Author: NewMexiKen

March 6th

Today is the birthday

… of Ed McMahon. Johnny’s sidekick is 86.

… of Alan Greenspan. He’s 83.

… of Gabriel Garcia Marquez, 82.

. . . “Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice.”

His family wanted him to go to law school, and he gave it a try, but he hated it. After five years, he left without earning a degree. He worked as a reporter in Europe and Venezuela, and settled in Mexico City. For several years, he wrote no fiction. Then one day he was driving between Mexico City and Acapulco, and the whole first chapter of One Hundred Years of Solitude came to him. He went home and told his wife not to disturb him with any problems, and he spent the next 18 months writing, shut in a room for eight to 10 hours a day. His wife sold their car, pawned household appliances, and applied for loan after loan.

The first printing in 1967 sold out before the end of the week, and One Hundred Years of Solitude has now sold about 30 million copies. . . .

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Mary Wilson. The Supreme who is neither Diana Ross nor the one Dream Girls is about is 65 today.

The members of the Supremes – Diana Ross, Florence Ballard and Mary Wilson – first came together in a quartet, the Primettes, that had been recruited by singer Paul Williams as a sister act to his locally popular Detroit group, the Primes (later known as the Temptations). After persistently showing up at Motown’s “Hitsville” headquarters after school, the Supremes were signed to the label in January 1961. The group was slow to find its footing, enduring several years of flop singles before finally clicking with “When the Lovelight Starts Shining Through His Eyes” (#23) in early 1964. After that, it was off to the races for the Supremes, who amassed a dozen Number One hits between 1964-69. In addition to the aforementioned singles, the Supremes’ other chart-toppers were “I Hear a Symphony,” “You Can’t Hurry Love,” “You Keep Me Hangin’ On,” “Love Is Here and Now You’re gone,” “The Happening,” “Love Child” and “Someday We’ll Be Together.”

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

… of Rob Reiner. “Meathead” is 62.

… of Shaquille O’Neal. He’s getting up there — 37.

Michelangelo Buonarroti was born on this date in 1475.

God

Detail from the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

Elizabeth Barrett Browning was born on this date in 1806.

How do I love thee? Let me count the ways.
I love thee to the depth and breadth and height
My soul can reach, when feeling out of sight
For the ends of being and ideal grace.
I love thee to the level of every day’s
Most quiet need, by sun and candle-light.
I love thee freely, as men strive for right.
I love thee purely, as they turn from praise.
I love thee with the passion put to use
In my old griefs, and with my childhood’s faith.
I love thee with a love I seemed to lose
With my lost saints. I love with the breath,
Smiles, tears, of all my life; and, if God choose,
I shall but love thee better after death.

Bob Wills was born on this date in 1905.

You can see the Grand Ole Opry in Nashville, Tennessee,
It’s the home of country music, on that we all agree.
But when you cross that ole Red River, hoss,
that just don’t mean a thing,
‘Cause once you’re down in Texas,
Bob Wills is still the King.

(‘Bob Wills Is Still The King’ by Waylon Jennings)

Bob Wills was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1968 and the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1999.

Lazy blogging

Lazy blogging ‘cuz no links.

Some professor studied news pundits. Seems they are less accurate in their forecasts than chance. That is, they are almost never right.

That took an academic study?

Saw the word meretricious used yesterday describing CNBC (discussing Stewart’s classic takedown). It’s an awesome word and totally apt. It means (I had to look it up to be sure) “apparently attractive but having in reality no value or integrity.”

We live in a meretricious-filled society.

So far, among the few Twittering celebrities that I follow, John Mayer is the most interesting. Shaq likes to eat. Penn Jillette was 54 yesterday, but you knew that. Oh, and John McCain is meretricious.

March 5th

It’s the birthday of novelist Leslie Marmon Silko, born in Albuquerque, New Mexico (1948). She grew up on a Pueblo reservation, where her community was made up of matrilineal families: Women owned the houses and the fields and were the authority figures, and men did much of the child rearing. Her first novel, Ceremony (1977), was one of the first novels ever published by a Native American woman, and many critics consider it a masterpiece.

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

It’s also the birthday

… of Penn Jillette. Penn of Penn & Teller is 54.

… of Adriana Barraza. The 2007 supporting actress Oscar nominee is 53 today.

… of Kevin Connolly of Entourage. He’s 35.

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.

The Worst Hard Time

Two years ago today NewMexiKen posted a review of The Worst Hard Time by Timothy Egan (quoted earlier today). Like Rabbit Proof Fence, I thought it was worth bringing to your attention again.

Egan’s book is subtitled The Untold Story of Those Who Survived the Great American Dust Bowl. Centered around the Oklahoma and Texas panhandles, southeastern Colorado and southwestern Kansas, and particularly Boise City, Oklahoma, and Dalhart, Texas, Egan tells a half-dozen personal stories from the greatest environmental disaster in American history.

It was a lost world then; it is a lost world now. The government treats it like throwaway land, the place where Indians were betrayed, where Japanese Americans were forced into internment camps during World War II, where German POWs were imprisoned. The only growth industries now are pigs and prisons. Over the last half-century, towns have collapsed and entire counties have been all but abandoned to the old and the dying. Hurricanes that buried city blocks farther south, tornadoes that knocked down everything in their paths, grassfires that burned from one horizon to another— all have come and gone through the southern plains. But nothing has matched the black blizzards. American meteorologists rated the Dust Bowl the number one weather event of the twentieth century. And as they go over the scars of the land, historians say it was the nation’s worst prolonged environmental disaster.

And the worst of it was man made.

But it’s the stories of the people where Egan excels; of lost jobs, lost farms, lost children, and lost hope. Even in the years before the drought and dust, life was tough.

In the fall of 1922, Hazel saddled up Pecos and rode off to a one-room, wood-frame building sitting alone in the grassland: the schoolhouse. It was Hazel’s first job. She had to be there before the bell rang — five-and-a-half miles by horseback each way — to haul in drinking water from the well, to sweep dirt from the floor, and shoo hornets and flies from inside. The school had thirty-nine students in eight grades, and the person who had to teach them all, Hazel Lucas, was seventeen years old. … After school, Hazel had to do the janitor work and get the next day’s kindling — dry weeds or sun-toasted cow manure.

One of nine kids, Ike Osteen grew up in a dugout. A dugout is just that — a home dug into the hide of the prairie. The floor was dirt. Above ground, the walls were plank boards, with no insulation on the inside and black tarpaper on the outside. Every spring, Ike’s mother poured boiling water over the walls to kill fresh-hatched bugs. The family heated the dugout with cow chips, which burned in an old stove and left a turd smell slow to dissipate. The toilet was outside, a hole in the ground. Water was hauled in from a deeper hole in the ground.

Egan’s book won the National Book Award.

The Boston Massacre

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.

Power to the Peeps

Welcome to our third annual Peeps Diorama Contest.

We want you to make a diorama of a famous occurrence or scene or concept. It can be a historic, current or future event. It can be a nod to pop culture. It can be an evocation of an idea or abstraction. The one rule is that all the characters in the diorama must be played by Peeps, those marshmallowy chicks and rabbits plaguing checkout lines in every convenience store this season.

Entry Guidelines for the 2009 Peeps Diorama Contest

Thanks to Nora for the link.

March 4th ought to be a national holiday

The Constitution went into effect 220 years ago today.

Legendary Notre Dame football player and coach Knute Rockne was born on March 4th in 1888. He died in a plane crash at age 43 in 1931.

Rockne always said that every play, if perfectly carried out, would go for a touchdown from wherever it was started. His last two teams usually started their scoring with long runs from scrimmage.

In coaching he tried always for perfection and spent hours in teaching the art of blocking. Simple plays, well executed, were his idea of the way to win football games. He had small use for any so-called trick plays. There were only seven places in a line to send a man with a ball, he said, and there ought not to be many more than seven plays.
. . .

Perhaps his greatest teams came in 1920, 1924, 1929 and 1930. On the first was George Gipp, who was named by Rockne as the greatest player he ever had. The coach told the story of seeing Gipp, who was not trying for the team, throwing a ball and kicking on the campus and of inducing him to join the squad. Gipp died a few weeks after the close of the 1920 season of a throat infection, with Rockne at his bedside.

The 1924 team was the one of the famous Four Horsemen, Harry Stuhldreher, Jimmy Crowley, Don Miller and Elmer Layden. As a combination, they have not been excelled in modern back fields and they had a great line in front of them, led by the famous Adam Walsh at centre, who is now assisting with the coaching at Yale. That team of the Four Horsemen won all over the country, beating Princeton at Princeton with a temperature of 10 above zero, and several weeks later journeying to the Coast to defeat Stanford in a temperature of 70 degrees.

The New York Times

Patricia Heaton of ”Everybody Loves Raymond” is 51.

Khaled Hosseini, author of The Kite Runner, is 44.

Sonny and Cher’s daughter Chastity is 40.

Famed bridge expert Charles Goren was born on March 4th in 1901.

First impressions of Kindle on iPhone

On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app. Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog.

Walt Mossberg has the first review.

NewMexiKen picked up the app last night but I haven’t had a chance to check it out yet. My eyes are so full of water from spring allergies it’s a wonder I can find my iPhone let alone read anything on it.