Month: June 2008

Gas goes boom

Just a little math.

Nearly 60% of the price of a gallon of gas is the cost of oil. (The percentage has been increasing.) At $138.54 a barrel (today’s closing price) the cost of crude is $3.30 a gallon (138.54 divided by 42 gallons per barrel).

Even if the price of oil gets to be two-thirds of the cost of gasoline, that still means $5 gas is very near.

Tom Friedman last week:

I was visiting my local Toyota dealer in Bethesda, Md., last week to trade in one hybrid car for another. There is now a two-month wait to buy a Prius, which gets close to 50 miles per gallon. The dealer told me I was lucky. My hybrid was going up in value every day, so I didn’t have to worry about waiting a while for my new car. But if it were not a hybrid, he said, he would deduct each day $200 from the trade-in price for every $1-a-barrel increase in the OPEC price of crude oil. When I saw the rows and rows of unsold S.U.V.’s parked in his lot, I understood why.

Crude oil was up $9 $10.75 a barrel today, so your SUV just lost $1800 $2150 in trade-in value.

June 6th

Levi Stubbs is 72. Stubbs was and is the lead vocalist of The Four Tops. It’s Stubbs who sings:

Now if you feel that you can’t go on
Because all of your hope is gone
And your life is filled with much confusion
Until happiness is just an illusion
And your world around is tumbling down
Darling reach out
C’mon girl
Reach on out for me
Reach out for me

Tennis Hall of Famer Bjorn Borg is 52.

Oscar nominee Paul Giamatti is 41. He was nominated for his supporting role in Cinderella Man. Giamatti’s father was professor of Renaissance literature at Yale, president of Yale, and Commissioner of Baseball.

Nathan Hale was born on June 6th in 1755. “I only regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” he said when hanged by the British in 1776 as an American spy. Hale had volunteered to report on British positions in New York. He was caught when Karl Rove’s ancestor revealed Hale’s covert identity to Robert Novak.

It’s a gas

The average U.S gallon of regular was $3.98-something yesterday and the price of crude oil jumped 5% today to $134 6.5% today to $136.60 8% today to $138.54 a barrel.

I know I’ve been stocking up. It isn’t safe to re-use plastic bottles for water, but I’ve been filling them with gasoline and storing them on a shelf in the garage. I must have 30 or 40 gallons out there by now. I’m prepared.

Here’s a list of current average prices. I see Albuquerque is among the lowest in the U.S. (I paid just $3.719 earlier this week.)

Edison, Make Way for the L.E.D.s

In case you didn’t know it, Thomas Edison’s invention, in use for more than 100 years to illuminate virtually everything, is quickly heading for the exits. What will eventually take its place is the light-emitting diode (L.E.D.) bulb, made up of tiny light sources the size of a head of a pin that use a fraction of a regular light bulb’s electricity, produce little heat, and last for tens of thousands of hours of use.
. . .

L.E.D.’s are not widely used today because of their high cost: An L.E.D. bulb can run as high as $90. Even if they would save money in the long run, few people are willing to spend that much up front.

But costs will come down, and when they do, expect to see the end of what is in essence an interim technology: the compact fluorescent bulb. Fluorescents, while using much less power than incandescent light bulbs, are sometimes too bulky, often can’t be dimmed and produce light that is less pleasing than incandescents.

Bits

Christian License Plate Law Approved

South Carolina

South Carolina Governor Mark Sanford (R) yesterday allowed legislation authorizing a Christian-themed specialty license plate to become law without his signature. This means that the state Department of Motor Vehicles may issue a controversial new “I Believe” plate that displays a cross superimposed on a stained glass window.

TheNewspaper

Exciting new NewMexiKen poll

From an article at Salon — Who will Obama choose as veep? Nope, you’re wrong:

Almost half the time over the last 40 years, in fact, the vice president has been a national embarrassment — or worse. For the last seven and a half years, we have had a power-hungry megalomaniac, radiating visible contempt for democratic norms, as our vice president. Throw in Mr. Potato Head (Quayle) and Spiro Our Hero and you end up with quite a rogues’ gallery. The losers take some explaining as well, from Tom Eagleton (who was driven from the 1972 Democratic ticket when it was discovered that he had received electroshock treatments as a mental patient) to Geraldine Ferraro (who embarrassed Walter Mondale by not revealing her husband’s shady real-estate dealings before she was named as his 1984 V.P. choice). And with each passing day, Joe Lieberman seems to have been an increasingly incongruous running mate for Al Gore in 2000.

{democracy:33}

Fascinating

Rubber DuckyAnother event from early 1992, still reverberating today: On January 10, a container holding almost 29,000 plastic bath toys spills off a cargo ship into the middle of the Pacific Ocean and breaks open. The unsinkable toys, which were en route from Hong Kong to Tacoma (Washington), include a lot of iconic yellow rubber ducks that have since been caught up in the world’s ocean currents and continue turning up on the most improbable shores. Curtis Ebbesmeyer, a retired oceanographer, saw from the beginning how valuable the rubber duckies could be in tracing ocean currents, and correctly predicted their trip through the Northwest Passage.

Strange Maps has more.

Breaking

The endgame of Hillary Clinton’s bid for the Democratic presidential nomination took an unexpected turn today as her husband, former President Bill Clinton, updated his status on a popular social networking site.

Visitors to Mr. Clinton’s profile page at Facebook noticed that minutes after Mrs. Clinton suspended her campaign, President Clinton updated his status from “Married” to “It’s Complicated.”

The Borowitz Report .com

Electoral Enchantment

Urban and wild define the New West — fast-growing cities nestled in Wallace Stegner’s “geography of hope.” The art, the history and the food of New Mexico have been commoditized, for obvious reasons. But many of its special places are intact, and owned by every American because of the Wilderness Act, which dates to the fertile years of Stewart Udall’s reign as the emperor of the outdoors.

Mark Udall has climbed every one of Colorado’s 54 peaks over 14,000 feet (and has come within 3,000 feet of the summit of Everest). Tom Udall is the driving force behind legislation that saved the spectacular Valle Vidal in northern New Mexico from the predations of Dick Cheney and his allies.

From a longer piece by Timothy Egan on the Udalls and Democrats in the Southwest. Egan is one of the very best contemporary writers on the West anything.

Best line of the day, so far

“They’re all over the ‘Hillary has 18 million voters’ bit, as if 18 million people were following her around like goslings.”

Functional Ambivalent; the “they” being the commentariat.

You gotta go read Tom’s whole post, but I can’t help excerpting this:

Listen: Obama doesn’t need her or her big money friends. He raised $300 million a hundred bucks at a time, signing up a couple of million small contributors. Lest you forget your history, that’s the kind of financial base Ronald Reagan built, that has carried Republicans to victory for 20 years. When Obama stops by to speak, lines form 10 blocks long. Hillary’s big-money loyalists aren’t going to stay out of this election. They’re not in the political money business because they think Hillary’s a doll. They’re in it because it buys them access and influence and status, and there’s not one of them who’s going to stay over at Hillary’s pity party when Obama’s rockin’ the house down the block. They go with the winner.

As for those 18 million voters, well, maybe there are a few who are going to vote for John McCain. Maybe they’re that angry. But here’s what they’re going to have to swallow: No comprehensive healthcare; war forever in Iraq; bomb bomb bomb, bomb bomb Iran; anti-abortion judges; and more tax cuts for rich people. When they go to the McCain dinners, they’re going to be seated next to people who don’t understand why we haven’t put Jesus’s image on the dollar bill.

June 5th ought to be a national holiday

Bill Moyers is 74 today.

Author Ken Follett is 59.

Suze Orman is 57.

Kenneth Gorelick is 52. You know, Kenny G.

Peter Gibbons is 41, and no longer turning out TPS reports and going to Chotchkie’s. That’s actor Ron Livingston.

Supporting Oscar nominee Mark Wahlberg is 37.

Richard Scarry was born on June 5, 1919. Scarry has written more than 300 books for children and, according to The Writer’s Almanac, “said that what made him happiest as an author was receiving letters from people telling him that their copies of his books were all worn out, or were held together with Scotch tape.” Scarry died in 1994.

Doroteo Arango was born on June 5, 1878. We know him as Pancho Villa.

Adam Smith was baptized on June 5, 1723. His An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations was published in 1776.

Another immortal economist, John Maynard Keynes was born on June 5, 1883.

He’s best known for his book The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money, published during the Great Depression in 1935. He argued that governments can correct severe depressions by spending lots of money, even if it means running a deficit, to put people back to work. Keynes’s ideas greatly influenced Franklin D. Roosevelt’s New Deal polices, and his ideas have been used to justify budget deficits ever since.

The Writer’s Almanac

Hoppy and Topper

William Boyd, better known as Hopalong Cassidy, was born on this date in 1895. After success as a leading man in silent film, Boyd’s career was going nowhere in 1935 when he was cast to play the cowboy, Hopalong Cassidy. He made 54 films in the role for producer Harry Sherman, then 12 more on his own. In 1948, in one of the great prescient moves ever made in Hollywood, Boyd bought the rights to all the films, selling his ranch to raise the money. Television needed Saturday morning fare and Boyd had it.

One medium fed on the other, and by 1950 [William] Boyd was at the center of a national phenomenon. For two years he was as big a media hero as the nation had seen. In personal appearances he was mobbed: 85,000 people came through a Brooklyn department store during his appearance there. His endorsement for any product meant instant sales in the millions. It meant overnight shortages, frantic shopping sprees, and millions of dollars for Boyd. There were Hopalong Cassidy bicycles, rollerskates (complete with spurs), Hoppy pajamas, Hopalong beds. The demand for Hoppy shirts and pants was so great that a shortage of black dye resulted. His investment in Hopalong Cassidy paid off to an estimated $70 million.

Why a man of 52 years appealed to so many children remains a mystery. Possibly some of it had to do with the novelty of television: just as Amos ‘n’ Andy had capitalized on the newness of radio a generation earlier, a TV sensation was bound to occur. And the hero had a no-nonsense demeanor: he was steely-eyed and quick on the draw, and he meted out justice without the endless warbling and sugar-coated romance that came with the others. As for Boyd, he became Cassidy in a real sense. His personal habits changed; he gave up drinking and carousing and lived with his fifth wife until his death in 1972.

John Dunning, On the Air

Hopalong Cassidy was NewMexiKen’s first hero. None has been as good since.

Robert F. Kennedy

. . . was shot by Sirhan Bishara Sirhan early on this date 40 years ago. The 42-year-old brother of assassinated president John Kennedy, father of 11, died the next day. Read the story from The New York Times.

Sirhan's revolver Sirhan’s snubnosed .22-caliber Iver Johnson Cadet model revolver, which wounded five individuals in addition to killing Senator Kennedy.

NewMexiKen photo

More George Marshall

Marshall is one of the truly great Americans. He was Army chief of staff during World War II (and the first five-star general in American history), secretary of state 1947-1949, and secretary of defense 1950-1951 (at age 72). Marshall received the Nobel Peace Prize in 1953.

According to one story told to NewMexiKen, Marshall lived near Leesburg, Virginia, some 35 miles from Washington. As a cabinet officer Marshall was entitled to a car and driver for his commute. Marshall, however, thought it was unreasonable for the taxpayers to pay when he chose to live so far out. So each day he drove himself 23 miles to Tysons Corner, Virginia, where he was met by his driver for the few miles remaining in the trip to the office.

Not many like Marshall anymore.

The Marshall Plan

Secretary of State George C. Marshall announced what became known as the Marshall Plan at a speech at Harvard University’s graduation ceremonies on this date in 1947. The State Department provides this brief summary:

Europe, still devastated by the war, had just survived one of the worst winters on record. The nations of Europe had nothing to sell for hard currency, and the democratic socialist governments in most countries were unwilling to adopt the draconian proposals for recovery advocated by old-line classical economists. Something had to be done, both for humanitarian reasons and also to stop the potential spread of communism westward.

The United States offered up to $20 billion for relief, but only if the European nations could get together and draw up a rational plan on how they would use the aid. For the first time, they would have to act as a single economic unit; they would have to cooperate with each other. Marshall also offered aid to the Soviet Union and its allies in eastern Europe, but Stalin denounced the program as a trick and refused to participate. The Russian rejection probably made passage of the measure through Congress possible.

The Marshall Plan, it should be noted, benefited the American economy as well. The money would be used to buy goods from the United States, and they had to be shipped across the Atlantic on American merchant vessels. But it worked. By 1953 the United States had pumped in $13 billion, and Europe was standing on its feet again. Moreover, the Plan included West Germany, which was thus reintegrated into the European community.

Inappropriate behavior

From the Associated Press in an article entitled Lesbian kiss at Seattle ballpark stirs up gay-friendly town.

“Guerrero denied she and her date were groping each other, saying that along with eating garlic fries, they were giving each other brief kisses.”

NewMexiKen doesn’t care about lesbians kissing or even the reaction to the allegation that an usher told them it was inappropriate. But I was at Safeco Field two months ago and I can still smell the garlic fries.

Eating garlic fries and kissing, now that’s inappropriate behavior.

Salaries vs. Performance

salary vs performance is a chart that “looks at all 30 Major League Baseball Teams and ranks them on the left according to their day-to-day standings. The lines connect each team to their 2008 salary, listed on the right.”

The more vertical the blue line, the better the ratio. (Congratulations Rays and Marlins!) The more vertical the red line the worse. (Way to go Yankees, Tigers and Mariners!).