Author: NewMexiKen

It’s the birthday

… of Nadia Comaneci. The perfect 10 is 43.

… of Brian Hyland. The Itsy Bitsy Teeny Weeny Yellow Polka Dot Bikini singer is 61.

… of Booker T. Jones. The organist is 60. According to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Between 1963 and 1968, Booker T. and the MGs appeared on more than 600 Stax/Volt recordings, including classics by such artists as Otis Redding, Eddie Floyd, Rufus Thomas, Carla Thomas, Johnnie Taylor and William Bell. As a result of Stax’s affiliation with Atlantic Records, the group also worked with Wilson Pickett, Sam and Dave, and Albert King. Moreover, Booker T. and the MGs were a successful recording group in their own right, cutting ten albums and fourteen instrumental hits, including “Green Onions,” “Hang ‘Em High,” “Time Is Tight” and “Soul-Limbo.”

… of Neil Young. He’s 59. Again, according to the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame:

Neil Young is one of rock and roll’s greatest songwriters and performers. In a career that extends back to his mid-Sixties roots as a coffeehouse folkie in his native Canada, this principled and unpredictable maverick has pursued an often winding course across the rock and roll landscape. He’s been a cult hero, a chart-topping rock star, and all things in-between, remaining true to his restless muse all the while. At various times, Young has delved into folk, country, garage-rock and grunge. His biggest album, Harvest (1972) , apotheosized the laid-back singer/songwriter genre he helped invent. By contrast, Rust Never Sleeps (1979), Young’s second-best seller, was a loud, brawling masterpiece whose title track, an homage to Johnny Rotten of the Sex Pistols, contained the oft-quoted line “Better to burn out than it is to rust.”

Name game

From Sideline Chatter:

Among those signing letters of intent this week to play basketball at Idaho State was Central Kitsap’s Emily Zygmontowicz, whose surname alone is worth 41 points in Scrabble tiles.

NewMexiKen is waiting for the cheerleaders to try this one:

Zygmontowicz, Zygmontowicz,
She’s our man
If she can’t do it
Nobody can

Witness to creation — and destruction

There’s a lot of history packed into Ghost Ranch, a beautiful high-desert spot tucked into an upper corner of New Mexico. Read what the Los Angeles Times‘ Christopher Reynolds has to say about it.

At its highest points, Ghost Ranch rises as a set of chalky red slopes, slopes that you know you’ve seen somewhere before. At its lowest points, along the Chama River, a thousand cottonwoods wear their fall robes of gold.

Washington …

was admitted to the Union as the 42nd state on this date in 1889.

According to the Library of Congress:

Racism, rather than concerns about sovereignty, propelled the very first settlers into the Washington region. In 1844, George W. Bush, a man of African-American ancestry was among early pioneers to Oregon Country. After learning the Oregon Provisional Government prohibited black people from owning property, Bush’s party evaded control of the Provisional Government by crossing the Columbia River into present-day Washington. Olympia, now the state capital, traces its settlement to this band of pioneers.

It’s the birthday

… of Calista Flockhart. Ally McBeal is 40.

… of Demi Moore. She’s 42.

… of Jonathan Winters. He’s 79. “If God had really intended man to fly, He’d make it easier to get to the airport.”

… of Kurt Vonnegut Jr. He’s 82. The Writer’s Almanac has several paragraphs on Vonnegut, including this:

Slaughterhouse-Five was published at the height of the Vietnam War, and the book made Vonnegut a hero among the war protesters. Vonnegut said it was an anti-war book. But he also said, “Anti-war books are as likely to stop war as anti-glacier books are to stop glaciers.”

Veterans

According to the Census Bureau, there are 1.5 million fewer veterans in the U.S. than there were two years ago: 24.9 million.

Of these, 9.7 million are over age 65.

In honor of all veterans


“The Allied powers signed a cease-fire agreement with Germany at Rethondes, France on November 11, 1918, bringing World War I to a close. Between the wars, November 11 was commemorated as Armistice Day in the United States, Great Britain, and France. After World War II, the holiday was recognized as a day of tribute to veterans of both world wars. Beginning in 1954, the United States designated November 11 as Veterans Day to honor veterans of all U.S. wars.” (Source: Library of Congress)

Official Department of Veterans Affairs Veterans Day website.

Photo taken by Donna at the Arizona Memorial, Pearl Harbor, Hawaii.

Sheriff Lupe

Lupe Valdez is a woman, a Hispanic, a Democrat and a lesbian — and, come Jan. 1, she’s entering the ranks of Texas good ol’ boys. Valdez is becoming Sheriff Lupe.

Any one description — female, Latina, Democrat and openly gay — would have qualified Valdez’s election as Dallas County sheriff for the local history books. But all four?
…

“It has not that much to do with me,” Valdez, 57, a retired federal law enforcement officer, said as she sat in her modest campaign office in Dallas’s largely Hispanic Oak Cliff neighborhood. The former migrant farm worker, who picked green beans and beets as a child and went on to a career in the military and federal government, and who recently earned a master’s degree in criminology, lives in the neighborhood, with its multitude of bungalows, taquerias and Latino-owned auto body shops.

“It speaks very well of Dallas County, for them to be comfortable in looking at my credentials and feeling comfortable that I could do the job,” she said. “What does female, what does Hispanic, what does any of this have to do with this? What is important is your experience, your ability and your willingness to do the job.”

— Story from The Washington Post

What the hell?

The following is supposedly an actual question given on a University of Washington chemistry mid-term. The answer by one student was so “profound” that the professor shared it with colleagues, via the Internet, which is, of course, why we now have the pleasure of enjoying it as well.

Bonus Question: Is Hell exothermic (gives off heat) or endothermic (absorbs heat)?

Most of the students wrote proofs of their beliefs using Boyle’s Law (gas cools when it expands and heats when it is compressed) or some variant.

One student, however, wrote the following:

First, we need to know how the mass of Hell is changing in time. So we need to know the rate at which souls are moving into Hell and the rate at which they are leaving. I think that we can safely assume that once a soul gets to Hell, it will not leave. Therefore, no souls are leaving.

As for how many souls are entering Hell, let’s look at the different religions that exist in the world today. Most of these religions state that if you are not a member of their religion, you will go to Hell. Since there is more than one of these religions and since people do not belong to more than one religion, we can project that all souls go to Hell. With birth and death rates as they are, we can expect the number of souls in Hell to increase exponentially.

Now, we look at the rate of change of the volume in Hell because Boyle’s Law states that in order for the temperature and pressure in Hell to stay the same, the volume of Hell has to expand proportionately as souls are added.

This gives two possibilities:

1. If Hell is expanding at a slower rate than the rate at which souls enter Hell, then the temperature and pressure in Hell will increase until all Hell breaks loose.

2. If Hell is expanding at a rate faster than the increase of souls in Hell, then the temperature and pressure will drop until Hell freezes over.

So which is it?

If we accept the postulate given to me by Teresa during my Freshman year that, “it will be a cold day in Hell before I sleep with you,” and take into account the fact that I slept with her last night, then number 2 must be true, and thus I am sure that Hell is exothermic and has already frozen over.

The corollary of this theory is that since Hell has frozen over, it follows that it is not accepting any more souls and is therefore, extinct … leaving only Heaven, thereby proving the existence of a divine being which explains why, last night, Teresa kept shouting “Oh my God.”

THIS STUDENT RECEIVED THE ONLY “A”

[Thanks to Byron for passing along the story.]

The Polar Express

“The Polar Express” is a grave and disappointing failure, as much of imagination as of technology. Turning a book that takes a few minutes to read into a feature-length film presented a significant hurdle that the filmmakers were not able to clear.
…

Still, from the looks of “The Polar Express” it’s clear that, together with Mr. Zemeckis, this talented gang has on some fundamental level lost touch with the human aspect of film. Certainly they aren’t alone in the race to build marvelous new worlds from digital artifacts. But there’s something depressing and perhaps instructive about how in the attempt to create a new, never-before-seen tale about the wonderment of imagination these filmmakers have collectively lost sight of their own.

— Manohla Dargis in The New York Times

The Edmund Fitzgerald …

went down off Whitefish Bay, Lake Superior, on this date 29 years ago.

The Wreck of The Edmund Fitzgerald
©1976 by Gordon Lightfoot and Moose Music, Ltd.

The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they called “Gitche Gumee.”
The lake, it is said, never gives up her dead
when the skies of November turn gloomy.
With a load of iron ore twenty-six thousand tons more
than the Edmund Fitzgerald weighed empty,
that good ship and true was a bone to be chewed
when the “Gales of November” came early.

The ship was the pride of the American side
coming back from some mill in Wisconsin.
As the big freighters go, it was bigger than most
with a crew and good captain well seasoned,
concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
when they left fully loaded for Cleveland.
And later that night when the ship’s bell rang,
could it be the north wind they’d been feelin’?

The wind in the wires made a tattle-tale sound
and a wave broke over the railing.
And ev’ry man knew, as the captain did too
’twas the witch of November come stealin’.
The dawn came late and the breakfast had to wait
when the Gales of November came slashin’.
When afternoon came it was freezin’ rain
in the face of a hurricane west wind.

When suppertime came the old cook came on deck sayin’.
“Fellas, it’s too rough t’feed ya.”
At seven P.M. a main hatchway caved in; he said,
“Fellas, it’s bin good t’know ya!”
The captain wired in he had water comin’ in
and the good ship and crew was in peril.
And later that night when ‘is lights went outta sight
came the wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald.

Does any one know where the love of God goes
when the waves turn the minutes to hours?
The searchers all say they’d have made Whitefish Bay
if they’d put fifteen more miles behind ‘er.
They might have split up or they might have capsized;
they may have broke deep and took water.
And all that remains is the faces and the names
of the wives and the sons and the daughters.

Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings
in the rooms of her ice-water mansion.
Old Michigan steams like a young man’s dreams;
the islands and bays are for sportsmen.
And farther below Lake Ontario
takes in what Lake Erie can send her,
And the iron boats go as the mariners all know
with the Gales of November remembered.

In a musty old hall in Detroit they prayed,
in the “Maritime Sailors’ Cathedral.”
The church bell chimed ’til it rang twenty-nine times
for each man on the Edmund Fitzgerald.
The legend lives on from the Chippewa on down
of the big lake they call “Gitche Gumee.”
“Superior,” they said, “never gives up her dead
when the gales of November come early!”

The ship was thirty-nine feet tall, seventy-five feet wide, and 729 feet long.

Lightfoot’s lyrics had one error — the load was bound for Detroit, not Cleveland.

There were waves as high as 30 feet that night; so high they were picked up on radar.

The Edmund Fitzgerald was only 17 miles from safe haven (Whitefish Point).

The captain and a crew of 28 were lost.

It was on this date …

in 1865 that Andersonville prison commander Henry Wirz was hanged. The Library of Congress tells us:

Henry Wirz, former commander of the infamous Confederate prison at Andersonville, Georgia, was hanged on November 10, 1865 in Washington, D.C. Swiss-born Wirz was assigned to the command at Andersonville on March 27, 1864. When arrested on May 7, 1865, he was the only remaining member of the Confederate staff at the prison. Brigadier General John Winder, commander of Confederate prisons east of the Mississippi and Wirz’s superior at Andersonville, died of a heart attack the previous February.

A military tribunal tried Wirz on charges of conspiring with Jefferson Davis to “injure the health and destroy the lives of soldiers in the military service of the United States.” Several individual acts of cruelty to Union prisoners were also alleged. Caught in the unfortunate position of answering for all of the misery that was Andersonville, he stood little chance of a fair trial. After two months of testimony rife with inconsistencies, Wirz was convicted on all counts and sentenced to death.

View a photograph taken just before the hanging and another just after the trap was sprung.

Factoid: Niagara Falls

Today only half the water of the Niagara River passes over Niagara Falls. And at night it’s just one-quarter. The water is diverted to produce hydro-electric power.

So, when we go to Niagara Falls we see only half what our ancestors could have seen. Bummer.

E pluribus unum

It is of great importance in a republic not only to guard the society against the oppression of its rulers, but to guard one part of the society against the injustice of the other part. Different interests necessarily exist in different classes of citizens. If a majority be united by a common interest, the rights of the minority will be insecure.

In a free government the security for civil rights must be the same as that for religious rights.

It is no less certain than it is important, notwithstanding the contrary opinions which have been entertained, that the larger the society, provided it lie within a practical sphere, the more duly capable it will be of self-government.

— James Madison, Federalist 51