… was proclaimed a national monument 100 years ago today by President Theodore Roosevelt.
Gila Cliff Dwellings National Monument offers a glimpse of the homes and lives of the people of the Mogollon culture who lived in the Gila Wilderness from the 1280s through the early 1300s. The surroundings probably look today very much like they did when the cliff dwellings were inhabited.
LAS VEGAS, N.M., laid claim to its name about 70 years before that upstart neon metropolis sprang out of the sands of Nevada — and it shows. With only about 14,000 people, this Las Vegas has 900 buildings on the National Register of Historic Places, four grand old hotels (two still accepting guests), and not one but two period-piece downtowns.
Its Old West credentials are solid. Doc Holliday had a dentist’s office in town, and Billy the Kid hung out there. Teddy Roosevelt recruited some of his Rough Riders in Las Vegas and spent a not-so-rough stay at the local hot-springs castle. And before that, this was a stop on the Santa Fe Trail.
Read more about Las Vegas from The New York Times.
It seems kos doesn’t much like Albuquerque’s Mayor Marty.
“Oh, I soo hope Chavez doesn’t drop out of the Senate race. It’ll be sweet seeing him go down, along with his crooked political career.”
Geez, even NewMexiKen wouldn’t go that far.
On second thought . . .
Albuquerque’s Mayor Marty, until yesterday the biggest champion of the much-disliked red-light cameras in the city, has now decided to appoint “a nine-member independent task force to look at every aspect of the program.”
This has absolutely nothing to do with his campaign for the Democratic nomination for the U.S. senate.
The neighborhood phantom that NewMexiKen has mentioned previously still shows up in the evening from time-to-time, parks his car across the street (in front of the vacant house) and wanders off for 15-20 minutes or more.
He was here tonight early as I headed out to dinner and still here when I got home (much longer than his usual M.O.). He was walking up the street as I drove in and I’d have to say he looked away to avoid being seen directly in my headlights. I pulled in the garage, closed the garage door, and went through the house and quietly into my front courtyard where I doubted I could be seen. When he got near his car I spoke.
“Just curious, you’ve been parking there for off-and-on for some time now. What are you up to.”
“I like this neighborhood. I just like the way it smells. I like the smell of the flowers.”
Well, that solves that. Makes perfect sense to me.
According to a report in the Albuquerque Tribune, 798 drivers have been cited for talking on a hand-held cell phone since the ordinance went into effect. Two have been cited twice since enforcement began in April.
It’s $100 for the first offense; $200 for subsequent offenses. Those would be a pretty expensive calls.
NewMexiKen sees this violated all the time, including one police officer I noticed using a hand-held phone while driving.
Elsewhere The Newspaper.com has a lengthy piece on red-light and speed cameras — The Roads Have Eyes.
Well, taxes anyway.
NewMexiKen received the property tax bill today — just seven days before the first half is due. (Nice work, Bernalillo County!)
Most of the agencies are up a few dollars but a couple are down a few too. One however, is a big change. The taxes for Albuquerque Public Schools are up a whooping 29.2% over last year.
Now I happen to think schools are underfunded and teachers (most of them anyway) underpaid. But 29% in one year? I need to start paying attention — it’s 36% of my tax bill.
Here’s another interesting one — taxes for the University of New Mexico Hospital are 22% of my total bill.
And overall, in eight years, my property taxes are up 50%. (The assessment is up just 22%, so most of the increase is in the tax rates.)
How about you? Do you ever look at your property tax bill?
With an open Senate seat for the first time in 25 years and THREE open House seats, New Mexico is shaping up as the center of the political universe in 2008.
And for those of you unaware, New Mexico only has THREE House seats. In other words, 80% of the New Mexico Congressional delegation is on the line next year. (Chris Cillizza above is assuming Rep. Tom Udall will run for the Senate — meaning all three House members are in the fight.)
And another “Why ask why?” question. A significant number of state and local New Mexico politicians appear to have Hispanic origins. None of the current Congressional delegation — Domenici, Bingaman, Wilson, Udall or Pearce — appear to. Why is that?
But Bill Richardson would be the best president of the lot. For example:
My opinion of Gov. Bill Richardson has just grown by leaps and bounds. He has appointed veteran criminal defense lawyer Charlie Daniels (a real criminal defense lawyer, by the way, who truly believes in and has been passionate about defending the rights of the accused his entire career) to be a Justice on the New Mexico Supreme Court.
Sort of the anti-Alito.
Grandpa NewMexiKen keeps telling The Sweeties® they should move to New Mexico because we not only have Santa Claus, we also have Santa Fe!
(And, when you think about it, Santa Fe is a fantasy a lot like Santa Claus, only in earth tones.)
Angel Station has a great description of an evening I’m very sorry to have missed. I’ve included some here to whet your interest, but you really need to go read it all.
What happens at the Enchanted Skies star party is that you show up and are given a BBQ chuckwagon dinner with all the trimmins. Then you sit on hay bales around the campfire circle, eat your dinner, and watch the sun set over the San Mateo Mountains while cowboy singer Doug Figgs entertains you with western ballads. (“Let me tell you ’bout the horses on my strang.”) This year he brought a fiddler with him.
Next, as the sky darkens and the tiny crescent new moon drops below the horizon, you listen to storyteller Great Bear Cornucopia (he answers to “G.B.”) tell Indian legends about the stars. He’s the “night sky interpreter” at the Chaco Canyon National Historical Park, living among Anasazi ruins and the Navajo Nation, and he knows a lot of Indian legends about the stars. These always include the story of “How Coyote Fucked Up the Stars,” which is told in so many variations that it doesn’t get boring when you hear it year after year.
Buggs’ Blog has three great photos from Thursday night’s Balloon Fiesta glow — including the Darth Vader balloon.
Friday!
That’s when The University of New Mexico and the National Park Service plan to open the 1.5 million-piece Chaco Collection at the university’s Hibben Center, said Wendy Bustard, the collection’s curator.
The collection includes items such as prehistoric pottery, stone and bone tools, sandals and matting, Bustard said, but isn’t limited to those items. The items range in age from A.D. 850 to A.D. 1200.
Chaco Canyon served as a major urban center of ancestral Puebloan culture. Remarkable for its monumental public and ceremonial buildings, engineering projects, astronomy, artistic achievements, and distinctive architecture, it served as a hub of ceremony, trade, and administration for the prehistoric Four Corners area for 400 years–unlike anything before or since.
Thanks to dangerousmeta! for the link — and the heads up.
“[L]aunching a balloon is never mandatory, but landing it always is.”
The above from hot air balloon pilots quoted in the Albuquerque Tribune in a story about a fatality as a woman fell about 80-feet from a balloon gondola Monday morning. The balloon, Heavenly Ride, was carrying four paid passengers when it collided with a utility line. A tether to people on the ground was used to steady the balloon; the line snapped, tipping the wicker gondola as the balloon rose quickly.
The last fatality at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta was in 1998. It too was a balloon carrying paid passengers. Balloon pilots NewMexiKen knows told me last night that accidents are often (usually) commercial balloons, as they tend to fly in more borderline conditions.
On Saturday, balloonists in the second (and later) wave of launches were told the wind was increasing and to treat their flight like a first date: “Don’t go far and come home early.” Commercial balloons don’t always have that prerogative.
New Mexicans interested in politics and sharing more or less NewMexiKen’s outlook should be sure to read Burque Babble’s What I Want For Election ’08.
NewMexiKen, too, might vote for Republican Wilson in a Wilson (R) vs. Mayor Marty (D) senate race. And I have never voted for a Republican, and I have been voting since 1966. I even voted for Black Panther Party founder Bobby Seale once (for mayor of Oakland, California — he came in second of nine).
All together, [Albuquerque] collected $10,611,397 in revenue and handed over $2,844,920 to Redflex. This left the city with between $5.8 and $7.8 million in net profit. The precise figure is not known as officials charged as photo enforcement expenses a number of part and full-time police officer salaries as well as the entire administrative hearing office budget. The audit report sidestepped the question of whether the ticketing program has had any beneficial effect on traffic accidents. It mentioned that police could claim only two of the nineteen intersections with cameras might have seen a decrease in accidents.
I like this most about our local system: “The so-called ‘speed on green’ feature ensures that motorists will not be able to adjust their speed to make it through a short yellow light without getting a ticket.”
The retirement of Senator Pete Domenici has put our local politicos and journalists into a tither. C’mon, none of you thought an increasingly unpopular 75-year-old who wears pajamas to work might not run? It’s unexpected, but surely not a shock.
The speculation this morning about the probable senate candidates and then who will rush to fill the other chairs has NewMexiKen thinking about Bill [Richardson] and the 7 dwarves.
Mayor Marty couldn’t win reelection in Albuquerque today. Why would anyone think he’d be a good U.S. senator?
Current Representative Heather “Are you working on those indictments?” Wilson barely won her race last year. She’d get about three votes in northern New Mexico (and those from former Texans living in Santa Fe).
Patricia Madrid. Puh-leese, she is so o-ver. She couldn’t beat Wilson in a Democratic year. And god forbid if there was a candidates debate. Might as well have that big hair blonde that does the Beaver Toyota ads run.
It’s enough to give me a brain disease.
U.S. Senator Pete Domenici (R-NM) will announce tomorrow that he will not run for reelection next year.
Chris Cillizza of The Washington Post broke the story today at 2:30 MT.
Domenici was first elected to the Senate in 1972.
Interesting fact NewMexiKen did not know. Domenici’s parents were immigrants — from Italy.
“There was a comment made tonight that [Mayor Chavez] was offering an olive branch. He needs to bring the whole tree.”
Councilman Brad Winter quoted in the Albuquerque Tribune.
Albuquerque’s city council election was yesterday and though NewMexiKen doesn’t live in the city, I had posted an item or two here about the goings on.
You may remember the mail-order college degrees candidate. She got 18.6% of the vote in her district.
Indeed all the candidates endorsed by Mayor Marty seem to have lost. Maybe a few more pandas and a few more red-light cameras Marty, and your popularity will take off.
Or maybe, just maybe, being mayor isn’t about you. Maybe it’s about us.
The 2007 Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta begins this coming Saturday and runs through the following Sunday, October 14.
Two years ago NewMexiKen posted photos and text about the preparation, launch and landing of a balloon — Balloon Fiesta!
Pueblo — that city we hurry past on our way to Denver — has a river walk. But, oh no, not Albuquerque!
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NewMexiKen sees that Santa Fe has slipped behind Albuquerque suburb Rio Rancho and is now just the Land of Enchantment’s fourth most populated city. (Albuquerque is first; Las Cruces is second.)
Is it no wonder?
The appearance of the town defies description, and I can compare it to nothing but a dilapidated brick-kiln or a prairie-dog town. The inhabitants are worthy of their city, and a more miserable, vicious-looking population it would be impossible to imagine. Neither was the town improved, at the time of my visit, by the addition to the population of some three thousand Americans, the dirtiest, rowdiest crew I have ever seen collected together. Crowds of drunken volunteers [American soldiers] filled the streets, brawling and boasting, but never fighting; Mexicans, wrapped in serapes, scowled upon them as they passed; donkey-loads of hoja—corn-shucks—were hawked about for sale; and Pueblo Indians and priests jostled the rude crowds of brawlers at every step. Under the portals were numerous monte-tables, surrounded by Mexicans and Americans. Every other house was a grocery, as they call a gin or whisky shop, continually disgorging reeling, drunken men, and everywhere filth and dirt reigned triumphant.
[George F. Ruxton, an Englishman, who visited in 1846. Quoted in David Dary’s The Santa Fe Trail: Its History, Legends, and Lore
NewMexiKen loves Santa Fe, a city that works very hard at maintaining its image. Still, it’s good to throw a little reality about their past at them from time-to-time.
“Taxation, which they dislike; slavery, which they hate, and Texas, which they most cordially abhor.”
Bvt. Major Henry L. Kendrick, writing about New Mexicans, quoted in an Austin, Texas, newspaper in 1850.
We’re pretty much still like that.
The first American governor of New Mexico, Charles Bent, was beaten, murdered and mutilated in his Taos home in front of his family on January 19, 1847. The assassins were from the nearby pueblo but their action was part of a larger insurrection by Mexicans and Indians against the American conquest. Several other Americans were killed.
If you’ve been to Taos Pueblo, you’ve seen the ruins of San Jeronimo church. To capture the insurgents taking refuge inside, the U.S. Army destroyed the church with fire and artillery on February 4, 1847. An estimated 150 Indians were killed in that and the subsequent pursuit, and several more were tried and hanged as ringleaders. (The father of one of the American victims presided over the trial.)
All part of that “peaceful” conquest of New Mexico we learned about.
