Another in a series of household hints based upon NewMexiKen’s personal experience:
When enjoying a late morning cup of coffee while browsing the internets with the laptop, it is better to take the half-filled coffee mug off the arm of the recliner-rocker before releasing the chair and standing up.
Believe it or not, in the future people will be buying and selling homes. Some of them will even make a profit.
It’s not so crazy an idea. Consider Albuquerque, N.M. The mid-sized Southwestern city has experienced housing price declines since a peak in the third quarter of 2007, job growth has been flat, and housing starts are expected to fade by 45 percent through the end of 2008. Nevertheless, it’s a city that home builders and economists are bullish about for 2010 and beyond.
Forbes has the story.
A house on my street that sold last summer for top dollar is on the market again (it’s a long story). The asking price is just 2% less than last year. Of course, they haven’t sold it after three weeks. Still . . .
Thanks to Byron for the link.
So the McCain campaign googled for a photo of Walter Reed Medical Center to put behind McCain during his speech last night and they got Walter Reed Middle School (of North Hollywood, California). And that’s what they used.
Now, that’s competence you can believe in my friends.
Talking Points Memo has the scoop.
“The thing about nuclear bombs and hand grenades and hurricanes is that close counts.”
Mark Goodman, emergency management director, North Carolina’s Onslow County, to The Jacksonville Daily News.
Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:
There was a time, a gentler time, when, if a woman was…expecting…she would retire to her country home and quietly await the arrival of the child, keeping the news from all but closest family, and never discussing it in mixed company.
Now, when the baseball coach sends an e-mail asking who can come to practice tonight, the whole e-mail list gets this in response:
“We cannot confirm whether [our son] will be able to attend practice this evening or not. I’m dilated 4 cm and might be having this baby at any minute!”
The Sweeties® are all in school this year, Mack in 2nd grade, Kiley in kindergarten and the others in pre-school.
Aidan’s teacher didn’t have to discuss his behavior with Aidan’s mom until the second day this year, a new personal best for Aidan.
But let’s keep in mind his older brother’s approach:
“[Mack] also told us about the green-yellow-red behavior system and said that he won’t get any reds but we should expect a few yellows.”
Mack later said that it’s not that he might purposefully break a rule, it’s that you don’t always know the rules. Indeed. It’s difficult to go through kindergarten, or any other part of life, without a few yellows.
Jesse James was born on this date in 1847. If James were alive today, he’d be the kind of guy who’d park a Ryder truck in front of a federal building. He was not the Robin Hood character many learned, but rather a racist, anti-emancipation, anti-union murdering terrorist long after the civil war had effectively decided the larger matters. See T.J. Stiles masterful Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War.
“As this patient biography makes clear, violence came to Jesse James more or less with his mother’s milk.” — Larry McMurtry.
“Overall, this is the biography of a violent criminal whose image was promoted and actions extenuated by those who saw him as a useful weapon against black rights and Republican rule.” — Eric Foner
John Cage was born on this date in 1912. On his death in 1992, The New York Times described Cage as a “prolific and influential composer whose Minimalist works have long been a driving force in the world of music, dance and art.” Cage’s most influential and famous piece is 4’33”. It consists of four minutes and 33 seconds of silence. The work was among National Public Radio’s 100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.
The piece, premiered in 1952, directs someone to close the lid of a piano, set a stopwatch, and sit in silence for four minutes and thirty-three seconds. Musicians and critics alike initially thought the piece a joke. But its premiere pianist, who never played a note, calls it his most intense listening experience. “4:33” speaks to the nature of sound and the musical nature of silence.
Bob Newhart is 79. John Stewart of The Kingston Trio is 69. Raquel Welch is 68. Michael Keaton is 57.
The Fiesta de Santa Fe, celebrated annually since 1712, began Thursday night with the burning of Old Man Gloom before a crowd of 25,000.
Zozobra centers around the ritual burning in effigy of Old Man Gloom, or Zozobra, to dispel the hardships and travails of the past year. …
The effigy is a giant animated wooden and cloth marionette that waves its arms and growls ominously at the approach of its fate. A major highlight of the pageant is the fire spirit dancer, dressed in a flowing red costume, who appears at the top of the stage to drive away the white-sheeted “glooms” from the base of the giant Zozobra. …
Zozobra is a well crafted framework of preplanned and pre-cut sticks, covered with chicken wire and yards of muslin. It is stuffed with bushels of shredded paper, which traditionally includes obsolete police reports, paid off mortgage papers, and even personal divorce papers.
NewMexiKen deposited his gloomy thoughts in writing in the gloom box and I feel much better now that they’ve been burned along with the Zozobra. (It’s cheaper than a shrink, and probably as effective.)
This was the 84th burning of the Zozobra. The marionette was about 50-feet tall.
I saw an ad on the internets a little while ago. It asked “What would you say to the next president.”
I’d say “Aloha.”
The parent team — or at least its player-manager — could see their chances of making the playoffs diminish, so they called up the kid from A ball.
And in her first at bat, before a home town crowd, she knocked it out of the park. Got to give the rookie credit. (Some argue it was only a ground rule double.)
But I suggest we withhold judgement until she faces a major league curve ball on the road playing every day.
L.A. was founded on this date in 1781. They didn’t call it L.A. then. They called it El Pueblo de Nuestra Señora La Reina de los Ángeles de Porciúncula (The Village of Our Lady, the Queen of the Angels of Porziuncola).1
The Edsel was introduced by the Ford Motor Company 51 years ago today.
Paul Harvey is 90 today, and that’s the rest of the story.
Tom Watson (59) and Raymond Floyd (66) share this birthday.
Beyonce Knowles is 27.
Richard Wright was born 100 years ago today.
Wright spent ten years in Chicago, working as a ditch-digger, delivery boy, hospital worker, and a postal clerk. He began to write short stories and his first book was the collection Uncle Tom’s Children (1938). Two years later, he published his masterpiece Native Son (1940), the story of a black man named “Bigger Thomas” who gets a job as a driver for a beautiful, young white woman and then accidentally kills her. Wright based the character on every bully, rebel, and outlaw he’d ever known.
The Book-of-the-Month-Club demanded that he delete some of the more explicitly sexual scenes from the novel, and publishers worried that even the edited version would be too shocking for most readers. But Native Son sold 215,000 copies in three weeks and went on to become the first bestselling novel by an African American writer. The unedited text of the novel was finally published in 1991.
1 The Spanish mission at the Pecos Pueblo had a similar name: Nuestra Señora de los Ángeles de Porciúncula de los Pecos. Porciúncula or Porziuncola is the name of a small chapel near Assisi, Italy, where St. Francis established the Franciscan Order in the early 13th century.
There’s no coffee club. You have to make the coffee AND clean the pot every day.
This was first published here five years ago today.
The San Luis Valley is said to be the largest mountain valley in the world. It runs north-south for 125 miles between the San Juan and Sangre de Cristo (Blood of Christ) mountain ranges in south central Colorado. Both of these ranges have numerous peaks above 14,000 feet (4300m).
Just south of Poncha Pass, the narrower northern end of the San Luis Valley is an extraordinarily picturesque landscape — even this week without snow on the mountains. Further south the distance between the ranges widens to 65 miles and the Valley becomes broad and flat — and less picturesque. The altitude of the Valley averages near 7,500 feet.
The Rio Grande del Norte rises in the San Juan Mountains and flows generally eastward into the San Luis Valley. East of Alamosa the “Great River of the North” bends south toward New Mexico. Through centuries the river deposited sand and silt from the San Juan Mountains along its meandering, changing course across the Valley. The prevailing wind blew these deposits eastward toward the Sangre de Cristos, where they were trapped at the foot of the mountains. Today the resulting sand pile is known as the Great Sand Dunes National Monument and Preserve.
The dunes tower as high as 750 feet (230m) and cover nearly 40 square miles. They are the tallest dunes in North America. Sufficient rain and snow fall to keep the dunes stable, though the surface dries quickly and the winds sculpt and restructure the surface continuously. Here the expression “leave nothing but footprints” has little meaning as footprints will soon be gone.
Hiking in the dunes is encouraged (with the usual caveats about heat, water, lightning and not getting lost). Showers and changing rooms are provided near the parking lot — just as at a beach. Walking across the broad, sandy space between the parking lot and the first dunes and then up into the dunes I was surprised by the amount of sand stowing away in my socks and shoes. The sand makes walking more strenuous than on more solid surfaces. 
It also makes sliding and rolling appealing.
The Sangre de Cristos loom more than a mile above the dunes, curving around them from the north to the southeast. The Valley land to the west is being acquired by the National Park Service to prevent the mining of ground water from under the dunes. Once the acquisition is complete, the Monument will be come the 57th National Park.
And it did become a national park on September 13, 2004, though the 58th not the 57th.
Geronimo and Naiche (son of Cochise) surrendered to Gen. Nelson Miles on this date in 1886 at Skeleton Canyon, near the Arizona-New Mexico line just north of the border with Mexico. It was the fourth time Geronimo had surrendered — and the last. With them were 16 men, 14 women and six children. The band was taken to Fort Bowie and by the 8th were on a train to Florida as prisoners of war.
Click image for larger version of this photograph (above) taken at a rest stop along the route to San Antonio. Naiche is third from left, Geronimo third from right (with the straw hat) in the front row. He was probably in his late 50s.
Geronimo and the others were moved to Fort Sill, Oklahoma, in 1894. Geronimo eventually became a marketable celebrity, paid to appear at expositions and fairs. He died at Fort Sill in 1909, about age 80.
Also pictured are Geronimo at his third surrender in March 1886 and Geronimo on exhibit at the 1904 St. Louis World’s Fair. (Click each for larger version.)
“With Rudy’s speech, to riff on the brilliance of the immortal Molly Ivins, I think I preferred this speech in the original German.”
NewMexiKen has finished with last week’s New Yorker and three items that are online merit your consideration.
Anthony Lane writes about the second week of the Olympics in Letter from Beijing. It’s a superb piece, especially as a counterweight to the TV coverage. Strongly recommended.
Ryan Lizza writes about politics in Colorado and the new Democratic party in The Code Of The West. Insightful.
And Janet Frame’s 1954 short story Gorse Is Not People is as sad a piece of short fiction as you’d ever care to read.
I’ve been meaning to write about Vicky Cristina Barcelona the latest flick from Woody Allen. It stars Oscar-winner Javier Bardem as the bohemian Lothario painter and Penélope Cruz as his loco ex, with Rebecca Hall and Scarlett Johansson as the Americans who fall for his charms.
Anyway, it’s an enjoyable film, better than much of Allen’s work, though not among his very best. Bardem is believable, Cruz wonderful, and everybody else right for the role. Well written, of course, and well directed.
Mostly it’s a commercial for life in Barcelona and along the Spanish coast. By the time the film was over, we were yearning for a sidewalk cafe.
No car chases or explosions; some gun shots. PG-13.
Do you miss Beijing? Are you pining for some good ol’ fashioned totalitarianism? Enjoy seeing any small voice squashed like a ladybug under a Hummer?
Then come to the University of Virginia!
At Virginia a new rule bans signs of any kind at all sporting events, including football and basketball.
Rick Reilly tells the story.
From the Anchorage Daily News, April 3, 1996, the first appearance of Sarah Palin in any news account:
Sarah Palin, a commercial fisherman from Wasilla, told her husband on Tuesday she was driving to Anchorage to shop at Costco. Instead, she headed straight for Ivana.
And there, at J.C. Penney’s cosmetic department, was Ivana, the former Mrs. Donald Trump, sitting at a table next to a photograph of herself. She wore a light-colored pantsuit and pink fingernail polish. Her blonde hair was coiffed in a bouffant French twist.
“We want to see Ivana,” said Palin, who admittedly smells like salmon for a large part of the summer, “because we are so desperate in Alaska for any semblance of glamour and culture.”
Ivana Trump, the former Czechoslovakian Olympic skier who found fame and wealth as the wife of the New York tycoon, came to Anchorage Tuesday to push her line of perfume.
More than 500 people waited as long as half an hour in J.C. Penney to chat with her and receive an autographed photo.
Above via Glenn Greenwald relying on Nexis.
[Note I personally think Sarah Palin is wrong on most issues and stunningly ill-prepared. That stated, I just thought the above was interesting. It isn’t intended as piling on. It’s also the 45th mention of Costco on NewMexiKen.]
“[I]t is important for the public to know that Palin raised taxes as governor, supported the Bridge to Nowhere before she opposed it, pursued pork-barrel projects as mayor, tried to ban books at the local library and thinks the war in Iraq is ‘a task from God.'”
It is not about her gender.
And it is not about her daughter, who no major media outlet or politician has criticized. Only the McCain campaign is pushing that issue.
It is about her record, lean as it is, and the way it has been misrepresented by the campaign. And, even more, it is about McCain’s careless approach to a major decision he had months to prepare for.
They screwed up and they’re blaming everyone but themselves.
Oh, and this:
“Three times in recent years, McCain’s catalogs of ‘objectionable’ spending have included earmarks for this small Alaska town, requested by its mayor at the time — Sarah Palin.” (Los Angeles Times)
“Yesterday, the New Kids on the Block canceled their outdoor concert on the ‘Today’ show because Hurricane Gustav struck Louisiana. Victims of the hurricane are describing it as ‘totally worth it.'”
Conan O’Brien
“Well in 1984, Sarah Palin came in second in the Miss Alaska Beauty Pageant. Now she could be vice president of the United States. So for the first time in history, a beauty pageant contestant might actually bring about world peace.”
Jay Leno
You are being fooled by a shiny, sparkling distraction. My advice: Ignore the pundits and spinmeisters every time they tell you that the McCain campaign chose Gov. Sarah Palin in an effort to deprive Barack Obama of Hillary Clinton voters. Republican leaning pundits use this line because they want to exaggerate Palin’s appeal. Democratic-leaning pundits use this line as a way of mocking McCain for being out of touch with the real concerns of Clinton voters. Non-ideological pundits use this line because they are not reading the polls. It’s too early to tell what impact Palin could have among women voters, but it’s not hard to tell what group of women the McCain campaign hopes to lure. And they are not Hillary Clinton voters. “Hillary got about 10 million women’s votes. There are going to be about 62 million women voters in November,” explains Peter Brown, a pollster at Quinnipiac University. “The Palin stuff is not aimed at the Hillary 10, it’s at the other 52.”
From a longer piece by Michael Scherer at TIME.com: Swampland.
NewMexiKen’s advice: Ignore the pundit and spinmeisters all the time.
Ferdinand Porsche was born in Maffersdorfon in what is now the Czech Republic on this date in 1875. Porsche was an automotive engineer instrumental in the early development and racing of Austrian and German cars, notable at Austro-Daimler (1906-1923) and Daimler-Motoren-Gesellschaft (1923-1929). He developed the compressor for Mercedes-Benz and the torsion bar suspension with his own design company in 1931. And he was the leader in the development of the Volkswagen, which began production just before World War II.
It was, however, Ferdinand (Ferry) Porsche, the first Ferdinand Porsche’s son, who built the race and sports cars we recognize today, beginning in 1948.
It’s pronounced like the name Portia — por-sha.
Mark Hopkins was born on this date in 1813. Hopkins came to California in 1849, but to become a merchant not a miner. With Collis Huntington, Leland Stanford and Charles Crocker, Hopkins established the California Pacific to build east to Utah from Sacramento as part of the first transcontinental railroad. The Central Pacific eventually merged with the Southern Pacific, which they — The Big Four — also owned. Today it is part of the Union Pacific, one of the four remaining major rail lines.
Mort Walker is 85 today. He’s the creator of the comic strip Beetle Bailey.
Al Jardine, the only member of the original Beach Boys not related to the others, is 66 today. He sang the lead on “Help Me, Rhonda.”
The Treaty of Paris that formerly ended the American war with Great Britain was signed on this date in 1783, more than eight years after the first shots were fired at Lexington and Concord.
Article 1:
His Brittanic Majesty acknowledges the said United States, viz., New Hampshire, Massachusetts Bay, Rhode Island and Providence Plantations, Connecticut, New York, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, Delaware, Maryland, Virginia, North Carolina, South Carolina and Georgia, to be free sovereign and independent states, that he treats with them as such, and for himself, his heirs, and successors, relinquishes all claims to the government, propriety, and territorial rights of the same and every part thereof.
Once the largest army post in the southwest, Fort Union is now little more than a shadow of its former self set among beautiful grasslands north of Las Vegas, New Mexico. For 40 years in the second half of the 19th century, it was the Santa Fe Trail equivalent of an interstate truck stop and regional warehouse.
Alas, NewMexiKen found his Nikon was in need of a charge. These photos were taken with my iPhone.
Click each photo for a larger version.