Author: NewMexiKen

A little too graphic

It seems to me that Parents Against Bad Books in Schools needs more detail than absolutely necessary. This is from the Sample Book Review Documentation Form.

For each type checked above also indicate level of vividness/graphicness using the following as a general guide:

Basic (B): large breasts

Graphic (G): large, voluptuous bouncing breasts

Very graphic (VG): large, voluptuous bouncing breasts with hard nipples

Extremely graphic (EG): large, voluptuous bouncing breasts with hard nipples covered with glistening sweat and bite marks

Link via Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

Maybe she was just doing some homework

A psychologist who has spoken out on eating disorders and other issues was arrested after she collapsed in a supermarket, allegedly after inhaling propellant from whipped cream cans.

Lisa G. Berzins, who has been interviewed on television and in newspapers and successfully lobbied for a state law regulating claims by weight loss businesses, was arrested on a warrant Friday charging her in the May 29 incident.

Houston Chronicle

Link via Boing Boing: A Directory of Wonderful Things

McDonald’s diet works for her

Article from the Raleigh News & Observer via the Detroit Free Press:

At a cost of $9 to $11 for three meals, the single mother of two can afford it. She travels throughout the Raleigh area working construction jobs, and she has never failed to find a McDonald’s somewhere. The whole process of ordering and eating a meal takes maybe 5 minutes, and she mostly eats in her car. Sometimes she hits the drive-through only once, ordering enough food to last the whole day.

Since April 22, when Morgan launched her diet with a Sausage Burrito and a medium Diet Coke, she’s lost 33 pounds, putting her at about 195 pounds. At 5 feet, 9 inches tall, she’s dropped from a size 22 or 24 to a size 15. The size 2X and 3X T-shirts she used to wear look like dresses on her. And despite her friends’ fears about skyrocketing cholesterol, she feels great.

Sounds yummy, too.

Sasquatch sighting reported in Yukon

A group of people in the Yukon community of Teslin say they saw a sasquatch or bushman over the weekend, the second reported sighting in the area in about a year.

Nine people, some of them children, say a large human-like figure covered in hair passed by a window of a house. They later saw it standing behind an abandoned car near some houses in the community, which is located 180 kilometres east of Whitehorse.

CBC North

Be careful out there

National Rifle Association certified instructor, NRA range safety officer, New Mexico Department of Public Safety instructor and concealed-carry instructor Steve Akins addresses the shortcomings in recent legislation. Excerpted from a column in The Albuquerque Tribune.

The changes to New Mexico’s Right to Carry gun law that were adopted during the 2005 legislative session took effect June 17.

Significant progress was made during the session, but there are some issues that remain unresolved. Some of the initiatives ended with less than completely desirable results for concealed-carry advocates.

We succeeded in getting the minimum age for concealed carry lowered from 25 to 21. This is a big step forward, but still we need to recognize that this minimum age fails to address our military personnel in the 18-to-20 age group. They are trained for combat and expected to use firearms, putting their lives on the line to defend their country. Yet they are not trusted to carry a concealed firearm to defend themselves or their families here in New Mexico.

…

We made a common-sense change in the caliber-qualification requirement. Now, a licensee can qualify with a large-caliber firearm and is authorized then to carry any lesser caliber of the same category – that is, semiautomatic or revolver.

…

A limitation was added in New Mexico saying a licensee may carry only one concealed firearm at a time. That limitation is ridiculous, in that licensees often carry a primary and a backup firearm. In New Mexico, they can’t legally do so.

…

A major failure was our inability to address the alcohol-establishment issue. Under the law, a licensee may not carry a concealed firearm into any licensed alcohol establishment. Doing so would turn the most law-abiding, trustworthy citizen in the state into a felon.

That means licensees must disarm before shopping for groceries – going into a Wal-Mart, for example, or trying to pay for gas inside a convenience store if it sells alcohol. Not only is this an encouragement to those that have no respect for the law and find safe havens to rob or injure others in such establishments, it also requires a licensee to leave a firearm unattended in his or her vehicle.

A gas

Where’s the downside? As I said, there are many good reasons to own a Civic GX, but driving pleasure is not among them. Styled like the dull end of a spoon, this car is boring on a scale that calls for parsecs. Cloth seats, a dinky two-speaker stereo, a trunk eaten up by the CNG cylinder, steel wheels and a 1.7-liter four-cylinder under the hood — or an asthmatic squirrel — the GX could school Savonarola on privation. The car’s CVT gearbox howls for mercy at 80 miles per hour, which is how fast you have to drive sometimes so you don’t get plowed under in the HOV lane.

— Dan Neil in the Los Angeles Times

Best line of the day, so far

“Numbers became so important that if the SecDef went to a briefing and we had reported that we had captured 14 Al Qaeda and it really turned out to be 12 or 16, then it would be easier to let two go or go back and capture two more rather than to try to change the OSD [Office of the Secretary of Defense] number.”

A deputy commanding general in Afghanistan quoted in Sean Naylor’s Not A Good Day to Die via INTEL DUMP

No black passport

Valerie Plame was a classmate of mine from the day she started with the CIA. I entered on duty at the CIA in September 1985. All of my classmates were undercover–in other words, we told our family and friends that we were working for other overt U.S. Government agencies. We had official cover. That means we had a black passport–i.e., a diplomatic passport. If we were caught overseas engaged in espionage activity the black passport was a get out of jail free card.

A few of my classmates, and Valerie was one of these, became a non-official cover officer. That meant she agreed to operate overseas without the protection of a diplomatic passport. If caught in that status she would have been executed.

— Larry Johnson, guest at the TPMCafe

More on Willie’s reggae album

While the music on “Countryman” might raise the eyebrows of country purists, so will the cover. With green marijuana leaves on a red and yellow background, the cover art makes the CD look like an oversized pack of rolling papers.

The marijuana imagery reflects Jamaican culture, where the herb is a leading cash crop and part of religious rites, but it also reflects Nelson’s fondness for pot smoking.

Universal Music Group Nashville is substituting palm trees for the marijuana leaves on CDs sold at the retail chain Wal-Mart, a huge outlet for country music that’s also sensitive about lyrics and packaging.

“They’re covering all the bases,” Nelson joked.

Yahoo! News

Here’s a review from E! Online:

It’s one of those ideas that looks great on paper…rolling paper, that is. Willie Nelson, the classic American country singer lights up a bushel of reggae hits and gives his own tunes an island spin in tribute to his favorite recreational activity: blazing a giant doobie. What should be the ultimate stoner’s delight (or at least a laugh-a-minute musical oddity) disappointingly goes up in smoke the minute the music starts. With a drowsy mix of slide guitars and echoing Caribbean beats, Nelson sleepwalks through Jimmy Cliff’s “The Harder They Come” and his own “Darkness on the Face of the Earth” sounding like Jimmy Buffet with a bad hangover. It’s no wonder his former label kept this stuff locked away in the vaults for nine years. Whoever decided to put this out must have been, well, you know.

Best line of the day, so far

“The authors suggest that this overestimation occurs, in part, because people who are unskilled…suffer a dual burden: Not only do these people reach erroneous conclusions and make unfortunate choices, but their incompetence robs them of the metacognitive ability to realize it.”

Unskilled and Unaware of It: How Difficulties in Recognizing One’s Own Incompetence Lead to Inflated Self-Assessments

In other words, the less you know, the more you think you know. Or, to put it yet another way, stupid is as stupid does.

Keeping it in the family

While reading Rivers of Gold (see below) NewMexiKen checked out the genealogy in the appendices. This was the most remarkable find:

King Manuel of Portugal (b. 1469, d. 1521) first married Isabel of Aragon, daughter of Queen Isabel and King Fernando. She died in childbirth in 1498.

So then King Manuel married her 16-year-old sister, Maria of Aragon. She died in 1517.

He then married Leonor, the daughter of Juana, the oldest of Fernando and Isabel’s daughters (that is, his niece by two marriages).

He had children with all three. What a guy.

Amerigo

NewMexiKen remembers learning that Amerigo Vespucci was just a mapmaker who got America named after him by mistake. Not entirely true.

Vespucci, a native of Florence, settled in Seville in 1492, after a career as a private secretary for various diplomats. He was nearing 40. In 1499, he sailed with one of the first non-Columbian expeditions and explored the north coast of South America, Trinidad, Curaçao and Aruba. Initially, Vespucci agreed with Columbus that these lands were extensions of Asia. By the time he returned to Europe in 1500 though, he thought they were a new continent. Vespucci wrote most enthusiastically about the women he had encountered, which no doubt helped make his reports widely read.

In 1501-1502, Vespucci sailed along the Brazilian coast as far south as the Rio Plata on a commission from the King of Portugal. This was too far south to be Asia. Vespucci wrote, “We arrived at a new land which, for many reasons…we observed to be a continent.” In 1502, the Portugese published a new map showing the new continent with another ocean between it and Asia. In contrast, Columbus continued to believe, until his death in 1506, that he had discovered an extension of Asia.

By this time, because Vespucci had become so well known, two additional letters of his appeared. These have since proven to be forgeries, probably written for fun and profit. They were accepted at the time however, and, ironically, it was one of these that was widely circulated and relied upon by geographer Martin Waldseemüller in his new edition of Ptolemy’s Cosmographia. In his introduction Waldseemüller wrote: “And since Europe and Asia have received the names of women, I see no reason why we should not call this other place Amerige, that is the land of Amerigo, or America, after the wise man who discovered it.” It was in this publication in 1507 where the new hemisphere was named “America” for the first time. Needless to say, the name stuck.

Meanwhile Vespucci was appointed piloto mayor by Spain, the chief geographer and cartographer for all expeditions to the new world. He died in 1512.

Source: Hugh Thomas, Rivers of Gold, a book that, while interesting, is burdened with so many trivial details about each and every participant, and so many reversals of chronology, that the story is made tedious.

Happy Birthday

• Poets have said that the reason to have children is to give yourself immortality. Immortality? Now that I have five children, my only hope is that they are all out of the house before I die.

• You know the only people who are always sure about the proper way to raise children? Those who’ve never had any.

• Women don’t want to hear what you think. Women want to hear what they think — in a deeper voice.

• I want to die before my wife, and the reason is this: If it is true that when you die, your soul goes up to judgment, I don’t want my wife up there ahead of me to tell them things.

• Is the glass half full, or half empty?
It depends on whether you’re pouring or drinking.

• Old is always fifteen years from now.

• Nothing I’ve ever done has given me more joys and rewards than being a father to my children.

Bill Cosby, who turns 68 today.

Late night with Jay Leno

• How ’bout the price of gas? Oh my God! Oil is now over $62 a barrel. In fact, it is so high, today I saw the Sierra Club drilling in Alaska.

• A judge in Mobile, Alabama has put a 90 year old woman in jail for selling drugs. Here’s my question — where are the parents?

• Willie Nelson did an album with reggae musicians. Did you hear about this? How much smoke poured out of that studio? It must have looked like they were electing a new pope.

• Happy Birthday to Jessica Simpson who turned 25 years old on Sunday. Jessica threw a surprise party for herself — and it worked. She had no idea!

• “ESPN” magazine said that Lance Armstrong is considering running for governor of Texas. Well finally Texas would have a governor who knows how to ride a bicycle.

• The White House announced today that next month Vice President Dick Cheney will get a colonoscopy. It’s important that you get these on a regular basis. You know, the last time he had one, they found one polyp and three oil company executives up there.

Show me

If you’re on the job, and you’re reading this story, you should probably get back to work. The average worker wastes more than two hours a day, and that’s not including lunch, according to a new survey by America Online and Salary.com. That means companies spend as much as $759 billion on salaries annually for which they receive no apparent benefit, the research found. The No. 1 state for wasting time was Missouri, where workers who responded to the survey reported slacking off 3 hours and 12 minutes a day. The survey didn’t specifically look at why Missouri is the worst in the nation, but if Missouri workers think the perception is unfair, “We would encourage people to visit the home page and weigh in further on that,” said Richard Cellini, Salary.com’s head of research.

Associated Press via Wired News