Myths about saving at the pump

Belief: Driving close behind a truck improves gas mileage because the truck cuts your wind resistance.

Reality: True, but it’s also dangerous.

Belief: Gasoline stations near freeway exits charge higher prices.

Reality: Generally true.

Belief: You get more for your money if you fill up when it’s cold because gasoline is denser at low temperatures.

Reality: Not really. Any difference would be insignificant and besides, most pumps correct for temperature.

Belief: Turning off the air conditioning saves gas.

Reality: True, but if you then roll down the windows, the increased wind resistance may eat up any savings.

Belief: Gas prices go up on the weekend, so fill up during the week.

Reality: Generally false.

Bottleneck Blog | Los Angeles Times

Wrong hill, right cause

The first major battle of the American war for independence was fought on June 17th 1775, more than a year before the Declaration of Independence.

After the action at Lexington and Concord in April (Paul Revere’s ride, the shot heard ’round the world), the reinforced British were camped in Boston. The Massachusetts Committee of Safety decided to contain the British by occupying the heights of Charlestown north of Boston before the Redcoats did. The militiamen, however, did not yet have artillery to defend the heights once occupied.

By the morning of June 17, some 1,200 Americans were entrenched on Breed’s Hill in Charlestown — not the higher Bunker Hill, which might have been a better choice. Reinforcements increased the number to 1,500 by afternoon. They were bombarded by British cannon shooting uphill and without much effect. At around 3:30 some 2,200 British troops attacked the fortified position — uphill, carrying 125 pound knapsacks. The first two assaults were thrown back, but the third succeeded as American gun powder ran out.

Though the British took the hill, they suffered more than 1,000 casualties — “The dead lay as thick as sheep in a field.” American losses were less than 500.

The Battle of Bunker Hill encouraged the colonies. It proved that American forces could inflict heavy losses on the British. Washington assumed command in July and there was no major action again in Massachusetts.

An American officer, William Prescott, is said to have ordered during the battle, “Don’t fire until you see the whites of their eyes.”

Smoke ’em if you’ve got ’em

As the Democratic primaries revealed, Barack Obama is having a hard time winning the support of blue-collar voters.

So here’s a piece of strategic advice for the candidate: Lose the Nicorette. Light up instead.

Consider these statistics, culled from studies of smoking patterns. Americans who make between $24,000 and $36,000 a year smoke at twice the rate of those earning $90,000 or more. The same applies to Americans with a high-school education rather than a college degree. Rural Americans smoke more than city-dwellers. As for race, there’s a close correlation between states with high rates of white smokers and those where Mr. Obama polled worst in the primaries. Leading the pack of smoking states are Kentucky and West Virginia; industrial states like Ohio aren’t far behind.

Bottom line: small-towners in the Rust Belt and Appalachia don’t cling to guns and religion so much as they do cigarettes.

Tony Horwitz

There’s more.

June 17th

Barry Manilow is 65. He was born Barry Alan Pincus, but raised by his mother and grandparents named Manilow. Some sources say he is 62.

Thomas Haden Church is 47. Church was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for Sideways.

Greg Kinnear is 45. Kinnear was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for As Good As It Gets. Kinnear is a graduate of The University of Arizona (1985).

Venus Williams is 28.

EscherM.C. Escher was born on June 17th in 1898.

Ralph Bellamy was born on June 17th in 1904. Bellamy was nominated for a supporting actor Oscar for The Awful Truth in 1937. He received an Honorary Oscar in 1987. Bellamy starred in an early TV series, Man Against Crime.

John Hersey was born on June 17th in 1914. Hersey won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction in 1945 for A Bell for Adano but is perhaps better known for Hiroshima.

After the atomic bomb was dropped on Hiroshima on August 6th, 1945, he was one of the first Western reporters to arrive and document the aftermath. In his reporting, he deciding to write about how individual persons were affected, and he focused his stories on the lives of six people in Hiroshima at the time of the explosion: a minister, a seamstress who had been widowed, two doctors, a minister, a Catholic priest, and a young factory worker.

The editor of The New Yorker decided to devote the last issue in August of 1946 to Hersey’s articles. Later, the collected articles appeared in book form, Hiroshima, published in 1946.

The Writer’s Almanac

Watergate

As reported in The Washington Post in 1972:

Five men, one of whom said he is a former employee of the Central Intelligence Agency, were arrested at 2:30 a.m. [Saturday, June 17] in what authorities described as an elaborate plot to bug the offices of the Democratic National Committee here.

Three of the men were native-born Cubans and another was said to have trained Cuban exiles for guerrilla activity after the 1961 Bay of Pigs invasion.

They were surprised at gunpoint by three plain-clothes officers of the metropolitan police department in a sixth floor office at the plush Watergate, 2600 Virginia Ave., NW, where the Democratic National Committee occupies the entire floor.

There was no immediate explanation as to why the five suspects would want to bug the Democratic National Committee offices or whether or not they were working for any other individuals or organizations.

Race or Gender

At a dinner party NewMexiKen attended Saturday evening there was a conversation about whether sexism or racism was the greatest obstacle to success. The women argued that women have faced more discrimination than minorities — and they gave some convincing personal examples. The men were, I think, less certain, but mainly argued that race was the greater hurdle.

I didn’t think to mention it at the dinner, but the first black woman in Congress, Shirley Chisholm, once said, “Of my two ‘handicaps’ being female put more obstacles in my path than being black.”

Yet, writing for The New Yorker this week, Hendrik Hertzberg makes the opposite case:

Competitions among grievances do not ennoble, and both Clinton and Obama strove to avoid one; but it does not belittle the oppressions of gender to suggest that in America the oppressions of race have cut deeper. Clinton’s supporters would sometimes note that the Constitution did not extend the vote to women until a half century after it extended it to men of color. But there is no gender equivalent of the nightmare of disenfranchisement, lynching, apartheid, and peonage that followed Reconstruction, to say nothing of “the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil” that preceded it. Nor has any feminist leader shared the fate of Medgar Evers, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X. Clinton spoke on Saturday of “women in their eighties and nineties, born before women could vote.” But Barack Obama is only in his forties, and he was born before the Voting Rights Act redeemed the broken promise of the Fifteenth Amendment.

Hertzberg adds that there are 16 women senators and eight female governors, but only two black governors and one senator.

NewMexiKen fears that even today, racism and sexism are more closeted than gone. The veneer of open-mindedness, even of political correctness, is paper thin.

In such a world, who has the steepest climb?

The National Open Championship

NewMexiKen has been watching sports for at least 56 years that I can remember and while fully understanding the emotion that makes the contest du jour the event of the century, I must say that the past three days of U.S. Open coverage have been absolutely compelling. It just doesn’t get any better.

91st hole, sudden death. Woods putts for win, misses, then taps in. Mediate putts to tie (and continue the match).

P.S. The four most dramatic putts in memory (on 18) and the imbeciles who manage the local NBC affiliate run a programming crawl that cancels out the high definition picture, then forget to change back until Woods and Mediate have finished.

Moon Illusion

On Wednesday night, June 18th, step outside at sunset and look around. You’ll see a giant form rising in the east. At first glance it looks like the full Moon. It has craters and seas and the face of a man, but this “moon” is strangely inflated. It’s huge!

You’ve just experienced the Moon Illusion.

Click here to learn more from NASA.

Moonrise Wednesday in Albuquerque is 8:52 PM MDT.

A house divided

Abraham Lincoln delivered his House Divided Speech at Springfield, Illinois, 150 years ago today.

“A house divided against itself cannot stand.”

I believe this government cannot endure, permanently half slave and half free.

I do not expect the Union to be dissolved — I do not expect the house to fall — but I do expect it will cease to be divided.

It will become all one thing or all the other.

Either the opponents of slavery, will arrest the further spread of it, and place it where the public mind shall rest in the belief that it is in the course of ultimate extinction; or its advocates will push it forward, till it shall become alike lawful in all the states, old as well as new — North as well as South.

The speech was made at the Illinois Republican State convention that had nominated Lincoln for U.S. Senator. It was a precursor to the Lincoln-Douglas debates in the campaign that followed, which Lincoln lost. It seems to be about as succinct a statement of the core issue of the American Civil War as one could find.

The phrase “a house divided” comes from Matthew 12:25 — “And Jesus knew their thoughts, and said unto them, Every kingdom divided against itself is brought to desolation; and every city or house divided against itself shall not stand.”

Geronimo

Several sources give June 16, 1829, as Geronimo’s date of birth. It’s not clear to NewMexiKen that the Apaches were using the Gregorian calendar at that time. And, indeed, one of those sources, The New York Times, stated in its obituary of Geronimo in February 1909 that he was nearly 90 — not 79 as this birth date would indicate. But, he had to be born some time. So why not June 16?

In her excellent 1976 biography of Geronimo, Angie Debo concludes:

Geronimo was born in the early 1820’s near the upper Gila in the mountains crossed by the present state boundary [Arizona-New Mexico], probably on the Arizona side near the present Clifton. …

He was given the name Goyahkla, with the generally accepted meaning “One Who Yawns,’ why or under what circumstances is not known.

As an adult in battle he was called Geronimo by Mexican soldiers, perhaps because they could not pronounce Goyahkla, or perhaps to invoke Saint Jerome (Geronimo is Spanish for Jerome). The name was adopted for him by his own people.

Continue reading Geronimo

June 16th

Novelist Joyce Carol Oates is 70 today.

She published her first story, “In the Old World,” in Mademoiselle magazine (1959) just before her senior year of college, and she published her first book of short stories, By the North Gate, a few years later, in 1963. She has gone on to become one of the most prolific writers of her generation, writing more than 70 books in 40 years, including novels, short stories, plays, poetry, and essays. She writes almost everything in long hand before typing, and she usually cuts out a few hundred pages from every novel before it is published.

The Writer’s Almanac

Lamont Dozier is 67. Who is Lamont Dozier you say? Along with Eddie and Brian Holland, Dozier wrote a few songs you may know, among them:

Baby I Need Your Loving
Baby Love
Bernadette
Come See About Me
Nowhere To Run
I Hear a Symphony
My World Is Empty Without You
Reach Out, I’ll Be There
How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You
(Sugar Pie, Honey Bunch) I Can’t Help Myself
Stop! In The Name Of Love
This Old Heart Of Mine
It’s The Same Old Song
Jimmy Mack

Roberto “No Mas” Duran is 57. In a 1980 fight with Sugar Ray Leonard, with 16 seconds remaining in the 8th round, Duran had enough. He told the referee, “No mas, no mas.”

Phil Mickelson —Lefty — is 38 today. He’s watching the playoff on TV with the rest of us.

Happy birthday to you too Uncle Rich.

Looking to Avoid Aggressive Drivers? Check Those Bumpers.

Three horrors await Americans who get behind the wheel of a car for a family road trip this summer: the spiraling price of gas, the usual choruses of “are-we-there-yet?” — and the road rage of fellow drivers.

Divine intervention might be needed for the first two problems, but science has discovered a solution for the third.

Watch out for cars with bumper stickers.
. . .

It does not seem to matter whether the messages on the stickers are about peace and love — “Visualize World Peace,” “My Kid Is an Honor Student” — or angry and in your face — “Don’t Mess With Texas,” “My Kid Beat Up Your Honor Student.”
. . .

“The more markers a car has, the more aggressively the person tends to drive when provoked,” Szlemko said. “Just the presence of territory markers predicts the tendency to be an aggressive driver.”

Washington Post

It seems bumper stickers are pretty much the equivalent of dogs urinating on trees and fire hydrants. It’s a way people stake out their territory. The more stickers, the more the person needs to claim the space. It’s actually quite interesting.

Thanks to Jill for the link — the article confirms her take on an incident reported here last year.

Yuck!

I was glancing down the page and read about Ah-Dee’s Belly again.

It occurs to me that I too got some medicine flavored with Hershey’s syrup as a little kid and — this is true —I haven’t liked chocolate milk or chocolate ice cream since. I’ll eat an occasional Hershey’s candy bar and Hershey’s kisses, but I don’t like chocolate sundaes or chocolate shakes or dark chocolate cake or dark chocolate frosting or chocolate pudding.

Maybe my memory is wrong or maybe it’s just a coincidence, but is Aidan still drinking chocolate milk?

(Chocolate milk is a superior energy drink by the way — as if I’d know.)

I was thinking about this a little more and realized while I do like M&Ms, I always avoided the brown M&Ms thinking they were more chocolaty (though they aren’t, of course). I’d blame the psychological impact of the chocolate flavored medicine for sure for that one, except I also now remember resisting the medicine because it had chocolate and I already didn’t like chocolate. I could probably justify a couple of years therapy over this. I wonder if Dr. Melfi is accepting new patients.

Question for my eight regular readers

Should I repost the birthday and other date-specific posts from past years?

Today for example is Geronimo’s birthday and I have posted about him every year. Today is also the anniversary of Lincoln’s “House Divided” speech, another event I’ve posted about every June 16th.

Should I publish these posts again every year even if I don’t add anything different?