“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt on signing the Social Security Act 73 years ago today.
. . . was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on this date in 1935.
My parents are receiving Social Security payments. Should I be worried that their monthly checks will be cut and that I will have to make up the difference?
No, there are no plans to reduce benefits for current retirees. In fact, benefits will continue to grow annually with inflation. Even without any changes, current benefits are expected to be fully payable on a timely basis until 2041.
I’m 35 years old in 2007. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?
Unless changes are made, at age 69 in 2041 your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 22 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter from presently scheduled levels.
I’m 26 years old in 2007. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?
Unless changes are made, when you reach age 60 in 2041, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 22 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you lived to be 101 years old in 2082 (which will be more common by then), your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 25 percent from today’s scheduled levels.
Should I count on Social Security for all my retirement income?
No. Social Security was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement. It is often said that a comfortable retirement is based on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions and savings. American workers should be saving for their retirement on a personal basis and through employer-sponsored or other retirement plans.
Is there really a Social Security trust fund?
Yes. Presently, Social Security collects more in taxes than it pays in benefits. The excess is borrowed by the U.S. Treasury, which in turn issues special-issue Treasury bonds to Social Security.
More informative Q&A about Social Security.
A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”
… better known as Grant’s tomb, became part of the National Park Service 50 years ago today.
This memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, victorious Union commander of the Civil War, includes the tomb of General Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant. A West Point graduate, Grant served in the Mexican War and at various frontier posts, before rapidly rising through the ranks during the Civil War. Grant’s tenacity and boldness led to victories in the Battles of Vicksburg and Chattanooga and Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, scenes depicted by mosaics in the tomb. In 1866 Congress awarded Grant his fourth star making him the first full General of the Armies.
A grateful nation twice elected Grant to serve as President of the United States, from 1869 to 1877. Grant’s accomplishments include signing the act establishing the first national park, Yellowstone, on March 1, 1872. After the Presidency, Grant settled in New York City. Ulysses S. Grant died of throat cancer on July 23, 1885 in Mount McGregor, New York, and was laid to rest in New York City on August 8th.
Approximately 90,000 people from around the country and the world donated a total of over $600,000 towards construction of his tomb, the largest public fundraising effort ever at that time. Designed by architect John Duncan, the granite and marble structure was completed in 1897 and remains the largest mausoleum in North America. Over one million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of Grant’s Tomb, on April 27, 1897.
Edith Cullen Shain is the nurse in the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photo V-J Day in Times Square taken 63 years ago today. She kept her identity secret for 34 years, then identified herself to Eisenstaedt and he confirmed it was her when they met.
From an interview two years ago:
“The street was just wild with people. It was exuberant. They were dashing around and hugging and kissing and we walked in on that. And a sailor grabbed me and held me and kissed me a long time.
“When he grabbed me, I didn’t see him, and when he kissed me, I didn’t see him because I closed my eyes. And then I turned around and walked the other way, and so that was the end of the story as far as the recognition is concerned,” she said.
Shain later became a school teacher in California where she married and had three children.
Sixty years later, Shain, who says she was kissed by only one sailor that day, still has no idea who the sailor was. More than 20 men have come forward through the years claiming to be the kisser but none has ever been confirmed.
A statue in Times Square commemorates the moment. It’s called “Unconditional Surrender.”
Click image for larger version of the original photo.
The best thing ever, Pandora Radio.
Especially if you have an iPhone or iPod touch (with internet connectivity).
For the iPhone and touch you download the app free from iTunes, sign up (email and password) and then select an artist, song or composer you like. I started with Willie Nelson, but experimented with Mozart, Bach, Corinne Bailey Rae, Bob Marley, Keren Ann and Billie Holiday. The service (which is free at present) relies on The Music Genome Project® to find similar tracks. It even tells you how — in brief very general terms — each track fits).
So Corinne Bailey Rae leads to Norah Jones leads to John Mayer leads to Sade back to Corinne back to Norah to India Arie to Amy Winehouse and so on. Along the way you can vote thumbs up or down to further refine your interests. (And you can click to buy the song from iTunes.)
What a great way to enjoy great music and find similar sounds too.
Apparently Pandora also works with Sprint and other AT&T phones — and, of course, in any browser.
Amy Winehouse gave way to Nelly Furtado.
Keren Ann lead to Bavarian Fruit Bread back to Keren Ann then on to Hem then to Holly Brook.
NewMexiKen has three travel ideas. For now they are just ideas. I need sponsors and/or companions.
1. Around the world, say in 80 days (why not?). Kind of do the Matt Harding thing without the silly dance.
2. Another 80 days just in Europe; I’ve been to Europe a half-dozen times but never done the grand tour.
3, The Atlantic Coast from Newfoundland to the Florida Keys.
What do you think? I could take the laptop and the camera and fill the blog with wise, whimsical and witty things every day. Properly marketed it could bring in lots of readers (I mean more than the ususal seven) and be supported by lots of ads.
Who can help me make these ideas into plans — and then into reality? I can leave Monday.
For the record I have already been to:
São Paulo
Montevideo
Buenos Aires
Lisbon
Madrid
Geneva
Cologne (airport only)
Bonn
Frankfurt (airport only)
Tokyo
Beijing
Hong Kong
Macau
St. Petersburg
Helsinki
Stockholm
Ankara
Istanbul
Nicosia
Athens
Yaounde
Douala
Lagos
Zurich (airport only)
Paris
Havana
Warsaw
Moscow
Alma Ata
Prague (airport only)
Bratislava
Vienna
All 50 states, Canada and Mexico.
Here’s [Michael] Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t choose among these options. He eats them all, according to the [New York] Post.)
Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.
Comcast has redeemed themselves. They’ve been responsive, polite and adjusted (and possibly expedited) my refund. I got a call a short while ago.
It was never the money that made it worth the complaint, though it was MY money. It was the inconsistencies in the story I got from their people and the clear indication that what they told me — billing will end July 21st — was not what happened — it appeared to have ended August 1st.
But thanks for the polite and positive feedback Comcast — and the correction.
I do suggest you take a look at your bills and see if they really are clear to the average customer, especially when services are added or ended.
And consider allowing former customers that relied on electronic bills and payments access to their record until the balance is paid and the account closed — no matter who owes whom.
Next complaint: Tucson Electric Power.
. . . is 82 today. Castro took control of Cuba in 1959.
NewMexiKen saw Castro give a speech outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1993. It was interesting to see the man who has been so much a focus of America for now nearly 50 years.
Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. (He says he was 12, but should have been 13 or 14.) “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter [back] because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.” Castro went on to say, “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you [FDR] don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.”
A copy of the letter is here.
Biography.com has more information about Castro.
… was born on this date in 1860. Larry McMurtry’s excellent essay “Inventing the West” from the August 2000 issue of The New York Review of Books tells us about this famous performer.
Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses—or Mosey) grew up poor in rural Ohio, shot game to feed her family, shot game to sell, was pressed into a shooting contest with a touring sharpshooter named Frank Butler, beat him, married him, stayed with him for fifty years, and died three weeks before he did in 1926.
When Annie Oakley and Frank Butler offered themselves to Cody the Colonel was dubious. His fortunes were at a low ebb, and shooting acts abounded. But he gave Annie Oakley a chance. She walked out in Louisville before 17,000 people and was hired immediately. Nate Salsbury, Cody’s tight-fisted manager, who did not spend lavishly and who rarely highlighted performers, happened to watch Annie rehearse and promptly ordered seven thousand dollars’ worth of posters and billboard art.
Annie Oakley more than justified the expense. Sitting Bull, normally a taciturn fellow, saw her shoot in Minnesota and could not contain himself. Watanya cicilia, he called her, his Little Sure Shot. Small, reserved, Quakerish, she seemed to live on the lemonade Buffalo Bill dispensed free to all hands. In London she demolished protocol by shaking hands with Princess Alexandra. She shook hands with Alexandra’s husband, the Prince of Wales, too, though, like his mother the Queen, she strongly disapproved of his behavior with the ladies. In France the Parisians were glacially indifferent to buffalo, Indians, cowboys, and Cody—Annie Oakley melted them so thoroughly that she had to go through her act five times before she could escape. In Germany she likened Bismarck to a mastiff.
In 1901 she was almost killed in a train wreck. Annie claimed that it was the wreck that caused her long auburn hair to turn white overnight; skeptics said her hair turned white because she left it in hot water too long while at a spa. She continued to shoot into the 1920s. In her last years she looked rather like Nancy Astor. Will Rogers visited her not long before her death and pronounced her the perfect woman. Probably not until Billie Jean King and the rise of women’s tennis had a female outdoor performer held the attention of so many people. She became part of the “invention” that is the West by winning her way with a gun: a man’s thing, the very thing, in fact, that had won the West itself.
Annie was her nickname as a child. Oakley was a stage name. Offstage she referred to herself as Mrs. Frank Butler.
Photo taken 1902 when Oakley was 42. Click image for larger version.
. . . premiered on this date 66 years ago. Is there a sadder movie ever than this Disney classic?
Roger Ebert wrote an excellent review when Bambi was released yet again in 1988. He starts generally positive:
In the annals of the great heartbreaking moments in the movies, the death of Bambi’s mother ranks right up there with the chaining of Dumbo’s mother and the moment when E. T. seems certainly dead. These are movie moments that provide a rite of passage for children of a certain age: You send them in as kids, and they come out as sadder and wiser preteenagers.
And there are other moments in the movie almost as momentous. “Bambi” exists alone in the Disney canon. It is not an adventure and not a “cartoon,” but an animated feature that describes with surprising seriousness the birth and growth of a young deer. Everybody remembers the cute early moments when Bambi can’t find his footing and keeps tripping over his own shadow. Those scenes are among the most charming the Disney animators ever drew.
But then he questions the whole effort:
Hey, I don’t want to sound like an alarmist here, but if you really stop to think about it, “Bambi” is a parable of sexism, nihilism and despair, portraying absentee fathers and passive mothers in a world of death and violence. I know the movie’s a perennial clasic, seen by every generation, remembered long after other movies have been forgotten. But I am not sure it’s a good experience for children – especially young and impressionable ones.
“McCain camp denies plagiarizing Wikipedia in Georgia remarks, claims he’s still a foreign policy expert [citation needed]”
I agree with kahunaburger, though I think wasting any brain on this woman would be a misuse. Could she be serious?
But then again, this woman is serious — and she’s in congress!
McCain said he told [Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili] “that I know I speak for every American when I say to him today, we are all Georgians.”
I don’t know where this ass clown got his religious upbringing, but where I got mine this sort of thing would have been considered blasphemous.
He’s a representative of Focus on the Family.
And, yes, I acknowledge he may just be trying to be funny. Even so, it seems like taking God’s name in vain to me.
When Lin Miaoke, 9, belted out “I Sing for My Country” as the Chinese flag entered the national stadium, she became an instant celebrity and was quickly dubbed a “smiling angel.” The image of her dressed in a pretty red dress appeared around the world.
But she apparently wasn’t the one singing. Chen Qigang, the ceremony’s music director, told state broadcaster CCTV that the voice hundreds of millions of people heard was that of 7-year-old Yang Peiyi. Yang had the voice and was supposed to perform but was yanked at the last minute because she had crooked teeth.
Here’s the video of the song.
It’s sort of funny when he’s just an unhinged senator. But think for a moment where we’d be if this man were president right now, as he may well be in six months. This man takes the counsel of the people who got us into the Iraq War. On foreign policy, he is in league with the people who were so extreme they’ve now largely been kicked out of the Bush administration. People like John Bolton and others like him.
It’s beyond Obama or political strategy or dinging McCain on this or that policy.
This man is simply too dangerous and unstable to be president. People need to wake up and get a look of the preview he’s giving us of a McCain presidency.
NewMexiKen agrees with Marshall. Keep your eye on the ball people. War, and war especially with a powerful foe, trumps all other issues — except, of course, who’s wearing a flag lapel pin.
James Fallows fears email.
I make my living writing things down, but even I have reached the point where I am not willing to put any sentiment whatsoever into reproducible form — in an email that could be forwarded, in a document that could be cut-and-pasted — without thinking about how it would look if it got into unintended hands.
Brad DeLong does not.
Second, for most of us the big problem has never been that people will repeat what we say, but rather that they will repeat what we did not say–or take what we say out of context.
. . .In such a world as this one in which we live in, email and other means of communication that automatically create a record that can be used to push back against distortions is a blessing.
NewMexiKen has had to testify in federal court about what I meant in emails I had written, so I know what can happen. The written word is very powerful. It demands thoughtfulness, which is sadly lacking in so many email messages. (And, indeed, some of the informality of email has bled over into more formal documents too.)
Say what you mean, be polite, and don’t write what you don’t want repeated. Read, revise and proofread.
That said, I go along with DeLong.
And you?
An interesting article at Slate about Spying on other people’s computers. I was amused by this guy’s solution to inappropriate use of the internets at work:
I stopped “special” surfing at the office when I put a linux box on a hub between the network internet router and the switches. I simply sniffed all traffic for image files and displayed it on a 42″ LCD out in the sales area. Images were displayed of what people were surfing. I also attached the ip address of the user to the image. It stopped inappropriate internet surfing in that office in 3 days. When everyone can see what you are doing, you get back to real work.
Frankly inappropriate internet usage at work is a problem unrelated to the internet. It’s a sign of an office of people without enough to do, or — more likely — without enough of the right things to do.
And, that is an age old problem.
I fear this is too simple for NewMexiKen’s national parks fans but try it anyway. From Mental_Floss, The National Park Quiz.
NewMexiKen scored 10 of 10, but heck I’ve visited eight of the ten.
Will all these swimming world records, someone better give a drug test to the pool.
Undaunted, the Sap-o-Meter stayed up late churning the treacle, and it’s got a new record to show for it: an inspirational 38 Sap Points.
If you watch enough NBC, you know that there’s a flag-waving mom behind every extraordinary achievement. Well, supporting last night’s record-breaking performance were a remarkable 13 mothers—that is, 13 mentions of the words mom or mother. NBC also continued to dream big, with a robust six mentions for the second consecutive night.
“Aug. 12 (Bloomberg) — Almost one-third of U.S. homeowners who bought in the last five years now owe more on their mortgages than their properties are worth, according to Zillow.com, an Internet provider of home valuations.”
Via Atrios.
If you know anything about mythology you probably learned about it first from Edith Hamilton, born on this date in 1867. Hamilton’s book Mythology, written after she had retired as a school head mistress, was published in 1942.
George Hamilton is 69 today.
Mark Knopfler is 59. Money for nothin’ and your chicks for free.
Pete Sampras is 37.
Cantinflas, the great Mexican comedian, acrobat and musician — and bullfighter — was born on this date in 1911. His actual name was Fortino Mario Alfonso Moreno Reyes. Cantinflas was Passepartout in Michael Todd’s 1956 Around the World in Eighty Days. In English-speaking countries, David Niven was billed as the star. Elsewhere Cantinflas took top billing — he was the highest paid actor in the world at the time. He saved the movie from the stiff Niven if you ask me.
The movie producer Cecil B. DeMille was born on August 12th in 1881. Known for his extravaganzas (e.g., The Ten Commandments), DeMille won his only Oscar for The Greatest Show on Earth.
And it’s the birthday of Zerna Sharp, born in Hillisburg, Indiana, on this date in 1889. According to The Writer’s Almanac a few years back, Ms. Sharp is the woman who —
invented the characters Dick and Jane to help teach children how to read…Sharp’s idea was to use pictures and repetition to teach children new words. She took her idea to Dr. William S. Gray, who had been studying the way children learn to read, and he hired her to create a series of textbooks. She didn’t write the books, but she created the characters Dick, Jane, their sister Sally, their dog Spot, and their cat Puff. Each story introduced five new words, one on each page.