Author: NewMexiKen

Top Tens

Top Ten John Kerry Excuses:

10. Voters were in a fever-induced haze because they couldn’t get flu shots.

9. Floridians confused by shockingly unconfusing ballots.

5. Should’ve campaigned more in New Mexico, less in regular Mexico.

3. Thought America was ready for a lunatic first lady.

1. Was distracted by late night erotic phone calls from Bill O’Reilly.

Top Ten Ways George Bush Celebrated:

10. Eliminated tax cut for 55 million Americans who voted for Kerry.

9. Went trippin’ on a handful of Cheney’s heart pills.

6. Pretended not to notice his father’s envious weeping.

5. Dug out tapes of some of his favorite Texas executions.

1. Asked for Laura’s help with a very different bulge under his suit.

Nothing to laugh about

“In fact, the GOP did so well, the only Republican without a mandate: Dick Cheney’s daughter.”
— Jay Leno

“Democrats and liberals, stop saying you’re going to move because Bush won. Real liberals should be pledging to stay because Bush won. Trust me, you can’t get away from Bush by moving to France because that’s where we’re invading next.”
— Bill Maher

“There’s already speculation that Hillary Clinton will be the nominee for the Democrats in 2008. Well, you have to admire the dedication of the Democratic party. They just lost an election, and they’re already hard at work planning to lose the next one.”
— Bill Maher

“John Kerry said yesterday, ‘In an American election, there is no loser.’ Uh, earth to John.”
— Jay Leno

The hobbits were real

It sounds too incredible to be true, but this is not a hoax. A species of tiny human has been discovered, which lived on the remote Indonesian island of Flores just 18,000 years ago.

Researchers have so far unearthed remains from eight individuals who were just one metre tall, with grapefruit-sized skulls. These astonishing little people, nicknamed ‘hobbits’, made tools, hunted tiny elephants and lived at the same time as modern humans who were colonizing the area.

From Nature.com, which has a number of articles, photos, etc.

Seemingly there’s now more evidence for Middle Earth than for the Garden of Eden.

And women have more ribs than men, right?

GRANTSBURG, Wisconsin (AP) — School officials have revised the science curriculum to allow the teaching of creationism, prompting an outcry from more than 300 educators who urged that the decision be reversed.

Members of Grantsburg’s school board believed that a state law governing the teaching of evolution was too restrictive. The science curriculum “should not be totally inclusive of just one scientific theory,” said Joni Burgin, superintendent of the district of 1,000 students in northwest Wisconsin.

— CNN

It’s the birthday

… of Billy Graham. He’s 86 today.

… of Mary Travers. Mary of Peter, Paul & Mary is (big sigh) 67.

… of Roberta Joan Anderson. Joni Mitchell is 61.

Let’s go to the videotape

Phil Simms’ new book Sunday Morning Quarterback is discussed in Richard Sandomir’s column in The New York Times.

Simms’s view of calling football is derived from a belief that what you see on a TV screen is not the truest reflection of what just happened. “TV absolutely can lie,” he writes. Those who do not delve beyond what is immediately before them are doomed to simple analysis.

“I can watch a game on TV,” he said, “but when I put on coaches’ tape, my opinions and thought processes change dramatically.”

It wasn’t until his sixth season that Simms had his epiphany about coaches’ tape. One day, Ron Erhardt, the Giants’ offensive coordinator, showed him tape of the Redskins’ defense.

Erhardt pointed to an outside linebacker, who, he said, kept his feet parallel when Washington was going to rush four down lineman but kept one foot forward for a blitz.

“But that can’t be true all the time,” Simms writes. Yes, Erhardt said, 100 percent of the time.

The Bryant case

The Los Angeles Times has an article on the mock trial the prosecution staged in the Kobe Bryant case.

They wanted to gauge how their chief witness would hold up under hostile cross-examination.

The answer: Disastrously.

For more than three hours, a lawyer playing the role of Bryant defense attorney Pamela Mackey pounded away at the accuser and the account she had given police. The lawyer pointed out that in her police statement the woman said she had kissed Bryant consensually for five minutes before the alleged assault.

“All right, let’s start now,” the lawyer said, looking at his watch.

For the next 60 seconds the courtroom was silent.

“You’re still kissing him,” the lawyer broke in, continuing to look at his watch. “You kissed him for four more minutes.”

“That’s too long,” she responded. “We didn’t kiss that long.”

The lawyer pounced: “Well, you said five minutes.”

The woman crumbled, and seven days later so did the criminal case against Bryant, superstar guard of the Los Angeles Lakers and one of the nation’s wealthiest and most celebrated sports figures.

Is nothing sacred?

Michael Barbaro in The Washington Post writes that retailers are planning to play remixed Christmas songs in hopes of boosting sales.

On the remixed holiday CDs now hitting retailers’ shelves, the song titles are familiar, but the sound is not. On Old Navy’s “Jazzy Jolly” holiday CD, 46Bliss remixes Mahalia Jackson’s rendition of Silent Night. Jackson’s voice is still there, but the original tune is all but unrecognizable, replaced with a thumping drum base line and computer-generated pulses.

On Pottery Barn’s “Christmas Chill” album, Michael Kessler remixes Mel Torme’s recording of “The Christmas Song.” Torme sings, accompanied by his own echo, which reverberates throughout the piece, and a hip-hop-inspired rhythm is inserted in the background.

Deal in danger

Michael Wilbon thinks the D.C. government is fouling off the deal to bring the Expos to Washington.

And if I ran MLB I would call [Mayor] Williams and say, “The deal’s off the table. We’re not accepting your council chairman’s bait-and-switch idiocy. Do we have a deal or not? And if not, we’ll let the team play in RFK until we strike a deal with Las Vegas, or perhaps we’ll more fully explore our options in Northern Virginia. If you don’t get the stadium built where you promised, you don’t get the team. Period.”

Shocking, simply shocking

Sending a weak electrical impulse through the front of a person’s head can boost verbal skills by as much as 20 percent, according to a new study by the U.S. National Institute of Neurological Disorders and Stroke.

In the study, researchers at the institute asked 103 volunteers to recall as many words that begin with a particular letter as possible. The researchers then passed a 2-milliamp current — one-tenth of what is needed to power a small LED (light-emitting diode) light — through electrodes attached to the surfaces of the volunteers’ foreheads. When the volunteers were quizzed again while the current was still on, this time with a different letter, they were able to come up with 20 percent more words on average.

— Wired News

Now they will have to test Boggle players to make sure they’re not getting an illegal boost.

Little Rock Central High School National Historic Site …

was authorized on this date in 1998. The National Park Service tells us:

On the morning of September 23, 1957, nine African-American high school students faced an angry mob of over 1,000 whites protesting integration in front of Central High School in Little Rock, Arkansas. As the students were escorted inside by the Little Rock police, violence escalated and they were removed from the school. The next day, President Dwight D. Eisenhower ordered 1,200 members of the U.S. Army’s 101st Airborne Division from Fort Campbell to escort the nine students into the school. As one of the nine students remembered, “After three full days inside Central [High School], I know that integration is a much bigger word than I thought.”

This event, watched by the nation and world, was the site of the first important test for the implementation of the U.S. Supreme Court’s historic Brown v. Board of Education of Topeka decision of 1954. Arkansas became the epitome of state resistance when the governor, Orval Faubus, directly questioned the authority of the federal court system and the validity of desegregation. The crisis at Little Rock’s Central High School was the first fundamental test of the national resolve to enforce African-American civil rights in the face of massive southern defiance during the years following the Brown decision.

The Incredibles

The buzz on the internets is that The Incredibles, the new film from Pixar/Disney, is wonderful. Not just a great animated film, but a great film.

Seems it’s about time the Academy of Motion Picture Arts and Sciences comes up with an Oscar category for Best Performance by an Actor (and Actress) in a Voice-Over Role.

Mildcats

Poor Mike Stoops. The first-time coach (brother of Oklahoma head coach Bob Stoops) inherited an Arizona team that went 2-9 in 2003 and he’s having a tough time doing as well. The Wildcats are 1-7.

Try rebuilding with the country’s toughest schedule. They’ve lost to teams currently ranked No. 4 (Wisconsin), No. 6 (California) and No. 8 (Utah). Arizona’s one win was over Division 1-AA Northern Arizona.

Today may be Stoops’ best chance for one more victory. The Wildcats play Washington (also 1-7) in Seattle.

Next week it’s USC (8-0 and ranked No. 1). The final game is against Arizona State (6-2 and No. 23).

[Update: Arizona 23 Washington 13]

Like taking a bus

Dave Barry posted this item on his blog:

Hey —

I’m a flight attendant with Northwest Airlines… You’re gonna love this one.

Recently, Northwest reprimanded a flight attendant because she made a passenger put her lap dog back in its carrier during the flight.Until last month, this was the required action when a pet was removed from their carrier. With our October FAA Manual Update “Emotional Support Animals” are no longer required to be in carriers during peoples travels and if they are the size of a lapchild they can be held in the passengers lap through out all phases of flight. This in itself has most flight attendants saying…. what? so now anyone can have their pet in their lap for emotional support through out the flight??? better yet… WHAT contstitutes an “Emotional Support Animal”… and what authorization does someone need to carry this “ESA” with them on flights. Remember we are not talking about Dogs for the Blind or Monkeys for the Paralized. Spefically noted in the Update Pigs and Small Horses are to be allowed on board planes…. YES … SMALL HORSES? As my co-workers and I read this we asked ourselves, Who is going to clean up after the Quadriplegics pig and pony as we travel from Detroit to Tokyo??? and better yet where are we going to put the cleaned up items.We are Union Workers you know, and I know there is nothing in that last contract that requiring us to clean up after dogs, cats, pigs, monkeys or horses. Our contract negotiations are scheduled to begin in the next few months while pay cuts seem to be on the top of the list for Management requests, I’m thinking first you put me in the middle of the passengers and the Terrorists, but now you tell me I have to live with barn animals on my flight too??? God, I need to rethink what I do for a living.I’ve enjoyed reading your column through the years…. thought you might enjoy that.

NWA Flight Attendant

A cartridge generated a faulty number

COLUMBUS, Ohio — A computer error with a voting machine cartridge gave President George W. Bush 3,893 extra votes in a Gahanna precinct.

President Bush won Ohio by 136,000 votes so fixing the error wouldn’t change the election’s outcome.

Franklin County’s unofficial results gave Bush 4,258 votes to Democratic challenger John Kerry’s 260 votes in Precinct one-B.

Records show only 638 voters cast ballots in that precinct. Franklin County elections director Matthew Damschroder says Bush got 365 votes there.

Damschroder says he got calls Thursday from people who saw the error when reading poll results on the election board’s Web site.

Damschroder says after Precinct one-B closed, a cartridge from one of three voting machines at the polling place generated a faulty number at a computerized reading station.

AP via News Channel 5 (Cleveland)

Imagine that, a software flaw (must be a first)

FORT LAUDERDALE, Fla. — It had to happen. Things were just going too smoothly.

Early Thursday, as Broward County elections officials wrapped up after a long day of canvassing votes, something unusual caught their eye. Tallies should go up as more votes are counted. That’s simple math. But in some races, the numbers had gone … down.

It turns out the software used in Broward County can handle only 32,000 votes per precinct. After that, the system starts counting backward. Why a voting system would ever be designed to vote backward was a mystery to Broward County Mayor Ilene Lieberman. It had her on the phone late Wednesday with Omaha-based Elections Systems and Software.

Bad numbers showed up only in running tallies through the day, not the final one. Final tallies were reached by cross-checking machine totals and officials are confident they are accurate.

From the Palm Beach Post

No time for that now

A dude shows up in a town in the old west, ties up his horse and settles in at the saloon for a beer. Soon he senses a lot of anxious activity. People are running here and there, closing shutters, pulling down shades, locking doors.

The dude asks the bartender, “What’s going on?”

The bartender replies — fear clearly etched in his voice — “Big Ed is coming!”

Not knowing what this means, the dude continues to sip his beer. Soon he sees emerging from a cloud of dust down the street a huge man riding on the back of a longhorn bull, whipping it with a live rattlesnake (think Mongo from Blazing Saddles, only bigger and uglier; or maybe Tex Cobb in Raising Arizona).

The huge man rides the bull to the front of the saloon, climbs off and knocks it cold with a punch. He bites the head off the rattlesnake and throws it aside. He walks into the saloon, shoves the bartender to the floor and drinks a huge beer in one swallow.

The dude, scared out of his wits, doesn’t know what to do. Running seems foolish. Hiding is impossible. Finally, in an act of desperation, he says to the most terrifying man he has ever seen, “C-c-can I b-b-buy you a beer?”

The man-monster looks at him, then says, “No time for that now. Big Ed is coming!”

And so the second Bush Administration begins.

Beware the demo

From AP via Wired News:

JACKSONVILLE, North Carolina — More than 4,500 votes have been lost in one North Carolina county because officials believed a computer that stored ballots electronically could hold more data than it did. Scattered other problems may change results in races around the state.

Local officials said UniLect, the maker of the county’s electronic voting system, told them that each storage unit could handle 10,500 votes, but the limit was actually 3,005 votes.

In the kid court

Abstracts of recent decisions by Ian Frazier. An example:

A and B, siblings, on car trip, entered ill-advisedly into burping contest. Drinking soda was involved. B said new flavor of soda, tried by him for first time, was pretty good. A replied, “I’ll bet it’s really not.” This later construed as evidence of animus against B. Contest proceeded without further dispute. Burps of A and B roughly equal in quality, volume, etc. After ten minutes, A said she was bored. B then produced outstanding burp, which A let go by without comment. B, noting A’s silence, asked her opinion. Still receiving no answer, B said, “Hey, I complimented your burps.” A replied in a way seen as unforthcoming by B, who then put pressure on A’s seat belt until she screamed.

Court pulled over and refused to continue until A and B were silent; both enjoined to remain like that; contest suspended.