July 23rd ought to be national holiday

On July 23, 1904, according to some accounts, Charles E. Menches conceived the idea of filling a pastry cone with two scoops of ice-cream and thereby invented the ice-cream cone. He is one of several claimants to that honor: Ernest Hamwi, Abe Doumar, Albert and Nick Kabbaz, Arnold Fornachou, and David Avayou all have been touted as the inventor(s) of the first edible cone. Interestingly, these individuals have in common the fact that they all made or sold confections at the 1904 Louisiana Purchase Exposition, known as the St. Louis World’s Fair. It is from the time of the Fair that the edible “cornucopia,” a cone made from a rolled waffle, vaulted into popularity in the United States.

Library of Congress

July 22nd

Bob Dole is 85 today.

Oscar-winning actress Louise Fletcher, Nurse Ratched, is 74.

68. How old is Jeopardy host Alex Trebek today?

One-time supporting actor Oscar nominee Albert Brooks, Danny Glover and The Eagles Don Henley all turn 61 today

Two-time Oscar nominee for best actor Willem Dafoe, aka the Green Goblin, aka Jesus, is 53.

David Spade is 44.

Court, unpacked

“On this day in 1937 the Senate shelved President Franklin Roosevelt’s court-packing plan, which would have allowed him to appoint new judges and justices to the federal bench for each who did not retire within six months of his (it would have been ‘his’, then) seventieth birthday.”

Read more at The Edge of the American West.

Rollin’ into Cleveland to the Lake

On July 22, 1796, a party of surveyors led commissioned by General Moses Cleaveland arrived at the mouth of the Cuyahoga River, believing that an ideal location for a new town—Cleaveland, Ohio. The Connecticut Land Company had sent General Cleaveland to the Western Reserve—the northeastern region of Ohio—to speed the sale of the 3.5 million acres that the land company had reserved when Ohio was opened for settlement ten years earlier. In 1831, the Cleveland Advertiser dropped the first “a” in the city’s name to reduce the length of the newspaper’s masthead. From then on, the community was known as Cleveland.

Located on the southern shore of Lake Erie, the town did not grow substantially until the Erie Canal was completed in 1825. The canal opened a passage to the Atlantic Ocean, making the city a major St. Lawrence Seaway port. Soon, the city became a center for commercial and industrial activity. This activity increased further in the 1840s when the railroad arrived.

Today, Cleveland continues to have a highly diversified manufacturing base although the economy has shifted towards health care and financial services. With the opening of the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum and other attractions—including various museums, boating on Lake Erie, and a wide variety of entertainment options, Cleveland also has become a tourist destination.

Library of Congress

Sort of Albuquerque’s sister city. They took a letter out of our name too.

Another reason they want to drill on your land — it’s cheap

Among the reasons some are arguing for more offshore drilling and drilling on wilderness lands, is it’s a bargain. This first reported here two years ago today:

While the oil companies are recording record profits and oil-producing nations are awash in cash, the income from the oil and gas you own (if you are an American citizen) is up just 8% from 2001-2005. (About one-third of all the oil and gas produced in the U.S. comes from federal land.)

That’s eight percent at the same time the price of oil is up 90% and the price of natural gas up 30%.

Presumably production from federal lands is down 20% and that explains the small increase in income.

Sure.

McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet

From the great Andy Borowitz:

In a daring bid to wrench attention from his Democratic rival in the 2008 presidential race, Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) today embarked on an historic first-ever visit to the Internet.

Given that the Arizona Republican had never logged onto the Internet before, advisors acknowledged that his first visit to the World Wide Web was fraught with risk.

But with his Democratic rival Barack Obama making headlines with his tour of the Middle East and Europe, the McCain campaign felt that they needed to “come up with something equally bold for John to do,” according to one advisor.

Read on, it gets better.

Free at last

No more Comcast at Casa NewMexiKen. I have installed Qwest high-speed internet (fiber optic) and it seems at least as fast, even much faster. (How does one tell for sure? And how much does it matter anyway?)

It’s definitely cheaper!

DirecTV delayed until Wednesday due to installation limitations. (That pesky HOA.) Guess I can continue to blog, as potatoing on the couch not much fun with only 10 channels.

Boob job undone

In a decision that clears CBS of any wrongdoing for airing the 2004 Super Bowl halftime show that featured Janet Jackson’s infamous “wardrobe malfunction,” a federal appeals court overturned the $550,000 fine that the Federal Communications Commission levied against the station, calling the fine arbitrary and capricious.

The New York Times

He’s really old or just not very bright or both — your call

“We have a lot of work to do, and I’m afraid it’s a very hard struggle, particularly given the situation on the Iraq-Pakistan border.”

John McCain on Good Morning America today.  

Iraq and Pakistan do not have a border. They are separated by several hundred miles of Iran.

Neither borders Czechoslovakia either.

July 21st is the birthday

… of Janet Reno, the first woman attorney general of the United States. She is 70.

… of actor Edward Herrmann. He is 65.

… of Doonesbury cartoonist Garry Trudeau. He’s 60.

… of Mork. Robin Williams is 57. Williams has been nominated for the best actor Oscar three times without winning. He did win the best supporting actor Oscar for Good Will Hunting.

… of Jon Lovitz. He’s 51. Fresh!

… of Brandi Chastain. She’s 40.

Ernest Hemingway was born on this date in 1899. He died a few weeks before his 62nd birthday in 1961. Hemingway was awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1954 “for his mastery of the art of narrative, most recently demonstrated in The Old Man and the Sea, and for the influence that he has exerted on contemporary style.” The New York Times has an extraordinary wealth of reviews, articles, interviews and other material collected on Hemingway.

Marshall McLuhan was born on this date in 1911.

Given a Shovel, Americans Dig Deeper Into Debt

“Tallying what the lenders have made off Ms. McLeod over the years is revealing. In 2007, when she earned $48,000 before taxes, she was charged more than $20,000 in interest on her various loans.”

From The Debt Trap, a The New York Times “series about the surge in consumer debt and the lenders who made it possible.”

Most outrageous line of the day, so far

“[F]ormer chief executive of AT&T, Ed Whitacre, was ‘probably the most exploited worker in American history’ since he received only a $158 million pay package rather than the ‘billions’ he deserved for his success in growing Southwestern Bell.”

Phil Gramm speaking on behalf of John McCain as reported by Frank Rich.

But the rest of us are a “nation of whiners” according to Gramm, rumored to be McCain’s odds-on-favorite to be Secretary of Treasury.

“On issues of economics and … family values, there’s nobody that I know that’s stronger,” Mr. McCain has said of Gramm.

That says more about who McCain knows than it does about Phil Gramm.

The Real Mustangs

The New York Times today has an article entitled Federal Agency Proposes a Euthanasia Program for Its Herd of Mustangs. Here’s an excerpt from the beginning:

The champions of wild mustangs have long portrayed them as the victims of ranchers who preferred cattle on the range, middlemen who wanted to make a buck selling them for horsemeat and misfits who shot them for sport. But the wild horse today is no longer automatically considered deserving of extensive protections.

Some environmentalists and scientists have come to see the mustangs, which run wild from Montana to California, as top-of-the-food-chain bullies, invaders whose hooves and teeth disturb the habitats of endangered tortoises and desert birds.

Even the language has shifted. In a 2006 article in Audubon magazine, wild horses lost their poetry and were reduced to “feral equids.”

Read on.

The mustangs have only been on the range since, at the earliest, 1540. That’s a blink of an eye in ecological terms. It makes almost as much sense to have a herd of zebra in Nevada.

Why are the horses being maintained (at taxpayer expense) at all?

Warming up

Seven-year-old Sweetie Mack, you may remember, was learning to ride a bike in order to compete in a triathlon on August 9th. Lo and behold, there’s youth triathlons all the time in northern Virginia, so Mack got his first taste of competition today.

Jill, Mack’s mom, and official older daughter of NewMexiKen, reports. Click the image for a larger version.

Mack completed his first youth triathlon today. Yay, Mack!

Triathlon

He had fun and seemed to do it with little problem…physically. Unfortunately, this was the first race put on by a new organization and it was a mess. The volunteers made many mistakes. In regard to Mack, [the mistakes] led to him riding extra mileage on the bike (luckily, Byron and I caught him before he rode an entire extra loop, like many kids did), then completely missing the run when they sent him directly from transition into the finish chute.

So he’ll have a great .68 mile time of about 15 seconds!

At first when the error was realized (too late to do anything about it, officially, as they’d already removed his timing chip), Mack was despondent and I wasn’t far behind. Then Mack decided to complete the run anyway, with no timing device on. He did a great job and kicked it home in an impressive time.

So, Mack is really happy with his morning and said, “I actually got to do extra on the bike and run Mom, that’s good.” We are, of course, very proud that he did the run even knowing it wouldn’t count. None of the other kids who were similarly misdirected did so, that we saw.

I’m trying to get over the fact that his time was messed up and that he was therefore unable to win one of the trophies for first, second or third place in his age group. Trying. Trying hard. And I’ll keep trying. At least my seven-year-old has his priorities in line.

Exactly the Country for This Old Man

Cormac McCarthy is 75 today.

The Writer’s Almanac has a good short profile that includes this:

It wasn’t until the publication of All the Pretty Horses in 1992 that McCarthy finally became widely recognized. It’s about a 16-year-old Texas rancher who leaves his family and rides into northern Mexico looking to make his fortune. None of McCarthy’s first five novels had sold more than 2,500 hardcover copies, but All the Pretty Horses won the National Book Award and sold almost 200,000 copies in less than six months. It’s since been made into a Hollywood movie. McCarthy used the money to buy a new truck.

And there’s this from the Cormac McCarthy web site:

Critics have compared Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish yet beautifully written adventure masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, with the best works of Dante, Poe, De Sade, Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and William Styron. The critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence.

And, of course, McCarthy’s novel No Country for Old Men was made into last year’s Oscar winner for best picture. The Coen brothers won the Oscar for best adaptation, but the movie quite faithfully follows what McCarthy had written.

39 years ago

It was 39 years ago this evening (U.S. time) that man first walked on the moon, an event that NewMexiKen believes centuries from now will rank as the most historic happening in our lifetimes.

I can remember watching the TV that evening thinking how cool it would be if some creature came crawling over the horizon into the field of view of the live camera.

The New York Times has its next day coverage on-line, including the historic front page.

 Man on Moon

Hitler assassination attempt

Sixty-four years ago today, German military officers failed in an attempt to assassinate Adolf Hitler with a bomb in a briefcase. Four were killed but Hitler, though wounded, was saved by the heavy wooden table on which he was reviewing maps. This from the BBC —

Adolf Hitler has escaped death after a bomb exploded at 1242 local time at his headquarters in Rastenberg, East Prussia.

The German News Agency broke the news from Hitler’s headquarters, known as the “wolf’s lair”, his command post for the Eastern Front.

A senior officer, Colonel Claus Schenk von Stauffenberg, has been blamed for planting the bomb at a meeting at which Hitler and other senior members of the General Staff were present.

Hitler has sustained minor burns and concussion but, according to the news agency, managed to keep his appointment with Italian leader Benito Mussolini.

*****

Von Stauffenberg was arrested the same day and shot. The rest of the conspirators were tried and hanged or offered the chance to commit suicide.

Eight of those executed were hanged with piano wire from meat-hooks and their executions filmed and shown to senior members of the Nazi Party and the armed forces.

Santana

Carlos Santana was born in Autlan de Navarro, Mexico, 61 years ago today. His family migrated to the U.S. in the 1960s.

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame introduces inductee Santana this way —

Guitarist Carlos Santana is one of rock’s true virtuosos and guiding lights. Since 1966, he has led the group that bears his surname, selling over 30 million albums and performing before 13 million people. Though numerous musicians have passed through Santana’s ranks, the continuing presence of Carlos Santana at the helm has insured high standards. From the earliest days, when Santana first overlaid Afro-Latin rhythms upon a base of driving blues-rock, they have been musical sorcerers. The melodic fluency and kineticism of Santana’s guitar solos and the piercing, sustained tone that is his signature have made him one of rock’s standout instrumentalists. Coupled with the polyrhythmic fury of drums, congas and timbales, the sound of Santana in full flight is singularly exciting. Underlying it all is Santana’s belief that music should “create a bridge so people can have more trust and hope in humanity.”