Enough to drive us all to drink — if we could afford Middle Eastern oil to drive and European Bud and Wild Turkey to drink

According to a report at MSN Money, at $140 a barrel, two of our best friends, Iran and Saudi Arabia — just those two — could sell their oil reserves (403 billion barrels) for enough dollars to buy the entire United States of America.

Every three months the Federal Reserve estimates the value of our collective tangible assets, financial assets and liabilities to arrive at our net worth. It’s the whole enchilada — all our cars, our houses, our durable “stuff,” bank deposits, stocks, bonds and mutual funds. Everything. Then it subtracts all our mortgages, consumer credit and other debt to arrive at our net worth.

At the end of March, for instance, our collective net worth as a nation was $56 trillion, the second straight quarter it had dropped. Divide $56 trillion by the recent $140-a-barrel price of oil and you get 400 billion barrels of oil as the value of America . . .

FiveThirtyEight.com

FiveThirtyEight.com uses current polling data to make projections for the election — as they claim, “Electoral Projections Done Right.” This kind of analysis is different, of course, than just relying on straight-up polling, which generally asks how people would vote today.

For example, from the post linked above.

McCain has eight “penumbra” states where the model projects he will win by five-to-ten percent. Obama has seven “penumbra” states. McCain wins the electoral vote in these 15 states 81-67.

Twenty-four states and the District of Columbia are projected to go to one candidate or the other by more than 10%. The electoral vote here goes to Obama 175-79.

Summing up, in the states where a candidate is projected to win by more than 5% of the vote, Obama leads McCain 242-160. You need 270 to win.

That leaves the battleground states, the 11 that are projected to be within five percent come November. The eleven are North Carolina, Florida, Missouri, Nevada, Indiana, Montana and Virginia that slightly favor McCain; and Colorado, Ohio, Michigan and New Mexico that slightly favor Obama. These are the battleground states and they have 136 electoral votes. FiveThrityEight figures Obama to win 51 of these, and thus the election 293-245.

NewMexiKen finds FiveThirtyEight’s analysis to be among the more interesting — and potentially more accurate. I recommend the site to you — I extracted as much as I did for this post to get you interested.

FiveThirtyEight.com is run by Nate Silver, whose claim to fame before was as “a writer, analyst and partner at a sports media company called Baseball Prospectus. What we do over there and what I’m doing over here are really quite similar. Both baseball and politics are data-driven industries.” How the data is used is what makes FiveThirtyEight.com intriguing.

Term-of-the-day

Today’s term-of-the-day is “cloud computing.”

In the geek world, “cloud computing” is a white-hot buzzword these days. It basically means working with files and programs that reside on the Internet, beyond your company’s walls — out there in the “cloud.”

Everyday consumers are doing cloud computing, too, maybe without even realizing it. When you use an Internet-based backup service, or Google’s online word processor or spreadsheet, or a Gmail or Yahoo mail account, you’re working with data on a secure Internet server somewhere — not on your hard drive.

Or so says David Pogue in a review of Apple’s new “cloud” service MobileMe.

NewMexiKen has been experimenting with MobileMe. It’s an improvement over dot Mac despite rough beginnings late last week. The sync function between computers is the biggest benefit — keeping your email, bookmarks, contacts and calendars the same on Macs, PCs and iPhones (and in my case an iPod touch). MobileMe is $100 a year; a 60-day free trial is available. For the $100, you get no ads, and a much cleaner web interface — to my taste Yahoo! is too cluttered, iGoogle too plain-jane.

MobileMe, of course, keeps the master copy in the — all together now class — “cloud.”

One Hundred Push Ups

Push ups are one of the basic and most common exercises for the human body. Push ups are not only great for your chest, but do a tremendous job of defining your abs, triceps, shoulders and torso.

Push ups can be performed no matter where you are, and best of all, they are completely free – no expensive equipment or annual gym fees required! If you’re looking to develop a great chest and shoulders, you could do much worse than follow along with the hundred push ups plan. Your core strength will also go through the roof too!

one hundred push ups

Ask me in two weeks how I’m doin’.  Until then, nevermind.

Guess who line of the day

“A guy gets up and quizzes me — it’s my fault for trying to answer — but John McCain says something about the ‘ambassador to Czechoslovakia.’ Well, I know there is no Czechoslovakia (there’s a Czech Republic and a Slovakia), but yet it didn’t make the nightly national news. I’m not going to gripe about it, but the media question is starting to pop up.”

That’s Firedoglake quoting none other than Governor George W. Bush in 2000. The subject comes up because twice in the past two days Senator McCain has referred to Czechoslovakia — a country that ceased to exist more than 15 years ago.

When even Bush knows you’re wrong — and it’s eight years later and you’re still wrong — there is something amiss.  McCain’s own memoir, Faith of My Fathers, has a chapter “Fifth from the Bottom.”  It refers to his class rank at the Naval Academy — 894th out of 899.

Do we want a president even more ignert than Bush?

Top 25 college athletic programs

With 330 Division I schools in the U.S., picking the nation’s top athletic program is a daunting task. For nearly two decades, the Collegiate Directors of Athletics have done so, using components like a “64-team non-bracket point system” to determine the Directors’ Cup winner. (Stanford finished on top in ’07-08 for the 14th consecutive year). But critics argue that its formula is extremely complicated. Moreover, Stanford will likely continue to dominate for years to come.

In an effort to be a little less complicated, we came up with a different scoring system, a three-pronged formula that puts the emphasis on national titles, top 30 finishes and conference championships. The results are in and Arizona State is No. 1, based on its three national titles (softball and men’s and women’s indoor track and field) and 12 top 30 finishes.

NewMexiKen is not pleased. Arizona Friggin’ State!? To this University of Arizona grad, Arizona State is still just Tempe Normal School. Its teams aren’t the Sun Devils; they’re the Normals. (Tempe Normal School became Tempe State Teachers College in 1925 and Arizona State College in 1945. It became ASU in 1958. They’ve been the Sun Devils since 1956.)

SI.com’s Top 25 Rankings of the college programs

Seven Pac 10 schools in the top 25 — including Arizona. Four SEC. Three Big 10. Three ACC.

A few good boys

Jill, official older daughter of NewMexiKen, brings us up to date on 7-year-old Mack’s training for a triathlon August 9th.

Today Mack had swim practice for an hour. They worked on the butterfly stroke for the whole hour, which can only help him.

Then he rode his bike home. That was two miles.

As soon as he got home he ran around the block — only .2 of a mile, but I figured one lap was enough.

His stomach hurt, but I kid you not, he wasn’t even breathing hard.

Loving grandpa that I am, I responded that he’d make a good Marine. Jill wrote back.

Nope, I’ve told all [three boys] that they are forbidden from pursuing any career which would lead to people shooting at them.

So that knocks out anything in the armed forces, as well as police officer, security guard, border patrol and working for the post office.

Most painful line of the day, so far

“PNM won’t be ready to project what this winter’s bills will be until August, but they will be ‘significantly higher’.”

The Albuquerque Journal quoting PNM spokesperson Susan Sponar. PNM is New Mexico’s largest gas and electric provider. Your mileage may differ, but I’m thinking heating bills this coming winter are going to be scarier than Dick Cheney’s to-do list.

Thanks to jfleck at inkstain for the pointer.

Oh, and here’s another painful line, as if we didn’t know. This from CNN Money.

“Record gas and higher food prices drove inflation to the biggest annual jump since 1991 and fanned fears about growing pressures on consumers.”

Crude Reporting

When it comes to the cost of gasoline, who should we believe? Here are some nominees and their viewpoints:

1. The oil companies: It’s supply and demand at its most basic, just like your professor outlined in your freshman economics course.
2. The petro-toadies in Congress: All we have to do is open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and the waters off Florida and California.
3. The Department of Energy: OPEC has to pump more, and we’ve got to allow more refineries by rolling back environmental restrictions.
4. King Abdullah: OPEC pumps plenty of crude but “despicable” oil-futures speculators in the West are driving up the prices due to their “selfishness.”
5. Senator John McCain: Exxon Mobil has done such a good job of demonstrating the magic of the marketplace that it deserves another $1.2 billion in tax breaks.
6. Senator Barack Obama: Impose a windfall-profits tax to remind American oil executives that price gouging can backfire politically.
7. About 90 percent of the print and TV reporters in America: See No. 1. It really is that ol’ devil supply and demand.
8. The White House: Never mind. Nobody’s home.

Howell Raines in an article critical of news media coverage of energy issues.

‘No one who saw it could forget it, a foul and awesome display’

It was on this day in 1945 that the first atomic bomb was exploded at 5:30 a.m., one hundred and twenty miles south of Albuquerque, New Mexico. It was the end result of the Manhattan Project, which had started in 1939. The bomb contained a ball of plutonium about the size of a baseball, surrounded by a ring of uranium and a series of detonators. Its main pieces were placed on the backseat of an army jeep and driven to the test site, where the bomb was assembled and positioned at the top of a hundred-foot steel tower for the test explosion.

At 2:00 a.m. on this day in 1945, a thunderstorm blew in from the Gulf of Mexico. The men assembling the bomb had to do so in the midst of a lightning storm, wondering what would happen if lightning struck the tower. But the weather cleared up just before dawn. They started the countdown fifteen seconds before 5:30 a.m. The physicists and military men watched from about 10,000 yards away. They all wore Welder’s glasses and suntan lotion.

One of the physicists who was there that day said, “We were lying there, very tense, in the early dawn, and there were just a few streaks of gold in the east; you could see your neighbor very dimly. … Suddenly, there was an enormous flash of light, the brightest light I have ever seen … it bored its way right through you. It was a vision which was seen with more than the eye. It was seen to last forever. … There was an enormous ball of fire which grew and grew and it rolled as it grew; it went up into the air, in yellow flashes and into scarlet and green. It looked menacing. It seemed to come toward one.”

The ball of fire rose rapidly, releasing four times the heat of the interior of the sun, followed by a mushroom cloud that extended forty thousand feet into the sky. Tests showed that it had released energy equal to 21,000 tons of TNT. The burst of light was so bright that it lit up the moon. An army captain in Albuquerque who knew about the test could see the explosion from his hotel room, more than a hundred miles away.

Later, when the scientists went to examine the site of the explosion, they found a crater in the ground 1200 feet in diameter. The ground was covered with a green, glassy substance, which was actually sand that had been fused into glass by the heat.

At the time, the military announced that an ammunitions dump had exploded, and a few weeks later the atom bomb was dropped on Hiroshima.

Source: The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media (2006).

July 16th

Catcher in the Rye by J.D. Salinger was published on this date in 1951. It’s sold about 60 million copies since. The following is excerpted from a longer piece today at The Writer’s Almanac with Garrison Keillor.

Salinger’s division hit the beach in the fifth hour of the invasion, and for the next several months Salinger saw some of the bloodiest fighting of the war, including the Battle of the Bulge. Between 50 and 200 soldiers in his division were killed or wounded every day. At the end of the war, Salinger checked into an Army general hospital in Nuremberg, suffering from a nervous breakdown. He spent several months recuperating.

It was after Salinger’s release from the hospital that he sent out for publication the first Holden Caulfield story narrated by Holden Caulfield himself, a story called “I’m Crazy.” It was published in Collier‘s in December of 1945. One year later, in 1946, The New Yorker finally published “Slight Rebellion Off Madison,” which they had been holding onto since before the war began. J.D. Salinger had finally become a New Yorker writer, something he’d been dreaming of for more than a decade.

Major John Glenn, USMC, set a transcontinental (Los Angeles to New York) speed record of 3 hours, 23 minutes and 8 seconds on this date in 1957. Average speed: 723 mph.

Will Ferrell is 41 today; Barry Sanders is 40.

Two Hollywood greats, Ruby Catherine Stevens and Virginia Katherine McMath were born on July 16th.

We know Stevens better as Barbara Stanwyck, born in 1907, she was a four time best actress Oscar nominee. Anthony Lane wrote an excellent review of Stanwyck’s work last year for The New Yorker.

And we know McMath better as Ginger Rogers, born in 1911, and an Oscar winner for best actress for Kitty Foyle. This from the abstract of a 1995 New Yorker item by Arlene Croce about Rogers.

Ginger Rogers was a star because she was unique and representative at the same time; she was complicatedly iconographic. Her very name tells us all we need to know. First of all, it’s euphonious (those three soft “g”s), and then what the first name specifies–something delicious–the last name, a half rhyme, pluralizes.

Apollo 11 left Florida for the moon on this date in 1969.

You people are so boring

… that after two-and-a-half years without cable TV I’ve ordered DirecTV (and Qwest Fiber-optic internet). You’ll miss me when I’m a couch potato instead of a blogger.

I had to renew my vehicle registration this month. Every year I just renew for one year instead of two because I figure I’m due — now after seven years — for a new car. (I had the last one seven years before I got this one.) Anyway I went over to the air inspection place, got the necessary inspection, came home and registered the car online. Altogether, 30 minutes — it was 3:14 when I left and 3:44 when I started updating this post.

Registration in New Mexico is $51 a year (unless you have a special license plate). There are no other taxes or fees for cars that I know of. How much do you pay?

This plate is $37 extra. I think about it — and then figure, who cares.

Works Progress Administration

Curious to know a bit more about the Works Progress Administration — the folks that built all those bridges you still see when you drive two lane highways? Or that wrote those wonderful state guides?

The New York Times has a concise description of the program accompanying a series of articles about WPA-related projects.

Recommended.

And here’s another related and interesting article — Going Down the Road – Places Captured in Time, but Not Frozen There.

“The American Guide Series of books, … was produced during the Depression by the Federal Writers’ Project and has become part of the canon of American travel writing.”

And I found this in a U.S. Senate document:

The American Guide Series is a highly collectible set of books; many people search the shelves of antiquarian book shops in an attempt to bring together the entire series. The Guide Series’ value continues to increase, with some titles now worth several hundred dollars. Two of the more desirable titles include the first edition Idaho volume, most of which were destroyed in a warehouse fire, and the Dakota volumes, which had very limited printings. The recent popularity of the series has also prompted publishing houses to reissue selected titles in attractive and affordable paperback editions.

The Great Ichiro

Ichiro Suzuki is among the greatest to ever hit a baseball — in another decade or two when my grandkids ask who were the best players I ever saw in person, Ichiro will make the list — along with the likes of Mantle, Berra, Ryan, Reggie, Bonds, Schmidt.

But Ichiro can also be more quotable than most as this item at Bats reveals.

Disturbingly comprehensive

Want to get in shape for next month’s Olympics? You need Olympics Statistics and History:

First off, we have not only every medalist ever, but every one [of] the known 110,000+ athletes has their own page from Paavo Nurmi and Boris Shakhlin to Sabine Bau and Knut Johannesen. 24,000 of them even have a brief biographical snippet as well.

There are results for each Summer and Winter Game including the disputed 1906 games.

There are summaries for each sport, each country, each country by sport and each country by event. For sports, we also have a summary of each sport by game.

For each event that has taken place, we have a listing of the medalists for each game (including all participants) and for all games.

July 15th ought to be a national holiday

Today is the birthday

Linda Ronstadt Time… of Alex Karras, All-American, Heisman runner-up (and he was a lineman), Outland Award winner, NFL star (1958-1971), Monday Night Football sportscaster, TV sitcom actor and — most notably — Mongo in Blazing Saddles. He’s 73 today.

… of Tucson’s favorite daughter, Linda Ronstadt, 62 today. Miss Ronstadt has sold more than 66 million albums worldwide. The session band behind her on her third album became The Eagles. Linda went to a different high school and was behind me a year or two, but I did sit behind her cousin Margaret in many a class when the nuns had us in alphabetical order.

… of Forest Whitaker, 47. Whitaker has been in more than 60 films and television productions, most notably Good Morning, Vietnam, The Crying Game and as Charlie “Bird” Parker in Bird (which earned him best actor at Cannes). He won the best actor Oscar, of course, for portraying Idi Amin in The Last King of Scotland.

Rembrandt Van Rijn was born in Leiden, Netherlands on this date in 1606.

This Bud’s for who?

“I’ll tell you one thing,” said the 21-year-old concrete worker during his lunch break at The Brick of St. Louis bar, in the shadow of this city’s storied Anheuser-Busch Cos. brewery, “if Budweiser is made by a different country, I don’t drink Budweiser anymore. I’ll go back to Wild Turkey.” (Wild Turkey, a Kentucky bourbon, is owned by French drinks giant Pernod Ricard SA.)

WSJ.com via Paul Krugman.

Billy the Kid

… was killed 127 years ago tonight.

Henry McCarty was born in New York City (or Brooklyn) in the fall of 1859. With his mother and brother he moved west — Indiana, Kansas, New Mexico. Mrs. McCarty married a man named William Antrim in Santa Fe. After she died in Silver City in 1874, the boy got into minor trouble, escaped jail to Arizona Territory, and used the name William Antrim. His size and age led to “Kid” or “Kid” Antrim.

Billy the KidArrested for shooting and killing a blacksmith who was beating him in 1877, the Kid escaped back to New Mexico and assumed the name William H. Bonney. He enlisted in the range war in Lincoln County on the side of John Tunstall against Lawrence Murphy. After Tunstall was killed, the Kid rode with a group called the Regulators, a quasi-legal vigilante gang. The Regulators captured two of Tunstall’s killers and someone, most likely the Kid, killed both before they reached Lincoln and the jail. Later the Kid was among the group that killed Sheriff William Brady. The Kid was wounded in the fight at Blazer’s Mill with “Buckshot” Roberts. There were other gunfights between the warring parties. In July, the Kid was in the “five-day battle” in Lincoln where the leader of his group, Tunstall’s lawyer Alexander McSween, was killed. After that the war was considered over and the Kid lost any legitimacy. In August 1878, he was present when the clerk at the Mescalero Indian agency was killed.

Incoming New Mexico Territorial Governor Lew Wallace (the author of Ben Hur) issued a general pardon for the Lincoln County war, but it did not apply to Billy Bonney because he had been involved in the killing of Sheriff Brady. After another outburst of violence led to the killing of a lawyer named Chapman, Governor Wallace offered the Kid a full pardon if he’d testify against Chapman’s killers. Bonney agreed and was arrested in early 1879. Meanwhile Chapman’s killers escaped.

After waiting several months for the pardon, the Kid, who had some liberties, walked away from his guards, mounted a horse and escaped. He became a cattle thief, claiming it was owed him for back wages. He killed a saloon braggart whose gun misfired. Another man was killed in an attempt to capture Bonney.

The new Lincoln County sheriff, Pat Garrett, finally caught the Kid at Stinking Springs, 25 miles from Fort Sumner. After a gunfight the Kid was arrested. He was first charged in the murder of “Buckshot” Roberts, but eventually brought to trial and convicted for the murder of Sheriff Brady. Before Bonney could be hanged, he killed two deputies and escaped. Garrett located the Kid at Pete Maxwell’s ranch, waited in the dark bedroom, and shot him twice when he saw him outlined in the opened bedroom doorway. The Kid died without knowing who had killed him. He was 21 years old.

Billy the Kid Tombstone

NewMexiKen photo, 2006. Souvenir hunters have chipped away.

Among the best of the many books on Billy the Kid is Michael Wallis’s Billy the Kid: The Endless Ride.