Category: People & Human Interest

Inappropriate behavior

From the Associated Press in an article entitled Lesbian kiss at Seattle ballpark stirs up gay-friendly town.

“Guerrero denied she and her date were groping each other, saying that along with eating garlic fries, they were giving each other brief kisses.”

NewMexiKen doesn’t care about lesbians kissing or even the reaction to the allegation that an usher told them it was inappropriate. But I was at Safeco Field two months ago and I can still smell the garlic fries.

Eating garlic fries and kissing, now that’s inappropriate behavior.

The Golden Gate Bridge

. . . opened on this date in 1937. Vehicular traffic began the next day. Jumping off began three months later.

Read about the world’s leading location for suicide from a 2003 article in The New Yorker.

On the bridge, Baldwin counted to ten and stayed frozen. He counted to ten again, then vaulted over. “I still see my hands coming off the railing,” he said. As he crossed the chord in flight, Baldwin recalls, “I instantly realized that everything in my life that I’d thought was unfixable was totally fixable—except for having just jumped.”

Ken Baldwin, one of 26 known survivors

The Golden Gate Bridge had the longest suspension span in the world (4,200 feet) until 1964. It’s now ninth.

Airports

Airports are not just for travel anymore. Now you get to listen to any number of inane telephone conversations — many at maximum volume.

Use your inside voice folks, please.

Update: You know, my opinion of the whole human race has diminished since I’ve been privileged to hear other people talking on the phone.

Like stupid, intelligence is as intelligence does

This first posted here two years ago. It made me laugh again today, so here it is for you.

Guy #1: The thing is, dating gets so much harder as we get older.

Guy #2: Yeah, especially if you’re intelligent.

Guy #1: It’s not like you can just look at a woman and tell if she’s smart enough to date.

Guy #2: True.

Guy #1: I’d never date an Aries though.

–in line at MOMA

Overheard in New York

Two-Faced Baby Worshipped As Goddess

(AP) A baby with two faces was born in a northern Indian village, where she is doing well and is being worshipped as the reincarnation of a Hindu goddess, her father said Tuesday.

The baby, Lali, apparently has an extremely rare condition known as craniofacial duplication, where a single head has two faces. Except for her ears, all of Lali’s facial features are duplicated – she has two noses, two pairs of lips and two pairs of eyes.

“My daughter is fine – like any other child,” said Vinod Singh, 23, a poor farm worker.

CBS News

Goddess nothing. She’s already running for political office.

There’s a photo if you click on the link. All part of God’s plan I’m sure.

McCain healthcare plan

Here’s a CNN news item I first posted four years ago today. I wonder how mother and child are doing.

A pregnant woman in Mexico gave birth to a healthy baby boy after performing a caesarean section on herself with a kitchen knife, doctors said on Tuesday.

It is thought to be the first known case of a self-inflicted caesarean in which both the mother and baby survived.

The unidentified 40-year-old, who lived in a rural area without electricity, running water or sanitation that was an eight-hour drive from the nearest hospital, performed the operation when she could not deliver the baby naturally.

Mine Is Longer than Yours

In this week’s The New Yorker, Michael Kinsley has about as accurate an analysis of aging as any I’ve read. Worthwhile for oldsters of all ages. He also touches poignantly on his Parkinson’s.

Some excerpts:

What’s more, of all the gifts that life and luck can bestow—money, good looks, love, power—longevity is the one that people seem least reluctant to brag about. In fact, they routinely claim it as some sort of virtue—as if living to ninety were primarily the result of hard work or prayer, rather than good genes and never getting run over by a truck. Maybe the possibility that the truck is on your agenda for later this morning makes the bragging acceptable. The longevity game is one that really isn’t over till it’s over.

Anyway, the answer is sixty-three. If a hundred Americans start the voyage of life together, on average one of them will have died by the time the group turns sixteen. At forty, their lives are half over: further life expectancy at age forty is 39.9. And at age sixty-three the group starts losing an average of one person every year. Then it accelerates. By age seventy-five, sixty-seven of the original hundred are left. By age one hundred, three remain.

For a yuppie careerist, the first painful recognition that you have crossed the invisible line probably comes at work. You’ve done fine, but guess what? You will not be chairman of the company, or editor of the newspaper, or president of the university. It’s mathematically inevitable that for every C.E.O. there will be half a dozen vice-presidents whose careers will seem successful enough to everybody but themselves. Nevertheless, to them this realization is poignant.

Precisely.

The Yuppiest person in America

“Wil Shipley, a Seattle software developer, uses his iPhone at the Whole Foods fish counter to check websites for updates on which seafood is the most environmentally correct to purchase. He quizzes the staff on where and how a fish was caught. Because he carries the Internet with him, “I can be super-picky,” he said.”

Stuff White People Like

Thanks BTW to Veronica for telling me about this website. I haven’t linked to it before (that I remember) but I have been enjoying reading it.

The Lost Children

The week before last Margaret Talbot had an article in The New Yorker on the T. Don Hutto Residential Center near Austin, Texas. Hutto is a detention center for illegal immigrants and their families, though not Mexican nationals who are immediately returned to Mexico when apprehended. The immigrants at Hutto (there is another center like it in Pennsylvania) are held awaiting action on their case. So are their children.

I’ve been trying to read this article for several days. I get through about three or four paragraphs and I throw the magazine down in disgust. The story it tells about us and our country is just too depressing.

Read along with me a little:

Children were regularly woken up at night by guards shining lights into their cells. They were roused each morning at five-thirty. Kids were not allowed to have stuffed animals, crayons, pencils, or pens in their cells. And they were not allowed to take the pictures they had made back to their cells and hang them up. When Hutto opened as an immigration-detention center, children attended school there only one hour a day. Detainees, including children, wore green or blue prison-issue scrubs. In November, 2006, Krista Gregory, who lives in Austin and works with church groups there, got a call from a couple of Hutto employees who, she says, were unhappy about the lack of supplies for child detainees. Gregory arranged for local churches to donate toys, baby blankets, and Bibles.

Staff members, who wore police-type uniforms, were mostly people who had backgrounds in corrections rather than in child welfare. Detainees said that when parents or children broke rules guards threatened them with separation from their children. Kevin Yourdkhani, at the prompting of one of Hines’s law students, wrote a brief description of one such occasion. “I was in my bed and my dad came to fix my bed,” he wrote. “When the police came and saw my dad in the room, he said, ‘If He comes and see my dad again in my room His going to put my mom in a siprate jail and my dad in a sipate jail and me a foster kid.’ I cried and cried so much that I lost my energy. I went to sleep. I felt If I will be siprated I can never see my parents again, and I will get stepparents and they will hurt me or maybe they will kill me.”

The adults incarcerated committed no serious crime. The children, of course, committed no crime at all. And this is how we treat them. Sometimes I am just so embarrassed to be an American.

You really should read this article.

Guys

Dave Barry posted this story on his blog in 2005. It’s a good — and all too typical — one.

So I took my daughter to soccer practice this evening, and another dad and I were talking to one of the moms, whom we both know and whom we have both seen roughly once a week for the past six months. After we talked for about 10 minutes, a second mom showed up, and immediately said to the mom we’d been talking to: “YOU HAD YOUR BABY!” And then they hugged, and the new mom got out baby pictures. And the other dad and I looked at each other and realized that not only had we failed to notice that she’d had a baby, but we had been at most only dimly aware that she had been pregnant. We apologized, and she assured us that it was no big deal. Women are accustomed to the cluelessness of guys in these matters.

The thing is, if she had shown up carrying a cool new cell phone, we would have noticed that.

A big big big box store

Jill reports that the Super Target that opened near her Sunday — it being such a hassle to go to the Super Target 5 miles in other direction — is so big they had to go home for snacks, then return to finish the tour.

I’ve encouraged her to write more about it — she was so funny on the phone.

I wonder if Lileks and Gnat were there.

The Best Place In the World

Functional Ambivalent is ready to relocate to the perfect place.

Arlington, Oregon, recalled its mayor yesterday for posing for racy MySpace pictures in her underwear. Not every mayor could pull that off, but Mayor Carmen Kontur-Gronquist did, convincingly.

While the underwear controversy sparked the recall effort, the voters were disgruntled for other reasons as well. For example: there is the matter of the management of the Arlington Municipal Golf Course. To save money, the mayor had cut two people from the course’s maintenance staff.

So, to recap: a town where the mayor looks great posing in frilly underthings has a political uprising over how often the local golf course staff rakes the traps. I’m moving there next week.

But actually it isn’t just the attractions of Arlington. Tom may need to get out of town to escape his pending embarassment. Read about how No Good Deed Goes Unpunished.

Best line of the day, so far

And then the Bagger learned, from the eagle-eared kids at Defamer, that Mr. Rudin “closed his Best Picture acceptance speech with a special mention to ‘my partner, John Barlow. Without you, honey, this is just hardware.’”

The Academy later updated its post, saying that the words had suddenly appeared. Good move, AMPAS. Once somebody has thanked the love of their life in front of tens of millions, the fact that all kinds of people love all kinds of people is pretty much out of the bag.

Carpetbagger

The Geography of Bliss

This week NewMexiKen has really enjoyed reading The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner (thank you again Veronica and Ken).

The operating conceit of this odyssey memoir is that the author, a professed grouch (“My last name is pronounced ‘whiner,’ and I do my best to live up to the name”), will travel to the world’s happier places to explore to what degree an individual’s happiness is intertwined with a shared geography and culture. To that end, he shoots off to unusual locales — Bhutan, Iceland, Qatar — and to Thailand and India, perpetual stopovers for pleasure seekers, visiting nine foreign countries altogether over the course of a year. His final chapter is about the United States, which “is not as happy as it is wealthy.”

The New York Times

The Times reviewer, Pamela Paul, found Weiner’s humor forced or contrived — I found it amusing.

“We know a thing by its opposite. Hot means nothing without cold. Mozart is enhanced by the existence of Barry Manilow.”

“I picked up the companion book to Grumpy Old Men [a British TV series] and flipped to the foreword, written by a grump named Arthur Smith. He begins by observing that ‘life is shit organized by bastards.’ Then he gets negative.”

But mostly I found Weiner’s insights into what makes us happy — and what doesn’t — interesting.

“Social scientists estimate that about 70 percent of our happiness stems from our relationships, both quantity and quality, with friends, family, coworkers, and neighbors. During life’s difficult patches, camaraderie blunts our misery; during the good times, it boosts our happiness.”

“People are least happy when they’re commuting to work.”

And I always find it rewarding to read about other places and other people.

There’s an interesting dialogue with Weiner at World Hum.

The Happiest Place on Earth Isn’t DisneyWorld — It’s Denmark

Happiness is that quirky, elusive emotion that the Declaration of Independence maintains we have every right to pursue. And we do pursue it: we are suckers for an endless stream of self-help books that promise a carefree existence for a mere $24.95; and television hucksters of every kind claim they have the key to Nirvana. So the happiness business, at least, is one big smiley face.

As for the rest of us, the main scientific survey of international happiness carried out by Leicester University in England ranks the U.S. a distant 23rd, well behind Canada and Costa Rica. But you’ll be pleased to know we beat Iraq and Pakistan.

60 Minutes

Here’s the 12-minute video (after a short ad).

Meanwhile NewMexiKen is reading The Geography of Bliss: One Grump’s Search for the Happiest Places in the World by Eric Weiner. In this amusing, yet informative book Weiner travels to places that rate the highest on the World Database of Happiness (WDH) at Erasmus University Rotterdam and relates his findings.

Kansas again

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.

Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was to work the game with her.

SI.com

Link via Bitch. Ph.D. who added “Of course the immediate thought is, what about those boys’ mamas?”