Would President McCain have handled the Georgia-Russian thing as well as Bush:
“It’s hard to know since he’s a corrupt, pandering politician who is clearly willing to do anything to get elected, but if we take him at his word, we’d have to assume that we’d have declared war on Russia.”
“I’m not saying we won’t get our hair mussed. 20-30 million tops…”
Jack A. Weil, a garter salesman, breezed into Denver in 1928 in a new Chrysler Roadster to start a new life. He exceeded his hopes and became a king of cowboy couture — almost certainly the first to put snaps on Western shirts (17 on a shirt), and most likely the first to produce bolo ties commercially.
His Rockmount Ranch Wear Mfg. Company has sold millions of shirts, including at least one shipment to Antarctica, since it started in 1946. Clark Gable wore one in “The Misfits” with Marilyn Monroe, and Heath Ledger’s shirt in “Brokeback Mountain” — plaid fabric, diamond snaps and saw-tooth pockets — was Style No. 69-39.
Until Wednesday, when he died at 107 in Denver, Mr. Weil was still chief executive of the company he founded and, until just before his death, came to work daily. He was regularly called the oldest chief executive still working.
If NewMexiKen lives that long I could be doing this blog for 49 years.
“At some point you just have to let your parents go and make their own mistakes and just hope that you raised them right.”
Source protected to preserve the parent-child relationship.
“John McCain blames his love of ABBA on being shot down in Vietnam: ‘A lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane…’ War IS Hell”
For the record, the number one hit in the U.S. on the day McCain was shot down (October 26, 1967) was “To Sir, with Love” by Lulu. “The Letter” by the Box Tops had preceded it as number one earlier in the month.
ABBA did not have a top ten hit in the U.S. until 1974.
“[R]esearchers found that a typical serving of coffee contains more antioxidants than typical servings of grape juice, blueberries, raspberries and oranges.”
From an article in The New York Times and first posted here two years ago.
Today, August 15, is the Feast of the Assumption, the principal feast of the Blessed Virgin. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, the feast celebrates both the “happy departure of Mary from this life” and the “assumption of her body into heaven.” That she “was taken up body and soul into heavenly glory, when her earthly life was over, and exalted by the Lord as Queen over all things” is a principle of Catholic dogma.
… is Napoleon’s birthday. He was born August 15, 1769 (and died in 1821, at age 51). As an adult, Napoleon was just over 5-feet, 6-inches tall (1.686 m), about average for his countrymen at the time.
Four time Oscar nominee for best supporting actress (one win), Ethel Barrymore was born on this date in 1879.
Pulitzer-winning author Edna Ferber was born 120 years ago today. She’s known best for So Big (Pulitzer prize in 1924), Show Boat, Cimarron, Giant and Ice Palace.
TV chef Julia Child was born in Pasadena, California, on this date in 1912.
Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer is 70.
Pro Football Hall of Fame member Gene Upshaw is 63 today. Upshaw played for the Raiders, 1967-1981. (Ahh, the glory years.) Upshaw has had a second career as Executive Director of the National Football League Players Association since 1983.
Princess Anne, daughter of Queen Elizabeth, is 58.
Grace, that is, actress Debra Messing, is 40.
Ben Affleck is 36.
The Wizard of Oz premiered 69 years ago tonight.
“Draft opinion from Federal Elections Committee says McCain did not break law. Obama lets out sigh of relief knowing he won’t have to deal with pardoning his old ass”
… of Earl Weaver. The former Orioles manager is 78.
… of Dash Crofts. The Crofts of Seals and Crofts is 70.
… of David Crosby. The Crosby of Crosby, Stills and Nash is 67. Mama Cass introduced Crosby, Stills and Nash to one another in 1968. Before that, of course, Mr. Crosby was in another Hall of Fame group, The Byrds.
… of Steve Martin, born in Waco, Texas, but grew up in Orange County, California. He’s 63 today.
… of Susan St. James. The wife of McMillan and Wife is 62. McMillan was played by Rock Hudson.
… of Danielle Steel. The author is 61.
… of Gary Larson. The Far Side cartoonist is 58.
… of Earvin “Magic” Johnson. Magic is 49, as is actress Marcia Gay Harden.
… of Susan Olsen. Cindy, of The Brady Bunch, is 47.
… of Halle Berry. The Academy Award winner is 42.
… of Ernest Thayer, the man who wrote “Casey at the Bat,” born on this date in 1863.
The Outlook wasn’t brilliant for the Mudville nine that day:
The score stood four to two, with but one inning more to play.
And then when Cooney died at first, and Barrows did the same,
A sickly silence fell upon the patrons of the game.
“We can never insure one hundred percent of the population against one hundred percent of the hazards and vicissitudes of life, but we have tried to frame a law which will give some measure of protection to the average citizen and to his family against the loss of a job and against poverty-ridden old age.”
Franklin Delano Roosevelt on signing the Social Security Act 73 years ago today.
. . . was signed into law by President Franklin Roosevelt on this date in 1935.
My parents are receiving Social Security payments. Should I be worried that their monthly checks will be cut and that I will have to make up the difference?
No, there are no plans to reduce benefits for current retirees. In fact, benefits will continue to grow annually with inflation. Even without any changes, current benefits are expected to be fully payable on a timely basis until 2041.
I’m 35 years old in 2007. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?
Unless changes are made, at age 69 in 2041 your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 22 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter from presently scheduled levels.
I’m 26 years old in 2007. If nothing is done to change Social Security, what can I expect to receive in retirement benefits from the program?
Unless changes are made, when you reach age 60 in 2041, benefits for all retirees could be cut by 22 percent and could continue to be reduced every year thereafter. If you lived to be 101 years old in 2082 (which will be more common by then), your scheduled benefits could be reduced by 25 percent from today’s scheduled levels.
Should I count on Social Security for all my retirement income?
No. Social Security was never meant to be the sole source of income in retirement. It is often said that a comfortable retirement is based on a “three-legged stool” of Social Security, pensions and savings. American workers should be saving for their retirement on a personal basis and through employer-sponsored or other retirement plans.
Is there really a Social Security trust fund?
Yes. Presently, Social Security collects more in taxes than it pays in benefits. The excess is borrowed by the U.S. Treasury, which in turn issues special-issue Treasury bonds to Social Security.
More informative Q&A about Social Security.
A supporter once called out, “Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!” And Adlai Stevenson answered, “That’s not enough. I need a majority.”
… better known as Grant’s tomb, became part of the National Park Service 50 years ago today.
This memorial to Ulysses S. Grant, victorious Union commander of the Civil War, includes the tomb of General Grant and his wife, Julia Dent Grant. A West Point graduate, Grant served in the Mexican War and at various frontier posts, before rapidly rising through the ranks during the Civil War. Grant’s tenacity and boldness led to victories in the Battles of Vicksburg and Chattanooga and Robert E. Lee’s surrender at Appomattox, scenes depicted by mosaics in the tomb. In 1866 Congress awarded Grant his fourth star making him the first full General of the Armies.
A grateful nation twice elected Grant to serve as President of the United States, from 1869 to 1877. Grant’s accomplishments include signing the act establishing the first national park, Yellowstone, on March 1, 1872. After the Presidency, Grant settled in New York City. Ulysses S. Grant died of throat cancer on July 23, 1885 in Mount McGregor, New York, and was laid to rest in New York City on August 8th.
Approximately 90,000 people from around the country and the world donated a total of over $600,000 towards construction of his tomb, the largest public fundraising effort ever at that time. Designed by architect John Duncan, the granite and marble structure was completed in 1897 and remains the largest mausoleum in North America. Over one million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of Grant’s Tomb, on April 27, 1897.
Edith Cullen Shain is the nurse in the famous Alfred Eisenstaedt photo V-J Day in Times Square taken 63 years ago today. She kept her identity secret for 34 years, then identified herself to Eisenstaedt and he confirmed it was her when they met.
From an interview two years ago:
“The street was just wild with people. It was exuberant. They were dashing around and hugging and kissing and we walked in on that. And a sailor grabbed me and held me and kissed me a long time.
“When he grabbed me, I didn’t see him, and when he kissed me, I didn’t see him because I closed my eyes. And then I turned around and walked the other way, and so that was the end of the story as far as the recognition is concerned,” she said.
Shain later became a school teacher in California where she married and had three children.
Sixty years later, Shain, who says she was kissed by only one sailor that day, still has no idea who the sailor was. More than 20 men have come forward through the years claiming to be the kisser but none has ever been confirmed.
A statue in Times Square commemorates the moment. It’s called “Unconditional Surrender.”
Click image for larger version of the original photo.
The best thing ever, Pandora Radio.
Especially if you have an iPhone or iPod touch (with internet connectivity).
For the iPhone and touch you download the app free from iTunes, sign up (email and password) and then select an artist, song or composer you like. I started with Willie Nelson, but experimented with Mozart, Bach, Corinne Bailey Rae, Bob Marley, Keren Ann and Billie Holiday. The service (which is free at present) relies on The Music Genome Project® to find similar tracks. It even tells you how — in brief very general terms — each track fits).
So Corinne Bailey Rae leads to Norah Jones leads to John Mayer leads to Sade back to Corinne back to Norah to India Arie to Amy Winehouse and so on. Along the way you can vote thumbs up or down to further refine your interests. (And you can click to buy the song from iTunes.)
What a great way to enjoy great music and find similar sounds too.
Apparently Pandora also works with Sprint and other AT&T phones — and, of course, in any browser.
Amy Winehouse gave way to Nelly Furtado.
Keren Ann lead to Bavarian Fruit Bread back to Keren Ann then on to Hem then to Holly Brook.
NewMexiKen has three travel ideas. For now they are just ideas. I need sponsors and/or companions.
1. Around the world, say in 80 days (why not?). Kind of do the Matt Harding thing without the silly dance.
2. Another 80 days just in Europe; I’ve been to Europe a half-dozen times but never done the grand tour.
3, The Atlantic Coast from Newfoundland to the Florida Keys.
What do you think? I could take the laptop and the camera and fill the blog with wise, whimsical and witty things every day. Properly marketed it could bring in lots of readers (I mean more than the ususal seven) and be supported by lots of ads.
Who can help me make these ideas into plans — and then into reality? I can leave Monday.
For the record I have already been to:
São Paulo
Montevideo
Buenos Aires
Lisbon
Madrid
Geneva
Cologne (airport only)
Bonn
Frankfurt (airport only)
Tokyo
Beijing
Hong Kong
Macau
St. Petersburg
Helsinki
Stockholm
Ankara
Istanbul
Nicosia
Athens
Yaounde
Douala
Lagos
Zurich (airport only)
Paris
Havana
Warsaw
Moscow
Alma Ata
Prague (airport only)
Bratislava
Vienna
All 50 states, Canada and Mexico.
Here’s [Michael] Phelps’s typical menu. (No, he doesn’t choose among these options. He eats them all, according to the [New York] Post.)
Breakfast: Three fried-egg sandwiches loaded with cheese, lettuce, tomatoes, fried onions and mayonnaise. Two cups of coffee. One five-egg omelet. One bowl of grits. Three slices of French toast topped with powdered sugar. Three chocolate-chip pancakes.
Lunch: One pound of enriched pasta. Two large ham and cheese sandwiches with mayo on white bread. Energy drinks packing 1,000 calories.
Dinner: One pound of pasta. An entire pizza. More energy drinks.
Comcast has redeemed themselves. They’ve been responsive, polite and adjusted (and possibly expedited) my refund. I got a call a short while ago.
It was never the money that made it worth the complaint, though it was MY money. It was the inconsistencies in the story I got from their people and the clear indication that what they told me — billing will end July 21st — was not what happened — it appeared to have ended August 1st.
But thanks for the polite and positive feedback Comcast — and the correction.
I do suggest you take a look at your bills and see if they really are clear to the average customer, especially when services are added or ended.
And consider allowing former customers that relied on electronic bills and payments access to their record until the balance is paid and the account closed — no matter who owes whom.
Next complaint: Tucson Electric Power.
. . . is 82 today. Castro took control of Cuba in 1959.
NewMexiKen saw Castro give a speech outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1993. It was interesting to see the man who has been so much a focus of America for now nearly 50 years.
Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. (He says he was 12, but should have been 13 or 14.) “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter [back] because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.” Castro went on to say, “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you [FDR] don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.”
A copy of the letter is here.
Biography.com has more information about Castro.
… was born on this date in 1860. Larry McMurtry’s excellent essay “Inventing the West” from the August 2000 issue of The New York Review of Books tells us about this famous performer.
Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses—or Mosey) grew up poor in rural Ohio, shot game to feed her family, shot game to sell, was pressed into a shooting contest with a touring sharpshooter named Frank Butler, beat him, married him, stayed with him for fifty years, and died three weeks before he did in 1926.
When Annie Oakley and Frank Butler offered themselves to Cody the Colonel was dubious. His fortunes were at a low ebb, and shooting acts abounded. But he gave Annie Oakley a chance. She walked out in Louisville before 17,000 people and was hired immediately. Nate Salsbury, Cody’s tight-fisted manager, who did not spend lavishly and who rarely highlighted performers, happened to watch Annie rehearse and promptly ordered seven thousand dollars’ worth of posters and billboard art.
Annie Oakley more than justified the expense. Sitting Bull, normally a taciturn fellow, saw her shoot in Minnesota and could not contain himself. Watanya cicilia, he called her, his Little Sure Shot. Small, reserved, Quakerish, she seemed to live on the lemonade Buffalo Bill dispensed free to all hands. In London she demolished protocol by shaking hands with Princess Alexandra. She shook hands with Alexandra’s husband, the Prince of Wales, too, though, like his mother the Queen, she strongly disapproved of his behavior with the ladies. In France the Parisians were glacially indifferent to buffalo, Indians, cowboys, and Cody—Annie Oakley melted them so thoroughly that she had to go through her act five times before she could escape. In Germany she likened Bismarck to a mastiff.
In 1901 she was almost killed in a train wreck. Annie claimed that it was the wreck that caused her long auburn hair to turn white overnight; skeptics said her hair turned white because she left it in hot water too long while at a spa. She continued to shoot into the 1920s. In her last years she looked rather like Nancy Astor. Will Rogers visited her not long before her death and pronounced her the perfect woman. Probably not until Billie Jean King and the rise of women’s tennis had a female outdoor performer held the attention of so many people. She became part of the “invention” that is the West by winning her way with a gun: a man’s thing, the very thing, in fact, that had won the West itself.
Annie was her nickname as a child. Oakley was a stage name. Offstage she referred to herself as Mrs. Frank Butler.
Photo taken 1902 when Oakley was 42. Click image for larger version.
. . . premiered on this date 66 years ago. Is there a sadder movie ever than this Disney classic?
Roger Ebert wrote an excellent review when Bambi was released yet again in 1988. He starts generally positive:
In the annals of the great heartbreaking moments in the movies, the death of Bambi’s mother ranks right up there with the chaining of Dumbo’s mother and the moment when E. T. seems certainly dead. These are movie moments that provide a rite of passage for children of a certain age: You send them in as kids, and they come out as sadder and wiser preteenagers.
And there are other moments in the movie almost as momentous. “Bambi” exists alone in the Disney canon. It is not an adventure and not a “cartoon,” but an animated feature that describes with surprising seriousness the birth and growth of a young deer. Everybody remembers the cute early moments when Bambi can’t find his footing and keeps tripping over his own shadow. Those scenes are among the most charming the Disney animators ever drew.
But then he questions the whole effort:
Hey, I don’t want to sound like an alarmist here, but if you really stop to think about it, “Bambi” is a parable of sexism, nihilism and despair, portraying absentee fathers and passive mothers in a world of death and violence. I know the movie’s a perennial clasic, seen by every generation, remembered long after other movies have been forgotten. But I am not sure it’s a good experience for children – especially young and impressionable ones.
“McCain camp denies plagiarizing Wikipedia in Georgia remarks, claims he’s still a foreign policy expert [citation needed]”
I agree with kahunaburger, though I think wasting any brain on this woman would be a misuse. Could she be serious?
But then again, this woman is serious — and she’s in congress!
McCain said he told [Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili] “that I know I speak for every American when I say to him today, we are all Georgians.”
I don’t know where this ass clown got his religious upbringing, but where I got mine this sort of thing would have been considered blasphemous.
He’s a representative of Focus on the Family.
And, yes, I acknowledge he may just be trying to be funny. Even so, it seems like taking God’s name in vain to me.