Category: People & Human Interest

New NewMexiKen Poll

{democracy:13}

Background from the Los Angeles Times:

Paris Hilton, her long blond hair tied back in a ponytail and oversized sunglasses shading her eyes, pulled up to L.A. traffic court near downtown Friday more than 15 minutes late for her probation violation hearing.

It was perhaps a moment when being prompt would have proved more fashionable.

Two hours later, Hilton departed with a 45-day jail sentence and a verbal comeuppance from the judge, who told her the time had come to take responsibility for her own actions. She has until June 5 to report to Century Regional Detention Center in Lynwood to serve her time or risk a total of 90 days behind bars.

On the stand, the socialite blamed her handlers for her being caught behind the wheel twice while her driver’s license was suspended for a drunk-driving conviction.

Asked whether she had understood the terms of the drunk-driving plea that she agreed to Jan. 22, Hilton, 26, said: “I just sign what people tell me to sign…. I’m a very busy person.”

At one point, her attorney, Howard L. Weitzman — calling his client someone with “unique issues and needs” who simply made a mistake — tried to shoulder some of the fault Hilton was placing on others.

Superior Court Judge Michael T. Sauer saw it otherwise.

“She disregarded everything and continued to drive,” Sauer said.

Most intriquing line of the day, so far

“Ambition interests me because it’s such a surefire indicator of damage.”

Peter Morgan, writer of “The Queen,” “The Last King of Scotland” and “Frost/Nixon,” quoted in a profile by John Lahr.

NewMexiKen believes we are all damaged in some way and ambition can be an indicator of that damage.

Anyone else have an opinion?

Curing the addiction

Michael Agger asks, Are you addicted to e-mail? It includes this:

The idea behind emptying your inbox is to convert all those e-mails into actions. You’re allowed to deal with any mail that will take less than two minutes to answer. Otherwise, you should file your outstanding messages into folders such as “Pending,” “Reply To,” “Archive,” and “YouTube Links” and deal with them as a unit later, when you’ve mapped out your day and polished off those urgent TPS reports.

Read about the 12-step program for curing your “e-mail e-ddiction.”

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

Insight

NYU chick: I found out I didn’t have AIDS… I went to Whole Foods… It was a good day.

–27th & Park

NYU chick: Yeah, we almost broke up like four or five times, so I think that’s indicative that we’re happy together.

–Bowery & Canal

Queer student: I don’t really have a problem with incest, but in my family there aren’t many lookers.

–NYU Silver Center

Tourist girl to friend, looking at hall of fame pictures on wall: Leo-nard… Bern-stein… Oh, that’s the guy who wrote The Berenstain Bears.

–Gershwin Theatre

Overheard in New York

Have a little savoir faire

The woman across the street is moving and the van is here to load her stuff (locals, not a national firm). Anyway, the radio is on so loudly in the truck that I can make it out all the way in the back of my house across the street.

Wanted to share that with you.

A hike into horror and an act of courage

Glacier National Park, Mont. — JOHAN looked up. Jenna was running toward him. She had yelled something, he wasn’t sure what. Then he saw it. The open mouth, the tongue, the teeth, the flattened ears. Jenna ran right past him, and it struck him — a flash of fur, two jumps, 400 pounds of lightning.

It was a grizzly, and it had him by his left thigh. His mind started racing — to Jenna, to the trip, to fighting, to escaping. The bear jerked him back and forth like a rag doll, but he remembered no pain, just disbelief. It bit into him again and again, its jaw like a sharp vise stopping at nothing until teeth hit bone. Then came the claws, rising like shiny knife blades, long and stark.

Los Angeles Times

Follow the link to read the rest of the first part of the story. It’s really good.

Get a Job

Like the Silhouettes, Linda Hirshman thinks women should get a job. The decreasing number of women with children who do not, troubles her.

Should we care if women leave the work force? Yes, because participation in public life allows women to use their talents and to powerfully affect society. And once they leave, they usually cannot regain the income or status they had. . . .

And despite the happy talk of “on ramps” back in, only 40 percent of even high-powered professionals get back to full-time work at all.

That the most educated have opted out the most should raise questions about how our society allocates scarce educational resources. The next generation of girls will have a greatly reduced pool of role models.

Or a greatly increased one, depending on how you look at it. To think that the quality of life is determined by whether one is “employed.” To think that mothers who do not “work” do not contribute to public life. How absurd, how narrow-minded, how arrogant.

It used to be called liberation, but it was always about doing what other, self-certain people thought you should do.

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

Trash or treasure?

A painter for the Fresno school district by day and inveterate antique buff the rest of his waking hours, Norsigian was combing through suburban castoffs when he came across a time-weathered wooden box. The crate was heavy with old glass-plate photographic negatives.

Frozen in early 20th century black and white were sharply detailed shots of Yosemite landmarks, the San Francisco waterfront, Carmel’s historic mission and scenic Point Lobos.

Norsigian bought the five dozen negatives for about 75 cents apiece. They were a nice bit of memorabilia, he figured, nothing more.

Still, over the months that followed, when he gingerly pulled the delicate plates out of faded manila envelopes to show friends and relatives, nearly everyone said the same thing: These old glass negatives look like the work of Ansel Adams.

A notion slowly took hold of Norsigian: Perhaps this was a misplaced collection of the American photographic legend’s early work. Maybe he had turned up a lost treasure.

Los Angeles Times

In case you wonder what the best boy and gaffer talk about

Electric guy to himself: Where’s my gloves?

Grip guy: Gloves? I don’t use gloves. I use my bare hands like a man! Only pussies use gloves. Are you a pussy? Be a man, ya pussy.

Electric guy: But then my skin will get all dry and crack and stuff.

Grip guy: Duh, well, yeah. That’s why you have to moisturize.

–Movie set of I Am Legend

Overheard by: Another electric guy

Overheard in New York

Life in Solitary Confinement: 12,775 Days Alone

Around midday today, Central Time, two men in Angola Prison in Louisiana will quietly mark the moment, 35 years ago exactly, when the bars of solitary confinement cells closed behind them. They will likely spend the moment in their 6 by 9 concrete cells reading, or writing letters to their hundreds of supporters around the world. And most of America and the rest of the world will still have never heard of them, or that in the United States of America, it is still possible to spend a life sentence in solitary confinement without interruption and without any real means of appeal.

AlterNet has the details.

We Feel Fine

Since August 2005, We Feel Fine has been harvesting human feelings from a large number of weblogs. Every few minutes, the system searches the world’s newly posted blog entries for occurrences of the phrases “I feel” and “I am feeling”. When it finds such a phrase, it records the full sentence, up to the period, and identifies the “feeling” expressed in that sentence (e.g. sad, happy, depressed, etc.). Because blogs are structured in largely standard ways, the age, gender, and geographical location of the author can often be extracted and saved along with the sentence, as can the local weather conditions at the time the sentence was written. All of this information is saved.

The result is a database of several million human feelings . . .

Interesting, very interesting. The planetary village.

We Feel Fine by Jonathan Harris and Sepandar Kamvar

A threat of cancer, a drastic decision

The BRCA1 mutation, primarily found among Ashkenazi Jews, raises my risk of ovarian cancer as high as 54% and breast cancer up to 81%. The surgery would cut my chances of ovarian cancer to virtually nothing. And as long as I had the operation by the time I turned 35, it would reduce my risk of breast cancer by half. I was 30.

My father thought I was playing Russian roulette with my life. Now that I had a baby, he believed there was no reason to wait.

I felt terrified for myself as well, as though cancer were this venomous snake waiting to strike. My aunt Lois was just 34, a few years older than I, when she was diagnosed with ovarian cancer. She died at 38.

I wanted to tell my father what he wanted to hear. How could I deny him his last wish for me?

But I wasn’t ready. I wanted another baby, a sibling for my daughter. Over and over, I apologized. I begged him to trust me.

Soon, I told him. Not yet, but soon.

Anna Gorman tells her story in the Los Angeles Times.

Pas de Deux of Sexuality Is Written in the Genes

Beginning of an intriguing article in The New York Times:

When it comes to the matter of desire, evolution leaves little to chance. Human sexual behavior is not a free-form performance, biologists are finding, but is guided at every turn by genetic programs.

Desire between the sexes is not a matter of choice. Straight men, it seems, have neural circuits that prompt them to seek out women; gay men have those prompting them to seek other men. Women’s brains may be organized to select men who seem likely to provide for them and their children. The deal is sealed with other neural programs that induce a burst of romantic love, followed by long-term attachment.

So much fuss, so intricate a dance, all to achieve success on the simple scale that is all evolution cares about, that of raising the greatest number of children to adulthood. Desire may seem the core of human sexual behavior, but it is just the central act in a long drama whose script is written quite substantially in the genes.

Money quote: “Several advances in the last decade have underlined the bizarre fact that the brain is a full-fledged sexual organ, in that the two sexes have profoundly different versions of it. This is the handiwork of testosterone, which masculinizes the brain as thoroughly as it does the rest of the body.”

And this: “. . . although average IQ is identical in men and women, there are fewer average men and more at both extremes.”

Fascinating

Simply fascinating.

The poet Billy Collins once laughingly observed that all babies are born with a knowledge of poetry, because the lub-dub of the mother’s heart is in iambic meter. Then, Collins said, life slowly starts to choke the poetry out of us. It may be true with music, too.

There was no ethnic or demographic pattern to distinguish the people who stayed to watch Bell, or the ones who gave money, from that vast majority who hurried on past, unheeding. Whites, blacks and Asians, young and old, men and women, were represented in all three groups. But the behavior of one demographic remained absolutely consistent. Every single time a child walked past, he or she tried to stop and watch. And every single time, a parent scooted the kid away.

Another use for iPods

iPod Bullet

Wow, as if there weren’t enough reason to carry around your iPod, Kevin Garrad of the 3rd Infantry Division has evidence that an iPod can save your life. Apparently, he had the iPod in his outside pocket when he was shot with an AK-47; the iPod seems to have slowed down the bullet enough to prevent it from penetrating his body armor.

The Unofficial Apple Weblog (TUAW)

Wash. man, 101, passes driver’s test

LANGLEY, Wash. – Alden Couch just celebrated his 101st birthday. And he passed his Washington state driver’s test with flying colors, if you listen to him. “I haven’t parallel parked for 10 years and I sailed through it like nothing,” he said.

A resident of the Whidbey Island town of Langley, Couch planned to take a birthday drive — by himself — down to the local senior center, where his friends had a party planned for him. Then he planned to drive home — by himself again.

Yahoo! News

Good for him.

He’s a former lineman for Puget Power who is 95 years older than the Impala he now owns, which happens to be his all-time favorite car.

“It isn’t the cheapest one in the whole deal, but it’s a good one,” he said.

Couch used to be partial to Oldsmobiles until he outlived the make, which was discontinued in 2004. The first car Couch drove was an oldie but goodie, Ford’s Model T. It was his parents’ car.

I wonder if he has any bumper stickers on the Impala.

Jerks

Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:

I had to drive over to the school this afternoon to drop Mack off for drama class. When I pulled into the lot, there was only one space left. I hesitated to take it, because it was next to a big white van (not a mini van) with two different bumper stickers for George Bush, one about not being “Fonda Kerry,” one encouraging me to support the troops (I guess we’re supposed to support the current troops, but not troops from the past), an anti-abortion message, and some sort of Jesus thing.

I usually don’t park next to people like that, because — although I’m sure we’d just be super great friends with so much in common — I don’t want my car catching anything.

So I was glad when I came out of school, after dropping off Mack, and saw that the van was gone. Until I got up to my car and saw the big ding mark of white paint on the driver’s side door. And do you know what, I wasn’t even surprised.