Author: NewMexiKen

Building a Nation of Know-Nothings

From another good column by Timothy Egan:

… It’s not just that 47 percent of Republicans believe the lie that Obama is a Muslim, or that 27 percent in the party doubt that the president of the United States is a citizen. But fully half of them believe falsely that the big bailout of banks and insurance companies under TARP was enacted by Obama, and not by President Bush.

Take a look at Tuesday night’s box score in the baseball game between New York and Toronto. The Yankees won, 11-5. Now look at the weather summary, showing a high of 71 for New York. The score and temperature are not subject to debate.

Yet a president’s birthday or whether he was even in the White House on the day TARP was passed are apparently open questions. …

Rockin’

The National League East leading Atlanta Braves were at Denver today to play the Colorado Rockies. I’m a Rockies fan so I turned on the game around 2 o’clock.

And it was 10-1 Atlanta in the 3rd. [If it was soccer they’d have sent the Rockies back to France by then.]

But I left the game on anyway. Ken Burns came along to talk up his new documentary and he was more interesting than usual. And the Rockies scored a few runs — one in the fourth, three in the fifth.

10-5 after five.

Three more in the sixth. 10-8.

But none in the seventh. Still 10-8.

Then, four runs in the eighth. Rockies ahead 12-10.

And, to end the game in the ninth an incredible sliding catch by Carlos Gonzalez. What a great, great ballgame.

Well not so much for Atlanta.

Some trivia and stuff along the way. Atlanta’s nine starters each had an extra base (in just the first four innings) — seven doubles, a triple and a home run. That’s happened just five times in 58 years. (And they lost.)

Burns and the broadcasters were, of course, talking about baseball being the only game without a clock; it’s never over until it’s over kind of stuff.

But Burns noted as well that baseball (and softball) are the only game where the defense has the ball. The only game where the player scores and not the ball. The only game where you only get to use your best offensive player just one-ninth of the time (no going to Kobe or LeBron or Adrian Peterson every important play).

Worst line of the day

Social Security is a “milk cow with 310 million tits.”

Alan Simpson, chairman of the President’s deficit commission

For now, let’s dedicate the next playing of Cee-Lo’s hit track to Alan Simpson.

And if the President doesn’t fire Simpson, we can dedicate the subsequent playing to the President.

[Atrios calls the deficit commission the catfood commission in anticipation of what they’ll leave us to live on.]

How low will it go?

The interest rate on 10-year Treasury bonds is 2.45% this morning (and the DOW was below 10,000 and the thermometer at Casa NewMexiKen reached 57º).

2.45% is the lowest the 10-year Treasury rate has been since the financial crisis during the winter of 2008-2009.

What it means is, among other things, investors are afraid of stocks and real estate and are putting their money in the safest investment around, U.S. government obligations. With so much money chasing the Treasury, interest rates keep dropping.

In other news, only 25,000 new homes were sold last month, the lowest number of sales for the month of July since 1982. By comparison, 117,000 new homes were sold in July 2005.

Still one of my favorite best lines

I enjoy this story about Julia Thorne, the first Mrs. John Kerry, posted here originally three six years ago:

When she was interviewed for the Washingtonian story [1996], Thorne said she didn’t want to get married again. However, she hadn’t totally soured on love.

“I went to a Wyoming ranch every summer and one year a man came out in the ranch truck to meet me. I saw him and I thought: ‘This man looks like a middle-aged hippie alcoholic.’ And he looked at me and thought: ‘She looks like a bitch on wheels.’ And we’ve been together ever since.”

Thorne and her husband, Richard Charlesworth, now live in Montana.

Smallest Full Moon of 2010

Tonight’s full moon (it actually became full at 11:05 AM MDT) will be the smallest looking of the year. That’s because tonight it will be at apogee, the most distant point in its monthly elliptical orbit around Earth.

There’s about a 12% variation in how large the moon appears when it is full at perigee (closest) and when it is full at apogee (farthest) like tonight. Tonight’s full moon is much dimmer too.

The moon was about 31,000 miles closer to us during 2010’s brightest full moon. That was January 29th.

New Rolling Stone 500

In May Rolling Stone published a new list of “the 500 Greatest Songs of All Time, as voted on by an all-star panel that included Chris Martin, Slash, Lil Wayne and more.”

The previous 500 had been published in 2004 and I’ve mentioned it here. (Here’s an archived copy of the 2004 list.)

Rolling Stone isn’t posting, so far as I can tell, the new 500 list on line. They want you to buy the special issue. I was able to find it though, and by my calculations there are 26 additions (and 26 deletions) to the 2004 500. Many other songs shifted a few positions up or down.

I’m not arguing here for the validity of the list or not.

But here are the new tracks:

100. “Crazy” – Gnarls Barkley
118. “Crazy in Love” – Beyonce Feat. Jay-Z
160. “Moment of Surrender” – U2
172. “99 Problems” – Jay-Z
194. “Rehab” – Amy Winehouse
236. “Paper Planes” – M.I.A.
260. “Mississippi” – Bob Dylan
273. “Jesus Walks” – Kanye West
286. “Seven Nation Army” – The White Stripes
307. “One More Time” – Daft Punk
327. “Take Me Out” – Franz Ferdinand
345. “Beautiful Day” – U2
386. “Maps” – Yeah Yeah Yeahs
412. “Umbrella” – Rihanna Feat. Jay-Z
424. “Juicy” – The Notorious B.I.G
432. “American Idiot” – Green Day
448. “In Da Club” – 50 Cent
466. “Get Ur Freak On” – Missy Elliot
467. “Big Pimpin'” – Jay-Z Feat. UGK
478. “Last Night” – The Strokes
482. “Since U Been Gone” – Kelly Clarkson
484. “Cry Me a River” – Justin Timberlake
490. “Clocks” – Coldplay
493. “Time to Pretend” – MGMT
494. “Ignition (Remix)” – R. Kelly
497. “The Rising” – Bruce Springsteen

And here are the songs no longer among the “500 greatest”:

114 Da Doo Ron Ron (When He Walked Me Home) – The Crystals
166 Lose Yourself – Eminem
215 Sh-Boom – The Chords
391 Band of Gold – Freda Payne
400 Kicks – Paul Revere & the Raiders
406 I Believe I Can Fly – R. Kelly
409 Crossroads – Cream
422 Lola – The Kinks
428 Devil With a Blue Dress On/Good Golly Miss Molly – Mitch Ryder and the Detroit Wheels
442 Keep a Knockin’ – Little Richard
450 By the Time I Get to Phoenix – Glen Campbell
456 Stagger Lee – Lloyd Price
460 One Fine Day – The Chiffons
468 Search and Destroy – The Stooges
469 It’s Too Late – Carole King
470 Free Man in Paris – Joni Mitchell
471 On the Road Again – Willie Nelson
474 One Nation Under a Groove — Part 1 – Funkadelic
485 Graceland – Paul Simon
488 Rhiannon – Fleetwood Mac
491 You Don’t Have to Say You Love Me – Dusty Springfield
493 Then He Kissed Me – The Crystals
494 Desperado – The Eagles
498 Rainy Night in Georgia – Brook Benton
499 The Boys are Back in Town – Thin Lizzy
500 More Than a Feeling – Boston

And yes, I have a playlist in iTunes with all 526.

August 24th

Ron, i.e., Rupert Grint, is 22 today.

Baseball hall-of-fame inductee Cal Ripken Jr. is 50.

Steve Guttenberg is 52. According to IMDb, Guttenberg doesn’t have a single award of any kind to his credit.

Marlee Matlin is 45. She has a best actress Oscar for Children of a Lesser God.

Dave Chappelle is 37.

Kenny Baker is 72 today. He was R2D2 in the “Star Wars” movies.

Howard Zinn was born on August 24th in 1922; he died in January.

He’s the author of A People’s History of the United States (1980). It has sold more than a million copies and continues to sell about 100,000 copies each year.

Zinn wrote more than 20 books, including the memoir You Can’t Be Neutral on a Moving Train (1994). Last year, he said: “I think it’s very important to bring back the idea of socialism into the national discussion to where it was at the turn of the [last] century before the Soviet Union gave it a bad name. Socialism had a good name in this country. Socialism had Eugene Debs. It had Clarence Darrow. It had Mother Jones. It had Emma Goldman. It had several million people reading socialist newspapers around the country. Socialism basically said, hey, let’s have a kinder, gentler society. Let’s share things. Let’s have an economic system that produces things not because they’re profitable for some corporation, but produces things that people need. People should not be retreating from the word socialism because you have to go beyond capitalism.”

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

Every American should read A People’s History of the United States.

Sin more

Permission granted: You can officially stop feeling guilty about those little “bad-for-you” habits you can’t seem to break. Turns out, many of life’s greatest indulgences bring big health benefits — helping you stay slim, fight off the blues, and kick disease to the curb.

And we’ve got the 10 best right here, conveniently ranked by Health magazine’s expert panelists. Start at the top of the list to get the most bang for your healthy buck, and keep moving on down to learn how to boost your well-being in the most decadent ways possible.

Here’s the 10 and here’s the link to learn more about the benefits of each.

Pleasure No. 1: Getting your zzz’s

Pleasure No. 2: Playing hooky

Pleasure No. 3: Sexual healing

Pleasure No. 4: A daily chocolate fix

Pleasure No. 5: Girls’ nights out

Pleasure No. 6: Full-fat dressing

Pleasure No. 7: Your morning java

Pleasure No. 8: Getting a rubdown

Pleasure No. 9: Basking in the sun

Pleasure No. 10: Wine with dinner

Washington burns

The invading British burned the public buildings of Washington on this date in 1814.

On August 24, 1814, as the War of 1812 raged on, invading British troops marched into Washington and set fire to the U.S. Capitol, the President’s Mansion, and other local landmarks. The ensuring fire reduced all but one of the capital city’s major public buildings to smoking rubble, and only a torrential rainstorm saved the Capitol from complete destruction. The blaze particularly devastated the Capitol’s Senate wing, the oldest part of the building, which was honeycombed with vulnerable wooden floors and housed the valuable but combustible collection of books and manuscripts of the Library of Congress, then located in the Capitol building. Heat from the intense fire reduced the Senate chamber’s marble columns to lime, leaving the room, in one description, “a most magnificent ruin.”

Source: U.S. Senate Art & History

After 26 hours in Washington, the British moved toward Baltimore, where they met with resistance and the Star-spangled banner still waved.

Best line of the day

“Whatever happens, they say afterwards, it must have been Fate. People are always a little confused about this, as they are in the case of miracles. When someone is saved from certain death by a strange concatenation of circumstances, they say that’s a miracle. But of course if someone is killed by a freak chain of events — the oil just spilled there, the safety fence just broke there — that must also be a miracle. Just because it’s not nice doesn’t mean it’s not miraculous.”

Terry Pratchett quoted by Ask the Pilot’s Patrick Smith. Smith points out that when people survive air crashes it’s because the planes were engineered that way and the crews trained.

Real Estate’s Gold Rush Seems Gone for Good

Fun while it lasted if your timing was good.

From an article in The New York Times:

Instead, Mr. Humphries and other economists say, housing values will only keep up with inflation. A home will return the money an owner puts in each month, but will not multiply the investment.

Dean Baker, co-director of the Center for Economic and Policy Research, estimates that it will take 20 years to recoup the $6 trillion of housing wealth that has been lost since 2005. After adjusting for inflation, values will never catch up.

“People shouldn’t look at a home as a way to make money because it won’t,” Mr. Baker said.

If the long term is grim, the short term is grimmer. Housing experts are bracing themselves for Tuesday, when the sales figures for July will be released. The data is expected to show a drop of as much as 20 percent from last year.

. . .

“It’s entirely likely that markets like Arizona will not recover even in the 15- to 20-year time frame,” said Mr. Humphries of Zillow. “The demand doesn’t exist.”

Be careful out there — and buckle up

Total traffic fatalities in the U.S. in 2008: 37,361

51.6% were drivers
20.0% were passengers
14.2% were motorcyclists
12.3% were pedestrians
1.9% were cyclists

32% of the fatalities were alcohol-related (11,773 deaths).

83% of drivers and passengers use seat belts.

There were 23,507 vehicle fatalities where seat belt use was determined. Of these, 12,865 (55%) were not using seat belts.

67% of pickup truck drivers killed were not wearing seat belts; 70% of pickup truck passengers killed were not.

70% of the 342 13-15-year-olds killed were not wearing seat belts.

August 23rd is the birthday

… of Barbara Eden. “Jeannie” is 76.

… of football hall-of-famer Sonny Jurgensen, 76 today.

… of Linda Thompson. The folk/rock musician, who with then husband Richard made one of the great rock albums — Shoot Out the Lights, is 63 today. She was voted best female singer of 1982 in Rolling Stone.

… of Shelley Long. The star of Cheers and numerous films is 61. Long received six Emmy nominations for her portrayal of Diane Chambers, winning once.

… of Kobe Bryant. He’s 32.

Gene Kelly, the wonderful singer/dancer/actor, was born on this date in 1912. Kelly is most famous for Singin’ in the Rain but received his sole Oscar nomination for best actor for Anchors Aweigh. He died in 1996.