Story from Harvey Penick’s Lessons and Teachings from a Lifetime in Golf:
Ben [Crenshaw] came to see me when he was about 8 years old. …
There was a green about 75 yards away. I asked Ben to tee up a ball and hit it onto the green. He did. Then I said, “Now, let’s go to the green and putt the ball into the hole.”
“If you wanted it in the hole, why didn’t you tell me the first time?” little Ben asked.
In his convention address in New York, President Bush announced a new $1 billion initiative to enroll “millions of poor children” in two popular government health programs. But next week, the Bush administration plans to return $1.1 billion in unspent children’s health funds to the U.S. Treasury, making his convention promise a financial wash at best.
From The Washington Post, September 25, 2004
Hey, “Blogs” was a category of Jeopardy! — last Friday during the Tournament of Champions. Here’s the answers; click on each for the question.
Link via Kottke.
From Wonkette:
At one point, Kerry seemed a little irony-challenged. He greeted a young man in a “Titanic Swim Team” t-shirt and asked what events he swam. The embarrassed kid said he was actually on his high school track team. “So you stole the shirt?” Kerry joked. “I thought you were on the swim team. You faked me out there.”
The General, A 10 on the Manly Scale of Absolute Gender, fears his shortcomings have been revealed. Funny story, worth a click.
The General tells us, “At first they thought it was my heart, but they later attributed my chest pain and tightness to some kind of virus in my chest wall–in other words they couldn’t figure it out.” Sounds all too familiar to NewMexiKen.
Here’s why. (Background from NewMexiKen here).
Especially don’t miss this postage stamp.
Based on current polls, according to the Votemaster at Current Electoral Vote Predictor 2004, “If the Senate election were held today, the Democrats would take control of the Senate, 52-48 (counting independent Sen. Jeffords as a Democrat, since he caucuses with the Democrats).”
“If Kerry were the president and Bush the challenger, would anyone — anyone — think Bush has what it takes to be the commander in chief?”
Colorado Luis referring to last week’s debate
Five years of record-breaking drought in the Colorado River basin have drained Lake Powell of more than 60% of its water. Flows on the Colorado are among the lowest in 500 years.
Downriver, Lake Mead, the biggest reservoir in North America and supplier of water to Southern California, Arizona and Las Vegas, is little more than half full. At Mead’s northern end, the foundations of St. Thomas, a little town demolished in the 1930s to make way for the reservoir, have reemerged.
From the Los Angeles Times.
Once again NewMexiKen encourages you to consider Mozilla Firefox as your browser. As the Wall Street Journal’s Walt Mossberg puts it:
I suggest dumping Microsoft’s Internet Explorer Web browser, which has a history of security breaches. I recommend instead Mozilla Firefox, which is free at www.mozilla.org. It’s not only more secure but also more modern and advanced, with tabbed browsing, which allows multiple pages to be open on one screen, and a better pop-up ad blocker than the belated one Microsoft recently added to IE.
The newest release of Firefox also allows you to create RSS bookmarks (Live Bookmarks)!
“There’s 100,000 troops trained: police, guard, special units, border patrol. There’s going to be 125,000 trained by the end of this year.”
President George W. Bush
Presidential Debate
September 30th, 2004
From Reuters:
They estimated that 22,700 Iraqi personnel have received enough basic training to make them “minimally effective at their tasks,” in contrast to the 100,000 figure cited by Bush.
A couple of guys, Chip and Terry, have taken Route 66 from Chicago to Santa Monica on motorcycles and produced a fascinating photo album. Passing through New Mexico they even managed to get a photo of NewMexiKen’s house! (Click to enlarge.)
Well done guys.
Thanks to Albloggerque for the pointer.
What can happen when you leave children Home Alone.
The web site Timothy McSweeney’s has, among other things, a number of amusing lists. Recent ones include:
Some Possibilities in a Half-Hearted Campaign to Rename the Middle West
“[T]he Central Intelligence Agency has fewer experienced case officers assigned to its headquarters unit dealing with Osama bin Laden than it did at the time of the [September 11, 2001] attacks…”
Tomorrow through October 10.
8,172 unique visitors (or at least unique IP addresses) from 63 different countries visited NewMexiKen 14,862 times in September, looking at 59,815 pages.
Which means that “largest college stadiums,” “Agador Spartacus” and “Ron Howard’s brother” are what this corner of the Internet is all about. They seem to be the big attractions.
Update: Some perspective — Kos is getting more than 32,000 hits an hour.
Functional Ambivalent is appropriately worked up about the “news” coverage of the debate.
This is the biggest, best-financed, most professional journalism machine in the history of the world, at a critical moment in our history, on a night when public interest is high and audiences are large just before a Presidential election…and that journalism machine walks through the coverage using the same template it would use if it were covering a Congressman’s speech in front of the Rotary Club of Bettendorf, Iowa. Get a Republican reaction…get a Democrat reaction…get the story filed and head to the bar.
As he says, “a news-like substance.”
… of James Whitmore. The actor, twice nominated for an Oscar, is 83. He was the sole cast member of Give ’em Hell, Harry!.
… of Jimmy Carter. The 39th President is 80 today.
… of William Rehnquist. The Chief Justice is also 80 today.
… of Tom Bosley. Richie Cunningham’s father is 77.
… of Julie Andrews. Mary Poppins is 69. Ms. Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins; she was nominated for The Sound of Music and Victor/Victoria. Of course, her claim to fame really was as Eliza Doolittle in the stage version of My Fair Lady.
… of Rod Carew. The baseball hall of fame player is 59.
… of Tim O’Brien. The novelist is 58. O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 1990, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time as the best novel of 1994. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.
From Dwight Perry’s Sideline Chatter —
Psychologist Don Powell has written a book titled “Best Sports Clichés Ever!” — listing 1,771 of them in 87 categories — reports Brooks Melchior of sportsbybrooks.com.
As soon as our backs aren’t against the wall and there is a tomorrow, we plan to give this book the 110 percent it deserves — one cliché at a time.
From The Smoking Gun — Virginia grade schoolers accidentally served alcohol at lunch.
Mount St. Helens has become restless: “processes are underway that have significant likelihood of culminating in hazardous volcanic activity but … evidence does not indicate that a life- or property-threatening event is imminent.”
Via Wonkette, Kerry Haters for Kerry.
Don’t ever forget. It’s not about Kerry. It’s about it not being Bush.