… and stupid.
Three 20-something motorcyclists rode alongside NewMexiKen as I drove home from the store this afternoon. As his two companions kept watch for police cruisers, three times in fewer miles one of the cyclists gunned his bike to about 75 mph and rode vertically (on the rear wheel) for a quarter-mile or so. This on a major street in traffic in daylight.
No harm done I suppose. Halfway fun to watch. But really!?!
Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter, mentioned just below, does make at least one interesting claim:
The movies, by their nature, favor only a few stars, and only a few national heroes. Of the thousands of interesting characters who played a part in winning the West, only a bare handful have any real currency with the American public now. Iconographically, even Lewis and Clark haven’t really survived, though Sacagawea has. With the possible exception of Kit Carson, none of the mountain men mean anything today. Kit Carson’s name vaguely suggests the Old West to many people, but not one in a million of them will have any distinct idea as to what Kit did.
The roster of still-recognizable Westerners probably boils down to Custer, Buffalo Bill Cody, Billy the Kid, and perhaps Wild Bill Hickok. …
Skimpy as the image bank is for white Westerners, it is even skimpier for Indians. My guess would be that only Sacagawea, Sitting Bull, and Geronimo still ring any bells with the general public. Crazy Horse, who never allowed his image to be captured, is still important to Indians as a symbol of successful resistance, but less so to whites. Even a chief such as Red Cloud, so renowned in his day that he went to New York and made a speech at Cooper Union, is now only known to historians, history buffs, and a few Nebraskans.
At the broadest level, only the white stars Custer, Cody, and Bill the Kid, and two tough Indians, Sitting Bull and Geronimo, are the people the public thinks about when it thinks about the Old West.
NewMexiKen would add Wyatt Earp, but otherwise thinks McMurtry is correct. Anyone feel differently?
… was admitted to the Union as the 47th state on this date 93 years ago (1912).
NewMexiKen decided a forced march was a good way to stimulate a little more reading (that wasn’t on a computer screen). So yesterday I stacked five recent acquisitions to my library on the coffee table and dug in, telling myself I would get through all five (and enjoy them, dammit!) in the next five days.
The first, which I began and completed last evening is Larry McMurtry’s Oh What a Slaughter, a brief, nonfiction survey of several western U.S. massacres. While interesting in parts, with well-crafted sentences, this book has little to recommend it. It’s as if McMurtry took some cursory notes on 3X5 cards, somewhat organized the cards, and transcribed the notes. The result is disorganized, almost stream of consciousness and really not detailed enough to merit value as a history of the horrific incidents he includes.
NewMexiKen is a big fan of McMurtry’s fiction and nonfiction. This book does not measure up. (See also here for another review.)
Later last evening I got a headstart on day two, Joan Didion’s Where I Was From. More later.
So who gets the Christmas story better, the U.S. with Santa Claus on December 25th, or Latin America today, the Epiphany, with gifts from the three kings on El Día de Los Reyes?
Great video clip of sobriety test. Laugh-out-loud.
Link via Talk Left (where we learn this is a clip from Comedy Central’s Reno 911).
Mack, official oldest grandchild of NewMexiKen, watched much of the Rose Bowl with his mother Wednesday night. Here’s the story as told by his mother, Jill:
The honorary marshal came onto the field, before the game, to flip the coin. I saw that it was Sandra Day O’Connor.
I said, “Oh, Mack, that is one of my heroes.”
“Why?”
I referenced conversations we’ve had in the past, “You know how we’ve talked about how, for thousands of years, men got to be in charge of everything and women didn’t get to do lots of things?” (Mack has a fairly solid background knowledge in this stuff, at least for a five-year-old boy.)
“Yes, like how they couldn’t vote or have a house or do lots of jobs?”
“Right. Well one job they didn’t get to do was be a judge. A judge gets to decide the laws for all the people to follow. It’s a really important job. Well, that lady was the first woman who got to be a judge. So she is one of Mommy’s heroes.” (Not strictly accurate, I know.)
Mack looked at me for a minute, then said, “Then she is one of my heroes, too.”
My heart melted. I put my arms out for a hug, so proud of my brilliant, sensitive child.
He continued, “Yes. Also Batman.”
“[W]hich was a great help when I was teaching college coarses…”
Found among comments on a website.
The Zapruder film of the John Kennedy shooting has been stabilized to diminish camera movement. There is no sound.
1. Hand me the snow shovel.
2. I wish we had some good scenery.
3. Look out for that snake!
4. Which direction is the beach?
5. Nice shoes.
Scott Adams, The Dilbert Blog
Since I firmly believe Marv Albert should do every big NBA game, Pat Summerall every big NFL game and Keith Jackson every big college football game, no matter how old they are, and only because it feels like a bigger game when any of them is involved, I feel totally comfortable saying this: Listening to Jackson is like driving with my mother at night. In other words, maybe he can’t really see anymore, and he might drive over a few curbs, and maybe he’ll even send a pedestrian diving behind a parking meter … but it’s always exciting, and you always get home safely in the end.
Bill Simmons at ESPN.com, in a live-blogging the Rose Bowl column with multiple laugh-out-loud lines.
“As an avid watcher of the Oscars,” he dead-panned in a statement, “I can’t help but be a little disappointed with the choice.”
Jon Stewart on the news he is to host the Oscar telecast.
“A slipshod final play, where a crisp one might have allowed for a tying field goal try, left [Matt] Leinart looking dazed and diminished, like a boxing champ who got KO’d in the last round. I couldn’t help but feel a twinge of sympathy. Then I remembered his sickeningly charmed life and snapped out of it.”
Robert Weintraub at Slate in a very good summary of the game titled “Don’t Mess With Texas.”
“The outcome could have been different, [the judge] suggested, if the man had been on trial for ‘being a jerk.'”
Washington Post story on bench trial of man accused of indecent exposure for mooning his neighbor. The man was acquitted.
From The Late Show with David Letterman:
10. Fewer decisions based on wild, drunken hunches
9. Have N.S.A. find out what really happened between Nick and Jessica
8. Stop using Situation Room monitors to play X-Box 360
7. More C-SPAN, less “Yes, Dear”
6. Team up with leading scientists to make Cheetos even cheesier
5. To capture and bring to justice King Kong
4. Beat the twins at beer pong
3. Respond to reporters questions with, “Bitch, don’t go there”
2. Scale back on grueling 12-hour work week
1. “Who needs resolutions? Everythng is fine”
“It’s the nature of the sports fan to second-guess. There are sports fans still second-guessing the landing at Normandy.”
NewMexiKen is told 5-year-old Mack thinks USC made a bad choice going for it on fourth down and two at the Texas 45-yard line with 2:09 left. I disagree. By then everyone knew USC couldn’t stop Vince Young. 45 or 20, it made no difference.
As Joel Achenbach puts it: “The Southern Cal defenders had nothing left, and essentially just applauded, like a good audience, as Young waltzed into the end zone for the national title.”
It truly was a game that lived up to its hype.
We must spare no effort to raise the general level of health in this country. In a nation as rich as ours, it is a shocking fact that tens of millions lack adequate medical care. We are short of doctors, hospitals, nurses. We must remedy these shortages. Moreover, we need–and we must have without further delay–a system of prepaid medical insurance which will enable every American to afford good medical care.
President Harry S. Truman, 57 years ago today in his State of the Union Address
… is hosting the Oscar broadcast.
From Oscar Beat by Steve Pond:
Stewart, who was born Jonathan Stewart Liebowitz, once told “60 Minutes” that he dropped the name Liebowitz because it “sounded too Hollywood.”
Sorry, Jon. Can’t get much more Hollywood than this new gig of yours.
… of Boo Radley and Mac Sledge. Robert Duval is 75.
… of Annie Hall. Diane Keaton is 60.
As NewMexiKen wrote here 13 months ago:
How come these [college football] awards are given before the bowl games? When first established, many of the bowl games were just post season fun. Now, with the BCS especially, the outcome of these games is critical for a team. Why determine awards before the most important game of the season?
Or, in other words, don’t you think Vince Young would win the Heisman if the voting were today?
Tonight, Thursday evening, is Twelfth Night (the eve of the Epiphany).
As The New York Times reported, on this date in 1914:
Henry Ford, head of the Ford Motor Company, announced…one of the most remarkable business moves of his entire remarkable career. In brief it is:
To give to the employees of the company $10,000,000 of the profits of the 1914 business, the payments to be made semi-monthly and added to the pay checks.
To run the factory continuously instead of only eighteen hours a day, giving employment to several thousand more men by employing three shifts of eight hours each, instead of only two nine-hour shifts, as at present.
To establish a minimum wage scale of $5 per day. Even the boy who sweeps up the floors will get that much.
Before any man in any department of the company who does not seem to be doing good work shall be discharged, an opportunity will be given to him to try to make good in every other department. No man shall be discharged except for proved unfaithfulness or irremediable inefficiency.
Read the complete Times article.
“ESPN couldn’t cover USC any more extensively if the letters stood for University of SportsCenter.”
Well, it’ll probably diminish some now.