Author: NewMexiKen

Alarming

Dan Neil is good today. Here’s the first paragraph to set the scene:

“Is that the car alarm?” my wife said as she shook me out of a dead sleep, and then I heard it, the WHOOP! WHOOP! WHOOP! of the Bentley Arnage T’s alarm system going off like Hell’s Ladder Co. No. 5 in my driveway. It was precisely 3:48 a.m. Let me just now pause in the narrative — the part where I run panicked through the night in my tighty whities and T-shirt — to say that the Bentley’s alarm system is the most piercing in automotive Christendom. I don’t live that far from Forest Lawn, and I had visions of Sid Grauman and Irving Thalberg holding me while Norma Shearer punched me in the head.

Story of my life

NewMexiKen went to the lab early this morning for routine blood work. I’m not crazy about needles and so never watch. As I’m sitting there, having felt nothing at all, I realize that the technician is already drawing blood. This is too good to believe — a part of me actually doesn’t believe it — and then she’s done. Wow, I think, that was easy.

“Oh,” she says, “I’m sorry. I’ve got another one [tube] to get. I’ll have to do it again. I’m so sorry.”

It goes without saying I suppose that the second poke was the one that hurt like hell.

Inadequate and improper

White House personnel appear to have been systematically avoiding using their government emails on the job because they knew they might some day be subpoenaed.

But as we noted earlier with Karl Rove, this may have been too clever by half. If the president’s aides were using RNC emails or emails from other Republican political committees, they can’t have even the vaguest claim to shielding those communications behind executive privilege.

Talking Points Memo

They would also seem to be violating federal law that requires adequate documentation.

Through the implementation of records management controls and other necessary actions, the President shall take all such steps as may be necessary to assure that the activities, deliberations, decisions, and policies that reflect the performance of his constitutional, statutory, or other official or ceremonial duties are adequately documented and that such records are maintained as Presidential records pursuant to the requirements of this section and other provisions of law.

44 U.S.C. § 2203. (a)

McCain is full of it

Yesterday, Sen. John McCain R-AZ told radio host Bill Bennett that President Bush’s escalation is working. “There are neighborhoods in Baghdad where you and I could walk through those neighborhoods, today,” he said. Today, when CNN’s Wolf Blitzer asked McCain why Americans still aren’t able to safely leave the Green Zone in Iraq, the senator replied that Blitzer was giving three-month-old talking points:

General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed humvee. I think you oughta catch up. You are giving the old line of three months ago. I understand it. We certainly don’t get it through the filter of some of the media.

But according to CNN reporter Michael Ware, who has been in Iraq for four years, McCain is “way off base.” He stated, “To suggest that there’s any neighborhood in this city where an American can walk freely is beyond ludicrous. I’d love Sen. McCain to tell me where that neighborhood is and he and I can go for a stroll.”

Ware also rebutted McCain’s assertion that Petaeus travels in an unarmed humvee: “[I]n the hour since Sen. McCain’s said this, I’ve spoken to military sources and there was laughter down the line. I mean, certainly the general travels in a humvee. There’s multiple humvees around it, heavily armed.”

Think Progress, which has the video.

Get serious about McCain. He’s oblivious to the truth.

Best sports line of the day, so far

Illinois, with 38 victories, owns the dubious distinction of winning the most NCAA tournament games without ever capturing a national title.

“And now that Chief Illiniwek has been relegated to the ‘happy hunting ground of mascots,’ ” reader Tom Scarpelli noted in an e-mail to ChicagoSports.com, “the University of Illinois athletic teams can unveil their rightful new name, ‘The Fighting Schottenheimers.’ ”

Sideline Chatter

March 28th is the birthday

. . . of Russell Banks, 67.

. . . born in Newton, Massachusetts (1940), who wrote Continental Drift (1985), The Sweet Hereafter (1992), and Cloudsplitter (1998).

He once said, “[If I] hadn’t become a writer … I would have been stabbed to death in the parking lot outside a bar in Florida at 24, or something like that. I really believe that, actually. I think writing saved my life.”

The Writer’s Almanac

. . . of two-time Oscar winner Dianne Wiest. She’s 59. Ms. Wiest won supporting actress Oscars for Hannah and Her Sisters and Bullets Over Broadway. She was nominated for the same award for Parenthood.

. . . of Reba McEntire, 52.

McEntire was the single most successful female country vocalist of the ’80s and ’90s, scoring a consistent stream of Top Ten singles and a grand total of 18 number one singles. (allmusic)

. . . of Vince Vaughn. He’s 37.

Bandleader Paul Whiteman was born on this date in 1890.

. . . There he soon became the best-known American bandleader, particularly with his recording of Whispering and Japanese Sandman (1920), which sold more than a million copies. By the early 1920s his lush orchestral style was widely copied on countless bandstands at home and abroad.
. . .

Whiteman was a key figure in American popular music. While jazz purists accused him of diluting the character of early jazz for commercial purposes, less biased observers applauded the high polish and versatility of his orchestras, which had to be as comfortable in the concert hall as at a college dance. He employed a number of talented musicians: in the original arrangement of Rhapsody in Blue three of his reed players were required to play a total of 17 instruments. Although his dance music tended to be sedate, there were occasional jazz solos from musicians such as Bix Beiderbecke, Frankie Trumbauer, Eddie Lang, Bunny Berigan, and Jack Teagarden.

JAZZ A Film By Ken Burns

And, of course, it’s the birthday of Jason, official youngest child of NewMexiKen. Happy Birthday Jason!

Three Mile Island

At 4:00 AM on March 28, 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suddenly overheated, releasing radioactive gases.

Before the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, few had heard of the nuclear power plant on the Susquehanna River. But the crisis…quickly turned the plant and its giant cooling towers into icons in the long national argument over the safety of nuclear energy.

The initial information from the accident in the Unit 2 reactor was sketchy and contradictory. The utility company that ran the plant said the situation was manageable. But officials from mayor’s offices to the Oval Office worried about possible complications that would shower radioactivity on the small communities around Three Mile Island — or perhaps even farther. Government engineers feared that the reactor’s nuclear fuel would melt out of its thick steel and cement encasement, or that a hydrogen gas bubble in the core would explode.

In Harrisburg, less than 10 miles away, the state’s new governor struggled with conflicting advice on whether to begin an evacuation that might affect more than 600,000 people. In Washington, 100 miles south, federal regulators anxiously sought reliable information to guide local authorities and the president, former nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter.

In the two decades since Three Mile Island, the plant has become a rallying symbol for the anti-nuclear movement. But the nuclear power industry, which has not built a single new plant in the United States since 1979, says the accident showed that its safety systems worked, even in the most extreme circumstances.

There is a great deal of information about Three Mile Island on the net. The Washington Post published an extensive review on the 20th anniversary of the incident in 1999, from which the above is excerpted. Frontline has the 1996 ruling dismissing legal claims for radiation health hazards in the community. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a Fact Sheet on The Accident at Three Mile Island.

The Gettysburg of the West

The battle of Glorieta Pass concluded on this date in 1862. Union troops from Fort Union, New Mexico, joined by volunteers from Colorado, effectively ended Confederate attempts to march north up the Rio Grande and on to the gold fields in Colorado.

Estimated casualties: Union 142, Confederate 189.

The Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Battle Summary: Glorieta Pass provides fuller detail.

The man behind the curtain

NewMexiKen finished The Wizard of Menlo Park: How Thomas Alva Edison Invented the Modern World yesterday and came away with a more realistic view of the great inventor.

The book, published just two weeks ago, attempts to discuss Edison as the first great American celebrity who was not a politician or military leader. In that regard it pretty much succeeds; as a full-scale biography, however, the book falls short. We get nearly day-by-day discussions of the important inventions — though no real technical details — then skim through the last 50 years of Edison’s life in a couple of chapters. (Edison was 32 when he invented the incandescent light bulb. He lived to be 84.)

Stross writes well and he does make the case that becoming famous contributed to Edison’s limitations as a businessman, which were well known even then. Indeed, Edison was a fairly one-dimensional human being — but it was an important dimension.

Aside: When Edison died in 1931, much of the country — including the White House — turned off the lights for a minute the evening of his funeral as a salute.

Further aside: Here’s the recommended biographies from The Edison Papers. (The first item is by the managing editor of those same Papers, so take that for what it’s worth.)

The standard biography is Paul Israel, Edison: A Life of Invention (New York: John Wiley, 1998). A good older biography is Matthew Josephson, Edison: A Biography (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1959; reprint New York: John Wiley & Sons, 1992). Two other biographies that focus on Edison’s personality and family relations are Robert Conot, A Streak of Luck (New York: Seaview Press, 1979) and Neil Baldwin, Edison: Inventing the Century (New York: Hyperion, 1995). A short biography is Martin V. Melosi, Thomas A. Edison and the Modernization of America (Glenview, Ill.: Scott, Foresman/Little, Brown Higher Education, 1990).

March 27th is also the birthday

. . . of Maria Schneider. She’d be having that “Last Tango in Paris” at 55 now. She was 20 then.

. . . of Mariah Carey. She’s 37.

. . . of Fergie. No, not that Fergie. The singer. She’s 32.

Three-time Oscar nominee for best actress Gloria Swanson was born on this date in 1897. She’s best known for Sunset Blvd., which was made in 1950, and was only her second film since 1934. She’s perhaps even better known for an affair with Joseph P. Kennedy. Ms. Swanson died in 1983.

Quentin Tarantino

. . . is 44 today. An excerpt from the profile at The Writer’s Almanac:

Instead of going to film school, he got a job at video rental store that had one of the largest video collections in Southern California. Several other aspiring filmmakers worked there, and they would watch movies all day at work, discussing camera angles and dialogue. He spent five years working at the video store, writing screenplays, but he wasn’t getting anywhere in his career.

He finally got a break when he met an actor who knew another actor who knew Harvey Keitel, and Keitel agreed to look at one of Tarantino’s scripts. Keitel was impressed enough to volunteer to help Tarantino produce the film, and to act in it himself. The result was Reservoir Dogs (1992), which made Tarantino internationally famous. His next film, Pulp Fiction, won the Palme d’Or at the Cannes Film Festival in 1994, and it went on to win an Academy Award for best screenplay.

Sarah Vaughan

. . . was born on this date in 1924. The PBS web site for American Masters profiles Miss Vaughan, who died in 1990:

Jazz critic Leonard Feather called her “the most important singer to emerge from the bop era.” Ella Fitzgerald called her the world’s “greatest singing talent.” During the course of a career that spanned nearly fifty years, she was the singer’s singer, influencing everyone from Mel Torme to Anita Baker. She was among the musical elite identified by their first names. She was Sarah, Sassy — the incomparable Sarah Vaughan.

Heat Invades Cool Heights Over Arizona Desert

Timothy Egan writes in The New York Times that climate change is having a major impact on the southwest’s “sky islands.” A short excerpt:

The American Southwest has been warming for nearly 30 years, according to records that date to the late 19th century. And the region is in the midst of an eight-year drought. Both developments could be within the range of natural events.

But what has convinced many scientists that the current spate of higher temperatures is not just another swing in the weather has been the near collapse of the sky islands and other high, formerly green havens that poke above the desert.

Buy now and save

Bush administration lawyers urged the Supreme Court today to repeal a nearly 100-year-old rule that bars manufacturers from fixing the retail prices of their products.

They argued that the rigid rule makes it harder for companies to market their products with special displays in retail stores.
. . .

The National Assn. of Manufacturers and other business groups want the court to pull back on enforcing the antitrust laws so that companies can promote their brands as they see fit. Sometimes that could mean making contracts with retailers to charge a fixed minimum price for a product.

Since 1911, such contracts have been illegal under the antitrust laws.

The Consumer Federation of America says repealing this rule would allow manufacturers and retailers to set higher prices. It would hurt discounters, as well as shoppers who go online to look for deals, the group said.

Los Angeles Times