Author: NewMexiKen

Multi-tasking — it’s hazardous to your health

From Robin Marantz Henig in The New York Times:

In the last few years, 30 states have considered legislation to outlaw the use of hand-held cellphones while driving. Most have failed. But three states now have such laws. The most far-reaching, New Jersey’s, which went into effect this month, prohibits drivers from doing anything else – not just talking while holding a cellphone but restraining a pet, reading a map or eating a Krispy Kreme doughnut on the way to work. The ultimate antimultitasking law.

*****

Still, in the long run, multitasking is what wastes time. Last year, psychologists at the University of Michigan reported that when they asked subjects to perform two or more experimental tasks – solving arithmetic problems, say, at the same time they identified a series of shapes – the frontal cortex, the executive function center of the brain, had to switch constantly, toggling back and forth in a stutter that added as much as 50 percent to the time it would have taken to perform the tasks sequentially instead of simultaneously.

Terror at the elections

Wonkette is beginning to see how the terrorists might threaten the election:

Or if they somehow purged a bunch of law-abiding citizens off the voter rolls for no reason. Or maybe if they rigged up a black box electronic voting system. Or threw the whole thing to the Supreme Court. Those things would be a problem, democracy-wise.

And Jesus’ General writes Pastor Soaries (chairman of the U.S. Election Assistance Commission):

I understand that you have a tough sell. I’m sure there are many who have pointed out that elections have never been suspended before, not even during the Civil War when our very existence as a nation was in danger. These people fail to understand the nature of the threat today. Certainly, Osama bin Laden’s minions pose a greater danger to the Union than the armies of the Confederacy ever did.

Fore!

After not playing golf for more than 35 years, and never playing well, NewMexiKen has rejoined the ranks of the duffers. Sunday, in a round shortened by a thunderstorm, I was faced with a par-three-hole that consisted pretty much of tee boxes, a green and a water hazard the approximate size of Lake Superior (well, it looked that way to me). I figured the smartest move was to just go ahead and dump my supply of golf balls directly into the water.

But I gave it a shot. I hit the ball rather well (for me that means that it actually left the ground at any point). It took off nicely and then skipped across the surface of the water two or three times before landing just on the green.

I figured either the water in Albuquerque is even harder than I thought or the gods of golf were sucking me in.

Changing nation

From an article in Sunday’s New York Times on Smith remaining the most popular surname in America.

For the first time, more Americans now describe their ancestry as African or African-American than English, more as Mexican than Italian and nearly as many Vietnamese as Cuban. But no group grew more in the 1990’s than those who described their ancestry only as “American” – up to 20 million in 2000 from 12 million in 1990.

Cluckhold

From Furthermore at Wired News:

A Fijian man who was raised by chickens has been given a second chance at life. Sunjit Kumar was locked in a chicken coop for several years as a young boy and, deprived of contact with humans, he adopted the habits and mannerisms of his feathered friends. When Kumar escaped, he was taken to a hospital where he was confined for 20 years. Kumar, now 32, was recently discovered by Elizabeth Clayton, president of a local Rotary Club, who is teaching him to walk and speak like a person. “He was perching, he was picking at his food, he was hopping around like a chicken. He’d keep his hands in a chickenlike fashion, and he’d make a noise … like the calling of a chicken,” Clayton said. She said Kumar has made “remarkable progress.”

If you had to choose

NewMexiKen has mentioned the TCCI twice already but has decided, like other prominent bloggers, to post it directly with my choice (and a few I didn’t know or couldn’t decide).

  1. Fred Astaire or Gene Kelly? Kelly
  2. The Great Gatsby or The Sun Also Rises? Sun
  3. Count Basie or Duke Ellington? Duke trumps Count
  4. Cats or dogs? Dogs
  5. Matisse or Picasso? Matisse
  6. Yeats or Eliot? Yeats
  7. Buster Keaton or Charlie Chaplin? Keaton
  8. Flannery O’Connor or John Updike? Updike
  9. To Have and Have Not or Casablanca? Casablanca
  10. Jackson Pollock or Willem de Kooning?
  11. The Who or the Stones? Stones
  12. Philip Larkin or Sylvia Plath?
  13. Trollope or Dickens? Dickens
  14. Billie Holiday or Ella Fitzgerald? Billie
  15. Dostoyevsky or Tolstoy? Dostoyevsky
  16. The Moviegoer or The End of the Affair?
  17. George Balanchine or Martha Graham?
  18. Hot dogs or hamburgers? Depends on who’s grilling
  19. Letterman or Leno? Letterman
  20. Wilco or Cat Power?
  21. Verdi or Wagner? German cars, Italian opera — Verdi
  22. Grace Kelly or Marilyn Monroe? Marilyn
  23. Bill Monroe or Johnny Cash? Cash
  24. Kingsley or Martin Amis?
  25. Robert Mitchum or Marlon Brando? Brando
  26. Mark Morris or Twyla Tharp?
  27. Vermeer or Rembrandt? Rembrandt
  28. Tchaikovsky or Chopin? Chopin
  29. Red wine or white? White (red better for you, though)
  30. Noël Coward or Oscar Wilde? Wilde
  31. Grosse Pointe Blank or High Fidelity?
  32. Shostakovich or Prokofiev? Prokofiev
  33. Mikhail Baryshnikov or Rudolf Nureyev? Baryshnikov
  34. Constable or Turner?
  35. The Searchers or Rio Bravo? Rio Bravo
  36. Comedy or tragedy? Comedy
  37. Fall or spring? Fall
  38. Manet or Monet? Monet
  39. The Sopranos or The Simpsons? Sopranos
  40. Rodgers and Hart or Gershwin and Gershwin? Gershwins
  41. Joseph Conrad or Henry James? Conrad
  42. Sunset or sunrise? Sunrise
  43. Johnny Mercer or Cole Porter? Porter
  44. Mac or PC? PC (for now)
  45. New York or Los Angeles? New York to visit, LA to live
  46. Partisan Review or Horizon?
  47. Stax or Motown? Stax
  48. Van Gogh or Gauguin? Van Gogh
  49. Steely Dan or Elvis Costello? Elvis
  50. Reading a blog or reading a magazine? Blogs (plural)
  51. John Gielgud or Laurence Olivier? Olivier
  52. Only the Lonely or Songs for Swingin’ Lovers? Roy did a few songs well. Frank did them all well. Roy for this song.
  53. Chinatown or Bonnie and Clyde? Faye and Jack over Faye and Warren
  54. Ghost World or Election?
  55. Minimalism or conceptual art?
  56. Daffy Duck or Bugs Bunny? Bugs
  57. Modernism or postmodernism?
  58. Batman or Spider-Man? Spidey
  59. Emmylou Harris or Lucinda Williams? Emmylou
  60. Johnson or Boswell? Boswell
  61. Jane Austen or Virginia Woolf? Austen
  62. The Honeymooners or The Dick Van Dyke Show? Honeymooners
  63. An Eames chair or a Noguchi table?
  64. Out of the Past or Double Indemnity?
  65. The Marriage of Figaro or Don Giovanni? Don Giovanni
  66. Blue or green? Blue
  67. A Midsummer Night’s Dream or As You Like It? Dream
  68. Ballet or opera? Opera
  69. Film or live theater? Film
  70. Acoustic or electric? What tune?
  71. North by Northwest or Vertigo? Vertigo (Kim over Eva)
  72. Sargent or Whistler? Whistler
  73. V.S. Naipaul or Milan Kundera?
  74. The Music Man or Oklahoma? Oklahoma
  75. Sushi, yes or no? No
  76. The New Yorker under Ross or Shawn? Shawn
  77. Tennessee Williams or Edward Albee? Williams
  78. The Portrait of a Lady or The Wings of the Dove?
  79. Paul Taylor or Merce Cunningham?
  80. Frank Lloyd Wright or Mies van der Rohe? Wright
  81. Diana Krall or Norah Jones? Norah
  82. Watercolor or pastel? Watercolor
  83. Bus or subway? Subway
  84. Stravinsky or Schoenberg? Igor, of course
  85. Crunchy or smooth peanut butter? Smooth
  86. Willa Cather or Theodore Dreiser? Cather
  87. Schubert or Mozart? Mozart
  88. The Fifties or the Twenties? Fifties
  89. Huckleberry Finn or Moby-Dick? Huck
  90. Thomas Mann or James Joyce?
  91. Lester Young or Coleman Hawkins? Prez
  92. Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman? Whitman
  93. Abraham Lincoln or Winston Churchill? Lincoln
  94. Liz Phair or Aimee Mann?
  95. Italian or French cooking? Italian
  96. Bach on piano or harpsichord? Harpsichord
  97. Anchovies, yes or no? No
  98. Short novels or long ones? Depends on the novel
  99. Swing or bebop? Swing
  100. “The Last Judgment” or “The Last Supper”? Supper, now that I’ve read The Da Vinci Code

More Hamilton-Burr

See below for NewMexiKen’s first posting on the Alexander Hamilton-Aaron Burr duel that took place 200 years ago today. Ron Chernow, author of the currently best-selling biography of Hamilton, has an op-ed piece in today’s New York Times that puts the shooting into a broader, more analytical historical context.

Aha!

NewMexiKen isn’t the only one. The Ethicist questions the conventional wisdom as well.

I do agree that it can be tough on the parents having to tell a child something at least potentially painful and confusing. But you have years of practice ahead of you when you try to explain, for example, why the “Lord of the Rings” movies won all those Oscars.

Spidey Crushes ‘Fahrenheit’ in 2004

Frank Rich gets real about Fahrenheit 911 and writes a swell review of Spider-Man 2 as well.

The extraordinary popularity of this hero on the Fourth of July weekend might give partisans on both sides of this year’s political race pause. As a man locked in a war against terror, Peter Parker could not be further removed from the hubristic bravura of Mr. Bush and his own cinematic model, the Tom Cruise of “Top Gun.” There’s nothing triumphalist about Spider-Man; he would never declare “Mission Accomplished” after a passing victory, and his very creed is antithetical to the Bush doctrine of pre-emptive war. But neither is he a stand-in for John Kerry. Whatever inner equivocation he suffers over his role as a superhero, he stops playing Hamlet when he has a decision to make. Nor does he follow Mr. Kerry’s vainglorious example of turning his own past battles into slick promotional hagiography.

Spider-Man 2 took in $152 million its first five days, a record. It added 18 of NewMexiKen’s dollars Friday night. It’s good. For its genre it’s very, very good.

Couldn’t Burr have just told Hamilton to ‘Go f*** yourself’?

It was on this date 200 years ago that Aaron Burr, the Vice President of the United States, killed Alexander Hamilton, the former Secretary of the Treasury and the man depicted on the $10 bill even today.

From the Library of Congress:

At dawn on the morning of July 11, 1804, political antagonists and personal enemies Alexander Hamilton and Aaron Burr met on the heights of Weehawken, New Jersey to settle their longstanding differences with a duel. The participants fired their pistols in close succession. Burr’s shot met its target immediately, fatally wounding Hamilton and leading to his death the following day. Burr escaped unharmed. This tragically extreme incident reflected the depth of animosity aroused by the first emergence of the nation’s political party system.

Both men were political leaders in New York: Burr, a prominent Republican, and Hamilton, leader of the opposing Federalist party. Burr had found himself the brunt of Hamilton’s political maneuvering on several occasions, including the unusual presidential election of 1800, in which vice-presidential candidate Burr almost defeated his running mate, presidential candidate Thomas Jefferson. In 1804, Hamilton opposed Burr’s closely fought bid for governor of New York. On the heels of this narrow defeat, Burr challenged Hamilton to a duel on the grounds that Hamilton had publicly maligned his character.

For an excellent telling of the story of the duel, see Joseph J. Ellis, Founding Brothers.

Top search terms

In just one day yesterday, “Tami Maida” surged to the top of the search terms/phrases leading people to NewMexiKen. Sorry folks, the only reference here was for Helen Hunt’s birthday. Hunt played Maida in the 1983 movie Quarterback Princess, which was shown several times this weekend.

“Ron Howard’s brother” (Clint Howard) remains popular.

“Stupid dirty girl” is third. That’s the phrase used by California Education Secretary Richard Riordan.

It’s been a long time since Omarosa made the list.

Slow down, savor

NewMexiKen saw this article in The New York Times earlier in the week and meant to post it then.

Ultimately, it’s not the carbohydrates — or the next unsuspecting food group that will come under attack — that will make us overweight. It’s our relationship with food and our lifestyle. In other words, how we eat is just as important — if not more so — than what we eat.

Maybe that’s the ultimate cooking lesson. In general, Italians take their time when they eat. Many businesses in Italy still close in the middle of the day for three hours to allow for a leisurely lunch. Family mealtimes are sacred. Cooking for one’s family becomes an act of love. Family meals allow for conversation and strengthen the family bond. The antithesis of the Italian eating style is fast food and “eating on the run,” where little attention is given to what is being consumed and the quicker one is done, the better. There is a physiological benefit of eating more slowly, too: your body senses that food has reached the stomach and shuts off the feeling of hunger before you overeat.

The whole article is worth reading.

Dos Juans

From The Albuquerque Tribune:

“The Dos Juans” made their debut as a team in Albuquerque. It sounds like the name of a salsa band or a Vegas magic show, but the title is a nickname coined by a few enthusiastic audience members for Democrats John Kerry and John Edwards in honor of their first joint New Mexico appearance.

Dos Juans sounds better than Jorge and Ricardo to me.