Woodrow Wilson Guthrie

… was born in Okemah, Oklahoma, on this date in 1912. We, of course, know him as Woody Guthrie.

This from David Hajdu in a review in The New Yorker earlier this year of a new biography of Guthrie:

…”This Land Is Your Land,” a song that most people likely think they know in full. The lyrics had been written in anger, as a response to Irving Berlin’s “God Bless America,” which Woody Guthrie deplored as treacle. In addition to the familiar stanzas (“As I went walking that ribbon of highway,” and so on), Guthrie had composed a couple of others, including this:

One bright sunny morning in the shadow of the steeple
By the Relief Office I saw my people—
As they stood hungry, I stood there wondering if
God Blessed America for me.

There’s an American Masters program on Guthrie currently in circulation on PBS.

I ain’t never got nowhere yet
But I got there by hard work

Woody Guthrie died in 1967.

Bastille Day

July 14th is Bastille Day in France, a national holiday. Even Google gets in on the act (google.fr, that is).

Google Bastille Day

The Bastille was a Paris prison, by 1789 more symbolic than significant. It had a sinister reputation as the place where people were held on the sole and arbitrary power of the king. More importantly in 1789, it was a storehouse of gunpowder and arms.

On July 14, Parisian crowds overwhelmed the prison and it was surrendered. The event is seen as a significant early step in the French Revolution.

Fête Nationale became a holiday in 1880.

Satire or ?

New Yorker

Everyone else is writing about this, NewMexiKen might as well too. That’s this week’s New Yorker cover, art by Barry Blitt. That’s Barack and Michelle Obama in the Oval Office, she with AK-47, he in Muslim garb. The American flag is in the fireplace.

This cover work for you?

Update: New Yorker editor David Remnick —

Obviously I wouldn’t have run a cover just to get attention — I ran the cover because I thought it had something to say. What I think it does is hold up a mirror to the prejudice and dark imaginings about Barack Obama’s — both Obamas’ — past, and their politics. I can’t speak for anyone else’s interpretations, all I can say is that it combines a number of images that have been propagated, not by everyone on the right but by some, about Obama’s supposed “lack of patriotism” or his being “soft on terrorism” or the idiotic notion that somehow Michelle Obama is the second coming of the Weathermen or most violent Black Panthers. That somehow all this is going to come to the Oval Office.

The idea that we would publish a cover saying these things literally, I think, is just not in the vocabulary of what we do and who we are… We’ve run many many satirical political covers. Ask the Bush administration how many.

The Huffington Post

There may be a reason you’re drawing a blank

Blitzer: Are there any significant economic differences between what the Bush administration has put forward over these many years as opposed to John McCain’s support?

[S.C. Governor Mark] Sanford: Yea, I mean for instance take, you know, ummm, ahhh, take for instance the issue of, ahhhh..(knocks on table) I’m drawing a blank. I hate it when I do that particularly on TV.

Transcript via Crooks and Liars.

Oil prices aren’t all about us

It’s an all-too-common belief that if only we had authorized more domestic development of oil, our gasoline prices would be lower.

Even though we are the proverbial 8,000 pound gorilla, consuming about one-quarter of the world’s energy, oil prices are not all about us. The increasing consumption of countries in Asia, South America, Russia, and the Middle East have more than made up for the slight declines in petroleum consumption we have experienced this year. Global consumption is expected to increase another 1 mbpd this year, even as consumption declines in the U.S.

The fact is that oil is a globally traded commodity. Since the U.S. imports two-thirds of the oil it consumes, the price of domestic oil will always maintain parity with global prices. Therefore, no matter how much we drill up the remaining resources, it will not significantly change the price of fuel.

With the global supply and demand balance as tight as it is for oil, natural gas, and coal, it is highly unlikely that a slight increase in U.S. production could make any noticeable difference in our gasoline prices.

From a lengthy piece about “peak oil” at The Oil Drum by Chris Nelder, author of Profit from the Peak: The End of Oil and the Greatest Investment Event of the Century.

Another interesting point: Many oil fields are depleting; that is, their production is decreasing. Any new oil fields must make up this decrease before there is a net gain. Currently net growth of production is 1% a year. Demand is up 1.5% a year. Do the math.

Most important line of the day, so far

“That’s why the Bush White House’s corruption in the end surpasses Nixon’s. We can no longer take cold comfort in the Watergate maxim that the cover-up was worse than the crime. This time the crime is worse than the cover-up, and the punishment could rain down on us all.

Frank Rich in a column discussing Jane Mayer’s The Dark Side: The Inside Story of How The War on Terror Turned into a War on American Ideals.

Reported without comment, two

“The Environmental Protection Agency has put the value of a human life at $6.9 million, 11 percent lower than five years ago.”

NPR

When drawing up regulations, government agencies put a value on human life and then weigh the costs versus the lifesaving benefits of a proposed rule. The less a life is worth to the government, the less the need for a regulation, such as tighter restrictions on pollution.

Seth Borenstein, AP Science Writer

Bisexual Species: Unorthodox Sex in the Animal Kingdom

The following begins a story at Scientific American:

Two penguins native to Antarctica met one spring day in 1998 in a tank at the Central Park Zoo in midtown Manhattan. They perched atop stones and took turns diving in and out of the clear water below. They entwined necks, called to each other and mated. They then built a nest together to prepare for an egg. But no egg was forthcoming: Roy and Silo were both male.

Robert Gramzay, a keeper at the zoo, watched the chinstrap penguin pair roll a rock into their nest and sit on it, according to newspaper reports. Gramzay found an egg from another pair of penguins that was having difficulty hatching it and slipped it into Roy and Silo’s nest. Roy and Silo took turns warming the egg with their blubbery underbellies until, after 34 days, a female chick pecked her way into the world. Roy and Silo kept the gray, fuzzy chick warm and regurgitated food into her tiny black beak.

Like most animal species, penguins tend to pair with the opposite sex, for the obvious reason. But researchers are finding that same-sex couplings are surprisingly widespread in the animal kingdom. Roy and Silo belong to one of as many as 1,500 species of wild and captive animals that have been observed engaging in homosexual activity. Researchers have seen such same-sex goings-on in both male and female, old and young, and social and solitary creatures and on branches of the evolutionary tree ranging from insects to mammals.

‘The Dumbest Generation’

In the four minutes it probably takes to read this review, you will have logged exactly half the time the average 15- to 24-year-old now spends reading each day. That is, if you even bother to finish. If you are perusing this on the Internet, the big block of text below probably seems daunting, maybe even boring. Who has the time? Besides, one of your Facebook friends might have just posted a status update!

So begins a review by Lee Drutman of Mark Bauerlein’s The Dumbest Generation. Gonna bother clicking and reading it?

Why is it?

Why is it that some argue that American laws don’t apply outside America, say at Guantánamo Bay, Cuba.

While at the same time some argue that American laws do apply outside America, say to babies born in 1936 in the Panama Canal Zone?

Did he think I don’t own a computer?

So NewMexiKen and Donna are driving down the street the other day and we see an ’03 Honda S2000 roadster in the front of a dealer lot. I continue on down the street, think what the heck, make a U-turn and we go back to check it out. I’ve had my eye on this particular model since 2001 — considered one then but took a pass because dealers were getting several thousand more than the MSRP.

The sales consultant wanders out and tells me $18,995 for this particular vehicle, which appears very clean. One owner he tells me.  Traded it in because his wife was pregnant and the car would be too small with a child.

I’m interested but it’s hot, and besides I know better than to act too interested. I’ll come by next week, I say.

Guess what? The car is listed online by the dealer for $1,000 LESS THAN THAT and has had three owners in its five years (in three states) according to CarFax. Not good.

(Even before she knew the car’s biography and actual price, Donna told me she’d offer just $15,995 for the vehicle. I am hiring Donna to negotiate all my major purchases. And “major purchase” for NewMexiKen is anything over ten bucks.)

Update: Donna called the sales manager late this afternoon. He acknowledged two prices and two (but not three) owners. She said he didn’t seem to care all that much that we had been interested in the car, but now wouldn’t trust them enough to buy Cinderella’s used pumpkin.

Don’t eat the peppers

In its latest update on the Salmonella outbreak, the Centers for Disease Control today confirmed that the investigation has uncovered a second suspect: jalapeños.

“The accumulated data from all investigations indicate that jalapeño peppers caused some illnesses but that they do not explain all illnesses,” the agency said in a statement. Tomatoes, however, remained under investigation along with serrano peppers and fresh cilantro.

The Lede

John, NewMexiKen’s official younger brother, became very ill while visiting Albuquerque several weeks back. He now thinks his may have been one of the early cases of Salmonella. He didn’t get medical attention and recovered nicely, but it wasn’t pretty for a couple of days.

“[S]tay away from fresh salsa, guacamole and pico de gallo if [you] wish to reduce the risk of infection, says the CDC.

You’d think this was from The Onion, but it’s real

Take the case of two Dallas County commissioners. One of them commented that so much paperwork had been lost in an office that it had become a “black hole”.

Another commissioner took great offense at this, and said it was more like a “white hole”. Then a judge demanded that the first commissioner apologize for his “racially insensitive” remark.

Bad Astronomy Blog