Author: NewMexiKen

Hunting for laughs

I have to admit that I turned away from the Olympics yesterday. Fox had a more exciting sporting event on. Softball with Dick Cheney and Britt Hume.

Yesterday Dick Cheney gave an interview with Fox News. I don’t want to say that Fox News was lenient but their first question was, “Who do you like on ‘American Idol’?”

Actually the interview did get off to a bad start when Brit Hume said, “Mr. Vice President, I have some questions.” And Cheney said, “Okay, shoot.?”

Over the weekend while on a hunting trip down in Texas, Vice President Dick Cheney accidentally shot a member of his hunting party. He apologized. In fact, he told Brit Hume that he was actually trying to hit Cindy Sheehan.

Jay Leno

Jim Brown

… was born on this date in 1936. That would make him 70 today.

Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. (Which makes him the second greatest athlete born on this date. It’s Michael Jordan’s birthday, too.)

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

Richard Ford

… was born in Jackson, Mississippi, on this date in 1944. The Writer’s Almanac had a particularly good essay on Ford two years ago. It begins:

[Ford is] best known as the author of the novels The Sportswriter (1985) and Independence Day (1995). He has said that one of the reasons he became a writer is that he was mildly dyslexic as a child and had to concentrate on words more intensely than most people. He also lived across the street from novelist and short story writer Eudora Welty, and his mother used to point her out to him as someone to look up to.

This year The Writer’s Almanac has this:

Ford has spent most of his adult life moving from city to city with his wife. He’s lived in fourteen states, as well as France and Mexico. At one point he divided his time between a townhouse on Bourbon Street in New Orleans, a house in Montana, and a plantation house in Mississippi. He said, “The really central thing is that, no matter where I move, I always write and I’m married to the same girl. All that other stuff is just filigree.”

Ford’s novels are particular favorites of NewMexiKen.

Follow Me

NewMexiKen only today read an article about Duke basketball coach Mike Krzyzewski in The New York Times Sports Magazine (published February 5th).

The article, “Follow Me,” by Michael Sokolove, is excellent. It discusses Coach K’s abilities and techniques (he gets up to $100,000 for a lecture) in a context of basketball, but it is not an article about basketball. It is about leadership and management skills.

Highly recommended.

Key quote: “So what is the secret to Krzyzewski’s success? For starters, he coaches the way a woman would. Really.”

The killer who was ‘hunted like a dog’

John Wilkes Booth, meet Jack Bauer. That’s the recipe of “Manhunt,” an engrossing blend of history and thriller that pulls off the heady feat of creating edge-of-your-seat narrative even as its conclusion is inevitable. And the ride? Like Bauer’s TV show, “24,” James L. Swanson’s tale of the search for President Abraham Lincoln’s killer rivets because of its pacing – and because its shifting scenes and characters are juggled with sure hands.

Lincoln is gone within the first quarter of the book, leaving center stage for his assassin, the celebrity-actor Booth. All but the most avid Lincoln followers will be surprised by the numerous twists and turns surrounding the president’s death, as well as Booth’s motley crew of co-conspirators, many of whom escaped severe punishment.

From a review in the Christian Science Monitor

Changes Ahead for a Theater Near You

From columnist David Leonhardt in today’s Times:

Let’s say you decide to take a break tonight and go out to a movie. It’s Wednesday, of course, so when you walk up to the ticket counter, there is not another person in line. You settle on “Glory Road,” an inspirational basketball movie that has been out for a month. The theater is so empty that it almost feels as if you are watching it in your den. Your ticket costs $8.

Now it’s the weekend. You meet up with some friends to see “Date Movie,” a spoof that has just opened to good buzz. You have to stand in a long line to get a ticket, and the only seats you can find are in the third row. It is clearly a hot ticket. Yet it costs the same $8 as “Glory Road.”

This isn’t the way much of the American economy works. It’s not how airlines sell seats, the Gap sells shirts or eBay sells anything.

Soon, it won’t be the way the movies work either. You will pay more for a ticket on the weekends and less on weekdays. You’ll be able to buy a reserved seat in the center of the theater for a few extra dollars. One of these days, you may even have to pay more for a hit movie than for a bomb. The changes are under way, and they are long overdue.

In the meantime, NewMexiKen would like to know where these $8 movie tickets are.

Dot-Dot-Dot, Dash-Dash-Dash, No More

Noting the end of the telegram, The New York Times provided some memorable ones, inlcuding these:

Writers, of course, say the cleverest things. The humorist Robert Benchley, arriving in Venice for the first time, cabled Harold Ross, editor of The New Yorker.

STREETS FULL OF WATER. PLEASE ADVISE.

Mark Twain, like most writers, found it easier to write long than short. He received this telegram from a publisher:

NEED 2-PAGE SHORT STORY TWO DAYS.

Twain replied:

NO CAN DO 2 PAGES TWO DAYS. CAN DO 30 PAGES 2 DAYS. NEED 30 DAYS TO DO 2 PAGES.

Harold Arlen

… was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, New York, on this date in 1905.

A short list from the more than 400 tunes written by Harold Arlen:

  • Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive
  • Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
  • Come Rain Or Come Shine
  • Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
  • Hooray For Love
  • It’s Only A Paper Moon
  • I’ve Got the World on A String
  • One For My Baby
  • Over The Rainbow
  • Stormy Weather
  • That Old Black Magic

Arlen worked with many lyricists through the years, most notably Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer and even Truman Capote. Harburg, for example, wrote the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz songs. Though it’s the lyrics we most remember, it’s the melody that makes a song memorable. That was Arlen.

A trillion, triumphant

Sunday’s New York Times has these comparisons to a trillion (in light of the $2.77 trillion U.S. budget for 2007):

  • Possible hands for one bridge player: 635 billion
  • Stars in the Milky Way: Up to 400 billion
  • Pennies in use: 150 billion
  • All people who ever lived: Perhaps 100 billion
  • Acres of land on earth: 37 billion

Best line of the day, so far

“As the story of the weekend’s bizarre hunting accident is wrenched out of the White House, the picture isn’t pretty: With American soldiers dying in Iraq, Five-Deferment Dick ‘I Had Other Priorities in the 60’s Than Military Service’ Cheney gets his macho kicks gunning down little birds and the occasional old man while W. rides his bike, blissfully oblivious to any collateral damage. Shouldn’t these guys work on weekends until we figure out how to fix Iraq, New Orleans, Medicare and gas prices?”

Maureen Dowd [emphasis added]

The Kiss of Life

Since it’s Valentine’s Day, let’s dwell for a moment on the profoundly bizarre activity of kissing. Is there a more expressive gesture in the human repertoire?

When parents kiss their children it means one thing, but when they kiss each other it means something entirely different. People will greet a total stranger with a kiss on the cheek, and then use an identical gesture to express their most intimate feelings to a lover. The mob kingpin gives the kiss of death, Catholics give the “kiss of peace,” Jews kiss the Torah, nervous flyers kiss the ground, and the enraged sometimes demand that a kiss be applied to their hindquarters. Judas kissed Jesus, Madonna kissed Britney, a gambler kisses the dice for luck. Someone once even kissed a car for 54 hours straight.

From the beginning of an op-ed article about the kiss in The New York Times

Key quote: “The German language has words for 30 different kinds of kisses, including nachküssen, which is defined as a kiss ‘making up for kisses that have been omitted.'”

Cowboys Are Frequently Secretly (Fond of Each Other)

There’s many a strange impulse out on the plains of West Texas
There’s many a young boy who feels things he don’t comprehend
Well, the small town don’t like it when somebody falls between sexes
No, the small town don’t like it when a cowboy has feelings for men.

Now I believe to my soul that inside every man there’s the feminine
And inside every lady there’s a deep manly voice loud and clear
Well the cowboy may brag about things that he does with his women
But the ones that brag loudest are the ones who are most likely queer.

Sung by Willie Nelson; written (in 1981) by Ned Sublette. Recording released today; available at iTunes.

Pretty much explains everything

1. HER DIARY

Tonight I thought he was acting weird.

We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment. Conversation wasn’t flowing so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed but he kept quiet and absent. I asked him what was wrong; he said nothing. I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said it had nothing to do with me and not to worry.

On the way home I told him that I loved him, he simply smiled and kept driving. I can’t explain his behavior. I don’t know why he didn’t say I love you too. When we got home I felt as if I had lost him, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there and watched T.V. He seemed distant and absent.

Finally, I decided to go to bed. About 10 minutes later he came to bed, and to my surprise he responded to my caress and we made love, but I still felt that he was distracted and his thoughts were somewhere else.

He fell asleep – I cried. I don’t know what to do. I’m almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

2. HIS DIARY

I shot the worst round of golf in my life today, but at least I got laid.

Found at Andrew Tobias – Money and Other Subjects