Author: NewMexiKen

Doubling our pleasure — not!

Sex scenes on TV have almost doubled since 1998, according to a Kaiser Family Foundation study released Wednesday.

According to the study of 1,000 hours of all genres of programming–excluding news, sports, and kids shows–across the four major broadcast nets, several top cable nets and a couple of stations, 70% of shows had some sexual content, averaging 5 sex scenes per hour.

Source: Broadcasting & Cable

This is not the reason why NewMexiKen bought a new TV over the weekend. I’ve got nothing against sex on TV. I just think there should be sex shows and non-sex shows and no overlap, yet “70% of the surveyed shows had some sexual content.” (RHETORICAL QUESTION ALERT) Why?

Using our indoor voices

From an article in The New York Times, At Center of a Clash, Rowdy Children in Coffee Shops:

“I love people who don’t have children who tell you how to parent,” said Alison Miller, 35, a psychologist, corporate coach and mother of two. “I’d love for him to be responsible for three children for the next year and see if he can control the volume of their voices every minute of the day.”

Mr. McCauley, 44, said the protesting parents were “former cheerleaders and beauty queens” who “have a very strong sense of entitlement.” In an open letter he handed out at the bakery, he warned of an “epidemic” of antisocial behavior.

“Part of parenting skills is teaching kids they behave differently in a restaurant than they do on the playground,” Mr. McCauley said in an interview. “If you send out positive energy, positive energy returns to you. If you send out energy that says I’m the only one that matters, it’s going to be a pretty chaotic world.”

And so simmers another skirmish between the childless and the child-centered, a culture clash increasingly common in restaurants and other public spaces as a new generation of busy, older, well-off parents ferry little ones with them.

An online petition urging child-free sections in North Carolina restaurants drew hundreds of signers, including Janelle Funk, who wrote, “Whenever a hostess asks me ‘smoking or non-smoking?’ I respond, ‘No kids!’ ”

At Mendo Bistro in Fort Bragg, Calif., the owners declare “Well-behaved children and parents welcome” to try to stop unmonitored youngsters from tap-dancing on the 100-year-old wood floors.

Menus at Zumbro Cafe in Minneapolis say: “We love children, especially when they’re tucked into chairs and behaving,” which Barbara Daenzer said she read as an invitation to cease her weekly breakfast visits after her son was born.

Even at the Full Moon in Cambridge, Mass., a cafe created for families, with a train table, a dollhouse and a plastic kitchen in a carpeted play area, there are rules about inside voices and a “No lifeguard on duty” sign to remind parents to take responsibility.

There’s more.

Now we’re getting places

The Mossberg Solution takes a look at the online mapping services:

This week, my assistant Katie Boehret and I tested the old reliable, MapQuest, against Google Local, http://maps.google.com, and a new, enhanced version of Yahoo Maps, http://maps.yahoo.com/beta. Yahoo’s new site was just released last week, and it’s still in its “beta,” or test, phase.

As everyone who has used online mapping knows, it has its limitations. The mapping services too rarely spit out the kind of smart, speedy routes a savvy local driver would choose. Their suggested routes are generally more convoluted, and sometimes wrong. But, in most cases, they do get you where you’re going, and thus are a boon to drivers unfamiliar with the area in question.

These newer sites are free, like MapQuest, but they offer some fancy features, like the ability to pan across a map simply by moving your mouse’s cursor, or zooming in or out on a location quickly. Google adds satellite photos of the actual locations, down to the trees in your front yard.

MapQuest looks a little dowdy by comparison to the newcomers, but it works for a lot of folks because it gets people from point A to point B, without any extra fuss. So, we tested these new features from Google and Yahoo to see if they were actually useful, or just a lot of hype that muddied up the direction-retrieval process.

Overall, we concluded that, for the sake of getting where you’re going with the most-thorough directions, MapQuest still does the best job, with the most accurate directions. But Yahoo has a multipoint routing feature that’s valuable. And, for some, the ability to quickly pan a geographic region on Yahoo and Google — with satellite photos on the latter — can familiarize them with the surrounding area and make the drive easier.

There’s more.

NoVa

Anyone who has lived in Northern Virginia (that is, the Washington, D.C., Virginia suburbs) as NewMexiKen did for 14+ years, will appreciate this from Joel Achenbach:

Those of you who aren’t familiar with the domain of Lord Fairfax should understand that it used to be a lovely Piedmont region with cornfields and vineyards and the occasional horsey person in jodhpurs, but now has roughly 300 million residents, all of them currently stuck in a traffic jam. Main Street is something called Route 7, also known as the Leesburg Pike, and it has become 40 miles of uninterrupted retail shopping. This sprawling region is culturally more diverse than you’d think, thanks to the immigrant population, and it’s full of swing voters. The Commonwealth of Virginia went for Nixon in 1968, and has been a red state since, but the dramatic growth in population has been in NoVa. Anyone hoping to win the White House in 2008 will want to get out there on the Pike and work the entrances to the big box stores. Hint: Walking may be faster than driving.

Spreading guilt

“If a kid asks where rain comes from, I think a cute thing to tell him is ‘God is crying.’ And if he asks why God is crying, another cute thing to tell him is ‘Probably because of something you did.'”

— Jack Handy, who has many, many more Deep Thoughts.

This and the item directly below via ack ack ack.

Noise-cancellation headphones

Scott Adams’ fantasy below reminded me. NewMexiKen recently acquired Bose noise-cancellation headphones and wore them on the trip to Baltimore and return. Outstanding! You don’t even completely realize how good they are while they are on, but once you take the headphones off you cannot believe the incredible noise in the cabin. No wonder you see people wearing the headphones without any music device attached.

The Dilbert Blog

Scott Adams’ stream of consciousness:

The better question would be how I get past writer’s block. The quick answer — and maybe the only legitimate one — is that I’m just wired that way. There’s a fine line between creative and goofy, and believe me, you wouldn’t want to spend time in my head. Let me give you some real time examples, except not real time. I’m on a plane as I write this. Allow me to write down my thoughts as they happen, just so you get a sense of it. I haven’t planned this:

I wonder if you could make gigantic noise-cancellation headphones to put on the outside of the plane so all the passengers don’t need them on the inside?
Damn, this was a stupid idea to write down my thoughts. Now I don’t have any, except for my thoughts about not having any thoughts. Oh, God, I’m stuck in some sort of loop.
Wait, now I have a thought about the drunken lady’s glass of wine on the seat divider next to me. It’s rocking wildly from the turbulence. It’s going to land on my keyboard. Oh, God, I know it is. Uh-oh, I think she looked over here and read that I called her a drunken lady. My hands hurt from typing. I have to pee again but the seatbelt sign is on. If she dozes off, I might have to top off her chardonnay.

Astronomy Picture of the Day

For your convenience, NewMexiKen has added a button in the sidebar to take you directly to the Astronomy Picture of the Day. It’s right below the button you can use to access Amazon.com. Any purchase you make after accessing Amazon through that gateway generates a little kickback for me at no additional cost to you.

Anyway, be sure to take a look at today’s Solar Prominence photo.

Evolution Slate Outpolls Rivals

All eight members up for re-election to the Pennsylvania school board that had been sued for introducing the teaching of intelligent design as an alternative to evolution in biology class were swept out of office yesterday by a slate of challengers who campaigned against the intelligent design policy.

— The New York Times

Of course, the losers in this election can just move to Kansas.

One also wonders where the author of this story went to school — a 48 word sentence!

What kind of people are these?

From an AP report via WSJ.com:

Both New Jersey and Virginia saw races for governor marked by nasty personal attacks. One ad in Virginia charged that one candidate would not have supported the death penalty for Adolf Hitler; another in New Jersey quoted a candidate’s ex-wife as saying he would betray the state.

Three die playing catch with grenade

BANJA LUKA, Bosnia (Reuters) – A hand grenade being used instead of a ball in a game of catch exploded early on Saturday killing three youths in this Bosnian town, police and news agencies said.

Two youths aged 19 and 20, one of them from neighboring Croatia, were killed instantly while a 20-year-old woman died on her way to hospital, police said. Her sister was slightly injured but two other youths suffered serious injuries.

One suspects alcohol was involved as the incident took place at 2 am. Even so, these weapons have been laying around since the war there 10-13 years ago. In other words, these “youths” have undoubtedly been familiar with hand grenades since they were 7-8 years old. Even so, they sound like Darwin Award material.

Or is that Intelligent Design Award material now?

Frankenstein wines

European Wine Fighting for Survival from Der Spiegel. An excerpt from this interesting article:

Löwenstein has written a manifesto that has caused an uproar in the industry, what he calls a “Manifesto of the Terroirists.” He complains about the “infantilization” of taste, about people who want their wines to be as fruity as “strawberry jam or chocolate syrup.” He also curses the addiction to mass-produced wine and a German law that measures wine quality by sugar content. He scoops up a handful of soil and crushes it in his hands. It’s “as if the sun had baked out the oil,” says Löwenstein.

Soil, climate, weather. These factors should determine what the wine will ultimately taste like, is Löwenstein’s philosophy. Not technology — after all, technology determines everything else. It’s a philosophy that has earned him a reputation in the industry. A reputation as a troublemaker.

…

For Löwenstein, there are real wines and there are Frankenstein wines, and it looks as though the Frankenstein camp is currently gaining ground. Löwenstein has old fashioned ideas, and he wants to return to the past.