Author: NewMexiKen

The Virginia Quarterly Review

While NewMexiKen is in Virginia — awaiting grandchild number six — I thought I might mention The Virginia Quarterly Review, nominated this week for six National Magazine Awards.

Wow! Everyone in our office has been trying not to hyperventilate. The finalists for the 2006 National Magazine Awards (the magazine world’s equivalent to the Pulitzers or the National Book Awards) were announced today and VQR garnered six nominations! Pretty unheard of for a magazine our size. The Atlantic Monthly led all magazines with eight nominations, then came us, followed by GQ, Harper’s, National Geographic, New York, and The New Yorker with five nominations each. Pretty heady company. We received a nomination in the General Excellence category for magazines with circulations under 100,000 (which we fit well under). Also nominated in this category were Aperture, The Believer, Legal Affairs, and ReadyMade.

And congrats go out to our writers whose work was chosen as finalists:

  • Sven Birkerts, for Reviews & Criticism, for his essays “Humboldt’s Gift” (Summer issue) and “A Weekend at Montauk” (Winter 2005 issue),
  • Pauline W. Chen in the Essay category for “Dead Enough?: The Paradox of Brain Death” (Fall 2005 issue),
  • Martin Preib in the Essay category for “The Wagon” (Summer 2005 issue),
  • Isabel Allende in Fiction for “The Guggenheim Lovers” (Summer 2005 issue; sorry, not available online),
  • Brock Clarke in Fiction for “The Ghosts We Love” (Summer 2005 issue),
  • Alan Heathcock in Fiction for “Peacekeeper” (Fall 2005 issue),
  • R.T. Smith in Fiction for “Ina Grove” (Fall 2005 issue),
  • And Joyce Carol Oates in Fiction for two stories, “So Help Me God” (Winter 2005 issue) and “Smother” (Fall 2005 issue). (Incredibly, Oates had another story nominated, “High Lonesome” published in Zoetrope: All Story.)

Winners will be announced on May 9 at Jazz at Lincoln Center in New York.

Trifecta

Oh, by the way, Governor Kempthorne, welcome to the Indian Trust litigation.

First it was Cobell v. Babbitt. Then it became Cobell v. Norton. After confirmation of Idaho Governor Dirk Kempthorne as the new Interior secretary, it will be Cobell v. Kempthorne.

The judge in this, the individual Indian trust class action lawsuit, has already found both Secretary Babbitt and Secretary Norton in contempt (though an appeals court overturned the latter).

Winning a pool in 20 easy steps

From The Atlanta Journal-Constitution (registration required):

2. Fill your bracket out backwards.

That’s right, backwards.

“After thinking hard about the tournament and potential matchups, decide first who you think is most likely to win the whole shebang,” says Yale professor Edward Kaplan, who co-authored a mathematical analysis of NCAA tournament pools. “Pen that team in as your winner, then work backwards, [writing it in for the previous five rounds].

“Next, decide your pick for the loser in the championship game, then the two losing Final Four teams. Keep working backwards until you have filled in the entire draw.”

3. Make sure your national champion has at least one former McDonald’s All-American on its roster. Only one winner since 1979 hasn’t.

And my personal favorite:

11. Listen extra carefully to what Dick Vitale, Billy Packer and Jay Bilas have to say the next few days about who’ll win, why they’ll win and how they’ll win.

Then, do the exact opposite.

James Madison

… was born on this date in 1751.

No government any more than an individual will long be respected without being truly respectable.

There are more instances of the abridgement of the freedom of the people by gradual and silent encroachments of those in power than by violent and sudden usurpations.

[I]t is proper to take alarm at the first experiment on our liberties.

James Madison

Beware the Ides of March

Julius Caesar was assassinated on the ides of March in 44 B.C. A group of Roman senators led by Cassius and Brutus thought Caesar was becoming arrogant and tyrannical, and they devised a plot to assassinate him at a senate meeting on March 15. Many of the conspirators were close friends of Caesar, including Brutus. At the meeting, the group of senators circled around Caesar and pretended to submit a petition. Suddenly, one of them grabbed Caesar’s robe and yanked it off his neck, which was the signal to begin the attack. All of the conspirators were hiding daggers, and they each stabbed him as he staggered across the floor.

The Writer’s Almanac

Ides

American historians, official daughters of NewMexiKen, reenact the assassination of Julius Caesar with a ballpoint pen on the steps of the Roman Curia (Senate) 1997.

My other car is a plane

The always delightful, always on target Dan Neil:

Mercedes-Benz executives offer this wholly meritless defense: Many of its customers leave the brand because the company does not offer a full-size SUV that meets their needs, which is to say, a seven-passenger, 17-foot 4×4 with a 9,300-pound towing capacity. At this point in the presentation in Napa Valley last week, execs showed slides of the GL pulling a 30-foot boat. So there you have it: Mercedes’ audience of water-skiing polygamists is underserved.

Needs? Did the man say needs? OK, then. I propose needs testing for the purchase of such a vehicle. You must have a Chris-Craft and three or more school-age children in the yard to qualify. Your vehicle must do double-duty as, um, a bookmobile.

Need has very little to do with it. This segment is about want, naked and unquenchable, I-got-mine-you-get-bent appetite. It’s well established that the vast majority of these vehicles never touch gravel, never carry more than a couple of people, and never tow anything heavier than the weight of their owner’s childhood traumas.

Why We’re All Jesus’ Children

At Slate, Steve Olson tells us Go back a few millenniums, and we’ve all got the same ancestors.

It gets even stranger. Say you go back 120 generations, to about the year 1000 B.C. According to the results presented in our Nature paper, your ancestors then included everyone in the world who has descendants living today. And if you compared a list of your ancestors with a list of anyone else’s ancestors, the names on the two lists would be identical.

This is a very bizarre result (the math behind it is solid, though—here’s a brief, semitechnical explanation of our findings). It means that you and I are descended from all of the Africans, Australians, Native Americans, and Europeans who were alive three millenniums ago and still have descendants living today. That’s also why so many people living today could be descended from Jesus. If Jesus had children (a big if, of course) and if those children had children so that Jesus’ lineage survived, then Jesus is today the ancestor of almost everyone living on Earth. True, Jesus lived two rather than three millenniums ago, but a person’s descendants spread quickly from well-connected parts of the world like the Middle East.

Bird brain

“In a remarkable speech over the weekend, Secretary of Health and Human Services Michael Leavitt recommended that Americans store canned tuna and powdered milk under their beds for when bird flu hits. What? This ranks right up there with ‘duck and cover’ during a nuclear attack. In case of radiation wear a hat.

“Powdered milk and tuna? How many would rather have the bird flu?”

Jay Leno

Well, I guess we’ve all been there

“A Mexican couple were recovering separately after a marital spat got out of control and saw them firing guns, throwing knives and hurling homemade bombs, Mexican daily Milenio said on Monday.

“In scenes taken straight out of hit romantic comedy ‘Mr. and Mrs. Smith,’ starring Brad Pitt and Angelina Jolie, Juan Espinosa and Irma Contreras fought until their house blew up in a homemade gasoline bomb explosion, Milenio said.”

Yahoo! News

Pajama day

Mack, official oldest grandchild of NewMexiKen, was nervous. According to his mother, it was “pajama day” at Little Lambs pre-school. That meant that all the five-year-olds were supposed to wear a favorite pair of pajamas to school. In his pajamas in the car on the way however, it felt a little uncertain.

To alleviate the uncertainty — which by then had started to settle into her own mind — his mom began to suggest other “clothing days” there might be. In the joking that followed, Mack suggested — as 5-year-old boys will — “underpants day.”

His mother assured him there would be no day when the kids just wore underpants to class — at least not until college.

Drink of champions

One little milk study and everyone’s having a cow.

For decades, biochemists and physiologists in the dog-eat-dog world of sports drink technology have struggled to find the perfect elixir — the right balance of carbohydrates, electrolytes, protein and fluid to keep athletes in peak form after various types of exercise.

So it was big news when exercise kinesiology professor Joel Stager and co-workers at Indiana University in Bloomington declared they had stumbled upon the perfect drink for elite cyclists recovering their energy after strenuous exercise.

That beverage was chocolate milk.

Read more from the report in the Los Angeles Times.

Lady and the Tramp

NewMexiKen has been watching Lady and the Tramp — and watching it and watching it and watching it. I’m certain we’ve seen the scene with the Siamese cats (Si and Am) at least a dozen times.

And, you know what? After 50+ years, it’s pretty darn good. It has some typical Disney pathos and a touch of anxiety for the little ones a few times (when mean dogs enter the picture), but considerably less than in the Disney animations of Grimm fairy tales. And much less of the singing and nonsense that I didn’t like in Disney films when I was five-years-old — and still don’t.

If you’ve got young ‘uns to entertain (under 5 especially), I recommend Lady and the Tramp. It’s good.

And a word about Verna Felton, the character actress who was a voice in many Disney animations — a matriarchical elephant in Dumbo, the Fairy Godmother in Cinderella, the Queen of Hearts in Alice in Wonderland, Aunt Sarah in Lady and the Tramp. I recognized her voice and did a little research. As I remembered, Ms. Felton played with Harry Morgan in an early fifties show, December Bride — and its 1960 spinoff Pete and Gladys. She died in 1966, but Morgan kept Felton’s photo on Sherman Potter’s desk on the M*A*S*H set to portray Mrs. Potter. Nice.

American Idol

Dan Neil has 800 Words on American Idol. Go read them all, but here’s some of them:

In this newspaper’s op-ed section, author Thomas de Zengotita theorized that the popularity of “Idol” reflected the onset of the “virtual revolution,” a pervasive self-publicizing impulse (blogs, chat rooms, MySpace.com) that has ordinary people “demanding a share of the last scarce resource in the overdeveloped world—attention.”

This is a grand bit of pop culture hermeneutics, and it’s just bull. “Idol” is a talent show, an amateur singing contest, no better and no worse—and no more driven by digital culture—than the “Original Amateur Hour,” which ran on radio and then on television almost uninterrupted from 1934 until 1970. Were “The Gong Show” and “Star Search” also manifestations of the virtual revolution?

In fact, it’s the celebration of amateurism that makes “Idol” so compelling; conversely, it was the Olympics’ semi-pro vibe that made the Winter Games so farcical and forgettable.
…

Far from polishing the almighty pedestal of celebrity, “Idol” takes a wrecking ball to it. Here is proof that pop stars are not so unapproachably special and rare that they deserve to be worshipped. People just as talented and just as worthy may be shelving your library books or cold-calling you for newspaper subscriptions or cleaning your pool. It turns out we’re a pretty gifted species, Homo sapiens cinderellus.

Greatest moment in basketball commentary history

Billy Packer, NewMexiKen’s least favorite sports commentator, devotes his whole life to the game, gets to the big CBS selection show Sunday evening and, true to form, blows it. Commenting on the Washington bracket, Packer says he likes the 8-9 game between Arizona and Wisconsin.

Only problem, the Arizona-Wisconsin game is in the Minneapolis bracket, which CBS hasn’t gotten to yet.

Other NewMexiKen takes on Packer are here and here and here and here and here and here and here.

(All of them at one click.)

In case you think McCain is a solution

Mr. McCain praised the president for his failed effort to rewrite the Social Security system, said he supported the decision to go into Iraq and blistered at critics who suggested the White House had fabricated evidence of unconventional weapons in Iraq to justify the invasion.

“Anybody who says the president of the United States is lying about weapons of mass destruction is lying,” Mr. McCain said.

The New York Times reporting on the Southern Republican Leadership Conference.