The Milky Way

Have you ever seen the Milky Way? Here’s what it looks like at 16,500 feet on a dry, dark night.

The Milky Way

Click image for larger version and to learn more.

Reposted from one year ago because it’s so cool.

The Trials of the Auto Dealer

A report in The Wall Street Journal tells of hard times for many car dealers, some of whom probably deserve it.

GM alone has 6,426 dealers, the company says. Toyota, with U.S. sales equaling about 85% of GM’s, has just 1,461 dealers.

In seeking federal aid, the Detroit companies promised to close or combine thousands of dealerships. Although the recently approved loans for GM and Chrysler don’t require this, the recession has been lowering the numbers anyway. The dealer association estimates that 900 auto dealers in the U.S. closed in 2008 — 86% of them sellers of domestic makes. It expects about 1,100 more dealerships to close in 2009.

G

Mega rap star Lil’ Wayne has been chosen as one of the voice-overs for the newly designed Gatorade beverage.

In a new commercial for the popular sports drink, Weezy is heard narrating a description of what “g” represents, as popular sports figures like Dwayne Wade, Serena Williams and Bill Russell glare into the camera.

“[G’s] the emblem of a warrior, it’s the swagger of an athlete, a champion and dynasty,” Weezy says in the commercial. “It’s gifted, golden, genuine and glorious. It is a lower-case god. It’s the goat. Ha-ha. The greatest of all time.”

As the 60-second video continues to scroll past other public figures, including the Yankee’s Derek Jeter holding a bat and Muhammad Ali facing off with his fists, Weezy wraps up the meaning of “G.” “What’s G,” he asks. “It is the heart, hustle and soul of the game. That’s G.”

SOHH.com

‘Earthquake swarm’ continues to rock Yellowstone

The Denver Post reported yesterday on the activity at Yellowstone:

“It’s not business as usual,” said [Utah University professor] Smith. “This is a large earthquake swarm, and we’ve recorded several hundred. We are paying careful attention. This is an important sequence.”

Smith noted that beginning in 2004, there was “accelerated uplift of the Yellowstone Caldera” that covered the entire caldera.

In 2007, Smith and his University of Utah colleagues said the current rise in the caldera was “unprecedented” but concluded that because there were no major earthquakes or “earthquake swarms” accompanying the uplift, they found “little indication that the volcano is moving toward an eruption.”

The last major earthquake swarm was in 1985 and lasted three months, Smith told The Denver Post.
The Yellowstone Plateau, which comprises Yellowstone National Park, is one of the largest super-volcanoes in the world and has gone through three volcanic cycles spanning two million years that included some of the world’s largest-known eruptions.

Through 5 p.m. Dec. 31, the swarm had included 12 events of magnitude 3.0 to 3.9 and approximately 20 of 2.5 to 2.9, with a total of 400 quakes large enough to be located.

The observatory said similar swarms have occurred in the past without triggering steam explosions or volcanic activity. However, the observatory said there is some potential for explosions and that earthquakes may continue and increase in intensity.

So uplift with no earthquakes, no problem. Now we have the uplift and earthquakes, problem?

Best line of the day, so far

See, John Parker Wilson stands at a bar at Bourbon Street, and he’s wondering what to drink. There’s a lot of beers, see. Tons of them. There’s Abita Amber, Abita Turbo Dog, Bud, Bud Lite, Corona, Coors Light, Harp, Guinness, PBR. So many options! He’s just about to decide, he’s looking, he promises he is and he’s looking….he reaches his bruised arm into his pocket to get money.

The bartender asks: “What do you want?”

And in the moment, just when John Parker Wilson is about to decide, he is tackled by three defenders wearing Utah jerseys. They take his money and mock his bangs before heading to Pat O’Brien’s to drink Hurricanes until their eyes cross.

From EDSBS (Every Day Should Be Saturday). Awesome win Utes, 13-0. The nation’s only undefeated Division 1 football team.

Futility, Cardinals Is Thy Name

Through 89 seasons, today’s contest is just the eighth post season game for the Chicago-St. Louis-Arizona Cardinals. And it’s only the second time they’ve played a playoff or championship game at home — the other time was in 1947, when they won the NFL Championship at Comiskey Park as the Chicago Cardinals.

59 out of the 89 Cardinal years have seen losing seasons.

Making the Bad Worse

Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:

Remember how the Smithsonian’s American History Museum always felt like a museum that was fun and interesting in spite of itself? Like, the museum itself was so antiquated and the exhibits were so boring and old-fashioned…yet you still enjoyed visiting simply because the items they had to display were so great?

Well, they closed the museum for more than two years, spent more than $85 million and managed to make it…even worse.

Oh my gosh, we went there today and we were so disappointed. They’ve renovated the building, but they have the same old exhibits, except even smaller and more cramped, with fewer items on display. All the exhibits are like cramped in corners and there is very little to see, and lines everywhere to even get into these tiny rooms.

We couldn’t get out of there fast enough. Reid was SO UPSET because we’d promised him he could see Indiana Jones’ hat. Nope. The entire entertainment/music/sports exhibit is now one room about the size of my living room with about three interesting things in it (Kermit, Oscar the Grouch, and the Ruby Slippers).

Yuck. At least the Museum of Natural History never disappoints.

The Best Sportswriting of 2008

The Daily Fix is a blog at The Wall Street Journal that takes a “daily look at the best sportswriting on the Web.”

The average Daily Fix contains a dozen links to sportswriting from around the Web, which over a year adds up to some 3,000 sports stories we thought were worthy of a look. Some pieces stuck with us weeks and even months later. For the fifth straight year, we’re picking the 10 columns or features we found most memorable.

Here they are.

Random stuff

I read somewhere that a survey sent to economists asking when they thought the recession would end did not even include any dates in 2009.

We saw Slumdog Millionaire Wednesday evening and it lived up to its hype. Definitely one you should see and a likely prospect to take the best picture Oscar. The audience stayed longer into the titles than any in my recent memory and I’m thinking they didn’t want the experience to be over. (It’s a story of a young man who succeeds remarkably on India’s version of “Who Wants to Be a Millionaire?” He is accused of cheating and explains how he knew the answers with flashbacks to his growing up. The child actors are phenomenal; the whole film fascinating and poignant.)

You know how sometimes after you’ve been driving too long, even after you get out of the car it still feels like you are moving? Yesterday when I finally turned off the TV after the Orange Bowl (way to go Virginia Tech!), I could still hear football announcers in the house. Three games back-to-back is really too much for me.

But I must confess I switched back and forth a lot during the Orange Bowl to the movie Waitress on HBO. The film had all the signs of a Lifetime channel movie, but was entertaining nonetheless, perhaps because Keri Russell is about the cutest person on the planet.

The guy that invented the button on the remote that jumps back-and-forth between two channels ought to be given a damn Nobel Prize.

When do you take down your Christmas decorations (including the tree)?

What’s With the Home Underdogs in the N.F.L.?

Freakonomics author Steven D. Levitt looks at this weekend’s NFL games and concludes:

Home underdogs are of particular interest right now because, remarkably, in all four playoff games this weekend, the home team is the underdog. If I were a betting man (or more accurately, if I had an account I could bet on), I would be hammering the home underdogs this weekend.

Click the link to read Levitt’s reasoning.

January 2 is the hottie birthdate

Tia Carrere, 42.

Cuba Gooding Jr., 41.

Christy Turlington, 40.

Taye Diggs, 38.

Paz Vega, 33.

Kate Bosworth, 26.

Sally Rand was born on this date in 1904. Ms. Rand was a burlesque dancer, famed for her feather fan and bubble dances. She was portrayed in the movie The Right Stuff, shown performing for the Mercury Astronauts in 1962 when she was 58. Ms. Rand died in 1979.

Issac Asimov

… was born in Petrovichi, Russia, on this date in 1920. The Writer’s Almanac profile today includes this:

His family immigrated to the United States when he was three years old, and his parents opened a candy shop in Brooklyn. He spent most of his time working in the family store, and he was fascinated by the shop’s newspaper stand, which sold the latest issues of popular magazines. When his father finally relented and let him read pulp fiction, Asimov started reading science fiction obsessively.

He started writing science fiction as well. He published his first story when he was 18, and published 30 more stories in the next three years. At age 21, he wrote his most famous story after a conversation with his friend and editor John Campbell. Campbell had been reading Ralph Waldo Emerson’s Nature, which includes the passage, “If the stars should appear one night in a thousand years, how would men believe and adore; and preserve for many generations the remembrance of the city of God which has been shown!” Asimov went home and wrote the story “Nightfall” (1941), about a planet with six suns that has a sunset once every 2,049 years. It’s been anthologized over and over, and many people still consider it the best science fiction short story ever written.

Asimov died in 1992.

Best line from a mother any day

“Byron surprised Jill with a short birthday trip to New York, where they saw a show and actually had dinner in a restaurant where crayons were not given out with the menus.”

Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen and the mother of three sons, in Jill and Byron’s holiday newsletter, 2005.

Apsley Cherry-Garrard

… was born in Bedford, England on this date in 1886. From The Writer’s Almanac in 2003:

He’s the author of the Antarctic travelogue, The Worst Journey in the World (1922). His book is about a search for the eggs of the Emperor Penguin in 1912. He and his two companions traveled in near total darkness and temperatures that reached negative 77.5 degrees Fahrenheit. He wrote, “Polar exploration is at once the cleanest and most isolated way of having a bad time which has been devised.”

And, as noted in The 25 (Essential) Books for the Well-Read Explorer, where Cherry-Garrard’s tale is listed second:

Cherry-Garrard’s first-person account of this infamous sufferfest is a chilling testimonial to what happens when things really go south. Many have proven better at negotiating such epic treks than Scott, Cherry, and his crew, but none have written about it more honestly and compassionately than Cherry. “The horrors of that return journey are blurred to my memory and I know they were blurred to my body at the time. I think this applies to all of us, for we were much weakened and callous. The day we got down to the penguins I had not cared whether I fell into a crevasse or not.”

New Year’s Day is the birthday

… of J.D. Salinger. The reclusive author of Catcher in the Rye is 90.

He wanted to be a writer, and his dream was to publish his fiction in The New Yorker, which rejected his work over and over. In November of 1941, he finally got an acceptance letter from The New Yorker for a short story called “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” about a teenager named Holden Caulfield. It was set to come out in the Christmas issue, but then the Japanese bombed Pearl Harbor, and the story was put on hold. Salinger was drafted into the Army, deployed in the ground force invasion of Normandy, and he was part of the Battle of the Bulge and some of the worst fighting of WWII. When the war ended, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from shell shock. In 1946, The New Yorker finally published “Slight Rebellion Off Madison.” Salinger took the character of Holden Caulfield, and he wrote an entire novel about him. And even though it got mixed reviews and Salinger refused to help with publicity at all, it was a best seller: The Catcher in the Rye (1951). And Salinger became a celebrity, which he hated, so he became a recluse.

The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor

… of Frank Langella. The likely Oscar-nominee this year is 71.

… of Country Joe McDonald. Give me an “F”… He’s 67.

… of Grandmaster Flash. The rapper is 51.

Also born on New Year’s Day:

William Fox (of Fox Pictures) in 1879.

“Wild Bill” Donovan in 1883. Donovan directed the American Office of Strategic Service during World War II, precursor to the CIA.

J. Edgar Hoover, in 1895.

Barry Goldwater in 1909.

Betsy Ross was born on this date in 1752, but that was before the British Empire accepted the Gregorian calendar and designated January 1st New Year’s Day.

Thenceforward, and forever free

The Emancipation Proclamation was issued on this date in 1863.

Emancipation ProclamationAlthough the Emancipation Proclamation did not end slavery in the nation, it did fundamentally transform the character of the war. After January 1, 1863, every advance of Federal troops expanded the domain of freedom. Moreover, the Proclamation announced the acceptance of black men into the Union Army and Navy, enabling the liberated to become liberators. By the end of the war, almost 200,000 black soldiers and sailors had fought for the Union and freedom.

From the first days of the Civil War, slaves had acted to secure their own liberty. The Emancipation Proclamation confirmed their insistence that the war for the Union must become a war for freedom. It added moral force to the Union cause and strengthened the Union both militarily and politically. As a milestone along the road to slavery’s final destruction, the Emancipation Proclamation has assumed a place among the great documents of human freedom.

Source: The National Archives

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