[Update April 19: See this post for link to article.]
Rolling Stone cover for the issue out this Friday — according to Drudge.
Andrew Johnson, Franklin Pierce, Warren Harding and James Buchanan are generally considered the presidential failures — so far.
NewMexiKen is currently reading Sean Wilentz’s The Rise of American Democracy: Jefferson to Lincoln.
Richard Cohen is on board. An excerpt from his column, which is enthusiastic about Gore’s global warming film due out in May, “An Inconvenient Truth.”
Gore insists his presidential aspirations are behind him. “I think there are other ways to serve,” he told me. No doubt. But on paper, he is the near-perfect Democratic candidate for 2008. Among other things, he won the popular vote in 2000. He opposed going to war in Iraq, but he supported the Persian Gulf War — right both times. He is smart, experienced and, despite the false caricatures, a man versed in the new technologies — especially the Internet.
The SportsProf has an affectionate essay about — as the title says — Kids and Baseball Cards. Recommended.
“A bizarre NOLA mayoral candidate has been caught doctoring photos of herself standing in Disneyland. For the second time.”
Read the story and see the photos at Boing Boing.
From The Seattle Times, the menu for tonight’s dinner for Chinese President Hu Jintao at Bill Gates’ home:
First course
Smoked guinea fowl salad with hazelnuts, spring radishes and Granny Smith apples
Entree
Three choices:
• Fillet of beef with Walla Walla onions, local asparagus, celeriac purée and chervil glacé
• Alaskan halibut and spot prawns with spring vegetables, fingerling potatoes and a smoked-tomato-infused olive oil
• A vegetarian option
Wines
2002 Leonetti Cellars Cabernet Sauvignon or 2003 Chateau Ste. Michelle Chardonnay, Canoe Ridge Estate
Dessert
Rhubarb brown butter almond cake
David Remnick is on board. An excerpt from an essay worth reading:
It is past time to recognize that, over a long career, his policy judgment and his moral judgment alike have been admirable and acute. Gore has been right about global warming since holding the first congressional hearing on the topic, twenty-six years ago. He was right about the role of the Internet, right about the need to reform welfare and cut the federal deficit, right about confronting Slobodan Milosevic in Bosnia and Kosovo. Since September 11th, he has been right about constitutional abuse, right about warrantless domestic spying, and right about the calamity of sanctioned torture. And in the case of Iraq, both before the invasion and after, he was right—courageously right—to distrust as fatally flawed the political and moral good faith, operational competence, and strategic wisdom of the Bush Administration.
I read the articles in the newspapers this weekend. It was just wild speculation, by the way.
George W. Bush
Press Conference
April 10, 2006
Question: Sir, when you talk about Iran, and you talk about how you have diplomatic efforts, you also say all options are on the table. Does that include the possibility of a nuclear strike?
The President: All options are on the table.
George W. Bush
Press Conference
April 18, 2006
NewMexiKen hasn’t learned a good technique for taking photos out airliner windows, but this view of the Sierra Nevada taken last Thursday morning gives you an idea of the snow. Looking south (mostly) from above Mammoth Mountain.
Unfortunately I was too slow to capture some wonderful shots of a setting sun on the highest peaks on the return yesterday.
[Nevada is a Spanish adjective meaning snow-covered.]
Late on the night of April 18, 1775, Boston patriot Joseph Warren learned of a British military operation planned for the next day. To warn John Hancock and Samuel Adams, who were across the Charles River in Lexington, Warren dispatched two riders, Paul Revere and William Dawes. Revere took the shorter route “by sea,” while Dawes went “by land” over the isthmus from Boston to Roxbury, then crossing the Charles River over a bridge in Cambridge. Revere’s ride has been celebrated in poems and textbooks, but Dawes’ role was at least as important.
One By Land
William Dawes rode by land past the guard at the gate of the strip of land that connected Boston to Roxbury. Dawes had befriended a number of guards in the preceding weeks, and was lucky to find a friendly face on duty that night. He slipped through the gate after some Redcoats. Continuing west to Brookline, over the Charles at a bridge in Cambridge, he sped his horse through Menotomy (today called Arlington) to Lexington.One By Sea
Paul Revere took the more direct sea route. After he was rowed quietly across the Charles, within sight of the British warships, Revere obtained a horse at Lechmere and rode through Cambridge toward Adams and Hancock in Lexington. Stopped by British officers en route, Revere made a quick escape and chose an indirect path to Lexington, through Medford.The Alarm is Sounded
Both riders arrived in Lexington just after midnight and delivered their news of the British plans. The two messengers also decided to warn the militia in Concord that their military supplies would be targeted. They were joined on this leg by Dr. Samuel Prescott, a Concord resident who had been visiting a Lexington friend. Prescott proved invaluable when the riders were surprised by more British soldiers. Revere was captured and Dawes lost his horse, but Prescott took the back trails he knew to reach Concord and sound the alarm.
Excerpted from American Experience | Patriots Day
Helpful Tips for Fighting and Winning the War on Easter by J. Chris Rock. Here’s two:
Tip No. 3
Have each member of your family write a letter every day to Just Born, Inc., makers of PEEPS. Suggest they make PALMS instead, marshmallow fronds that deliciously celebrate Christ’s triumphant return to Jerusalem. Great writing exercise for the kids!
Tip No. 5
Mothers, throw that “Easter” bonnet your child brought home from art class right in the trash. They’ll cry (trust me on this one), but tell them that if they really loved Mommy they’d make you a crown of thorns out of a paper plate.
Earlier NewMexiKen noted Ernie Pyle’s death 61 years ago today. Here’s some more, this via CNN:
COMMAND POST, IE SHIMA April 18, (AP) — Ernie Pyle, war correspondent beloved by his co-workers, G.I.s and generals alike, was killed by a Japanese machine-gun bullet through his left temple this morning.
The bulletin went via radio to a ship nearby, then to the United States and on to Europe. Radio picked it up. Reporters rushed to gather comment. In Germany General Omar Bradley heard the news and could not speak. In Italy General Mark Clark said, “He helped our soldiers to victory.” Bill Mauldin, the young soldier-cartoonist whose warworn G.I.’s matched the pictures Pyle had drawn with words, said, “The only difference between Ernie’s death and that of any other good guy is that the other guy is mourned by his company. Ernie is mourned by the Army.” At the White House, still in mourning only six days after the death of Franklin Roosevelt, President Harry Truman said, “The nation is quickly saddened again by the death of Ernie Pyle.”
And this from the report of his death in The New York Times:
Ernie Pyle was haunted all his life by an obsession. He said over and over again, “I suffer agony in anticipation of meeting people for fear they won’t like me.”
No man could have been less justified in such a fear. Word of Pyle’s death started tears in the eyes of millions, from the White House to the poorest dwellings in the country.
President Truman and Mrs. Eleanor Roosevelt followed his writings as avidly as any farmer’s wife or city tenement mother with sons in service.
Mrs. Roosevelt once wrote in her column “I have read everything he has sent from overseas,” and recommended his writings to all Americans.
For three years these writings had entered some 14,000,000 homes almost as personal letters from the front. Soldiers’ kin prayed for Ernie Pyle as they prayed for their own sons.
In the Eighth Avenue subway yesterday a gray-haired woman looked up, wet-eyed, from the headline “Ernie Pyle Killed in Action” and murmured “May God rest his soul” and other women, and men, around her took up the words. This was typical.
It was rather curious that a nation should have worked up such affection for a timid little man whose greatest fear was “Maybe they won’t like me.”
And here’s what Ernie Pyle had to say about his adopted hometown:
Yes, there are lots of nice places in the world. I could live with considerable pleasure in the Pacific Northwest, or in New England, on the Mississippi Gulf Coast, or in Key West or California or Honolulu. But there is only one of me, and I can’t live in all those places. So if we can have only one house — and that’s all we want — then it has to be in New Mexico, and preferably right at the edge of Albuquerque where it is now. Ernie Pyle, January 1942
Joel Achenbach has a good posting about the 1906 San Francisco earthquake that includes this:
In that day and age, no one knew basic structure of the surface of the Earth — how it is divided into plates that move, grind against one another, build stress. People didn’t know that continents could migrate across the globe. They had no grasp of tectonic forces that shaped the dramatic landscape of California. They didn’t know anything of mid-oceanic ridges and subduction zones and the relationship between subducting crustal plates and volcanoes. They didn’t even know if faults in the Earth caused earthquakes, or if it was the other way around. You know, the ground shakes, maybe that causes those cracks and scarps?
From Jane Smiley’s Notes for Converts:
2. Bush doesn’t care whether you disagree with him. As a man who has dispensed with the reality-based world, and is entirely protected by his handlers from feeling the effects of that world, he is indifferent to what you now think is real. Is the Iraq war a failure and a quagmire? Bush doesn’t care. Is global warming beginning to affect us right now? So what. Have all of his policies with regard to Iran been misguided and counter-productive? He never thinks about it. You know that Katrina tape in which Bush never asked a question? It doesn’t matter how much you know or how passionately you feel or, most importantly, what degree of disintegration you see around you, he’s not going to ask you a question. You and your ideas are dead to him. You cannot change his mind. Nine percent of polled Americans would agree with attacking Iran right now. To George Bush, that will be a mandate, if and when he feels like doing it, because…
3. Bush does what he feels like doing and he deeply resents being told, even politely, that he ought to do anything else. This is called a “sense of entitlement”. Bush is a man who has never been anywhere and never done anything, and yet he has been flattered and cajoled into being president of the United States through his connections, all of whom thought they could use him for their own purposes. He has a surface charm that appeals to a certain type of American man, and he has used that charm to claim all sorts of perks, and then to fail at everything he has ever done. He did not complete his flight training, he failed at oil investing, he was a front man and a glad-hander as a baseball owner. As the Governor of Texas, he originated one educational program that turned out to be a debacle; as the President of the US, his policies have constituted one screw-up after another. You have stuck with him through all of this, made excuses for him, bailed him out. From his point of view, he is perfectly entitled by his own experience to a sense of entitlement. Why would he ever feel the need to reciprocate? He’s never had to before this.
… was proclaimed such on this date in 1924.
Twenty seven million years ago a volcanic eruption of immense proportions shook the land around Chiricahua National Monument. One thousand times greater than the 1980 eruption of Mount St. Helens, the Turkey Creek Caldera eruption eventually laid down two thousand feet of highly silicious ash and pumice. This mixture fused into a rock called rhyolitic tuff and eventually eroded into the spires and unusual rock formations of today.
The monument is a mecca for hikers and birders. At the intersection of the Chihuahuan and Sonoran deserts, and the southern Rocky Mountains and northern Sierra Madre in Mexico, Chiricahua plants and animals represent one of the premier areas for biological diversity in the northern hemisphere.
… of Pollyanna. Hayley Mills is 60.
… of Daphne Moon. Jane Leeves of “Frasier” is 45.
… of Conan O’Brien. He’s 43.
The first game was played at Yankee Stadium on this date in 1923.
War correspondent, and Albuquerquean, Ernie Pyle was killed by Japanese gunfire on the Pacific island of Ie Shima, off Okinawa, on this date in 1945.
Albert Einstein died at age 76 on this date in 1955.
And it was on this date in 1775 that Paul Revere and others rode to warn their countryman that British troops were mobilizing.
Listen, my children, and you shall hear
Of the midnight ride of Paul Revere,
On the eighteenth of April, in Seventy-five;
Hardly a man is now alive
Who remembers that famous day and year.
Continue reading Paul Revere’s Ride by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow.
… on this date in 1857. Here’s how The New York Times began Darrow’s obituary in 1938:
Clarence Darrow, famous criminal lawyer, recently described as one who thoroughly understood human nature yet loved his fellow-man, died this afternoon at his home here at the age of 80. For two months he had been confined to bed because of heart disease; for two years he had been retired, for many years he had been
trying to retire.
…Mr. Darrow was known internationally as a criminal lawyer. Defender in a hundred or more murder trials, no client of his had ever died on the gallows or electric chair. He had built up a reputation for himself as a friend of labor and of the downtrodden. His oratory and his philosophy made him known to millions.
A kindly, homely personage who dressed in the certainty that clothes do not make the man, he went through life declaring himself an agnostic. But three years ago he declared he no longer had any doubts. He proclaimed himself a materialist whom it had taken fifty years to find out that there is nothing after death.
… that a magnitude 8.3 earthquake struck San Francisco killing an estimated 3,000 people (out of a population of 450,000).
At 5:12 A.M. on April 18, 1906, an 8.3 magnitude earthquake struck San Francisco. With thousands of un-reinforced brick buildings and closely-spaced wooden Victorian dwellings, the city was poorly prepared for the quake. Collapsed buildings, broken chimneys, and a shortage of water due to broken mains led to several large fires that soon coalesced into a city-wide holocaust. The fire raged for three days, sweeping over nearly a quarter of the city, including the entire downtown area.
Over 3,000 people are estimated to have died as a result of the disaster. For those who survived, the first few weeks were hard; as aid poured in from around the country, thousands slept in tents in city parks, and citizens were asked to do their cooking in the street. A severe shortage of public transportation made a taxicab out of anything on wheels. Numerous businesses relocated temporarily to Oakland, and many refugees found lodgings outside the city. Most of the cities of central California were badly damaged. However, reconstruction proceeded at a furious pace, and by 1908, San Francisco was well on the way to recovery.
The Virtual Museum of the City of San Francisco has an engrossing online exhibit about the quake that includes photographs, eyewitness accounts, police and fire department reports, the Mayor’s “Shoot to Kill” Order and more.
The ten-month-old in front of me screamed for most of the two hour flight from San Francisco to Albuquerque last night (Thank you, Bose!). NewMexiKen felt sorry for the child, who I was told was simply exhausted, and I felt for the mother who was, no doubt, exhausted herself — and frustrated and embarassed.
Next time she should just administer drugs. No, of course not to the baby. To the rest of us.
… of Olivia Hussey. Sixteen when she played Juliet in Franco Zeffirelli’s Romeo and Juliet, she’s 55 today.
… of Liz Phair. She’s 39.
… of Jennifer Garner. She’s 34.
J. P. Morgan (1837), Nikita Khrushchev (1894), Thornton Wilder (1897) and Harry Reasoner (1923) were born on April 17.
… for Pope Benedict XVI — 79 on Easter Sunday.
… for Bobby Vinton, 71 today. Here’s hoping his roses are still red, my love.
… for Kareem Abdul-Jabbar — 59.
… for Ellen Barkin. She’s 52.
… for Peter Billingsley — the kid who wants a BB-gun for Christmas so he can shoot his eye out. He’s 34.
Four time Oscar-winner, and 18 time nominee, Henry Mancini was born on this date in 1924.
“The Pink Panther”
“Peter Gunn”
“Moon River”
“Charade”
“Days of Wine and Roses”
“Mr. Lucky”
Charlie Chaplin was born on this date in 1889.
In a 1995 worldwide survey of film critics, Chaplin was voted the greatest actor in movie history. He was the first, and to date the last, person to control every aspect of the filmmaking process — founding his own studio, United Artists, with Douglas Fairbanks, Mary Pickford and D.W. Griffith, and producing, casting, directing, writing, scoring and editing the movies he starred in. In the first decades of the 20th century, when weekly moviegoing was a national habit, Chaplin more or less invented global recognizability and helped turn an industry into an art. In 1916, his third year in films, his salary of $10,000 a week made him the highest-paid actor — possibly the highest paid person — in the world. By 1920, “Chaplinitis,” accompanied by a flood of Chaplin dances, songs, dolls, comic books and cocktails, was rampant. Filmmaker Mack Sennett thought him “just the greatest artist who ever lived.” Other early admirers included George Bernard Shaw, Marcel Proust and Sigmund Freud. (The Time 100)
Abraham Lincoln was shot by John Wilkes Booth on this date, also Good Friday, in 1865. Lincoln died the next morning.
As Atzerodt and Paine fanned out to seek their targets, Booth, a celebrated actor, familiar to everybody who worked at Ford’s Theatre, had no trouble in slipping upstairs during the performance of Our American Cousin. Moving quietly down the aisle behind the dress circle, he stood for a few moments near the President’s box. A member of the audience, seeing him there, thought him “the handsomest man I had ever seen.” John Parker, the Metropolitan policeman assigned to protect the President, had left his post in the passageway, and the box was guarded only by Charles Forbes, a White House footman. When Booth showed Forbes his calling card, he was admitted to the presidential box. Barring the door behind him, so as not to be disturbed, he noiselessly moved behind Lincoln, who was leaning forward, with his chin in his right hand and his arm on the balustrade. At a distance of about two feet, the actor pointed his derringer at the back of the President’s head on the left side and pulled the trigger. It was about 10:13 P.M.
When Major Rathbone tried to seize the intruder, Booth lunged at him with his razor-sharp hunting knife, which had a 7¼-inch blade. “The Knife,” Clara Harris reported, “went from the elbow nearly to the shoulder, inside, — cutting an artery, nerves and veins — he bled so profusely as to make him very weak.” Shoving his victim aside, Booth placed his hands on the balustrade and vaulted toward the stage. It was an easy leap for the gymnastic actor, but the spur on his heel caught in the flags decorating the box and he fell heavily on one foot, breaking the bone just above the ankle. Waving his dagger, he shouted in a loud, melodramatic voice: “Sic semper tyrannis” (“Thus always to tyrants” — the motto of the state of Virginia). Some in the audience thought he added, “The South is avenged.” Quickly he limped across the stage, with what one witness called “a motion…like the hopping of a bull frog,” and made his escape through the rear of the theater.
Up to this point the audience was not sure what had happened. Perhaps most thought the whole disturbance was part of the play. But as the blue-white smoke from the pistol drifted out of the presidential box, Mary Lincoln gave a heart-rending shriek and screamed, “They have shot the President! They have shot the President!”
From David Herbert Donald’s outstanding biography of Lincoln.
On April 26, Booth and co-conspirator David Herold were surrounded while hiding in a tobacco shed in Port Royal, Virginia. Herold surrendered to Union troops, but Booth held out and was shot while the shed burned down around him.
Click on the image to see a larger version of the poster.
Read The New York Times story from the day after the assassination, headlined Awful Event.
The theory: There are two kinds of bloggers, referential and experiential. …
The referential blogger uses the link as his fundamental unit of currency, building posts around ideas and experiences spawned elsewhere: Look at this. Referential bloggers are reporters, delivering pointers to and snippets of information, insight or entertainment happening out there, on the Intraweb. They can, and do, add their own information, insight and entertainment to the links they unearth — extrapolations, juxtapositions, even lengthy and personal anecdotes — but the outward direction of their focus remains their distinguishing feature.
The experiential blogger is inwardly directed, drawing entries from personal experience and opinion: How about this. They are storytellers (and/or bores), drawing whatever they have to offer from their own perspective. They can, and do, add links to supporting or explanatory information, even unique and undercited external sources. But their motivation, their impetus, comes from a desire to supply narrative, not reference it.
There’s nothing here to imply that one type of blogger is better than the other. There are literally thousands — OK, hundreds… OK, at least a dozen — of both kinds that are valuable additions to the on-going conversation/food-fight/furry-cuddle that is the Internet.
Greg Knauss writing at kottke.org.
… of Loretta Lynn. The coal miner’s daughter was born in Butcher Holler, Kentucky, 71 years ago. Married at 14, Ms. Lynn had four children by the time she was 17.
… of Pete Rose. You can bet that Pete is 65 today.
… of Adrien Brody. The Oscar winner (best actor for The Pianist) is 33.
… of Sarah Michelle Gellar. Buffy is 29.
Three time Oscar-nominated actor Rod Steiger was born on this date in 1925. Steiger won for Best Actor for his portrayal of the sheriff in the movie In the Heat of the Night. He was nominated for best actor for The Pawnbroker and for best supporting actor for On the Waterfront. The Pawnbroker (1964) was one of the first films to deal with the emotional aftermath of the Nazi concentration camps. Steiger died in 2002.
And James Cash Penney opened his first retail store, called the Golden Rule Store, in the mining town of Kemmerer, Wyoming, on this date in 1902. In 1913, the chain incorporated as J.C. Penney Company, Inc.
The first store, as seen in 1904.
Walter Mossberg has a PC buying guide. Key points: