Scenes from Life

The concept is simple. Each day, one new photo will be posted on the site. A photographer is assigned to shoot one photo a day for seven days. The photo can be of anything the photographer wants. The only guideline is that the photo that’s posted has to have been taken within the past 24 hours. After the week is up a new photographer in a new location will contribute a week’s worth of photos and so on. Our archive section will contain every photo posted on this site.

The purpose of the site is to show a wide range of photos from a wide range of place from an eclectic mix of photographers. You don’t need be a professional photographer to contribute as this is really more about snapshots from our daily lives.

scene from my life

Thanks to Veronica for the tip.

Chuckles from Last Week

“Louisiana Congressman Bill Jefferson — the one who got caught with $90,000 in bribe money hidden in his freezer — is running an ad saying he has never taken a bribe from anyone. And you can tell he’s trying to put a good spin on it — he said he put the money in his freezer to protect it from global warming.”

Jay Leno [Jefferson is in a run-off election.]

“The popular toy this Christmas is the new doll – the Heckle Me Kramer.”

David Letterman

Like I wrote in the headline, “Chuckles,” not laughs.

New Content for NewMexiKen

Cute kid stories 24-7.

Tanya reports:

This weekend we decided to take the girls to see Santa Claus. In preparation for the trip, I asked Cat, age 4, what she wanted for Christmas. She thought for a long time and then said, “shiny new lipstick of my very own.” “Ok, I said, what else?” She sat quietly for a minute and then said “a new world.” “A new world?” I asked wondering if Disney had launched a Princess Planet that I had missed. “What kind of new world?” Cat replied, “Mommy, I want a new world where everyone can play nicely together.”

Any kid that wants lipstick and a new world deserves a picture postcard.

Miss Cat Cunningham c/o Pre-K/K
EEC, Inc.
730 Halstead Rd.
Wilmington, DE 19803

All News Has Become ‘People’ Magazine

Daily Howler discusses the Bush-Webb story. An excerpt:

What did Bush say to Webb? The truth is, we don’t really know. And what was his tone of voice—did he—”snap?” Sorry, we don’t know that either.

No, we don’t really know what Bush said to Webb. And we don’t know his tone of voice when he said it. But so what! As we first noted years ago, “novelization of news” has long been the specialty of the cohort we still call a “press corps.” It’s the way they prefer to transform the real news. Here’s how the practice works:

First, they form a Standard Group Judgment about some politician’s character. Then, they come up with a pleasing Group Story—a story which helps persuade the world that their judgment is wonderfully accurate. In 1999 and 2000, this was endlessly done to Candidate Gore—and it sent Candidate Bush to the White House. But the “press corps” has finally come to see that Bush has been a cosmic failure. So they’ve started peddling pleasing novels which display hisfailed character too.
…

Let’s offer a slightly larger perspective. The “press corps” is now writing novels which cut against Bush because they’ve finally agreed to disown him. For years, though, their silly tales have cut against Dems—and because they’re largely an upper-class institution, that’s the way their tales will tend to cut in the future. In our view, liberals and progressives would do better to reject this silly version of “news” altogether. The press corps does this sort of thing to Republicans when they manage to ruin the world. But in the long run, they will do this to Dems for no earthly reason. In our view, liberals and progressives would be much wiser to reject this whole practice. Flat, cold.

NewMexiKen didn’t mention the Webb story for this very reason. Who knows what was really said and its tone?

Oh, and regarding my title for this post, there is absolutely nothing wrong with People. It’s when all public discourse becomes celebrity-driven that we have a problem.

Hey, College Presidents, Who Pays Your Salary?

To state the obvious, if there was a playoff system, this morning eight teams would still have a shot at the NCAA Division I-A football championship instead of two. That is so much better than the BCS, it’s by orders of magnitude.

Most of the football powers are state schools. That means the people that run those schools are public employees (whether they realize it or not).

So excuse me, but why are our employees f***ing with us?

Ins and Outs, Mostly Outs

Freakonomics co-author Stephen Dubner asks: Would You Fly on an Airplane With No Pilot?. That is, would you fly on a remotely operated airliner?

Called and then showed up at a restaurant Sunday afternoon. Was told in turn by four different people: “definitely open for dinner at 4,” “it’s early, but not a problem,” “I don’t think we’re serving yet, but I’ll check,” (it was no), and “not until five.” C’mon folks, how hard can it be? Maybe they had too many hosts and hostesses and not enough cooks. We went somewhere else.

The photo in the masthead (as this is written) is of my neighbor’s house. Don’t tell him. (It’s the least he could do. He’s left than darn things on all night the last two nights.)

My cockles are still warm from the rock ballet last evening. As my friend Donna said, when she danced you had to be the right size and just so to be in the cast. Now everyone is allowed to perform. Seeing as how it wasn’t exactly the Bolshoi, letting everyone perform is just perfect.

True to form (that’s why I love him) FunctionalAmbivalent found a particularly tacky underwear Christmas gift today.

What I’d really like for Christmas:

  • Someone to wash all my house windows, inside and out.
  • Someone to detail my car.

Jeff Bridges is 57 today, Cassandra Wilson 51, Jay-Z 37, and Tyra Banks 33. Bridges has four Oscar nominations, three for supporting actor and one for leading — Starman.

Roll Over Beethoven

And tell Tchaikovsky the news. In Albuquerque they perform The Nutcracker to a different beat.

NewMexiKen had the enjoyable pleasure this evening of attending a tenth anniversary performance of Nutcracker on the Rocks, a reinvented version of the traditional Nutcracker ballet. The music of Tchaikovsky opens and closes the dance, but in between we hear — and the dancers dance to — James Brown (“I Got You”), Van Morrison (“Moondance”), The Velvet Underground (“Rock ‘n Roll”), Aretha Franklin (“Rock Steady”) Billie Holiday, The Rolling Stones (“Sympathy for the Devil”), Morphine (“You Look Like Rain”), Janis Joplin (“Move Over”) and others. There were nearly 100 individual dancers, some of them very young, all of them enthusiastic, many quite good. Keshet founding company member Sarah Elizabeth Bennett was terrific as the Rat Queen.

And it makes me proud and happy that I live in a time and place where some of the “snowflakes” danced in their wheelchairs — and that even the chairs were choreographed into the dance movements.

The performance was at the Roy E. Disney Center for the Arts at the National Hispanic Cultural Center, an Albuquerque gem. The run is over for this year, but make plans for 2007.

Keshet Dance Company is a community supported, non-profit professional dance company. Keshet is Hebrew for rainbow.

Do Any of Us Ever Leave Junior High?

30-year-old #1: So we went out on Thursday, and he didn’t call me Friday or Saturday, which was good. Then he showed up at the party on Sunday and didn’t talk to me for the first 35 minutes. Yesterday, he left me a message telling me how nice the party was, and I haven’t called him back.

30-year-old #2: But you like him.

30-year-old #1: Yeah, I think it’s going well.

–12th & Broadway

Overheard in New York

A Good Guy

NewMexiKen learned recently that my dentist had been killed in an accident in September. Swimming alone at a gym pool late in the evening he hit his head and, as I understand it, drowned. So sad. He was an agreeable man in his late fifties, easy with a laugh. And, of course, I felt toward him as so many of us do toward our health professionals, a certain amount of Stockholm syndrome. Rest in Peace.

I’ve mentioned the dentist before in these pages.

December 3rd

Ozzy Osbourne is 58.

Daryl Hannah is 46 today. So is Julianne Moore. Together they have four Oscar nominations, two for leading actress and two for supporting actress. All are Moore’s, of course.

Brendan Fraser is 38.

Illinois was admitted to the Union as the 21st state on this date in 1818.

George B. McClellan was born on this date in 1826. McClellan was the commander of Union forces in the east during much of the first two years of the War of the Rebellion. He loved to organize and feared to fight. McClellan was the unsuccessful Democratic candidate for President in 1864, receiving 21 to Lincoln’s 212 electoral votes. For his unabashed hubris, McClellan rates right up there as one of the great asses of American history.

Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski was born on this date in 1857. Born in the Ukraine of Polish descent, Joseph Conrad learned English in the British merchant marine in his twenties. He began writing in the 1890s and published his first novel, Almayer’s Folly, in 1895. Lord Jim (1900) and Heart of Darkness (1902) are his most famous works.

The first human heart transplant took place in Cape Town, South Africa, on this date 39 years ago (1967). The patient, Lewis Washkansky, survived 18 days before he died from double pneumonia, a result of anti-rejection drugs suppressing his immune system.

Fighting DWI with a Song

The Soul Deacons, a Santa Fe-based band, will soon get the most radio play in their six-year history— but it will only be 30 seconds at a time.

The band has recorded its version of an old R&B song, “Christmas in Jail,” and a 30-second piece of that recording is the centerpiece of the state Department of Transportation’s anti-DWI messages for the holiday season.

The Albuquerque Journal has a player with the song currently on its free, public main page.