“So, Intel Macs can now run Windows: Wow – this is GREAT! Now I can combine the overpriced hardware with the inferior software!”
[NewMexiKen paid $1650 for an iMac with 20-inch widescreen monitor, 1 GB of RAM, 250 GB hard drive, 128 MB video, built-in camera and microphone. It also came with iLife ’06. Is that really overpriced?]
“On Wednesday, March 1st, 2006, in Annapolis at a hearing on the proposed Constitutional amendment to prohibit gay marriage, Jamie Raskin, professor of law at AU, was requested to testify. At the end of his testimony, Republican Senator Nancy Jacobs said: ‘Mr. Raskin, my Bible says marriage is only between a man and a woman. What do you have to say about that?’ Raskin replied: ‘Senator, when you took your oath of office, you placed your hand on the Bible and swore to uphold the Constitution. You did not place your hand on the Constitution and swear to uphold the Bible.'”
Told by Andrew Tobias
… of Harry Morgan. Colonel Sherman Potter is 91. IMDb lists 158 films for Morgan (that includes TV).
… of Omar Sharif. Dr. Zhivago is 74. Sharif was nominated for a best supporting actor Oscar for Lawrence of Arabia.
… of David Halberstam. The Pulitizer Prize winning author is 72.
One of America’s most successful authors, David Halberstam began his career as a journalist in the 1950s, first as a reporter for The Daily Times Leader in West Point, Mississippi and later for the Nashville Tennessean. In 1960 he joined The New York Times and shortly thereafter was assigned to the paper’s bureau in Saigon. Halberstam was among a small group of reporters there who began to question the official optimism about the growing war in Vietnam. Halberstam’s work from Vietnam so rankled official Washington that President Kennedy once asked the publisher of The New York Times to transfer Halberstam to another bureau. In 1964, at age 30, Halberstam earned a Pulitzer Prize for his reporting from Vietnam. His best-selling book, The Best and The Brightest, chronicles America’s deepening involvement in Vietnam through the Kennedy and Johnson administrations. (Reporting America at War | PBS)
… of John Madden. He’s 70.
… of Don Meredith. He’s 68. “Turn out the lights, the party’s over.”
… of Paul Theroux (rhymes with through). He’s 65.
It’s the birthday of novelist and travel writer Paul Theroux, born in Medford, Massachusetts (1941). After college he decided to join the Peace Corps in 1963. He later said, “I had thought of responsibilities I did not want—marriage seemed too permanent, grad school too hard, and the army too brutal.” He said the Peace Corps was a kind of “Howard Johnson’s on the main drag to maturity.”
The Peace Corps sent him to live in East Africa. He was expelled from Malawi after he became friends with a group that planned to assassinate the president of the country. He continued traveling around Africa, teaching English, and started submitting pieces to magazines back in the United States. While living in Africa, he became friends with the writer V.S. Naipaul, who became his mentor and who encouraged him to keep traveling.
He had published several novels when he decided to go on a four-month trip through Asia by train. He wrote every day on the journey, and he filled four thick notebooks with material that eventually became his first best-seller, The Great Railway Bazaar: By Train Through Asia (1975). (The Writer’s Almanac)
… of Steven Seagal. He’s 55. No Oscar nominations for Seagal, but he has been nominated for several Razzies and won once.
… of Anne Lamott. She’s 52.
It’s the birthday of novelist and essayist Anne Lamott, born in San Francisco, California (1954). In the late 1970s, her father was diagnosed with brain cancer, and she began to write short pieces about the effect of the disease on him and other members of her family, and these pieces became chapters of her first novel, Hard Laughter (1980).
She wrote three more novels over the next decade, but she didn’t have any big literary successes. Then, in her mid-thirties, she accidentally got pregnant and her boyfriend left her when she decided to keep the baby. For her first year as a single mother, she found herself on the edge of financial and emotional disaster. She was too busy to write fiction, so she just kept a daily journal of experiences as a parent, and that became her memoir Operating Instructions: A Journal of My Son’s First Year (1993). It was her first best-seller. (The Writer’s Almanac)
Paul Krugman concluding his column for Monday’s New York Times.
Why might Mr. Bush want another war? For one thing, Mr. Bush, whose presidency is increasingly defined by the quagmire in Iraq, may believe that he can redeem himself with a new Mission Accomplished moment.
And it’s not just Mr. Bush’s legacy that’s at risk. Current polls suggest that the Democrats could take one or both houses of Congress this November, acquiring the ability to launch investigations backed by subpoena power. This could blow the lid off multiple Bush administration scandals. Political analysts openly suggest that an attack on Iran offers Mr. Bush a way to head off this danger, that an appropriately timed military strike could change the domestic political dynamics.
Does this sound far-fetched? It shouldn’t. Given the combination of recklessness and dishonesty Mr. Bush displayed in launching the Iraq war, why should we assume that he wouldn’t do it again?
NewMexiKen went to Costco today and bought a lot of stuff I didn’t know I needed until I got there.
Santa Fe County Sheriff Greg Solano spoke today at Santa Fe’s Immigrants Rights Rally and March. He posted some of his speech. Here is an excerpt:
At one time our president demanded Russian President [Gorbachev] to “tear down that wall”. Now some in the Republican Party and in Congress wish to build a great wall on our borders.
This will change the very nature of America and the principles it was built on. The call from the statue of liberty itself. “Give me your tired, your poor, your huddled masses yearning to breath free, the wretched refuse of your teeming shore, send these, the homeless, tempest-tost to me. ” Outlined what America is all about.
The ill-fated René-Robert Cavelier, Sieur de La Salle, reached the Gulf of Mexico by way of the Mississippi River on this date in 1682 and claimed the Mississippi watershed in the name of France, naming it Louisiana in honor of King Louis XIV.
Head Quarters of the Armies of the United States
Appomattox C.H. Va. Apl 9th 1865Gen. R. E. Lee
Comd’g C.S.A.General,
In accordance with the substance of my letter to you of the 8th inst., I propose to receive the surrender of the Army of N. Va. on the following terms to wit; Rolls of all the officers and men be made in duplicate, one copy to be given to an officer to be designated by me, the other to be retained by such officer or officers as you may designate. The officers to give their individual paroles not to take up arms against the Government of the United States until properly exchanged, and each company or regimental commander to sign a like parole for the men of their commands – The arms, artillery and public property to be parked and stacked and turned over to the officer appointed by me to receive them. This will not embrace the side arms of the officers nor their private horses or baggage. This done each officer and man will be allowed to return to their homes, not to be disturbed by United States authority as long as they observe their parole and the laws in force where they may reside—
Very Respectfully
U. S. Grant
Lt. Gen
The two generals met shortly after noon on April 9, 1865, at the home of Wilmer McClean in the village of Appomattox Court House, Virginia. Lee’s surrender of the Army of Northern Virginia to Ulysses S. Grant, general-in-chief of all United States forces, hastened the conclusion of the Civil War.
In the weeks following, Confederate forces surrendered, and Confederate President Jefferson Davis was captured. On April 14, President Lincoln’s name was added to the list of over 1 million Civil War casualties, and the bloody era the that began four years earlier in the corn fields of Manassas, Virginia finally was brought to a close. (Library of Congress)
How we play the game from Seymour Hersh’s New Yorker article on Iran:
American Naval tactical aircraft, operating from carriers in the Arabian Sea, have been flying simulated nuclear-weapons delivery missions—rapid ascending maneuvers known as “over the shoulder” bombing—since last summer, the former official said, within range of Iranian coastal radars.
La Queen Sucia, actually author Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez, has been providing some valuable observations on the immigration issue. Indeed, a post earlier this week was published in today’s Washington Post.
Here’s her original post,
And a few excerpts from the Post version:
1 The words “immigrant” and “Hispanic” are not synonymous. The majority of Hispanics in the United States are not immigrants. According to 2004 census data, 60 percent of the more than 40 million Hispanics in this country were born here. Of the 40 percent who were born elsewhere, the majority are legal immigrants, not illegal.
2 Many immigrants are not Latino. There could be more than 100,000 Nigerians living in and around Houston. There are thousands of illegal Irish immigrants in and around Boston. China, India, South Korea and Canada are among the leading countries sending people here. Many illegal immigrants are college students and workers who choose to overstay their visas.
…4 Enough about the flags, already. They’re symbols of cultural pride, not national allegiance. Think Irish flags on St. Patrick’s Day, or Confederate flags over South Carolina. When newspapers ignorantly frame this debate in ethnic terms, people ignorantly respond with misplaced ethnic pride.
… of Hugh Hefner. Hef is 80.
… of Michael Learned. Momma Walton is 67.
… of Jerry Lee Lewis, Gordon Cooper, Doc Holliday, Sam Houston and, lest we forget, New Orleans Det. Remy McSwain. Dennis Quaid is 52.
… of Cynthia Nixon. The Sex in the City star is 40. Nixon played the maid hired by Salieri to spy on Mozart in the film Amadeus.
… of Rudy Huxtable. Keshia Knight Pulliam is 27.
Paul Robeson was was born on this date in 1898.
Paul Robeson was the epitome of the 20th-century Renaissance man. He was an exceptional athlete, actor, singer, cultural scholar, author, and political activist. His talents made him a revered man of his time, yet his radical political beliefs all but erased him from popular history. Today, more than one hundred years after his birth, Robeson is just beginning to receive the credit he is due.
Read more from the profile of Robeson at the PBS site for American Masters.
Sixty percent of the Mexican people are mestizo (Amerindian-Spanish), 30% are Amerindian or predominantly Amerindian, 9% are white and 1% are other. The percentage with Indian heritage is even higher among the people of Guatemala and Honduras. (Source: CIA – The World Factbook)
If 90% of Mexicans have American Indian origins, then, of course, 90% of Mexican-Americans also have some American Indian origins. It follows then that instead of 4 million American Indians and Alaska natives in the U.S. (as identified in the 2000 Census), there are easily more than 30 million persons with some American Indian ancestry.
So, all together now, who are the immigrants?
Malcolm Gladwell has more on the need to analyze the validity of sports records (cf. Bonds) before accepting them. An excerpt:
Second–and here I strongly disagree with some readers–peformance enhancing drugs work. They confer an enormous advantage. They allow an athlete to train so much harder than he or she otherwise could that they can turn mediocre athletes into very good athletes, and very good athletes into legends. “Game of Shadows” makes, I think, an overwhelming case that drugs allowed Bonds to essentially double his annual home run output, and turned Tim Montomgery from an also-ran into a world record holder.
… was born on this date in 1896. One of the great lyricists, Harburg would be loved by us all if only for —
Somewhere over the rainbow way up high
There’s a land that I’ve heard of once in a lullaby
Somewhere over the rainbow skies are blue
And the dreams that you dare to dream
Really do come true
Some day I’ll wish upon a star
And wake up where the clouds are far behind me
Where troubles melt like lemon drops
Away above the chimney tops
That’s where you’ll find me
Somewhere over the rainbow blue birds fly
Birds fly over the rainbow
Why then, oh why can’t I?
If happy little bluebirds fly beyond the rainbow
Why oh why can’t I?
The Harburg Foundation provides this biographical sketch:
Edgar Y. (Yip) Harburg (1896-1981) was born of Russian-Jewish immigrant parents of modest means on Manhattan’s Lower East Side. He attended the City University of New York. In high school (Townsand Harris) he met his lifelong friend, Ira Gershwin and discovered that they shared a mutual love for the works of Gilbert and Sullivan. Yip and Ira were frequent contributors of poetry and light verse to their high school and college papers.
The years after college found Yip slipping further away from writing and eventually into the world of business. After the electric appliance business Yip had helped develop over seven long years was decimated by the stock market crash of 1929, Yip turned his attention back full time to the art of writing lyrics. His old friend Ira Gershwin became a mentor, co-writer and promoter of Yip’s.
Mr. Harburg’s Broadway achievements included Bloomer Girl, Finnian’s Rainbow, Flahooley and Jamaica.
His most noted work in film musicals was in The Wizard of OZ for which he wrote lyrics, was the final editor and contributed much to the script (including the scene at the end where the Scarecrow, Tin Man, and Cowardly Lion are rewarded for their efforts by the Wizard). He also wrote lyrics for the Warner Brothers movie, Gay Purr-ee.
Yip was “blacklisted” during the 50’s by film, radio and television for his liberal views.
In all, Yip wrote lyrics to 537 songs including; “Brother Can You Spare a Dime”, “April In Paris”, “It’s Only a Paper Moon”, “Hurry Sundown”, “Lydia the Tattooed Lady”, “How Are Things In Glocca Mora” and of course his most famous… “Over the Rainbow”.
At The New Yorker, Seymour Hersh (coincidentally, today is his 69th birthday) tells us Bush is intent on war with Iran. And we all know what happens when Bush wants war.
A government consultant with close ties to the civilian leadership in the Pentagon said that Bush was “absolutely convinced that Iran is going to get the bomb” if it is not stopped. He said that the President believes that he must do “what no Democrat or Republican, if elected in the future, would have the courage to do,” and “that saving Iran is going to be his legacy.”
One former defense official, who still deals with sensitive issues for the Bush Administration, told me that the military planning was premised on a belief that “a sustained bombing campaign in Iran will humiliate the religious leadership and lead the public to rise up and overthrow the government.” He added, “I was shocked when I heard it, and asked myself, ‘What are they smoking?’ ”
Key quote: “Speaking of President Bush, the House member said, ‘The most worrisome thing is that this guy has a messianic vision.'”
The Sports Economist finds irony in the Baltimore Orioles-Washington Nationals TV deals:
Major League Baseball negotiated with Peter Angelos, owner of the Orioles, and granted him the broadcast rights for the region. Angelos created the Mid Atlantic Sports Network, MASN, to broadcast Orioles’ and Nationals’ games, witht the Orioles getting 90% of the revenues. The Nationals get a $20 million licensing fee. Eventually the Nationals are to become a 1/3 owner of MASN.
Comcast, the cable broadcaster, and the Orioles are now in a legal battle as Comcast refuses to air Nationals’ games via the MASN. Comcast is staking out territory as the protector of consumers against the monopoly on rights granted the Orioles by Major League Baseball. Anyone who has ever dealt with Comcast will see the irony in Comcast’s position.
… should have been 60 years old today.
The bigger the game, the better he pitched. Jim “Catfish” Hunter, with his pinpoint control, epitomized smart pitching at its finest. He pitched a perfect game in 1968, won 21 or more games five times in a row, and claimed the American League Cy Young Award in 1974. Arm trouble ended his career at age 33, but he still won 224 games and five World Series rings. The likable pitching ace died in 1999 at age 53 – a victim of ALS, the same disease that cut short the life of Lou Gehrig.
NewMexiKen, once again acting my age, is excited to be attending the Bob Dylan concert here in Albuquerque next week even if I have read elsewhere that the venue sucks.
Opening act — Merle Haggard.
Set list from Bakersfield:
Historian Howard Zinn reminds us that if we knew the history of the U.S. — no, really knew it — George Bush’s lies that got us into Iraq would have been seen three years ago for what we now know. It’s an excellent, if strident essay. An excerpt:
If we don’t know history, then we are ready meat for carnivorous politicians and the intellectuals and journalists who supply the carving knives. I am not speaking of the history we learned in school, a history subservient to our political leaders, from the much-admired Founding Fathers to the Presidents of recent years. I mean a history which is honest about the past. If we don’t know that history, then any President can stand up to the battery of microphones, declare that we must go to war, and we will have no basis for challenging him. He will say that the nation is in danger, that democracy and liberty are at stake, and that we must therefore send ships and planes to destroy our new enemy, and we will have no reason to disbelieve him.
But if we know some history, if we know how many times Presidents have made similar declarations to the country, and how they turned out to be lies, we will not be fooled. Although some of us may pride ourselves that we were never fooled, we still might accept as our civic duty the responsibility to buttress our fellow citizens against the mendacity of our high officials.
We would remind whoever we can that President Polk lied to the nation about the reason for going to war with Mexico in 1846. It wasn’t that Mexico “shed American blood upon the American soil,” but that Polk, and the slave-owning aristocracy, coveted half of Mexico.
We would point out that President McKinley lied in 1898 about the reason for invading Cuba, saying we wanted to liberate the Cubans from Spanish control, but the truth is that we really wanted Spain out of Cuba so that the island could be open to United Fruit and other American corporations. He also lied about the reasons for our war in the Philippines, claiming we only wanted to “civilize” the Filipinos, while the real reason was to own a valuable piece of real estate in the far Pacific, even if we had to kill hundreds of thousands of Filipinos to accomplish that.
President Woodrow Wilson—so often characterized in our history books as an “idealist”—lied about the reasons for entering the First World War, saying it was a war to “make the world safe for democracy,” when it was really a war to make the world safe for the Western imperial powers.
Harry Truman lied when he said the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima because it was “a military target.”
Man: That banana is huge!
Girl: Yeah, I know.
Man: It must have been on steroids.
Girl: No, if it were on steroids, it would have been much, much smaller.
–Deli, 14th & 8th
Another in a series of household hints based upon NewMexiKen’s personal experience.
If you decide to have BLTs for dinner and if you go to the store specifically to buy L (lettuce) for the BLTs, and you pick out a nice head of L and put it in your cart, it’s also a good idea to make certain the checker actually bags the L after she rings it up.
BTs, while tasty, are not as tasty as BLTs.
“Instead, sounding very Lewis Carroll, the White House claims that when the president leaks something secret, it’s not secret anymore. It’s the Immaculate Declassification…”
Malcolm Gladwell thinks we should “require that athletes pass a statistical plausibility in the wake of their achievements.”
“Game of Shadows” points out that Bonds had the second, ninth and tenth greatest offensive season in baseball history at the ages of 36, 37, and 39 respectively—and the average age of everyone else on that list (Gehrig, Foxx, Ruth and Hornsby) is 27. No one—no one—turns himself into one of the greatest hitters of all time in his late 30’s. His home run record should have been denied as statistically implausible.
Goldfish Cam. Check it out.
NewMexiKen guessed correctly eight times out of ten this week. How well can you do on The Week Quiz?