Month: April 2008

Two misconceptions about Albuquerque

1. No, Albuquerque is not as hot as Phoenix, Las Vegas or Tucson. Last year the temperature got to 100º F just once. Not at all in some years. The temperature gets to 100º or more in Phoenix one hundred or more days a year.

2. Yes, Albuquerque is just as high above sea level as Denver. In fact, parts of Albuquerque are higher than any part of Denver. The altitude in Denver ranges from 5,130 to 5,470 feet above sea level. The altitude in Albuquerque ranges from 4,946 to 6,120 feet above sea level. Albuquerque has the highest altitude of any of the 50 largest cities.

1692 in America

[1692 in America] is an account of several notable events that took place in the Western Hemisphere during the year 1692, giving a day-by-day description of every little occurrence within each of these events that was recorded in a form that has survived to the present day. The idea behind it is to give a sense for what was happening at the same time in different places during a very tumultuous and eventful year for the European colonies in America.

The most important and best-documented events of 1692 in America were the Salem witch trials and the reconquest of New Mexico. Accordingly, a great deal of this blog is devoted to these two events.

1692 in America.

Link via The Edge of the American West.

Mexican Diet May Cut Breast Cancer Risk

When it comes to breast cancer, a traditional Mexican diet may serve up an ounce of prevention for a variety of women.

A study involving hundreds of women living in the Four Corners region (Colorado, Utah, New Mexico, and Arizona) shows that a diet emphasizing Mexican cheeses, beans, soups, tomato-based sauces, and meat may help lower the risk of breast cancer in both Hispanic and non-Hispanic women.

WebMD

There’s more info. Like most of these kinds of studies, the results are mixed. Still …

A Lesson In Watching Out What You Wish For

An excellent look at China and the upcoming Olympics from Functional Ambivalent. Good stuff.

An excerpt:

The Chinese wanted the Summer Games for the same reason everyone else does: the P.R. value of having everyone in the world stop by when the house is clean and the kids are in their Sunday best. The Chinese government promised, in effect, to not be itself — abandoning it’s longstanding policy of horrifying oppression and cruelty in pursuit of a perfect society. Landing the games was a triumph, but I wonder now if there aren’t a few high in the bureaucracy massaging their foreheads and asking themselves, “What were we thinking?”

April 9th ought to be a national holiday

Today we celebrate the birthdays

… of Hugh Hefner. Hef is 82.

… of Michael Learned. Momma Walton is 69.

… of Jerry Lee Lewis, Gordon Cooper, Doc Holliday, Sam Houston and, lest we forget, New Orleans Det. Remy McSwain. Dennis Quaid is 54.

… of Cynthia Nixon. The Sex in the City star is 42. Nixon played the maid hired by Salieri to spy on Mozart in the film Amadeus.

… of Rudy Huxtable. Keshia Knight Pulliam is 29.

Paul Robeson was was born on this date in 1898.

Paul Robeson was the epitome of the 20th-century Renaissance man. He was an exceptional athlete, actor, singer, cultural scholar, author, and political activist. His talents made him a revered man of his time, yet his radical political beliefs all but erased him from popular history. Today, more than one hundred years after his birth, Robeson is just beginning to receive the credit he is due.

Read more from the profile of Robeson at the PBS site for American Masters.

Appomattox Court House

Head Quarters of the Armies of the United States
Appomattox C.H. Va. Apl 9th 1865

Gen. R. E. Lee
Comd’g C.S.A.

General,

In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst., I propose to receive the surrender of the Army of N. Va. on the following terms to wit; Rolls of all the officers and men be made in duplicate, one copy to be given to an officer to be designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander to sign a like parole for the men of their commands – The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority as long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside—

Very Respectfully
U. S. Grant
Lt. Gen

The two generals met shortly after noon on April 9, 1865, at the home of Wilmer McClean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all United States forces, hastened the conclusion of the Civil War.

In the weeks following, Confederate forces surrendered, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured. On April 14, President Lincoln’s name was added to the list of over 1 million Civil War casualties, and the bloody era the that began four years earlier in the corn fields of Manassas, Virginia finally was brought to a close. (Library of Congress)

‘Au nom de Louis XIV, roi de France et de Navarre, le 9 avril 1682’

The ill-fated René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi River on this date in 1682 and claimed the Mississippi watershed in the name of France, naming it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV.

Je, René-Robert Cavelier de La Salle, en vertu de la commission de Sa Majesté que je tiens en mains, prêt à la faire voir à qui il pourrait appartenir, ai pris et prends possession, au nom de Sa Majesté et de ses successeurs de sa couronne, de ce pays de la Louisiane, mers, havres, ports, baies, détroits adjacents et de toutes les nations, peuples, provinces, villes, bourgs, villages, mines, minières, pèches, fleuves, rivières compris dans l’étendue de ladite Louisiane.

Two-Faced Baby Worshipped As Goddess

(AP) A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali’s facial features are duplicated – she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

“My daughter is fine – like any other child,” said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

CBS News

Goddess nothing. She’s already running for political office.

There’s a photo if you click on the link. All part of God’s plan I’m sure.

April 8th ought to be a national holiday

Today we celebrate the birthdays

. . . of Betty Ford, 90.

. . . of journalist Seymour Hersh, 71.

It was Seymour Hersh who broke the story that American soldiers had massacred an entire village in Vietnam, killing all the men, women, and children. He followed up on it and broke the story of what is now known as the My Lai massacre and went on to write a Pulitzer Prize-winning book on the subject, My Lai 4: A Report on the Massacre and Its Aftermath (1970).

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

. . . of John Havlicek, 68.

Known for clutch performances in big games, Havlicek posted impressive numbers during his illustrious 16-year career. In 1,270 regular-season games he scored 26,395 points and averaged 20.8 points to rank as the Celtics’ all-time leading scorer and the sixth-highest scorer in NBA history. He also grabbed 8,007 rebounds, recorded 6,114 assists, and played on eight Boston championship teams. He appeared in 13 consecutive NBA All-Star Games, earned 11 selections to the All-NBA First or Second Team, and was named to the NBA All-Defensive First or Second Team eight times.

NBA.com

. . . of Gary Carter, 54.

A rugged receiver and enthusiastic on-field general, Gary Carter excelled at one of baseball’s most demanding positions, as both as offensive and defensive force. A three-time Gold Glove Award winner, Carter belted 324 home runs in his 19-season major league career. “Kid” showed a knack for the big-time, twice earning All-Star Game MVP awards in his 11 selections. His clutch 10th-inning single in Game Six of the 1986 World Series sparked a dramatic Mets’ comeback victory, ultimately leading to a World Series title.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

. . . of Barbara Kingsolver, 53.

She majored in biology at DePauw University in Indiana, and then got a master’s degree in evolutionary biology. She was working on a Ph.D. thesis on the social lives of termites when she decided to abandon a career in science and try to become a writer. She took a job as a technical writer, which forced her to sit in front of a computer for eight hours a day and do nothing but write. She later said, “I learned to produce whether I wanted to or not. It would be easy to say oh, I have writer’s block, oh, I have to wait for my muse. I don’t. Chain that muse to your desk and get the job done.”

Her first novel was The Bean Trees (1986), about a woman from rural Kentucky who leaves home so she won’t get stuck in a boring, dead-end life. She’s perhaps best known for her novel The Poisonwood Bible (1998), about the wife and four daughters of an evangelical Baptist minister who go as missionaries to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

. . . of the Princess bride. Robin Wright Penn is 42.

Peggy Lennon is 67 and Julian Lennon is 45. They are not related.

Patricia Arquette (Allison Dubois) is 40 and Emma Caulfield (Susan Keats and Anya) is 35.

Gladys Marie Smith was born on this date in 1892. We know her as Mary Pickford. Miss Pickford won the Oscar for best actress for Coquette. The first big female movie star, Pickford was an industry leader as well, helping found United Artists and the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences.

Jim “Catfish” Hunter was born on this date in 1946.

The bigger the game, the better he pitched. Jim “Catfish” Hunter, with his pinpoint control, epitomized smart pitching at its finest. He pitched a perfect game in 1968, won 21 or more games five times in a row, and claimed the American League Cy Young Award in 1974. Arm trouble ended his career at age 33, but he still won 224 games and five World Series rings. The likable pitching ace died in 1999 at age 53 – a victim of ALS, the same disease that cut short the life of Lou Gehrig.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Yip Harburg

… was born on this date in 1896. One of the great lyricists, Harburg would be loved by us all if only for —

Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true

Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That’s where you’ll find me

Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow
Why oh why can’t I?

The Harburg Foundation provides this biographical sketch:

Edgar Y. (Yip) Harburg (1896-1981) was born of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents of modest means on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He attended the City University of New York. In high school (Townsand Harris) he met his lifelong friend, Ira Gershwin and discovered that they shared a mutual love for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Yip and Ira were frequent contributors of poetry and light verse to their high school and college papers.

The years after college found Yip slipping further away from writing and eventually into the world of business. After the electric appliance business Yip had helped develop over seven long years was decimated by the stock market crash of 1929, Yip turned his attention back full time to the art of writing lyrics. His old friend Ira Gershwin became a mentor, co-writer and promoter of Yip’s.

Mr. Harburg’s Broadway achievements included Bloomer Girl, Finnian’s Rainbow, Flahooley and Jamaica.

His most noted work in film musicals was in The Wizard of OZ for which he wrote lyrics, was the final editor and contributed much to the script (including the scene at the end where the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion are rewarded for their efforts by the Wizard). He also wrote lyrics for the Warner Brothers movie, Gay Purr-ee.

Yip was “blacklisted” during the 50’s by film, radio and television for his liberal views.

In all, Yip wrote lyrics to 537 songs including; “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”, “April In Paris”, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, “Hurry Sundown”, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”, “How Are Things In Glocca Mora” and of course his most famous… “Over the Rainbow”.

Great game

Exciting win for Kansas in overtime and a great game overall. I didn’t even mind Billy Packer.

There could well be an equally exciting game Tuesday night when Stanford plays Tennessee for the women’s championship. Can Candace Parker, first woman ever to dunk in an NCAA tournament game, overcome her shoulder injury and lead the Vols to a repeat title (and eighth overall; Stanford has won it all twice)?

And if you didn’t hang around for Monday’s post game show you missed the Jayhawks climbing a Werner ladder — “Official Ladder of the NCAA® Basketball Championships” — to cut down the net. There isn’t anything that isn’t available for marketing these days.

A Pueblo Mystery

Why did the Ancestral Pueblo people leave Four Corners?

Scientists once thought the answer lay in impersonal factors like the onset of a great drought or a little ice age. But as evidence accumulates, those explanations have come to seem too pat — and slavishly deterministic. Like people today, the Anasazi (or Ancient Puebloans, as they are increasingly called) were presumably complex beings with the ability to make decisions, good and bad, about how to react to a changing environment. They were not pawns but players in the game.

Looking beyond climate change, some archaeologists are studying the effects of warfare and the increasing complexity of Anasazi society. They are looking deeper into ancient artifacts and finding hints of an ideological struggle, clues to what was going through the Anasazi mind.

Read more about from The New York Times.

Living will

“While I was watching the sweet sixteen college basketball games, my wife and I got into a conversation about life and death, and the need for living wills. During the course of the conversation I told her that I never wanted to exist in a vegetative state, dependent on some machine and taking fluids from a bottle.

“She got up, unplugged the TV and threw out all my beer.”

First posted here two years ago. Originally in an email sent to Debby.

Raising the quality of insults

Taking a lesson from Saint Francis Xavier, born on this date in 1506 (see here), NewMexiKen has decided to raise the level of the insults I hurl, for example, at other drivers. From now on, instead of “Hey, a**hole,” or “m*****f*****,” or some other Deadwood appropriate language, I am simply going to yell:

“It upsets me to know that at the hour of your death you may be ordered out of paradise.”

McCain healthcare plan

Here’s a CNN news item I first posted four years ago today. I wonder how mother and child are doing.

A pregnant woman in Mexico gave birth to a healthy baby boy after performing a caesarean section on herself with a kitchen knife, doctors said on Tuesday.

It is thought to be the first known case of a self-inflicted caesarean in which both the mother and baby survived.

The unidentified 40-year-old, who lived in a rural area without electricity, running water or sanitation that was an eight-hour drive from the nearest hospital, performed the operation when she could not deliver the baby naturally.

2008 Pulitzer Prizes

HISTORY:
Daniel Walker Howe, “What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815-1848”

BIOGRAPHY:
John Matteson, “Eden’s Outcasts: The Story of Louisa May Alcott and Her Father”

FICTION:
Junot Diaz, “The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao”

GENERAL NONFICTION:
Saul Friedlander, “The Years of Extermination: Nazi Germany and the Jews, 1939-1945”

DRAMA:
Tracy Letts, “August: Osage County”

POETRY:
Robert Hass and Philip Schultz, “Time and Materials,” by Robert Hass ” and “Failure,” by Philip Schultz

MUSIC:
David Lang, “The Little Match Girl Passion”

SPECIAL CITATIONS:
Bob Dylan

Best line of the day, so far

“One historian indicated that his reason for rating Bush as worst is that the current president combines traits of some of his failed predecessors: ‘the paranoia of Nixon, the ethics of Harding and the good sense of Herbert Hoover. . .’ ”

History News Network report on historians’ poll.

I like this one too:

“‘Bush does only two things well,’ said one of the most distinguished historians. ‘He knows how to make the very rich very much richer, and he has an amazing talent for f**king up everything else he even approaches. His administration has been the most reckless, dangerous, irresponsible, mendacious, arrogant, self-righteous, incompetent, and deeply corrupt one in all of American history.'”

And that’s the bright side.

The world really does seem to be falling apart

I’m talking about the food crisis. Over the past few years the prices of wheat, corn, rice and other basic foodstuffs have doubled or tripled, with much of the increase taking place just in the last few months. High food prices dismay even relatively well-off Americans — but they’re truly devastating in poor countries, where food often accounts for more than half a family’s spending.

From an important column by Paul Krugman today. Read it.

I blame Bush.

Our Confusing Economy, Explained

“Perplexed by the U.S. economy? You’re not alone. Law professor Michael Greenberger joins Fresh Air to explain the sub-prime mortgage crisis, credit defaults, the shaky future of other types of loans and what we can expect from the U.S. financial markets.”

I’ve read that this NPR “Fresh Air” discussion is a pretty good explanation of what’s going on in the economy. You can get it from NPR here or as a podcast here.

39 minutes.

Interesting

As I said in an earlier post, any candidate who supports corn ethanol is unqualified to lead the country. By that standard, we don’t have any qualified candidates for president. But the bar should be higher than that. If we don’t know who will advise them, how they plan to pay the bills, and who they would nominate for the Supreme Court, they haven’t given us the minimum information needed to support them.

The above from Scott Adams.

April 7th

Today is the birthday

. . . of Ravi Shankar. Norah Jones’ father is 88.

. . . of Hendley “The Scrounger,” Bret Maverick and Jim Rockford. That’s James Garner, 80 today.

. . . of Trapper. Wayne Rogers is 75.

. . . of Governor Moonbeam. Oakland Mayor Jerry Brown is 70.

. . . of Francis Ford Coppola. The Oscar-winning writer and director is 69. Coppola has been nominated 14 times overall, winning five, three for writing (Patton, Godfather and Godfather II). He won the best director and best picture Oscars for Godfather II.

. . . of David Frost. The journalist, television celebrity is 69.

. . . of Jackie Chan, 54.

. . . of Russell Crowe. The 3-time best actor Oscar nominee is 44. He won for Gladiator.

. . . of Tiki and Ronde. The Barber brothers are 66.

Eleanora Fagan was born on this date in 1915. We know her as Billie Holiday.

Miss Holiday set a pattern during her most fruitful years that has proved more influential than that of almost any other jazz singer, except the two who inspired her, Louis Armstrong and the late Bessie Smith.

Miss Holiday became a singer more from desperation than desire. She was named Eleanora Fagan after her birth in Baltimore. She was the daughter of a 13-year-old mother, Sadie Fagan, and a 15-year-old father who were married three years after she was born.

The first and major influence on her singing came when as a child she ran errands for the girls in a near-by brothel in return for the privilege of listening to recordings by Mr. Armstrong and Miss Smith.
. . .

At Jerry Preston’s Log Cabin, a night club, she asked for work as a dancer. She danced the only step she knew for fifteen choruses and was turned down. The pianist, taking pity on her, asked if she could sing. She brashly assured him that she could. She sang “Trav’lin’ All Alone” and then “Body and Soul” and got a job–$2 a night for six nights a week working from midnight until about 3 o’clock the next afternoon.

Miss Holiday had been singing in Harlem in this fashion for a year or two when she was heard by John Hammond, a jazz enthusiast, who recommended her to Benny Goodman, at that time a relatively unknown clarinet player who was the leader on occasional recording sessions.

She made her first recording, “Your Mother’s Son-in-Law” in November, 1933, singing one nervous chorus with a band that included in addition to Mr. Goodman, Jack Teagarden, Gene Krupa and Joe Sullivan.

Two years later Miss Holiday started a series of recordings with groups led by Teddy Wilson, the pianist, which established her reputation in the jazz world. On many of these recordings the accompanying musicians were members of Count Basie’s band, a group with which she felt a special affinity. She was particularly close to Mr. Basie’s tenor saxophonist, the late Lester Young.

It was Mr. Young who gave her the nickname by which she was known in jazz circles–Lady Day. She in turn created the name by which Mr. Young was identified by jazz bands, “Pres.” She was the vocalist with the Basie band for a brief time during 1937 and the next year she signed for several months with Artie Shaw’s band.

The New York Times (1959)

Billie Holiday and Francis Ford Coppola. It ought to be a national holiday.