Category: People & Human Interest

Redux post of the day

First posted here six years ago today (and repeated in 2006):

Drug test
By NewMexiKen [1998]

You’ll be pleased to hear that all of your government secrets are in drug free hands.

Yup, today was the day I got called with 53 minutes notice for my random drug urine test. Illegal search and seizure if you ask me, but I had to sign a waiver and give up my rights when I got a security clearance. My attorney advises me that this has probably already been litigated, so I went and did my thing for a drug free U.S. federal workforce. Hope Centrum Silver doesn’t set off any alarms.

Actually, I can state unequivocally that I have been controlled substance free, so the test was more annoying than anything. Too bad, if I failed I would have had my security clearance pulled and been given a probationary period doing nothing for the same money for months, as happened to at least two guys in our office last year. Poor bastards really suffered.

Highlight of the experience. I said to the person administering the test, “This must be an unpleasant job.”

“Best job I’ve ever had,” she replied.

Whoa! In this job she is called a “Collector.” Can you even imagine her other jobs?

And for those who’ve never had this little indignity, no they don’t watch. They just don’t let you take anything in with you and they check the temperature of the specimen to make sure it is body temperature. Of course, they may have a camera in there and I may be action news “film at 11.”

Or in my case, perhaps “America’s Funniest Videos.”

Secrets of Magus

The playwright David Mamet and the theatre director Gregory Mosher affirm that some years ago, late one night in the bar of the Ritz-Carlton Hotel in Chicago, this happened:

Ricky Jay, who is perhaps the most gifted sleight-of-hand artist alive, was performing magic with a deck of cards. Also present was a friend of Mamet and Mosher’s named Christ Nogulich, the director of food and beverage at the hotel. After twenty minutes of disbelief-suspending manipulations, Jay spread the deck face up on the bar counter and asked Nogulich to concentrate on a specific card but not to reveal it. Jay then assembled the deck face down, shuffled, cut it into two piles, and asked Nogulich to point to one of the piles and name his card.

“Three of clubs,” Nogulich said, and he was then instructed to turn over the top card.

He turned over the three of clubs.

Mosher, in what could be interpreted as a passive-aggressive act, quietly announced, “Ricky, you know, I also concentrated on a card.”

After an interval of silence, Jay said, “That’s interesting, Gregory, but I only do this for one person at a time.”

Mosher persisted: “Well, Ricky, I really was thinking of a card.”

Jay paused, frowned, stared at Mosher, and said, “This is a distinct change of procedure.” A longer pause. “All right—what was the card?”

“Two of spades.”

Jay nodded, and gestured toward the other pile, and Mosher turned over its top card.

The deuce of spades.

A small riot ensued.

From the beginning of a Mark Singer profile of Ricky Jay in The New Yorker (1993).

The next trick described is even more fantastic. If you ever play cards (especially if you play for stakes), you should read at least the first part of this lengthy piece.

Ricky Jay portrayed the character Eddie Sawyer in Deadwood.

She ‘wasn’t feeling well’

NewMexiKen is taking the day off to celebrate the blog’s sixth anniversary.
The posts today are being written by readers just like you. This is from Jill, but my thoughts exactly.

Remember the mother who drove the wrong way on the Taconic Parkway near New York City, eventually causing a crash that killed eight people, including her daughter and three nieces, and critically injured her son?

Police announced today that the woman, Diane Schuler, had a blood alcohol level of .19 and had also smoked marijuana in the hour before her death.

Apparently, she was driving erratically for some time before the crash: straddling lanes, tailgating, flashing her lights, driving across a median, and trying to pass on the shoulder. Six people called 911 to report her.

My initial reaction when I heard about this crash was to feel a measure of relief that this woman did not survive. I thought no person could or should have to live with that much pain. But, thinking now of what those last minutes must have been like for those terrified children, I find myself wishing she had survived.

Supplies

NewMexiKen is taking the day off to celebrate the blog’s sixth anniversary.
The posts today are being written by readers just like you. This is from Jill.

Byron handled the school-supply shopping this evening. He thought he was doing me a big favor. But I’m kind of grumbly because I like doing it. It’s like the perfect type A activity – having to get everything in the right size, and the right color, and the right number, and “chisel tip,” and “alcohol free,” and “dries clear.”

I do wonder why Aidan needed 20 (twenty) glue sticks. There will be 25 or 26 kids in his class. What class needs more than 500 glue sticks for the year? What exactly will they be gluing? Is there some sort of black market in glue sticks, and the teachers plan to sell them off to supplement their salaries?

I’m also wondering why Mack needs, specifically, a ruler with three holes, a fabric pencil case with three holes, and paper with three holes…but no binders or folders with three rings.

Campground justice

It was first light, the twilight just before dawn. Two shots rang out. The campers awake in their tents and RVs were startled; then they relaxed and fell back asleep. They realized that it was just some right-minded person meting out justice to the jerks breaking camp with all the subtlety and quiet of the circus leaving town.

Above first posted here four years ago. It is all true, except for the shots.

So much for the second amendment

Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports on the excitement on her street last night.

Mack’s friend Nick was over, and at about 8:00 it was time for him to go home. As he walked down the driveway I realized there were two police cars in front of my house. I followed him out to make sure everything was okay, and saw that there were three police cars at the end of the street. There were two officers [across the street in the] back and side yard, each with long black body shields and rifles. One officer saw us and yelled at us to go back in the house. At the same time Nick’s mom saw us from down at her end of the street (she works for the sherrif’s office) and yelled at us to get back inside.

Which we did QUICKLY.

I sent all the kids into the basement, but I couldn’t resist watching. Eventually our neighbor who lives [across the street one house down] came out into his driveway and put his hands up over his head. Then he turned around and kneeled with his hands behind his head, and an officer came up with weapon drawn and cuffed him. They took him back in the house.

Sometime later, the police left and Nick’s mom came down to get him.

It seems that [the neighbor] took his dog for a walk and brought a BB gun with him. Someone saw him and thought it was a real gun and called the police. So it was really nothing — if having a swarm of cops with rifles on your street can ever be nothing.

Stupid is as stupid does

I had my ID checked at the ball game the other night to buy a watered-down beer. OK, I’m used to this stupidity by now, checking the ID of obvious AARP members.

But this a-hole vendor insisted I take my license out of the plastic. He gave it a once over, made sure the hologram was there, and so on. Like I was getting on a f***ing airplane bound for Syria. (I will remind you that it became legal for me to buy alcoholic beverages 43 years ago.)

So I took the beer and gave it to a teenager in the crowd.

Finally, an everyday use for evolution!

Strangers are more likely to return lost wallets containing photos of cute babies, according to British researchers. The scientists sprinkled 240 wallets across Edinburgh last year with pictures of either a smiling baby, a puppy, a “happy family,” or a “contended elderly couple.” It turns out nobody cares about your pooch, retired parents, or smugly superior family life. But that cute wittle baby? Apparently it triggers a “compassionate instinct towards vulnerable infants that people have evolved to ensure the survival of future generations.”

Consumerist has the details.

The good life

Just this last year [Stewart Udall] rafted down the Colorado River from Lees Ferry — named for Udall’s grandfather — and, with a grandson, trekked from the floor of the Grand Canyon up Bright Angel Trail some 7,000 feet to the South Rim. His family had cautioned against it, and he rejected a Park Service offer of a mule. “They wouldn’t have liked it if I hadn’t made it,” he recounted, “but what a way to go.” Once at the South Rim, Udall marched straight to the bar at the Tovar Lodge and ordered a martini.

Udall was 84 when the above took place. Stewart Udall was Secretary of the Interior under Presidents Kennedy and Johnson. He is the father of New Mexico’s junior U.S. senator Tom Udall.

From a 2005 Los Angeles Times profile of Udall.

Lee P. Cook

GpaCook.jpgMy mother’s uncle, and her guardian, was born in Conlogue, Illinois, on this date in 1888. I knew him as Grandpa, usually written as G’pa.

A salesman through most of his career, after tough times during the Depression he established a successful insurance agency in Detroit in the 1940s and 1950s. Despite his success, his office was in the dining room, then in the second bedroom of a small apartment — a great place for a little boy to play “office”.

G’pa was a conservative, staid almost austere man. His favorite activity — other than work — was telling “stories” (jokes we would call them), none of which were ever off color and a few I can still remember hearing. He was good at the telling and no doubt that was part of his success in sales. Ironically though, it didn’t seem to serve him well in the Army, a time of his life he particularly disliked — but then he was a 29-year-old draftee.

Lee Cook sold the insurance agency when he was in his early 70s, but couldn’t retire. He continued trying to sell this or that, without much success. It was sad to see him so frustrated. (I learned then that I should have a blog when I retired to keep me busy.)

Grandpa’s been gone more than 35 years now, but I still miss him.

Redux post of the day

Posted here originally two years ago today.

Last week NewMexiKen read Daniel Gilibert’s Stumbling on Happiness. This is an informative and funny book by a Harvard psychologist that explains how our brain, mind, memory and emotions work — and why they lead us to such poor decisions about what makes us happy.

As Malcolm Gladwell has written about the book, “If you have even the slightest curiosity about the human condition, you ought to read it. Trust me.”

Trust me, too.

First, because Gilbert is an amusing writer, throwing in unexpected delights.

Emotional happiness is like that. It is the feeling common to the feelings we have when we see our new granddaughter smile for the first time, receive word of a promotion, help a wayward tourist find the art museum, taste Belgian chocolate toward the back of our tongue, inhale the scent of our lover’s shampoo, hear the song we used to like so much in high school but haven’t heard in years, touch our cheek to kitten fur, cure cancer, or get a really good snootful of cocaine.

… [O]r trying to predict how proud you will be of your spouse’s accomplishment without knowing which accomplishment (winning a Nobel Prize or finding the best divorce lawyer in the city?) …

“There are many good things about getting older, but no one knows what they are.”

Second, because Gilbert writes about us, human beings, “the only animal that thinks about the future.” Able to think about the future, we make predictions; we make predictions so that we can control our future. Gilbert explains we are captains of a boat on “the river of time.” We get pleasure from controlling the boat. We also get pleasure from controlling the destination, the place that will bring us happiness. The problem is, our future destinations are “fundamentally different” than they appear.

The book explains why. Happiness itself is subjective. Our imaginations are defective — our memory unknowingly fills in details that didn’t happen and forgets details that did; we base too much on the present; we rationalize outcomes, good becomes better, bad becomes worse. We are unable to recall our real feelings once an event has passed.

Stumbling on Happiness is not a self-help book. You may learn how you make decisions about future happiness, even why you make those decisions, but not how to make better decisions — at least not directly. But just learning may be a good start.

Glastonbury 2009

Over the weekend, approximately 190,000 people made their way to Worthy Farm in western England to attend the 2009 Glastonbury Festival. Attendees came to see performances at what is billed as “Europe’s largest open-air music festival” on many stages over four days – headliners included Bruce Springsteen, Neil Young, and a reunited Blur. Rainy weather did little to dampen the mood, as attendees enjoyed themselves in tent cities, concert performances, dance tents, and the surrounding countryside of Somerset, England. Collected here are a handful of images from this year’s festival. (33 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

We are an interesting lot, us humans.

Decisions, decisions, decisions

I hate having to decide.

For example, this evening (now) should I have cheese, crackers and a glass of nicely chilled Chardonnay, or should I have chips, salsa and a Margarita?

Sometimes decisions like these just leave me paralyzed and I do without.

Other times I have cheese, crackers and Chardonnay, AND chips, salsa and a Margarita.

But which should I have first?

The girl in the window

Go read this story. It won Lane DeGregory a Pulitzer Prize.

No, really, go read it.

A brief excerpt:

The doctors and social workers had no way of knowing all that had happened to Danielle. But the scene at the house, along with Danielle’s almost comatose condition, led them to believe she had never been cared for beyond basic sustenance. Hard as it was to imagine, they doubted she had ever been taken out in the sun, sung to sleep, even hugged or held. She was fragile and beautiful, but whatever makes a person human seemed somehow missing.