Author: NewMexiKen

Update on iTunes

Last week NewMexiKen posted that I was holding off on installing the update to iTunes (6.0.2) because it installed software that collected information about the music you were listening to without informing you. They’ve changed it, so that now you are given a choice:

The iTunes MiniStore allows you to discover new music and videos right from your iTunes Library. As you select items in your Library, information about that item is sent to Apple and the MiniStore will send you related songs or videos. Apple does not keep any information related to the contents of your music Library.

Would you like to turn on the MiniStore now?

It’s the birthday

… of Kevin Costner. Costner won the Oscars for director and best picture for Dances With Wolves and was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Lt. John Dunbar. He’s 51 today.

… of Jesse L. Martin. The Law & Order star is 37.

It’s also the birthday of Cary Grant (Archibald Alexander Leach, 1904-1986) and Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminski, 1913-1987).

White Sands National Monument (New Mexico)

… was established by President Herbert Hoover on this date in 1933.

At the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert lies a mountain ringed valley called the Tularosa Basin. Rising from the heart of this basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders – the glistening white sands of New Mexico.

White Sands

Here, great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert and have created the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The brilliant white dunes are ever changing: growing, cresting, then slumping, but always advancing. Slowly but relentlessly the sand, driven by strong southwest winds, covers everything in its path.

White Sands National Monument

Best line of the day, so far

“If the Democrats are like the dithering ‘Desperate Housewives,’ the Republicans have come across like the counterterrorism agent Jack Bauer on ’24’: fast with a gun, loose with the law, willing to torture in the name of protecting the nation. Except Jack Bauer is competent.”

Maureen Dowd, who adds: “How many things do you have to mess up in the country and the world before you lose your reputation for machismo?”

Update: The Daily Howler reminds us who put the skirts on Gore.

Really, you’d have to be drunk to try this stuff

“The Winter Olympics is based on drunken dares,” the comedian [Jon Stewart] once told HBO’s Bob Costas. ” ‘You go down that.’ ‘No man, I’m not going down that.’ ‘You go down that on this.’ ‘All right.’

“That is the whole thing. You think the luge is a sport? It’s not a sport, it is a bet. ‘Here, have a beer, lie like this.’

“Halfpipe? They just came up with that. Just a bunch of guys getting high in the back. ‘What else can we do on snow?’ ‘Halfpipe.’ ”

Sideline Chatter

More Franklinisms (it’s his 300th birthday)

“The use of money is all the advantage there is in having money.”

“He is not well-bred, that cannot bear ill-breeding in others.”

“You may talk to much on the best of subjects.”

And some advice for any number of politicians (especially Joe Biden) in this description from Edmund Morgan’s wonderful Benjamin Franklin:

At any rate, in an age of great public rhetoric, he never made a memorable public speech—not in any political campaign, not in the Philadelphia Common Council, not in the Pennsylvania Assembly, not in the Continental Congress, not in the Constitutional Convention of 1787. He was always Poor Richard, never saying too much in any company, especially very large company. His specialty was listening and then making the right suggestions to the right people at the right time.

Also from Morgan: “Franklin never offended people except intentionally.”

Pulitzer Prize-winning author Stacy Schiff has an interesting piece on Franklin on today’s New York Times op-ed page.

Best line of the day, so far

“When I started designing websites, if the guy on the plane next to me asked what I did, I had to say something like “digital marketing” if I wanted to avoid the uncomprehending stare.

“A few years later, if I told the passenger beside me I was a web designer, he or she would regard me with a reverence typically reserved for Stanley-Cup-winning Nobel Laureate rock stars.”

Jeffrey Zeldman at A List Apart. He goes on to add: “Then the bubble burst, and the same answer to the same question provoked looks of pity and barely concealed disgust.”

Get up, stand up

Older people who exercise three or more times a week are less likely to develop Alzheimer’s disease and other types of dementia, according to a study that adds to the evidence that staying active can help keep the mind sharp.

Researchers found that healthy people who reported exercising regularly had a 30 to 40 percent lower risk of dementia.

The study, published today in the Annals of Internal Medicine, reached no conclusions about whether certain types of exercise helped more than others, but researchers said even light activity, such as walking, seemed to help.

AP via DenverPost.com

NewMexiKen exercised already today — I think. Or maybe not. Hmm, my short term memory isn’t what it used to be.

Link via Wash Park Prophet.

Bush vs. Franklin: The Debate

From Daily Kos: Cheers and Jeers.

Here’s one of the six exchanges between George Bush and Benjamin Franklin (others longer, but better):

Bush: The fact that somebody leaked this program [of illegally spying on Americans without a warrant] causes great harm to the United States. There’s an enemy out there.
Franklin: Any society that would give up a little liberty to gain a little security will deserve neither and lose both.

Best lines of 300 years, so far

Benjamin Franklin:

  • A good conscience is a continual Christmas.
  • All would live long, but none would be old.
  • One today is worth two tomorrows.
  • Do not anticipate trouble, or worry about what may never happen. Keep in the sunlight.
  • Early to bed and early to rise makes a man healthy, wealthy, and wise.
  • Beer is living proof that God loves us and wants us to be happy.
  • Certainty? In this world nothing is certain but death and taxes.
  • Guests, like fish, begin to smell after three days.
  • Many people die at twenty five and aren’t buried until they are seventy five.
  • I should have no objection to go over the same life from its beginning to the end: requesting only the advantage authors have, of correcting in a second edition the faults of the first.
  • If you would not be forgotten, as soon as you are dead and rotten, either write things worth reading, or do things worth the writing.
  • I wake up every morning at nine and grab for the morning paper. Then I look at the obituary page. If my name is not on it, I get up.

Golden Globes

David Carr, Carpetbagger, has some fun stuff from last night’s Golden Globes.

Some samples:

Remember that kid in high school who always threw bashes at his parent’s slamming, giant house, the one with like, 11 different rooms? The drunken fest was always a blast, but it was hard to know where to be. You’d think you were in the cool room, with the crowd everybody wanted to be in with, and then someone would suddenly blow a whistle you could not hear and they were gone, off in another corner of the house. The Globes were like that.

Just then, Ziyi Zhang, who missed out on best actress in a drama, but lit the room in a green frock that even the Bagger recognized as exquisite, was about to leave on the rooftop red carpet. She and Mr. Lee, who both broke through to American audiences five years ago with “Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon,” had a long embrace. The cameras went wild, and then they did it again, seemingly to satisfy the photo hounds, but by the third time, it was obvious that two artists who have traveled far and well were having a moment.

On a night when Drew Barrymore, one of the industry’s eternally young beanie babies, seemed to show her age and other features in a poorly received garment, Reese Witherspoon was a Big Star, in a down-home sort of way….She looked smashing and demurely wrapped the press around her finger. “Tomorrow, it’s back to diapers and carpool, and driving five kids to school. Maybe I’ll put this on the dashboard,” she said backstage. She was a remarkable contrast to her brooding co-star. “That’s what makes them such a magnetic combination,” said director James Mangold….

By the way, the age Drew Barrymore would be showing is 30.

Best line of the day, so far

“At noon today, in a nod to the 120th meeting of the American Historical Association, which has been raising Center City’s tweed factor all week, the National Constitution Center will host three celebratory Ben Franklin biographers: Gordon Wood, Walter Isaacson and Stacy Schiff.

“All three would display posters of Philadelphia’s 300th Birthday Boy on their dorm-room walls if they still had dorm-room walls.”

Carlin Romano in the Philadelphia Inquirer.

Center of gravity

Cory, obviously with a lot of time on his hands, calculates the center of gravity for the Manhattan Starbucks. Go take a look, but here’s the idea:

What does “center of gravity” mean? Well, it means the exact place you can stand in Manhattan and be closest to ALL Starbucks. As if every single Starbucks was pulling you equally in its direction, this is the place where u could stand to feel the most Starbucks power…and not just within a few blocks radius, but for the whole Island! Think of it like being at the North Pole for overpriced coffee…The power center / death star if you will allow me to go that far….

It’s four miles to NewMexiKen’s nearest Starbucks.

Winning is forever; losing is for yesterday

At Three Bed Two Bath, Hugh visits the Indianapolis Zoo the day after the Colts lost to the Steelers:

No one was wearing any Colts paraphernalia. No one. And this in a town in which, in addition to seeing people wearing the obvious jerseys (18 Manning, 32 James, 88 Harrison) you see people wearing 21 Sanders and 63 Saturday — the safety and the center for land’s sake. In fact, the only person I saw wearing a jersey all morning was this guy who was so big, football jerseys are almost the only thing he can wear, he’s not going to be shopping for button-down oxford shirts any time soon.

It’s the birthday

… of Betty White. The character actress, who first appeared on television in 1949, and most famous now for The Golden Girls, is 84. Miss White has been nominated for 15 Emmy Awards, winning four times.

… of Eartha Kitt. Santa’s Baby is 79.

… of James Earl Jones. The voice of Darth Vader is 75. Jones has been in more than 130 films and appeared on more than 50 television programs. He was nominated for the 1971 best actor Oscar for The Great White Hope.

… of Muhammad Ali. The Champ is 64.

… of Jim Carrey. The actor is 44. NewMexiKen thought Carrey deserved an Oscar nomination for Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind; it’s difficult for the clown to be taken seriously.

And it’s the birthday of Al Capone, born in Naples, Italy, in 1899. Here’s some of the background from his obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1947 at the age of 48.

Alphonse (Scarface) Capone, the fat boy from Brooklyn, was a Horatio Alger hero–underworld version. More than any other one man he represented, at the height of his power from 1925 through 1931, the debauchery of the “dry” era. He seized and held in thrall during that period the great city of Chicago and its suburbs.

Head of the cruelest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War I hand grenade.

His infamy made international legend. In France, for example, he was “The One Who Is Scarred.” He was the symbol of the ultimate in American lawlessness.

Capone won great wealth; how much, no one will ever know, except that the figure was fantastic. He remained immune from prosecution for his multitudinous murders (including the St. Valentine Day Massacre in 1929 when his gunners, dressed as policemen, trapped and killed eight of the Bugs Moran bootleg outfit in a Chicago garage), but was brought to book, finally, on the comparatively sissy charge of evasion of income taxes amounting to around $215,000.

For this, he was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison–serving first at Atlanta, then on The Rock, at Alcatraz–and was fined $50,000, with $20,000 additional for costs. With time out for good conduct, he finished this sentence in mid-January of 1939; but by then he was a slack- jawed paretic overcome by social disease, and paralytic to boot.

The Founding Uncle

Benjamin FranklinBenjamin Franklin was born on this date 300 years ago today.

As a recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, states:

[Franklin] was, during his eighty-four-year-Iong life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and cleanburning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.

But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.

And, as historian Gordon S. Wood wrote in his review of Isaacson’s biography:

[Franklin] is especially interesting to Americans, and not simply because he is one of the most prominent of the Founders. Among the Founders his appeal seems to be unique. He appears to be the most accessible, the most democratic, and the most folksy of these eighteenth-century figures.

Pinnacles National Monument (California)

… was established on this date in 1908.

Pinnacles National Monument

Rising out of the chaparral-covered Gabilan Mountains, east of central California’s Salinas Valley, are the spectacular remains of an ancient volcano. Massive monoliths, spires, sheer-walled canyons and talus passages define millions of years of erosion, faulting and tectonic plate movement. Within the monument’s boundaries lie 24,000 acres of diverse wildlands. The monument is renowned for the beauty and variety of its spring wildflowers. A rich diversity of wildlife can be observed throughout the year.

Pinnacles National Monument

Cheating in the N.F.L.?

Freakonomics co-author Stephen J. Dubner is wondering if the NFL wanted the Colts to win:

I’ve had occasion over the years to deal with the N.F.L. on a number of levels, and I think it’s a pretty remarkable industry (well, okay, a pretty remarkable cartel). But yesterday’s Steelers-Colts game contained three mind-boggling calls (or non-calls) that went against the Steelers, and made me wonder what was happening.

Click link above to read more.