Author: NewMexiKen

Sidney Poitier

… is 79 today.

American Masters from PBS sums it up nicely:

More than an actor (and Academy-Award winner), Sidney Poitier is an artist. A writer and director, a thinker and critic, a humanitarian and diplomat, his presence as a cultural icon has long been one of protest and humanity. His career defined and documented the modern history of blacks in American film, and his depiction of proud and powerful characters was and remains revolutionary.

Lilies of the Field — with Poitier’s Oscar winning performance — has been one of NewMexiKen’s favorites since it was released more than 40 years ago. If you don’t know the film, you should.

Wouldn’t it be cool

… if the Olympic figure skating judges gave their opinions like Simon, Paula and Randy on American Idol?

This and some other ideas via Sideline Chatter:

SI.com’s Pete McEntegart says NBC could spice up its Winter Olympics ratings just by borrowing some other sure-fire TV tricks, such as:

• “More [events with] guns: If there’s anything to be learned from the vice president’s hunting accident, it’s that firearms are a ratings bonanza.

• “Allow competitors to vote each other out: We’re guessing that Bode Miller would be sent packing to his personal RV in less time than it takes him to chug a beer.

• “Don’t run from ‘American Idol’ — learn from it: Figure-skating judges [should] start giving their critiques out loud and on camera. Then we’ll really see some tears in the kiss-and-cry room.”

Washington’s Birthday

George Washington was born on February 11, 1731. In 1752, however, Britain and her colonies changed from the Julian to the Gregorian calendar, the calendar we use today. The change added 11 days and designated January rather than March as the beginning of the year. Accordingly, Washington’s birthday was February 22, 1732.

The federal holiday was celebrated on February 22 until legislation in 1968 designated the third Monday of February the official day to celebrate Washington’s birthday. In 1971, when the 1968 Act went into effect, President Nixon proclaimed the holiday Presidents’ Day, to commemorate all past presidents, not just Washington and Lincoln. This was never intended or authorized by Congress; even so, it gained a strong hold on the public consciousness.

The states are not obliged to adopt federal holidays, which only affect federal offices and agencies. While most states have adopted Washington’s Birthday, a dozen of them officially celebrate Presidents’ Day. A number of the states that celebrate Washington’s Birthday also recognize Lincoln’s Birthday as a separate legal holiday.

iPod generation

The U.S. snowboarding team’s pinstriped uniforms are already wired for the machines, with a nifty iPod-size pocket, speakers in the hood and a control panel on the left sleeve that allows the athletes to select songs.
…

That’s where iPod scores big. Its small size and digital technology facilitate listening in extreme situations – such as being upside down, in the middle of a 1080 toe grab, during a once-in-a-lifetime Olympic routine.

Baltimore Sun

The ‘Public Intellectual’

From AP via Yahoo! News, a report on Jon Stewart’s prep for Oscar night. He’s very busy.

“What we’re hoping is, in my daughter’s first two weeks, she’s not going to remember a whole lot of this,” he says. “So instead of me being there, I just take my deodorant and jam it in her crib. She’ll have the faint smell of me but won’t really know I haven’t been an influence.”
…

But if he’s nervous, he’s not showing it.

“If I had to go out there and surf, that would be a problem,” Stewart says. “But you know, it’s just comedy.”

Winter Olympics thoughts

Amazing victory for speedskater Shani Davis. I don’t know how anyone can skate so fast with such a heavy chip on his shoulder.

Love the technological ability of NBC to match two skiers or ski jumpers (from individual runs) in one picture. I walked in while they were superimposing two ski jumpers and thought the Olympics had been moved to Brokeback Mountain.

Apolo Anton Ohno seemed gracious about winning just a bronze medal, but Bob Costas was awfully disappointed. If Ohno didn’t win, surely it most have been those nasty Korean tactics that denied him his due.

No ‘I’ in team

Oscar Robertson and Kareem Abdul-Jabbar each provide their take on Kobe’s 81.

The conclusion of each:

Oscar — I know, you’ve heard a lot of this from us old-school players. And you’ll continue to hear it. I, for one, care too much about the game to settle for the highlight reel that N.B.A. basketball has become today. I believe Kobe does as well.

Kareem — Kobe’s 81-point game should without a doubt stand alongside Wilt’s 100 as one of the greatest individual feats in league history, and who’s to say he won’t one day break Wilt’s 44-year old record? The world will be watching and waiting.

How do you say, ‘Do you believe in miracles?’ in Switzerland

The Swiss called their Olympic upset of the Czechs the biggest victory in their country’s history.

How wrong they turned out to be.

Switzerland stunned defending Olympic champion Canada on Saturday with a 2-0 victory that shook up the men’s hockey tournament at the Turin Games.

AP via The New York Times

Answer: Galuben Sie an Wunder? or Croyez-vous aux miracles?

(There are four official languages in Switzerland. About two-thirds speak German, 20% French, 8% Italian and less than one percent Romansch.)

Blogging to iTunes

iTunes started at the top of the alphabet (unintentionally on my part) this morning.

‘Ama’ama, Israel Kamakawiwo’le
‘S Wonderful, Ella Fitzgerald
‘Til, The Angels
‘Til I Gain Control Again, Rodney Crowell
‘Til Tomorrow, Marvin Gaye
“40,” U2
“Heroes,” David Bowie
“Minute” Waltz, Chopin
“Moonlight Sonata,” Beethoven
“Pathétique Sonata,” Beethoven
(‘Til) I Kissed You, The Everly Brothers
(Da Le) Yalleo, Santana

(Punctuation marks come first, then numbers and then A-B etc. in the computer alphabet.)

Brrr

Joel Achenbach got his winter heating bill and turned his thermostat down. Part of his amusing take:

The average American burns roughly 47 jillion “British thermal units” of energy daily, plus an uncounted number of French and German thermal units. The general standard, in the past, was that you would turn down the thermostat only if there was evidence that your house was melting the under-lying planetary crust. People took pride in having a house so hot that, in the depths of winter, everyone sat around in undergarments, fanning themselves and holding iced beverages to their foreheads.

But that’s changing. Now we recognize that household warmth, far from a necessity, is a fetish, an indulgence. It’s a recent invention of a society grown so soft that its members have forgotten how to kill, gut and don the hide of a wild furry animal. Other than the socialites.

The good news is, there are many very practical steps that ordinary people can take to keep their heating bills reasonable. In my house we keep the thermostat at 48 degrees and then turn it down at night. It’s hard to enter my house because of the towels and spare curtains and stuffed animals crammed by the front door to keep the heat inside. When you do manage to fight your way in, the first thing you see are strange mounds of blankets and clothes in the living room. Laundry? No, my children.

The thermostat stays at 72° during the winter here at Casa NewMexiKen; automatically lowered to 60° overnight. Still, even with our mild winter, nearly $200 for natural gas last month.

iShirt

These days putting a lowercase I in front of any product is tantamount to printing your own money. Following shirt er, suit is something for all the hipsters in the house, the iShirt from PodShirt. It s a standard black t-shirt with the word iShirt printed on the front in block white letters. Cool? Yes, yes it is. Even more cool is that the I is actually an iPod shuffle attached to a magnet. (Shuffle not included, obviously.) $29 buys you instant popularity. (Gizmodo)

Click to see photo.

R.I.P. STOP

From a fine tribute to the telegram by Dan Neil, who has more:

For all their worldwide, instantaneous bandwidth, the one thing modern electronic communications systems don’t offer is a sense of occasion, of consequence. One hundred e-mails per day does not equal better information. It’s just a snowdrift of words to be shoveled off the walk. Telegrams were sparingly used and sparingly written, but every word counted.

And, in the hands of experts, telegrams could be used like a scalpel. One of the most famous telegram exchanges pitted George Bernard Shaw against Winston Churchill. Shaw to Churchill: “Am reserving two tickets for you for my premiere. Come and bring a friend if you have any.” Churchill to Shaw: “Impossible to be present for the first performance. Will attend the second if there is one.”

A Hollywood favorite: Cary Grant, evasive about his age, intercepted a telegram to his agent from a reporter: “How old Cary Grant?” it read. Grant responded himself: “Old Cary Grant fine. How you?”

Dorothy Parker, on her honeymoon, to an editor nagging her for late work: “Too [expletive] busy, and vice versa.”

At $42 Billion, Largest Contract of its Kind, Company Says

HALLIBURTON WINS CONTRACT TO RECONSTRUCT CHENEY’S REPUTATION

The Halliburton Company announced today that it had won a $42 billion no-bid contract from the U.S. government to reconstruct the reputation of Vice President Dick Cheney.

While Halliburton has been known for massive reconstruction projects in such war-torn nations as Iraq, the $42 billion contract represents the first time that the company has been employed to put its reconstruction expertise to work on one embattled human being.

The Borowitz Report, which has more.

Toni Morrison

The Writer’s Almanac has a good essay on Toni Morrison today, her 75th birthday.

It’s the birthday of novelist Toni Morrison, born Chloe Anthony Wofford in Lorain, Ohio (1931). She didn’t start writing fiction until she was in her thirties, working as an editor for Random House and raising two children. She wasn’t happy with her marriage and writing helped her escape her daily troubles. She joined a small writing group and one day she didn’t have anything to bring to the group meeting, so she jotted down a story about a black girl who wants blue eyes. The story later became her first novel, The Bluest Eye (1969).
…

Morrison’s first big success was the 1977 novel Song of Solomon, about a rich black businessman who tries to hide his working-class background. It was the first novel by a black author to be chosen for the Book-of-the-Month Club since Richard Wright’s Native Son in 1940.

But Morrison is probably best known for her novel Beloved (1987), about a former slave named Sethe, living just after the Civil War, who is haunted by the ghost of the baby daughter she killed in order to save the girl from a life of slavery….

Toni Morrison wrote, “They straightened out the Mississippi River in places, to make room for houses and livable acreage. Occasionally the river floods these places … but in fact it is not flooding; it is remembering. … All water has a perfect memory and is forever trying to get back to where it was. Writers are like that: remembering where we were, what valley we ran through, what the banks were like, the light that was there and the route back to our original place.”

Wallace Stegner

In 1999, San Francisco Chronicle readers ranked the 100 best non-fiction and fiction books of the 20th century written in, about, or by an author from the Western United States.

NewMexiKen has posted the top 10 from the lists previously, but repeats them once again — because the lists are interesting, but primarily to honor Wallace Stegner, who was born on this date in 1909.

Stegner is first in fiction, second in non-fiction; now that’s a writer.

TOP 10 FICTION
1. “Angle of Repose,” by Wallace Stegner
2. “The Grapes of Wrath,” by John Steinbeck
3. “Sometimes a Great Notion,” by Ken Kesey
4. “The Call of the Wild,” by Jack London
5. “The Big Sleep,” by Raymond Chandler
6. “Animal Dreams,” by Barbara Kingsolver
7. “Death Comes for the Archbishop,” by Willa Cather
8. “The Day of the Locust,” by Nathanael West
9. “Blood Meridian,” by Cormac McCarthy
10. “The Maltese Falcon,” by Dashiell Hammett

TOP 10 NON-FICTION
1. “Land of Little Rain,” Mary Austin
2. “Beyond the Hundredth Meridian,” Wallace Stegner
3. “Desert Solitaire,” Edward Abbey
4. “This House of Sky,” Ivan Doig
5. “Son of the Morning Star,” Evan S. Connell
6. Western trilogy, Bernard DeVoto
7. “Assembling California,” John McPhee
8. “My First Summer in the Sierra,” John Muir
9. “The White Album,” Joan Didion
10. “City of Quartz,” Mike Davis

It’s the birthday

… of Jack Palance. He’s 87.

… of George Kennedy. Dragline is 81.

… of the woman who broke up the Beatles. She’s 73 today. That’s Yoko Ono.

… of Cybill Shepherd. She’s 56.

… of Vinnie Barbarino. He’s 52 today. So are Vincent Vega, Chili Palmer, Michael, Buford ‘Bud’ Uan Davis, Tod Lubitch, Danny Zuko and Tony Manero. And so is John Travolta.

… of the letter turner. Vanna White is 49 today.

… of Matt Dillon. The Oscar nominee is 42.

… of Molly Ringwald. She’s 38.