Author: NewMexiKen

Top Ten Surprises In The Barbara Walters Interview With Martha Stewart

Late Show Top Ten Archive: October 14, 2003

10. Under pressure, Martha sometimes swallows her chaw
9. Barbara showing gratitude for illegal stock tip that paid for new Hummer
8. When Don Zimmer rushed in and took a swing at Martha
7. Martha grew up in poor neighborhood where several households had to share single spice rack
6. The Madonna and Britney-style open mouth kiss
5. Martha introducing her fiance, Ben Affleck
4. Entire hour spent breaking down this week’s Bears-Seahawks game
3. Barbara closing with, “See ya in 3 to 5”
2. Martha’s first book, “Entertaining,” was ghost-written by a young Dave Letterman
1. The two women comparing their “groped by Schwarzenegger” stories

Blanked

“A winless record was tough enough for one Michigan high school girls’ basketball team, but getting shut out in a game earlier this week was quite another.

‘The whole bus ride home, I couldn’t believe it,’ Leslie High Coach Jay Harkness told the Jackson Citizen Patriot after the team fell to 0-13 after a 61-0 loss to Olivet. ‘We missed layups. We missed two-footers. Everything that could go wrong did.’

At least the bus didn’t break down on the way home.”

From the Los Angeles Times.

Mommie Dearest

Christopher Hitchens hits hard on Mother Teresa, “a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud.”

“More than that, we witnessed the elevation and consecration of extreme dogmatism, blinkered faith, and the cult of a mediocre human personality. Many more people are poor and sick because of the life of MT: Even more will be poor and sick if her example is followed. She was a fanatic, a fundamentalist, and a fraud, and a church that officially protects those who violate the innocent has given us another clear sign of where it truly stands on moral and ethical questions.”

Wheel – of – Fortune!

It’s pretty exciting having the Wheelmobile here in ‘Burque.

“What is the Wheelmobile? It’s 32-feet long, 13 feet high and bright yellow. It rolls through cities, down highways and into America’s heartland. Wherever it stops, huge crowds are waiting. It’s giving fans all over the country the chance to try out for America’s favorite game show.The Wheelmobile serves as the preliminary screening process before the final Wheel of Fortune contestant audition.

What happens at a Wheelmobile event? Thousands of fans fill out applications and gather in front of stage with a traveling version of the famous Wheel and Puzzle board. Applications are drawn at random throughout the event, calling individuals on stage in groups of five to participate in a brief interview, play a version of the Wheel of Fortune speed-up round and win special show-themed prizes.”

Niagara fall

“Although daredevils in barrels have survived a plunge over Niagara Falls, the unidentified man who went over the edge Tuesday is believed to be the first person ever to survive the drop without the aid of some kind of flotation device. The man, who witnesses said had a smile on his face as he climbed over the railing near Horseshoe Falls, disappeared for several minutes before reappearing a few hundred feet downstream. Refusing help from a tour boat, he swam to shore and was promptly arrested.”

From Wired News

Always alert

“In August, U.S. Customs confiscated an SUV being used to smuggle Mexican immigrants into the country, but later admitted that their thorough search of it had overlooked a 13-year-old girl hiding inside; she was discovered 42 hours later. And in July, Adrian Rodriguez was imprisoned (but released by an appeals court a month later) because Mexican authorities found 33 pounds of marijuana that U.S. Customs had failed to find in a vehicle it had just sold to him at auction. That was the third time recently that someone had bought a vehicle from U.S. Customs that contained overlooked marijuana and for which the purchaser spent at least some time in prison (in one case, one year) before things were straightened out.”

From News of the Weird

From The Week

Only in America
When a Texas high school student suffered an asthma attack at school on a day she’d forgotten her inhaler at home, her boyfriend, who uses the same medication, let her use his. As a result, Brandon Kivi was expelled for “delivery of a dangerous drug,” under the school district’s zero-tolerance policy. “I’m expelled till after Christmas, and I can probably come back after Christmas,” said Kivi, “but I won’t.” His parents said they would home-school him from now on.

Good Week for…
Having it all, as New Mexico high school freshman Vanessa Lucero scored the opening touchdown in her school’s big football game shortly after being crowned homecoming princess.

Bad Week for…
Staying connected, as former world chess champion Ruslan Ponomariov was disqualified from a championship match when his cell phone rang.

Social Studies

Jonathan Rauch on presidential hopefuls “sell-by date.”

With only one exception since the presidency of Theodore Roosevelt, no one has been elected president who took more than 14 years to climb from his first major elective office to election as either president or vice president.

George W. Bush took six years. Bill Clinton, 14. George H.W. Bush, 14 (to the vice presidency). Ronald Reagan, 14. Jimmy Carter, six. Richard Nixon, six (to vice president). John Kennedy, 14. Dwight Eisenhower, zero. Harry Truman, 10 (to vice president). Franklin Roosevelt, four. Herbert Hoover, zero. Calvin Coolidge, four. Warren Harding, six. Woodrow Wilson, two. William Howard Taft, zero. Theodore Roosevelt, two (to vice president). The one exception: Lyndon Johnson’s 23 years from his first House victory to the vice presidency.

Hmmm, let me think about that
while you put on your sweater

“The presence of a grandparent confirms that parents were, indeed, little once, too, and that people who are little can grow to be big, can become parents, and one day even have grandchildren of their own. So often we think of grandparents as belonging to the past; but in this important way, grandparents, for young children, belong to the future.” Fred Rogers

James Lileks on chain restaurants

The Bleat:

Oh, I don’t think the chains suck. There’s a garlic / olive oil / fresh diced tomatoes / angel hair pasta dish at Olive Garden I like; between that and the salads, I know that if I ever end up there, I’ll have something good to eat. Nearly everything on Perkin’s menu is a little drier and saltier than I’d like, but their breakfasts are American classics. TGIF has really thick napkins. Pizza Hut is deplorable on so many levels it hurts my pizza bone, hurts it to the marrow. But Applebee’s food was lousy. The bun was dry. The fries were damp and limp. The brisket was old and the BBQ sauce was mostly sugar with sugared hickory sugar added. Gnat’s hamburger looked like a steamroller had backed over it six times. The coffee was tepid. If this place can’t get burgers, fries and coffee right, I’ve no hope for anything else on the menu.

I’ll give them high marks for the decor, though. It was the standard explosion-in-an-antiques-store design, with old enameled signs galore covering the rough woodwork. I love that stuff. The overall effect is disjointed and annoying, but the individual items are often quite fascinating. The Block E Applebee’s had a large amount of Hubert Humphrey memorabilia – the Happy Warrior squinting alongside the jugeared mug of LBJ on a crude red-white-and-blue poster dominated the back wall. You won’t get that at a hoity and/or toity cafe, and if they did have such a display, it would be intended ironically.

Chaco Culture National Historical Park


According to the National Park Service, “Chaco Canyon was a major center of ancestral Puebloan culture between AD 850 and 1250. It was a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area – unlike anything before or since.”


“Chaco is remarkable,” the Park Service continues, “for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, and its distinctive architecture. To construct the buildings, along with the associated Chacoan roads, ramps, dams, and mounds, required a great deal of well organized and skillful planning, designing, resource gathering, and construction. The Chacoan people combined pre-planned architectural designs, astronomical alignments, geometry, landscaping, and engineering to create an ancient urban center of spectacular public architecture – one that still amazes and inspires us a thousand years later.”

NewMexiKen visited Chaco Culture National Historical Park for the first time Sunday and Monday. More than anything Chaco resembles — in concept, not appearance — an assemblage of European monastaries. Relatively few people lived there, yet the dozens of “Great Houses” were extensive with hundreds of rooms, scores of kivas and large plazas.

The Negro President

Garry Wills has a fascinating article in The New York Review of Books on “the protection and extension of slavery through the three-fifths clause in the Constitution.”

Though aware of the clause of course, I had never really thought about how it skewed elections. If you owned slaves, you had your vote and three more for every five slaves you owned. As Wills states, “It was with the help of that clause that Jefferson won the presidential election in 1800.” Wills quotes the historian Leonard Richards:

In the sixty-two years between Washington’s election and the Compromise of 1850, for example, slaveholders controlled the presidency for fifty years, the Speaker’s chair for forty-one years, and the chairmanship of House Ways and Means [the most important committee] for forty-two years. The only men to be reelected president —Washington, Jefferson, Madison, Monroe, and Jackson—were all slaveholders. The men who sat in the Speaker’s chair the longest—Henry Clay, Andrew Stevenson, and Nathaniel Macon—were slaveholders. Eighteen out of thirty-one Supreme Court justices were slaveholders.

In all, an engrossing analysis typical of Wills.