Mack Truck

The oldest of The Sweeties, Mack, not only plays soccer, football and swims for the club team, he runs the mile. He is seven.

His mother reports:

Mack Truck Comin' ThroughMack did so great at his race yesterday.  …  He came in second in his age group with a time of 8:09.  The kid who came in first in his age division is the kid that went by Mack when he stopped at the wrong ending line (the kid finished in 8:06).  Which kills me, but doesn’t seem to matter to Mack.  The kid is a second grader, so Mack finished first in first graders and younger.
. . .
 
He came in 19th in the race, of 163 people 18 and under.
 
It would have been nice if he won, because the girl he luuuuurves won the girls 7 and under.  That could have been the spark that brought them together.  Now she will feel superior to him (although he did beat her by more than a minute.)  Actually, I think she already feels superior to him.  After all, he is a boy and she is a girl.

The 31 Places to Go This Summer

The New York Times suggests 31 North American travel destinations including two in New Mexico.

Thus, here are 31 options — from river rafting in eastern Oregon to biking in the White Mountains of New Hampshire — for a great summer vacation. Not one involves the terrifying conversion of dollars into euros, many can be enjoyed without ever getting on a plane, and the road trips are ones that actually justify filling up your tank, even if the price of gas hits $5 a gallon this summer.

And she probably votes

A woman called Orem police Friday afternoon needing help because her battery died and she was locked inside her car.

When police arrived, they found the woman sitting in the car, unable to get herself out. She couldn’t hear the officers instructions through the rolled-up windows so she motioned to them to call her on her cell phone, according to police.

Once officers were able to talk to the woman on the phone, they were able to tell her how to manually operate the slide lock mechanism on the inside door panel to open the door and free herself.

KUTV.com

Washita ‘Battlefield’ Misnamed

Yesterday we visited the Washita Battlefield National Historic Site. This is the location of Black Kettle’s village of Southern Cheyenne at the Washita River in Indian Territory (now western Oklahoma). On November 27, 1868, the 7th Cavalry attacked the village just before dawn. (This event is portrayed in the movie Little Big Man.)

Here is what took place, as described by James Welch in Killing Custer:

Just before midnight, they crawled to the edge of a bluff which overlooked a river valley. One of the scouts announced he could smell smoke. The other heard a dog bark. Custer could not see anything, and he did not smell smoke or hear the dog. But in the quiet moments of listening, he heard a baby cry. He had found his Indians.

Custer divided his command into four detachments, which would surround the village, north, south, east, and west, and wait for dawn. On his command, they would charge from the four directions.

At first light, Custer turned to the band leader and directed him “to give us ‘Garry Owen’ [his favorite song]. At once the rollicking notes of that familiar marching and fighting air sounded forth through the valley, and in a moment were re-echoed back from the opposite sides by the loud and continued cheers of the men of the other detachments, who, true to their orders, were there and in readiness to pounce upon the Indians the moment the attack began. In this manner the battle of the Washita commenced.”

The “battle” in the village was short, barely fifteen minutes. The soldiers drove the people from their lodges barefoot and half naked, shooting them in the open. Many of the warriors managed to reach the trees, where they began to return fire; a few of them escaped, but after a couple of hours, the firing ceased and 103 Cheyennes lay dead in the snow and mud. Custer reported that they were fighting men, but others said that ninety-two of them were women, children, and old people. Black Kettle, the sixty-seven-year-old leader of the band, and his wife, Medicine Woman Later, who had survived nine gunshot wounds at the Massacre of Sand Creek four years before, had been shot in the back as they attempted to cross the Lodge Pole or Washita River. Their bodies, trampled and covered with mud, were found in the shallow water by the survivors.

The soldiers seized everything in the village—guns, bows and arrows, decorated clothing, sacred shields, tobacco, dried meat, dried berries, robes, and fifty-one lodges—and burned it. In addition, they captured 875 horses and mules. Custer gave the order to slaughter these animals by cutting their throats, but the horses feared whiteman smell and shied away, and after several attempts, the men grew tired. Custer gave the order to shoot the animals instead. Custer himself slaughtered camp dogs. Then the 7th Cavalry took its captives, mostly women and children and old ones, and headed north to its base of operations, Camp Supply.

Custer’s attack on the village of Southern Cheyennes was hailed as a great victory in the Indian wars.

[The National Park Service says “approximately 30 to 60 Cheyenne” were killed.]

It wasn’t a battle and isn’t a historic battlefield. It was state-sponsored terrorism and should be renamed a national memorial.

Indian Citizenship Act of 1924

Eighty-four years ago today the United States declared: “That all non citizen Indians born within the territorial limits of the United States be, and they are hereby, declared to be citizens of the United States.”

Until the Indian Citizenship Act of 1924, Indians occupied an unusual status under federal law. Some had acquired citizenship by marrying white men. Others received citizenship through military service, by receipt of allotments, or through special treaties or special statutes. But many were still not citizens, and they were barred from the ordinary processes of naturalization open to foreigners. Congress took what some saw as the final step on June 2, 1924 and granted citizenship to all Native Americans born in the United States.

The granting of citizenship was not a response to some universal petition by American Indian groups. Rather, it was a move by the federal government to absorb Indians into the mainstream of American life. No doubt Indian participation in World War I accelerated the granting of citizenship to all Indians, but it seems more likely to have been the logical extension and culmination of the assimilation policy. After all, Native Americans had demonstrated their ability to assimilate into the general military society. There were no segregated Indian units as there were for African Americans. Some members of the white society declared that the Indians had successfully passed the assimilation test during wartime, and thus they deserved the rewards of citizenship.

Source: NebraskaStudies.org

It was 24 years before every state enabled Indian citizens to vote.

The states that set the most stringent restrictions on voter eligibility were Arizona, Nevada, and Utah. These states required that voters be not only citizens, but residents and taxpayers as well. In Arizona, the state supreme court in Porter v. Hall, decided in 1928, ruled that Indians should be disqualified from voting because they were under “federal guardianship,” a status construed by the court to be synonymous with “persons under disability.” This decision stood for twenty years until the court finally reversed itself in Harrison v. Laveen.

Source: Encyclopedia of North American Indians

Must See

NewMexiKen had been to the Oklahoma City Memorial before — it’s a well-done and moving tribute to those who lost their lives — and to the survivors and rescuers — in 1995’s terrorist bombing of the Murrah Federal Building. This album has photos I took in 2006 (you may click any image to enlarge).


 
 
This trip I also took in the adjacent Oklahoma City Memorial Museum and I urge you to add this to your list of places to see. Without losing sight of the human tragedy — or sensationalizing it — the museum tells the story of the bombing, the rescue and aftermath, the news coverage, the investigation and convictions, and the memorial itself. All of it is very well done — and fascinating.

Oklahoma City Memorial Museum

I also encourage you to revisit the Memorial at night when the chairs representing each of the victims are lighted. Click image for larger version.

Oklahoma City Memorial at Night May 31, 2008

Removal

On this day in 1830, President Andrew Jackson signed the Indian Removal Act, a vaguely written piece of legislation later used as a pretext by state and federal authorities to dispossess the few remaining tribes in the southeastern United States — “removing” them to lands west of the Mississippi.

Read more about one of the many chapters of American imperialism at The Edge of the American West.

Michael Bolton would be proud

Not that Michael Bolton. The Michael Bolton that worked with Peter Gibbons and Samir Nagheenanajar.

A California man has been indicted for an inventive scheme that allegedly siphoned $50,000 from online brokerage houses E-trade and Schwab.com in six months — a few pennies at a time.

Michael Largent, of Plumas Lake, California, allegedly exploited a loophole in a common procedure both companies follow when a customer links his brokerage account to a bank account for the first time. To verify that the account number and routing information is correct, the brokerages automatically send small “micro-deposits” of between two cents to one dollar to the account, and ask the customer to verify that they’ve received it.

Largent allegedly used an automated script to open 58,000 online brokerage accounts, linking each of them to a handful of online bank accounts, and accumulating thousands of dollars in micro-deposits.

Threat Level from Wired.com

Cody Unser drives fast

Not even paralysis can black-flag those racing Unsers.

Cody Unser, 21, a paraplegic since contracting a rare degenerative spinal-cord disease nine years ago, gets around in a car equipped with special hand controls in much the same fashion her father Al Jr., grandfather Al and great-uncle Bobby did in winning the Indianapolis 500 nine times. As in: fast.

“I always tell the officer when he pulls me over that it’s in my blood,” she told the Indianapolis Star. “The only difference is, I don’t have a lead foot. I have a lead hand.”

Sideline Chatter

The Unsers are royalty in Albuquerque.

“New Mexico is proud to honor a family which has served as such great ambassadors. In racing the name Unser is synonymous with Albuquerque and New Mexico.” — Governor Bill Richardson

May 28th

Jerry West is 70 today.

Jerry West was on the fast track to stardom from the day he touched a basketball. Throughout the NBA’s history, it would be hard to find a better pure shooter. At West Virginia University, West led the Mountaineers to the NCAA Finals and captured the tournament’s Most Outstanding Player award in 1959. In a superlative senior season, West was a consensus All-America and led West Virginia to its third consecutive conference championship. In Los Angeles, West played virtually his entire career with Hall of Famer Elgin Baylor, and five years with Wilt Chamberlain. When the game was on the line, West’s Los Angeles Laker teammates always found a way to get the ball to “Mr. Clutch.” His cool, calm, and collected personality and his leadership on the court was a coach’s dream. When he retired, West’s name was on nearly every page of the record books. He scored 25,192 points (third), averaged 27.0 ppg (fourth), made 7,160 free throws (second), dished out 6,238 assists (fifth). West was equally adept on the defensive end, named to the NBA All-Defensive First-Team four times.

Official Website of the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame

Rudolph Giuliani is 64 today. This alone disqualifies May 28th from any consideration as a holiday.

Gladys Knight is 64. The Pips are various ages.

Gladys Knight and the Pips – brother Merald “Bubba” Knight and cousins Edward Patten and William Guest – are one of the most respected and longest-lived soul groups, with hits spanning four decades. Knight was born in Atlanta, Georgia, where she began singing at age four with her brother and cousins at Baptist church functions. The group first recorded for the Brunswick label in 1958 and dented the charts with “Every Beat of My Heart” (1961) and “Letter Full of Tears” (1962), both on Fury Records. After a few more singles and personnel changes, which cemented Gladys Knight and the Pips in their most enduring and best-known lineup, the group signed with Motown’s Soul label in 1966. Motown founder Berry Gordy, who saw them perform at Harlem’s Apollo Theater in 1966, made note of Knight’s “class, artistry and stage presence….She could talk to an audience and articulate what she wanted to say with just the right words.”

At Motown, Gladys Knight and the Pips quickly rose to prominence with their version of “I Heard It Through the Grapevine” (#1 R&B, #2 pop), which boasted more of an uptempo, gospel-style arrangement than Gaye’s own recording of it.

Rock and Roll Hall of Fame

John Fogerty is 63 today. Fogerty was inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame in 1993 with Creedence Clearwater Revival.

John Fogerty now firmly at the helm as guitarist, singer, songwriter and producer, Creedence took off with their neo-psychedelic reworking of Dale Hawkins’ rockabilly classic “Suzie Q.” From then on, the hits kept coming as the band churned out six albums of powerful, roots-oriented rock and roll between 1968 and 1970: Creedence Clearwater Revival, Bayou Country, Green River, Willie and the Poorboys, Cosmo’s Factory and Pendulum. Ten of Creedence’s singles cracked the Top Ten during the period 1968-71. Although the group was not overtly political, several of their songs – particularly “Fortunate Son” and “Who’ll Stop the Rain” – eloquently expressed the counterculture’s resistance to the Vietnam War and sympathy for those who were fighting in what now stand as anthems of those troubled times.

Oh, put me in, coach – I’m ready to play today;
Put me in, coach – I’m ready to play today;
Look at me, I can be centerfield.

Sondra Locke is 61 today. Though never married, she and Clint Eastwood were a couple from 1975-1990.

The Dionne Quintuplets were born in Corbeil, Ontario, Canada, 74 years ago today.

Annette Lillianne Marie Dionne
Cécile Marie Emilda Dionne
Emilie Marie Jeanne Dionne (died 1954)
Marie Reina Alma Dionne (died 1970)
Yvonne Edouilda Marie Dionne (died 2001)

Together, the five girls, at least two months premature, weighed about 14 pounds. They were put by an open stove to keep warm, and mothers from surrounding villages brought breast milk for them. Against all expectations, they survived their first weeks. Watch video.

According to the CBC Archives:

Dionne QuintsWhen the quints are still babies, the Ontario government takes the sisters from their parents, apparently to protect their fragile health, and makes the girls wards of the state. For the first nine years of their lives, they live at a hospital in their hometown that becomes a tourist mecca called “Quintland.” The Ministry of Public Welfare sets up a trust fund in their behalf with assurances that the financial well-being of the entire Dionne family would be taken care of “for all their normal needs for the rest of their lives.”

Between 1934 and 1943, about 3 million people visit Quintland. The government and nearby businesses make an estimated half-billion dollars off the tourists, much of which the Dionne family never sees. The sisters are the nation’s biggest tourist attraction — bigger than Niagara Falls.

After nine years and a bitter custody fight, the girls rejoined their family.

There is still a mystery surrounding what happened to the money the Ontario government placed in a trust fund for the quints, though it’s believed that most of the funds went to pay for the many employees of “Quintland.”

In 1998 the surviving quints were awarded $4 million by Ontario.

NewMexiKen has a vague memory of seeing the Dionne quints on display (so to speak) at the Michigan State Fair when I was a little kid. Perhaps only four were there, depending on when it was.

And the greatest athlete of the first half of the 20th century was born near Prague, Oklahoma, on this date in 1888. His Sac and Fox given name was Wa-Tho-Huk (Bright Path). We know him as Jim Thorpe.

Thorpe was named by ESPN as the 7th greatest athlete of the 20th century (after Jordan, Ruth, Ali, Brown, Gretsky and Owens). Read the biographical essay, Thorpe preceded Deion, Bo. A couple of items from the biography:

  • Thorpe won both the decathlon and the pentathlon at the 1912 Olympics in Stockholm. Swedish King Gustav V told him, “Sir, you are the greatest athlete in the world.” Thorpe reputedly replied, “Thanks, king.”
  • Jim Thorpe was a twin. His brother Charles died of pneumonia at age 8.

The Virginian

Considered the first serious western, The Virginian was published on this date in 1902. The novel by Owen Wister sold 300,000 copies in its first year. The University of Wyoming (the novel is set in Wyoming) has an online exhibit concerning The Virginian. According to the site:

Since its 1902 publication, The Virginian has left a lasting impact upon the American cultural landscape. In earlier years after its publication, The Virginian did much to popularize the American West. As a result, a romanticized view of the West became an integral part of the American popular imagination and cultural identity. In recent years, The Virginian has come under scrutiny. Wister’s portrayal of the West is seen by many as a myth at odds with reality.

When the San Francisco Chronicle listed the 100 best Western works of fiction in 1999, Wister’s novel was 46th.

Life is just a bowl of cherries

This story from Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, was first posted here four years ago today.

[Three-year-old] Mack and I picked out some lovely ripe cherries at the market today. We’re going to chop them up put them in homemade ice cream.

At lunch I diced some of them and gave them to [8-month-old] Aidan.

He grabbed a couple and stuffed them in his mouth. Immediately, his eyes shot to me with an expression that perfectly conveyed two thoughts:

“My God, but I do love you, woman.”

and

“Exactly what else have you been keeping from me?”

Is it more efficient to leave your car idling?

Simple answer. No.

Today’s cars use electronic fuel injectors, which rigorously control the amount of gas delivered to the engine when you hit the ignition. As a result, virtually no fuel is wasted during startup, and only a thimbleful is burned as the car roars to life. So forget about the 30-minute axiom you were raised on—the threshold at which it makes more sense to shut off rather than to idle should be expressed in seconds, not minutes.

How many seconds, exactly? A lot of environmental organizations advocate the 10-second rule: If you’re going to be stopped for more than 10 seconds, it’s best to shut off your engine. The one exception is when you’re stopped in street traffic—it’s illegal to kill the engine in many states, due to concerns that switched-off cars are more easily rear-ended (especially if an absent-minded driver forgets to restart once the gridlock abates).

. . . The researchers concluded that restarting a six-cylinder engine—with the air conditioner switched on—uses as much gas as idling the same car for just six seconds.

Idling is similarly wasteful in frigid temperatures. Contrary to popular belief, cold-weather drivers needn’t warm up their cars for longer than 30 seconds. The best way to raise an engine’s temperature to optimal levels is to drive it almost immediately after startup . . .

Slate Magazine

Kindergartener Voted Out

A Port St. Lucie, Fla., mother is outraged and considering legal action after her son’s kindergarten teacher led his classmates to vote him out of class.

Melissa Barton says Morningside Elementary teacher Wendy Portillo had her son’s classmates say what they didn’t like about 5-year-old Alex. She says the teacher then had the students vote, and voted Alex, who is being evaluated for Asperger’s syndrome — an autism spectrum disorder — out of the class by a 14-2 margin.

CBS News

Dick Martin

Comedian Dick Martin died Saturday at age 86. Martin’s biggest claim to fame by far was the TV show Laugh-In that ran 1968-1973. Martin is on the right with partner Dan Rowan.

Is she still Goldie Hawn, or do we just call her Kate Hudson’s mother now?

Passing in the night

Do you get the feeling that gas prices and housing prices are going to pass each other going in opposite directions sometime soon?

Standard & Poor’s/Case-Shiller said its national home price index fell 14.1 percent in the first quarter compared with a year earlier, the lowest since its inception in 1988. The quarterly index covers all nine U.S. Census divisions.

Prices nationwide are at levels not seen since the third quarter of 2004 . . .

Las Vegas had the worst performance in March, falling 25.9 percent from a year earlier, followed by Miami and Phoenix.

Yahoo! News

Meanwhile AAA says that the nationwide average price for regular is $3.937, up 9.4% (33.8¢) in a month. Up a dime a gallon in five days! I want my 18.4¢ a gallon federal tax rebate.

How come Clinton and McCain quit talking about that rebate?