Month: July 2006

Best line of tomorrow tonight, so far

No matter what the trappings or the ceremonies require of the leader of the free world, he brings the same DKE diction, bearing and cadences, the same insouciance and smart-alecky attitude, the same simplistic approach — swearing, swaggering, talking to Tony Blair with his mouth full of buttered roll, and giving a startled Angela Merkel an impromptu shoulder rub. He can make even a global summit meeting seem like a kegger.

Maureen Dowd in a column titled “Animal House Summit”

For Some Netflix Users, Red Envelopes Gather Dust

With three Netflix envelopes sitting here for at least a week, NewMexiKen found this article at The Wall Street Journal interesting. It includes this:

Netflix Inc., which boasts nearly five million members, often trumpets how its all-you-can-eat rental model is changing the way people are watching movies. But Netflix may also be changing the way people don’t watch them. Through its Web site, Netflix makes it easy to comb through a massive catalog of 60,000 films. It offers access to everything from Charlie Chaplin’s 1921 silent tramp movie “The Kid” to recent Academy Award-winners like “Crash.” And some members admit that when browsing the Netflix backlog, they overestimate their appetite for off-the-beaten-track films. The result: Sometimes DVDs languish for months without being watched.

1776

NewMexiKen has completed David McCullough’s 1776, a military history of that fateful year newly out in paperback.

After an opening chapter detailing the politics in Britain, McCullough traces the action, from the successful American siege of Boston (forcing the British ultimately to abandon the city), through a series of dreadful and disastrous American defeats in New York, the demoralizing retreat across New Jersey and, at the end of December and beginning of January, the miraculous American victories at Trenton and Princeton. McCullough includes much from the contemporary correspondence and reminisces of the participants; the reader learns more about the war fighters than the fighting, but that is good.

The American army was hardly more than tattered remnants when it reached the Delaware River and crossed into Pennsylvania. As Thomas Paine so famously wrote that December of 1776:

These are the times that try men’s souls. The summer soldier and the sunshine patriot will, in this crisis, shrink from the service of their country; but he that stands it now, deserves the love and thanks of man and woman.

Considering the circumstances — the depleted American ranks, the British naval and military superiority — it really is rather remarkable that Americans today are taking coffee breaks rather than stopping for tea and biscuits. The reason — in two words — George Washington, who learned from his (and other’s) mistakes, and, while often losing hope, never lost faith.

Where does electricity come from?

Making electricity is generally about creating a source of heat and steam, and using that steam to turn giant turbines and generate power. Less than 3 percent of our electric power is generated from oil. Besides the 20 percent contribution from nuclear power, 50 percent of our electricity comes from burning coal, 18 percent from burning natural gas and (in a heat-free method that is often the cheapest) 6.5 percent by harnessing the energy of water moving through dams. Wind and solar power make up less than one-half of 1 percent of what we use on a typical day.

Source: Atomic Balm?, an article in The New York Times Magazine about the possible renaissance of nuclear power.

They’re not sure about the remaining 2%, I guess. Maybe it’s from batteries.

Billie Holiday

Billie Holiday died on this date in 1959. She was 44.

Considered by many to be the greatest jazz vocalist of all time, Billie Holiday lived a tempestuous and difficult life. Her singing expressed an incredible depth of emotion that spoke of hard times and injustice as well as triumph. Though her career was relatively short and often erratic, she left behind a body of work as great as any vocalist before or since.

— American Masters

Indeed. Treat yourself.

Read more about Billie Holiday.

Black Smoke Over Beirut – Why isn’t it white?

“Black smoke rose over the city” of Haifa on Sunday morning, after Hezbollah militants fired at least 50 rockets into Israel. Meanwhile, Israeli bombs were “sending a thick column of white and black smoke skyward” over Beirut, Lebanon. And in California, firefighters watched as “plumes of gray, white and black smoke floated across the horizon.” What makes some smoke white and other smoke black?

The Explainer explains.

Often you can tell if fire fighters have reached a fire. Once they begin to put water on a fire the smoke will usually get lighter (as a result of the cooler fire and the steam I assume).

Why be accurate, it’s just a ‘story’

Daily Howler’s take on the Kornblut blunder:

[W]e won’t assume the report is “dishonest.” Though it’s understandably hard for most people to grasp, the national press corps—for all its celebrity—is an extremely unimpressive group of people. Yes, they do misconstrue on this scale, quite routinely; it’s entirely possible that Kornblut just bungled when she produced this groaning report. Indeed, it often seems that people get hired on the press corps’ highest levels only after proving their mediocrity. It often seems, when it comes to our celebrity press, that clear-thinkers need not apply.

As NewMexiKen has said, I’ve never seen a mainstream news report about something I was familiar with that did not have at least some inaccurate statements. (I started to correct this to “I’ve hardly ever,” but decided “never” was right.)

Joltin’ Joe

Joe DiMaggio did not get a hit on this date in 1941. Too bad, if he had, his streak would have been 73. As it was he hit safely in 56 consecutive games up to this date — and 16 after. (44 is the best by anyone else.)

At AmericanHeritage.com, John Steele Gordon, who seems not to have heard of Eddie Gaedel, tells two good DiMaggio stories:

A few years before he died, in 1999, when baseball salaries had been going through the roof, a reporter asked DiMaggio what he thought he might be paid if he were playing baseball then. DiMaggio smiled and answered, “I’d just knock on Mr. Steinbrenner’s door and say, ‘Howdy, pardner.'”

The other story concerns his brief, disastrous marriage to Marilyn Monroe. Monroe was a film actress, used to working in front of cameras and technicians, not audiences. After their wedding, DiMaggio and Monroe went to Korea to entertain the American troops fighting there against the Chinese communists. There were perhaps 5,000 soldiers on the air-base runways waiting to greet them, and when they stepped out of the plane, the soldiers started cheering. Monroe, startled by the ovation, turned to her husband and said, “I bet you’ve never heard such cheering, Joe.” DiMaggio, who had brought a sold-out Yankee Stadium screaming to its collective feet more times than he could count, just said quietly, “Oh, yes I have.”

Then he beat her.

More on Red Light Cameras

Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano addresses the red light cameras again, linking to an interesting, if long-winded, post by a retired Albuquerque law enforcement officer that Albuquerque car owners (and voters) should read, and to studies suggesting that intersections with the cameras tend to have an increase in accidents.

The Albuquerque cameras are at Montgomery and San Mateo, Montgomery and Wyoming, Montgomery and Eubank, Eubank and Lomas, and Paseo Del Norte and Coors.

Think I’ll stay off Montgomery.

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site (Kentucky)

… was established as a national park on this date in 1916. It became a national historic site in 1959.

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace

In the fall of 1808, Thomas and Nancy Lincoln settled on the 348 acre Sinking Spring Farm. Two months later on February 12, 1809, Abraham Lincoln was born in a one-room log cabin near the Sinking Spring. Here the Lincolns lived and farmed before moving to land a few miles away at Knob Creek. The area was established by Congress on July 17, 1916. An early 19th century Kentucky cabin, symbolic of the one in which Lincoln was born, is preserved in a memorial building at the site of his birth.

Abraham Lincoln Birthplace National Historic Site

Wolfgang Amadé Mozart

At The New Yorker, Alex Ross writes about Mozart, the man and the music. He listened to it all — in order. Fans of Mozart (and if you’re not, shame on you) should read the whole article. I liked this little bit:

Ambitious parents who are currently playing the “Baby Mozart” video for their toddlers may be disappointed to learn that Mozart became Mozart by working furiously hard, and, if Constanze was right, by working himself to death.

In 1991, the Philips label issued a deluxe, complete Mozart edition—a hundred and eighty CDs—employing such distinguished interpreters as Mitsuko Uchida, Alfred Brendel, and Colin Davis. The set has now been reissued in a handsome and surprisingly manageable array of seventeen boxes. During a slow week last winter, I transferred it to an iPod and discovered that Mozart requires 9.77 gigabytes.

And this:

In the unimaginable alternate universe in which he lived to the age of seventy, an anniversary-year essay might have contained a sentence such as this: “Opera houses focus on the great works of Mozart’s maturity—‘The Tempest,’ ‘Hamlet,’ the two-part ‘Faust’—but it would be a good thing if we occasionally heard that flawed yet lively work of his youth, ‘Don Giovanni.’”

Literary Guide to New Mexico: One Opinion

Philip Connors, the editor of the “New West Reader,” and a fire lookout in the Gila National Forest of New Mexico, recommends some reading. He begins:

New Mexico is a world of almost blinding clarity and color. The vistas are vast. The hot peppers are eye-watering when fresh and bright blood-red if left to dry. Summer sunsets nearly make you want to weep. A person could write a good guide to New Mexico merely by compiling a list of Hatch green chile recipes and cataloging the state’s fire lookouts — one of which I’m lucky enough to occupy, and where on a clear day I can see a dozen mountain ranges, some in Mexico and Arizona. Yet it’s the spooky human history pulsing just beneath the surface that makes New Mexico such a fascinating place; any real reckoning with the literature of the state has to involve a reckoning with genocide and apocalypse. It would also, ideally, be undertaken by a bilingual reader. Long before English dominated the written stories of the region, Spanish reigned supreme. Indeed, the original masterpiece of American writing appeared before America even existed. It was composed as a report for the king of Spain by a remarkable explorer with a wonderful name, Cabeza de Vaca, or “head of a cow.”

Connors choices:

The Narrative of Cabeza De Vaca by Alvar Nunez Cabeza De Vaca
Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
The Last Cheater’s Waltz by Ellen Meloy
Songs of the Fluteplayer by Sherman Apt Russell

Any suggestions from NewMexiKen’s readers?

Who killed Meriwether Lewis?

Meriwether Lewis MarkerJill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, dropped by the grave of Meriwether Lewis on her recent road trip. She took this photo [click it to enlarge]. It got me to investigating the controversy around Lewis’s death and I found this article at Salon Ivory Tower. Here’s the beginning to draw you into the Meriwether Lewis murder mystery:

In the afternoon of Oct. 10, 1809, Meriwether Lewis rode up to an inn called Grinder’s Stand, a small log cabin in the Tennessee mountains on the Natchez Trace, the old pioneer road between Natchez, Miss., and Nashville, Tenn. He was traveling to Washington, where he hoped to clear up debts to the War Department he had incurred while serving as the first American governor of the Louisiana Territory. Then he planned to deliver the priceless journals of his great expedition, which had come to a triumphant conclusion just three years earlier, to his Philadelphia publishers.

The 35-year-old explorer appears to have been in a desperate state. One month earlier, on Sept. 11, he had written his will. At about the same time, according to a letter written by the commander of a fort where Lewis had stayed on his trip, Lewis had twice tried to kill himself, either by jumping overboard or by shooting himself, while traveling down the Mississippi River by boat. The commander, Capt. Gilbert Russell, wrote that he had been forced to hold Lewis, who had been drinking heavily, on 24-hour suicide watch at the fort for a week. Lewis’ companion on the trip, James Neelly, later told Thomas Jefferson that Lewis “appeared at times deranged in mind.” Historians have speculated that Lewis may have been tormented by manic depression, or even suffering from syphilis.

Lewis asked Mrs. Grinder, whose husband was absent, whether there was room in her inn. Neelly had stayed behind to round up two stray horses and was planning on meeting Lewis at the next residence inhabited by white people. Except for two servants, who were trailing behind, burdened by heavy trunks, Lewis was alone.

According to the conventional scholarly view, later that night, Lewis, after tormentedly pacing in his room for several hours and talking out loud, shot himself once in the head, grazing his skull, and then again in the chest. Still alive, he may or may not have tried to finish the job by cutting himself from head to toe with his razor blades. He died shortly after sunrise on Oct. 11.

On the face of it, there would not seem to be much reason to question this account. But there has long been a dissenting body of thought that holds that Lewis was not the victim of a suicide, but of a murder.

Read on.

Intractable

My girlfriend broke up with me last week. She did it cruelly. She sent me a letter saying she ran away with a tractor salesman. I was devastated. It was the first time in my life I’ve gotten a John Deere letter.

Stupid, careless or dishonest — you decide

Here is what New York Times reporter Anne E. Kornblut wrote:

ROGERS, Ark., July 15 — Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, returning to her red-state ties, chastised Democrats Saturday for taking on issues that arouse conservatives and turn out Republican voters rather than finding consensus on mainstream subjects.

Without mentioning specific subjects like gay marriage, Mrs. Clinton said: “We do things that are controversial. We do things that try to inflame their base.”

“We are wasting time,” the senator told a group of Democratic women here, on part of a two-day swing through a state that could provide an alternate hub to New York if she starts a national political campaign.

Here, via Atrios, is what Senator Clinton said:

You have to ask yourself, we have all these problems, and we have solutions sitting out there, why can’t we move in the right direction? And it really comes down to a difference in values and philosophy.

You know the nine women Democratic Senators, anybody see us on Larry King’s show? We put out what we call our Checklist for Change. I don’t know about you, but I am a list maker. I guess it’s like a part of the DNA for women. I make lists about lists. And so we were talking one day and saying, you know, we as individuals, we have all of this legislation, we can’t get it on the floor of the Senate. We can’t get a vote on it because the Republican majority wants to vote on other things. So we pulled all our best ideas together.

Wouldn’t this be a good agenda for America: safeguard America’s pensions; good jobs for Americans; make college affordable for all; protect America and our military families; prepare for future disasters; make America energy independent; make small business and healthcare affordable, invest in life saving science; and protect our air, land, and water.

You know, Blanche Lincoln has a bill to make healthcare affordable for small business, I have a bill I was talking to you about with respect to energy independence, we have legislation sitting in the Senate to address these problems.

But with the Republican majority, that’s not their priority. So we do other things, we do things that are controversial, we do things that try to inflame their base so that they can turn people out and vote for their candidates. I think we are wasting time, we are wasting lives, we need to get back to making America work again, in a bipartisan, nonpartisan way. [emphasis added to show quotes used by reporter]

Clinton didn’t chastise Democrats as Kornblut wrote. She chastised the Republican majority. Clinton’s “we” refers to the Senate not the Democratic party.

On this date

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published on this date in 1951. It’s sold about 60 million copies since.

Major John Glenn, USMC, set a transcontinental (Los Angeles to New York) speed record of 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds on this date in 1957. Average speed: 723 mph.

Will Ferrell was born on this date in 1967.

Apollo 11 left Florida for the moon on this date in 1969.