Linkage

“Today is both the anniversary of the event that started World War I and the day that the treaty was signed that officially brought the war to a close.” The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media has a succinct summary of the two.

At Slate Magazine there’s an edifying and somewhat thought provoking discussion of today’s school integration Supreme Court decision by Walter Dellinger, Dahlia Lithwick, and Stuart Taylor Jr. It’s up to about five parts at this writing, but each is brief and worthy of your time.

The opinion itself is here. [pdf]

Conservative commentator and former Reagan appointee Bruce Fein thinks the congress should Impeach Vice President Cheney. (The blogosphere sees Fred Thompson as the likely man Bush would appoint to the job — under the 25th amendment — if Cheney left for any reason. Do you think Thompson could get a majority in both houses?)

Sexist for sure, but amusing nonetheless, Benjamin Franklin advises a young friend to consider the advantages of an older paramour. Old Mistresses Apologue by Benjamin Franklin.

And Pearl is back in Good Cop, Baby Cop. Not as funny as when she was Will Ferrell’s landlord, but amusing at times.

Half Wisdom, Half Whimsy, Half Wit

I think this is a reasonably erudite, somewhat informative, occasionally amusing blog.

So too, do about seven other people.

Why only seven? And, after nearly four years, why does “Ron Howard’s Brother” still seem to be the main attraction? (That, and the photo of the original Apprentice female cast in lingerie.)

I can’t seem to quit, so it frustrates me that there aren’t more day-to-day readers. (I do still get several hundred visits a day to myriad older items.)

Any ideas?

Change the title, so people realize it’s not just about New Mexico? (It is, after all, rarely about New Mexico.)

More entries? Fewer entries? More topics? Fewer topics? More photos of The Sweeties? No photos of The Sweeties?

Sorry to be annoying, but as you longtime readers know, I need some encouragement from time-to-time. It’s all I ask (well, that and an occasional click on an ad that interests you).

This and that

  1. What’s It Cost to Kill a Bear?
  2. An environmental crackdown in San Francisco:

    SAN FRANCISCO (Reuters) – Thirsty San Francisco city workers will no longer have bottled water to drink under an order by Mayor Gavin Newsom, who says it costs too much, worsens pollution and is no better than tap water.

    Newsom’s executive order bars city departments, agencies and contractors from using city funds to serve water in plastic bottles and in larger dispensers when tap water is available.

    “In San Francisco, for the price of one 1 gallon (3.8 liters) of bottled water, local residents can purchase 1,000 gallons of tap water,” according to the mayor’s order.

    Reuters

  3. Animated Mark Fiore editorial cartoon.
  4. Top 5 most dangerous roads of the world, with lots and lots of pictures.
  5. 15 Reasons Mister Rogers Was the Best Neighbor Ever, for example, number 8:

    Once while rushing to a New York meeting, there were no cabs available, so Rogers and one of his colleagues hopped on the subway. Esquire reported that the car was filled with people, and they assumed they wouldn’t be noticed. But when the crowd spotted Rogers, they all simultaneously burst into song, chanting “It’s a wonderful day in the neighborhood.” The result made Rogers smile wide.

    [Actually the lyric is, “It’s a beautiful day in the the neighborhood.”]

  6. You know you’re living in 2007 when…. Several indicators, including:

    3. You have a list of 15 phone numbers to reach your family of 3.

    8. Leaving the house without your cell phone, which you didn’t have the first 20 or 30 (or 60) years of your life, is now a cause for panic and you turn around to go and get it.

  7. Can the level of math education sink any lower?
  8. Asking Miriam for advice may surprise you.

The Fight for Your Face

About a million Americans regularly go under the needle to get doses of Botox, which works by temporarily paralyzing wrinkle-making muscles in the forehead, and Restylane, a hyaluronic-acid dermal filler that fills in deeper folds or unevenness in the lower part of the face (think spackle).

The above from a report on the booming industry of wrinkle injections from Newsweek Health. Money quotes:

“Part of Allergan’s challenge will be to overcome the fear factor that comes with the notion of injecting a substance officially named Botulinum Toxin Type A into the face.”

“Medicis, for its part, has created a campy reality show called “Hottest Mom in America”—a cross between ‘Desperate Houswives’ and ‘American Idol.'”

It’s an interesting article.

Thanks to Veronica for the link.

Guess these guys saw the NewMexiKen poll on freeway speeds

The Washington State Patrol says a trooper arrested two men speeding 141 mph on I-5 in Snohomish County. The patrol says the trooper thought he was hearing an airplane early Sunday as the cars whizzed by going north, a 2005 BMW 330i with a 2007 Honda Accord right behind.

The trooper caught up with the cars because they had stopped for a passenger from one of the cars to get into the other.

The 22-year-old driver of the BMW, and the 18-year-old driver of the Honda were booked into the Snohomish County Jail for charges of reckless driving.

Yahoo! News

I never got my Accord above 113.

Best line of the day, so far

[Senator] Clinton finished by asking Buffett, “Why are you a Democrat?”

[Warren] Buffett said he thought Democrats would do a better job in evening out the field for those who had drawn the unlucky tickets in life.

The Washington Post

“Last year, Buffett said, he was taxed at 17.7 percent on his taxable income of more than $46 million. His receptionist was taxed at about 30 percent.”

Got the link from dangerousmeta!

Harry Potter as literature

Must reading from Michael Bérubé, Harry Potter and the Power of Narrative. It’s a insightful (and touching) analysis from a literary critic (and a pdf file).

I can’t possibly do justice to any of the plots of these books, let alone the subplots, sub-subplots, and moments of inspired levity and bewildering pathos. Indeed, that’s one of the complaints about Rowling’s creations—that they are too baroquely plotted, too cloak-and-dagger-and triple-reversal-with-a-double-axel, as if they are children’s versions of spy fiction in the mode of Robert Ludlum. But it’s astonishing to me that tens of millions of young readers are following Rowling through her five-, seven-, and even nine-hundredpage elaborations on the themes of betrayal, bravery, and insupportable loss; it’s all the more astonishing that one of those tens of millions is my own “retarded” child, a child who wasn’t expected to be capable of following a plot more complicated than that of Chicken Little. And here’s what’s really stunning: Jamie remembers plot details over thousands of pages even though I read the books to him at night, just before he goes to bed, six or seven pages at a time. Well, narrative has been a memory-enhancing device for some time now, ever since bards got paid to chant family genealogies and catalog the ships that laid siege to Troy. But this is just ridiculous.

Book four, here I come.

Link via Unfogged.

Trade easy pleasures for more complex and challenging ones

Dana Gioia, chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts, gave the commencement speech at Stanford a couple weeks ago. It’s quite good and worth your time.

NewMexiKen particularly had to agree with this sentiment:

I grew up mostly among immigrants, many of whom never learned to speak English. But at night watching TV variety programs like the Ed Sullivan Show or the Perry Como Music Hall, I saw—along with comedians, popular singers, and movie stars—classical musicians like Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein, opera singers like Robert Merrill and Anna Moffo, and jazz greats like Duke Ellington and Louis Armstrong captivate an audience of millions with their art.

The same was even true of literature. I first encountered Robert Frost, John Steinbeck, Lillian Hellman, and James Baldwin on general interest TV shows. All of these people were famous to the average American—because the culture considered them important.

Today no working-class or immigrant kid would encounter that range of arts and ideas in the popular culture. Almost everything in our national culture, even the news, has been reduced to entertainment, or altogether eliminated.

Read the prepared text.

Thanks to dangerousmeta! for the link.

Con Law 101

NewMexiKen is currently reading Perilous Times: Free Speech in Wartime: From the Sedition Act of 1798 to the War on Terrorism by Geoffrey R. Stone and intending to follow it with America’s Constitution: A Biography by Akhil Reed Amar.

You might prefer instead Constitutional law: the five-minute crash course by Walter Dellinger.

Best line from the five-minute crash course: “Finally, one needs to understand judicial restraint, the doctrine that a judge should avoid ‘legislating from the bench’ and should instead strictly apply the text of the Constitution ‘exactly as written.’ This approach is very appealing to those who have never read the Constitution.

Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely

A meter maid in Toronto, Canada issued a parking ticket to a car last week after it had been trapped by a fallen branch. Heavy thunderstorms knocked over trees and downed powerlines throughout the city on June 19. One tree fell and pinned the Chevrolet Corsica that belonged to Tom and Elizabeth Koukodimos. While waiting for help to free their vehicle, a meter maid slapped a ticket on the windshield.

theNewspaper.com

June 27th is the birthday

… of Ross Perot. He’s 77.

… of Margo Timmins of Cowboy Junkies. She’s 46. The group includes her two brothers, Michael and Peter, and bassist Alan Anton. All are from Montreal.

… of Tobey Maguire. He’s 32.

Helen Keller was born on June 27 in 1880. The following is from her obituary in The New York Times when she died in 1968.

For the first 18 months of her life Helen Keller was a normal infant who cooed and cried, learned to recognize the voices of her father and mother and took joy in looking at their faces and at objects about her home. “Then” as she recalled later, “came the illness which closed my eyes and ears and plunged me into the unconsciousness of a newborn baby.”

The illness, perhaps scarlet fever, vanished as quickly as it struck, but it erased not only the child’s vision and hearing but also, as a result, her powers of articulate speech.

Her life thereafter, as a girl and as a woman, became a triumph over crushing adversity and shattering affliction. In time, Miss Keller learned to circumvent her blindness, deafness and muteness; she could “see” and “hear” with exceptional acuity; she even learned to talk passably and to dance in time to a fox trot or a waltz. Her remarkable mind unfolded, and she was in and of the world, a full and happy participant in life.

What set Miss Keller apart was that no similarly afflicted person before had done more than acquire the simplest skills.

But she was graduated from Radcliffe; she became an artful and subtle writer; she led a vigorous life; she developed into a crusading humanitarian who espoused Socialism; and she energized movements that revolutionized help for the blind and the deaf.

Best iPhone line of the day, so far

“In other words, maybe all the iPhone hype isn’t hype at all. As the ball player Dizzy Dean once said, ‘It ain’t bragging if you done it.'”

David Pogue reviewing the iPhone.

But I’m waiting for the second generation, cachet or not.

Here’s the summary by Walter S. Mossberg and Katherine Boehret:

We have been testing the iPhone for two weeks, in multiple usage scenarios, in cities across the country. Our verdict is that, despite some flaws and feature omissions, the iPhone is, on balance, a beautiful and breakthrough handheld computer. Its software, especially, sets a new bar for the smart-phone industry, and its clever finger-touch interface, which dispenses with a stylus and most buttons, works well, though it sometimes adds steps to common functions.

The Baby-Name Business

What’s in a name?

Stress.

Sociologists and name researchers say they are seeing unprecedented levels of angst among parents trying to choose names for their children. As family names and old religious standbys continue to lose favor, parents are spending more time and money on the issue and are increasingly turning to strangers for help.

Some parents are checking Social Security data to make sure their choices aren’t too trendy, while others are fussing over every consonant like corporate branding experts. They’re also pulling ideas from books, Web sites and software programs, and in some cases, hiring professional baby-name consultants who use mathematical formulas.

Denise McCombie, 37, a California mother of two who’s expecting a daughter this fall, spent $475 to have a numerologist test her favorite name, Leah Marie, to see if it had positive associations. (It did.) This March, one nervous mom-to-be from Illinois listed her 16 favorite names on a tournament bracket and asked friends, family and people she met at baby showers to fill it out. The winner: Anna Irene.

Holy crap; get a grip people.

Read more, if you can deal with it, at The Wall Street Journal.

June 26th is the birthday

… of three-time Oscar nominee for best actress Eleanor Parker. She’s 85 today.

… of Derek Jeter, 33.

… of Michael Vick, 27.

Author Walter Farley was born on June 26, 1916.

He grew up loving horses and went on to write the novel The Black Stallion (1941). It’s the story of a boy and a wild stallion who survive a shipwreck and become friends on a deserted island. The book was so popular that Farley went on to write twenty novels about the horse, including The Black Stallion Returns (1945), The Black Stallion Revolts (1953), and The Black Stallion’s Ghost (1969).

The Writer’s Almanac from American Public Media

NewMexiKen’s favorite was always The Island Stallion.

Mildred (Babe) Didrikson Zaharias was born on June 26, 1914. Ms. Zaharias was named the top female athlete of the first half of the 20th century. She excelled in track and field, then took up golf at age 21, often hitting more than 1,000 golf balls a day as she learned the game. Eventually she won every important championship. Babe Zaharias died of cancer at age 42.

Pearl Buck was born on June 26, 1892. Ms. Buck won the Noble Prize for literature in 1938 “for her rich and truly epic descriptions of peasant life in China and for her biographical masterpieces.”

Selecting Seafood

From the Monterey Bay Aquarium, A Consumer’s Guide to Sustainable Seafood — complete with regional seafood guides you can print and take along to the store.

Our Seafood Watch regional guides contain the latest information on sustainable seafood choices available in different regions of the U.S. Our “Best Choices” are abundant, well managed and fished or farmed in environmentally friendly ways. Seafood to “Avoid” are overfished and/or fished or farmed in ways that harm other marine life or the environment.

(Always avoid the fish on Trans American Airlines.)

Oceans Alive also has a guide to Best & Worst Seafood Choices. “Our guide can help you choose fish that are healthy for the oceans and safe to eat.”