Author: NewMexiKen

U.S. Royalty Plan to Give Windfall to Oil Companies

From The New York Times:

The federal government is on the verge of one of the biggest giveaways of oil and gas in American history, worth an estimated $7 billion over five years.

New projections, buried in the Interior Department’s just-published budget plan, anticipate that the government will let companies pump about $65 billion worth of oil and natural gas from federal territory over the next five years without paying any royalties to the government.Based on the administration figures, the government will give up more than $7 billion in payments between now and 2011. The companies are expected to get the largess, known as royalty relief, even though the administration assumes that oil prices will remain above $50 a barrel throughout that period.

The royalty relief stems from a time 10 years ago when oil was $10 a barrel (it was a mis-guided effort to encourage production and consumption if you ask me). But do you think Congress will react to the changing times? I doubt it. Providing “relief” to that poor Exxon Mobil company is more important, I guess.

Grocery shopping? Take your rubber gloves!

According to a Reuters report via Yahoo! News, grocery shopping cart handles are among the most bacteria infested items we come in contact with in daily life.

You know the handles, the ones little kids in the baby seat sometimes gum when they are teething.

And this from MSNBC.com about a science project:

The 12-year-old compared the ice used in the drinks with the water from toilet bowls in the same restaurants. Jasmine said she found the results startling.

“I thought there might be a little bacteria in the ice, but I never expected it to be this much,” she said. “And I never thought the toilet water would be cleaner.”

Her discovery: Seventy percent of the time, the ice had more bacteria than the toilet water.

Thanks to Dwight Perry for the pointer.

White House Slow to Reveal Burr-Hamilton Duel

Joel Achenbach takes aim at the other time a Vice President shot someone. An excerpt:

So Burr called him out. They would settle the matter like gentleman, face to face, with pistols. Complicating matters was that Hamilton had declared an aversion to shedding blood in private combat and insisted that he would “waste” his shot, intentionally missing Burr. Was this suicidal? Henry Adams and various psychobiographers have argued just that: Hamilton was depressed and wanted to die. [New theory: Texas billionaire intentionally lunged into Cheney’s line of fire.] Hamilton wouldn’t practice with a pistol, while Burr practiced regularly. It was going to be a slaughter.

‘People write absolutely, incredibly stupid things in…e-mails’

According to recent research published in the Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, I’ve only a 50-50 chance of ascertaining the tone of any e-mail message. The study also shows that people think they’ve correctly interpreted the tone of e-mails they receive 90 percent of the time.

From Wired News, which has details.

Key quote: “‘People often think the tone or emotion in their messages is obvious because they “hear” the tone they intend in their head as they write….'”

Of course, not many of you get to discuss you emails from the witness chair in federal court, as NewMexiKen has. That’s always fun.

Massacre Valentine’s Day

St. Valentine was supposedly a martyred 3rd century priest, not a shill for the flower industry or a marketing genius for a certain Kansas City, Mo., greeting-card titan. Still, with all due respect to his martyrdom, we think it’s high time the holiday bearing his name be abolished.

Call us hopeless romantics on this page, but we find that true love is overwhelming, irrepressible and spontaneous. Romance shouldn’t be confined to a particular day; nor need it be triggered by the arrival of Feb. 14. Compulsory love is an oxymoron.

Excerpt from a Los Angeles Times editorial

Canyon De Chelly National Monument (Arizona)

… was authorized on this date in 1931.

Petroglyphs

Reflecting one of the longest continuously inhabited landscapes of North America, the cultural resources of Canyon de Chelly–including distinctive architecture, artifacts, and rock imagery–exhibit remarkable preservational integrity that provides outstanding opportunities for study and contemplation. Canyon de Chelly also sustains a living community of Navajo people, who are connected to a landscape of great historical and spiritual significance–a landscape composed of places infused with collective memory.

Canyon de Chelly is unique among National Park service units, as it is comprised entirely of Navajo Tribal Trust Land that remains home to the canyon community. NPS works in partnership with the Navajo Nation to manage park resources and sustain the living Navajo community.

Canyon De Chelly National Monument

The Daily Show

The Daily Show covered the Cheney shooting story as only it could, including this:

Rob Corddry: “Jon, tonight the vice president is standing by his decision to shoot Harry Whittington. According to the best intelligence available, there were quail hidden in the brush. Everyone believed at the time there were quail in the brush. And while the quail turned out to be a 78-year-old man, even knowing that today, Mr. Cheney insists he still would have shot Mr. Whittington in the face. He believes the world is a better place for his spreading buckshot throughout the entire region of Mr. Whittington’s face.”

Crooks and Liars has more quotes and the video from the show.

They Still Are Playing Copycat at Their Age

Brothers Chiang Hock Woo, 48, and Chiang Hock Tew, 46, each got their first holes in one on the same 147-yard hole recently at a country club in Singapore, Bloomberg news service reported. As Hock Tew approached the green, he saw his brother’s ball lodged between the flag and the pin and assumed his ball had gone through the green.

“I peeked into the hole and to my surprise my ball was at the bottom,” said Hock Tew, a 13-handicap.

Morning Briefing, which has more hole-in-one trivia. (The longest recorded is 447-yards.)

It’s the birthday

… of Kim Novak. Madeleine Elster/Judy Barton (Vertigo) and Madge Owens (Picnic) is 73.

… of George Segal. Jack Gallo (Just Shoot Me) and Nick (Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?) is 72.

… of Carol Lynley. Nonnie Parry (The Poseidon Adventure) and Janet Willard (Blue Denim) is 64.

… of Peter Tork of the Monkees. He’s 64.

… of Jerry Springer. He’s 62.

… of Stockard Channing. Abbey Bartlet (West Wing) and Louisa (‘Ouisa’) Kittredge (Six Degrees of Separation) is 62.

… of Mike Krzyzewski. The Duke coach is 59 today.

… of Peter Gabriel. He’s 56.

… of actor Neal McDonough. He’s 40.

So Cheney

… had to be intoxicated, right?

That alone would seem to explain both the accident and the delay in making it public.

Update: Two men hunting with two women not their wives might be another explanation for the delay in reporting.

Excuse me!?

“‘The vice president was concerned,’ said Mary Matalin, a Cheney adviser who spoke with him yesterday morning. ‘He felt badly, obviously. On the other hand, he was not careless or incautious or violate any of the [rules]. He didn’t do anything he wasn’t supposed to do.'” (Washington Post)

So, he was “supposed” to shoot Whittington in the face. Presumably it was an accident. The person with the gun is always responsible for where he shoots.

Talk about spin.

Know your target and what is beyond.
Be absolutely sure you have identified your target beyond any doubt. Equally important, be aware of the area beyond your target. This means observing your prospective area of fire before you shoot. Never fire in a direction in which there are people or any other potential for mishap. Think first. Shoot second. (NRA Gun Safety Rules)

Chuck Yeager

The first person to break the sound barrier is 83 today.

Chuck Yeager broke the sound barrier on October 14, 1947, reportedly with two ribs broken two nights before in a drunken horseback ride. The plane, Glamorous Glennis, is hanging from the Air & Space Museum ceiling. Glennis was Mrs. Yeager.

Yeager is the basis for the character played by Sam Shepard in The Right Stuff. Glennis was played by Barbara Hershey.

In his wonderful book The Right Stuff Tom Wolfe explains that West Virginian Yeager is the reason why all airline pilots talk with a drawl — to be like Yeager, “the most righteous of all the posessors of the right stuff.”

My Peter Benchley story

This Peter Benchley story isn’t about Great White sharks.

Benchley was hired away from Newsweek in 1967 to be a speechwriter for President Lyndon Johnson. The White House speechwriters were used to deadlines, demands and long hours, yet Benchley (in his mid-twenties) worked at a different pace, still finding time for tennis and other pursuits.

As the story was told to me in 1975 by former speechwriter, and then Johnson Library Director Harry Middleton, the writers finally went to Chief of Staff Joseph Califano and insisted he do something about the fact that Benchley was not working as hard as they. One thing lead to another and Califano eventually told Benchley he was fired.

Benchley refused to be fired. He said, “I was hired by the President of the United States, and only the President can fire me.”

Califano went to the President. The timing couldn’t have been worse. Califano had been featured in Time or Newsweek as “the second most powerful man in America.” LBJ told Califano, “You’re the second most powerful man in America, and you can’t even fire a speechwriter.”

As Middleton told it, Califano went back to Benchley, who still refused to be fired. And so it continued. Benchley working less-and-less, but staying adamant that only the President could fire him. LBJ having too much fun with Califano to step in and actually fire Benchley.

Benchley lasted until the end of the Johnson Administration.

I asked Middleton what he thought about Benchley. His reply was that the speechwriters all resented that he was a slacker and that they had to work all the more to take up that slack, but they sure all had to admire his ability to stand up to Califano and Johnson.

RIP Peter Benchley.

Best line of the day, so far

“For all the good things it has brought our society, the Web has also fostered ideological hermits, who only talk to folks who believe exactly what they do. This creates an echo chamber that only further convinces people that they are right, and everyone else is not only wrong, but an idiot or worse. So when an incident like this one arises, it’s not enough to point out an error; they must prove that the error had nefarious origins. In some places on the Web, everything happens on a grassy knoll.”

Jim Brady, executive editor of washingtonpost.com.

(Brady’s column is in play around the internets today, but thanks to John Fleck for highlighting this paragraph for me.)

Arrested for asking for quiet in cinema

An Australian tourist has been charged with assault after telling a Texas woman to stop talking on her mobile phone at the movies.

Pauline Clayton was enjoying a matinee screening of Brokeback Mountain in a Texas cinema when her day suddenly turned ugly.

The former Sunshine Coast councillor said about halfway through the movie, a mobile phone started ringing nearby, a woman answered it and started talking.

“I put one finger up to my mouth to shoosh her,” Ms Clayton said.

“She ignored me – I then leaned across and touched her with three or four fingers on the top of her arm.”

When the “very large” woman failed to end her call, Ms Clayton again touched her on the shoulder and that was when the woman exploded.

Ms Clayton said the woman stood up over her, started shouting expletives at her and then stormed out of the cinema, in the town of Webster, just outside Houston.

A short time later two Texas police officers walked into the cinema and escorted Ms Clayton out.

Both women were charged. Read more.