. . . was authorized 10 years ago today.
On November 29, 1864, Colonel John M. Chivington led approximately 700 U.S. volunteer soldiers to a village of about 500 Cheyenne and Arapaho people camped along the banks of Big Sandy Creek in southeastern Colorado. Although the Cheyenne and Arapaho people believed they were under the protection of the U.S. Army, Chivington’s troops attacked and killed about 150 people, mainly women, children, and the elderly.
A lady walks up to a pharmacist and asked to buy a bottle of cyanide.
The pharmacist said, “Why in the world do you need cyanide?”
The lady then explained she needed it to poison her husband.
The pharmacist’s eyes got big and he said, “Lord, have mercy — I can’t give you cyanide to kill your husband! That against the law! I’ll lose my license, they’ll throw both of us in jail and all kinds of bad things will happen! Absolutely not, you can NOT have any cyanide!”
The lady reached into her purse and pulled out a picture of her husband in bed with the pharmacist’s wife. The pharmacist looked at the picture and replied, “Well, now, you didn’t tell me you had a prescription?”
A penguin walks into a psychiatrist’s office wearing a santa suit.
The doc says “It’s clear. You have bipolar disorder.”
A blonde woman was speeding down the road in her little red sports car and was pulled over by a woman police officer who was also a blonde.
The blonde cop asked to see the blonde driver’s license. She dug through her purse and was getting progressively more agitated.
“What does it look like?” she finally asked.
The policewoman replied, “It’s square and it has your picture on it.”
The driver finally found a square mirror, looked at it and handed it to the policewoman.
“Here it is,” she said.
The blonde officer looked at the mirror, then handed it back saying, “Okay, you can go. I didn’t realize you were a cop.”
I thought basketball season had begun — Michigan 67 Illinois 65.
But it was football.
At Dinner without Crayons, Tanya goes auto-retro. An excerpt:
I tried going car-free for over a week but eventually cracked and asked Darling Hubby to arrange for a rental for me to pick up Thursday. I told him it didn’t need to be anything special. He took me at my word and reserved a Hyundai Accent. It has all manual locks and doors, something the girls have never encountered before in a car.
Already mentioned for its good lines, this piece about loneliness from Roger Ebert is just superb.
“You know what a bore is, Travis. Someone who deprives you of solitude without providing you with companionship.”
Meyer, friend of Travis McGee, quoted by Roger Ebert.
Another line, this by Ebert himself:
“[A]ll relationships are virtual, even those that take place in person.”
… as the previous post does.
I can get the senior discount at Albertson’s (55 and older) simply by asking, but have to show ID to buy a bottle of wine.
On a long drive from Clovis, New Mexico, to Gatlinburg, Tennessee, for a family reunion, George and Maggie Powell made a pit stop in Sevierville, Tennessee, that they will long remember.
“Several of us needed to go to Walmart and the nearest one was in Sevierville,” Maggie says. “We finished our shopping and went to a checkout counter.
My husband had purchased beer, and the checker asked for his ID.”
The fun began when George showed the checker his driver’s license. “I’ll have to see your passports,” she said.
The Powells weren’t expecting this request, and George asked her to repeat it. “I can’t sell you beer without seeing your passports,” she said.
Guessing the source of the checker’s misunderstanding, the Powells segued into a geography lesson. They explained that they were not from a foreign country but from New Mexico—“One of our 50 states, between Arizona and Texas.”
The checker was adamant. “I know where Mexico is. These are Walmart’s rules, not mine.”
When the Powells threatened to go to another checkout counter, the checker relented. “I’ll go ahead and finish checking you out this time, because if I don’t, you’ll be held up for more than an hour.”
“It was obvious to us this was not a Walmart rule, but a case where the checker had no idea where New Mexico is,” Maggie says.
You think autumns in New England are the greatest of them all
But give me sweet Virginia for the fireworks of Fall
The prettiest October, in all the 50 states
Just drive up to the Skyline, park the car and wait
“Old Dominion”
Eddie from Ohio
Today is Guy Fawkes Day, celebrating the day in 1605 when police foiled the so-called Gunpowder Plot by seizing Guy Fawkes before he could blow up the English Parliament. Fawkes was a British soldier who had converted to Roman Catholicism at a time when the British government was making it a crime to be a Catholic. Catholic masses were held in secret chapels, clergy had to go into hiding and sleep in closets, and families that refused to attend Protestant mass suffered crippling fines.
Fawkes became so disgusted by British Protestantism that he left England and enlisted in the Spanish Army in the Netherlands. He became known as a soldier of great courage. At that time, a small group of Catholics were secretly planning to assassinate the Protestant King James I, and they enlisted Fawkes to help them execute the plot, and he agreed.
They rented a cellar under the Parliament building, and Fawkes planted more than 20 barrels of gunpowder there, in the hopes of blowing up the king. The rest of their plan included an uprising in the Midlands, and the crowning of a puppet queen, the king’s young daughter Elizabeth. But an anonymous tip gave up the plot to the authorities and Guy Fawkes was caught red-handed, ready to light the fuse. He managed to withstand torture on the rack for two days before giving up the names of his co-conspirators.
For Catholics, the discovery of the Gunpowder Plot only worsened their oppression. They could no longer practice law, serve as officers in the army or navy, nor vote in local or parliamentary elections. Some British authorities even suggested that Catholics should have to wear red hats in public.
November 5th came to be celebrated as a holiday in England and in the early American colonies. People would build bonfires, light off fireworks, and burn Guy Fawkes in effigy. But even in England, the holiday has been overshadowed by the American import of Halloween.
Source: The Writer’s Almanac (2005)
… was authorized 44 years ago today. It is one of just three National Park Service sites in Indiana.
Indiana Dunes National Lakeshore is a treasure of diverse natural resources located within an urban setting. The national lakeshore features communities that have both scientific and historic significance to the field of ecology. In addition, four National Natural Landmarks and one National Historical Landmark are located within its boundaries.
The park is comprised of over 15,000 acres of dunes, oak savannas, swamps, bogs, marshes, prairies, rivers, and forests. It contains 15 miles of Lake Michigan shoreline spanning the distance from Gary to Michigan City. Lake Michigan is part of the largest complex of freshwater lakes in the world. The national lakeshore’s beaches are the park’s most significant recreational resource.
Top speed 155. 62.6 mpg. BMW (as if you couldn’t tell from the front). Hybrid or all electric, TBD. Ballpark: $220K.
There is damn little room for error during takeoff at Chicago’s Midway airport.
We had about 1500 feet of runway left when the back wheels left the ground.
My four-year-old grandson sings to himself, like most of us of all ages.
Still, it strikes me odd to hear him sing the chorus from “Highway to Hell.”
‘[B]asic arithmetic makes people very, very angry.”
“And the solution is to yell a lot.”
Today is the birthday
… of James Knox Polk, 11th president of the United States, born on this date in 1795.
… and of Warren Gamaliel Harding, 29th president of the United States, born on this date in 1865.
Polk is generally rated among the “near great” presidents for achieving what he set out to do (wrong as some of it might have been). Harding who died while president, is generally considered a “failure,” though he has moved up the ratings at least one slot during the past decade.
Daniel Boone was born on November 2nd in 1734 near Reading, Pennsylvania. (It was October 22nd the day he was born, but the calendar of the British Empire officially dropped 11 days in 1752.)
Daniel Boone fought in the French and Indian War, came home and got married, and managed to have 10 children in between his long and frequent hunting trips into the wilderness. He explored farther and farther west, and in 1767 he ventured into Kentucky for the first time. A couple of years later, he made it to the Cumberland Gap, and then he said, “I returned to my family with a determination to bring them as soon as possible to live in Kentucky, which I esteemed a second paradise.” He did manage to move his whole family to Kentucky, then West Virginia, and finally, Missouri. When someone asked him why he had left Kentucky, he said it was “too crowded.” In 1788, when he moved to West Virginia, there were about 70,000 people in the entire territory.
Above from The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor, which has more, as well as info about Lady Chatterly’s Lover and the birthday of cheerleading.
Pat Buchanan, a specter some people see everywhere, is 72 today.
Stefanie Zofya Paul was born in Hollywood, California, 68 years ago today. As Stefanie Powers she is best known for her role in Hart to Hart.
k.d. lang is 49. David Schwimmer — “Ross” — is 44.
Burt Lancaster was born on November 2, 1913. Lancaster had four best actor Oscar nominations, winning for Elmer Gantry. Among his last performances was as Dr. Archibald “Moonlight” Graham in Field of Dreams. Lancaster died in 1994.
North and South Dakota became the 39th and 40th states respectively on November 2, 1889.
“It’s always nice when the weirdest team wins.”
Joe Posnanski writes “An unlikely story, San Francisco finally has a World Series champion”.
“Typical memories. But as I recall, the special excitement of Halloween didn’t come from candy or costumes or dark, whispery streets. The overwhelming thrill came from going out of the house at night and wandering freely around the neighborhood with no parents.
“Halloween was a night of incredible freedom.”
NewMexiKen is going to take about 10 days off. At least that’s my plan. Perhaps some Halloween photos will appear along the way, we’ll see.
Otherwise, see you on or about November 8th.
But, before I go, Richard Dreyfuss is 63 today, Kate Jackson of Charlie’s Angels is 62, Dan Castellaneta, the voice of Homer Simpson, is 53, and Winona Ryder is 39.
David Remnick, the editor of The New Yorker, is 52.
There have been just four editors of The New Yorker before him: Harold Ross, William Shawn, Robert Gottlieb, and Tina Brown. At the magazine, Remnick has inadvertently distinguished himself from his colorful predecessors by his trademark sanity, lack of eccentricity, and calm style. Editorial director Henry Finder said: “I think he regards the editor’s job as being not crazy. The writer’s prerogative is to be, perhaps, a little crazy.”
Jill and I saw the film The Social Network over the weekend. We commented to each other last evening that we were still thinking about the movie.
This is the film about the birth of Facebook (or as it was originally called, The Facebook). The movie is very well written (screenplay by Aaron Sorkin) and very well acted (Jesse Eisenberg, Andrew Garfield and even Justin Timberlake). It is also, I thought, just plain interesting about the mechanics of the modern world in the same way West Wing was.
Like the people it portrays, this is a very smart movie. It engages you with dialogue and complexity made dramatic.
Today is the birthday of Charlie Daniels. The devil in Georgia is 74.
Actress Jane Alexander is 71 today. Ms. Alexander has four Oscar nominations in her career; two for best actress and two for best supporting actress.
Det. Andy Sipowicz is 66. That’s Dennis Franz.
Bill Gates, the former resident of Albuquerque, is 55 today.
When he was in 8th grade, the [Seattle] Lakeside Mothers Club had a rummage sale and used the money to buy computer equipment for the school. Gates and his friend Paul Allen got completely swept up in the excitement of this new technology. They rummaged through dumpsters at the nearby Computer Center Corporation to find notes written by programmers, and with that information, they wrote a 300-page manual. He and Paul Allen moved to Albuquerque and started Microsoft in 1975.
Oscar winner Julia Roberts (Erin Brockovich) is 43. Ms. Roberts was also nominated for best actress for Pretty Woman and best supporting actress for Steel Magnolias.
Two-time Grammy winner Ben Harper is 41.
Joaquin Phoenix, who has already been nominated for a best supporting actor (“Gladiator”) and a leading actor (“Walk the Line”) Oscar, is 36.
Costume designer Edith Head was born on October 24th in 1897. Ms. Head was nominated for 35 Oscars, winning eight.
The developer of the first polio vaccine, Dr. Jonas Salk was born on this date in 1914.
He created the vaccine at the height of a polio epidemic in the mid-1950s, when parents were so worried about their children that they kept them home from swimming pools in the summer. Salk’s discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus, and he tested the vaccine on himself, his family, and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe. The vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, and the number of people infected by polio went down from more than 10,000 a year to fewer than 100. Salk was declared a national hero.
Harvard College was founded on this date in 1636.
Today is Pat Sajak’s birthday. His wheel of fortune has spun for 64 years.
Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton is 63 today.
Jaclyn Smith of Charlie’s Angels is 63.
Natalie Merchant is 47.
And it’s the birthday of Mahalia Jackson, born on this date in 1911 (she died in 1972). As The New York Times noted in Ms. Jackson’s obituary:
“I been ‘buked and I been scorned/ I’m gonna tell my Lord/ When I get home/ Just how long you’ve been treating me wrong,” she sang in a full, rich contralto to the throng of 200,000 people as a preface to Dr. King’s “I’ve got a dream” speech.
The song, which Dr. King had requested, came as much from Miss Jackson’s heart as from her vocal cords. The granddaughter of a slave, she had struggled for years for fulfillment and for unprejudiced recognition of her talent.
She received the latter only belatedly with a Carnegie Hall debut in 1950. Her following, therefore, was largely in the black community, in the churches and among record collectors.
Although Miss Jackson’s medium was the sacred song drawn from the Bible or inspired by it, the words–and the “soul” style in which they were delivered–became metaphors of black protest, Tony Heilbut, author of “The Gospel Sound” and her biographer, said yesterday. Among blacks, he went on, her favorites were “Move On Up a Little Higher,” “Just Over the Hill” and “How I Got Over.”
Singing these and other songs to black audiences, Miss Jackson was a woman on fire, whose combs flew out of her hair as she performed. She moved her listeners to dancing, to shouting, to ecstasy, Mr. Heilbut said. By contrast, he asserted, Miss Jackson’s television style and her conduct before white audiences was far more placid and staid.
Had Mahalia Jackson been born a few decades later, when she could have sung her soul for audiences black and white, she, Mahalia Jackson, and not Aretha Franklin, would have been the Queen of Soul and the first woman inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame.
