A Mac software bundle for an amazing $49.
That’s 12 applications for $49! NewMexiKen has and uses three of these applications — 1password, AppZapper and CSSEdit. They alone are worth more than $49. (I paid $30 just for CSSEdit.)
And 25% of your purchase prices goes to charity (you can pick from a list).
Mac only — and only four days left.
“It’s time to grow up and recognize that if we’re serious about this threat, we’ve got to take reasonable, measured but nevertheless determined steps to getting better security.” — Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff
“[Chertoff] frankly has as much credibility on telling people to ‘grow up’ as Geoffrey the Giraffe.” — Rep. Tom Reynolds, R-NY
Chertoff was defending rules effective January 31st requiring Americans to have a birth certificate or passport to re-enter the U.S. from Canada or Mexico.
“Doctors in Kentucky have issued a warning that people should not eat squirrel brains, a regional delicacy, because squirrels may carry a variant of mad cow disease that can be transmitted to humans and is fatal.”
“Come a cold morning a year from now, some pundit is going to come on my electric television set to explain how the inauguration of a Democrat as president of the United States is the best thing that ever happened to Rudy Giuliani’s campaign.”
If you have a Mac, Delicious Library is terrific software for cataloging your books, videos, music and games.
Get your Mac, a webcam, and Delicious Library and rediscover your home library. Just point any FireWire digital video camera, like an Apple iSight®, at the barcode on the back of any book, movie, music, or video game. Delicious Library does the rest. The barcode is scanned and within seconds the item’s cover appears on your digital shelves filled with tons of in-depth information downloaded from one of six different web sources from around the world.
If you don’t have a camera, you can use the keyboard to enter the UPC.
It’s $40, but truly well-designed software and fun to use. A major upgrade is due out very soon for Leopard, but it will be a free upgrade for anyone who buys now. In the meanwhile, download it and play with the demo.
Click image for larger version.
Regina Spektor, “Fidelity”
… was established by President Herbert Hoover on this date in 1933.
At the northern end of the Chihuahuan Desert lies a mountain ringed valley called the Tularosa Basin. Rising from the heart of this basin is one of the world’s great natural wonders – the glistening white sands of New Mexico.
Here, great wave-like dunes of gypsum sand have engulfed 275 square miles of desert and have created the world’s largest gypsum dune field. The brilliant white dunes are ever changing: growing, cresting, then slumping, but always advancing. Slowly but relentlessly the sand, driven by strong southwest winds, covers everything in its path.
Today is the birthday
… of Kevin Costner. Costner won the Oscars for director and best picture for Dances With Wolves and was nominated for the best actor Oscar for his portrayal of Lt. John Dunbar. He’s 53 today.
… of hockey hall-of-fame inductee Mark Messier. He’s 47.
… of Jesse L. Martin. The Law & Order star is 39.
It’s also the birthday of Cary Grant (Archibald Alexander Leach, 1904-1986) and Danny Kaye (David Daniel Kaminski, 1913-1987). Both won honorary Oscars though neither won the real thing; Grant had two nominations.
A.A. Milne was born on the date in 1882.
One of Milne’s friends had just started a new magazine for children, and asked him if he would contribute. He didn’t have any interest in writing children’s literature, even though his own son was three years old and just learning how to read. But during a holiday in Wales, he found himself trapped in the house during a rainstorm with nothing to do.
Milne said, “So there I was with an exercise-book and a pencil, and a fixed determination not to leave the heavenly solitude of that summer-house until it stopped raining … and there on the other side of the lawn was a child with whom I had lived for three years … and here within me unforgettable memories of my own childhood.” So he began writing a series of poems, most of them addressed to his son, Christopher Robin. The poems were collected in his book When We Were Very Young (1924), which was a huge success.
Around the same time, his son had begun playing with a group of stuffed animals named Pooh Bear, Piglet, Tigger, and Eeyore in the Ashdown forest near their house. Milne loved the idea that his son played with fake animals in a real forest. In his books Winnie-the-Pooh (1926) and The House at Pooh Corner (1928), he turned that forest into a magical place where there are no adults, but only Christopher Robin and his animal friends.
The first college basketball game with five players on a side was played on this date in 1896 at Iowa City, Iowa. The University of Chicago defeated the University of Iowa 15 to 12.
“Hillary Clinton is running to change the President; Barack Obama is running to change our politics; John Edwards is running to change the country.”
Join the action at the Double Stuf Racing League.
Interesting item from The Wall Street Journal Health Blog: “Don’t worry about that guy about to operate on your gallbladder. He trained on the Wii.”
If Ellen Page (“Juno”) wins best actress, she’ll set a new record for youngest actress. Who holds that distinction today? Your options: Joan Fontaine (“Suspicion”), Janet Gaynor (“Seventh Heaven,” “Street Angel,” “Sunrise”), Audrey Hepburn, (“Roman Holiday”), Marlee Matlin (“Children of a Lesser God”).
Quiz from The Envelope, which has the answer.
What warms me to Obama in this instance isn’t just his messy desk. It’s that when he was asked a human question (”What’s your greatest weakness”), he answered like a human being. … As Obama pointed out today on NPR, Edwards and Clinton both gave almost freakishly political answers. (Edwards: my greatest weakness is that I care too much. Clinton: I get impatient with people who don’t care enough about the children!) Come on, if you were interviewing someone for a job, and you asked ye olden “greatest weakness” chestnut, what would you think of the kinds of answers that Clinton and Edwards gave? I’d immediately think I was talking with someone who was both phony and unimaginative.
NewMexiKen has always admired people with messy desks, being congenitally unable to live like that myself (e.g., God forbid the pen be placed with its clip facing left rather than right).
NewMexiKen always looks around whenever I visit a home for the first time to see where the books are, what they are, and how many there are. I try not to judge books by their cover, but I often — though certainly not always — judge people by their books. (By “judge” I simply mean, get an impression.)
Not counting cookbooks, I have books in five bookcases in four rooms, around 700 altogether I believe.
How about you?
“There are two times a year it should absolutely, positively snow: Christmas Eve and during a playoff game at Lambeau Field.”
“Rudy Giuliani promises to make homeowners insurance cheaper in Florida, because you shouldn’t have to pay more just because you live in a hurricane bullseye, that’s, like, so unfair”
And while we’re on the subject of Florida, NewMexiKen is wondering if we really need 50 states anyway?
“Obama truly is a genius at talking in a manner which makes you think he’s saying what you hope he’s saying.”
“But Obama isn’t stupid, so he clearly is no Reaganite.”
Imagine (sung to the tune of John Lennon’s “Imagine”)
Imagine there’s no Apple,
No products that begin with “i,”
No monthly iPod models,
No Apple stores to get you high.
Imagine all the people
Finding other things to do!
Lyrics by David Pogue. Click to sing the other verses.
Eli Manning enjoys “Seinfeld” reruns.
Not that there’s anything wrong with that. Many NFL players have far worse vices.
But Jay Zollar, general manager of WLUK, a Fox affiliate in Green Bay, this week made it clear that he, not the Giants quarterback, is the master of that domain.
On a video on the station’s Web site, Zollar points at the camera and says, “Eli, no ‘Seinfeld’ for you!”
Yup, the station has pulled its regularly scheduled 5:30 p.m. Saturday “Seinfeld” rerun in an attempt to disrupt Manning’s preparation for Sunday’s NFC Championship Game against the Packers.
I’m thinking Eli can probably afford a portable DVD player.
In honor of youngest brother Eli Manning making it to the championship round (and not older brother Peyton), Mental Floss has a quiz about siblings.
But the quiz is grossly incomplete. They forgot Ron Howard’s Brother.
Today is the birthday
… of Betty White. The character actress, who first appeared on television in 1949, and most famous now for The Golden Girls, is 86. Miss White has been nominated for 15 Emmy Awards, winning four times.
… of Eartha Kitt. Santa’s Baby is 81.
… of James Earl Jones. The voice of Darth Vader is 77. Jones has been in more than 130 films and appeared on more than 50 television programs. He was nominated for the 1971 best actor Oscar for The Great White Hope.
… of long-time baseball coach Don Zimmer, now 77.
… of Muhammad Ali. The Champ is 66.
… of Bangle Susanna Hoffs, now 49.
… of Jim Carrey. The actor is 46.
… of Kid Rock. He’s 37.
… of Dwayne Wade. He’s 26.
And it’s the birthday of Al Capone, born in Naples, Italy, in 1899. Here’s some of the background from his obituary in The New York Times when he died in 1947 at the age of 48.
Alphonse (Scarface) Capone, the fat boy from Brooklyn, was a Horatio Alger hero–underworld version. More than any other one man he represented, at the height of his power from 1925 through 1931, the debauchery of the “dry” era. He seized and held in thrall during that period the great city of Chicago and its suburbs.
Head of the cruelest cutthroats in American history, he inspired gang wars in which more than 300 men died by the knife, the shotgun, the tommy gun and the pineapple, the gangster adaptation of the World War I hand grenade.
His infamy made international legend. In France, for example, he was “The One Who Is Scarred.” He was the symbol of the ultimate in American lawlessness.
Capone won great wealth; how much, no one will ever know, except that the figure was fantastic. He remained immune from prosecution for his multitudinous murders (including the St. Valentine Day Massacre in 1929 when his gunners, dressed as policemen, trapped and killed eight of the Bugs Moran bootleg outfit in a Chicago garage), but was brought to book, finally, on the comparatively sissy charge of evasion of income taxes amounting to around $215,000.
For this, he was sentenced to eleven years in Federal prison–serving first at Atlanta, then on The Rock, at Alcatraz–and was fined $50,000, with $20,000 additional for costs. With time out for good conduct, he finished this sentence in mid-January of 1939; but by then he was a slack- jawed paretic overcome by social disease, and paralytic to boot.
Benjamin Franklin was born on this date in 1706.
As his most recent biographer, Walter Isaacson, states:
[Franklin] was, during his eighty-four-year-Iong life, America’s best scientist, inventor, diplomat, writer, and business strategist, and he was also one of its most practical, though not most profound, political thinkers. He proved by flying a kite that lightning was electricity, and he invented a rod to tame it. He devised bifocal glasses and cleanburning stoves, charts of the Gulf Stream and theories about the contagious nature of the common cold. He launched various civic improvement schemes, such as a lending library, college, volunteer fire corps, insurance association, and matching grant fund-raiser. He helped invent America’s unique style of homespun humor and philosophical pragmatism. In foreign policy, he created an approach that wove together idealism with balance-of-power realism. And in politics, he proposed seminal plans for uniting the colonies and creating a federal model for a national government.
But the most interesting thing that Franklin invented, and continually reinvented, was himself. America’s first great publicist, he was, in his life and in his writings, consciously trying to create a new American archetype. In the process, he carefully crafted his own persona, portrayed it in public, and polished it for posterity.
All the above from Benjamin Franklin, born in Boston on this date in 1706.
Rudy in Florida:
“IF ELECTED, I’LL EXTEND THE ‘EARLY BIRD SPECIAL’ TO BETWEEN THE HOURS OF ‘9′ … AND ‘11′.”
