Andrew Tobias has a little perspective:
I am listening to 1776 on my Nano, and it’s 2 degrees Fahrenheit (in Boston, in 1776) and people are dragging 120 tons of can[n]ons from Ft. Ticonderoga 300 miles to General George Washington in Dorchester, and the suffering of the troops — civilians like you and me, who’ve left their families to fight the British — is astounding. Sentries are literally freezing to death. And all I can think about is how upset we get if we’re assigned a middle seat.
At Functional Ambivalent, Tom has the story about Another Republican For Big Government — this one wants to make it illegal to sell cold beer. He got the idea from a fifth grader.
A US man who threw a mouse onto a pile of burning leaves could only watch in horror as it ran into his house and set the building ablaze.
Luciano Mares, 81, of Fort Sumner, New Mexico, found the mouse in his home and wanted to get rid of it.
“I had some leaves burning outside, so I threw it in the fire, and the mouse was on fire and ran back at the house,” he was quoted as saying by AP.
Though no-one was injured, the house and everything in it was destroyed.
“I’ve seen numerous house fires, but nothing as unique as this one,” Fire Department Captain Jim Lyssy said.
New Mexico has seen several major blazes after unseasonably dry and windy conditions which have destroyed 10 homes and devastated more than 53,000 acres (21,200 hectares) of land.
NewMexiKen doubts the mouse realized he had the last laugh, but I like to think he somehow knew.
Via Lifehacker, the Google Pack Screensaver without the Google Logo.
The Google Pack screensaver, which displays photos from your digital picture collection, is a really neat bauble. Even though Windows can do a screensaver that rotates photos in a particular folder, the Google Pack screensaver is better because you can specify which subfolders of photos to display or not (uncheck “office” or “naughty” and include “holidays” and “family”) and also lets you choose between effects (collage, wipe, cross-fade) which you can’t do in XP.
However, the Google Screensaver includes the Google logo in the top right. Amit’s version does not.
Someone at The New York Times sure is excited about Wonkette (Ana Marie Cox) and her novel, Dog Days.
They’ve reviewed the book one, two, three times in a week (each time with a photo) and published her op-ed about Jack Abramoff.
The End of Faith by Sam Harris was NewMexiKen’s third book in my project to read five books in five days. I began book four, M. Scott Momaday’s House Made of Dawn last night, so am almost back on target.
In The End of Faith: Religion, Terror, and the Future of Reason, Sam Harris argues that religious faith is the problem in the world — a problem that endangers us all. The more fundamental the belief — Judaism, Christianity and Islam most of all — the more threatening it is.
Our situation is this: most of the people in this world believe that the Creator of the universe has written a book. We have the misfortune of having many such books on hand, each making an exclusive claim as to its infallibility. People tend to organize themselves into factions according to which of these incompatible claims they accept—rather than on the basis of language, skin color, location of birth, or any other criterion of tribalism. Each of these texts urges its readers to adopt a variety of beliefs and practices, some of which are benign, many of which are not. All are in perverse agreement on one point of fundamental importance, however: “respect” for other faiths, or for the views of unbelievers, is not an attitude that God endorses. While all faiths have been touched, here and there, by the spirit of ecumenicalism, the central tenet of every religious tradition is that all others are mere repositories of error or, at best, dangerously incomplete. Intolerance is thus intrinsic to every creed. Once a person believes—really believes—that certain ideas can lead to eternal happiness, or to its antithesis, he cannot tolerate the possibility that the people he loves might be led astray by the blandishments of unbelievers. Certainty about the next life is simply incompatible with tolerance in this one.
Observations of this sort pose an immediate problem for us, however, because criticizing a person’s faith is currently taboo in every corner of our culture. On this subject, liberals and conservatives have reached a rare consensus: religious beliefs are simply beyond the scope of rational discourse. Criticizing a person’s ideas about God and the afterlife is thought to be impolitic in a way that criticizing his ideas about physics or history is not. And so it is that when a Muslim suicide bomber obliterates himself along with a score of innocents on a Jerusalem street, the role that faith played in his actions is invariably discounted. His motives must have been political, economic, or entirely personal. Without faith, desperate people would still do terrible things. Faith itself is always, and everywhere, exonerated.
Harris is unlikely to make many converts, nonetheless he is convincing in his analysis of the danger. He is less convincing in his later chapters when he discusses alternative forms of belief and spirtuality, once we are weaned from the religious beliefs of our ancestors. Still, it’s a remarkable and worthwhile book.
“The belief that certain books were written by God (who, for reasons difficult to fathom, made Shakespeare a far better writer than himself….”
“Any culture that raises men and boys to kill unlucky girls [i.e., rape victims], rather than comfort them, is a culture that has managed to retard the growth of love. Such societies, of course, regularly fail to teach their inhabitants many other things—like how to read. Not learning how to read is not another style of literacy, and not learning to see others as ends in themselves is not another style of ethics. Its is a failure of ethics.”
… was proclaimed such by President Theodore Roosevelt on this date in 1908.
Until the 1800’s, many northern California coastal valleys were covered with coast redwood trees similar to those now found in Muir Woods National Monument. The forest along Redwood Creek in today’s Muir Woods was spared from logging because it was hard to get to. Noting that Redwood Creek contained one of the San Francisco Bay Area’s last uncut stands of old-growth redwood, Congressman William Kent and his wife, Elizabeth Thacher Kent, bought 295 acres here for $45,000 in 1905. To protect the redwoods the Kents donated the land to the United States Federal Government and, in 1908, President Theodore Roosevelt declared it a national monument. Roosevelt suggested naming the area after Kent, but Kent wanted it named for conservationist John Muir.
Source: Muir Woods National Monument
According to The History Channel’s This Day in History, on this date in 1958:
The Toyota and Datsun (later Nissan) brand names made their first appearances in the United States at the Imported Motor Car Show in Los Angeles, California. Previously, these auto makers had sold in the U.S. only under American-brand names, as part of joint ventures with Ford and GM.
… was established on this date in 1903.
One of the world’s longest and most complex caves and 28,295 acres of mixed-grass prairie, ponderosa pine forest, and associated wildlife are the main features of the park.
The cave is well known for its outstanding display of boxwork, an unusual cave formation composed of thin calcite fins resembling honeycombs.
The park’s mixed-grass prairie is one of the few remaining and is home to native wildlife such as bison, elk, pronghorn, mule deer, coyotes, and prairie dogs.
Source: Wind Cave National Park
… of Bart Starr. The hall-of-fame quarterback is 72.
… of Dick Enberg. The sportscaster is 71 (oh, my!).
… of Joan Baez. The singer is 65.
… of Jimmy Page. The Led Zeppelin rocker is 62.
… of Brenda Gayle Webb. Loretta Lynn’s little sister Crystal Gayle is 55.
… of Dave Matthews. He’s 39.
Richard Nixon was born on this date in 1913.
Many years ago NewMexiKen was contacted by the staff working with Richard Nixon on his memoirs, RN. I was asked to see if I could determine from among the Nixon papers in my custody the time of day he was born. As I remember it, my research was inconclusive. Someone else’s must have been helpful.
The memoirs begin:
I was born in a house my father built. My birth on the night of January 9, 1913, coincided with a record-breaking cold snap in our town of Yorba Linda, California.
Oops. NewMexiKen found other things to do Saturday and has fallen temporarily behind the pace of reading five books in five days.
Which reminds me of the time in high school when I spent most of the day reading a book during various classes so I could give an oral book report on it in last period English — Walter Lord’s A Night to Remember. I can still see the smiling, smirking and disapproving faces of a whole classroom full of high school juniors who thought it was somehow hilarious (and/or a mortal sin) that I pulled this off.
“On-demand delivery” is all the rage now. I was just ahead of the times.
… of Milton Supman. The television comedian, known as Soupy Sales, who was a big part of NewMexiKen’s life when I was 8 or 10 years old, is 80.
On New Year’s Day 1965 Soupy, miffed at having to work on the holiday, ended his live broadcast by encouraging his young viewers to tiptoe into their still-sleeping parents’ bedrooms and remove those “funny green pieces of paper” from their pants and pocketbooks. “Put them in an envelope and mail them to me,” Soupy allegedly instructed the children. “And you know what I’m going to send you? A post card from Puerto Rico!” In his 2001 autobiography Soupy Sez! My Life and Zany Times, Soupy admits it is true. He was suspended by the station for two weeks for encouraging children to steal. Soupy received $80,000 from viewers, mostly in play money. Any real money was donated to charity. (Wikipedia)
… of newscasters Sander Vanocur (78) and Charles Osgood (73).
… of Shirley Bassey. The singer of “Goldfinger” is 69.
… of Bob Eubanks. “The Newlywed Game” emcee is 68.
… of Stephen Hawking. The physicist and author is 64.
… of Yvette Mimieux. The actress is 64.
Born to a French father and Mexican mother, actress Yvette Mimieux grew up within shouting distance of Hollywood Boulevard. The blonde, well-proportioned Mimieux was a beauty contest winner and model when signed to an MGM contract in 1959. With her second film appearance as ethereal 800th century girl Weena in The Time Machine (1960), Mimieux achieved stardom; with her next film, Where the Boys Are (1960), she proved capable of heavy dramatics via a discreetly handled “gang rape” sequence. An appearance as a terminally ill girl on the 1964 Dr. Kildare episode “Tyger Tyger” drew a great deal of press attention for Mimieux, principally because she spent most of her early scenes in a bikini. (All Movie Guide via New York Times)
… of David Bowie. The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee is 59.
David Bowie is rock’s foremost futurist and a genre-bending pioneer, chameleon, and transformer. Throughout his solo career and in his alliances with other artists – including Lou Reed, Iggy Pop, Brian Eno and Nine Inch Nails – Bowie has positioned himself on the cutting edge of rock and roll. His innovations have created or furthered several major trends in rock and roll, including glam-rock, art-rock and the very notion of the self-mythologized, larger-than-life rock star. (Rock and Roll Hall of Fame)
… was fought on this date in 1815.
News of the peace treaty between Britain and the United States that had been signed at Ghent on December 24, 1814, did not reach the United States in time to avert the battle. Major General Andrew Jackson’s army of six-to-seven thousand troops consisted chiefly of militiamen and volunteers from southern states who fought against 7,500 British regulars.
The British stormed the American position, fortified effectively with earthworks and cotton bales. The fighting lasted only half an hour, ending in a decisive U.S. victory and a British withdrawal. British casualties numbered more than 2,000 (289 killed); American, only 71 (31 killed). News of the victory reached Washington at the same time as that of the Treaty of Ghent and did much to raise the low morale in the capital.
The anniversary of the Battle was widely celebrated with parties and dances during the nineteenth century, especially in the South. More recently it was commemorated in the “Battle of New Orleans,” as sung by Johnny Horton and others.
Battle of New Orleans by Jimmy Driftwood
In 1814 we took a little trip,
along with Colonel Jackson down the mighty Mississip.
We took a little bacon and we took a little beans,
and we fought the bloody British in the town of New Orleans.We fired our guns and the British kept a comin’,
There wasn’t ’bout as many as there was awhile ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.Oh we looked down the river and we seen the British come.
There must have been a hundred of ’em beatin’ on a drum.
They stepped so high and they made their bugles ring.
We stood behind our cotton bales and didn’t say a thing.Old Hickory said we could take ’em by surprise,
if we didn’t fire our muskets till we looked ’em in the eyes.
We held our fire till we seen their faces well,
then we opened up our squirrel guns and gave ’em a little…Well….we……fired our guns and the British kept a comin’,
There wasn’t ’bout as many as there was awhile ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.We fired our cannons till the barrels melted down,
then we grabbed an alligator and we fired another round.
We filled his head with cannonballs and powdered his behind,
and when we touched the powder off, the gator lost his mind.We fired our guns and the British kept a comin’,
There wasn’t ’bout as many as there was awhile ago.
We fired once more and they began to runnin’
On down the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico.
… were born in a house without electricity or plumbing in East Tupelo, Mississippi, on this date in 1935. Jesse, the older twin, was stillborn. The parents were Vernon Elvis Presley and Gladys Smith Presley.
See for yourself at Go Fug Yourself.
Michael Kinsley has an entirely readable, if nothing new, essay about the future of newspapers. A couple of quotes:
As we live through the second industrial revolution, your daily newspaper remains a tribute to the wonders of the first one.
And so, at last, there are two piles of paper: a short one of stuff to read, and a tall one of stuff to throw away. Unfortunately, many people are taking the logic of this process one step further. Instead of buying a paper in order to throw most of it away, they are not buying it in the first place.
The trouble even an established customer will take to obtain a newspaper continues to shrink, as well. Once, I would drive across town if necessary. Today, I open the front door and if the paper isn’t within about 10 feet I retreat to my computer and read it online. Only six months ago, that figure was 20 feet. Extrapolating, they will have to bring it to me in bed by the end of the year and read it to me out loud by the second quarter of 2007.
According to this National Weather Service report, frighteningly dry.
November was the 9th driest of the past 111 years in New Mexico, and preliminary numbers suggest December will also go into the record books as one of the 10 driest December months of the past 111 years. When considered together, the November-December period was one of the driest 5 such periods of the past 111 years. Precipitation for this time period has averaged a mere 11 percent of normal for the state.
…Fire Danger Impacts: The wet period in 2004 and early 2005 allowed abundant grass growth over eastern New Mexico. With the recent exceptionally-dry weather, these “fine fuels” are presenting high fire danger, much higher than normal for this time of year. Unless unforeseen significant precipitation develops, the fire season in 2006 is likely to be extended and severe in New Mexico, beginning in the lower elevations this month and progressing to higher elevations in the spring to early summer.
…The most likely scenario is for continued drier than normal, and warmer than normal weather in New Mexico through the spring.
Link via John Fleck.
Upside: We can not only play winter golf, we can play it in shorts.
Downside to the upside: Greens are very, very fast.
… of Katherine Anne Couric. University of Virigina grad Katie Couric is 49.
… of Nicholas Kim Coppola. The Oscar-winner, known better as Nicolas Cage, is 42.
“What was Reggie Bush thinking trying to lateral that ball in the red zone? A guy named Bush making a bonehead move. What are the odds? Has that ever happened?”
“A 40 year old woman in Israel who friends call an eccentric millionaire married a dolphin. President Bush said he has no problem with it, as long as the dolphin’s not gay.”
Jay Leno
In NewMexiKen’s recent drive through California I noticed a number of California penitentiaries I hadn’t remembered hearing about during my 12 years living in the state (but not since 1985). It occured to me that prisons were a growth industry. In her 2003 book, Where I Was From, Joan Didion confirms this impression and explains. Two excerpts:
The California Correctional Peace Officers Association is the prison guards’ union, a 29,000-member force that has maintained for some years now the most effective lobbying operation in Sacramento. In the 1998 election cycle, for example, the union funneled over two million dollars to Grey Davis’s gubernatorial campaign and another three million dollars to various other candidates and propositions. … Don Novey refers to those who consider the need for new prisons an arguable proposition as “the other element.” He gave $75,000 to the opponent of a state senator who had once spoken against a prison bond issue. “If Don Novey ran the contractors’ union,” a Republican strategist told the Times, “there’d be a bridge over every puddle in the state.” The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the victims’ rights movement. The prison guards were in California the political muscle behind the 1994 “three strikes” legislation and initiative, the act that mandated a sentence of twenty-five years to life for any third felony conviction, even for crimes as minor as growing a marijuana plant on a windowsill or shoplifting a bottle of Ripple. The prison guards were the political muscle that had by the year 2000 made the California corrections system, with thirty-three penitentiaries and 162,000 inmates, the largest in the western hemisphere.
Incarceration was not always a growth industry in California. In 1852 there was only San Quentin, by 1880 there was also Folsom. During the 104 years that followed, a century during which the population of California increased from 865,000 to 25,795,000 people, the state found need for only ten additional facilities, most of them low or medium security. It was only in 1984, four years after Don Novey took over the union, that the new max and supermax prisons began rolling online, Solano in 1984, “New Folsom” (a quarter mile removed from “Old Folsom”) in 1986, Avenal and lone and Stockton and San Diego in 1987, Corcoran and Blythe in 1988, Pelican Bay in 1989, Chowchilla in 1990, Wasco in 1991, Calipatria in 1992, Lancaster and Imperial and Centinela and Delano in 1993, Coalinga and a second prison at Blythe in 1994, second prisons at both Susanville and Chowchilla in 1995, Soledad in 1996, a second prison at Corcoran in 1997.
It was 1993 when the California Department of Corrections activated its first “death fence,” at Calipatria. It was 1994 when the second “death fence” was activated, at Lancaster, carrying a charge of 650 milliamperes, almost ten times the voltage required to cause instant death. … It was also 1994 when standardized testing of reading skills among California fourth-graders placed them last in the nation, below Mississippi, tied only with Louisiana. It was 1995 when, for the first time, California spent more on its prisons than on its two university systems, the ten campuses of the University of California and the twenty-four campuses of California State University.
In Where I Was From, Joan Didion gives us this wonderful takedown of pop artist Thomas Kinkade:
The passion with which buyers approached these Kinkade images was hard to define. The manager of one California gallery that handled them told me that it was not unusual to sell six or seven at a clip, to buyers who already owned ten or twenty, and that the buyers with whom he dealt brought to the viewing of the images “a sizeable emotional weight.” A Kinkade painting was typically rendered in slightly surreal pastels. It typically featured a cottage or a house of such insistent coziness as to seem actually sinister, suggestive of a trap designed to attract Hansel and Gretel. Every window was lit, to lurid effect, as if the interior of the structure might be on fire. The cottages had thatched roofs, and resembled gingerbread houses. The houses were Victorian, and resembled idealized bed-and-breakfasts, at least two of which in Placerville, the Chichester-McKee House and the Combellack-Blair House, claimed to have been the models for Kinkade “Christmas” paintings. “There’s a lot of beauty here that I present in a way that’s whimsical and charming,” Kinkade allowed to the Placerville Mountain Democrat. He branded himself the “Painter of Light,” and the postcards Media Arts provided to his galleries each for a while bore this legend: “Thomas Kinkade is recognized as the foremost living painter of light. His masterful use of soft edges and luminous colors give his highly detailed oil paintings a glow all their own. This extraordinary ‘Kinkade Glow’ has created an overwhelming demand for Thomas Kinkade paintings and lithographs worldwide.”
This “Kinkade Glow” could be seen as derived in spirit from the “lustrous, pearly mist” that Mark Twain had derided in the Bierstadt paintings, and, the level of execution to one side, there are certain unsettling similarities between the two painters. “After completing my recent plein air study of Yosemite Valley, the mountains’ majesty refused to leave me,” Kinkade wrote in June 2000 on his web site. “When my family wandered through the national park visitor center, I discovered a key to my fantasy-a recreation of a Miwok Indian Village. When I returned to my studio, I began work on The Mountains Declare His Glory, a poetic expression of what I felt at that transforming moment of inspiration. As a final touch, I even added a Miwok Indian Camp along the river as an affirmation that man has his place, even in a setting touched by God’s glory.”
Affirming that man has his place in the Sierra Nevada by reproducing the Yosemite National Park Visitor Center’s recreation of a Miwok Indian Village is identifiable as a doubtful enterprise on many levels (not the least of which being that the Yosemite Miwok were forcibly run onto a reservation near Fresno during the Gold Rush….
Not to mention that the Kinkade paintings available are all mass-produced reproductions.
NewMexiKen completed Joan Didion’s Where I Was From last evening, the second book in two days in an effort to read five books in five days. This really superb book incorporates history, memoir, journalism, literary and art criticism to examine California, then and now, real and imagined. The result is a rare combination of insightful analysis and personal feeling. Outstanding.
I’ll include two passages in separate entries.
NewMexiKen began book three last night, The Jefferson Bible, but after 50 or so pages realized that, though interesting, the book really doesn’t fit into the scheme of five books in five days. I will substitute something else for day three.
This is hilarious. It’s the audio of Bill Gates this week explaining all the exciting new features in Windows Vista (to be available this fall). With it, someone added video to show us all those very same features already here on Mac OS X Tiger.
Link via David Pogue.
Maureen Dowd in Saturday’s Times:
Doing the math, you’ve got to figure that the 12 wise men and one wise woman had about 30 seconds apiece to say their piece to the president about Iraq, where vicious assaults this week have killed almost 200 and raised U.S. troop fatalities to at least 2,189.
It must have been like a performance by the Reduced Shakespeare Company, which boils down the great plays and books to their essence. Proust is “I like cookies.” Othello raps that he left Desdemona “all alona, didn’t telephona.” “The Iliad” and “The Odyssey” condense into “The Idiodity.” “Henry V” is “A king’s gotta do what a king’s gotta do,” and “Antony and Cleopatra” is “Never get involved in Middle Eastern affairs.”
Beyond taking a class picture ringed around Mr. Bush’s bizarrely empty desk – a mesmerizing blend of “Sunset Boulevard,” “The Last Supper” and a “Sopranos” ad – the former secretaries of state and defense had to make the most of their brief colloquy with W.
…Sure, he has A.D.D. But he just spent six straight days mountain-biking and brush clearing in Crawford. He couldn’t devote 60 minutes to getting our kids home rather than just a few for a “Message: I Care” photo-op faking sincerity?
Bush allowed five to 10 minutes for interchange with the group.
Google Pack, a free collection of essential software from Google.
Includes: Google Earth, Google Desktop, Picasa, Google Pack Screensaver, Firefox, Norton Antivirus, Ad-Aware (antispyware) and Adobe Reader 7.