February 17th

Today is the birthday

… of Jim Brown, 72. Brown was listed as the 4th greatest athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. (Which makes him the second greatest athlete born on this date.)

“For mercurial speed, airy nimbleness, and explosive violence in one package of undistilled evil, there is no other like Mr. Brown,” wrote Pulitzer Prize winning sports columnist Red Smith.

Read the entire ESPN essay on Jim Brown: Brown was hard to bring down.

… of Michael Jordan, 45 today.

Jordan was the ranked the top athlete of the 20th century by ESPN. Here’s what they had to say: Michael Jordan transcends hoops.

“What has made Michael Jordan the First Celebrity of the World is not merely his athletic talent,” Sports Illustrated wrote, “but also a unique confluence of artistry, dignity and history.”

Paris Hilton

… of Oscar-nominee Hal Holbrook, 83.

… of Rene Russo, 54.

… of Lou Diamond Phillips, 46.

… of Paris Hilton, 27 today. Age now surpassing apparent IQ. That’s her celebrating last night. She’s a walking argument for keeping the inheritance tax.

H.L. Hunt was born on this date in 1889. Hunt was a Texas oil tycoon who, among other things, fathered 14 children with three women, including two that he was married to simultaneously.

Three-day weekend

Before we all head out for more shopping this three-day weekend, I thought this item from last year was worthy of a review:

According to some of the calendars and appointment books floating around this office, Monday, February 19th, is Presidents’ Day. Others say it’s President’s Day. Still others opt for Presidents Day. Which is it? The bouncing apostrophe bespeaks a certain uncertainty. President’s Day suggests that only one holder of the nation’s supreme magistracy is being commemorated—presumably the first. Presidents’ Day hints at more than one, most likely the Sage of Mount Vernon plus Abraham Lincoln, generally agreed to be the greatest of them all. And Presidents Day, apostropheless, implies a promiscuous celebration of all forty-two—Jefferson but also Pierce, F.D.R. but also Buchanan, Truman but also Harding. To say nothing of the incumbent, of whom, perhaps, the less said the better.

So which is it? Trick question. The answer, strictly speaking, is none of the above. Ever since 1968, when, in one of the last gasps of Great Society reformism, holidays were rejiggered to create more three-day weekends, federal law has decreed the third Monday in February to be Washington’s Birthday. And Presidents’/’s/s Day? According to Prologue, the magazine of the National Archives, it was a local department-store promotion that went national when retailers discovered that, mysteriously, generic Presidents clear more inventory than particular ones, even the Father of His Country. Now everybody thinks it’s official, but it’s not. (Note to Fox News: could be a War on Washington’s Birthday angle here, similar to the War on Christmas. Over to you, Bill.)

Hendrik Hertzberg

Hertzberg has more.

Is Your Printer Spying on You?

Imagine that every time you printed a document, it automatically included a secret code that could be used to identify the printer – and potentially, the person who used it. Sounds like something from an episode of “Alias,” right?

Unfortunately, the scenario isn’t fictional. In a purported effort to identify counterfeiters, the US government has succeeded in persuading some color laser printer manufacturers to encode each page with identifying information.

Electronic Frontier Foundation

List of Printers Which Do or Do Not Display Tracking Dots

Imagine that

Black voters are heavily represented in the 94th Election District in Harlem’s 70th Assembly District. Yet according to the unofficial results from the New York Democratic primary last week, not a single vote in the district was cast for Senator Barack Obama.

That anomaly was not unique. In fact, a review by The New York Times of the unofficial results reported on primary night found about 80 election districts among the city’s 6,106 where Mr. Obama supposedly did not receive even one vote, including cases where he ran a respectable race in a nearby district.

The New York Times [emphasis mine]

Best line from the writers back from strike, so far

“Stop saying how amazing it is for Democratic voters to have a choice for president between a woman and a black man. It’s not amazing. It’s two centuries late. It’s 2008. We’ve had 43 white guys in a row. Not to mention only one Catholic president, one bachelor president and, of course, one retarded president.”

Bill Maher

Best he really is a codger line of the day, so far

“‘Thanks for the question, you little jerk,’ he said last year to a New Hampshire high school student wondering if McCain, at 71, was too old to be president.”

From an AP article Is McCain’s Sharp Tongue Achilles Heel?

Another line from the article:

”I decided I didn’t want this guy [McCain] anywhere near a trigger.” Pete Domenici, 2000.

John McCain, Dick Cheney’s choice for president, 2008.

Ignorance of the law

A year ago today Albuquerque imposed a ban on hand-held cell phones. One year. While there has been some reduction in the use of hand-held phones, seeing a driver with a phone held to their ear is still commonplace.

Albuquerque’s mayor has picked a fight with the governor this week by halting the red-light camera program in mid-flash because the legislature approved a bill taking all the proceeds of the program. The mayor believes, I guess, that by suspending the cameras, he can strong-arm the governor into vetoing the bill. Of course, the argument that the red-light cameras have improved safety and reduced accidents takes a back seat to the politics. Either the program improves safety and halting it for political infighting is grossly irresponsible or the mayor has been lying about the safety all along.

My suggestion is, if you want revenue, get rid of the horrible cameras and all their technological and administrative problems and enforce the hand-held cell phone prohibition instead.

Running From Despair

An interesting article in The New York Times on American Indian runners. It begins:

SANTA FE, N.M. — On a cold Saturday morning last month, 16-year-old Chantel Hunt ran across a highway onto a gravel road where the snow under her shoes packed into washboard ripples. She ran around a towering red rock butte, past two old mattresses dumped on the roadside, and into the shadow of a mesa she sometimes runs on top of.

Chantel Hunt, 16, training for the national cross-country championships near her home on the Navajo reservation.
Hunt, a high school junior and a resident of the Navajo Nation, was on a short training run for the national cross-country championships being held Saturday in San Diego. Her team, Wings of America, has risen to prominence with an unlikely collection of athletes. It is a group of American Indians from reservations around the country, and a Wings team has won a boys or a girls national title 20 times since first attending a championship meet in 1988.

“You say Wings of America to anyone in the running community — it’s synonymous with the best Native American runners,” said Eric Heins, the cross-country and distance coach at Northern Arizona University, a program that has benefited from having Wings runners in recent years.

American Indians have especially high rates of youth suicide, Type 2 diabetes and deaths attributed to alcoholism, and extreme poverty is pervasive on many reservations. Wings of America, a 20-year-old nonprofit organization based here, has embraced the challenge.

Kansas again

The Kansas State High School Activities Association said referees reported that Michelle Campbell was preparing to officiate at St. Mary’s Academy near Topeka on Feb. 2 when a school official insisted that Campbell could not call the game.

The reason given, according to the referees: Campbell, as a woman, could not be put in a position of authority over boys because of the academy’s beliefs.

Campbell then walked off the court along with Darin Putthoff, the referee who was to work the game with her.

SI.com

Link via Bitch. Ph.D. who added “Of course the immediate thought is, what about those boys’ mamas?”

Best story of the day, so far

As she sipped her bloody mary, she quietly listened to two men, neatly dressed in suits. For a second she thought they were going to compare that day’s horrifying attack to the Japanese bombing in 1941 that blew America into World War II:

“This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one of the men said.

The other asked, “What is Pearl Harbor?”

“That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War,” the first man replied.

The above from author Susan Jacoby in an article in The New York Times. Ms. Jacoby has recently written The Age of American Unreason.

There’s also this: “A few years ago she participated in the annual campaign to turn off the television for a week. ‘I was stunned at how difficult it was for me,’ she said.”

NewMexiKen knows I’m unusual, but my television hasn’t been on since the Grammy Awards show Sunday. The computer — now that’s another story.

Competence? Now there’s a refreshing new concept

We have three plausible candidates remaining–Obama, Clinton and John McCain–and Obama has proved himself the best executive by far. Both the Clinton and the McCain campaigns have gone broke at crucial moments. So much for fiscal responsibility. McCain has been effective only when he runs as a guerrilla; in both 2000 and ’08, he was hapless at building a coherent campaign apparatus. Clinton’s sins are different: arrogance and the inability to see past loyalty to hire the best people for the job and to fire those who prove inadequate. “If nothing else, we’ve learned that Obama probably has the ability to put together a smooth-running Administration,” said a Clinton super-delegate. “That’s pretty important.”

Joe Klein, Time

What’s your favorite sport?

We’re in those terrible February doldrums between the Super Bowl and March Madness. Even spring training games haven’t begun, and basketball is still just routine regular season match ups.

That makes it a good time to ask — what is your favorite sport to watch? If asked during the NFL playoffs or bowls or during March Madness or the World Series, your emotions might rule your answer. Right now it’s difficult to even have any emotions about sports (other than to despise Fox broadcaster Joe Buck, which if I were czar would be THE national pastime).

So, here’s the latest NewMexiKen poll. I’ve limited it to nine ten choices, knowing that I may have overlooked your personal favorite. But hey, too many choices and the poll becomes meaningless. [Belatedly I added NHL (pro hockey) in case I had a Canadian reader.]

{democracy:24}

Pregnancy FAQs

What with the pregnancy featured in the movie Juno, as a public service to my seven readers NewMexiKen is going to answer some common pregnancy-related questions.

Q: I’m two months pregnant now. When will my baby move?
A: With any luck, right after he finishes college.

Q: Do I have to have a baby shower?
A: Not if you change the baby’s diaper very quickly.

Q: When is the best time to get an epidural?
A: Right after you find out you’re pregnant.

February 15th

Today is the birthday

… of actor Allan Arbus. Major Sidney Friedman on M*A*S*H is 90.

… of Harvey Korman. Hedley Lamarr (that’s Hedley) and Carol Burnett’s buddy is 81.

… of Melissa Manchester. She’s 57.

… of Jane Seymour. Dr. Quinn is 57.

… of Matt Groening. He’s 54.

It’s the birthday of cartoonist Matt Groening, . . . born in Portland, Oregon (1954). He decided to move to Los Angel[e]s after college to try to make it as a writer. He lived in a neighborhood full of drug dealers and thieves, and got a job ghostwriting the memoirs of an 88-year-old filmmaker. After that, he worked at a convalescent home, a waste treatment plant, and a graveyard.

He started writing a comic strip based on his daily troubles called “Life in Hell.” When a television producer asked Groening to create a TV show, Groening decided to invent a cartoon family that would be the exact opposite of all the fictional families that had ever been on American television. He named the parents after his own parents, Homer and Marge, and he named the two sisters after his own sisters, Lisa and Maggie. He chose the name Bart for the only son because it was an anagram of the word “brat.”

Critics immediately praised The Simpsons, because it was in some ways more realistic than any other American sitcom. Homer was fat, bald, and stupid; he drank a lot, worked at a nuclear power plant, and occasionally strangled his son. His wife, Marge, was an obsessive-compulsive housewife with a blue beehive hairdo. The characters were frequently selfish, rude, and mean to one another, and the show often took on dark subjects like suicide, adultery, and environmental disaster. The Simpsons went on to become the most popular and longest-running sitcom in America.

Matt Groening said, “Teachers, principals, clergymen, politicians — for the Simpsons, they’re all goofballs, and I think that’s a great message for kids.

The Writers Almanac from American Public Media

Harold Arlen was born Hyman Arluck in Buffalo, New York, on this date in 1905. A short list from the more than 400 tunes written by Harold Arlen:

  • Ac-cent-tchu-ate The Positive
  • Between The Devil And The Deep Blue Sea
  • Come Rain Or Come Shine
  • Ding Dong! The Witch Is Dead
  • Hooray For Love
  • It’s Only A Paper Moon
  • I’ve Got the World on A String
  • One For My Baby
  • Over The Rainbow
  • Stormy Weather
  • That Old Black Magic

Arlen worked with many lyricists through the years, most notably Ira Gershwin, Yip Harburg, Johnny Mercer and even Truman Capote. Harburg, for example, wrote the lyrics for the Wizard of Oz songs. Though it’s the lyrics we most remember, it’s the melody that makes a song memorable. That was Arlen.

John Barrymore, Drew’s grandpa, was born on this date in 1882. John is the sibling of Lionel and Ethel Barrymore. Considered the greatest American Shakespearean actor of his time, John Barrymore’s later career was hampered (and shortened) by alcoholism.

“There are lots of methods. Mine involves a lot of talent, a glass and some cracked ice.”

Susan B. Anthony was born on this date in 1820. As The New York Times said in her obituary in 1906, “Susan Brownell Anthony was a pioneer leader of the cause of woman suffrage, and her energy was tireless in working for what she considered to be the best interests of womankind.”

A New Mexico Valentine

New Mexico Isleta Valentine

NewMexiKen received an authentic New Mexico style Valentine cookie yesterday evening. Bet you people living in states that aren’t the Land of Enchantment didn’t have such a purty gift.
The cookie is decorated in Isleta Pueblo pottery style and is from Chiwewe’s Bakery next to Chiwewe’s Smoke Shop, 1831 State Road 314 Southwest, Albuquerque. Click image for larger version.