“Mr. [Orlando] Bloom, as is his custom, leaps about, trying to overcome his incurable blandness, and is upstaged by special effects, musical cues, octopus tentacles and pieces of wood.”
A.O. Scott in a a generally positive, more-or-less, kind of, but qualified, review of Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man’s Chest.
Deadwood fans — alas, currently not NewMexiKen as I continue without HBO — may appreciate this post from Give Me the Booger. I know they will appreciate the photos of the stars, in and out of character, especially W. Earl Brown/Dan Dority, who may always be in character.
“[A]n industry that miscasts “normal” as some kind of brave statement, and rewards the size-0 waifs whose only solids are taken in via the nostril in powder form.”
Go Fug Yourself; the “industry” being movies-television-celebritihood.
The always delightful Dan Neil visits Prada. His essay, well worth your click, includes this:
Ah yes, the fashion world. The gist of Lauren Weisberger’s book—which I read while waiting at a red light last week—is that the world of high fashion is full of toxic egomaniacs and money-grubbing, drunk-with-power neurotics raving at their underlings with impossible demands, crushing their spirits and feeding like vampires on their idealistic ambition. No, wait, that’s the newspaper business. Anyway, the book is based on Weisberger’s adventures as the sniveling thrall to real-life Vogue editor Anna Wintour. The book is a roman à clef—that’s French for “bitch fest”—in which Weisberger’s alter ego is named Andy Sachs and the infamous “Nuclear” Wintour is renamed Miranda Priestly.
“It wasn’t live, but it was classic Larry King: a warm bath, not a hot seat.”
Alessandra Stanley reviewing President and Mrs. Bush’s appearance on Larry King.
From BBC News:
A print of the only photograph of Mozart’s widow, Constanze Weber, has been found in Germany.
The photograph was taken in 1840 in the Bavarian town of Altoetting when she was 78. She died two years later.
Click here to see the print. Constanze is on the front left.
She was 29 when Mozart died.
All those warnings from Smokey Bear and it wasn’t really even our fault.
Rising temperatures throughout the West have stoked an increase in large wildfires over the past 34 years as spring comes earlier, mountain snows melt sooner and forests dry to tinder, scientists reported Thursday.
More than land-use changes or forest management practices, the changing climate was the most important factor driving a four-fold increase in the average number of large wildfires in the Western United States since 1970, the researchers concluded.
…“I think this is the equivalent for the West of what hurricanes are for the Gulf Coast,” said fire ecologist Steven Running at the University of Montana in Missoula, who was not connected with the research. “This is an illustration of a natural disaster that is accelerating in intensity as a result, I feel, of global warming.”
All told, the average fire season has grown more than two months longer, while fires have become more frequent, longer-burning and harder to extinguish. They destroy 6.5 times more land than in the 1970s, the researchers found.
Google is officially a verb.
Google Inc.’s eponymous search engine became a sanctioned part of the English language Thursday, when “google” — with a small “g” — earned an entry among the 165,000 or so terms in the 11th edition of the Merriam-Webster Collegiate Dictionary.
Sean Ingle, writing for Guardian Unlimited, loves the tournament but laments the lack of scoring in this year’s World Cup. He proposes some changes:
Such intervention needs to happen again. Because ever since the wondrous magic of Euro 2000, football’s delicate balance between attack and defence has spun increasingly out of kilter. Here are a few ideas:
– Stop the clock every time someone gets injured. Too often players feign distress, especially in the last 10 minutes, wasting two or three minutes of play and destroying their opponents’ momentum. They’re rarely seriously injured. Another option: if the injury is in the middle of the pitch, allow the physio on but keep playing. Either way, more playing time may lead to more goals.
– Investigate the use of sin bins. At the moment it’s rational for defenders to body-check, scythe and take out opponents in promising positions, picking up a professional yellow, because conceding a goal is far worse. The possibility of 20 minutes in the sin bin – with a yellow card chucked in – for cynical fouls might change a player’s incentives and, ergo, behaviour.
– Increase the size of the goals by a few centimetres. Yes, you hate the idea. Every football fan does, but surely it’s worth experimenting with in a semi-professional league? After all, keepers are at least a foot taller now then in the 19th century when goalpost sizes were laid down in law.
Think American TV likes that idea about time outs (known here as commercial time outs)?
Pointer via The Sports Economist.
Historian and author David McCullough is 73 today. His works include some of the best—and best-selling—biographies ever, Truman and John Adams, and the more recent miliary history 1776.
NewMexiKen thought this excerpt from an interview McCullough did with NEH Chairman Bruce Cole was interesting:
McCullough: There are certain books that I like very much. Reveille in Washington. I love Barbara Tuchman’s work, particularly The Proud Tower. Paul Horgan’s biography of Archbishop Lamy is a masterpiece. Wallace Stegner’s book on John Wesley Powell I’m fond of.
I like some of the present-day people: Robert Caro’s first volume on Lyndon Johnson was brilliant. I care for some of the best of the Civil War writing: Shelby Foote, for example, and Bruce Catton’s The Stillness at Appomattox. It was Catton’s Stillness at Appomattox that started me reading about the Civil War, and then on to people like Tuchman and others. There is a wonderful book called The Reason Why, about the Charge of the Light Brigade–and biographies–Henri Troyat’s Tolstoy, for example.
I work very hard on the writing, writing and rewriting and trying to weed out the lumber. I’m very aware how many distractions the reader has in life today, how many good reasons there are to put the book down. To hold the reader’s attention, you have to bring the person who’s reading the book inside the experience of the time: What was it like to have been alive then? What were these people like as human beings?
When I did Truman, I had no idea what woods I was venturing into. Had I known it was going to take me ten years, I never would have done it. In retrospect, I’m delighted now that I didn’t know.
I love all sides of the work but that doesn’t mean it isn’t hard. There have been times when a book was taking year after year—not with this one so much, but with The Path Between the Seas—when I’d come down to Washington to do research in the National Archives, hoping I wouldn’t find anything new because it could set me back another year or two.
By the same token, to open up a box of the death certificates kept by the French at the hospital in Ancon, at Panama City and to read the personal details of those who died—their names, their age, where they came from, height, color of eyes—was a connection with the reality of them, the mortal tale of that undertaking, that one can never find by doing the conventional kind of research with microfilm or Xeroxed copies.
McCullough also says this: “You stand in front of one of those great paintings or you pick up Samuel Johnson’s essays or Francis Parkman’s works on the French and Indian War, and it’s humbling. But it also is affirming in the sense that you realize that you’re working in a great tradition.”
This date, July 7, is significant in American imperial growth. On July 7, 1846, Commodore John D. Sloat captured Monterey and officially raised the American flag over California. On July 7, 1898, President William McKinley signed the Newlands Resolution which annexed the Hawaiian Islands to the United States.
The artist Marc Chagall was born in Vitebsk, Russia, on this date in 1887. Click on his Paris through the Window to learn more and see other images of his work.
… was established on this date in 1964.
The Roosevelt Campobello International Park is not a unit of the United States National Park Service or Parks Canada. It is administered by a joint U.S./Canadian Commission, funded equally by the two countries.
The Roosevelt Campobello International Park is a unique example of international cooperation. This 2800 acre park is a joint memorial by Canada and the United States and a symbol of the close relationship between the two countries. Here are the cottage and the grounds where President Roosevelt vacationed, the waters where he sailed, and the woods, bogs, and beaches where he tramped and relaxed.
Baseball Hall of Fame pitcher Satchel Paige was born 100 years ago today. A huge star in the Negro Leagues, Paige began pitching in 1926 and was the oldest major league rookie ever when he joined the Cleveland Indians at age 42. Paige pitched in his last major league game in 1965 (at age 59).
In the barnstorming days, he pitched perhaps 2,500 games, completed 55 no-hitters and performed before crowds estimated at 10 million persons in the United States, the Caribbean and Central America. He once started 29 games in one month in Bismarck, N.D., and he said later that he won 104 of the 105 games he pitched in 1934.
By the time Jackie Robinson signed with the Brooklyn Dodgers in 1947 as the first black player in the majors, Mr. Paige was past 40. But Bill Veeck, the impresario of the Cleveland club, signed him to a contract the following summer, and he promptly drew crowds of 72,000 in his first game and 78,000 in his third game. (The New York Times)
Paige first published his Rules for Staying Young in 1953. This version is from his autobiography published in 1962, Maybe I’ll Pitch Forever.
Despite denials by those involved, speculation persists that Candy Spelling, the widow of the recently deceased TV mogul Aaron Spelling, is planning to place the family’s famous 56,500-square-foot Holmby Hills mansion on the market. The price for the 45-room, six-acre property? According to one gossip Web site: $150 million.
In case you want to run some comps, that’s about $2,650 per square foot (discounting the land value). Or more than $3 million a room.
Notice that tax increase this past week my fellow Bernalillo countians?
Yup, the sales tax in the county (actually a gross receipts tax) went up .125% on July 1. The increase is to pay for the West Side jail.
The new rate in the county is 5.6875%. The new rate in the city is 6.875%.
What I don’t understand is this. The county took over the jail from the city. OK, so the county tax went up. Why didn’t the city tax go down?
New Mexico is one of 15 states — as well as Washington, D.C. — that tax downloads of music, movies and electronic books.
Other states that tax digital downloads are Alabama, Arizona, Colorado, Hawaii, Idaho, Indiana, Kentucky, Louisiana, Maine, South Dakota, Texas, Utah, Washington and West Virginia….
It rained again this morning at Casa NewMexiKen. Nothing with ark-building overtones like a day earlier, but brief periods of hard rain nonetheless.
Thunderstorms remain in the forecast for the next several days.
Lovin’ it.
… of President Bush, six-oh today.
… of Sylvester Enzio Stallone, also 60 today. Stallone is one of three people to be nominated for a writing Oscar and an acting Oscar for the same movie. The others are Chaplin and Welles.
… of Nancy Reagan (85), Merv Griffin (81) and William Schallert, Patty Duke’s TV father, (84).
… of Ned Beatty. Beatty, who is 69 today, was nominated for the supporting actor Oscar for Network.
Bill Haley (“Rock Around the Clock”) was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1981.
The Mexican artist Frida Kahlo was born on this date in 1907 [she claimed 1910]. Ms. Kahlo died in 1954.
This article (articles actually) in New York Magazine goes on-and-on, but some of it is actually useful and some of it is funny. It’s subtitled, “New rules for getting along in an endlessly wired, ruthlessly crowded, sexually libertarian city.” Some examples:
Is it ever acceptable to talk to a stranger on an elevator?
If there are six or fewer people on the elevator, no. However, if the group is larger than six, you have achieved an Elevator Humor Quorum and someone must make a remark about the elevator’s lack of size or speed in order to relieve the tension created by standing in a tiny space with six or more strangers. If another member of the group makes the remark first, Elevator Humor Solidarity obligates you to chuckle mildly.
What are the rules for disciplining other kids when their parents are around?
The same rules apply to adjusting other people’s yoga poses when the teacher is around: It’s just not done. The only exception is in matters of safety when the other parent isn’t paying attention (throwing toys, biting). As they always say (and by “they” we mean Oprah), the only person you can truly change is yourself; similarly, the only kids you can change are your own. If the parents are deadbeat do-as-you-willers, all you can do is make sure your own kid takes away the lesson, like, “That little boy is not being nice by doing that, but we know not to rob liquor stores, right?” As a last resort, you can always decide it’s time to go home.
“This is a lot of gear for a sub-$40,000 car. To name but a few items: stability control, six air bags, xenon headlights, tire-pressure monitoring, power moon roof, heated outside mirrors with reverse tilt-down, speed-sensitive wipers, leather heated seats, and enough bins, compartments and squirrel holes to carry Rush Limbaugh’s entire personal stash.”
Dan Neil in a rave review of the new Acura RDX.
“The car will monitor its position relative to the sun and compensate for solar heating on one side of the cabin.”
On this day in 1954, Elvis Presley recorded his first rock and roll song and his first hit, “That’s All Right, Mama.” Elvis had wanted to be a crooner, and in his first recording sessions he only sang slow ballads. But then, in between takes, Elvis and the other musicians started fooling around and singing a blues tune called “That’s All Right.” Sam Phillips asked them to start over from the beginning and recorded the song. He then rushed the record to the biggest DJ in Memphis, and it became Elvis’s breakout hit.
The “other musicians” were, of course, Scotty Moore on guitar and Bill Black on bass.
Sam recognized it right away. He was amazed that the boy even knew Arthur “Big Boy” Crudup — nothing in any of the songs he had tried so far gave any indication that he was drawn to this kind of music at all. But this was the sort of music that Sam had long ago wholeheartedly embraced, this was the sort of music of which he said, “This is where the soul of man never dies.” And the way the boy performed it, it came across with a freshness and an exuberance, it came across with the kind of clear-eyed, unabashed originality that Sam sought in all the music that he recorded — it was “different,” it was itself.
They worked on it. They worked hard on it, but without any of the laboriousness that had gone into the efforts to cut “I Love You Because.” Sam tried to get Scotty to cut down on the instrumental flourishes — “Simplify, simplify'” was the watchword. “If we wanted Chet Atkins,” said Sam good-humoredly, “we would have brought him up from Nashville and gotten him in the damn studio!” He was delighted with the rhythmic propulsion Bill Black brought to the sound. It was a slap beat and a tonal beat at the same time. He may not have been as good a bass player as his brother Johnny; in fact, Sam said, “Bill was one of the worst bass players in the world, technically, but, man, could he slap that thing!” And yet that wasn’t it either — it was the chemistry. There was Scotty, and there was Bill, and there was Elvis scared to death in the middle, “but sounding so fresh, because it was fresh to him.”
Peter Guralnick, Last Train to Memphis: The Rise of Elvis Presley
“Superman and the Bible are plainly cut from the same template: baby Superman and baby Moses are both rescued from certain death, sent off by their desperate parents in a rocket ship/wicker basket, and are then raised by an alien family but always remember the ways of their people and spend their lives fighting for justice.”
Freakonomics Blog, in a posting entitled “Does Obesity Kill?”
The Mossberg Solution has a good primer on digital music.
Over 50 million Apple iPods, and lots of competing digital music players, have been sold by now — as well as over a billion songs and tens of millions of videos, since legal media sales took off a few years ago.
But many folks — even some who own iPods and other players — are still confused over how legal digital music works. So here’s a quick-and-dirty guide to the digital music world, in question-and-answer form. We’ve included the questions we are asked most frequently, plus a few other topics.
Want the fastest way to put your Mac right into a deep, sleepy-bear hibernation-like sleep (no whirling fan, no dialogs, no sound — nuthin’ — just fast, glorious sleep). Just press Command-Option and then hold the Eject button for about 2 seconds and Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz. It doesn’t get much faster than that.