I asked Dr. Bowden, author of “The 150 Healthiest Foods on Earth,” to update his list with some favorite foods that are easy to find but don’t always find their way into our shopping carts. Here’s his advice.
Among them, cinnamon, prunes and turmeric.
Today we honor two venerable American institutions.
On this date in 1864 Abraham Lincoln signed the land grant preserving Yosemite Valley.
According to the Library of Congress:
The legislation provided California with 39,000 acres of the Yosemite Valley and the nearby Mariposa Big Tree Grove “upon the express conditions that the premises shall be held for public use, resort, and recreation.”
The newly-appointed Yosemite Board of Park Commissioners confronted the dual task of preserving the magnificent landscape while providing for public recreation. With amazing foresight, board member and landscape architect Frederick Law Olmsted noted these goals could conflict. In his August 9, 1865 Draft of Preliminary Report upon the Yosemite and Big Tree Grove, Olmsted warns “the slight harm which the few hundred visitors of this year might do, if no care were taken to prevent it, would not be slight, if it should be repeated by millions.”
And Lena Horne is 91 today.
Even in her eighties, the legendary Lena Horne has a quality of timelessness about her. Elegant and wise, she personifies both the glamour of Hollywood and the reality of a lifetime spent battling racial and social injustice. Pushed by an ambitious mother into the chorus line of the Cotton Club when she was sixteen, and maneuvered into a film career by the N.A.A.C.P., she was the first African American signed to a long-term studio contract. In her rise beyond Hollywood’s racial stereotypes of maids, butlers, and African natives, she achieved true stardom on the silver screen, and became a catalyst for change even beyond the glittery fringes of studio life.
Elsewhere —
Vincent D’Onofrio is 49.
Deirdre Lovejoy — Rhonda Pearlman of The Wire — is 46.
Mike Tyson is 42.
37 years ago today the 26th amendment was ratified by Ohio, the required 38th state. The amendment lowered the voting age to 18.
100 years ago today, a small chunk of rock or possibly ice was lazily making its way across the inner solar system when a large, blue-green planet got in its way. Traveling roughly westward, it entered the Earth’s atmosphere moving at tens of thousands kilometers per hour. Compressed and battered by tremendous forces, the object got about 5 – 10 kilometers from the ground before it succumbed, exploding like a gigantic multi-megaton bomb.
The air blast flattened trees for hundreds of square kilometers. The ground shook, witnesses felt the hellish heat from kilometers away, and the shock wave circled the world. It happened over the remote Podkammenaya Tungus river, a swampy region in Russia; had it happened over Moscow a million people might have died within minutes.
Now known as the Tunguska Event, it stands today as a shocking reminder that we live in a cosmic shooting gallery, and the Earth sits in the crosshairs of many objects.
NewMexiKen received an email this morning from a company offering Barack Obama Bumper Stickers! Normally this would be no big deal — in fact I delete email messages like that fairly often.
But I liked their idea of 50 different bumper stickers for 50 different states.
According to the email I received: “22 percent of the proceeds from each sale benefits the Obama Campaign, and we’re offering both full-size ‘bumper-stickers’ and six-packs of mini ‘laptop stickers’.”
“This year, about 12,000 Americans will be shot to death.”
The wild part starts Tuesday, when Mars, Saturn and the star Regulus— part of the constellation Leo– loiter together, with Mars and Regulus tightly grouped. On subsequent nights, sky gazers will observe that Mars moves toward Saturn. A new moon joins the trio on the evenings of July 5 and 6.
The following week, look west. Saturn (zero magnitude, bright enough to see in urban skies) and Mars conjunct July 10 above the western horizon. You can spot them after dusk. The ringed planet is the brighter of the two, and Mars (first magnitude) has the rusty, red tint.
If you have a brain, and I believe most readers of this blog do, you may want to read an article in this week’s New Yorker by Atul Gawande.
The article begins by describing the symptoms of a patient, M, who had a phantom itch. Ultimately her scratching became so severe that, “She had scratched through her skull during the night—and all the way into her brain.”
There are nerves specifically that convey itch, but after describing them Gawande goes on to discuss the larger phenomenon of phantom itches and phantom pain — the reader who starts to scratch while reading The New Yorker article about itching, the amputee who still feels his arm. Possibly these are, the medical professor suggests, perceptions of the brain and not, as has been long thought, neurological misfires. The brain is far more a part of our perception than we generally think.
The images in our mind are extraordinarily rich. We can tell if something is liquid or solid, heavy or light, dead or alive. But the information we work from is poor—a distorted, two-dimensional transmission with entire spots missing. So the mind fills in most of the picture. You can get a sense of this from brain-anatomy studies. If visual sensations were primarily received rather than constructed by the brain, you’d expect that most of the fibres going to the brain’s primary visual cortex would come from the retina. Instead, scientists have found that only twenty per cent do; eighty per cent come downward from regions of the brain governing functions like memory. Richard Gregory, a prominent British neuropsychologist, estimates that visual perception is more than ninety per cent memory and less than ten per cent sensory nerve signals.
Maybe there is nothing wrong with the engine. Maybe sometimes it’s just the dashboard sensor that’s broken.
[P]erhaps many patients whom doctors treat as having a nerve injury or a disease have, instead, what might be called sensor syndromes. When your car’s dashboard warning light keeps telling you that there is an engine failure, but the mechanics can’t find anything wrong, the sensor itself may be the problem. This is no less true for human beings. Our sensations of pain, itch, nausea, and fatigue are normally protective. Unmoored from physical reality, however, they can become a nightmare: M., with her intractable itching, and H., with his constellation of strange symptoms—but perhaps also the hundreds of thousands of people in the United States alone who suffer from conditions like chronic back pain, fibromyalgia, chronic pelvic pain, tinnitus, temporomandibular joint disorder, or repetitive strain injury, where, typically, no amount of imaging, nerve testing, or surgery manages to uncover an anatomical explanation. Doctors have persisted in treating these conditions as nerve or tissue problems—engine failures, as it were. We get under the hood and remove this, replace that, snip some wires. Yet still the sensor keeps going off.
So we get frustrated. “There’s nothing wrong,” we’ll insist. And, the next thing you know, we’re treating the driver instead of the problem. …
Fascinating.
Two Angels pitchers held the Dodgers hitless for eight innings last night, but it’s not a no hitter because the Dodgers didn’t bat in the ninth inning. They didn’t have to. They were the home team and they were ahead. The Dodgers won without a hit.
It’s only the fifth time since 1900 that a major league baseball team has won without getting a hit.
Angels, no runs, five hits, two errors.
Dodgers, one run, no hits, two errors.
The Los Angeles Times has the story on the Dodgers no hit 1-0 win.
Today is the birthday
… of Harmon Killebrew, 72. Not only is Killebrew in the Hall of Fame, but his is the profile on the Major League Baseball logo.
… of best actor Oscar nominee Gary Busey. He’s 64. The nomination was for The Buddy Holly Story.
… of Football Hall of Famer Dan Dierdorf, 59.
… of Maria Conchita Alonso, 51.
Actress Jayne Mansfield, just 34, was killed 41 years ago today when her car struck a trailer truck near Slidell, Louisiana. The driver and Ms. Mansfield’s companion, Sam Brody, were also killed. Three of her children asleep in the backseat survived.
Those who have seen Field of Dreams or read the book on which it was based, Shoeless Joe by W.P. Kinsella, will remember the character “Moonlight” Graham, played by Burt Lancaster in the film.
Archibald Wright Graham (1876-1965) was an actual player, and a doctor. Graham played in one game for the New York Giants on June 29, 1905 (in the movie it was the last game of the season in 1929). Graham played two innings in the field but never batted in the major leagues; he was on deck when his one game ended.
As you may have heard, oil prices have reached a new high above $140. I can already hear the outcry against speculators and their out-of-control games to enrich themselves at our expense.
Never mind that speculators have been caught shortselling oil (ie betting on a fall in prices) more than a few times in recent months. Never mind that spot oil prices, which require actual physical deliveries of oil at the end of each month, have behaved the same way as paper futures. Never mind that oil storage seems to not be increasing.
Nope, it is just too convenient, too irresistible and, let’s say it, too comfortable an excuse that speculators are to blame. It’s not our fault, we have our scapegoat. Our price increases are temporary, we’ll soon be back to “normal” lower prices, as soon as (take your pick) speculators have been punished/oil companies are taxed for their profiteering/”fundamentals” are left to set prices.
This is just denial
There are A LOT of good reasons why oil prices are going up. Let me show you just a few.
The Oil Drum runs down the reasons they believe $140 oil is real.
Whether they are correct on every point or not, this is a particularly good primer for informing your opinion.
DENVER — Faced with a surge in the number of proposed solar power plants, the federal government has placed a moratorium on new solar projects on public land until it studies their environmental impact, which is expected to take about two years.
The Bureau of Land Management says an extensive environmental study is needed to determine how large solar plants might affect millions of acres it oversees in six Western states — Arizona, California, Colorado, Nevada, New Mexico and Utah.
Study solar, but drill in ANWR, drill offshore, drill, drill, drill.
Power corrupts.
That’s what it’s for.
Been there. Done that.
Wrote the FAQs.
[By the way. I see that this is post #14000. (Some 669 were drafts never posted or have been deleted.)]
Dad, official late dad of NewMexiKen, provided this report on seasonal change in Tucson back in 2004:
Those of you familiar with the desert know that after two or three months of no rain we expect thunderheads to build up every afternoon south east of us. These are the rain clouds from the Gulf of Mexico, pushing up into the Sierra Madres in Mexico. Day by day they creep closer to us.
Yesterday while reading I was surprised by a loud clap of thunder. Glancing out the window it was true….. Rain………
I raced to the kitchen to gather my rain gauges and ruler; ran out the door and proceeded to record the event.
Taking numerous measurements, I concluded the drops averaged two inches apart and the rain had lasted four minutes…..a 2/4 rain.
… was created on this date in 1954, when President Eisenhower signed a bill authorizing the Secretary of the Interior to acquire the site and remaining structures.
Fort Union was established in 1851 by Lieutenant Colonel Edwin V. Sumner as a guardian and protector of the Santa Fe Trail. During it’s forty-year history, three different forts were constructed close together. The third and final Fort Union was the largest in the American Southwest, and functioned as a military garrison, territorial arsenal, and military supply depot for the southwest. Today, visitors use a self-guided tour path to visit the second fort and the large, impressive ruins of the third Fort Union. The largest visible network of Santa Fe Trail ruts can be seen here.
… at the end of World War I was signed on this date in 1919, five years to the day after the assassination that sparked the war.
The United States Senate never ratified the Treaty, as much for political as diplomatic reasons.
… was assassinated in Sarajevo on this date in 1914, igniting what we know as World War I.
Franz Ferdinand was the nephew of Emperor Franz Josef of Austria-Hungary. After the Emperor’s son had committed suicide and Ferdinand’s own father had died, Ferdinand was first in succession to the Emperor. He was considered likely to be a reformer, which upset Balkan nationalists.
In all, there were seven assassins along the route of the Archduke’s car, all Bosnian Serbs. The third of the seven, Nedelko Cabrinovic,
threw a bomb, but failed to see the car in time to aim well: he missed the heir’s car and hit the next one, injuring several people. Cabrinovic swallowed poison and jumped into a canal, but he was saved from suicide and arrested. He died of tuberculosis in prison in 1916.
The seventh was Gavrilo Princip.
Princip heard Cabrinovic’s bomb go off and assumed that the Archduke was dead. By the time he heard what had really happened, the cars had driven by. By bad luck, a little later the returning procession missed a turn and stopped to back up at a corner just as Princip happened to walk by. Princip fired two shots: one killed the archduke, the other his wife. Princip was arrested before he could swallow his poison capsule or shoot himself. Princip too was a minor under Austrian law, so he could not be executed. Instead he was sentenced to 20 years in prison, and died of tuberculosis in 1916.
It was the Archduke and Sophie’s fourteenth wedding anniversary. The Archduke’s last words were, “Sophie dear, Sophie dear, don’t die! Stay alive for our children.”
In the aftermath of the assassination, diplomatic efforts failed, perhaps because both Austria and Serbia feared loss of national prestige. Austria declared war on Serbia. Germany sided with Austria; Russia supported Serbia as required by treaty. France was obligated to support Russia in any war with Germany or Austria-Hungary. Britain was obligated to support France in an any war with Germany.
Source for quotes and some background: The Balkan Causes of World War One.
Here’s the deal — Where The Hell Is Matt?
… could get me on the New Mexico Rattler.
“Workers at a marble company in Dallas say they have a slab of natural granite that has the image of Jesus in it.”
That must be the Rock of Ages we’ve heard about.
Why would U.S. Sugar sell to the state of Florida you ask?
Florida offered $1.75 billion, which comes to about $350 a share. That’s well above two previous offers of $293 a share that the company turned down, and much higher than the $180 to $204 its shares have traded for privately in recent times, reports the St. Pete Times, which also notes the company will get to operate for six years—and presumably earn money—before winding down operations.
And here’s the money quote: “But more than 100,000 acres of it could be turned back to farming—perhaps growing crops for use as fuel, said [Florida] Department of Environmental Protection Secretary Mike Sole.”
Hmmm. U.S. Sugar is happy, because they’re getting nearly twice the stock value. Florida government is happy, because they can go into the fuel business. And environmentalists are happy because they don’t have a clue what’s really going on. And the national news media bought it hook, line and crocodile.
“The Supreme Court struck down the District of Columbia’s 32-year-old ban on handguns and ruled that Americans have a right to own guns for self-defense and hunting. When he heard the news, George Carlin was given a warning for using the seven words you can’t say in heaven.”
Marc Ragovin
This is the eighth-grade final exam in 1895 from Salina, Kansas. It was taken from the original document on file at the Smoky Valley Genealogical Society and Library in Salina and reprinted by the Salina Journal.
Grammar (Time, one hour)
1. Give nine rules for the use of Capital Letters.
2. Name the Parts of Speech and define those that have no modifications.
3. Define Verse, Stanza and Paragraph.
4. What are the Principal Parts of a verb? Give Principal Parts of do, lie, lay and run.
5. Define Case, Illustrate each Case.
6. What is Punctuation? Give rules for principal marks of Punctuation.
7 – 10. Write a composition of about 150 words and show therein that you understand the practical use of the rules of grammar.
Arithmetic (Time, 1.25 hours)
1. Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic.
2. A wagon box is 2 ft. deep, 10 feet long, and 3 ft. wide. How many bushels of wheat will it hold?
3. If a load of wheat weighs 3942 lbs., what is it worth at 50 cts. per bu., deducting 1050 lbs. for tare?
4. District No. 33 has a valuation of $35,000. What is the necessary levy to carry on a school seven months at $50 per month, and have $104 for incidentals?
5. Find cost of 6720 lbs. coal at $6.00 per ton.
6. Find the interest of $512.60 for 8 months and 18 days at 7 percent.
7. What is the cost of 40 boards 12 inches wide and 16 ft. long at $20 per m?
8. Find bank discount on $300 for 90 days (no grace) at 10 percent.
9. What is the cost of a square farm at $15 per are, the distance around which is 640 rods?
10. Write a Bank Check, a Promissory Note, and a Receipt.
U.S. History (Time, 45 minutes)
1. Give the epochs into which U.S. History is divided.
2. Give an account of the discovery of America by Columbus.
3. Relate the causes and results of the Revolutionary War.
4. Show the territorial growth of the United States.
5. Tell what you can of the history of Kansas.
6. Describe three of the most prominent battles of the Rebellion.
7. Who were the following: Morse, Whitney, Fulton, Bell, Lincoln, Penn, and Howe?
8. Name events connected with the following dates:
1607
1620
1800
1849
1865
Orthography (Time, one hour)
1. What is meant by the following: Alphabet, phonetic, orthography, etymology, syllabication?
2. What are elementary sounds? How classified?
3. What are the following, and give examples of each: Trigraph, subvocals, diphthong, cognate letters, linguals?
4. Give four substitutes for caret ‘u’.
5. Give two rules for spelling words with final ‘e’. Name two exceptions under each rule.
6. Give two uses of silent letters in spelling. Illustrate each.
7. Define the following prefixes and use in connection with a word: Bi, dis, mis, pre, semi, post, non, inter, mono, super.
8. Mark diacritically and divide into syllables the following, and name the sign that indicates the sound: Card, ball, mercy, sir, odd, cell, rise, blood, fare, last.
9. Use the following correctly in sentences, Cite, site, sight, fane, fain, feign, vane, vain, vein, raze, raise, rays.
10. Write 10 words frequently mispronounced andindicate pronunciation by use of diacritical marks and by syllabication.
Geography (Time, one hour)
1. What is climate? Upon what does climate depend?
2. How do you account for the extremes of climate in Kansas?
3. Of what use are rivers? Of what use is the ocean?
4. Describe the mountains of North America.
5. Name and describe the following: Monrovia, Odessa, Denver, Manitoba, Hecla, Yukon, St. Helena, Juan Fermandez, Aspinwall and Orinoco.
6. Name and locate the principal trade centers of the U.S.
7. Name all the republics of Europe and give capital of each.
8. Why is the Atlantic Coast colder than the Pacific in the same latitude?
9. Describe the process by which the water of the ocean returns to the sources of rivers.
10. Describe the movements of the earth. Give inclination of the earth.