Author: NewMexiKen

Flag at half mast

In case you were wondering:

As a mark of respect for His Holiness Pope John Paul II, I hereby order, by the authority vested in me by the Constitution and laws of the United States of America, that the flag of the United States shall be flown at half staff at the White House and on all public buildings and grounds, at all military posts and naval stations, and on all naval vessels of the Federal Government in the District of Columbia and throughout the United States and its Territories and possessions until sunset on the day of his interment. I also direct that the flag shall be flown at half staff for the same period at all United States embassies, legations, consular offices, and other facilities abroad, including all military facilities and naval vessels and stations.

From White House Proclamation

Many countries around the world did the same.

It appears, by the way, the many locations that display the U.S. flag didn’t get the memo. I’ve seen it at full mast nearly as often as not this week.

Washington’s Crossing

Six months after the Declaration of Independence, the American Revolution was all but lost. A powerful British force had routed the Americans at New York, occupied three colonies, and advanced within sight of Philadelphia. George Washington lost ninety percent of his army and was driven across the Delaware River. Panic and despair spread through the states.

Yet, as David Hackett Fischer recounts in this riveting history, Washington–and many other Americans–refused to let the Revolution die. Even as the British and Germans spread their troops across New Jersey, the people of the colony began to rise against them. George Washington saw his opportunity and seized it. On Christmas night, as a howling nor’easter struck the Delaware Valley, he led his men across the river and attacked the exhausted Hessian garrison at Trenton, killing or capturing nearly a thousand men. A second battle of Trenton followed within days. The Americans held off a counterattack by Lord Cornwallis’s best troops, then were almost trapped by the British force. Under cover of night, Washington’s men stole behind the enemy and struck them again, defeating a brigade at Princeton. The British were badly shaken. In twelve weeks of winter fighting, their army suffered severe damage, their hold on New Jersey was broken, and their strategy was ruined.

Fischer’s richly textured narrative reveals the crucial role of contingency in these events. We see how the campaign unfolded in a sequence of difficult choices by many actors, from generals to civilians, on both sides. While British and German forces remained rigid and hierarchical, Americans evolved an open and flexible system that was fundamental to their success. At the same time, they developed an American ethic of warfare that John Adams called “the policy of humanity,” and showed that moral victories could have powerful material effects. The startling success of Washington and his compatriots not only saved the faltering American Revolution, but helped to give it new meaning, in a pivotal moment for American history.

— From the book jacket of David Hackett Fischer’s Washington’s Crossing

General morass

More on GM from Dan Neil:

GM is a morass of a business case, but one thing seems clear enough, and Lutz’s mistake was to state the obvious and then recant: The company’s multiplicity of divisions and models is turning into a circular firing squad. How can four nearly identical minivans — one each for Pontiac, Buick, Chevrolet and Saturn — be anything but a waste of resources? Ditto the Four Horsemen of Suburbia, the Buick Rainier, Chevrolet TrailBlazer, GMC Envoy and Saab 9-7X. How does the Pontiac Montana minivan square with Pontiac as the “Excitement” division? Why, exactly, is GMC on this Earth?

For a company so utterly devoted to each of its 11 brands — counting offshore badges such as Opel, Holden, Vauxhall — the overarching strategy seems to be to flatten the distinctiveness out of all of them in the name of global efficiencies. Take Saab, poor Saab. The new 9-3s will be built in Russelsheim, Germany, alongside Opel Vectras. The 9-2X is a badge-engineered Subaru WRX. The 9-7X is a Chevy Trailblazer built in the Nordic enclave of Moraine, Ohio.

Gilead

In 1956, toward the end of Reverend John Ames’s life, he begins a letter to his young son, an account of himself and his forebears. Ames is the son of an Iowan preacher and the grandson of a minister who, as a young man in Maine, saw a vision of Christ bound in chains and came west to Kansas to fight for abolition: He “preached men into the Civil War,” then, at age fifty, became a chaplain in the Union Army, losing his right eye in battle. Reverend Ames writes to his son about the tension between his father–an ardent pacifist–and his grandfather, whose pistol and bloody shirts, concealed in an army blanket, may be relics from the fight between the abolitionists and those settlers who wanted to vote Kansas into the union as a slave state. And he tells a story of the sacred bonds between fathers and sons, which are tested in his tender and strained relationship with his namesake, John Ames Boughton, his best friend’s wayward son.

This is also the tale of another remarkable vision–not a corporeal vision of God but the vision of life as a wondrously strange creation. It tells how wisdom was forged in Ames’s soul during his solitary life, and how history lives through generations, pervasively present even when betrayed and forgotten.

Gilead is the long-hoped-for second novel by one of our finest writers, a hymn of praise and lamentation to the God-haunted existence that Reverend Ames loves passionately, and from which he will soon part.

— From the book jacket of the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel

The Pulitizer winners in Letters & Drama

FICTION
Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (Farrar, Straus & Giroux)

DRAMA
Doubt, a parable by John Patrick Shanley

HISTORY
Washington’s Crossing by David Hackett Fischer (Oxford University Press)

BIOGRAPHY
de Kooning: An American Master by Mark Stevens and Annalyn Swan (Alfred A. Knopf)

POETRY
Delights & Shadows by Ted Kooser (Copper Canyon Press)

GENERAL NON-FICTION
Ghost Wars by Steve Coll (The Penguin Press)

MUSIC
Second Concerto for Orchestra by Steven Stucky (Theodore Presser Company)

I know what you mean (cf., last line)

One popular theory is that he comes from Planet Brainiac, where he was such a dunce he had to be exiled to Earth.

My own theory is that Steve has that very rare mental power known as the ability to concentrate. When I peppered him with questions last night about the secrets of his craft, he confessed to the ability to see the shape of a narrative. He said the structure of the book came to him one day while he was jogging — how each part of the book would begin and end, and how the narrative would culminate in the events of Sept. 10, 2001.

Some of us can’t even get our brains around an entire blog item.

— Joel Achenbach writing about collegue and Pulitzer winner Steve Coll, author of Ghost Wars

Fort Raleigh National Historic Site …

was established on this date in 1941. According to the National Park Service:

The first English attempts at colonization in the New World (1585-1587) are commemorated here. These efforts, sponsored by Sir Walter Raleigh, ended with the disappearance of 116 men, women and children (including two that were born in the New World). The fate of this “lost colony” remains a mystery to this day. The Park was established in 1941, and enlarged in 1990 by Public Law 1001-603 to include the preservation of Native American culture, The American Civil War, the Freedman’s Colony, and the activities of radio pioneer Reginald Fessenden. The park is also home to the outdoor symphonic drama THE LOST COLONY, performed in the Waterside Theatre during the summer since 1937.

And, to NewMexiKen’s memory, home as well to an hellacious number of mosquitoes.

Winners

From The Albuquerque Tribune:

You win some, you lose some.

Until Monday, La Cueva’s Seth Johnson and Zach Arnett had defied that maxim.

Johnson and Arnett were around for all 70 games of La Cueva’s national record-setting win streak. They were freshmen when the streak began. They were sophomores and juniors when La Cueva won consecutive state baseball titles, going undefeated along the way.

And they are seniors this year, as La Cueva began 12-0 before falling 17-8 to Rio Grande on Monday.

But 70 wins tell only part of their story. Arnett and Johnson also played varsity football for the Bears, who have won 26 straight games and two consecutive state Class 5A titles.

Their win streak was really 96 games.

Before Monday, neither player had lost a high school football or baseball game since La Cueva fell 10-0 to Clovis in the quarterfinals of the 2002 state football playoffs.

“We’re having to work around them”

Report from The Arizona Daily Star:

In the first few days of the Minuteman Project, volunteers have been slowing illegal immigration into the Naco area. They’ve accomplished that with the help of an unlikely ally: Mexico.

Eager to avoid confrontations between volunteers and its people, Mexico is sweeping the area south of the Minuteman Project clear of migrants. …

What Minuteman volunteers have succeeded in doing is setting off false alarms by tripping ground sensors on the border, [Border Patrol spokesman Andy Adame] said.

“We’re having to work around them instead of concentrating on the actual border where we need to work,” Adame said.

W-A-T-E-R

According to The Writer’s Almanac:

On this day in 1887, teacher Annie Sullivan taught her blind and deaf student Helen Keller that the spelled-out letters “W-A-T-E-R” meant the liquid that flowed out of the pump.

NewMexiKen supposes that these days “W-A-T-E-R” would mean that liquid flows out of a plastic bottle. Not long ago I saw The Miracle Worker with Anne Bancroft and Patty Duke. Catch it if you get a chance. Great story, incredible Oscar-winning performances by both Bancroft and Duke.

It’s the birthday

… of Colin Powell. He’s 68.

Actress Bette Davis was born on this date in 1908. She died in 1989.

Conductor Herbert von Karajan was also born on this date in 1908 and he, too, died in 1989.

Joseph Lister was born on this date in 1827. His principle that bacteria must never enter a surgical incision was a breakthrough for modern surgery. Lister died in 1912. (One assumes Listerine is named for him.)

Another point of view

From an assessment of Pope John Paul II by Virginia Heffernan in The New York Times:

But Mr. [James] Carroll’s most forceful point is one that nearly all of television’s elegies have obscured in all their effort to cast John Paul II as, above all, a rock star.

In short, he said the pope was always suspicious about-and often contemptuous of-the very basis of American life. As Mr. Carroll put it, “He’s profoundly suspicious of democracy.”

Mr. Carroll continued, “He’s a man of tremendous modern sensibility, capable of being at home with rock musicians and young people, and yet he has staked everything on protecting a view of the church that has it roots in the Middle Ages.”

Seeing the light

Excerpt from an editorial in Scientific American:

In retrospect, this magazine’s coverage of so-called evolution has been hideously one-sided. For decades, we published articles in every issue that endorsed the ideas of Charles Darwin and his cronies. True, the theory of common descent through natural selection has been called the unifying concept for all of biology and one of the greatest scientific ideas of all time, but that was no excuse to be fanatics about it. Where were the answering articles presenting the powerful case for scientific creationism? Why were we so unwilling to suggest that dinosaurs lived 6,000 years ago or that a cataclysmic flood carved the Grand Canyon? Blame the scientists. They dazzled us with their fancy fossils, their radiocarbon dating and their tens of thousands of peer-reviewed journal articles. As editors, we had no business being persuaded by mountains of evidence.

Of course, the editorial was published April First.

Pointer from Paul Krugman

Glen Canyon exposed

The Los Angeles Times‘ Susan Spano at Glen Canyon. She begins:

From Glen Canyon Bridge on U.S. Highway 89, you can see both sides of an argument. To the north is placid Lake Powell, a big, blue tropical cocktail in the arid no man’s land of southeastern Utah. It’s Exhibit A in the case for letting 42-year-old Glen Canyon Dam stand. To the south is the Colorado River, testily emerging from impoundment, cutting through sheer rock walls on its way to the Grand Canyon, wild and free, the way nature made it.

I stood there with my brother, John, in early February, thinking about Seldom Seen Smith, the fictional mastermind of a plot to blow up the Glen Canyon Dam in Edward Abbey’s 1975 novel, “The Monkey Wrench Gang.”

Smith, Abbey wrote, “remembered the golden river flowing to the sea … canyons called Hidden Passage and Salvation and Last Chance … strange great amphitheaters called Music Temple and Cathedral in the Desert. All these things now lay beneath the dead water of the reservoir, slowly disappearing under layers of descending silt.”

The book has achieved cult status among lovers of Utah’s slick-rock plateau and canyon country. But Abbey’s book never expected that nature, in the form of a blistering six-year drought, would toy with the fate of Lake Powell.

GlenCanyon.jpg

The last time the reservoir was full — at 3,700 feet above sea level — was in July 1999. Since then the drought has lowered the water level 144 feet, leaving the reservoir at about 33% capacity, shrinking the length of the lake from 186 miles to 145 miles and gradually re-exposing something remarkable underneath: the arches and spires of Glen Canyon. People travel halfway around the world to see the canyon of China’s Yangtze River, doomed by construction of Three Gorges Dam. So was it any wonder that John and I felt compelled to go backpacking in little side canyons on the fringes of Lake Powell, where the water is rapidly receding? It was a chance in a lifetime to see something that couldn’t be seen five years ago and may not be seen five years from now.

John Paul II

The death of the Pope is not an event that makes NewMexiKen sad. John Paul lived a long and, by any measure, successful life, rising to the very top of his profession. His role in eliminating communism in eastern Europe ensures him a highly regarded place in history. He is loved, if the TV cameras are to be believed, by millions and respected by millions more. And, if there is a heaven, surely we have no reason to think Karol Wojtyla wasn’t welcomed there yesterday.

So, it seems to me his death should be a time for joy rather than mourning.

Or am I just weird?

Record!

From the report in The Albuquerque Journal:

La Cueva’s baseball team pitched, fielded and generally bashed its way into the national record books Saturday, winning consecutive game numbers 69 and 70.

By sweeping visiting Highland 15-1 and 11-0 in a doubleheader, the Bears went where no prep baseball team had gone before. They extended a winning streak that dates to 2002 and eclipsed a record that dated to 1966, when Archbishop Molloy High of Briarwood, N.Y., completed a 68-game run.

The setting could hardly have been more perfect.

Roughly 1,000 fans encircled La Cueva’s baseball diamond on a crystal-clear morning. Fans in lawn chairs lined the track outside the right-field fence, and a group of firefighters watched from atop a fire truck parked in left field.

Remarkably, two players have started every game of the four year streak.

This is NewMexiKen’s local high school (as if that matters).

Latest from Google

Google Gulp

At Google our mission is to organize the world’s information and make it useful and accessible to our users. But any piece of information’s usefulness derives, to a depressing degree, from the cognitive ability of the user who’s using it. That’s why we’re pleased to announce Google Gulp (BETA)™ with Auto-Drink™ (LIMITED RELEASE), a line of “smart drinks” designed to maximize your surfing efficiency by making you more intelligent, and less thirsty.

Vigilantes

This will end in tragedy:

TOMBSTONE – Faye Leedy cornered a burly man standing guard outside the white-walled headquarters for the Minuteman Project, ogling his T-shirt with a look of pure envy.

Leedy, a 73-year-old volunteer for a much-hyped civilian border patrol effort that starts in Tombstone today, read the writing, in old-fashioned Western script, out loud: “Undocumented Border Patrol Agent.”

“Oh, I gotta have one of those,” she said with a chuckle.

Leedy, a Sierra Vista retiree, is among an unlikely bunch of self-appointed border police set to descend on Cochise County to “assist” the U.S. Border Patrol in keeping undocumented immigrants from crossing the U.S.-Mexican border.

From The Arizona Republic