Author: NewMexiKen

Nora’s Avon Walk for Breast Cancer

Nora, official good friend of NewMexiKen, is participating in this year’s Avon Walk for Breast Cancer. Nora tells us:

To do this, I need your help and the help of many others, and I’m hoping that I can count on you to be part of my support team.

Any donation you make will go to the Avon Foundation Breast Cancer Crusade and support its mission of providing access to care and finding a cure. And if you’re ever in the Denver area, it’s worth touring the Anschutz Cancer Pavilion — you can see where your donations are going.

Visit Nora’s Page to learn more — to see a great photo of Nora — and to contribute what you can to this important cause.

And, other bloggers, please considering linking your blog to Nora’s page.

A billion people watching

Not on this planet. Oscarbeat by Steve Pond takes a serious look at the numbers. Two excerpts:

In the current issue of Sports Illustrated, columnist Steve Rushin nicely dismantles the billion figure as it applies to the Super Bowl. It turns out a media research firm measured the worldwide audience for last year’s game and came up with a figure of 93 million, only about 2 million of them from outside North America.

The U.S. audience for the Oscars was 42.1 million last year, though it’s been significantly higher in years past. In the rest of the world, the telecast begins at inconvenient hours (5:00 p.m. in Los Angeles is 1:00 a.m. in England) or tape-delayed and presented in an edited form after the winners are already known.

What he said

But there are two cities in America where there simply should not be a band imported to play at a quintessential American event, which is how the NFL packages the Super Bowl: Nashville and Detroit.

A whole lot of folks here were upset over the Stones being picked to play when Detroit has an unparalleled and historic stable of artists across the music spectrum. The two things associated with Detroit are cars and music, yet the NFL favored a European band, meaning the league passed on all of Motown, not to mention locals such as Madonna, Anita Baker, Eminem and Kid Rock.

The great Smokey Robinson performed across the street from Ford Field on Friday night, so chances are he was available. And if Aretha Franklin and Stevie Wonder can do pregame and the national anthem, then why not reward them with the honor of doing the big show? Seeing Aretha perform in Detroit is, for some of us, the equivalent of seeing Frank Sinatra perform in New York or Michael Jordan perform in Chicago.

It makes me wonder if some artists, particularly in the R&B tradition, are being forced to pay for Janet Jackson’s wardrobe malfunction from a couple of years ago.

Michael WIlbon

OK Amazon, which is it?

NewMexiKen received this response after notifying Amazon that a rebate input page was not accepting my data:

I’m sorry to hear about the system error you experienced that prevented you from entering your rebate information.

We are aware of this issue, and our developers are working on a resolution. Often these errors are corrected after only a short time, so please try again after one week.

Again, I apologize for this inconvenience. Thank you for shopping at Amazon.com.

Note: If after two days you are still experiencing the same problem, please use the link below to e-mail us so we can investigate further: [Emphasis added.]

One week? Two days? After the cutoff date for submitting the rebate?

The other woman in King’s life

Martin Luther King Jr. biographer David J. Garrow writes in the Los Angeles Times:

Just moments after the news of Coretta Scott King’s death, the first inquiring e-mail arrived: How long would it be before the woman some King scholars have for years privately thought of as “the other wife” either stepped forward or was identified by some unprincipled news outlet?

Her story is not exactly secret; it’s one that was known to dozens if not hundreds of people even before Martin Luther King Jr.’s tragic assassination on April 4, 1968. A number of biographers and historians (myself included) have met and interviewed her, and several have made reference to her. But although she was his most important emotional companion during the last five years of his life, her identity has remained hidden for even longer than that of Watergate’s “Deep Throat.”

Garrow continues.

Moving In for the Kill With Montana’s Buffalo Hunters

A good, fairly even-handed report on buffalo hunting in Montana from the Los Angeles Times. It begins:

GALLATIN NATIONAL FOREST, Mont. — Boots crunching on iced-over snow, Jeff Vader creeps toward two animals from the world’s last wild herd of pure buffalo.

The normally chatty 50-year-old crouches behind a cluster of juniper trees and puts a finger to his lips. The four men behind him fall mute. Vader lies on his belly, points his rifle at the biggest bull and becomes part of a contentious experiment in controlling an icon of the American West.

And includes this:

Vader and his hunting buddies have thought long and hard about these issues: Is it sporting to stalk a creature that is so oblivious to danger that, 125 years ago, millions were slaughtered by gunmen who could ride right into herds?

Buffalo, also known as bison, are found throughout the West but mostly live on ranches and are largely descended from cross-breeding with cattle. The Yellowstone herd is among the few herds that have no cross-breeding in their lineages and the only one that roams wild.

It’s the birthday

… of actor-comedian Red Buttons. He’s 87.

… of priest-professor-author Andrew M. Greeley. He’s 78.

… of baseball hall-of-famer Hank Aaron. Henry is 72.

… of singer-songwriter Barrett Strong. He’s 65. “Money (That’s What I Want)” was Strong’s only hit as a singer. The record provided Berry Gordon the capital to expand into Motown. With Norman Whitfield, Strong authored “I Heard It Through the Grapevine,” “Too Busy Thinking About My Baby,” “Papa Was a Rolling Stone,” “Ball of Confusion,” and “War.”

… of football hall-of-famer Roger Staubach. Jolly Roger is 64.

… of rock musician Al Kooper. If for nothing else, Kooper is known for playing the organ on Dylan’s “Like a Rolling Stone.” He’s 62.

… of actress Barbara Hershey. She’s 58.

… of actress Jennifer Jason Leigh. She’s 44.

Build an ark (for real)

Debby, official youngest sister of NewMexiKen, writes to report that Astoria, Oregon, had a record 24.10 inches of rain in January and 58.88 inches since October 1.

Astoria had 2.91 inches of rain on January 5.

Albuquerque hasn’t had 2.91 inches cumulative rainfall in nearly five months (since September 9, 2005).

Yalta

Big Three

It was on this day in 1945 that the Yalta Conference began, during which President Franklin D. Roosevelt of the United States, Prime Minister Winston Churchill of Great Britain, and Premier Joseph Stalin of the Soviet Union met to plan the final defeat and occupation of Nazi Germany. It took eight days and nights hashing out the future of the world. The meeting was totally secret with no news reporters allowed and there were no leaks to the press of anything that went on there.

At the time, Roosevelt and Churchill believed that they had to persuade Stalin to help fight against the Japanese and they also wanted him to help establish the United Nations. So they were willing to make the concession that he could continue to occupy Eastern Europe as long as he allowed free elections there.

Roosevelt’s health was failing at the time. He died of a stroke a little more than two months after the Yalta Conference. Some historians have suggested that Roosevelt’s health ruined his ability to negotiate effectively but others have argued that Stalin just had the better hand. He had effectively won the war on the Eastern Front with Germany and Roosevelt and Churchill desperately needed his help.

After the conference Stalin completely ignored his commitment to democracy and installed Communist Party dictatorships in Poland, Hungary, East Germany, Bulgaria, Yugoslavia and Albania, and the Cold War began.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

It’s the birthday

… of Byron Nelson. The hall-of-fame golfer is 94.

… of Betty Friedan. The feminist leader is 85. [Update: Friedan died Saturday, her birthday.]

… of Conrad Bain. The actor (Maude, Diff’rent Strokes) is 83.

… of John Steel. The Animals drummer (and therefore Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee) is 65.

… of David Brenner. The comedian is 61 today.

… of Dan Quayle. The former VP is 59.

… of Alice Cooper. The rocker is 58.

… of Lawrence Taylor. The NFL hall-of-famer is 47.

… of Clint Black. The country music star is 43.

Ain’t it funny how a melody can bring back a memory,
Take you to another place and time,
Completely change your state of mind.

It’s also the birthday of Rosa Parks. The soul of the civil rights movement was born on this date in 1913.

Charles Lindbergh was born on this date in 1902.

And George Washington was elected the first President of the United States on this date in 1789 when all 69 electors voting cast their ballot for him. John Adams was second with 34, becoming Vice President. (Each elector had two votes.)

Erin Brockovich

Pacific Gas and Electric on Friday agreed to pay $295 million to settle claims by more than 1,000 residents in several Mojave Desert towns who said they were harmed by groundwater contamination, a case made famous by the film “Erin Brockovich.”

As part of the settlement, the utility apologized to affected residents in the towns where leaks from gas compressor plants in the 1950s through the 1970s polluted the groundwater basin with chromium.

Los Angeles Times

An even better joke

This one posted by Eric Alterman:

President Bush was scheduled to worship at a small Methodist Church outside Washington, D.C. as part of Karl Rove’s campaign to reverse Bush’s rapidly deteriorating approval ratings. A week before the visit, Rove called on the Methodist Bishop who was scheduled to preach on the chosen Sunday. “As you know, Bishop,” began Rove, “we’ve been getting a lot of bad publicity among Methodists because of the president’s position on stem cell research and the like. We’d gladly arrange for Jack Abramoff’s friends to make a contribution of $100,000 to the church if during your sermon you would say that President Bush is a saint.”

The Bishop thought about it for a few minutes, and finally said, “This parish is in rather desperate need of funds … I’ll agree to do it.”

The following Sunday, Bush pompously showed up for the photo op, looking especially smug even while attempting to appear pious.

After making a few announcements, the Bishop began his homily: “George W. Bush is a petty, vindictive, sanctimonious hypocrite and a nitwit. He is a liar, a cheat, and a low-intelligence weasel with the world’s largest chip on his shoulder. He used every dirty election trick in the book and still lost, but his toadies in the Supreme Court appointed him. He lied about his military record in which he used special privilege to avoid combat, and then had the gall to dress up and pose on an aircraft carrier before a banner stating “Mission Accomplished.” He invaded a sovereign country for oil and war profiteering, turning Iraq into a training ground for terrorists who would destroy our country. He continues to confuse the American people by insisting on a nonexistent connection between the horrors of 9/11 and the reason he started his war in Iraq. He routinely appoints incompetent and unqualified cronies to high-level federal government positions and as a result, hundreds and hundreds of Americans died tragically in New Orleans. He lets corporate polluters despoil God’s creation and doom our planet. He uses fear-mongering to justify warrantless spying on American citizens, in clear violation of our Constitution. He is so psychotic and megalomaniacal that he believes that he was chosen by God. He is the worst example of a Methodist I have ever personally known. But compared to Dick Cheney and Karl Rove and the rest of the evil fascist bastards in this administration, George W. Bush is a saint.

Culture’s magnetic forces

From an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Not so long ago it seemed as if we all spoke the same pop-culture language. But in an era of 500 TV channels, billions of Web pages, unlimited Netflix rentals, and iPods with music libraries of Smithsonian proportions, popular entertainment has suddenly become mind-bogglingly vast. As the overlap between what we all watch, read, and listen to steadily erodes, the water cooler has become a modern-day tower of Babel, where conversations sound like the jumbled voices emanating from the jungle in “Lost.” (If that reference is lost on you then, well, Q.E.D.)

In decades past, major pop-culture moments – the ones that everybody experienced at the same time – acted as an intangible glue that bound us together. “There’s a ‘we’ in all of those; the unum of the pluribus,” says Tim Burke, a cultural historian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “It’s harder to get those things as the media fragments.”

Which makes Sunday’s Super Bowl all the more remarkable.

“It’s the largest national event, at least in terms of people doing a common thing at one time in American culture,” says Mark Dyreson, a Pennsylvania State University professor who co-wrote the chapter “Super Bowl Sunday: A New American Holiday?” for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Holidays.

That got us thinking: Which other pop-culture phenomena still bind us together? After days of argument, research, fact-checking, and multiple rounds of voting – a process as rigorous as a “CSI” forensics test – the staff here at Weekend came up with a highly subjective, nonscientific list of 10 things that act as common denominators.

Go read about the 10.

Pretty good joke

An English major was being released from prison. The nice looking female clerk was about to give him the $100.00 they give to all released prisoners. Since the inmate had not had female attention for a long time, he suggested that she could keep the money if she would have sex with him. He was immediately rearrested and thrown back into jail. Everybody knows you should never end a sentence with a proposition.

A Prairie Home Companion: Pretty Good Jokes

Flags at half-staff

Flags are at half-staff in various states to honor Coretta Scott King.

NewMexiKen isn’t sure what law authorizes this, but it seems fitting.

Among the states (and cities) honoring Mrs. King in this way are New Mexico, Georgia, Oklahoma, South Carolina, Rochester (N.Y.).

N.M. Governor Richardson’s Executive Order mistakenly says Mrs. King died in Atlanta. She died at a clinic in Mexico.