… began in Russia 93 years ago today.
The February Revolution was the first stage of the Russian Revolution. Mostly bloodless, it led to the abdication of Tsar Nicholas II. Ultimately, the regime that began in the February Revolution was replaced during the October (Bolshevik) Revolution.
Here’s some contemporary reports from The New York Times.
(Russia was still using the Julian Calendar in 1917. Hence, March 8 elsewhere was February 23 in Russia.)
Yesterday I saw my sixth of the ten films nominated for the Best Picture Oscar — District 9. Seeing it didn’t change any of my predictions. I’m off to see Avatar later this morning — in 3D of course. I’ve already predicted it will win.
Yesterday, in addition to District 9, I also watched The Hangover, Raising Arizona and The Milagro Beanfield War.
I’m not entirely certain that getting an HDTV with a wireless internet connection (Netflix!) was a good thing.
… a bunch of stuff happened and a bunch of people were born but, frankly, none of it or them interest NewMexiKen much.
Other than maybe, the fact that Oscar-winner Rachel Weisz is 39 today.
Oh, and Jenna Fischer is 36.
It was on this day in 1876 that Alexander Graham Bell received patent No. 174,465 for the telephone. He filed for his patent on the same day as a Chicago electrician named Elisha Gray filed for a patent on basically the same device. Bell only beat Gray by two hours.
It was on this day in 1933 that a man named Charles Darrow trademarked the board game Monopoly. Darrow based the game on an earlier game called “The Landlord’s Game,” which had been designed by a woman named Elizabeth Magie to teach people about the evils of capitalism.
It was on this day in 1917 that the Victor Talking Machine Company released the first jazz record in American history. There were various terms for this new music. It was called “ratty music,” “gut-bucket music,” and “hot music.” Historians aren’t sure how it came to be called jazz, but it’s believed that the word may have come from a West African word for speeding things up. It was also a slang term for sex.
The first band to record jazz was The Original Dixieland Jass Band, an all-white group led by an Italian-American cornetist from New Orleans.
Bank failures 23, 24, 25 and 26 of 2010 were consummated Friday evening.
One each in Florida, Maryland, Illinois and Utah.
Three Albuquerque and two other New Mexico banks are reportedly among the more than 600 banks with some problems. The following are from FDIC documents.
The Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (“FDIC”) has determined that Bank 1st, Albuquerque, New Mexico (“Bank”), is a Significantly Undercapitalized depository institution … [August 31, 2009]
High Desert State Bank, Albuquerque, New Mexico (“Bank”), through its board of directors, having been advised of its right to the issuance and service of a NOTICE OF CHARGES AND OF HEARING detailing the unsafe or unsound banking practices and violations of law and/or regulations alleged to have been committed by the Bank … [June 22, 2009]
Sunrise Bank of Albuquerque, Albuquerque, New Mexico (“Bank”), having been advised of its right to a NOTICE OF CHARGES AND OF HEARING detailing the unsafe or unsound banking practices alleged to have been committed by the Bank … [September 29, 2009]
Watch his facial expressions.
Give it a couple of seconds to start. You don’t need to click or anything.
[And yes, I realize the pins on the center lane are not set in the normal arrangement.]
What is this “Tattoo-to-tooth ratio,” you ask? Simply put, the ratio can be calculated by dividing the number of tattoos present on the patient by the number of teeth remaining in the patients skull. For example, a patient with 24 tattoos and 2 teeth would be said to have the astonishing ratio of 12. A general rule of thumb is that if the tattoo-to-tooth ratio is greater than or equal to one, your patient is indestructible. The higher the TTR score, the lower the likelihood of a terminal outcome. A patient with a TTR of just two could be run over by a truck after being shot twice in the back outside of the bar in which they drank six fifths of whiskey, and shortly after admission to the emergency department they would be demanding cigarettes and sexual favors from any nearby persons.
There’s more. Thanks to SinPantalones for the tweet.
Photographer Jason Hawkes, a frequent contributor to the Big Picture blog, returns today, sharing with us some of his latest images of American cities seen from above at night – New York City and Las Vegas, both cities that undergo significant transformations after the sun goes down. From Hawkes: “The images of New York were shot on Nikons latest camera, the D3S, using three gyro stabilizing mounts and flown using twin star helicopters. (Eurocopter AS355). We flew from heights of just over 500 ft up to 2,500-ft with no doors on, it was very very cold. The images of Las Vegas were shot for a separate project, using a range of helicopters from a Robinson 44 to Eurocopter AS355”. Be sure to see Hawkes’ earlier entries here (1, 2, 3), and check out his newly-released book “London at Night”. A book of his New York at night photos is due for publication in the Autumn. Captions provided by the photographer. (20 photos total)
In anticipation of Sunday’s Oscar presentations, Jill has now seen all ten films nominated for Best Picture.
I’m a slacker, only five, though I expect to see at least two more before Sunday night. I have seen a couple of the other films with nominations — Crazy Heart, Julie & Julia and Star Trek.
The 10 Best Picture nominees:
Avatar
The Blind Side
District 9
An Education
The Hurt Locker
Inglourious Basterds
Precious: Based on the Novel ‘Push’ by Sapphire
A Serious Man
Up
Up in the Air
Leslie Marmon Silko is 62 today.
Leslie Marmon Silko was born in 1948 to a family whose ancestry includes Mexican, Laguna Indian, and European forebears. She has said that her writing has at its core “the attempt to identify what it is to be a half-breed or mixed-blood person.” As she grew up on the Laguna Pueblo Reservation, she learned the stories and culture of the Laguna people from her great-grandmother and other female relatives. After receiving her B. A. in English at the University of New Mexico, she enrolled in the University of New Mexico law school but completed only three semesters before deciding that writing and storytelling, not law, were the means by which she could best promote justice. She married John Silko in 1970. Prior to the writing of Ceremony, she published a series of short stories, including “The Man to Send Rain Clouds.” She also authored a volume of poetry, Laguna Woman: Poems, for which she received the Pushcart Prize for Poetry.
In 1973, Silko moved to Ketchikan, Alaska, where she wrote Ceremony. Initially conceived as a comic story abut a mother’s attempts to keep her son, a war veteran, away from alcohol, Ceremony gradually transformed into an intricate meditation on mental disturbance, despair, and the power of stories and traditional culture as the keys to self-awareness and, eventually, emotional healing. Having battled depression herself while composing her novel, Silko was later to call her book “a ceremony for staying sane.” Silko has followed the critical success of Ceremony with a series of other novels, including Storyteller, Almanac for the Dead, and Gardens in the Dunes. Nevertheless, it was the singular achievement of Ceremony that first secured her a place among the first rank of Native American novelists. Leslie Marmon Silko now lives on a ranch near Tucson, Arizona.
Ceremony is required reading.
It’s also the birthday
… of actor Dean Stockwell. He’s 74. IMDb lists 190 credits for Stockwell, going back to 1945. He received a best supporting actor Oscar nomination in 1989 for Married to the Mob.
… of Penn Jillette. Penn of Penn & Teller has hit the double nickel.
… of Eva Mendes. She’s 36.
Patsy Cline died in a plane crash on this date in 1963. She was 30. John Belushi was found dead from a drug overdose on this date in 1982. He was 33.
On this date in 1770 —
It began when a young barber’s apprentice by the name of Edward Garrick shouted an insult at Hugh White, a soldier of the 29th Regiment on sentry duty in front of the Customs House (a symbol of royal authority). White gave the apprentice a knock on the ear with the butt of his rifle. The boy howled for help, and returned with a sizable and unruly crowd, cheifly boys and youths, and, pointing at White, said, “There’s the son of a bitch that knocked me down!” Someone rang the bells in a nearby church. This action drew more people into the street. The sentry found himself confronting an angry mob. He stood his ground and called for the main guard. Six men, led by a corporal, responded. They were soon joined by the officer on duty, Captain John Preston of the “29th,” with guns unloaded but with fixed bayonets, to White’s relief.
The crowd soon swelled to almost 400 men. They began pelting the soldiers with snowballs and chunks of ice. Led by a huge mulatto, Crispus Attucks, they surged to within inches of the fixed bayonets and dared the soldiers to fire. The soldiers loaded their guns, but the crowd, far from drawing back, came close, calling out, “Come on you rascals, you bloody backs, you lobster scoundrels, fire if you dare, God damn you, fire and be damned, we know you dare not,” and striking at the soldiers with clubs and a cutlass.
Whereupon the soldiers fired, killing three men outright and mortally wounding two others. The mob fled. As the gunsmoke cleared, Crispus Attucks (left) and four others lay dead or dying. Six more men were wounded but survived.
Excerpt from the Boston Massacre Historical Society, which has a wonderful web site with everything about the “Massacre.”
Attorney John Adams defended the soldiers at trial. Captain Preston and six of the soldiers were acquitted. Two of the soldiers were found guilty of manslaughter and branded on the thumb.
After Monday and Tuesday even the workweek calendar says W T F.
LINO LAKES, Minn. – Ever since his 1996 Toyota Camry shot up an interstate ramp, plowing into the back of an Oldsmobile in a horrific crash that killed three people, Koua Fong Lee insisted he had done everything he could to stop the car.
A jury didn’t believe him, and a judge sentenced him to eight years in prison. But now, new revelations of safety problems with Toyotas have Lee pressing to get his case reopened and his freedom restored. Relatives of the victims — who condemned Lee at his sentencing three years ago — now believe he is innocent and are planning to sue Toyota. The prosecutor who sent Lee to prison said he thinks the case merits another look.
Well I guess.
Dubbed The Boneyard, but officially known as the 309th Aerospace Maintenance and Regeneration Group (AMARG) facility, this sprawling US airbase is reputed to be the world’s largest military aircraft cemetery.
Spread across the huge 2,600 acre site, equivalent in size to 1,430 football pitches, is a collection of over 4,000 retired aircraft including nearly every plane the US armed forces have flown since World War II.
Now, for the first time, a series of high resolution satellite images of the four square mile-site have been released by Google Earth. They show in incredible detail the full range of aircraft found at the site.
BBC News has more and some satellite images of Tucson’s Boneyard.
Here you go, have your cake and eat it too. Porsche is looking to prove that the best of both worlds don’t have to be mutually exclusive with the 918 Spyder concept scheduled to debut tomorrow at the 2010 Geneva Motor Show. Looking a bit like a Carrera GT evolved, the 918 Spyder is powered by both a 500-horsepower V8 and a pair of electric motors (one for each axle) producing an additional 218 horsepower or 160kW. At full gallop, the concept can theoretically reach 62 miles per hour in 3.2 seconds and nip 198 mph on the high end. On the flip side, Porsche says it can also achieve 78 miles per gallon and emit just 70 grams of CO2 per kilometer. . . .
Every single cover in The New Yorker archive is now a jigsaw puzzle.
I mentioned last week that I was ordering the book Jesus for the Non-Religious
This book is incorrectly titled. It’s about Jesus, but it is not written so far as I can tell for the non-religious. It appears to be directed to the very religious in fact, to convince them to take a harder look at what we actually know about Jesus.
Spong takes that look and concludes — surmises would be more accurate — that most of what we think we know about Jesus is simply untrue. He explains that much of what is found in the New Testament is based on writings in the Torah and other books of the Old Testament. He argues that Mark, Matthew, Luke and John, writing 40 to 70 years after Jesus died, were convinced that Jesus was the messiah and so elaborated on what little they actually knew by relying on Old Testament prophecy and Jewish liturgy to fill out the story. Spong doesn’t believe, for example, that Jesus was born in Bethlehem (he says Nazareth), that Jesus had a father (or stepfather) named Joseph (who knows), that Jesus was crucified at Passover (more likely later in the year), that Barabbas existed (in Hebrew the name means son of God) or that any of the miracles ascribed to Jesus make sense (get real people).
Clearly the story of the ascension is not history. When one rises into the sky, one does not get to heaven. One either goes into orbit or escapes the gravitational pull of the earth and drifts into the infinity of space.
The gospels were interpretative, not historical.
The question for Bishop Spong then becomes, what was it about this man Jesus that made him so special that a few decades later the gospel writers were telling his story embellished with the most profound Jewish liturgy?
The issue that this analysis has raised over and over again is that there must have been something about this Jesus that was so powerful that it seemed appropriate for his disciples to wrap around him the sacred symbols of their worship, the myths of their messianic expectations, the most sacred heroes of their tradition, magnified to supernatural proportions. There was something about him that caused them to conclude that the God in whom they believed was present in and somehow with the Jesus they had known.
Spong’s answer is that Jesus overcame the tribal, racial, sexist and religious prejudices of his time, preaching an acceptance of all, a forgiveness to all, a “he who is without sin” approach to the human community. The goodness of his words, and his life, were overpowering to those that knew him. He wasn’t God, but he was made into a god.
The primary problem I had with this book are the leaps of faith Spong makes in his reasoning. Just because certain things are counterintuitive or unlikely does not mean they did not happen, however improbable. Just because certain passages in one text mirror those in an earlier text does not mean the later story must be untrue. To my thinking, if an individual arguing the opposite points made the same type of weak-tea arguments, I’d reject them. The same should apply here. Spong’s briefs would be thrown out of any court.
Nonetheless this is an interesting and provocative book that believers and non-believers alike might wish to read.
Today is the first day since November 13th that the temperature has risen above 60ºF officially in Albuquerque. It’s 62 63 and sunny. Convertible weather.
The official low here this winter was 12ºF on December 4th, a record for the date. The temperature dropped into the teens just eight times; six of those mornings were in December.
(The all-time record low temperature for Albuquerque is minus 17ºF on January 6, 1971. Yikes!)
There has been exactly 1 inch of precipitation since Halloween; 2.6 inches of it as snow. (It takes about 10 inches of snow, on average, to equal one inch of precipitation.)
We probably had about eight or nine inches of snow altogether at Casa NewMexiKen a thousand feet above the valley. I don’t think any of it lasted more than a few hours except as patches in shady spots. A couple of times it snowed an inch or two, then melted, then snowed another inch or two, then melted, all on the same day. That’s ideal. I’ve always thought it was nice to watch snow fall, to admire its beauty when everything is covered, then to magically wish it away. More often than not, that’s snow in Albuquerque.
