Author: NewMexiKen

Money to burn

According to an article in the Los Angeles Times, on each of those few cold, rainy nights in southern California supermarkets sell 1 million-plus bundles of firewood.

For ten years in Orange County, NewMexiKen got by splitting and burning lumber scraps from nearby housing developments.

Call the Guinness Book

In just the first few paragraphs Dan Neil sets a world record for figurative language:

As long as there have been high school proms and students with no dates to attend them, parents have reassured their awkward/chubby/ mouth-breathing adolescents that it’s what is on the inside that counts. I myself was full of inner beauty, though that beauty was trapped in a sebaceous mutant with glasses as thick as lighthouse lenses.

I would counsel and console the Buick LaCrosse in similar fashion. It’s all right, honey. Don’t cry. If customers don’t see what a wonderful car you are, well, it’s their loss.

I would also go around the house discreetly covering all the mirrors.

The LaCrosse — which replaces the Century and Regal in Buick’s batting order — is a nice car trapped in some astonishingly boring sheet metal. I find myself drawn to meteorological metaphors. If dullness were thunder, the LaCrosse would send dogs running for cover under porches. If mediocrity were snow, Detroit’s Wayne County airport would have to be shut down.

How big a committee styled this thing? There is some of the Olds Alero, a lot of the Ford Taurus, the headlights off the Lexus GS300, the decklid from a Dodge Neon. The front and the back look like different cars and the sum of it has this strange, worked-over quality, like an in-flight magazine’s crossword puzzle.

Rocky Mountain National Park …

is celebrating its 90th anniversary today.

RMNP.jpg

This from the National Park Service:

Established on January 26, 1915, Rocky Mountain National Park is a living showcase of the grandeur of the Rocky Mountains. With elevations ranging from 8,000 feet in the wet, grassy valleys to 14,259 feet at the weather-ravaged top of Long’s Peak, a visitor to the park has opportunities for countless breathtaking experiences and adventures.

Elk, mule deer, moose, bighorn sheep, black bears, coyotes, cougars, eagles, hawks and scores of smaller animals delight wildlife-watchers of all ages. Wildflower-lovers are never disappointed in June and July when the meadows and hillsides are splashed with botanical color. Autumn visitors can relax among the golden aspens or enjoy the rowdier antics of the elk rut (mating season).

NewMexiKen refers to the fall rut as the elk singles bar.

On the other hand

Kudos to CompUSA (at least locally) for permitting an exchange without a receipt or the original packaging (stuff I usually have). Even though the product was defective, NewMexiKen anticipated something of a hassle. There was none.

Standing tall

NewMexiKen visited the doctor for a routine exam yesterday. Nothing wrong that being younger couldn’t cure.

But the highlight of the day was learning that I am taller than ever before. By about half-an-inch. Really.

At this rate, in a few more years I may be basketball material.

And I still have all four years of college eligibility.

Carpet bomb

Forty-eight hours before the scheduled installation, NewMexiKen is called this morning to be told the carpet won’t be available. The house is a nightmare — bookcases emptied, guest room bedding stripped, knick-knacks packed, furniture shifted onto non-carpeted floors. I’d even pulled the carpet back and ripped up some tack boards that had been damaged by water and needed to be replaced.

For once I didn’t put everything off and look what happens.

It seems the mill is out of this particular favorite and won’t have more for a week — or until after three of the Sweeties and their mothers have arrived for a visit.

Aarrgghh!

UPDATE: This deal was through Costco, which relies on a sub-contractor, which in turn uses a local agent (an interior designer). The sub-contractor tells me that the local agent is not supposed to promise a date and that the window for installation is usually two-to-three weeks (not one).

In other words, the local designer told me what I wanted to hear (that installation could be this Friday) in order to make the deal.

I don’t know if she was a carpetbagger, but she certainly was a scalawag.

Nine seasons

Colorado Luis writes about the nine seasons of the year in Denver. Much of what he says resonates with northern New Mexico, though Albuquerque receives only about two-thirds as much precipitation as Denver and is about five degrees warmer on average.

And doesn’t have a Stock Show.

Larry Summers, a different take

Ruth Marcus of The Washington Post via the San Francisco Chronicle on the Larry Summers matter:

Is it so heretical, though, so irredeemably oafish, to consider whether gender differences also play some role? As the daughter of two scientists and the mother of two daughters, I think not. After all, scientists are reporting day by day about their breakthroughs in understanding the genetic basis of diseases or personality traits. Brain studies of men and women show that the two genders use different parts of their brain to process language. (Men tend to be left-siders, women both-lobers.)

Summers drew fire for relating the story of how he bought a set of trucks for his daughter, only to find her naming them “Daddy Truck” and “Baby Truck.” A clumsy and ill-advised anecdote perhaps, but one that resonated with legions of would-be gender-neutral parents of girls. I, for one, have a basement full of Brio train tracks, as pristine as they were pricey. We use the train table to fold our laundry.

Many of the same people denouncing Summers, I’d venture, believe fervently that homosexuality, for example, is a matter of biology rather than of choice or childhood experience. Many would demand that medical studies be structured to consider differences between men and women in metabolizing drugs, say, or responding to a particular disease. And many who find Summers’ remarks offensive seem perfectly happy to trumpet the supposed attributes that women bring to the workplace — that they are more intuitive, or more empathetic or some such. If that is so — and I’ve always rather cringed at such assertions — why is it impermissible to suggest that there might be some downside differences as well?

Wake up little Susie, Wake up

Law professor Michael Froomkin has a sleeper in his early morning class, which leads to this story —

The whole incident reminds me, albeit somewhat uncomfortably, of a story that was popular when I was a law student at Yale. Myres McDougal, the great international lawyer, was emeritus by the time I got there, but his v e r y slow southern drawl was as distinctive as ever. The story was that when, as a young man, he had taught at Columbia, they had given him a lecture room with a ground floor and a balcony. Supposedly, one of the Columbia students fell asleep in the front row of the balcony. McDougal looked as his seating chart, called on the student next to the sleeper and asked him to please waken his colleague.

The student supposedly responded, “You put him to sleep, you wake him up.”

Jules Feiffer

From The Writer’s Almanac:

It’s the birthday of cartoonist, novelist and playwright Jules Feiffer, born in the Bronx (1929). He said of his childhood, “The only thing I wanted to be was grown up. Because I was a terrible flop as a child. You cannot be a successful boy in America if you cannot throw or catch a ball.” He decided early on that he wanted to be a comic strip artist, and when he was a teenager, he showed his work to the cartoonist Will Eisner, and Eisner gave him a job. Feiffer said, “[It was] ten dollars a week part-time—erasing pages, filling in blanks, and dreaming great dreams.”

But he was drafted in 1951, and he did not take well to the army. He said, “I was treated with open contempt by one form of authority or the other in the army on a 24-hour basis.” The experience inspired him to write a bitterly cynical cartoon strip about a four-year-old boy who is drafted by mistake. He tried to sell the strip to a variety of major newspapers, but nobody would buy it. So he finally turned to a new weekly newspaper in his neighborhood called The Village Voice. Over the next decade, the Village Voice became nationally prominent, and Feiffer’s cartoons became nationally syndicated.

His strip in the Village Voice was one of the first cartoon strips to deal with adult themes such as sex, politics, and psychiatry. For most of his career, he has drawn and written all of his work in Central Park, which he considers his office.

Michigan …

joined the Union as the 26th state on this date in 1837.

  • The name Michigan is derived from the Indian words “Michi-gama” meaning large lake.
  • The State Nickname is the “Great Lake State”. Others include “Wolverine State” or “Water Winter Wonderland”.
  • The State motto is “Si quaeris peninsulam amoenam circumspice” (If you seek a pleasant peninsula, look about you).

Michigan

Paul Newman …

is 80 years old today.

Newman has been nominated for the Best Actor in a Leading Role Oscar eight times, winning for The Color of Money in 1986, but not for Cat On A Hot Tin Roof, The Hustler, Hud, Cool Hand Luke, Absence of Malice, The Verdict, or Nobody’s Fool. He was also nominated for the Best Supporting Actor for Road to Perdition (at age 78).

Best line of the day, so far

From a 1977 Johnny Carson monologue —

August 4th: President Carter has recommended that it should not be a criminal offense to be found in possession of an ounce or less of marijuana.

CARSON: The trouble is that nobody in our band knows what an ounce or less means.

DOC SEVERINSEN: It means you’re about out.

A very funny gentleman

Functional Ambivalent has a good take on Johnny Carson —

The thing that made Carson Carson was that he never went too far.

Whatever it is in a comic’s brain that conjurs jokes instantly…the dare-devil part that starts speaking the front of the joke before the back of the joke has even been formulated…the part that synthesises personality and context and culture into a singular, funny whole…that thing, in Carson, never, ever went over the line. In 30 years on the air — much of it live — Carson jabbed hilariously at his guests without drawing blood. There were no backstage tears at The Tonight Show.

A gentleman, Oscar Wilde once said, is someone who never insults anyone unintentionally. Johnny Carson was a very, very funny gentleman.

Tough fans

Brotherly love — I don’t think so. From The Seattle Times: Sideline Chatter:

Three takes on Philadelphia’s hard-boiled fans:

• Red Sox manager Terry Francona, as quoted by the Dayton (Ohio) Daily News: “Hey, I spent four years managing in Philadelphia. On Fan Appreciation Day, someone slashed my tires in the parking lot.”

• Slogan on the official Eagles Fan Club Web site, www.eaglesfanclub.com: “Where the fans are tougher than the players!”

• Ian O’Connor of the Journal News of Westchester, N.Y., on ESPN’s “The Sports Reporters”: “The Eagles are the only team in the sport who actually want to score early to take their own fans out of the game.”

Oscar nominations

Links are to reviews in The New York Times.

BEST PICTURE
“The Aviator”
“Finding Neverland”
“Million Dollar Baby”
“Ray”
“Sideways”

DIRECTOR
Martin Scorsese, “The Aviator”
Clint Eastwood, “Million Dollar Baby”
Taylor Hackford, “Ray”
Alexander Payne, “Sideways”
Mike Leigh, “Vera Drake”

ACTOR IN A LEADING ROLE
Don Cheadle, “Hotel Rwanda”
Johnny Depp, “Finding Neverland”
Leonardo DiCaprio, “The Aviator”
Clint Eastwood, “Million Dollar Baby”
Jaime Foxx, “Ray”

ACTRESS IN A LEADING ROLE
Annette Bening, “Being Julia”
Catalina Sandino Moreno, “Maria Full of Grace”
Imelda Staunton, “Vera Drake”
Hilary Swank, “Million Dollar Baby”
Kate Winslet, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”

ACTOR IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Alan Alda, “The Aviator”
Thomas Haden Church, “Sideways”
Jaime Foxx, “Collateral”
Morgan Freeman, “Million Dollar Baby”
Clive Owen, “Closer”

ACTRESS IN A SUPPORTING ROLE
Cate Blanchett, “The Aviator”
Laura Linney, “Kinsey”
Virginia Madsen, “Sideways”
Sophie Okendo, “Hotel Rwanda”
Natalie Portman, “Closer”

ORIGINAL SCREENPLAY
John Logan, “The Aviator”
Charlie Kaufman, “Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind”
Keir Pearson and Terry George, “Hotel Rwanda”
Brad Bird, “The Incredibles”
Mike Leigh, “Vera Drake”

ADAPTED SCREENPLAY
Richard Linklater, Julie Delpy, Ethan Hawke and Kim Krizan , “Before Sunset”
David Magee, “Finding Neverland”
Paul Haggis, “Million Dollar Baby”
José Rivera, “The Motorcycle Diaries”
Alexander Payne and Jim Taylor, “Sideways”

FOREIGN LANGUAGE FILM
“As It Is in Heaven” (Sweden)
“The Chorus” (France)
“Downfall” (Germany)
“The Sea Inside” (Spain)
“Yesterday” (South Africa)

ANIMATED FEATURE
“The Incredibles”
“Shark Tale”
“Shrek 2”

ORIGINAL SCORE
“Finding Neverland”
“Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban”
“Lemony Snicket’s A Series of Unfortunate Events”
“The Passion of the Christ”
“The Village”

ORIGINAL SONG
“Accidentally in Love” from “Shrek 2”
“Al Otro Lado Del Rio” from “The Motorcycle Diaries”
“Believe” from “The Polar Express”
“Learn to Be Lonely” from “The Phantom of the Opera”
“Look to Your Path (Vois Sur Ton Chemin)” from “The Chorus”