Oyez oyez oyez

On this date in 1803 Marbury v. Madison was argued before the Supreme Court.

Marbury was the case that established the Supreme Court’s standing as the arbiter of the Constitution.

On this date in 1856 Dred Scott v. Sandford was argued before the Supreme Court.

Scott was the case where the Supreme Court ruled that persons of African descent could never be citizens of the United States whether free or slave and that the federal government had no constitutional authority to limit slavery in the territories.

Idol thoughts while watching The Grammys

NewMexiKen wouldn’t want to dis a career as an archivist like I had, but it occurs to me every once in awhile — like while watching the Grammy Awards show — that I should have given more thought to being a rock god.

There was a group of about 20 British school kids (13-15 year olds) on the plane last night from Atlanta to Albuquerque. They were flying from London to Taos for a week’s skiing. Privileged brats. (Though the U.S. is cheap these days if we’ll let you in.) Personally, I’d have given a visa to Amy Winehouse instead.

(While I think of it, I saw Spike Lee’s When the Levees Broke on DVD last week with Jill. This is Lee’s four part documentary on New Orleans and Katrina. After the first two parts, we wondered what could be added, but actually it’s pretty riveting over the better part of the full four parts. I strongly recommend you see the film — if only to better understand what happened in light of so much contemporary news that got it wrong and the overall chaos. It will make you very disappointed in our country.)

Aretha, honey, no one loves you more than I do, but you’ve got to consider Jenny Craig or something.

Bush McCain HugThis photo has nothing to do with anything, but I suggest it’s worth seeing and reminding ourselves every day until November.

Dylan has been right about so much, and certainly not least with: “I was thinkin’ ’bout Alicia Keys, couldn’t keep from crying.” She is something.

I saw an ad today for a wireless SD memory card for digital cameras. Move photo files from your camera to your computer via your home wireless network. 2GB for $100, so it’s pricey, but that will change. It’s called Eye-Fi.

I’d like to point out that the video for the Record of the Year was posted here nearly six weeks ago — Rehab.

Age

If John McCain is elected president, when he took the oath next January he would be the oldest person ever to assume the office, nearly 2½ years older than Reagan was.

If Hillary Clinton is elected president, when she took the oath next January she would be the ninth oldest person to assume the office.

If Barack Obama is elected, when he took the oath next January he would be the fifth youngest person to assume the office. Only Theodore Roosevelt, John Kennedy, Ulysses Grant and Bill Clinton were younger.

McCain will be 72 years, four months and 22 days old on January 20th. Clinton 61 years, two months and 25 days. Obama 47 years, five months and 16 days.

The adventures of Cowgirl Deb

Once upon a time NewMexiKen was driving across Wyoming. Just about dead center of the state we pulled into a store-bar-gas station for fuel. When I went in to pay (not all rural service stations take credit cards at the pump), a couple of cowboys were in the store talking to each other and the guy working there. The cowboys looked the type — hat, boots, jeans, slender.

“Did ya’ get your elk?” one asked the other.

“Nah, did you?”

“Yeah. What you been doin’?”

“Runnin’ cattle for McCormick.”

And so the conversation went as I paid for the gas and left. And I thought to myself, there’s 100 million guys and gals working in cubicles who surely fantasize from time-to-time about being a cowboy or elk hunting in Wyoming, but I bet there isn’t one cowboy who ever wanted to work in a cubicle.

And so, with that thought, and even though I’m pretty sure Mom and Dad didn’t want their babies to grow up to be cowboys — or cowgirls — I give you my sister Debby’s report on her day Friday.

Yesterday I got to experience what it’s really like doing ranch work in northwestern Nebraska.  I was asked to help on a cattle drive, so I took a personal day from rounding up 7th and 8th grade boys at recess to go out and round up about 180 head of black angus cattle.
 
It was February 8, and the morning was in the low 20’s with frigid winds approaching 20 mph.  In other words, BRRRRRRRRRRR!!  We saddled up the horses and drove them to the ranch where we were to round up the herd.  We left the horses in a corral there, moved the truck and trailer to the ranch where we would eventually end up, then drove another vehicle back to the starting point where we mounted up and started to move ’em out.

Continue reading The adventures of Cowgirl Deb

On arriving home

It was a beautiful, startlingly clear moonless night Saturday evening as I flew home from Virginia via Atlanta. It was fascinating to look down from six or seven miles up at city-after-city, then town-after-town, then vast dark spaces as we got closer to home. It’s nice to live in New Mexico where the people are fewer and farther between.

Today is gorgeous. Crystal clear — the snow beautiful on Mt. Taylor 70 miles west. Temperature in the 50s.

Continuing with the New Mexico elitism, I also have to say that just because it’s wrapped in a tortilla doesn’t make it Mexican food — and certainly not New Mexican food. If they don’t ask “red or green?” it just isn’t the best.

I had to get a few things at the store this morning and noticed that alcoholic beverages were closed off until noon. In my own religious faith we believe alcoholic beverages should only be sold between 2AM and noon on Sunday. What about separation of church and state? Why are we being discriminated against on Sunday mornings?

Readers outside the Albuquerque environs may wonder about why I bother to pick on Albuquerque’s Mayor Marty. Coco illustrates. First she has this quote from the local newspaper, emphasis hers:

Mayor Martin Chávez said the city needed to step in to help restore public faith in the water supply after KOAT-TV news last month reported that a fungus had contaminated some of the authority’s bottled water.  “They (the authority) just seem to not want to take responsibility,” Chávez said. “I don’t think they understand the gravity of the situation.”

Coco then explains: “Hello?  What is this ‘they’ business?  The Mayor sits on the Water Authority Board …”

Beyond that, NewMexiKen doesn’t like the mayor because he made an business agreement with a colleague a few years ago, then reneged on the deal. He seems even less honorable than most politicians.

Best line of the day, so far

“In its malaise, America’s right-wingers have emerged as an ancestor-worshiping cult.”

German newspaper Sued Deutsche quoted at cab drollery. The newspaper explains:

Reagan’s political mixture – military rearmament, religious renewal, radical tax cuts, including reducing government — is not a cure for current problems: The nation can no longer cope with billions more for the Pentagon, ever more fanatical Christian zeal against abortion and gays, and more tax relief for the wealthy at the expense of already impoverished communities. More of this kind of drastic remedy à la Ronald would drive the country to ruin.

Stuff

NewMexiKen’s visit with some of The Sweeties continues through Saturday. Blogging primarily via iPod is limiting, though I’ve been following the comments and especially appreciated all the birthday greetings. Next year you’re all invited for ice cream and cake and a rousing game of Pin the Tail on the Donkey.

I’d be very interested in reading your thoughts on the remaining presidential candidates—Clinton, Obama and McCain—especially if you feel strongly for or against.

Addendum: How do you people live in this Eastern time zone? It’s early afternoon by the time the day seems to be really underway. Living out west I’m used to blogging at 8 or 9 in the morning and things are already happening. Bad things more often than not, but things to blog about nevertheless.

February 6th

Today is the birthday

… of Mike Farrell. Captain B.J. Hunnicut is 69.

… of Tom Brokaw. He’s 68.

… of Fabian, now 65.

… of Axl Rose. He’s 46.

Babe Ruth was born on this date in 1895.

Ronald Reagan was born on this date in 1911.

It should be a friggin’ holiday. No silly, for Ruth.

Aaron Burr, the first vice president known to have shot someone, was born on this date in 1756.

The ultimate beginning of life

Ken, official oldest son of New MexiKen, reports on the meaning of life, four-year-old style:

Sofie asked some important questions this evening:

Babies come from mommies, so where did the first mommy come from?
(Answer: evolution)

Where did the first animal come from?
(Answer: early life in water)

Where did first plants in water come from?
(Answer: elements combined from energy in lightning storm)

Where did elements come from?
(Answer: big bang)

But, where did first toy come from?

It ought to be a national holiday

Today is NewMexiKen’s birthday.

Also Dan Quayle is 61, Alice Cooper is 60, Lawrence Taylor is 49 and Clint Black is 46.

Charles Lindbergh was born on this date in 1902. The following is the from the beginning of his obituary in 1974:

In Paris at 10:22 P.M. on May 21, 1927, Charles Augustus Lindbergh, a one-time Central Minnesota farm boy, became an international celebrity. A fame enveloped the 25-year-old American that was to last him for the remainder of his life, transforming him in a frenzied instant from an obscure aviator into a historical figure.

The consequences of this fame were to exhilarate him, to involve him in profound grief, to engage him in fierce controversy, to turn him into an embittered fugitive from the public, to accentuate his individualism to the point where he became a loner, to give him a special sense of his own importance, to allow him to play an enormous role in the growth of commercial aviation as well as to be a figure in missile and space technology, to give him influence in military affairs, and to raise a significant voice for conservation, a concern that marked his older years.

Pop culture’s magnetic forces

From an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

Not so long ago it seemed as if we all spoke the same pop-culture language. But in an era of 500 TV channels, billions of Web pages, unlimited Netflix rentals, and iPods with music libraries of Smithsonian proportions, popular entertainment has suddenly become mind-bogglingly vast. As the overlap between what we all watch, read, and listen to steadily erodes, the water cooler has become a modern-day tower of Babel, where conversations sound like the jumbled voices emanating from the jungle in “Lost.” (If that reference is lost on you then, well, Q.E.D.)

In decades past, major pop-culture moments – the ones that everybody experienced at the same time – acted as an intangible glue that bound us together. “There’s a ‘we’ in all of those; the unum of the pluribus,” says Tim Burke, a cultural historian at Swarthmore College in Pennsylvania. “It’s harder to get those things as the media fragments.”

Which makes Sunday’s Super Bowl all the more remarkable.

“It’s the largest national event, at least in terms of people doing a common thing at one time in American culture,” says Mark Dyreson, a Pennsylvania State University professor who co-wrote the chapter “Super Bowl Sunday: A New American Holiday?” for the forthcoming Encyclopedia of American Holidays.

That got us thinking: Which other pop-culture phenomena still bind us together? After days of argument, research, fact-checking, and multiple rounds of voting – a process as rigorous as a “CSI” forensics test – the staff here at Weekend came up with a highly subjective, nonscientific list of 10 things that act as common denominators.

Go read about the 10.

[Reposted from 2006.]

The Day the Music Died

One day in early February 1959, a 13-year-old in New Rochelle, New York, cut open the stack of newspapers he was about to deliver and read that three rock ’n’ roll stars, Buddy Holly, J. P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson, and Ritchie Valens, had died in a plane crash in Iowa. The boy later said he felt “like someone had punched me in the face.” It was a feeling shared by many in America and around the world. Years later, in 1971, that paperboy, Don McLean, would write the song “American Pie,” which gave an enduring name to the event: the Day the Music Died.

Right up there with other “where were you when you heard” events for those of us of a certain age. Read all about it at AmericanHeritage.com.

Democracy? Hmm, let me think about it before I answer.

So the people of Iowa, New Hampshire, Nevada, Michigan (sort of), South Carolina and Florida (sort of) have had a chance to vote and they have eliminated Biden, Dodd, Richardson, Kucinich, Edwards, Brownback, Hunter, Tancredo, Thompson, Giuliani and just about Huckabee, Paul and Romney.

Wasn’t that kind of them? Six states, most them arguably untypical of the larger country, and here we are left with Clinton, Obama and McCain.

Do you feel like you didn’t have much of a say?

January 31st

Ernie Banks plaqueToday is the birthday

… of Carol Channing. Broadway’s Dolly Gallagher Levi is 87.

… of Jean Simmons. The actress (The Robe, Spartacus, Elmer Gantry) is 79. Miss Simmons was twice nominated for an Oscar; Hamlet (supporting) and The Happy Ending (leading).

… of Ernie Banks. The baseball hall-of-famer is 77. Let’s play two.

… of composer Philip Glass. He’s 71.

The new musical style that Glass was evolving was eventually dubbed “minimalism.” Glass himself never liked the term and preferred to speak of himself as a composer of “music with repetitive structures.” Much of his early work was based on the extended reiteration of brief, elegant melodic fragments that wove in and out of an aural tapestry. Or, to put it another way, it immersed a listener in a sort of sonic weather that twists, turns, surrounds, develops.

Philip Glass: Biography

… of Queen Beatrix. She’s 70. Do you know what country is she queen of?

Nolan Ryan plaque

… of Nolan Ryan. The baseball hall-of-famer is 61.

… of KC. He’s 57. And his band was?

Minnie Driver is 38. Justin Timberlake is 27.

Suzanne Pleshette, Emily on the ”The Bob Newhart Show” and Annie (the teacher) in The Birds, would have been 71 today.

Norman Mailer was born on the last day of January in 1923. Here’s what NewMexiKen posted before on Mailer’s birthday.

Thomas Merton was born on this date in 1915. Here’s a previous entry for Merton.

John O’Hara was born on this date in 1905.

[O’Hara] went on to become one of the most popular serious writers of his lifetime, writing many best-selling novels, including Appointment in Samarra (1934) and A Rage to Live (1949). Most critics consider his best work to be his short stories, which were published as the Collected Stories of John O’Hara (1984). He holds the record for the greatest number of short stories published by a single author in The New Yorker magazine.

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

And Pearl Zane Grey, the first American millionaire author, was born on this date in 1872. Here’s a previous entry on Grey.