… of J.D. Salinger. The reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye is 87.
… of Frank Langella. The actor is 66.
… of Country Joe McDonald. Give me an “F”… He’s 64.
… of Grandmaster Flash. The rapper is 48.
Also born on New Year’s Day:
Betsy Ross in 1752.
William Fox (of Fox Pictures) in 1879.
“Wild Bill” Donovan in 1883. Donovan directed the American Office of Strategic Service during World War II, precursor to the CIA.
J. Edgar Hoover, in 1895.
Barry Goldwater in 1909.
The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on this date in 1863.
Initially, the Civil War between North and South was fought by the North to prevent the secession of the Southern states and preserve the Union. Even though sectional conflicts over slavery had been a major cause of the war, ending slavery was not a goal of the war. That changed on September 22, 1862, when President Lincoln issued his Preliminary Emancipation Proclamation, which stated that slaves in those states or parts of states still in rebellion as of January 1, 1863, would be declared free. One hundred days later, with the rebellion unabated, President issued the Emancipation Proclamation declaring “that all person held as slaves” within the rebellious areas “are, and henceforward shall be free.”
Lincoln’s bold step to change the goals of the war was a military measure and came just a few days after the Union’s victory in the Battle of Antietam. With this Proclamation he hoped to inspire all blacks, and slaves in the Confederacy in particular, to support the Union cause and to keep England and France from giving political recognition and military aid to the Confederacy. Because it was a military measure, however, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Union control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.
Although the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it did fundamentally transform the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of Federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.
From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery’s final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.
Source: The National Archives
Click document image to enlarge.
“You live and learn. At any rate, you live.”
Douglas Adams
Murrow was one large head staring into the camera and he’s looking at you, talking to you as if you are the most intelligent person on the planet. He talks in measured tone. No image of him being reduced to a tiny box.
I really believe that allows the viewer to draw their own conclusions. But today an event happens and there will be 5 maybe 6 people sitting around talking and discussing with each other, not to us. That, to me, is a decline in the way news is presented.
Actor Frank Langella, who plays CBS owner William Paley in Good Night, and Good Luck. Quoted from a chat room discussion at Gold Derby by Tom O’Neil.
The fundamental things apply
As time goes by.
And don’t forget to take full advantage of today’s leap second (5:00 PM MST).
An essay on Good and Bad Procrastination from Paul Graham:
So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.
There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.
Key quote: “What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?”
NewMexiKen is planning to read the rest of this article myself a little later.
BERLIN (Reuters) – Six German airline passengers who said they were being held against their will on an aircraft stuck on the runway for hours during a snowstorm have filed “false imprisonment” charges, German police said on Saturday.
The passengers filed charges against the pilot of a British Airways Berlin-London flight that sat on the runway for seven hours before it could take off, a federal police spokesman said.
Hey New Mexicans, think twice before you waste any water. According to a report in the Rocky Mountain News, while the snowpack is well above average in central Colorado, news is not so good for us:
Southwestern Colorado, however, has little to cheer about. Basins such as the San Miguel/Dolores and the Upper Rio Grande are alarmingly dry, with early snowpacks registering just 41 percent and 31 percent of average, respectively.
Link via Coyote Gulch.
… was born on this date in 1869. With Picasso, Matisse is considered the pinnacle of 20th century painting.
The WebMuseum has details of the life and works of Matisse including several examples.
Matisse died in 1954.
Click on the image to enlarge.
… of Odetta. The folk and blues singer is 75.
… of Anthony Hopkins. The Oscar winner is 68. Hopkins has been nominated for Best Actor three times, winning for The Silence of the Lambs. He was also nominated as Best Supporting Actor for Amistad.
… of Tim Considine. Spin of “Spin and Marty” is 65. Considine was also the oldest of “My Three Sons” and played the soldier slapped by General Patton in the film Patton.
… of Sarah Miles. The Oscar nominee (best actress for Ryan’s Daughter) is 64.
… of Ben Kingsley. The Oscar winner is 62. He won Best Actor for his portrayal of Gandhi. He was also nominated for Best Actor for House of Sand and Fog and twice for Best Supporting Actor.
… of Tim Matheson. Animal House’s “Otter,” better known recently as Vice President John Hoynes on “West Wing,” is 58.
… of Donna Summer. The Bad Girl is 57.
… of Bebe Neuwirth. Lilith is 47. Ms. Neuwirth won the Emmy twice for this role on Cheers.
… Val Kilmer. “Iceman” is 46.
Henry John Deutschendorf Jr. was born in Roswell, New Mexico, on this date in 1943. His grandmother gave him a guitar while he lived in Tucson and eventually he became John Denver.
Denver died in 1997 when his experimental plane crashed into Monterey Bay.
It’s the birthday of the novelist Nicholas Sparks, born in Omaha, Nebraska (1965). He’s one of the few successful male romance novelists starting with his first novel The Notebook which he wrote as an homage to his wife’s grandparents. They had been married for sixty-two years when he met them and he realized while talking to them for the first time that they were still flirting with each other.
Nicholas Sparks said, “Writing the last page of the first draft is the most enjoyable moment in writing. It’s one of the most enjoyable moments in life, period.”
NewMexiKen enjoyed Three Weeks with My Brother, Sparks’s non-fiction memoir.
… was established on this date in 1987.
This monument preserves 114,277 acres of which 109,260 acres are federal and 5,017 acres are private. El Malpais means “the badlands” but contrary to its name this unique area holds many surprises, many of which researchers are now unraveling. Volcanic features such as lava flows, cinder cones, pressure ridges and complex lava tube systems dominate the landscape. Closer inspection reveals unique ecosystems with complex relationships. Sandstone bluffs and mesas border the eastern side, providing access to vast wilderness.
For more than 10,000 years people have interacted with the El Malpais landscape. Historic and archeological sites provide reminders of past times. More than mere artifacts, these cultural resources are kept alive by the spiritual and physical presence of contemporary Indian groups, including the Puebloan peoples of Acoma, Laguna,and Zuni, and the Ramah Navajo. These tribes continue their ancestral uses of El Malpais including gathering herbs and medicines, paying respect, and renewing ties.
… was established in 1916 and renamed on this date in 1987.
Mammoths, giant bison, and short-faced bears were witness to the first tremblings of the earth and firework-like explosions of molten rock thousands of feet into the air. Approximately 60,000 years ago, the rain of cooling cinders and four lava flows formed Capulin Volcano, a nearly perfectly-shaped cinder cone, rising more than 1000 feet above the surrounding landscape. Although long extinct, Capulin Volcano is dramatic evidence of the volcanic processes that shaped northeastern New Mexico. Today the pine forested volcano provide habitat for mule deer, wild turkey, and black bear.
At the New West Network, Ted Alvarez has a terrific series on New Mexico’s wonderful San Luis Valley, an area that was mistakenly made part of Colorado 150 years ago. He begins part one of “Paradise without a PR Agent” with this:
In the storied valleys of the Rocky Mountains, Aspen has the glitz and glam, Vail has an unparalleled ski valley, and Jackson has rugged class.
The San Luis Valley has an intergalactic spaceport inside of Mt. Blanca.
You’ll probably want to read about Emma’s Hacienda in the town of San Luis in part three, The Holy Grail of Mexican Fare:
Emma’s Special consists of a beef taco, a green chile enchilada, a red chile enchilada, Spanish rice, beans, and sopapillas, and each item was positively transcendent, if quite spicy. The further I got into the meal, the more my value system crumbled: With each bite, the food at Emma’s Hacienda gained ground and eventually surpassed all of my Texas benchmarks. I remain humbled to this day by the accomplishment.
At The Seattle Times, columnist Danny Westneat bemoans the fact that sex sells.
By tallying clicks on our Web site, we now chart the most read stories in the online edition of The Seattle Times. Software then sorts the tens of thousands of stories for 2005 and ranks them. Not by importance, impact or poetic lyricism, but by which stories compelled the most people to put finger to mouse, click, open and, presumably, read.
Which brings me back to sex with horses. The story last summer about the man who died from a perforated colon while having sex with a horse in Enumclaw was by far the year’s most read article.
What’s more, four more of the year’s 20 most clicked-upon local news stories were about the same horse-sex incident. We don’t publish our Web-traffic numbers, but take it from me — the total readership on these stories was huge.
NewMexiKen has been wondering how to boost readership. That $25 I’ve made this month on ads isn’t really what I’d call life-changing money. The moral of Danny Westneat’s lament seems to be that, on the web, first and foremost, sex sells. Waiting for people to search on Ron Howard’s brother (long-time number one search item at NewMexiKen) isn’t going to generate enough visitors. Maybe it’s time I tried posting nude photos of Ron Howard’s brother.
Seattle Times link via BoingBoing.
Wired News on the Best (and Worst) Gadgets of 2005.
How many do you have?
The 2006 edition of the Statistical Abstract of the United States is available online.
Thanks to Coyote Gulch for the pointer.
At CJR Daily Steve Lovelady takes apart yesterday’s New York Times article on trends in housing prices. Lovelady begins:
Thursday, the New York Times, with a page one national story inexplicably datelined “Portland, Me.,” told us that “families in a vast majority of the country can still buy a house for a smaller share of their income than they could have a generation ago.”
Really? Hmmm. Let’s read on. It seems that, measured nationally, a family earning the median income would have to spend only 22 percent of its pre-tax income to make the mortgage payments on a median-priced house — “well below” the 30 percent that it took 25 years ago.
Wow! Is that good news, or not? Well, actually … NOT.
Let us count the ways that this story is flawed.
First, once we delve deeper into the story, we learn that this trend peaked in the glory days of 1998, when families only had to shell out 17 percent of their pre-tax income to buy that median home. In other words, in the past seven years, housing costs nationally as a percentage of income have risen 30 percent.
Oops.
Secondly, a study of the accompanying map and graph, conveniently tucked away on the page C9 jump of the story, reveals this nugget: In New York, Washington, D.C., San Francisco, Los Angeles and Miami, the cost of housing as a percent of income has actually risen over the past 20 years. In fact, that’s pretty much true for vast areas of the country — all of Washington State, Oregon, California, Nevada, most of the northeastern United States, and nearly all of Florida. In short, any area where population is growing and not stagnant.
A fascinating and amusing report on Those Weird College Ads from Mike DeBonis at Slate. He begins:
The 56 universities represented in this year’s bowlapalooza also have the chance to sell themselves to a national audience.
And no, they don’t let their football teams speak for themselves. America’s colleges and universities try to make an impression with “institutional spots”—trade parlance for the promotional television commercials they use to sell themselves. The ads typically run for 30 seconds during halftime. As state-school spokespersons are quick to point out, colleges don’t pay for the airtime—the slots are provided at no cost under most college-football television contracts.
The standard mise-en-scène of the institutional spot will be familiar to any dedicated college-sports watcher: campus greenery, one-on-one pedagogy, chemistry labs, black gowns and mortarboards, and laughing/hugging students of as many colors as possible.
And the award for hard-to-beat:
The season’s most memorable institutional spot won’t be playing during a bowl game. Notre Dame will introduce a new ad for the Fiesta Bowl, but the school will have a tough time encapsulating the smug Golden Domer attitude any better than it does in “Candle.” A girl lights candles at her church, ostensibly for many years, until a thick letter arrives from the Notre Dame admissions office. A glance to the skies confirms just who’s responsible for her shot at a “higher education.” Prayer for personal triumph: It’s not just for end zone celebrations anymore.
This from New West Network:
Speaking of in-migration, Rio Rancho, New Mexico is about to bump Santa Fe down a notch in the largest cities category. The sprawling suburb on the north[w]est edge of Albuquerque is waiting for the official count before proclaiming itself the third largest city in the state, behind Albuquerque and Las Cruces. That would put Santa Fe down to number four. Earlier this year the city of Albuquerque took offense when an Albuquerque Journal reporter mentioned that Albuquerque may become the Fort Worth to Rio Rancho’s Dallas.
An interesting report on bowl games and television ratings from Sam Walker at WSJ.com . It begins:
As college football’s bowl season begins in earnest, it’s time to have a look at the latest rankings. The nation’s top team isn’t USC, it’s the Oregon Ducks. Notre Dame isn’t as strong as it seems, Texas is a big disappointment and West Virginia is a doormat.
We aren’t talking about their performances on the football field, of course. This ranking is a measure of something that’s much less obvious to the public but just as significant to these schools in the long run: how many people watch their bowl games on television.
Link via The Sports Economist.
“Among the many goals I have for the blog in the coming year, right up there next to spending more time reflecting upon whether chronic self-indulgence is keeping me from focusing on my deeper feelings about myself ….”
From Salon via Powell’s Books a review of Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend by James D. McLaird. The review begins:
As author James D. McLaird confesses in his conclusion to Calamity Jane: The Woman and the Legend, historians sure know how to ruin a good story. In this case, somebody had to do it. Calamity Jane — 19th century gunslinger, drinker and cross-dresser — was so barnacled over with myth that it had become impossible to see the lady for the lore. From dime-store novels of the 1870s and ’80s chronicling her frontier fearlessness, to Doris Day’s G-rated Jane in the 1953 musical Calamity Jane, to Jane Alexander’s feminist reanimation of her in a 1984 ABC special, to Robin Weigert’s blowsy portrayal of her on the HBO series Deadwood, Calamity Jane has served as a Rorschach blot for devotees of unconventional women for over a century. Then again there was Larry McMurtry’s Buffalo Girls — published in 1990 — which trashed the myth altogether, casting her as a drunk, a liar and a hermaphrodite.
…For all executive producer David Milch’s claims for its veracity, HBO’s Deadwood got Jane wrong: She wasn’t an idle drunk in buckskins; rather, she was a dance hall girl in the early days of E.A. Swearingen’s Gem saloon, which was, at the time, a lumber and canvas construction where three women and a man dressed as a woman entertained customers. A Deadwood bartender claimed Swearingen sent Canary to “white slave” for him in Sidney, Neb., and that she brought back 10 girls she’d lured with stories of the vast wealth in the region. …
A couple of key quotations:
“Canary was the Courtney Love of her day”
“She was a good woman [,] only she drinked.”
… was signed by James Gadsden, U.S. Minister to Mexico, and General Antonio López de Santa Anna, President of Mexico, in Mexico City on this date in 1853. The treaty settled the dispute over the exact location of the Mexican border west of Texas and gave the U.S. approximately 29,000 square miles of land in what is now southern New Mexico and Arizona for the price of $10 million.
The Mexican Republic agrees to designate the following as her true limits with the United States for the future: retaining the same dividing line between the two Californias as already defined and established, according to the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo, the limits between the two republics shall be as follows: Beginning in the Gulf of Mexico, three leagues from land, opposite the mouth of the Rio Grande, as provided in the 5th article of the treaty of Guadalupe Hidalgo; thence, as defined in the said article, up the middle of that river to the point where the parallel of 31 47′ north latitude crosses the same; thence due west one hundred miles; thence south to the parallel of 31º 20′ north latitude; thence along the said parallel of 31º 20′ to the 111th meridian of longitude west of Greenwich; thence in a straight line to a point on the Colorado River twenty English miles below the junction of the Gila and Colorado rivers; thence up the middle of the said river Colorado until it intersects the present line between the United States and Mexico.
Read the entire Gadsden Purchase Treaty.
… of LeBron James. He’s 21 today.
… of Eldrick Woods. Tiger is 30.
… of Bo Diddley. “One of the most original and fertile rhythmic intelligences of our time,” the Rock Hall of Famer is 77.
… of Russ Tamblyn. Riff of “West Side Story” is 71.
… of Sandy Koufax. The most dominant pitcher in the game in the early 1960s, the man who threw four no-hitters including a perfect games is 79.
… of Paul (Noel actually) Stookey. Paul of Peter, Paul & Mary is 68.
… of James Burrows. The director of “Taxi,” “Cheers” and “Will and Grace” is 65.
… of Fred Ward. The actor (Gus Grissom in “The Right Stuff”) is 63.
… of Monkees Michael Nesmith (63) and Davy Jones (60).
… of Patti Smith. Punk rock’s poet laureate is 59.
… of Matt Lauer. The Today show host is 48.
… of Tracey Ullman. She’s 46.
Politician Al Smith (he lost to Herbert Hoover in 1928) was born on this date in 1873.
Albert Einstein was born on this date in 1880.
