“Complaining about the assholes we interact with on a daily basis is the #1 eternal pastime of the human race. We all do it, and we get to do it every day, because the world is full of assholes.”
Matt Taibbi in a fascinating analysis of the Palin phenomenon. With lots of other best lines, too.
“Prices nationwide have fallen 42.9% from their October 2007 peak…”
Calculated Risk using Moody’s Index.
Prices of what, you ask. Commercial Real Estate.
Two years. 42.9%.
I wish they were wrong. But here’s more evidence the saying is right. Click to learn a little about Cassandra Yazzie-Hotchkiss and perhaps donate.
But click especially to see the best wedding photo ever.
… of U.S. Senator Robert Byrd. The West Virginian is 92. Byrd entered the Congress as a representative on January 3, 1953; he became a senator six years later. He is now the longest serving member of Congress in history, breaking Carl Hayden’s record two days ago. Hayden served Arizona from statehood until 1969.
… of Nobel laureate Nadine Gordimer, “who through her magnificent epic writing has — in the words of Alfred Nobel — been of very great benefit to humanity.” She’s 86.
…of best supporting actress Oscar-winner Estelle Parsons. She won the award for “Bonnie and Clyde” and was nominated again the following year for “Rachel, Rachel.” She’s 82.
… of actor and “Family Feud” host Richard Dawson. He’s 77.
… of Don DeLillo. He’s 72 today.
… of comedian Dick Smothers. The straight man of the duo is 71.
… of Vice President Joe Biden. He’s 67.
… of Veronica Hamel of Hill Street Blues. She’s 66.
… of journalist Judy Woodruff. She’s 63.
… of Joe Walsh of The Eagles. He’s 62. Life’s been good to him so far.
I have a mansion forget the price
Ain’t never been there they tell me it’s nice
I live in hotels tear out the walls
I have accountants pay for it all
They say I’m crazy but I have a good time
I’m just looking for clues at the scene of the crime
Life’s been good to me so far
My Maserati does 185
I lost my license now I don’t drive
I have a limo ride in the back
I lock the doors in case I’m attacked
… of Richard Masur. He was the neighbor/boyfriend on On Day At a Time. He’s 61 today.
… of Bo Derek. She’s now five 10s and a 3.
… of Sean Young. Ms. Young won the Razzie for worst actress AND worst supporting actress for “A Kiss Before Dying” (she played twins). She’s been nominated for the award five other times. She’s 50.
Robert F. Kennedy might have been 84 today. He was assassinated at age 42.
Astronomer Edwin Hubble was born on this date in 1889.
During the past 100 years, astronomers have discovered quasars, pulsars, black holes and planets orbiting distant suns. But all these pale next to the discoveries Edwin Hubble made in a few remarkable years in the 1920s. At the time, most of his colleagues believed the Milky Way galaxy, a swirling collection of stars a few hundred thousand light-years across, made up the entire cosmos. But peering deep into space from the chilly summit of Mount Wilson, in Southern California, Hubble realized that the Milky Way is just one of millions of galaxies that dot an incomparably larger setting.
Hubble went on to trump even that achievement by showing that this galaxy-studded cosmos is expanding — inflating majestically like an unimaginably gigantic balloon — a finding that prompted Albert Einstein to acknowledge and retract what he called “the greatest blunder of my life.” Hubble did nothing less, in short, than invent the idea of the universe and then provide the first evidence for the Big Bang theory, which describes the birth and evolution of the universe. He discovered the cosmos, and in doing so founded the science of cosmology.
Source: TIME 100: Edwin Hubble
Keith Phipps visits Las Vegas — Las Vegas, New Mexico — as he retraces the Easy Rider road trip.
This is the fourth post in the series. The third was from Taos.
Las Vegas, NM, is a very cool place to visit. Great fun to stay at the Plaza Hotel, where Javier Bardem met up with Josh Brolin.
“Everyone has been trying to come up with a good nickname for the 10 years we’re concluding next month. Terror Era really sounds like too much of a downer. How about the Decade of Medical Backtracking?”
Gail Collins on The Breast Brouhaha. Recommended reading.
Hulu has Norah Jones videos, including this from her brand new album, The Fall.
FICTION
Colum McCann
Let the Great World Spin
In the dawning light of a late-summer morning, the people of lower Manhattan stand hushed, staring up in disbelief at the Twin Towers. It is August 1974, and a mysterious tightrope walker is running, dancing, leaping between the towers, suspended a quarter mile above the ground. In the streets below, a slew of ordinary lives become extraordinary in Colum McCann’s intricate portrait of a city and its people. Let the Great World Spin is the author’s most ambitious novel yet: a dazzlingly rich vision of the pain, loveliness, mystery, and promise of New York City in the 1970s
NONFICTION
T.J. Stiles
The First Tycoon: The Epic Life of Cornelius Vanderbilt
Founder of a dynasty, builder of the original Grand Central, creator of an impossibly vast fortune, Cornelius “Commodore” Vanderbilt is an American icon. Humbly born on Staten Island during George Washington’s presidency, he rose from boatman to builder of the nation’s largest fleet of steamships to lord of a railroad empire. In The First Tycoon, T.J. Stiles offers the first complete, authoritative biography of this titan, and the first comprehensive account of the Commodore’s personal life.
POETRY
Keith Waldrop
Transcendental Studies: A Trilogy
This compelling selection of recent work by poet Keith Waldrop presents three related poem sequences—“Shipwreck in Haven,” “Falling in Love through a Description,” and “The Plummet of Vitruvius”—in a virtuosic poetic triptych. In these quasi-abstract, experimental lines, collaged words torn from their contexts take on new meanings. Waldrop, a longtime admirer of such artists as the French poet Raymond Queneau and the American painter Robert Motherwell, imposes a tonal override on purloined materials, yet the originals continue to show through. These powerful poems, at once metaphysical and personal, reconcile Waldrop’s romantic tendencies with formal experimentation, uniting poetry and philosophy and revealing him as a transcendentalist for the new millennium.
YOUNG PEOPLE’S LITERATURE
Phillip Hoose
Claudette Colvin: Twice Toward Justice
On March 2, 1955, a slim, bespectacled teenager refused to give up her seat to a white woman on a segregated bus in Montgomery, Alabama. Shouting “It’s my constitutional right!” as police dragged her off to jail, Claudette Colvin decided she’d had enough of the Jim Crow segregation laws that had angered and puzzled her since she was a child.
But instead of being celebrated, as Rosa Parks would be when she took the same stand nine months later, Claudette found herself shunned by many of her classmates and dismissed as an unfit role model by the black leaders of Montgomery. Undaunted, she dared to challenge segregation again a year later—as one of the four plaintiffs in the landmark busing case, Browder v. Gayle.
“The combined percentage of loans in foreclosure or at least one payment past due was 14.41 percent…”
… but Elizabeth Warren should.
Warren Winning Means You Won’t Sell It If You Can’t Explain It
The criticism doesn’t bother her, Warren said. She learned to shake things off growing up in Norman, Oklahoma, with three older brothers “in a family of car parts and fist fights,” she said. “It was get tough or die, and I decided to get tough.”
Good profile.
The list is the origin of culture. It’s part of the history of art and literature. What does culture want? To make infinity comprehensible. It also wants to create order — not always, but often. And how, as a human being, does one face infinity? How does one attempt to grasp the incomprehensible? Through lists, through catalogs, through collections in museums and through encyclopedias and dictionaries. There is an allure to enumerating how many women Don Giovanni slept with: It was 2,063, at least according to Mozart’s librettist, Lorenzo da Ponte. We also have completely practical lists — the shopping list, the will, the menu — that are also cultural achievements in their own right.
Interview with Umberto Eco: ‘We Like Lists Because We Don’t Want to Die’
The Abstract City Blog with a clever montage of leaves. Amusing. Artistic.
We humans are drawn to the shore, with some 40% of the world’s population living within 100 kilometers of a coast. Coastal areas have made recent news with the arrival of several storms, concerns about rising sea levels and other environmental and conservation efforts. Collected here are a handful of photographs from around the world of people and animals at the shoreline, playing, working, struggling or relaxing on the border between land and sea. (36 photos total)
“A Texas man is in jail after trying to sell pot door-to-door. They didn’t buy his excuse that he was just trying to increase sales for the little girls who came after him selling cookies.”
A Czech fable: A poor farmer whose livestock is a single dairy cow goes to the field one morning to milk the cow and discovers that she’s dead. He falls to his knees and looks skyward, shaking his fists and cursing God for his misfortune. Suddenly a voice is heard from the heavens: “Your cries have reached me, my son. Tell me what you would like me to do.” The farmer gazes upward and says to God, “Please, Lord, kill my neighbor’s cow.”
Emily Yoffe at Slate Magazine.
I think you could substitute Czech with just about any other group.
A Maxine Thanksgiving card from Shoebox. It’ll make you smile — and then wonder why you’ve just smiled.
The Sports Pickle wonders if UNM soccer player Elizabeth Lambert is related to the great Pittsburgh Steelers linebacker Jack Lambert. Click for an awesome photo of Jack, a nine-time Pro Bowler.
Meanwhile, at The New York Times there is an adult-like interview with Ms. Lambert — Those Soccer Plays, in Context. Well done, and worth your time if you’ve paid any attention to this story.
Another remarkable photo. Be sure to click for the larger version.
How do you do it? Please tell us Elaine.
“A kid got nailed in the face during a dodgeball game at his school, and now he might sue the city. Maybe he needs to sue evolution for not giving him the reflexes to survive in middle school gym class.”
Today is the birthday
… of Senator James Inhofe (R-OK). Inhofe is the senator who has said, “man-made global warming is the greatest hoax ever perpetrated on the American people.” He’s 75, his age having now exceeded his IQ.
… of Gordon Lightfoot. The singer is 71.
I can see her lyin’ back in her satin dress
In a room where you do what you don’t confess
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you bin creepin’ round my back stairs
Sundown, you better take care
If I find you bin creepin’ round my back stairs
… of Martin Scorsese. The Oscar-winning director is 67.
… of Danny DeVito. The actor/director/producer is 65. Very early in his career DeVito played Martini in “One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.”
… of Lorne Michaels. The producer of Saturday Night Live is 65.
So he moved back to Canada, where he formed a comedy duo with Hart Pomerantz, and they had a television variety show on Canadian television, The Hart and Lorne Terrific Hour. They contracted their talents to comedic acts in the United States, writing for Phyllis Diller, Lily Tomlin, Joan Rivers, and Woody Allen. They also wrote for the NBC show Rowan & Martin’s Laugh-In, and then NBC asked Michaels to come up with a comedy show to replace the Johnny Carson reruns that aired Saturday nights at 11 p.m.
Michaels recruited talent from all sorts of places. Dan Aykroyd was a fellow Canadian, and Chevy Chase, John Belushi, and Gilda Radner had worked on the National Lampoon show. Muppet creator Jim Henson created sketches for the show, and recent Harvard grad Al Franken was signed on as a writer. And so Michaels put together the first season, 1975–1976, and won an Emmy for it.
… of Tom Seaver. Tom Terrific, the baseball hall-of-famer is 65.
… of Elvin Hayes. The basketball hall-of-famer is 64.
… of Howard Dean. The physician politician is 61.
… of Mary Elizabeth Mastrantonio. The actress is 51. Mastrantonio was nominated for a best supporting actress Oscar for “The Color of Money.”
… of Daisy Fuentes, 43. Sophie Marceau is 43, too.
Rock Hudson was born on this date in 1925; he died in 1985. Hudson got a best actor Oscar nomination for “Giant.”
Soichiro Honda was born on this date in 1906; he died in 1991. Honda started as an auto mechanic at age 15.
Michael Lind has written a really provocative piece about the Pledge of Allegiance.
Ironically, the Pledge of Allegiance, which today is most fiercely defended by white conservative Southerners whose Confederate ancestors tried to destroy the United States in the 1860s, was written by a Yankee socialist from New York in the 1890s.
Just go read it.
I think Tom wants to drink alone.
What brings joy to others gives me a feeling deep in my gut that is familiar to anyone who remembers what it’s like to be six years old and watching an accidentally-released helium balloon float into the sky, just out of reach.
Just go read it.