Month: June 2009

Baggage

A friend reports that shortly after take-off from Denver today the pilot came on the intercom to announce that an indicator light suggested a right baggage door might be unlatched. He said not to worry, they were going back to the airport, and they’d be making all left turns so they didn’t spew bags all over Colorado. (It was just a bad indicator.)

That reminded me of the announcement just before my last flight leaving Albuquerque. The pilot came on the intercom to say we were held up a few minutes waiting for some last minute baggage to be loaded. The funeral really couldn’t go on as scheduled without it, he said.

The internet changes everything

All over the world people are monitoring unfolding events in Iran via the internet, where an apparently decisive election victory by the incumbent Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is being challenged on the streets.

Although there are signs the Iranian government is trying to cut some communications with the outside world, citizen journalism appears to be thriving on the web.

Here is a selection of popular links, many of which have been written from a particular point of view but – when taken together – provide a wide range of perspectives.

BBC NEWS has the links — blogs, flickr, Picasa, YouTube, Twitter, Facebook.

As Tom Johnson, the blogger formerly known as FunctionalAmbivalent, posted on Facebook this morning, he:

feels like he’s watching a revolution on Twitter and Facebook. Iran is erupting, and unlike Tienanmen Square, the authorities can’t hold the information in. Too many cell phones with video; too much redundant web access. Who knows what’s going to happen? No one. But we’re going to see it live, unfiltered by the media. This is amazing!

Name-calling

The post about Arkansas demonstrates how often American Indian nations were renamed by their neighbors. The European explorers would ask, “Who lives further down this river?” And their hosts would reply, “Oh those c**ks**ckers, we call them the stupid downriver people.”

And so, a perfectly happily self-named tribe would soon become forever known by the word for “stupid downriver people” in some other Indian language, bastardized all the more by the Europeans who spelled it whatever which way in their journals.

It’d be like asking the people of Mexico what they called the people further north.

And so we would have become the United States of Gringos.

Arkansaw or Arkansas

… was admitted to the Union as the 25th state on this date in 1836.

At the time of the early French exploration, a tribe of Indians, the Quapaws, lived West of the Mississippi and north of the Arkansas River. The Quapaws, or OO-GAQ-PA, were also known as the downstream people, or UGAKHOPAG. The Algonkian-speaking Indians of the Ohio Valley called them the Arkansas, or “south wind.”

The state’s name has been spelled several ways throughout history. In Marquette and Joliet’s “Journal of 1673”, the Indian name is spelled AKANSEA. In LaSalle’s map a few years later, it’s spelled ACANSA. A map based on the journey of La Harpe in 1718-1722 refers to the river as the ARKANSAS and to the Indians as LES AKANSAS. In about 1811, Captain Zebulon Pike, a noted explorer, spelled it ARKANSAW.

During the early days of statehood, Arkansas’ two U.S. Senators were divided on the spelling and pronunciation. One was always introduced as the senator from “ARkanSAW” and the other as the senator from “Ar-KANSAS.” In 1881, the state’s General Assembly passed a resolution declaring that the state’s name should be spelled “Arkansas” but pronounced “Arkansaw.”

The pronunciation preserves the memory of the Indians who were the original inhabitants of our state, while the spelling clearly dictates the nationality of the French adventurers who first explored this area.

Arkansas Secretary of State

Magazine article shout-out of the day

A recent article in the New Yorker, for example, showed how McAllen, Texas is spending twice as much as El Paso County—not because people in McAllen are sicker and not because they are getting better care. They are simply using more treatments—treatments they don’t really need; treatments that, in some cases, can actually do people harm by raising the risk of infection or medical error. And the problem is, this pattern is repeating itself across America.

President Obama referring today to this article, which you should read.

June 15th is the birthday

… of Mario Cuomo, 77.

… of Jim Belushi. He’s 55.

… of Julie Hagerty. Airplane’s flight attendant is 54.

… of Wade Boggs, 51.

… of Oscar-winner Helen Hunt, 46.

… of Courteney Cox, now 45. Apparently that’s cougar age.

… of O’Shea Jackson. Ice Cube is 40.

And it’s the birthday of Doogie. Neil Patrick Harris was born in Albuquerque 36 years ago today. He grew up in Ruidoso, New Mexico.

Factoid of the day

The percentage of Americans of African descent was greater in 1776 than it is today.

About one person in five of those listed in the first census (1790) had African ancestry. It’s around 13.5% now.

A day late perhaps

…but let’s talk about Betsy Ross.

According to James W. Loewen in Lies My Teacher Told Me: Everything Your American History Textbook Got Wrong, Professor Michael Frisch at SUNY Buffalo asks his first-year college students to list “the first ten names that you think of” in American History before the Civil War. (He excludes presidents, generals, etc.) Betsy Ross led the list seven years out of eight.

Here’s reality according to Loewen: Betsy Ross played no part in the actual creation of the first American flag. As he puts it, “Ross came to prominence around 1876, when some of her descendants, seeking to create a tourist attraction in Phildadelphia, largely invented the myth of the first flag.”

Flag Day (June 14) commemorates the date in 1777 when the Continental Congress approved the design for a national flag.

However, according to my very own official younger daughter Emily, who—with her sister—has written about Betsy Ross, “She may have just had good PR, but my recent research did seem to lead me to believe that Betsy Ross did standardize the five-pointed star for use on the American flag. Until she made her flags, the stars were sometimes six pointed. Ross used the five points because she could cut it out quickly by folding the material and only making one cut. After her flags, the five-pointed star was used on other American flags.”

5-Pointed Star in One Snip

Sunday stuff

Saw the Clint Eastwood movie Gran Torino last night. A very good film. Eastwood does cranky old man just as well as he did tough cop and enigmatic western hero.

The Apple App Store has Peggle on sale through today for 99¢. It’s a fun arcade game. I’ve never been much of a video game player, but do enjoy them on the iPhone/iPod. Paper Toss is another great time waster, and it’s free.

A brief squall here this morning. Thunderstorms in June? In the morning? What is this planet coming to? Looks like some 90-degree days headed our way, though. I guess I’d better fire up the cooler — haven’t needed it yet this year.

I see we’ve gotten through the switch to digital TV without people taking to the streets with torches. It’s getting more and more difficult for ANY change to come about in our society without it being turned into the apocalypse.

FiveThirtyEight projects that Obama would win 445 electoral votes if an election were held today. The projection is based on his popularity, awarding the president states where he has 50% approval or better.

Alas, as Frank Rich writes, “A sizable minority of Americans is irrationally fearful of the fast-moving generational, cultural and racial turnover Obama embodies — indeed, of the 21st century itself. That minority is now getting angrier in inverse relationship to his popularity with the vast majority of the country.”

Cities Downsize to Survive

Via Calculated Risk:

Most are former industrial cities in the “rust belt” of America’s Mid-West and North East. They include Detroit, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, Baltimore and Memphis.

In Detroit … there are already plans to split it into a collection of small urban centres separated from each other by countryside.

Plans for Flint, Michigan, include a reduction of the city (converted to vacant, natural land) by 40%.

The girl in the window

Go read this story. It won Lane DeGregory a Pulitzer Prize.

No, really, go read it.

A brief excerpt:

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle’s almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.

Camping advisory line of the day

“[A]ll food, garbage, and scented items such as toothpaste, deodorant, sunscreen, toiletries, and chapstick, must be stored in bear canisters, hung from park bear wires, or hung at least 12 feet high and 10 feet out from the nearest tree trunk.”

National Parks Traveler describing new restrictions at Olympic National Park.

Camping in some parks is like trying to get on an airplane. Damn bears. Damn terrorists.

Thrifty

Not surprisingly, all the various chains of superdiscount stores are thriving in the recession. At Dollar Tree Inc. (3,667 stores), earnings were up nearly 38 percent in the most recent quarter. In its most recent quarter, Family Dollar Stores (6,654 locations) said same-store sales were up 6.2 percent. Both companies’ stocks are higher than they were when the market peaked in October 2007. And Dollar General (8,400 stores, $10.5 billion in 2008 sales) is performing even better.

Daniel Gross — Slate Magazine

Tiffany sales in NYC meanwhile are off 42%.