Month: June 2006

You can’t take it with you

From Fortune Magazine:

[Warren] Buffett has pledged to gradually give 85% of his Berkshire stock to five foundations. A dominant five-sixths of the shares will go to the world’s largest philanthropic organization, the $30 billion Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, whose principals are close friends of Buffett’s (a connection that began in 1991, when a mutual friend introduced Buffett and Bill Gates).

At the current Berkshire stock value, Buffet, 75, plans to give away $37 billion, the largest philanthropic gift ever. In reality it may prove to be even more, as he is planning to give 5% of his current holdings each year — the total cash value of his holdings could well appreciate more than that annually.

Best line of the day, so far

“Like many people, I’d been on the fence about seeing it, mostly because I almost prefer to remain unaware of horrible things beyond my control.”

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, who goes on to say, “I was wrong on two counts. ‘An Inconvenient Truth,’ while terrifying, is not depressing. It is a celebration of our planet … I was also wrong to think global warming is beyond my control.”

The battle at Little Bighorn

Little Bighorn

… took place 130 years ago today. Dee Brown wrote the following for The Reader’s Companion to American History:

Custer.jpg

In 1876, under command of Gen. Alfred Terry, Custer led the Seventh Cavalry as one force in a three-pronged campaign against Sitting Bull’s alliance of Sioux and Cheyenne camps in Montana. During the morning of June 25, Custer’s scouts reported spotting smoke from cooking fires and other signs of Indians in the valley of the Little Bighorn. Disregarding Terry’s orders, Custer decided to attack before infantry and other support arrived. Although scouts warned that he was facing superior numbers (perhaps 2,500 warriors), Custer divided his regiment of 647 men, ordering Capt. Frederick Benteen’s battalion to scout along a ridge to the left and sending Maj. Marcus Reno’s battalion up the valley of the Little Bighorn to attack the Indian encampment. With the remainder of the regiment, Custer continued along high ground on the right side of the valley. In the resulting battle, he and about 250 of his men, outnumbered by the warriors of Crazy Horse and Gall, were surrounded and annihilated. Reno and Benteen suffered heavy casualties but managed to escape to a defensive position.

Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star is generally regarded as the finest book on the battle; indeed, one of the finest on western American history. James Welch’s Killing Custer tells the story more from the Indian perspective.

Landscape photo credit: Little Bighorn Battlefield National Monument. Custer marker photo: NewMexiKen 1995.

Little Bighorn

The battle at Little Big Horn took place 130 years ago today.

Lt. Col. Custer made two errors of judgment that day. He acted without good intelligence and he divided his force.

By George, some commanders still do that.

I don’t get it

Fully one-quarter of the total time is remaining in the Argentina-Mexico soccer match and, with the score tied 1-1, the commenter on ESPN.com (the gamecast) says, “This is starting to look like it will go to extra time.”

Is there any other major sport where things seem so determined so early? Football teams rarely give up even if they are down by 17 at the start of the fourth quarter. Good basketball teams will fight back down six with 30 seconds to play. These too are uphill battles. Can someone explain the game psychology of soccer that seems to determine that similar comeback efforts are futile, even if only behind by one goal at half-time? This seems particularly strange in a sport where possession can change at any moment and a score takes just seconds.

Update: The game did, of course, go to extra time (overtime).

Land ho!

On this date in 1497, the Italian Giovanni Caboto, sailing for the English as John Cabot, made landfall. He and his English crew were the first reported Europeans to see North America. (Leiv Eiriksson had been in the area nearly 500 years previously, but left no record.)

Cabot’s own log and maps, if he had them, have never been located, and scholars have debated his route. He may have landed first in Labrador or Newfoundland or even Nova Scotia.

Newfoundland and Labrador Heritage has a good presentation.

American History Through the Eyes and the Letters of the People

The New York Times reviews a new exhibit at the National Archives in Washington. An excerpt:

Ms. Bredhoff has avoided letting this exhibition settle into chronological or thematic or political predictability. Thomas Jefferson’s letter to John Jay, United States Secretary of Foreign Affairs, reporting on the storming of the Bastille in Paris in 1789 — with its description of royalty consumed by rumor, and street mobs consumed by passions — is followed by the testimony of a Rochester election official who describes Susan B. Anthony demanding that she be registered to vote in 1872.

A letter from George Washington in 1775, worrying that the British might have deliberately sent smallpox-infected carriers into the ranks of American troops, is not far from where the 1937 voice of the radio broadcaster Herb Morrison can be heard, sounding as fiery, hysterical and consumed as the gas explosion he describes, which was engulfing the Hindenburg.

Events take on a different character, depending on how they are depicted. Lincoln’s assassination is seen through the eyes of his family physician, Dr. Robert King Stone, who finds a bullet hole on the back left side of the head, a hole “into which I carried immediately my finger.”

Jack Dempsey

… was born on this date in 1895 in Manassa, Colorado, which makes him about the most famous native-son of the San Luis Valley. As Red Smith wrote in Dempsey’s obituary for The New York Times in 1983:

Jack Dempsey was one of the last of a dwindling company whose exploits distinguished the 1920’s as ”the golden age of sports.” His contemporaries were Babe Ruth in baseball, Red Grange and the Four Horsemen of Notre Dame in football, Bobby Jones and Walter Hagen in golf, Bill Tilden, Helen Wills Moody and Suzanne Lenglen in tennis, Johnny Weissmuller and Gertrude Ederle in swimming, Paavo Nurmi in track, Man o’ War, the racehorse, and Earl Sande, the jockey. But none of the others enjoyed more lasting popularity than the man who ruled boxing between 1919 and 1926.

The obituary is worth reading.

Hey, guess what?

It’s raining at Casa NewMexiKen.

Posted at 4:35 PM. Temperature dropped 16 degrees in a few minutes.

Update: The rain lasted about long enough to write the above; it did leave the street damp and settled the dust.

Alas, we are a pathetic people, us desert rats, when it hasn’t rained in forever.

Update update: It rained again around 10 PM, longer and harder. Not enough, but we’re getting there!

This is a test

NewMexiKen, every day more a confirmed Mac user, has installed a widget on my desktop that permits me to blog without even opening the blog software. No big deal; just kind of cool.

I’ve also installed a desktop widget that searches for album cover art when I add music to iTunes. I just type in a word or two, the artist’s name for example, and voila, album covers.

This is all in addition to the usual desktop widgets — calendar, weather for me and The Sweeties, stocks, time, sunset, moon phases, a calculator, a dictionary, World Cup schedule, whatever.

All a keystroke away.

Like father, like son

A Little League father from Kent, N.Y., has been charged with misdemeanor assault, The Associated Press reported, after he allegedly punched the coach of 9- and 10-year-olds who suspended his kid for uppity behavior.

“A word of warning to youth baseball coaches,” wrote Bob Reno of BadJocks.com. “If you kick a kid off the team for insubordination, you can probably assume the little acorn hasn’t fallen far from the big nut tree.”

The Seattle Times: Sideline Chatter

I wish it would rain

Please, some rain. And not the six-inch rain we had yesterday and then again last night in parts of town — a drop every six inches.

So far in 2006 there has been measurable precipitation in Albuquerque just 11 times (including yesterday’s two occurences) for a grand total of 44/100ths of one inch. Seven of the eleven times the moisture was just two-hundredths of an inch or less. That’s not enough to do more than put rainspots on your car.

The humidity is in the thirties this morning. The dewpoint above 50. The monsoons are coming.

Where’d you come from?

Five billion searchable names — that’s billion, as in “gabillion” — are now online, thanks to Salt Lake City’s Ancestry.com. For three days, you can search the whole magilla without paying a cent. After that, it’s $155 a year.

It’s a huge opportunity, especially since Ancestry just finished adding complete census records from 1790 to 1930, and it’s the only place you can search those records in detail online. Mercy! Think of it — from 1790. That’s just after the Revolutionary War.

Ancestry says it took workers a combined 6.6 million hours of labor to pull off this staggering feat. They had to scan images of census documents, figure out the handwriting, then catalog each record — by hand. On a keyboard. 540 million names. Oy.

Read more at New West Network.

Or check it out at Ancestry.com.

It’s the birthday

… of Justice Clarence Thomas. He’s 58.

… of American Idol’s Randy Jackson. He’s 50.

… of Oscar-winner Frances McDormand. She’s 49. Miss McDormand has had three Oscar nominations for best supporting actress in addition to her winning best actress performance in Fargo.

Choreographer Bob Fosse was born on this date in 1927.

According to many sources, Killer Angels author Michael Shaara was born on this date in 1929. According to his biography at son Jeff Shaara’s web site, the father was born in 1928. The Killer Angels, which won the Pulitzer Prize and is regarded by many as the best Civil War novel, “was rejected by the first fifteen publishers who saw the manuscript.”

Ford’s Theatre (Washington, DC)

… was designated a national historic site on this date in 1970.

America’s transfer from civil war to peace was made more difficult on April 14, 1865, when Abraham Lincoln was shot and killed, just five days after General Lee’s surrender at Appomattox Court House. A well-known actor, John Wilkes Booth, desperate to aid the dying Confederacy, stepped into the president’s box. Booth’s decision to pull the trigger altered the nation’s power to reconstruct after the war. Booth escaped into the night as Abraham Lincoln was carried to the Petersen boarding house across the street. It was there that President Lincoln died early the next morning, and became the first American president to be assassinated.

Ford’s Theatre National Historic Site

Even Leonardo had attention issues

The following was written when Leonardo Da Vinci was 55:

Begun at Florence, in the house of Piero di Braccio Martelli, on the 22nd day of March 1508. And this is to be a collection without order, taken from many papers which I have copied here, hoping to arrange them later each in its place, according to the subjects of which they may treat. But I believe that before I am at the end of this [task] I shall have to repeat the same things several times; for which, O reader! do not blame me, for the subjects are many and memory cannot retain them [all] and say: ‘I will not write this because I wrote it before.’ And if I wished to avoid falling into this fault, it would be necessary in every case when I wanted to copy [a passage] that, not to repeat myself, I should read over all that had gone before; and all the more since the intervals are long between one time of writing and the next.

Page 4, The Notebooks of Leonardo Da Vinci

The power of American Idol

The new number one tune in the land is Taylor Hicks’s “Do I Make You Proud.” Hicks won Idol season five.

Four other Idol competitors have made it to the top spot:

“A Moment Like This,” Kelly Clarkson (Oct. 5, 2002)
“This Is the Night,” Clay Aiken (June 28, 2003)
“I Believe,” Fantasia (July 10, 2004)
“Inside Your Heaven,” Carrie Underwood (July 2, 2005)

And four of the five Idol number ones (all but Clarkson) entered the Hot 100 as number one. (Eleven other tunes have done so in the nearly 50 years the list has existed.)

Should have given these guys a red car

Autobahn? Try auto gone.

Two English soccer fans couldn’t locate their rental car after a World Cup game in Cologne, ananova.com reported, even though they’d alertly copied down the street name where they’d parked — “Einbahn Strasse” — to avoid just such a problem. They learned the folly of their ways when they asked a policeman, who pointed out that “Einbahn Strasse” is German for “one-way street” and that every other street in inner-city Cologne boasts such a sign.

They finally found the car, with the help of police, a few hours later.

The Seattle Times: Sideline Chatter