Author: NewMexiKen

Why is it?

Why is it that you can buy $40 or $50 worth of gasoline with a credit card without showing anyone the card or signing, but still have to sign, say for $15 worth of pizza?

There’s actually a reason. The credit card companies have exempted certain categories of merchants from the signature requirement and, after all, those gasoline purchases are authorized electronically. The credit card companies are extending this no-signature privilege to most other types of merchants for small purchases this year.

I also discovered that the credit card companies do not require you to show ID. In fact, their rules prohibit a merchant from denying a credit card transaction because you refuse to show ID. They do require your card to be signed and they do expect the cashier to verify some commonality between the card signature and the signature on the receipt (ha, good luck with that).

Putting “Ask for ID” on your credit card instead of your signature is not acceptable and your card should not be accepted without a signature according to the credit card companies. Besides, who wants to be flashing their driver’s license (with your address, etc.) to every Tom, Dick and Sally that asks for ID? You don’t have to according to Visa, Master Card, etc.

None of the above applies at Best Buy however, which requires a DNA sample for a credit card purchase.

Best line of the day

“The people NBC needs to woo aren’t sports fans. They broadcast the Olympics for people who like stories about polar bears and gymnasts with rare diseases and speed skaters whose sisters have cancer. Yes, these people are out there and to justify the insane investment dollars they have to watch too. It’s a mini-series that happens to have some sports in it.”

Deadspin

Best sometimes-even-satire-makes-a-key-point line of the day

Also worth considering: We charge $99 per year for a MobileMe subscription. Google gives you the same stuff and all they ask for is, um, permission to totally invade your privacy and to “monetize” (God I hate that word) your personal information. You think your personal information is worth less than $99 a year? Then you’re getting a hell of a deal with Google. The rest of us would rather spent $99 and keep the contents of our email to ourselves.

The Secret Diary of Steve Jobs

Best NBC (Nothing But Commercials) commentary of the day, so far

The other problem I had was the ski jump. People speeding down an incline and then launching farther than a football field through the air has to be about the coolest thing, right? Not if you watch on NBC! The shot of every competitor was a close up that fit just them in the screen. You know in how in The Aviator, Howard Hughes puts his movie on hold because there are no clouds in the sky and planes flying without clouds around provides no frame of reference and you can’t tell they are moving? That’s what this was like, basically you have a stationary guy first crouching, then pointed awkwardly, then suddenly landing. What is the point of this close up? Does the average person have enough knowledge of this sport to look at these people’s technical performance? “Oh, I don’t like how his ankle is cocked there. He’s making a big pocket in the middle!” No, just show people flying through the air already!

Commenter at Deadspin

State of the States

Overall well-being, life evaluation, emotional health, physical health, healthy behavior, work environment, and basic access based on Gallup-Healthways data from 2009.

Some observations:

Hawaii’s residents had the highest well-being in the nation in 2009, pulling ahead of 2008 leader Utah, and coming in with a new high state Well-Being Index score of 70.2. Utah and Montana are also among the top well-being states in the country, sharing the same score of 68.3. Kentucky (62.3) and West Virginia (60.5) have the two lowest well-being scores, as they did in 2008.

Among the nation’s 52 largest metropolitan areas that Gallup surveyed in 2009, San Jose, Calif., had the highest well-being in the nation followed closely by Washington, D.C., according to the Gallup-Healthways Well-Being Index. Rounding out the top five well-being cities are Raleigh, N.C., Minneapolis, and San Francisco.

Las Vegas ranked last in 2009 in overall well-being among all large cities, defined as those with a population size of 1 million or greater, with Providence, R.I.; Jackson[ville], Fla.; Tampa, Fla.; Louisville, Ky.; and Cleveland just ahead. Tampa, Jacksonville, and Miami gave the state of Florida the negative distinction of having three large metro areas in the bottom 10 in well-being for the year. Detroit, New Orleans, and Birmingham, Ala., round out the list. The regional breakdown in well-being scores is largely consistent with Gallup-Healthways state-level findings, which find higher than average scoring cities in the West and lower than average scoring cities in the South.

Four of the top ten states in church attendance rank among the bottom in well-being.

Three of the top ten states in well-being rank among the bottom in church attendance.

(Though, in fairness, Nevada is low in both and Utah high in both.)

Road kill

I’ve been in 43 states (and the District of Columbia) in the past nine years; 32 of them in the past two years.

I’ve haven’t been to Nebraska and Iowa since 1997. And I haven’t been to any New England states since 1994.

So I anticipate a trip to New England coming up. But, after two 4,600 mile road trips in the past six months, I am fairly certain I don’t ever want to drive that far again. Fly-drive, that’s me from now on.

My recent road trip (I got home Saturday afternoon) was to Virginia and back. On the return I came through Savannah and New Orleans. Savannah was delightful and I intend to return with more time. New Orleans was — well, New Orleans was New Orleans. The weather was 30s and rain however, so I need to return soon in warmer weather.

New Plan Would Let High Schoolers Graduate Early

From The New York Times:

Dozens of public high schools in eight states will introduce a program next year allowing 10th graders who pass a battery of tests to get a diploma two years early and immediately enroll in community college.

Students who pass but aspire to attend a selective college may continue with college preparatory courses in their junior and senior years, organizers of the new effort said. Students who fail the 10th grade tests, known as board exams, can try again at the end of their 11th and 12th grades. The tests would cover not only English and math but other subjects like science and history.

The new system of high school coursework with the accompanying board examinations is modeled largely on systems in high-performing nations including Denmark, Finland, England, France and Singapore.

Yeah, but are they ready for the drinking games?

New Mexico is among the eight states participating.

Feb 17

Today is the birthday

… of Jim Brown, 74. Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. (Which makes him the second greatest athlete born on this date.)

Brown played only nine seasons for the Cleveland Browns — and led the NFL in rushing eight times. He averaged 104 yards a game, a record 5.2 yards a pop. He ran for at least 100 yards in 58 of his 118 regular-season games (he never missed a game). He ran for 237 yards in a game twice, scored five touchdowns in another game and four times scored four touchdowns. He rushed for more than 1,000 yards in seven seasons, scorching opponents for 1,527 yards in one 12-game season and 1,863 in a 14-game season.

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

… of Michael Jordan, 47 today.

Jordan was the ranked the top athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. Here’s what they had to say: Michael Jordan transcends hoops.

“What has made Michael Jordan the First Celebrity of the World is not merely his athletic talent,” Sports Illustrated wrote, “but also a unique confluence of artistry, dignity and history.”

… of Oscar-nominee Hal Holbrook, 85. Here he is as Mark Twain in 1967.

… of Rene Russo, 56.

… of Lou Diamond Phillips, 48.

… of Paris Hilton, 29 today. She’s a walking argument for keeping the inheritance tax.

H.L. Hunt was born on this date in 1889. Hunt was a Texas oil tycoon who, among other things, fathered 14 children with three women, including two that he was married to simultaneously.

Lamar Hunt, one of those 14, was one of the founders of the American Football League and owner of the Dallas Texans (who became the Kansas City Chiefs).

[Lamar] Hunt may not have looked it, but he had a lot of money. His father, the legendary H.L. Hunt, had a fortune estimated at $600 million, which may not seem all that impressive in today’s era of billionaires but made him one of the nation’s richest men at the time.

It was the elder Hunt who came up with the best-remembered quote from the AFL era. After his son reportedly lost $1 million in his first season, H.L. was asked how long Lamar could keep doing that. According to various reports, he said Lamar would go broke in about 150 years if he kept it up.

And it was on February 17, 1801, that Thomas Jefferson was elected president and not Aaron Burr.

Republican Jefferson defeated Federalist John Adams by a margin of 73 to 65 electoral votes. When presidential electors cast their votes, however, they failed to distinguish between the office of president and vice president on their ballots. Jefferson and his running mate Aaron Burr each received 73 votes. With the votes tied, the election was thrown to the House of Representatives. There, each state voted as a unit to decide the election.

Still dominated by Federalists, the sitting Congress loathed to vote for Jefferson—their partisan nemesis. For six days, Jefferson and Burr essentially ran against each other in the House. Votes were tallied over thirty times, yet neither man captured the necessary majority of nine states. Eventually, a small group of Federalists, led by James A. Bayard of Delaware, reasoned that a peaceful transfer of power required the majority choose the President, and a deal was struck in Jefferson’s favor.

Library of Congress: Today in History

Pulitizer-winner Edward J. Larson has a recent book on the subject — A Magnificent Catastrophe: The Tumultuous Election of 1800, America’s First Presidential Campaign.

I hate Olympics TV coverage

Always have. Always will I’m afraid. Just hate it. Roone Arledge, the creator of all this highlights-based, personality-featured sports coverage should rot in hell forever IMHO. All those channels; why can’t we (if we wanted to) see every performance by every athlete from every country LIVE?

Henry Blodget agrees with me. This is part of a longer rant:

What NBC Sports apparently doesn’t understand (because it has done this to us before, again and again) is that we don’t care who is televising the Olympics. 

We don’t want to watch NBC’s “Olympics show”.  We want to watch The Olympics.  And like every other connected sports fan on the planet these days, we know exactly when the Olympics is taking place and what’s happening there–in real time.

So, right now, for us, NBC isn’t the network that brings us the Olympics.  It’s the network that prevents us from watching the Olympics.   And we hate NBC for that.

Questions for NBC

Henry Blodget has some Questions For NBC, The Network That Prevents You From Watching The Olympics. Among them:

3.  How much money would you lose (or do you think you would lose) if you showed the events live on a subsidiary network and then showed highlights again in your prime time broadcast?  To us, this seems like the best solution.  If you did this, sports fans could get their fix, and the “general audience” you’re obviously trying to appeal to in prime time with segments on polar bears can watch the “Olympics Show” you put on every night without wanting to throw their remote controls through the TV.

February 16th

Today is the birthday

… of Richard Ford. The Pulitzer-winning novelist is 66.

Richard Ford writes out almost everything in longhand, with a Bic pen. Before he started to write The Lay of the Land, he spent six months filling a three-ring binder with notes, placing his notes in sections marked “realty” or “Frank” or “New Jersey.” And he keeps all his notes and manuscripts in the freezer, so that if the house burns down, he might not lose all his work.

Above excerpted from longer piece at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

… of LeVar Burton. Kunta Kinte is 53.

… of Ice-T. Detective Odafin “Fin” Tutuola of Law & Order: Special Victims Unit is 52. His real name is Tracy Marrow and his son is Tracy Marrow Jr., not Ice-T Jr.

… of John McEnroe. The tennis hall-of-famer is 51.

… of Jerome Bettis. “The Bus” is 38.

Edgar Bergen was born on this date in 1903.

Born in Decatur, Michigan in 1903, Edgar Bergen developed a talent for ventriloquism at a young age. When Bergen asked a local carpenter to create a dummy, the wisecracking Charlie McCarthy was born. The duo began their career as talent show headliners, performing in Chicago while Bergen attended Northwestern University. Bergen eventually left Northwestern to concentrate on performing, but Charlie received an honorary degree from the school in 1938, a “Master of Innuendo and Snappy Comebacks.”

Bergen and McCarthy made their radio debut on Rudy Vallee’s Royal Gelatin Hour in 1936 and were an instant success. In 1937, they were given their own show for Chase & Sanborn. Almost immediately, The Edgar Bergen/Charlie McCarthy Show became one of radio’s highest-rated programs, a distinction it enjoyed until it left the air in 1956.

During the show’s two decades on the air, Bergen added new characters to the show, including the slow-witted Mortimer Snerd and the man-hungry spinster Effie Klinker. Today, Charlie McCarthy, Mortimer Snerd and Effie Klinker are on permanent display at the Radio Hall of Fame.

Edgar Bergen died on October 1, 1978. He is, of course, the father of actress Candice Bergen.

Radio Hall of Fame

Henry Adams was born on this date in 1838. Adams was the son of Charles Francis Adams (Lincoln’s ambassador to Great Britain), grandson of John Quincy Adams and great-grandson of John Adams. After serving as his father’s secretary in England, Henry decided on a life as a journalist and historian, writing histories of the Jefferson and Madison administrations but being best known perhaps for his autobiographical The Education of Henry Adams (1907), which won a Pulitzer Prize and remains highly regarded. Adams died in 1918.