TicketsNow.com, which connects ticket buyers and sellers, advertised Monday a 40-person luxury suite on the [Super Bowl] 40-yard-line for — are you sitting? — $261,000. Another Web site priced a box at $315,000. The median home price in the Detroit area last year was about $169,000.
Author: NewMexiKen
How to Get Great Sleep
A good, informative, useful report on How to Get Great Sleep from Psychology Today. Some key points:
Experts generally apply the “30-30 rule”: It’s insomnia if it takes you 30 minutes or more to fall asleep or if you’re awake for 30 or more minutes during the night — at least three times a week. No matter how little you sleep, it isn’t insomnia unless your nighttime habits drag you down during the day.
Believe it or not, “You don’t want to sleep like a baby,” says Michael L. Perlis, associate professor of psychiatry and psychology at New York’s University of Rochester and director of the behavioral sleep medicine service there. “You want to sleep like an adolescent.” Babies wake often; they are not yet able to consolidate sleep into one stretch. Adolescents sleep like there’s no tomorrow.
Now you’re even more tired and worried about the consequences of not sleeping than you were the day before — while you’re at your greatest vulnerability to irrational thought. Is this, you worry, the beginning of decrepitude?
Pretty soon, this self-defeating cycle takes on a life of its own. Under the influence of anxiety, your brain learns very quickly, without your knowledge or consent, to associate the bedroom with wakefulness. You lie down to rest and your brain goes on high alert. “It has been shown that people who have difficulty falling asleep are supersensitive to bedroom-related stimuli,” explains Perlis. “They become physiologically aroused in the bedroom environment” — their nervous system switches on just when they want it to calm down.
It’s the psychophysiologic equivalent of the perfect storm….
Where Albertson’s Failed
Interesting commentary on food shopping from Emily Esterson at New West Network. Albertson’s, one of just three “regular” grocery chains in Albuquerque, was sold yesterday to SuperValu (which I’d never even heard of).
Key quote from Esterson: “Wal-Mart was just as crowded and slow. The prices only marginally better on certain items, and the food, well, sort of franken-foodish in its cheerful coats of wax and cellophane.”
Second key quote: “Drive 30 miles to Whole Paycheck. Deal with the prices at Wild Oats (and make a second stop for toilet paper, paper towels and dog food?). We don’t have the income to spend $5 on organic carrots, or $9.99 for a pound of ranch-raised organic beef.”
It’s like ‘Teen Wolf’ sprung to life
From ESPN’s Bill Simmons, an excerpt:
Like many NBA junkies, I monitor Laker games since Kobe reached “you always need to make sure Kobe isn’t feeling it” status about two months ago, when it became apparent that his team stunk and Phil Jackson was fine with Kobe gunning 35 to 40 times a game. I don’t like the Lakers, and I definitely don’t like Kobe that much (except for the “Black Mamba” gimmick, which delights me to no end). But I enjoy the nightly potential of an ESPN Classic-caliber scoring explosion. It’s a form of basketball that’s never been seen at this level — as I wrote two weeks ago, it’s like “Teen Wolf” sprung to life. Not only is Mamba hogging the ball to a historic degree, just about everyone else on the Lakers seems OK with it. It’s their only chance to win.
(One player seems to be resisting: Poor Lamar Odom, who’s going to bludgeon himself to death with Phil Jackson’s blank clipboard soon. When they’re running the offense in which Odom sets up Kobe from the top of the key and then stands in place like a third base coach, I keep waiting for Odom to rear back and fire line drive baseball passes at Kobe to try to knock him unconscious. Frankly, there’s still time.)
So this has evolved into a unique situation: A Hall of Fame scorer in his absolute prime, stuck with teammates best described as deferential, playing with a chip on his shoulder after his last two seasons were marred by fallout from the Shaq trade and ongoing legal troubles, working with a permanently green light to hoist an ungodly amount of shots (nearly 28 a game). Again, everyone’s OK with it. Which means it’s impossible to determine a ceiling for Kobe Games right now. After the 62-point game against Dallas, when I bemoaned Kobe’s lost chance to make history, hundreds of Lakers fans disagreed. The common theme of the e-mails: “Dude, are you crazy? He’s shooting the ball 40 times a game! There will be plenty of chances for him to go for 80!”
You know what? Good point.
Mozart
In an essay that goes on to discuss nuances in some of Mozart’s music, Terry Teachout has this succinct description of the composer’s life and work:
One might easily put together an anthology of heartfelt tributes to Mozart’s music, were it not that the result would be so repetitious. Suffice it to quote Aaron Copland, writing in 1956 on the occasion of the Mozart bicentenary:
[W]e can pore over him, dissect him, marvel or carp at him. But in the end there remains something that will not be seized. That is why, each time a Mozart work begins . . . we composers listen with a certain awe and wonder, not unmixed with despair. The wonder we share with everyone; the despair comes from the realization that only this one man at this one moment in musical history could have created works that seem so effortless and so close to perfection.Some part of Copland’s wonder, of course, must have stemmed from the fact that its object was a child prodigy without formal education who wrote his first symphony at the age of nine and his last one a mere 23 years later, not long before his early death. All prodigies are by definition interesting, but in Mozart’s case the interest is heightened by the fact that he not only died young but left behind an oeuvre so extensive and all-encompassing that it might as well have been the work of a fully mature composer who died at sixty, or even eighty.
In addition, though, there is the still greater puzzle of the apparent incongruity between Mozart’s music and his personality. Forget the foul-mouthed idiot savant of Peter Shaffer’s movie Amadeus (1984); the real Mozart is elusive enough without benefit of caricature. “It is impossible,” wrote the great English musicologist Sir Donald Francis Tovey, “to exaggerate the depth and power of Mozart’s thought.” Yet Karoline Pichler, who knew him socially, described a man “in whose personal intercourse there was absolutely no other sign of unusual power of intellect and almost no trace of intellectual culture, nor of any scholarly or other higher interests.” His surviving letters paint a similarly inexplicable portrait of a likable, lively-minded lightweight.
The gap between man and artist is so vast, in fact, that one half-wonders why some ragtag band of ardent pseudo-scholars has not come along to claim that the music of “the man from Salzburg” was really written by a more cultivated and better situated contemporary.
The 250th anniversary of Mozart’s birth is Friday, January 27.
Preserving a Grand Landscape in New Mexico
NewMexiKen first posted this item two years ago today. The link to the Times still works, and I’ve posted about Valles Caldera twice recently, so I thought I’d include it again today.
The most sublime place described in this Sunday’s New York Times Travel Section is, of course, in New Mexico.
Less than four years ago, Congress paid $101 million to buy an 89,000-acre ranch in northern New Mexico of such grandeur and scientific richness it’s been called the Yellowstone of the Southwest. The nation’s backpacking cognoscenti laced up their hiking boots in anticipation. Here, finally, was the chance to tramp across a landscape so iconic of the American West that it appeared for years in Marlboro Man ads and on Stetson hatboxes.
Then the government promptly locked the gates. Managers of the newly renamed Valles Caldera National Preserve needed time to create a plan to safeguard the place from the surge of interest that was sure to come.
(When a few “sneak peek” hikes were announced in September 2000, 50,000 people telephoned in one day to snare the 1,500 spots.) But the managers also needed time to digest the mandate Congress had handed them. The preserve is “an experiment in land management” that is run neither by the Forest Service nor the National Park Service but by a trust that is governed by presidential appointees. Valles Caldera is to remain a working ranch while also protecting the environment and accommodating hikers, hunters and other users. As if that wasn’t challenging enough, Congress asked the preserve to try to become financially self-sufficient by 2015, whether by charging fees for cattle grazing and recreation or perhaps even permitting some logging. It is a complex, at times contradictory charge and one that makes Valles Caldera a good symbol of the many issues the nation’s public lands grapple with today….
Some of the West’s great vistas thrust themselves on you with a beauty that is almost oppressive. Valles Caldera is not one of these places. Beyond the windshield, steamship clouds dragged their shadows across Valle Grande, a treeless, harvest-colored valley that ran to a horizon of ponderosa and green peaks. A bull elk lounged in the valley with his harem, his chandelier of a rack rising above the grama grass. This is not the awe-demanding West of Albert Bierstadt but the welcoming West of an Aaron Copland score – a big-hearted landscape, heroic, promising, completely American. Seeing it, you realize that you know Valles Caldera from billboards and ads and untold westerns. You feel at home.
Aztec Ruins National Monument (New Mexico)
… was established on this date in 1923.
Around 1100 A.D. ancient peoples embarked on an ambitious building project along the Animas River in northwestern New Mexico. Work gangs excavated, filled, and leveled more than two and a half acres of land. Masons laid out sandstone blocks in intricate patterns to form massive stone walls. Wood-workers cut and carried heavy log beams from mountain forests tens of miles away. In less than three decades they built a monumental “great house” three-stories high, longer than a football field, with perhaps 500-rooms including a ceremonial “great kiva” over 41-feet in diameter.
A short trail winds through this massive site offering a surprisingly intimate experience. Along the way visitors discover roofs built 880 years ago, original plaster walls, a reed mat left by the inhabitants, intriguing “T” shaped doorways, provocative north-facing corner doors, and more. The trail culminates with the reconstructed great kiva, a building that inherently inspires contemplation, wonder, and an ancient sense of sacredness.
Blast off
It took the spacecraft just nine hours to pass the moon. That baby was moving (75,000 kmh).
Click image to enlarge and learn more.
Exercise
NewMexiKen has seen so many studies and articles over the years recommending exercise as important to good health that I’m beginning to think there might be something to it.
Anyone have any personal experience with this approach?
Oscar Predictions
The Oscar® Igloo updates its predictions.
Current top films:
Brokeback Mountain
Good Night, And Good Luck
Crash
Walk the Line
Capote
And don’t count out:
The Constant Gardener
Munich
A History of Violence
Oh, and Reese Witherspoon — “Simply unstoppable.”
Another Fine Mess
If Go Fug Yourself doesn’t do it for you, how about a pair of mugging mug shots from The Smoking Gun?
Fug
How about a good Go Fug Yourself laugh?
George Washington Birthplace National Monument (Virginia)
… was established on this date in 1930.
Located in the Northern Neck of Virginia, 38 miles east of Fredericksburg on Virginia Route 3, George Washington Birthplace National Monument preserves the heart of Augustine Washington’s plantation, the 17th century homesite of the immigrant John Washington, and the Washington Family Burial Ground.
George Washington’s Birthplace contains a Memorial House and dependencies constructed in 1931 near the site of the original Washington home. Here, in the peace and beauty of this place untouched by time, the staunch character of our hero comes to the imagination.
Kobe! Kobe!
Well, NewMexiKen yammered when Kobe went out of a game with 62 points, so let’s send him some basketball love. This is from the Lakers Blog:
When Brian Cook and Kobe Bryant combine for 83 points, there’s not much the opposition can do.
Down 14 at the half, Kobe took a potentially season crushing loss at home to the Raptors and turned it into a 122-104 win… and history. 81 points, the second highest total in NBA history behind only Wilt Chamberlain’s 100 in ’62. 55 in the second half, before leaving to a standing ovation and a hug for Phil Jackson with 4.2 seconds left, capping a performance that even he couldn’t have dreamed up. And unlike 62 (you remember 62, right?), this time Kobe wasn’t coming out of the game. Sam Mitchell tried every defense he could think of, but none of them helped as Kobe took a game the Raptors had in hand and made it his. The explosion took (some) of the sting away from the ending of his consecutive free throw streak at 62. To cap off the evening? How about a call from Magic?
There may be critics of 81 (don’t know who yet), but they’re misguided, says Dan Wetzel of Yahoo! Sports. Kobe is rewriting the rules of what’s possible, even if it means overshadowing NFL championship Sunday — no easy feat. Exact comparisons to Chamberlain are tough to make, but it’s very possible Kobe’s feat was more impressive.
Either way, save the box score. It’s a keeper.
Edouard Manet
was born on this date in 1832. The following is from an exhibition at the National Gallery of Art — Edouard Manet and His Influence:
It is hard to image a time when Paris was without broad, tree-lined streets or when the life of the city did not interest French artists. Yet this was the case in 1850 when Edouard Manet began to study painting. Young artists could expect to succeed only through the official Academy exhibitions known as Salons, whose conservative juries favored biblical and mythological themes and a polished technique. Within twenty-five years, however, both Paris and painting had a new look. Urban renovations had opened the wide avenues and parks we know today, and painting was transformed when artists abandoned the transparent glazes and blended brushtrokes of the past and turned their attention to life around them. Contemporary urban subjects and a bold style, which offered paint on the canvas as something to be admired in itself, gave their art a strong new sense of the present.
…
Several artists had begun to challenge the stale conventions of the Academy when Manet’s Olympia (now at the Musée d’Orsay, Paris) was accepted for the Salon in 1865. Never had a work caused such scandal. Critics advised pregnant women to avoid the picture, and it was rehung to thwart vandals. Viewers were not used to the painting’s flat space and shallow volumes. To many, Manet’s “color patches” appeared unfinished. Even more shocking was the frank honesty of his courtesan: it was her boldness, not her nudity, that offended. Her languid pose copied a Titian Venus, but Manet did not cloak her with mythology. She is not a remote goddess but emphatically in the present, easily recognized among the demimonde of prostitutes and dancehalls. In Olympia’s steady gaze there is no apology for sensuality and, for uncomfortable viewers, no escaping her “reality.”
Manet’s succès de scandale made him a leader of the avant-garde. In the evenings at the Café Guerbois, near his studio, he was joined by writers and artists, including Monet, Bazille, and others who would go on to organize the first impressionist exhibition. Manet’s embrace of what the poet Charles Baudelaire termed the “heroism of modern life” and his bold manner with paint inspired the future impressionists, though Manet never exhibited with them.
It’s the birthday
… of actress Jeanne Moreau. She’s 78. Moreau is best known for French New Wave films Jules and Jim (1962) and The Bride Wore Black (1968). Roger Ebert:
This is ridiculous, I told myself. You’ve interviewed Ingmar Bergman. Robert Mitchum. John Wayne. You got through those okay. Why should you be scared of Jeanne Moreau? Simply because she’s the greatest movie actress of the last 20 years? Simply because she’s made more good films for great directors than anybody else? Simply because something in her face and manner has fascinated you since you sat through “Jules and Jim” twice in a row? She’s only human; it’s not like she’s a goddess.
But I suspected that she was.
… of Mariska Hargitay. Jayne Mansfield’s daughter is 42. (She was in the car when her mother was killed in 1967.) Ms. Hargitay plays Detective Olivia Benson on Law & Order: Special Victims Unit.
It’s the birthday of Humphrey Bogart, born on this day in 1899. Bogart was nominated for the best actor Oscar for Casablanca, The Caine Mutiny and The African Queen; he won for The African Queen. According to The Writer’s Almanac:
[Bogart] was expelled from Massachusetts’ Phillips Academy and immediately joined the Navy to fight in World War I, serving as a ship’s gunner. One day, while roughhousing on the ship’s wooden stairway, he tripped and fell, and a splinter became lodged in his upper lip; the result was a scar, as well as partial paralysis of the lip, resulting in the tight-set mouth and lisp that became one of his most distinctive onscreen qualities.
And, born on this date in 1910, was Django Reinhardt. the first significant jazz figure in Europe — and the most influential European in jazz to this day. Play Jazz Guitar.com has some interesting background:
A violinist first and a guitarist later, Jean Baptiste “Django” Reinhardt grew up in a gypsy camp near Paris where he absorbed the gypsy strain into his music. A disastrous caravan fire in 1928 badly burned his left hand, depriving him of the use of the fourth and fifth fingers, but the resourceful Reinhardt figured out a novel fingering system to get around the problem that probably accounts for some of the originality of his style. According to one story, during his recovery period, Reinhardt was introduced to American jazz when he found a 78 RPM disc of Louis Armstrong’s “Dallas Blues” at an Orleans flea market. He then resumed his career playing in Parisian cafes until one day in 1934 when Hot Club chief Pierre Nourry proposed the idea of an all-string band to Reinhardt and Grappelli. Thus was born the Quintet of the Hot Club of France, which quickly became an international draw thanks to a long, splendid series of Ultraphone, Decca and HMV recordings.
The Red Hot Jazz Archive has some on-line recordings of the Quintette of the Hot Club of France.
The Bloggies
You won’t find NewMexiKen or any of the fine blogs I nominated among the finalists (sigh), but take a look anyway — and vote for your favorites — for the Sixth Annual Weblog Awards — the Bloggies.
In fairness
… I have to update an earlier entry and say that after my third call Comcast was responsive, sent out a technician Sunday afternoon who ultimately replaced my five-year-old cable modem. All’s well that ends well. They did good.
Timmy, Timmy
Bloggers are noting that today on Meet the Press Tim Russert asked U.S. Senator Barack Obama about a remark a private citizen, Harry Belafonte, had made.
Once before he asked a guest about a remark Harry Belafonte had made. That time he asked Colin Powell.
Some thoughts while watching Seattle win
Hurrah for the Seahawks for not pouring Gatorade on their winning coach. It’s a tradition that is old and tired and trite.
Baseball or football, sportscaster Joe Buck never knew a stat or piece of trivia his mouth couldn’t use,
Coaches chewing gum with their mouth open deserve to lose.
The Peyton Manning commercial is one of the best ads ever.
Crash
Simply awesome film.
Matt Dillon is superb. But everyone else is, too. As Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen put it, “I thought the performances, right down the line, were as good as in any movie I’ve ever seen.”
More after I watch it again: Crash.
After watching the Steelers beat the Broncos
… I have only one question.
How come my grandfather didn’t buy an NFL franchise in 1936 for $2500?
(As Steelers president Art Rooney II’s grandfather did.)
Lord Byron
It’s the birthday of romantic poet Lord Byron, born George Gordon Noel in Aberdeen, Scotland (1788). Byron was the product of his father’s second marriage. His father, nicknamed “Mad Jack,” struggled with debt, made his living by seducing rich women, and may have killed his first wife, though he was never charged with the crime.
In 1809 Lord Byron traveled to the Eastern Mediterranean and kept a diary of his adventures and exploits. While traveling in Albania, he let a friend read the diary, and his friend persuaded him to burn it. He rewrote the story of his travels as a partially fictionalized book-length poem called Child Harold’s Pilgrimage (1812). The book made Byron one of the most popular poets of his time.
He was also an outspoken politician in the House of Lords. In 1812, workers in the weaving industry were rioting and destroying machinery in Nottinghamshire because of poor wages and working conditions. The Tories introduced a bill to punish the destruction of weaving machinery by death. Byron fiercely opposed the bill, speaking on behalf of workers’ rights, and published a poem on the topic that said, in part, “Some folks for certain have thought it was shocking,/When Famine appeals, and when Poverty groans,/That life should be valued at less than a stocking,/And breaking of frames lead to breaking of bones.”
Byron wrote many more books of poetry, including Don Juan (1819), and lived a life of controversy and excess. When he died at age 36, several interested parties burned his unpublished memoirs before he’d even been buried.
A little provocative thinking for Sunday
The New York Times Magazine has some Questions for Daniel C. Dennett, a longtime professor of philosophy at Tufts University, who has written a book promoting the idea that religious devotion is a function of biology. Two of the interview exchanges:
So what can you tell us about God?
Certainly the idea of a God that can answer prayers and whom you can talk to, and who intervenes in the world – that’s a hopeless idea. There is no such thing.
Yet faith, by definition, means believing in something whose existence cannot be proved scientifically. If we knew for sure that God existed, it would not require a leap of faith to believe in him.
Isn’t it interesting that you want to take that leap? Why do you want to take that leap? Why does our craving for God persist? It may be that we need it for something. It may be that we don’t need it, and it is left over from something that we used to be. There are lots of biological possibilities.
States Step Up Fight on Abortion
Alito isn’t even on the Court yet and the Los Angeles Times has a report showing that the fight is already underway. The article begins:
Taking direct aim at Roe vs. Wade, lawmakers from several states are proposing broad restrictions on abortion, with the goal of forcing the U.S. Supreme Court — once it has a second new justice — to revisit the landmark ruling issued 33 years ago today.
The bill under consideration in Indiana would ban all abortions, except when continuing the pregnancy would threaten the woman’s life or put her physical health in danger of “substantial permanent impairment.” Similar legislation is pending in Ohio, Georgia and Tennessee.
Today is the 33rd anniversary of Roe v. Wade.