).

New wild and scenic rivers under Park Service administration included Alagnak, Alatna, Aniakchak, Charley, Chilikadrotna, John, Kobuk, Mulchatna, Noatak, North Fork of the Koyukuk, Salmon, Tinayguk, and Tlikakila rivers. Other wild and scenic rivers are designated or expanded in wildlife refuges and in other areas.

The vast majority of acreage in the Denali, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark, Noatak, and Wrangell-St. Elias units is designated wilderness.

Photo taken by Ken, official oldest son of NewMexiKen, 1998

Some words of wisdom from Woody Allen

As noted earlier, Woody Allen is 70 today. NewMexiKen saw Allen doing stand-up once upon a time when we were both a lot younger (about 40 years ago, sigh).

Here’s a few of his insights, some possibly from that very time.

“A fast word about oral contraception. I asked a girl to go to bed with me, she said ‘no’.”

“I had a terrible education. I attended a school for emotionally disturbed teachers.”

“I am thankful for laughter, except when milk comes out of my nose.”

“Some guy hit my fender, and I told him ‘be fruitful, and multiply.’ But not in those words.”

“I was thrown out of college for cheating on the metaphysics exam; I looked into the soul of the boy sitting next to me.”

“If it turns out that there is a God, I don’t think that he’s evil. But the worst that you can say about him is that basically he’s an underachiever.”

“More than any other time in history, mankind faces a crossroads. One path leads to despair and utter hopelessness. The other, to total extinction. Let us pray we have the wisdom to choose correctly.”

The CIA’s black highlighters

LANGLEY, VA—A report released Tuesday by the CIA’s Office of the Inspector General revealed that the CIA has mistakenly obscured hundreds of thousands of pages of critical intelligence information with black highlighters.

According to the report, sections of the documents— “almost invariably the most crucial passages” — are marred by an indelible black ink that renders the lines impossible to read, due to a top-secret highlighting policy that began at the agency’s inception in 1947.

Source: The Onion, which has a photo with an example.

Redshirting Your Own Kids

The SportsProf raises some interesting questions. This is just a short excerpt:

Many parents don’t want their kids — especially boys — being the youngest in their grade at school. Are there disadvantages to being the oldest kid in the grade? For example, will the kids of average age write off the oldest kid as less able because if he’s that old and in your grade, mustn’t there be something wrong with him? Or do kids really not think about that type of stuff at all, but rather whether someone is good and nice — or not? And are the decisions made because of a concern about the kid’s overall welfare, or merely about his ability to compete and earn a college scholarship?

What would you do? Suppose you’re not a good athlete and neither is your spouse and your kids haven’t demonstrated any noticeable athletic ability. Suppose one has size and one has speed, and people in your town are putting kids on travel teams at 8 and getting caught up in all sorts of extracurricular sports programs. You hear about kids getting into better colleges, getting better aid, with perhaps some of them getting full rides to a school. What do you do?

Insulin Problems Linked to Early Stages of Alzheimer’s Disease

Alzheimer’s disease may be a new, third type of diabetes that shares common features of type 1 and type 2 diabetes, according to a new study.

Researchers found that insulin and the cells that process it in the brain drop sharply in the early stages of Alzheimer’s disease. They also found that insulin levels continue to decline as the disease progresses and becomes more severe.

“Insulin disappears early and dramatically in Alzheimer’s disease. And many of the unexplained features of Alzheimer’s, such as cell death and tangles in the brain, appear to be linked to abnormalities in insulin signaling. This demonstrates that the disease is most likely a neuroendocrine disorder, or another type of diabetes,” says researcher Suzanne M. de la Monte, professor of pathology at Brown Medical School, in a news release.

WebMD

‘I never wanted to kill anybody, but if a man had it in his mind to kill me, I made it my business to get him first.’

The History Channel tells the fascinating story of Elfego Baca for This Day in Old West History — December 1, 1884:

Elfego Baca, legendary defender of southwestern Hispanos, manages to hold off a gang of 80 cowboys who are determined to kill him.

The trouble began the previous day, when Baca arrested Charles McCarthy, a cowboy who fired five shots at him in a Frisco (now Reserve), New Mexico, saloon. For months, a vicious band of Texan cowboys had terrorized the Hispanos of Frisco, brutally castrating one young Mexican man and using another for target practice. Outraged by these abuses, Baca gained a commission as deputy sheriff to try to end the terror. His arrest of McCarthy served notice to other Anglo cowboys that further abuses of the Hispanos would not be tolerated.

The Texans, however, were not easily intimidated. The morning after McCarthy’s arrest, a group of about 80 cowboys rode into town to free McCarthy and make an example of Baca for all Mexicans. Baca gathered the women and children of the town in a church for their safety and prepared to make a stand. When he saw how outnumbered he was, Baca retreated to an adobe house, where he killed one attacker and wounded several others. The irate cowboys peppered Baca’s tiny hideout with bullets, firing about 400 rounds into the flimsy structure. As night fell, they assumed they had killed the defiant deputy sheriff, but the next morning they awoke to the smell of beef stew and tortillas–Baca was fixing his breakfast.

A short while later, two lawmen and several of Baca’s friends came to his aid, and the cowboys retreated. Baca turned himself over to the officers, and he was charged with the murder of one of the cowboys. In his trial in Albuquerque, the jury found Baca not guilty because he had acted in self-defense, and he was released to a hero’s welcome among the Hispanos of New Mexico. Baca was adored because he had taken a stand against the abusive and racist Anglo newcomers. Hugely popular, Baca later enjoyed a successful career as a lawyer, private detective, and politician in Albuquerque.

Baca was 19 at the time of the shootout and lived until 1945. In 1958, Walt Disney Studios produced The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. Robert Loggia played the title role, with a cast that included Annette Funicello (as Chiquita), James Coburn and Alan Hale, Jr. (Gilligan’s skipper).

A golf tournament of sorts, the annual Elfego Baca Golf Shoot in Socorro, New Mexico, celebrates the deputy — “competitors are loaded into four-wheel drive vehicles to ascend Socorro Peak, 7,243 feet above sea level. Here they will battle in a one-hole shoot. The hole, a fifty foot patch of dirt, is located on the New Mexico Tech campus, about 4 hours long, 2550 feet down, and almost three miles away.”

You can read more about Elfego Baca here.

[Reposted from December 1, 2003.]

27 years ago today

President Jimmy Carter took abrupt and sweeping action to preserve 17 endangered areas of Alaska. Carter used the 1906 Antiquities Act to prevent exploitation while Congress deliberated.

Admiralty Island National Monument
Aniakchak National Monument
Becharof National Monument
Bering Land Bridge National Monument
Cape Krusenstern National Monument
Denali National Monument
Gates of the Arctic National Monument
Enlarging the Glacier Bay National Monument
Enlarging the Katmai National Monument
Kenai Fjords National Monument
Kobuk Valley National Monument
Lake Clark National Monument
Misty Fiords National Monument
Noatak National Monument
Wrangell-St. Elias National Monument
Yukon-Charley National Monument
Yukon Flats National Monument

Here’s Jay

  • Only in America—even though [Congressman Cunningham] stole 2.4 million he has agreed to pay back 1.8 million to make it right. So let that be a lesson to all you other congressmen out there. If you get caught stealing you may have to pay back a small fraction of what you took.
  • Don’t you love how our system works? So if you’re poor and you steal a loaf of bread it’s a $200 fine; if you’re a congressman who steals $2.4 million you get to keep a 25% bonus.

Jay Leno