For the first time since the Depression, more Americans ages 75 and older have been leaving the South than moving there, according to a New York Times analysis of Census Bureau data.
The reversal appears to be driven in part by older people who retired to the South in their 60s, but decided to return home to their children and grandchildren in the Northeast, Midwest and West after losing spouses or becoming less mobile.
A stream of elderly transplants leaving Florida was detected by sociologists two decades ago, including so-called half-backs, who stopped short of returning to their home states and settled elsewhere in the South. What is new is the growth in the number of people leaving the region entirely and the dimension of the migration.
Has film crew found the DNA of Jesus?
Although the evidence contained in the film and book is hardly definitive, it is compelling.
Inscribed in Hebrew, Latin or Greek, six boxes — taken from a 2,000-year-old cave discovered in 1980 during excavation for a housing project in Talpiyot, south of Jerusalem — bear the names: Yeshua [Jesus] bar Yosef [son of Joseph]; Maria [the Latin version of Miriam, which is the English Mary]; Matia [the Hebrew equivalent of Matthew, a name common in the lineage of both Mary and Joseph]; Yose [the Gospel of Mark refers to Yose as a brother of Jesus]; Yehuda bar Yeshua, or Judah, son of Jesus; and in Greek, Mariamne e mara, meaning ‘Mariamne, known as the master.’ According to Harvard professor François Bovon, interviewed in the film, Mariamne was Mary Magdalene’s real name.
There’s much more at The Globe and Mail.
A movie buff
NewMexiKen correctly picked 17 of 24 award-winners at last night’s Oscars.
Alan Arkin and those lousy short-subjects were my downfall.
How did I get 17 right? I’ll let you know my secret — I cheated.
February 26th is the birthday
… of Betty Hutton. The actress is 86. She was Annie Oakley in the eponymous 1950 film, and the trapeze artist who saves the circus in The Greatest Show on Earth.
… of Antoine “Fats” Domino. The Rock and Roll Hall of Famer is 79 — and he still Wants to Walk You Home.
… of columnist Robert Novak. He’s 76 and ought to be shuffling off to Florida with David Broder.
… of Mitch Ryder. He’s 62. No report on the ages of the Detroit Wheels.
… of Michael Bolton. The singer is 54. The computer programmer’s age in Office Space isn’t known.
Johnny Cash was born on this date in 1932.
Jackie Gleason was born in Brooklyn on this date in 1916. One of the greats of early TV, known primarily now for his portrayal of bus driver Ralph Kramden in the Honeymooners. He was in a number of films and received an Academy Award nomination for best supporting actor in The Hustler. Gleason also won a Tony Award.
“And away we go” was one of Gleason’s stock lines. It is also the inscription at his grave site.
John Harvey Kellogg was born on this date in 1852.
When he became a physician Dr. Kellogg determined to devote himself to the problems of health, and after taking over the sanitarium he put into effect his own ideas. Soon he had developed the sanitarium to an unprecedented degree, and he launched the business of manufacturing health foods. He gained recognition as the originator of health foods and coffee and tea substitutes, ideas which led to the establishment of huge cereal companies besides his own, in which his brother, W. K. Kellogg, produced the cornflakes he invented. His name became a household word. (The New York Times)
There might have been something to it. Kellogg lived to 91.
George Washington shares a birthday
… with Don Pardo. The original “Jeopardy!” and “Saturday Night Live” announcer is 89.
… with Senator Edward Kennedy. He’s 75.
… with Sparky Anderson. The baseball hall-of-fame manager is 73.
… with Julius Erving. Dr. J is 57.
… with that ass, doctor/senator Bill Frist. He’s 55.
… with Kyle MacLachlan. The actor is 48.
… with Vijay Singh. He’s 44.
… with Drew Barrymore. The actress is 32.
Artist Peter Hurd was born in Roswell, New Mexico, on this date in 1904. That’s his watercolor, “The Winos.”
American poets James Russell Lowell and Edna St. Vincent Millay were born on this date; Lowell in 1819 and Millay in 1892.
Edna St. Vincent Millay was a terse and moving spokesman during the Twenties, the Thirties and the Forties. She was an idol of the younger generation during the glorious early days of Greenwich Village when she wrote, what critics termed a frivolous but widely know poem which ended:
My candle burns at both ends, It will not last the night; But ah, my foes, and oh, my friends, It gives a lovely light!
All critics agreed, however, that Greenwich Village and Vassar, plus a gypsy childhood on the rocky coast of Maine, produced one of the greatest American poets of her time. (The New York Times)
Rembrandt Peale was born on this date in 1778. His brothers were named Raphael, Rubens and Titian. Son of portrait-painter Charles Wilson Peale, Rembrandt Peale is known primarily for his many renditions of George Washington. Most are based on his most famous work, this portrait of Washington from 1795 (click to view larger version). Rembrandt Peale also painted a classic portrait of Thomas Jefferson.
Steve Irwin, The Crocodile Hunter, should have been 45 today.
9,999
And so, this is the 9,999th post here at NewMexiKen. There have actually been many more than that, but some never made it to publication, or were quickly discarded, or deleted along the way (outdated and broken links, for example).
But when I click the publish button, this will be 9,999.
A good place to take a break; 10,000 is just so excessive, so 1990s.
I’ll be back. I always miss it. But not for a while.
Just assume I gave it up for Lent.
[Oops. NewMexiKen found three AWOL posts. There are actually 10,002 currently active.]
Ash Wednesday
[Ash Wednesday] probably dates from at least the eighth century. On this day all the faithful according to ancient custom are exhorted to approach the altar before the beginning of Mass, and there the priest, dipping his thumb into ashes previously blessed, marks the forehead — or in case of clerics upon the place of the tonsure — of each the sign of the cross, saying the words: “Remember man that thou art dust and unto dust thou shalt return.” The ashes used in this ceremony are made by burning the remains of the palms blessed on the Palm Sunday of the previous year.
Lent
Forty days of Lent to mark Jesus’s forty days of fasting in the wilderness.
Forty you say. But today is February 21 and Easter is April 8. That’s 46 days (four this week, then six more weeks). 6 times 7 equals 42 plus 4 equals 46
Aha! But the six Sundays don’t count. (No one told me that when I was a kid giving up candy for Lent.)
The date for Ash Wednesday, of course, is determined by counting back 46 days from the date for Easter Sunday.
The usual statement, that Easter Day is the first Sunday after the full moon that occurs next after the vernal equinox, is not a precise statement of the actual ecclesiastical rules. The full moon involved is not the astronomical Full Moon but an ecclesiastical moon (determined from tables) that keeps, more or less, in step with the astronomical Moon.
The ecclesiastical rules are:
- Easter falls on the first Sunday following the first ecclesiastical full moon that occurs on or after the day of the vernal equinox;
- this particular ecclesiastical full moon is the 14th day of a tabular lunation (new moon); and
- the vernal equinox is fixed as March 21.
resulting in that Easter can never occur before March 22 or later than April 25.
The equinox this year is March 20th in the Western Hemisphere (March 20, 6:07 PM MDT).
February 21st is the birthday
… of Blanche Elizabeth Hollingsworth Devereaux. Rue McClanahan is 72 today.
… of Mary Beth Lacey. Tyne Daly is 61.
… of Anthony Daniels. 3CPO is 61.
… of Patricia Nixon Cox. The former first daughter is 61.
… of Frasier Crane. Kelsey Grammer is 52 today.
… of Mary Chapin Carpenter. Celebrating, one hopes, down at the Twist and Shout, she’s 49 today.
… of Charlotte Church. She’s 21. Hasn’t she been one of the PBS fund drive specials for about 20 years?
Erma Bombeck was born on this date in 1927. According to The Writer’s Almanac:
[Bombeck] became famous for her humor column called “At Wits End”, about the daily madness of being a housewife. She knew she wanted to be a journalist from the eighth grade, and she had a humor column in her high school newspaper. She got a job at the Dayton Journal-Herald writing obituaries and features for the women’s page, but when she married a sportswriter there, she chose to quit her job and stay home with the kids. She spent a decade as a fulltime mother, and then in 1964 she decided she had to start writing again or she would go crazy. She said, “I was thirty-seven, too old for a paper route, too young for social security, and too tired for an affair.”
She got a column at a small Ohio paper and wrote about the daily trials and tribulations of the average housewife. Within a few years, she was one of the most popular humor columnists in America.
NewMexiKen thought Bombeck funniest when she really was a a full-time mom. When she became rich and famous the humor often seemed more contrived and strained. But then I’d rather be rich and famous than funny, too.
The great classical guitarist Andrés Segovia was born on this date in 1893. This from his obituary in The New York Times in 1987.
The guitarist himself summed up his life’s goals in an interview with The New York Times when he was 75 years old: ”First, to redeem my guitar from the flamenco and all those other things. Second, to create a repertory – you know that almost all the good composers of our time have written works for the guitar through me and even for my pupils. Third, I wanted to create a public for the guitar. Now, I fill the biggest halls in all the countries, and at least a third of the audience is young – I am very glad to steal them from the Beatles. Fourth, I was determined to win the guitar a respected place in the great music schools along with the piano, the violin and other concert instruments.”
NewMexiKen once attended a performance by Segovia.
Is it too late for birthday present hints?
Pay at the Pump
Gas prices are on the way up again and could likely pass $3 again this summer in many areas, according to the Detroit News. Gas in Detroit is up a whopping 38 cents in a month, and based on last years’ precedent is on course to again pass 3 bucks in May.
If you don’t live on the West Coast, consider yourself fuel-lucky. In Sacramento gas is now at $2.72 compared to the national average of $2.26.
Robert Altman
… was born on this date in 1925.
It was Alfred Hitchcock who noticed Altman’s work early on and hired him to direct episodes of the television show Alfred Hitchcock Presents. Altman went on to write and direct numerous TV shows, including Bonanza, but he began to experiment with a new way of portraying dialog in movies. He thought it was unrealistic to have only one actor speaking at a time, since in real life groups of people are constantly interrupting each other and talking over each other. So he developed a style in which he would put a microphone and a camera on each of the actors in a scene, and he encouraged them to improvise dialogue and to interrupt each other and talk over each other and to have simultaneous conversations.
Altman finally got his first chance to try out his new style when he chose to direct a movie about a group of military surgeons in the Korean War. The script had been passed over by 14 other directors. It was written as a comedy, but Altman chose to film the surgery scenes like a documentary, with the actors talking over each other and being interrupted by announcements on a loud speaker. And he chose to use lots of fake blood. The studio almost didn’t release the movie because the executives thought the mixture of violence and comedy was morbid and the profanity was too strong. But when it came out at the height of the Vietnam War, M*A*S*H (1970) became the highest-grossing movie of the year.
Altman went on to make a series of movies that are now considered classics, including McCabe and Mrs. Miller (1971), about a brothel in the Old West; and Nashville (1975), about the country music industry.
Ansel Adams
… was born on this date in 1902.
In a career that spanned more than 50 years, Mr. Adams combined a passion for natural landscape, meticulous craftsmanship as a printmaker and a missionary’s zeal for his medium to become the most widely exhibited and recognized photographer of his generation.
His photographs have been published in more than 35 books and portfolios, and they have been seen in hundreds of exhibitions, including a one-man show, ”Ansel Adams and the West,” at the Museum of Modern Art in New York in 1979. That same year he was the subject of a cover story in Time magazine, and in 1980 he received the Medal of Freedom, the nation’s highest civilian honor.
In addition to being acclaimed for his dramatic landscapes of the American West, he was held in esteem for his contributions to photographic technology and to the recognition of photography as an art form.
The Queen
Hard to believe there’s ever been a better performance in a film than Helen Mirren in The Queen, a pretty good movie overall.
John Glenn
… was the first American to orbit the earth — on this date 45 years ago.
Cape Canaveral, Fla., Feb. 20 — John H. Glenn Jr. orbited three times around the earth today and landed safely to become the first American to make such a flight.
The 40-year-old Marine Corps lieutenant colonel traveled about 81,000 miles in 4 hours 56 minutes before splashing into the Atlantic at 2:43 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.
He had been launched from here at 9:47 A. M.
The astronaut’s safe return was no less a relief than a thrill to the Project Mercury team, because there had been real concern that the Friendship 7 capsule might disintegrate as it rammed back into the atmosphere.
There had also been a serious question whether Colonel Glenn could complete three orbits as planned. But despite persistent control problems, he managed to complete the entire flight plan.
Fat Tuesday
There are well-known season-long Carnival celebrations in Europe and Latin America, including Nice, France; Cologne, Germany; and Rio de Janeiro, Brazil. The best-known celebration in the U.S. is in New Orleans and the French-Catholic communities of the Gulf Coast. Mardi Gras came to the New World in 1699, when a French explorer arrived at the Mississippi River, about 60 miles south of present day New Orleans. He named the spot Point du Mardi Gras because he knew the holiday was being celebrated in his native country that day.
Eventually the French in New Orleans celebrated Mardi Gras with masked balls and parties, until the Spanish government took over in the mid-1700s and banned the celebrations. The ban continued even after the U.S. government acquired the land but the celebrations resumed in 1827. The official colors of Mardi Gras, with their roots in Catholicism, were chosen 10 years later: purple, a symbol of justice; green, representing faith; and gold, to signify power.
Mardi Gras literally means “Fat Tuesday” in French. The name comes from the tradition of slaughtering and feasting upon a fattened calf on the last day of Carnival. The day is also known as Shrove Tuesday (from “to shrive,” or hear confessions), Pancake Tuesday and fetter Dienstag. The custom of making pancakes comes from the need to use up fat, eggs and dairy before the fasting and abstinence of Lent begins.
The Radical Roots of Barack Obama
A worth-your-time profile of Barack Obama by Ben Wallace-Wells in Rolling Stone.
The real cost of bottled water
Most of the price of a bottle of water goes for its bottling, packaging, shipping, marketing, retailing and profit. Transporting bottled water by boat, truck and train involves burning massive quantities of fossil fuels. More than 5 trillion gallons of bottled water is shipped internationally each year. Here in San Francisco, we can buy water from Fiji (5,455 miles away) or Norway (5,194 miles away) and many other faraway places to satisfy our demand for the chic and exotic. These are truly the Hummers of our bottled-water generation. As further proof that the bottle is worth more than the water in it, starting in 2007, the state of California will give 5 cents for recycling a small water bottle and 10 cents for a large one.
This article convinces me. What a waste (in most locations).
The Most Annoying Things About Windows Vista
There’s lots to like in the newest version of Windows. Vista’s look is stunning, the OS should be more secure, and finding things is often easier. But Windows wouldn’t be Windows without those aspects, big and small, that just drive you nuts with frustration. Here’s our list of Vista features that just make us wonder, “What were they thinking?”
Sidney Poitier
… is 80 today.
American Masters from PBS sums it up nicely:
More than an actor (and Academy-Award winner), Sidney Poitier is an artist. A writer and director, a thinker and critic, a humanitarian and diplomat, his presence as a cultural icon has long been one of protest and humanity. His career defined and documented the modern history of blacks in American film, and his depiction of proud and powerful characters was and remains revolutionary.
Lilies of the Field — with Poitier’s Oscar winning performance — has been one of NewMexiKen’s favorites since it was released more than 40 years ago. If you don’t know the film, you should.
Jesus and George
From Functional Ambivalent:
Beliefnet takes a look at the Christianity of George Washington:
What do the knowable facts show? A portrait not likely to be satisfying to either extreme in the culture war – a spiritual man who believed God was protecting him and the nation, and yet who showed disinterest in and sometimes disdain for important facets of Christianity.In some ways, the Father of Our Country bears a striking resemblance to a lot of other fathers:
He was a casual observer of the Sabbath and a semi-regular attendee of church – a little more than once a month, according to Boller’s review of Washington’s diaries. For instance, Washington attended church four times in the first five months of 1760 and 15 times in the year 1768. Sometimes bad weather prevented him from making the lengthy trip but there’s also evidence that Washington visited friends, traveled or went foxhunting instead of to church.He did all of that because there were no golf courses within riding distance from Mt. Vernon.
Read the whole fascinating thing here.
The Worst President of Them All
“Buchanan, Harding, Nixon, Dubya …? Much more fun than your high school History class, this year’s President’s Day tribute is to the very worst of them.”
Nicholas von Hoffman reviews the worst.
The holiday today
The federal holiday today — the reason there’s no mail delivery — is Washington’s Birthday.
There is no state holiday today in New Mexico. The state chooses to celebrate Presidents’ Day the day after Thanksgiving, November 23rd this year.
The next holiday is Memorial Day, May 28th this year. That’s 14 weeks from now!
U.S. Code: Title 4, § 6103. Holidays
(a) The following are legal public holidays:
New Year’s Day, January 1.
Birthday of Martin Luther King, Jr., the third Monday in January.
Washington’s Birthday, the third Monday in February.
Memorial Day, the last Monday in May.
Independence Day, July 4.
Labor Day, the first Monday in September.
Columbus Day, the second Monday in October.
Veterans Day, November 11.
Thanksgiving Day, the fourth Thursday in November.
Christmas Day, December 25.
The Greatest American
It was a speech so moving the crowd wept. It was a speech so personally important George Washington’s hand shook as he read it until he had to hold the paper still with both hands. After the ceremony, he handed the thing to a friend and sped out the door of the State House in Annapolis, riding off by horse. [December 23, 1783]
For centuries, his words have resonated in American democracy even as the speech itself — the small piece of paper that shook in his hands that day — was quietly put away, out of the public eye and largely forgotten.
Today, however, amid festivities celebrating his birthday, Maryland officials plan to unveil the original document — worth $1.5 million — after acquiring it in a private sale from a family in Maryland who had kept it all these years. . . .
The speech, scholars say, was a turning point in U.S. history. As the Revolutionary War was winding down, some wanted to make Washington king. Some whispered conspiracy, trying to seduce him with the trappings of power. But Washington renounced them all.
By resigning his commission as commander in chief to the Continental Congress — then housed at the Annapolis capitol — Washington laid the cornerstone for an American principle that persists today: Civilians, not generals, are ultimately in charge of military power.
Follow this link for a copy of the document. Here’s the text version:
The great events on which my resignation depended, having at length taken place, I have now the honor of offering my sincere congratulations to Congress, & of presenting myself before Congress them, to surrender into their hands the trust committed to me, and to claim the indulgence of retiring request permission to retire from the service of my country.
Happy in the confirmation of our independence and sovereignty, and pleased with the opportunity afforded the United States, of becoming a respectable Nation as well as in the contemplation of our prospect of National happiness, I resign with satisfaction the appointment I accepted with diffidence — a diffidence in my abilities to accomplish so arduous a task, which however was superseded by a confidence in the rectitude of our Cause, the support of the supreme Power of the Union, and the patronage of Heaven.
The successful termination of the War has verified the most sanguine expectations- and my gratitude for the interposition of Providence, and the assistance I have received from my Countrymen, increases with every review of the momentous Contest.
While I repeat my obligations to the army in general, I should do injustice to my own feelings not to acknowledge in this place the peculiar services and distinguished merits of the Gentlemen who have been attached to my person during the war. — It was impossible the choice of confidential officers to compose my family should have been more fortunate. –Permit me Sir, to recommend in particular those, who have continued in service to the present moment, as worthy of the favorable notice & patronage of Congress.–
I consider it an indispensable duty duty to close this last solemn act of my Official life, by commending the Interests of our dearest Country to the protection of Almighty God, and those who have the superintendance direction of them, to his holy keeping.–
Having now finished the work assigned me, I retire from the great theatre of action, — and bidding an affectionate a final farewell to this August body, under whose orders I have so long acted, I here offer today deliver? my Commission, and take my ultimate leave of all the employments of public life.–
Photo tip
Rule of thumb to avoid photographing people with their eyes closed: divide the number of people by three (or by two if the light is bad). That means that if you’re taking a photo of 12 people, you need to take at least 4 photos to have a good chance of getting a photo with everyone’s eyes open.