Category: Albuquerque & New Mexico

Drawn to the Lightning

This article appeared in The New York Times four years ago today. NewMexiKen has posted excerpts before, and it just sounds like a fascinating place. The article begins:

Drive for hours through the high desert of New Mexico, cross the Continental Divide, and fetch up in the tiny town of Quemado. Go past the adobe brick church and the Christmas tree, constructed of elkhorn, at the Chevron station. Park across from the bar, closed because the proprietor is keeping ”hunter’s hours.”

Wait. After a while, a van will pull up. Get in. The driver, who says his name is Robert, will know the way, but as soon as the van turns off the paved road you will be hopelessly lost, disoriented in a seemingly featureless landscape of scrubby grass and barbed wire fencing. After almost an hour, when the van pulls up at a tiny cabin, get out. Watch Robert drive away, leaving you and your five fellow travelers alone under a vast blue sky.

But not quite alone. Behind you is ”The Lightning Field,” an enormous and astonishing installation of 400 lightning rods, a work of art so immense and so changeable that is occupies the desert landscape like a living thing. The mystery of the road trip and the enforced isolation are all part of getting to know it.

What’s the deal about feeding birds?

NewMexiKen bought a bag of birdseed last month. Most mornings for a few weeks I’d spread some around the back patio. While I sat here amusing and informing my seven readers, I’d watch the birds come and eat the seed, fight with each other — you know, the whole bird nation dynamic.

The seed ran out and I haven’t gotten any more. The jays came by a few times and gave me some crap about there being no seed, and the doves still come around with a mournful look wondering what happened. (Get it? Mourning doves, mournful look. Damn, I can be so clever.)

Anyway, I think I read once that if you start to feed birds you take on some sort of obligation to be consistent because they become dependent. I assumed that wasn’t true this time of year, but is it? If I buy another bag of seed and train the birds to come by again, am I under some sort of ethical obligation to keep it up? Is it just a seasonal thing? What about when I go away? Do I have to take 50 or a 100 birds to the pet hotel?

Oh, and there’s the whole thing about identifying birds. I think bird watching and life-lists are a hoax. I can’t differentiate among the run-of-the-mill little birds. You seen one sparrow, you’ve seen ’em all if you ask me.

(But I did buy a field guide to Birds of New Mexico.)

Overheard at the State Fair

As the we noted here a few days ago, as Jeff Foxworthy says: “If you ever start feeling like you have the goofiest, craziest, most dysfunctional family in the world, all you have to do is go to a state fair. Because five minutes at the fair, you’ll be going, ‘you know, we’re alright. We are dang near royalty.’”

Here’s two of the four examples from the Alibi Weblog (click to go read all four).

Father to group of kids outside of the Monkey Man booth: “You will hold hands or I will fuck you up!”

Mother to daughter at the petting zoo: “Janessaaaaaaaaaaaa … you think you know everything, but you’re just a little shit.”

Best line of the day, so far

“You show me someone who doesn’t have skeletons in their closet. That person is a saint.”

— Albuquerque City Council candidate Paulette de’Pascal after it was revealed the B.S. and M.B.A. degrees she claimed on a candidate’s questionnaire were from the unaccredited online Almeda University. Tuesday de’Pascal acknowledged that she never took any classes for either degree.

Misrepresenting your education isn’t a “skeleton in your closet.” It isn’t even about your education. It’s about lying.

Fast commuter trains and grade crossings — a deadly mix — again

The Rail Runner commuter train collided with a vehicle Wednesday, killing one person, state police said.

The collision occurred just after 6 p.m. at a private crossing midway between Los Lunas and Belen. It was about a quarter of a mile from where the train struck a sport utility vehicle last month, killing two people.

Santa Fe New Mexican

At top speed the Rail Runner is moving 116 feet a second. People aren’t used to trains moving that fast — and they usually don’t on rails that have grade crossings. One of these collisions is going to kill people on the train.

Boom

Earlier today there was a loud boom that rattled my windows. I’ve since learned that it was a “controlled” explosion at Sandia National Laboratories about 15 miles away. Be assured we were told, it’s perfectly safe.

I don’t know about you but NewMexiKen hates it when there are ‘splosions at the place where they store nuclear weapons.

And New Mexico has three!

The 22 Most Corrupt Members of Congress (and two to watch) according to Citizens for Responsibility and Ethics in Washington.

Members of the Senate:
Sen. Pete V. Domenici (R-NM)
Sen. Mitch McConnell (R-KY)
Sen. Lisa Murkowski (R-AK)
Sen. Ted Stevens (R-AK)

Members of House:
Rep. Ken Calvert (R-CA)
Rep. John T. Doolittle (R-CA)
Rep. Tom Feeney (R-FL)
Rep. Doc Hastings (R-WA)
Rep. Duncan Hunter (R-CA)
Rep. William J. Jefferson (D-LA)
Rep. Jerry Lewis (R-CA)
Rep. Gary G. Miller (R-CA)
Rep. Alan B. Mollohan (D-WV)
Rep. Timothy F. Murphy (R-PA)
Rep. John P. Murtha (D-PA)
Rep. Steve Pearce (R-NM)
Rep. Rick Renzi (R-AZ)
Rep. Harold Rogers (R-KY)
Rep. David Scott (D-GA)
Rep. Don Young (R-AK)
Rep. Jerry Weller (R-IL)
Rep. Heather A. Wilson (R-NM)

Dishonorable Mention:
Sen. Larry Craig (R-ID)
Sen. David Vitter (R-LA)

Here’s the goods on each.

Top 10 Best Law Schools for Hispanics

  1. New Mexico (27%; 22%)
  2. Miami (12%; 8%)
  3. Texas (17%; 4%)
  4. USC (16%; 6%)
  5. American (14%; 6%)
  6. Florida State (8%; 7%)
  7. Arizona State (15%; 7%)
  8. Stanford (11%; 7%)
  9. Arizona (12%; 8%)
  10. Florida International (28%; 17%)

First number is percentage of Hispanic students; second Hispanic faculty.

Source: HispanicBusiness.com via Discourse.net.

NewMexiKen finds HispanicBusiness.com’s headline (which is the post title here) interesting. Shouldn’t the top 10 “best” law schools for Hispanics parallel the top 10 best law schools period?

Idle thoughts

I love America and I love New Mexico and I love the New Mexico State Fair. Could there be anything more American than the fair with it’s crazy food, and horses barrel racing, and street entertainers, and bands, and high school students reciting their own poems, and FFA displays? And blue ribbons everywhere — pottery, Indian bead work, photographs, Lego projects, paintings, cookies, scrapbook pages, woodworking, quilts.

At the Fair a number of schools and school districts from around the state had displays of student art work. Some was what you’d expect and some was great. And I don’t know if there is some secret art colony in Clayton, New Mexico, or an art teacher of extraordinary talent, but WOW! can those kids do art in Clayton, population 2,132.

NewMexiKen took my car in for servicing early this morning. On the floor in the Lexus showroom were four cars, three of them black. Henry Ford would be so proud. (Ford once said, “Any customer can have a car painted any color that he wants so long as it is black.” Black paint dried faster.)

“Today” was on the TV in the customer lounge at Lexus and I saw an interview with Jodie Foster, who has a new film. Watching Foster I decided John Hinckley Jr. wasn’t completely crazy.

The crowd of 41,000 for the New Mexico State vs. New Mexico football game last Saturday night doesn’t sound very impressive until you realize that was nearly as many people as live in Farmington, the sixth largest city in the whole state.

10 things I like best about living in Albuquerque

Driving along Tramway across Sandia Pueblo last evening, I was reminded of one of the best things about living in Albuquerque. I began to think, NewMexiKen you can live anywhere, why do you stay here?

There are a lot of ways to answer a question like that. One way is to make a list.

These aren’t the only reasons, and they aren’t in any particular order, but these are the ten that came to mind.

  1. The weather, except sometimes in March and April. Four seasons, all of them distinct, none of them oppressive, or too long. And September and October — amazing!
  2. The food, red and green — and sopapillas with honey.
  3. The Rio Grande, though we fail to do anything with it. A historic river — third longest in America — and Albuquerque’s Mayor Marty is so unimaginative he thinks pandas and streetcars are what we need. How about a river walk with cafes and shops (tastefully and environmentally correct, of course)?
  4. The plaza. Not as historic as Santa Fe’s, or even Taos’s. Still it’s always inviting and often filled with people celebrating a wedding at San Felipe de Neri. In other words, while a tourist attraction, it’s still “our” plaza.
  5. Santa Fe, Taos, Chaco and all, world-class tourist venues that are day trips for us.
  6. The sky, whether bluer than blue, or lit dramatically by sun or twilight, or with clouds, white or dark. Our sky is always something to behold, most gloriously at sunrise over the mountains and sunset over the volcanoes.
  7. The pueblos nearby with their cultures, feasts and dances.
  8. The Sandia mountains right here, rising a mile right above us.
  9. The diversity of people. It’s a community without a majority population.
  10. The Indian land north and south of the city, the forest land (and wilderness) east of it. If it weren’t for the permanently undeveloped land that surrounds so much of Albuquerque, I fear it all would look like Rio Rancho.

Comcast Rage

Former Albuquerque Mayor Jim Baca is unhappy with the ugliest utility.

Have you received your Comcast Cable bill this month? That little monopoly has raised rates again on just about everything. …

Oh, and if you want to talk to a live person at Comcast they now charge you for it. So if they provide bad service and you need help, they now charge for it.

NewMexiKen pays Comcast $65 a month JUST for internet service. There’s a $15 penalty because I don’t have television service — but if I wanted to add television I’m not eligible for any discounts because I’m an existing customer. That’s Comcast having their cake and eating it too I’d say.

Baca had a good piece the other day on the likely demise of Albuquerque’s afternoon newspaper The Tribune — Grab the Funnies. The surviving newspaper, The Albuquerque Journal, has the world’s most unappealing website. And, to my taste, the dead-tree version is about as equally ugly.

Been Readin’

NewMexiKen finally got around to finishing Hampton Sides’s Blood and Thunder: An Epic of the American West last night. I had started it when it first came out last year, but set it aside about a 100 pages in and just got back to it.

Despite that personal experience with it, I do recommend this book. As Pulitizer Prize-winning novelist M. Scott Momaday wrote in his review:

“Blood and Thunder” is a full-blown history, and Sides does every part of it justice. Five years ago he set out to write a book on the removal of the Navajos from Canyon de Chelly and their Long Walk to the Bosque Redondo, hundreds of miles from their homeland, where they were held as prisoners of war. But in the course of his research a much larger story unfolded, the story of the opening of the West, from the heyday of the mountain men in the early 1800’s to the clash of three cultures, as the newcomers from the East encountered the ancient Puebloans and the established Hispanic communities in what is now New Mexico, to the Civil War in the West and its aftermath — and all of it is full of blood and thunder, the realities and the caricatures of conquest. By telling this story, Sides fills a conspicuous void in the history of the American West.

It is a fascinating and important story well told. Surely anyone with any abiding interest in New Mexico and Arizona history should read it. I must say, however, that I found the episodic mixed chronology in the first third of the book terribly annoying. And Sides does let some anachronism float into his text — I don’t think Matthew Brady used flash bulbs, for example — and some lapses of fact. It’s not, in other words, a dry encyclopedic narrative. He tells a good story fervently and fairly.

The book I began before I was interrupted by my interest in Kit Carson — and will take up again today — is Craig Childs’s House of Rain: Tracking a Vanished Civilization Across the American Southwest. Childs, who grew up and lives in the southwest, takes a personal look at the Anasazi (or Ancestral Puebloan) ruins across the Four Corners area (Chaco, Aztec, Mesa Verde) as well as southeast Arizona and Mexico, and speculates about the people who lived there 700-1000 years ago and what happened to them and their magnificent cultures.

Entering the World of Willa Cather’s Archbishop

A writer for The New York Times visits Isleta, Laguna and Ácoma pueblos — Entering the World of Willa Cather’s Archbishop.

Today, these three pueblos are connected by freeways. Isleta and Ácoma have their own casinos. But each community still preserves its ancient identity. Eighty years after Cather’s novel was published and more than 150 since the events she recounted, it is possible to use her narration as a visitor’s guide. One warm March day, paperback in hand, I found my way to all three pueblos, grateful for Cather’s sensitivity to the great beauty and mystery of the Southwest and for her ability to bring to life the characters who had encountered one another in the same landscape so long ago.

I wonder why the writer failed to note that Laguna has two casinos.

Link via dangerousmeta!.

What is he up to?

The neighborhood phantom returned Sunday night after four nights off. About 9:30 he pulled up, strolled off, then returned after about half-an-hour, waited a couple of minutes and drove off.

As I told the neighbors, I try and be fairly libertarian about what people do as long as they aren’t harming anyone. So, I figure, why call the sheriff?

But this has all the appearances of something at least mildly nefarious.

I’m afraid I told you so

NewMexiKen last year: “A high-speed train crossing at grade level is a serious accident waiting to happen. People violate railroad crossing warnings all the time — and this time the train will be approaching at 116 feet a second with hundreds of people on board.”

Yesterday the Rail Runner Express hit a Jeep on the tracks at an ungated crossing, killing both occupants of the car. None of the 64 persons on the train was injured according to reports. The tragedy is compounded, however, because the victims, a middle-aged brother and sister, were together because their mother had died yesterday morning. Other family members in other cars witnessed the collision.

You just can’t have high-speed commuter trains crossing streets at grade.

What a Bunch of Yahoos

ALAMOGORDO — Otero County commissioners have passed a resolution opposing the listing of White Sands National Monument as a United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization World Heritage Site.

“We have sent a letter to the National Parks Service and to our congressional delegation expressing our official desires that White Sands be removed from the list of those sites being considered as World Heritage Sites,” said commission chair Doug Moore. “I think this resolution does a great job in capturing our feelings.”

UNESCO’s World Heritage Site program encourages the identification, preservation and protection of cultural and natural heritage around the world. Twenty of the 851 sites are in the United States, including Independence Hall, the Statue of Liberty and Grand Canyon, Mesa Verde, Yellowstone, Yosemite and Great Smoky Mountain national parks.

Albuquerque Tribune

It’s National Park Service, by the way, not Parks.

New Mexico Looks Again at Show’s Use of Children

The New Mexico attorney general has reopened an investigation into whether the CBS reality show “Kid Nation” violated the state’s child-labor laws and other state regulations governing the welfare of children, a spokesman for the attorney general said on Thursday.
…

“Kid Nation,” which is scheduled to have its premiere on Sept. 19, is a reality show that takes 40 children ages 8 to 15 to a New Mexico desert ghost town south of Santa Fe for 40 days and challenges them to build an adult-free society. Several children were injured during the production; four children drank bleach from an unmarked soda bottle and another was burned on her face with hot grease while cooking in an unsupervised kitchen.

The New York Times

Update

The software package arrived Thursday.

No sign of the neighborhood phantom Thursday evening, but we had an evening-long series of thunderstorms that may have dampened his plans.

What a light and thunder show, eh Albuquerqueans?

With all that rain I was thinking of my neighbor. He collects water from the canales (known elsewhere as gutters) and uses it to water his plants. I find that pretty impressive. I mostly use the water from my roof to splash down and wash soil from the yard into the street.

I’ve been seeing a roadrunner (Geococcyx californianus) from time-to-time in the backyard. Beep-beep. No snakes or rodents when they’re around.

That scream you may have heard earlier this morning was when I bent over to adjust the rug under my desk chair and seriously screwed up the disc-nerve arrangement in my spine. And they had been getting along so well. I don’t know if I cried out more from the pain or from the sudden realization that it will be several hours-days-weeks before I can move easily again.

Here’s an item about TV news that I posted a year ago today — Live, local, trivial.

21

In New Mexico, until you are 21 your driver’s license is vertical (“portrait” in computer talk). Once you turn 21 you can trade it in for the normal horizontal license adults receive (“landscape”).

I’ve been told that some establishments refuse service to anyone who does not have the horizontal license. That is, even after you turn 21, if you haven’t gone to MVD and gotten a new DL, they won’t admit you or serve you. If you don’t head over to MVD on your 21st birthday, you could be turned away from your own celebration.

I guess a private establishment is entitled to set its own rules if the rules are in fact administered across the board with no exceptions. But this sounds a little like a class action lawsuit in waiting to me.