October the Second

Mahatma Gandhi was born on October 2nd in 1869. Groucho Marx was born on October 2nd in 1890. Coincidence? I think not.

Maury Wills is 77 today. Wills stole 104 bases in 1962 to break Ty Cobb’s 47-year-old record. So far, that hasn’t been enough to get him into the Hall of Fame.

Don McLean is 64.

A long, long time ago…
I can still remember
How that music used to make me smile.
And I knew if I had my chance
That I could make those people dance
And, maybe, they’d be happy for a while.

But February made me shiver
With every paper I’d deliver.
Bad news on the doorstep;
I couldn’t take one more step.

I can’t remember if I cried
When I read about his widowed bride,
But something touched me deep inside
The day the music died.

Photographer Annie Leibovitz is 60.

Gordon Sumner is 58. You know? Sting.

You’ll remember me when the west wind moves
Upon the fields of barley
You’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we walk in the fields of gold

So she took her love
For to gaze awhile
Upon the fields of barley
In his arms she fell as her hair came down
Among the fields of gold

Will you stay with me, will you be my love
Among the fields of barley
We’ll forget the sun in his jealous sky
As we lie in the fields of gold

Lorraine Bracco is 55.

Gillian Welch is 42.

Elvis Presley Blues

Ruination Day Pt. 2 [links open iTunes]

Graham Greene was born on October 2nd in 1904.

Graham Greene realized early in his writing career that if he wrote just 500 words a day, he would have written several million words in just a few decades. So he developed a routine of writing for exactly two hours every day, and he was so strict about stopping after exactly two hours that he often stopped writing in the middle of a sentence. And at that pace, he managed to publish 26 novels, as well as numerous short stories, plays, screenplays, memoirs, and travel books. He said, “We are all of us resigned to death: it’s life we aren’t resigned to.”

The Writer’s Almanac (2007)

Bud Abbott was born on this date in 1897. He was the thin one of Abbott and Costello.

Redwood National Park (California)

… was established on this date in 1968.

Redwood National Park

Stand at the base of a coast redwood and even the huckleberry bushes tower over you. Watch bronze Roosevelt elk grazing in the prairies. Observe the tail of a female Chinook salmon heave skyward as she makes a nest for her eggs. Whether a morning or night person, you can hear the threatened marbled murrelets’ keer across the treetops as they fly from sea to mossy nest.

— Redwood National and State Parks

Tango

On September 30th, the United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization (UNESCO) added 76 new items to its “List of the Intangible Cultural Heritage of Humanity”, for safeguarding and preservation. The “Intangible” list is a companion to UNESCO’s World Heritage list, which focuses on physical sites worldwide. Submitted jointly by member states Argentina and Uruguay, the “symbolic universe” of tango was among the traditions added to the list. Tango is a deep-rooted tradition of dance, poetry and song, tied closely to the Rio de la Plata region of the two countries, and remains popular in competition, for pleasure, and for health – doctors worldwide are experimenting with tango as dance therapy to treat problems ranging from Alzheimer’s and Parkinson’s disease to phobias and marital breakdowns. (29 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

The Big Picture is one of those web sites — and this feature on the Tango especially — when you just think: How did we live before the internet?

Schussing without Snow

An essay from American Journeys on Great Sand Dunes National Park and Preserve in Colorado. It includes this:

Tucked in the curve where the Sangre de Cristo range meets the San Luis Valley, 30 square miles of sand pile up in dunes as high as 750 feet. On the drive toward the park along the flat expanse of the valley, the dunes materialize unexpectedly, as if someone had superimposed the Sahara onto Colorado’s lush, blue-green mountains.

Last month my husband, Jeff, and I, along with our three small children, hiked through the sand sheet, the vegetated stretch of sand surrounding the dunes. In the distance a fuzzy-antlered elk nibbled on Indian rice grass. Yucca and prickly pear cactus lined the trail, which led us to the base of the dunes. The children cooked sand cakes and lay down to make sand angels. They dug until they hit water, then jumped into the mucky pit, barefoot and giggling.

Great Sand Dunes is the newest of our 58 national parks.

More on Mothers against text-driving

First off, scientifically, there are different kinds of distractions.

• Visual distractions take your eyes off the road.
• Manual distractions take your hands off the wheel.
• Cognitive distractions take your mind off the road.
 
. . .
 
But texting is a “perfect storm.” It requires you to look at the keyboard, manually manipulate the keys, and think about what you’re writing. This means texting is a visual, manual, and cognitive distraction all in one.

Consumer Reports Cars Blog has more.

President Obama signed an Executive Order last night banning federal employees from texting while driving on Government business or if using Government-paid phones in their own cars.

Consumer Reports Cars Blog also has this:

Data from Virginia Tech shows that texting increases your odds 23.2 times of having a crash. That’s off the charts compared to drinking (even odds), eating (1.6 times), or applying make-up (3.1 times.) Some distractions, like talking to a passenger or adjusting the radio, actually improved safety and had a protective effect, possibly by combating fatigue or having the passenger serving as a collision warning device.

Idle thought

What, if anything, should be done by Congress or state legislators on the issue of distracted driving?

Why should phones and texting be outlawed and not GPS? Why should phones and texting be outlawed and not kids fighting over which DVD to watch? Why should phones and texting be outlawed and not people applying makeup or shaving? Or eating? Or drinking hot coffee with the lid not on right? Or listening to talk radio, which should drive any reasonable person to distraction?

Isn’t the real issue failure to control a moving vehicle and not the cause of that failure? And isn’t failure to control an offense already? Do we need more laws?

Oh, give me a break

The Consumerist has this report from ABC News:

In an Aug. 14 letter sent to Winkelmann’s St. Louis-area home, Jordan LaVine, a lawyer for The North Face, wrote that the companies’ logos are similar enough to possibly cause “consumer confusion as to the source, sponsorship or affiliation of particular problems and services that could dilute or tarnish the distinctive quality of the famous and distinctive TNFAC marks.”

Winkelmann is an 18-year-old who sells parody T-shirts and stuff.

Click here to see if you think consumer confusion might be an issue.

Free speech

Today is the 45th anniversary of the Free Speech Movement at Cal Berkeley. The protest was not about civil rights or the war in Vietnam. It was simply about the right for political action on campus (fundraising and membership drives, for example).

An excerpt from a good, brief history at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor:

At 10 a.m. on this day, they set up tables on the steps of Sproul Plaza. Fifteen minutes before noon, police went up to a guy manning one of the CORE tables. A former math grad student, he refused to identify himself or leave, and so the police arrested him [for] trespassing. He went limp. They brought in a police car to remove him (Jack Weinberg), but by now there was a huge crowd, which had gathered for the publicized noon rally. Nearly 200 students surrounded the car that the police had stuck Weinberg into, and they chanted, “Release him! Release him!” Dozens lay down in front of the squadron car and dozens more sat behind the car so that it could not move. For 32 hours, Jack Weinberg stayed inside that police car, surrounded by demonstrators. People fed him sandwiches and handed him milk through a rolled-down window of the police car.

Jack Weinberg after many hours in police car.
Jack Weinberg after many hours in police car.

The crowd grew to 7,000 and the number of police 500, but it was all over — peacefully ended — by the next evening.

We tend to think in terms of decades, but “The Sixties” began in 1964.

Photo from F S M.

The first day of the best month

Miss Bonnie Parker
Miss Bonnie Parker

… is the birthday

… of Bonnie Parker, the Bonnie of Bonnie and Clyde, born on this date in 1910. She died 23 years and 7⅔ months later.

… of Jimmy Carter. The 39th President is 85 today.

… of Tom Bosley. Richie Cunningham’s father is 82.

… of Julie Andrews. Mary Poppins is 74. Ms. Andrews won the Best Actress Oscar for Mary Poppins; she was nominated for The Sound of Music and Victor/Victoria. Of course, her claim to fame really was as Eliza Doolittle in the stage version of My Fair Lady.

… of Rod Carew. The baseball hall of fame player is 64.

Rod Carew lined, chopped and bunted his way to 3,053 career hits. His seven batting titles are surpassed only by Ty Cobb, Tony Gwynn and Honus Wagner, and equaled only by Rogers Hornsby and Stan Musial. He used a variety of relaxed, crouched batting stances to hit over .300 in 15 consecutive seasons with the Twins and Angels, achieving a .328 lifetime average. He was honored as American League Rookie of the Year in 1967, won the league MVP 10 years later and was named to 18 straight All-Star teams. He remains a national hero in Panama.

National Baseball Hall of Fame

… of Tim O’Brien. The novelist is 63. O’Brien is the author of Going After Cacciato, winner of the 1979 National Book Award in fiction, and The Things They Carried, which was named by The New York Times as one of the ten best books of 1990, received the Chicago Tribune Heartland Award in fiction, and was a finalist for both the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In the Lake of the Woods was named by Time as the best novel of 1994. The book also received the James Fenimore Cooper Prize from the Society of American Historians and was selected as one of the ten best books of the year by The New York Times.

… of Randy Quaid, 59.

… of Mark McGwire, 46.

Vladimir Horowitz was born on this date in 1903.

Vladimir Horowitz, the eccentric virtuoso of the piano whose extraordinary personality and skill overwhelmed six decades of concert audiences, died suddenly early yesterday afternoon [November 5, 1989] at his home in Manhattan, apparently of a heart attack. Though standard biographies list his birth date as Oct. 1, 1904, Mr. Horowitz recently celebrated what he called his 86th birthday.

Held in awe by aficionados of the instrument, Mr. Horowitz virtually cornered the market on celebrity among 20th-century pianists. His presence hovered over several generations of pianists who followed him.

The New York Times

The actor Stanley Holloway was born on October 1, 1890. Holloway is known foremost as Alfred P. Doolittle in the stage and film productions of My Fair Lady. He was nominated for the best supporting actor Oscar for the role and he was the only lead actor to do his own singing. This story was found at Wikipedia:

Holloway appeared with Rex Harrison in the stage production of “My Fair Lady”. Harrison had a reputation for being very abrupt with his fans. One night after a performance of the show, Holloway and Harrison left by the stage door. It was late, cold and pouring rain and there was an old woman standing alone outside the door. When she saw Harrison, she asked him for his autograph. He told her to “Sod off”, and she was so enraged at this that she rolled up her program and hit Harrison with it. Holloway congratulated him on not only making theater history, but, for the first time in world history, “the fan has hit the shit.”

Yosemite National Park (California)

… was established on this date in 1890.

NewMexiKen photo 1995. Click for larger version.
NewMexiKen photo 1995. Click for larger version.

Not just a great Valley…

but a shrine to human foresight, strength of granite, power of glaciers, the persistence of life, and the tranquility of the High Sierra.

Yosemite National Park, one of the first wilderness parks in the United States, is best known for its waterfalls, but within its nearly 1,200 square miles, you can find deep valleys, grand meadows, ancient giant sequoias, a vast wilderness area, and much more.

Yosemite National Park

 
 

The very first World Series game

… was played 106 years ago today. The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Pilgrims 7-3.

Cy Young was the losing pitcher that day but went on to win two games as Boston—later the Red Sox—won the best-of-nine series, five games to three.

Think big

Saturday night’s Powerball drawing is for a $193 million annuity ($99.6 million cash).

For God’s sake, if you’re going to buy a ticket and possibly be a winner, have a plan. Think big. There is nothing I hate more than those people that win $100 million and when asked what they’re going to use the money for, say remodel their kitchen and maybe buy a used pickup truck for the son-in-law.

NewMexiKen’s Powerball fantasy includes a tractor like this one:

And about 10,000 acres to go under it.

But that’s not first on my list. Hell, the tractor and land aren’t even on my first list.

Idle thought

The new University of New Mexico head football coach slugged one of his assistant coaches a couple of weeks ago. The assistant filed a criminal complaint. The head coach, Mike Locksley, currently 0-4, allegedly bloodied the lip of the coach. He has publicly apologized, but the assistant is on administrative leave. And way back last spring, when he’d hardly had time to unpack his bags, Coach Locksley had a sexual and age harassment complaint filed against him. He denies that charge.

Two thoughts. Is there any other academic department besides athletics where this guy wouldn’t be fired by now? And he’d better start winning in a hurry if he wants to be a head coach much longer.

Mother Nature is a bitch

About a week ago, Typhoon Ketsana (known in the Phillippines as “Ondoy”) made landfall, and according to the Philippine Atmospheric Geophysical Astronomical Services Administration (PAGASA), Ketsana dropped 455 mm (17.9 in) of rain on Metro Manila in a span of 24 hours on Saturday – the most in 42 years. A month’s worth of rainfall in a single day washed away homes and flooded large areas, stranding thousands on rooftops in the city and elsewhere. Ketsana later crossed over to Vietnam and Cambodia, where it is still active. Over 360 people are known to have been killed, and damage estimates are reaching $100 million. Unfortunately, another tropical storm may be headed toward the southern Philippines on Wednesday but is still 1,000 km (600 mi) off the coast. Here is a selection of photographs from the affected areas over the past week. (36 photos total)

The Big Picture – Boston.com

True genius

Die Zauberflöte — The Magic Flute — premiered in Vienna on September 30, 1791; libretto by Emanuel Schikaneder, music by Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. That night Mozart conducted the orchestra, Schikaneder played Papageno.

Mozart died less than 10 weeks later at age 35.

Redux post of the day

From 2006:

When Deputy Not Present

NewMexiKen is thinking that it would be impossible to get a traffic citation for violating this sign’s instruction and turning left.

If a deputy is present, it’s OK to turn left.

If no deputy is present, and you turn left anyway, who will write the citation?

[2009 Update: There’s a traffic light there now.]

But she didn’t publish this one on her own, so …

Jill reports:

So we went apple picking and then drove out to the [cross country] race.  We had to stop for gas, and ended up arriving later than planned.  Also, they seemed to be ahead of their published heat schedule.  So when we got there, the 6 and under age group was already on their second call, and lined up.  We registered quickly and got Aidan out there, but he was still in his long pants, and wearing a t-shirt, not a team jersey or shirt.  (I had put them in other shirts for the apple picking, in case it was messy.)  I felt so badly for him, looking at the line, because every other kid was in a little running suit or at least a team shirt and running shorts — it was a real x/c invitational, so he just looked kind of ridiculous.  Oh, and he’s wearing his white Target tennis shoes, not running shoes.
 
picsept27 030The age group had to run a 1k, which is a little more than six-tenths of a mile.  They take off, and right away Aidan veers off the wrong way because we hadn’t been there for the course walk through.  But he gets back in line, and they disappear into the woods.  About five minutes later, a kid comes in with nobody even in view behind him, and I was thinking, “Wow, these kids are good.”  Then the next kid comes out of the woods and I see red pants!  Aidan was in second and had several kids right behind him.  Of course, being Aidan, he’s running about ten steps, then slowing down and looking back over his shoulder.  Then running ten steps, slowing down and looking over his shoulder.  I could almost feel all these x/c coaches around me being horrifically damaged by the sight.  I ran out and yelled, “Do not look back one more time!”  He put his head down and kicked it in for second place overall.  He got a silver medal — only top three in each heat (m/f) got medals (there were no “thanks for trying” medals), so I never thought he would get a medal and I was so excited for him.  These kids are all on x/c teams and run all the time, so I thought it was really impressive that he beat most of them.  He does have those flashes of competitiveness every once in a while.
 
Then Mack was up in the 7-8-year-olds heat.  There were a lot of kids in the heat, and everyone in different unitards and tank tops for x/c teams.  At least Mack had a team jersey and running shoes. But he also was not stretched and didn’t know the course.
 
They took off and we had to wait a while — they were running a 2k.  We walked out to where we could see the people as they came up through the woods to the finishing loop.  I heard the host coach saying something about, “I don’t know…it’s going to be a close race.”  But then we started to see people, and we saw about four people blinking by through the trees and none of them were wearing red.  Luckily, it turns out two of them were girls (one of whom mis-ran the course) and Mack came charging out in fifth place, number three boy.  Remember, only the top three boys get any hardware.  There were two boys right on Mack’s heels as he came out into the open area, and I actually thought they were going to get him.  He looked kind of gassed.  But he played it beautifully.  He put on a little spurt and got some distance.  Then he eased it back and I think one of the boys thought he could catch up (the other one was obviously out of gas).  The boy picked it up and closed in on Mack.  Then, with about 70 yards left, Mack started his kick and the kid didn’t have enough left because of the effort he had just put into getting close.  So Mack got third easily.