Category: People & Human Interest

A friend, the chief operating officer for an organization of nearly 1,000 people, visited the doctor today for what turned out to be a sinus infection. The doctor kept asking her if she needed a doctor’s excuse or a request for time off while she recovered. She assured him she did not.

And in her mind kept thinking, “Quit being so free with those things.”

The memorial service for Dad on Saturday was, I think, just what he would have liked — a party in his honor he didn’t have to attend. A brother, all of his five children and five of Dad’s grandchildren spoke — he would have enjoyed that, too.

Early in the service while the chaplain was speaking, a cell phone rang. You could hear the sigh from all present at this breach of etiquette, but it proved amusing. Our sister had the phone — and it was Dad’s phone.

Thank you everyone for all the kind thoughts and messages. They’re greatly appreciated.

Longer-term readers of this site will, of course, recognize Dad, official dad of NewMexiKen, who often commented here from his home in Tucson. Dad and I took two lengthy road trips in recent years, also memorialized on these pages.

Dad has died of a heart attack. He was 83 and had serious heart problems since his 50s, but it’s still a shock. Blogging is what I do much of the time — and Dad was my most loyal reader — so it seems natural enough for me to share the news with you here.

Dude #1: So it’s 5:30 and it doesn’t start until 7:00. That gives us two and a half hours.

Chick: An hour and a half.

Dude #2: Here’s the former English major telling the med school student how to do math.

–Madison Square Garden

Overheard in New York

NewMexiKen is reposting this item from a year ago today for those of you who haven’t gotten around to reading it yet.

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An essay on Good and Bad Procrastination from Paul Graham:

So the question is not how to avoid procrastination, but how to procrastinate well.

There are three variants of procrastination, depending on what you do instead of working on something: you could work on (a) nothing, (b) something less important, or (c) something more important. That last type, I’d argue, is good procrastination.

Key quote: “What’s the best thing you could be working on, and why aren’t you?”

MADRID (Reuters) – A 67-year-old Spanish woman became the world’s oldest new mother on Saturday when she gave birth to twins, a Barcelona hospital said.

The woman, who became pregnant after receiving IVF treatment in Latin America, gave birth by caesarean section, a spokeswoman at the Hospital de la Santa Creu i San Pau told Reuters.

Both the woman, from the southern Spanish region of Andalucia, and babies were in good health, the hospital said, although the new-borns had been placed in an incubator.

Reuters via Yahoo! News

Now that’s something to look forward to, eh ladies? Motherhood at 67.

From a story in the Los Angeles Times:

Jorge Candelas spent eight months perfecting the look of his Imperial biker scout uniform.

He watched the “Star Wars” movies over and over, making sure the plastic armor on his uniform sat at just the right angle.

He endured teasing from his father, who calls him his “8-year-old who never grew up.”

But on Thursday, the 30-year-old computer engineer from Durango, Mexico, was marching proud.

He joined 200 fellow “Star Wars” fanatics at a Pasadena high school football field, trying to march in unison on the commands of an Army Reserve colonel in preparation for the 118th Rose Parade.

“‘Star Wars’ creator George Lucas is the grand marshal for 2007, which marks the 30th anniversary of the first ‘Star Wars’ film’s release.”

During the second day of the two days spent sorting through his garage looking for items for the Ford Museum, President Gerald Ford asked to borrow my pen. It was a simple Skilcraft felt marker (Skilcraft is the long-time government contractor) and the former president looked surprised even peeved when, as we finished late that afternoon, and he was saying thanks for the help, I asked for my pen back.

“Oh, I want to save it and give it to one of my grandchildren,” I said.

I swear Ford actually glowed at this simple flattery as he handed the pen to me.

And yes, I still have the pen nearly 28 years (and six grandchildren) later. Haven’t decided which one to give it to, yet.

As NewMexiKen has written elsewhere (I just reposted one item), I had several meetings with President Gerald Ford in the years after he left the White House. On one occasion I helped him go through items in his garage in Rancho Mirage, California, to find things for the Ford Museum.

One of the items we ran across in a garage stuffed full was a mover’s wardrobe holding six suits. These had been packed when Ford left his home in Alexandria, Virginia, to move to the White House when Nixon resigned in August 1974. The whole event was rather unprecedented, of course, and Ford had forgotten the suits packed some four-and-a-half years earlier. He asked that the wardrobe carton be taken into the house.

The next day we ran across another wardrobe with another six suits hanging in it. This time he was more circumspect. He asked that it be taken into the house but, he said, “Don’t let Mrs. Ford see it. She wouldn’t let me keep the suits in the other one.”

The former most powerful man on earth was nervous that his wife wouldn’t let him save some old suits. There was a whole lot of Mr. Ford’s character in that incident, I thought — qualified ego, self-deprecating humor, thrift. All characteristics we might find worthy today if you ask me.

[Among other items we found during the time in the garage was the typewriter Ford said he’d used at Yale Law, and one of his baby shoes.]

NewMexiKen had several meetings with President Gerald Ford in the years after he left office in 1977. In fact it can be said that on one two-day occasion in 1979 I helped him clean his garage. The most astonishing incident, however, was in 1981.

The Gerald R. Ford Museum was about to be dedicated in Grand Rapids. As the representative of the National Archives nearest Ford’s retirement office in Rancho Mirage, California, I was called with an urgent request. It seemed flags had not been ordered for the replica Oval Office in the Museum. President Ford would lend them his. I was asked to go to his office, pick them up and ship them to Michigan.

The next morning I was ushered into the former President’s office. He was standing at his desk browsing through some papers. After the routine “Hello, Ken” and “Hello, Mr. President” exchange, I went about my business with the flags. He continued his business with the papers.

The U.S. flag was on a brass stand with two wooden staff pieces screwed together at the middle and a brass eagle, wings outstretched, at the top, about seven feet from the floor. I unscrewed the two pieces of the staff, a task made difficult by the weight of the flag and the eagle above.

As I began to lower the top half at an angle, the eagle took flight. It was just set on the top of the staff, not screwed on as it should have been.

Stop and picture this. The former President of the United States is a few feet away. His gorgeous White House presidential desk is even closer. And we have a brass eagle weighing several pounds in free fall. I’m holding the flag and can’t do anything but watch.

Poor President Ford I thought, he is about to be in the news for being clunked (or worse!) by a flagpole eagle in his own office — and this after years of being portrayed by Chevy Chase on Saturday Night Live as a clumsy, stumble-prone klutz. (In reality Gerald Ford was an All-American football player at Michigan in the 1930s and still looked exceptionally fit at 68.)

It wasn’t my fault the eagle hadn’t been attached but I was about to be a footnote to history.

Amazingly, the eagle missed Mr. Ford. Even more miraculously, it missed the historic desk and fell harmlessly to the carpet with a thud.

The former President had to have noticed. He never said a word. For that alone he has my enduring admiration.

Rest in Peace, Mr. President.

[Previously posted in slightly different form.]

I’ve just moved a new idea to the top of my list of things that need to be invented: self-folding fitted sheets. I hate folding fitted sheets. In fact, I usually just take the sheets off, launder them, dry them, and put the same ones back on so I don’t have to fold the bottom sheet. It takes more time to fold a fitted sheet decently than it does to make the bed.

Self-folding fitted sheets — they’ll make someone a millionaire someday.

MildChild saves Christmas.

Every couple of months my friend Mae Laborde checks in to let me know how her acting career is going. She’s in a tough racket, to say the least, but Mae is definitely a working actress, with a steady flow of jobs in commercials, TV shows and film. Not bad for someone who just broke into the business four years ago, at the age of 93.

“Listen to this, honey,” Mae said the other day on the phone. “I’ve just had a call to go to a studio near Hollywood. It’s for some kind of TV show, I think, and I didn’t even have to audition for this one. They just called and said I had the job. Not bad, huh?”

She’ll be A-list by the time she hits 100, I swear it.

Read more from Steve Lopez in the Los Angeles Times.

At an open house yesterday NewMexiKen was impressed by a beautiful woman possibly 80. She was wearing a quite attractive sweater that depicted a nativity scene. It even had, on the lower back, two of the three kings, apparently showing up late (as indeed they did). It was lovely, but even lovelier was the way we were made to understand, quite unequivocably, that she’d gotten it from “Neiman Marcus.”

If you’d like to become rich, NewMexiKen suggests you invent the self-cleaning refrigerator. I don’t mean the self-defrosting refrigerator, although lord knows that was a breakthrough right up there with Velcro. No, I mean self-cleaning: throws out the time-dated food, cleans up the nasty spills underneath the produce drawers, refreshes the ice bin (some of those cubes may be old enough for geologists to take core samples).

As you might gather I just cleaned out my refrigerator. Just a cursory wipe out and jettison of the older stuff. It doesn’t really need a super cleaning. Hell, I’ve only lived here 7-1/2 years.

There was some strange stuff in there though, stuck in the back. A loose egg. I wonder where that came from. Better yet, I wonder when that came from. There were some spills of food that really didn’t look familiar. Must have been from the previous owners.

Why, you say, did I get the impulse to clean my refrigerator early on Saturday morning? (Go ahead, say it.) It was either that or address these damn Christmas cards.

Sad commentary: NewMexiKen’s two produce drawers contain a total of one-half lime. Of course, one-half lime is enough to wet several Margarita glass rims. 🙂

Adolescents and adults now spend, on average, more than 64 days a year watching television, 41 days listening to the radio and a little over a week using the Internet. Among adults, 97 million Internet users sought news online last year, 92 million bought a product, 91 million made a travel reservation, 16 million used a social or professional networking site and 13 million created a blog.
…

Mr. Rutherfurd said time spent with such media increased to 3,543 hours last year from 3,340 hours in 2000, and is projected to rise to 3,620 hours in 2010. The time spent within each category varied, with less on broadcast television down to 679 hours in 2005 from 793 hours in 2000 and on reading in general, and more using the Internet up to 183 hours from 104 hours and on cable and satellite television.

The New York Times, reporting on data in the 2007 Statistical Abstract of the United States

Some weeks NewMexiKen gets in my whole annual quota of 183 hours on the internets.

No, I’m sorry, it’s not with Britney Spears or Angelina Jolie. This interview is with Melinda Gates:

In excerpts from a wide-ranging interview, Mrs. Gates talks about juggling responsibilities for her young family and the foundation’s management of its global health program, brainstorming with her famous husband and stepping out of her previously unseen internal work for the foundation and into the public arena.

On the other hand, Don To Earth will be 93 on Christmas Eve and he sounds “good” to me.

Go read.

“I look after animals, so I’d have a lot to give my kids.”

Paris Hilton who says, “It’s been my dream to have four babies by 30.”

30-year-old #1: So we went out on Thursday, and he didn’t call me Friday or Saturday, which was good. Then he showed up at the party on Sunday and didn’t talk to me for the first 35 minutes. Yesterday, he left me a message telling me how nice the party was, and I haven’t called him back.

30-year-old #2: But you like him.

30-year-old #1: Yeah, I think it’s going well.

–12th & Broadway

Overheard in New York

NewMexiKen learned recently that my dentist had been killed in an accident in September. Swimming alone at a gym pool late in the evening he hit his head and, as I understand it, drowned. So sad. He was an agreeable man in his late fifties, easy with a laugh. And, of course, I felt toward him as so many of us do toward our health professionals, a certain amount of Stockholm syndrome. Rest in Peace.

I’ve mentioned the dentist before in these pages.

• Two-timing dentist
• Gold star
• Things you don’t want to hear from your dentist

At dangerousmeta!, Garret tells a wonderful story — and MildChild makes an apt observation.

Go read. No really, go read it now.