Month: February 2006

Changes Ahead for a Theater Near You

From columnist David Leonhardt in today’s Times:

Let’s say you decide to take a break tonight and go out to a movie. It’s Wednesday, of course, so when you walk up to the ticket counter, there is not another person in line. You settle on “Glory Road,” an inspirational basketball movie that has been out for a month. The theater is so empty that it almost feels as if you are watching it in your den. Your ticket costs $8.

Now it’s the weekend. You meet up with some friends to see “Date Movie,” a spoof that has just opened to good buzz. You have to stand in a long line to get a ticket, and the only seats you can find are in the third row. It is clearly a hot ticket. Yet it costs the same $8 as “Glory Road.”

This isn’t the way much of the American economy works. It’s not how airlines sell seats, the Gap sells shirts or eBay sells anything.

Soon, it won’t be the way the movies work either. You will pay more for a ticket on the weekends and less on weekdays. You’ll be able to buy a reserved seat in the center of the theater for a few extra dollars. One of these days, you may even have to pay more for a hit movie than for a bomb. The changes are under way, and they are long overdue.

In the meantime, NewMexiKen would like to know where these $8 movie tickets are.

Dot-Dot-Dot, Dash-Dash-Dash, No More

Noting the end of the telegram, The New York Times provided some memorable ones, inlcuding these:

Writers, of course, say the cleverest things. The humorist Robert Benchley, arriving in Venice for the first time, cabled Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker.

STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.

Mark Twain, like most writers, found it easier to write long than short. He received this telegram from a publisher:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.

Twain replied:

NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

Harold Arlen

… was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, New York, on this date in 1905.

A short list from the more than 400 tunes written by Harold Arlen:

  • Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive
  • Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
  • Come Rain Or Come Shine
  • Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
  • Hooray For Love
  • It’s Only A Paper Moon
  • I’ve Got the World on A String
  • One For My Baby
  • Over The Rainbow
  • Stormy Weather
  • That Old Black Magic

Arlen worked with many lyricists through the years, most notably Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer and even Truman Capote. Harburg, for example, wrote the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz songs. Though it’s the lyrics we most remember, it’s the melody that makes a song memorable. That was Arlen.

A trillion, triumphant

Sunday’s New York Times has these comparisons to a trillion (in light of the $2.77 trillion U.S. budget for 2007):

  • Possible hands for one bridge player: 635 billion
  • Stars in the Milky Way: Up to 400 billion
  • Pennies in use: 150 billion
  • All people who ever lived: Perhaps 100 billion
  • Acres of land on earth: 37 billion

Best line of the day, so far

“As the story of the weekend’s bizarre hunting accident is wrenched out of the White House, the picture isn’t pretty: With American soldiers dying in Iraq, Five-Deferment Dick ‘I Had Other Priorities in the 60’s Than Military Service’ Cheney gets his macho kicks gunning down little birds and the occasional old man while W. rides his bike, blissfully oblivious to any collateral damage. Shouldn’t these guys work on weekends until we figure out how to fix Iraq, New Orleans, Medicare and gas prices?”

Maureen Dowd [emphasis added]

The Kiss of Life

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s dwell for a moment on the profoundly bizarre activity of kissing. Is there a more expressive gesture in the human repertoire?

When parents kiss their children it means one thing, but when they kiss each other it means something entirely different. People will greet a total stranger with a kiss on the cheek, and then use an identical gesture to express their most intimate feelings to a lover. The mob kingpin gives the kiss of death, Catholics give the “kiss of peace,” Jews kiss the Torah, nervous flyers kiss the ground, and the enraged sometimes demand that a kiss be applied to their hindquarters. Judas kissed Jesus, Madonna kissed Britney, a gambler kisses the dice for luck. Someone once even kissed a car for 54 hours straight.

From the beginning of an op-ed article about the kiss in The New York Times

Key quote: “The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss ‘making up for kisses that have been omitted.'”

Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)

There’s many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas
There’s many a young boy who feels things he don’t comprehend
Well, the small town don’t like it when somebody falls between sexes
No, the small town don’t like it when a cowboy has feelings for men.

Now I believe to my soul that inside every man there’s the feminine
And inside every lady there’s a deep manly voice loud and clear
Well the cowboy may brag about things that he does with his women
But the ones that brag loudest are the ones who are most likely queer.

Sung by Willie Nelson; written (in 1981) by Ned Sublette. Recording released today; available at iTunes.

Pretty much explains everything

1. HER DIARY

Tonight I thought he was acting weird.

We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment. Conversation wasn’t flowing so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed but he kept quiet and absent. I asked him what was wrong; he said nothing. I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said it had nothing to do with me and not to worry.

On the way home I told him that I loved him, he simply smiled and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior. I don’t know why he didn’t say I love you too. When we got home I felt as if I had lost him, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there and watched T.V. He seemed distant and absent.

Finally, I decided to go to bed. About 10 minutes later he came to bed, and to my surprise he responded to my caress and we made love, but I still felt that he was distracted and his thoughts were somewhere else.

He fell asleep – I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

2. HIS DIARY

I shot the worst round of golf in my life today, but at least I got laid.

Found at Andrew Tobias – Money and Other Subjects

U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies

From The New York Times:

The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

The royalty relief stems from a time 10 years ago when oil was $10 a barrel (it was a mis-guided effort to encourage production and consumption if you ask me). But do you think Congress will react to the changing times? I doubt it. Providing “relief” to that poor Exxon Mobil company is more important, I guess.

Grocery shopping? Take your rubber gloves!

According to a Reuters report via Yahoo! News, grocery shopping cart handles are among the most bacteria infested items we come in contact with in daily life.

You know the handles, the ones little kids in the baby seat sometimes gum when they are teething.

And this from MSNBC.com about a science project:

The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling.

“I thought there might be a little bacteria in the ice, but I never expected it to be this much,” she said. “And I never thought the toilet water would be cleaner.”

Her discovery: Seventy percent of the time, the ice had more bacteria than the toilet water.

Thanks to Dwight Perry for the pointer.

White House Slow to Reveal Burr-Hamilton Duel

Joel Achenbach takes aim at the other time a Vice President shot someone. An excerpt:

So Burr called him out. They would settle the matter like gentleman, face to face, with pistols. Complicating matters was that Hamilton had declared an aversion to shedding blood in private combat and insisted that he would “waste” his shot, intentionally missing Burr. Was this suicidal? Henry Adams and various psychobiographers have argued just that: Hamilton was depressed and wanted to die. [New theory: Texas billionaire intentionally lunged into Cheney’s line of fire.] Hamilton wouldn’t practice with a pistol, while Burr practiced regularly. It was going to be a slaughter.

‘People write absolutely, incredibly stupid things in…e-mails’

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

From Wired News, which has details.

Key quote: “‘People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they “hear” the tone they intend in their head as they write….'”

Of course, not many of you get to discuss you emails from the witness chair in federal court, as NewMexiKen has. That’s always fun.

Massacre Valentine’s Day

St. Valentine was supposedly a martyred 3rd century priest, not a shill for the flower industry or a marketing genius for a certain Kansas City, Mo., greeting-card titan. Still, with all due respect to his martyrdom, we think it’s high time the holiday bearing his name be abolished.

Call us hopeless romantics on this page, but we find that true love is overwhelming, irrepressible and spontaneous. Romance shouldn’t be confined to a particular day; nor need it be triggered by the arrival of Feb. 14. Compulsory love is an oxymoron.

Excerpt from a Los Angeles Times editorial

Canyon De Chelly National Monument (Arizona)

… was authorized on this date in 1931.

Petroglyphs

Reflecting one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes of North America, the cultural resources of Canyon de Chelly–including distinctive architecture, artifacts, and rock imagery–exhibit remarkable preservational integrity that provides outstanding opportunities for study and contemplation. Canyon de Chelly also sustains a living community of Navajo people, who are connected to a landscape of great historical and spiritual significance–a landscape composed of places infused with collective memory.

Canyon de Chelly is unique among National Park service units, as it is comprised entirely of Navajo Tribal Trust Land that remains home to the canyon community. NPS works in partnership with the Navajo Nation to manage park resources and sustain the living Navajo community.

Canyon De Chelly National Monument

The Daily Show

The Daily Show covered the Cheney shooting story as only it could, including this:

Rob Corddry: “Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington’s face.”

Crooks and Liars has more quotes and the video from the show.

They Still Are Playing Copycat at Their Age

Brothers Chiang Hock Woo, 48, and Chiang Hock Tew, 46, each got their first holes in one on the same 147-yard hole recently at a country club in Singapore, Bloomberg news service reported. As Hock Tew approached the green, he saw his brother’s ball lodged between the flag and the pin and assumed his ball had gone through the green.

“I peeked into the hole and to my surprise my ball was at the bottom,” said Hock Tew, a 13-handicap.

Morning Briefing, which has more hole-in-one trivia. (The longest recorded is 447-yards.)