Category: People & Human Interest

Why Americans Keep Getting, Shall We Say, Larger

This just in from Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen:

I just received an e-mail from the Richmond chapter of the William and Mary alumni association, inviting me to their annual holiday party this weekend.

As I skimmed it, I thought, “Why is the Richmond chapter sending things to me? That’s two hours away.”

Then I saw this, noted below the list of appetizers:

Mashed Potato Bar
(Mashed potatos served into martini glasses for a walk-around treat
…choose from a variety of toppings. Delish!)

Oh, well then that makes sense. My reputation obviously has spread throughout the Old Dominion.

So I’ll be heading to Richmond on Saturday…

More or Less, Probably Less

NewMexiKen met a young guy, Matt, over the weekend whose family here in Albuquerque has two bison as pets. Really. A male named “Boy” and a female named — take a guess — you got it, “Girl.” Matt even showed me a photo. He said the male plays with a large ball. The two animals are three years old, which is getting pretty close to reproduction age. At full maturity a male bison can weigh 2,000 pounds, a female around 1,100. State regulations require a minimum of one acre per bison Matt told me — and a reinforced fence. The state wouldn’t let the family keep elk.

NewMexiKen figures we haven’t heard the end of this story: “An Albuquerque man who last week was awarded more than $300,000 in damages in a civil lawsuit against city police has been identified as the man found shot [to death] on Fourth Street on Thanksgiving.”

I got a kick out of this routing from Southwest for a possible trip to visit some Sweeties: Albuquerque to San Francisco, San Francisco to Los Angeles, Los Angeles to Oakland. Guess Southwest doesn’t know that the “O” in SFO (the San Francisco International Airport code) stands for “Oakland.”

Sorry to hear that Kid Rock and Pamela Anderson are getting divorced after four months of marriage. I thought they might have genuine staying power — six months at least. Oh, and I see Dumb and Dumber are all decked out in Christmas colors already.

Fun new “I’m a Mac, I’m a PC” ads from Apple. I especially liked this one. Also, there is news that there will soon be a Nike Amp+. It’s a bluetooth wristband that communicates with your Nike+iPod. From your wrist you can operate the iPod and monitor your workout. Coming soon.

The University of Arizona just completed its third season with Coach Mike Stoops. They’ve gone 3-8, 3-8 and 6-6 (and one of the wins each year was against a I-AA team). So really, 9-22. What’s reasonable for us alums to expect next year?

If I’m interpreting Andrew Tobias correctly, about a third of all the income taxes we pay goes to interest just on the debt accumulated under Reagan, Bush and Bush.

After a warm fall (Albuquerque has had nine totally cloudless days in November) we are told to expect lows in the teens and the possibility of snow tonight and tomorrow.

Chestnuts roasting on the open fire,
Jack Frost nipping at your nose.

This and That, But Mostly That

By the Sunday after Thanksgiving I’ve usually been enough of a glutton that I swear off food entirely. You know, go cold turkey.

Reading this article by Seymour Hersh in The New Yorker last night I couldn’t help but think we’ve turned into a country that Shakespeare could write a historical tragedy about.

NewMexiKen lives near a state highway with a posted speed limit of 50 mph. (That translates to about 65 in practice). Parallel to the road, and about 50 feet away from it, is a bike path. The path, however, is used by strollers (both the people kind and the kid-carrying kind) and slower bicycle riders. Most of the lycra-wearing bike riders use the bike lane on the highway itself. I understand that drivers are often rude to cyclists and that some drivers seem to get off on endangering bicycle riders. That said, though, why do so many of these bicycle riders — including those riding solo — hug the painted line separating the bike lane from the traffic lane? Isn’t that inviting trouble? The bike lane is eight or ten feet wide. I drive down the middle of my lane, why can’t/won’t so many cyclists ride down the middle of their lane?

New Mexico Bowl LogoWhy is it that some people put on both socks then both shoes, while other people put on one sock and one shoe then the other sock and shoe? I’m the latter type.

I kind of like the logo for the New Mexico Bowl, which is having its first game December 23. It’ll be UNM vs. Nevada or San Jose State.

Grinding the beans just before brewing the coffee really does enhance the flavor. It also gives you something to do while drinking the coffee — clean up the mess.

Notre Dame really needs to get into a conference for football. I know they like taking home ALL the TV money and not having to share it (as conference teams do), but playing the other independents like Army and Navy isn’t going to prepare them for pro teams like USC. Playing Stanford (1-10) and North Carolina (3-9) didn’t help either. The Big 10 has 11 teams. Why not 12?

I bought some Christmas lights at Costco. According to the info on the box, this 100-light string of multi-colored LED bulbs uses just 8 watts, compared to 36 watts for mini lamps and 500 for incandescent Christmas lights (C-7 bulbs). Seemed like a good choice; for indoor or outdoor. Bulbs never need replacing.

How come cocaine is against the law but Costco is permitted to sell chocolate covered bing cherries?

I bought the Obama book (mentioned in the previous post).

Household Hint

Another in a series of household hints based upon NewMexiKen’s personal experience:

If you are struggling with a plumbing repair it’s best not to use too much force. It is especially important not to use too much force, break something, and have to call out a plumber for an emergency repair.

It is especially important not to use too much force, break something, and have to call out a plumber for an emergency repair just before the beginning of a holiday weekend, say Thanksgiving.

So, for once, I didn’t. I put everything back together and will live with the drip in my shower until next week.

Ha Ha, you thought I had screwed up, didn’t you?

Happy Thanksgiving!

Size Matters Redux

NewMexiKen had been sulking since I read earlier today “that for every inch taller a man is than his speed-dating rivals, the number of women who want to meet him goes up by about five percent.”

And I always thought it was wit and intelligence that women looked for.1

But anyway, I did a little research and found this interesting article from The New Yorker in 2004. It included these factoids:

The men of the northern Cheyenne, he found, were the tallest people in the world in the late nineteenth century: well nourished on bison and berries, and wandering clear of disease on the high plains, they averaged nearly five feet ten.

In the First World War, the average American soldier was still two inches taller than the average German. But sometime around 1955 the situation began to reverse. The Germans and other Europeans went on to grow an extra two centimetres a decade, and some Asian populations several times more, yet Americans haven’t grown taller in fifty years. By now, even the Japanese—once the shortest industrialized people on earth—have nearly caught up with us, and Northern Europeans are three inches taller and rising.

Women, meanwhile, seem to be getting smaller. According to the National Center for Health Statistics—which conducts periodic surveys of as many as thirty-five thousand Americans—women born in the late nineteen-fifties and early nineteen-sixties average just under five feet five. Those born a decade later are a third of an inch shorter.

He has subdivided the country’s heights by race, sex, income, and education. He has looked at whites alone, at blacks alone, at people with advanced degrees and those in the highest income bracket. Somewhere in the United States, he thinks, there must be a group that’s both so privileged and so socially insulated that it’s growing taller. He has yet to find one.

1 NewMexiKen is exactly the average height for American men but I’ve got a Mensa pin around here somewhere.

Size Matters

LONDON (Reuters) – Walk tall – it’s the short cut to success at speed-dating. In what is billed as the first study of its kind, two academics found there is no short cut to true love.

They calculated that for every inch taller a man is than his speed-dating rivals, the number of women who want to meet him goes up by about five percent.

Yahoo! News

You know what this means when the results of this study become widely known? It means that spam will be about leg enlargement.

It also explains Wilt Chamberlain.

Aging Brains

Scott Adams has a lot on his mind:

They say you get smarter every day that you’re alive until some tipping point. After that, because your brain starts to rot with age, you get dumber every day. I wonder if I’ll know when it happens. That would be a bad day. “Something feels different today. I wonder what…uh-oh.”

I already forget more things than ever. But to be fair, I have more things to forget. So even if my retention-to-forgetting ratio stayed constant, I’d be forgetting more next year than I knew by the age of 17. …

Adams continues, including this:

All the experts agree that kids can learn new languages faster than adults. I am not impressed. If I had as few problems as a 9-year old, I could learn Chinese over the weekend. Let that kid start worrying about his HTML code, Iran’s nuclear program, and the Alternative Minimum Tax trap – then let’s see who can conjugate faster.

Delta Kicks Breastfeeding Mom Off Plane

NewMexiKen finds that much of what I read on the internets, or elsewhere for that matter, is biased or only tells one side. Here’s another one of those stories that I find a little incredulous. Why would Delta do this if she was, as the story says, discreet? Am I just being naive?

I almost got kicked out of a Flower & Garden Show for nursing my son ten years ago, but that pales in comparison to actually getting kicked off an airplane–as happened recently to a mother on a Delta Airlines flight in Vermont.

She was sitting on an airplane nursing her child in a next-to-last row window seat with her husband beside her (in other words, she was in a discreet location), when a flight attendant offered her a choice: Cover herself and her child with a blanket, or get off the plane.

She declined the blanket, and was escorted off the plane. …

Fearless Voices | The Huffington Post

The woman, from Santa Fe, was feeding her 22-month-old daughter. Here’s a report from the Burlington Free Press.

Boo!

So I talked to my physician’s assistant yesterday and she said, “Does the pain take your breath away? Because if the pain takes your breath away you should go to the emergency room.”

Thinking about going to the emergency room took my breath away.

Who knew Rush even flew on Southwest

I posted this first a year ago, but it so amazes me here it is again.

NewMexiKen sat next to an off-duty flight attendant on the trip east Wednesday. She told me that once while she was administering CPR to a passenger who had had a heart attack, the man behind her across the aisle tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she was going to get his drink or not.

Stuff

NewMexiKen, still hacking from the Virginia cooties, is going to Santa Fe for the afternoon — get some fresh air, take some photos of the aspens (if it’s not too late), and have a little repast on the plaza, as people have been doing for nearly 400 years.

And don’t worry Albuquerqueans, true to our apparent sworn civic duty, I promise I won’t like Santa Fe no matter how wonderful a time I have.

(Actually, in NewMexiKen’s opinion, living an hour from Santa Fe, one of the unique, special cities in the U.S. — an attraction people travel for thousands of miles to enjoy — is a bonus to living in Albuquerque. In other words, one of my very favorite things about Albuquerque is Santa Fe.)

Before I go:

Scott Adams tells us about being In Over My Head. Self-serving, no doubt, but still interesting. Go read it. (Adams claims he’s turned down as much as $100,000 to give an hour-long speech. His blog is free.) Link via Three Bed Two Bath.

Andrew Tobias has links showing how the Republicans can win the election, no matter what the polls say, including this, “hotel mini-bar keys open Diebold voting machines.”

And, in what one hopes will be a self-fulfilling prophecy, House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.) said today that anyone who covered up information about contacts between then Rep. Mark Foley and male pages “really ought to go.”

Must reads

NewMexiKen intended to take the day off but I think these are must reads:

Dan Froomkin:

There is a popular sentiment among the Washington elite that what went wrong in the run-up to the war in Iraq has been sufficiently examined, and that it’s all water under the bridge anyway.

It’s popular in the White House and among Republicans for obvious reasons. But it’s also remarkably popular among top Democrats and the establishment media, because they aren’t all that eager to call any more attention to the fact that they were played for suckers.

There are, however, some people who believe that what led this country to launch a war of choice under false pretenses must be examined in detail — over and over again if necessary — until the appropriate lessons have been learned.

Otherwise, one might argue, history is doomed to repeat itself.

Enter history, stage right.

Once again, powerful neoconservative politicians who just know in their hearts that there is a terrible threat posed by a Middle Eastern country they have identified as part of the axis of evil are frustrated by the lack of conclusive evidence that would support a bellicose approach. So they are pressuring the nation’s intelligence community to find facts that will support their argument.

And, at Slate, Emily Yoffe in a fun, insightful article:

I am a baby boomer, which makes me one of those sickening, self-obsessed, rapidly aging people you nonboomers wish would just shut up and shuffle off already. Although at age 50 I still have a margin of five years of “youth” before I can become a resident of Leisure World, the frequent entreaties I receive from AARP remind me how long ago my youth really was. (And if you think the Bush administration is monitoring you, try keeping your 50th birthday a secret from AARP.) For this Human Guinea Pig, I wanted to preview what old age would be like. Usually this column is about exploring odd corners of life so you don’t have to. But this time, I’m just getting there ahead of you, because if you’re lucky, you’ll get there, too.

Oh, and via Duke City Fix, How Angry Is Your City?. Albuquerque is 14th; Orlando — Orlando ? — is first.

What makes me angry is that when I thought it would be fun to comment at Duke City Fix that Albuquerque’s being ranked 14th made me angry, some commenters had already beaten me to it.

No more watermelon on airplanes

Emily, official youngest daughter or NewMexiKen, writes:

Have you ever heard of a watermelon imploding?

Rob bought a nice big watermelon on Sunday evening. We planned to cut into it today.

I guess the watermelon had other ideas . . .

Last night, it imploded and leaked sticky, gooey juice all over our kitchen island, stools, floor, trash cans, and life insurance papers. It totally ruined a rug. And our whole house smells like rotten watermelon.

Yuck!

Then, as I started to clean up, Rob tried to move the deflated fruit into the trash can. That’s when it exploded red pulp all over the floor and trash cans.

Gross!

Forty-five minutes and a whole roll of paper towel later, I finally got through mopping it all up.

The ants are already having a feast and I can only imagine it will get worse. I feel like I’ll have to mop for a week straight to STOP finding sticky spots on the floor.