I posted this first a year ago, but it so amazes me here it is again.
NewMexiKen sat next to an off-duty flight attendant on the trip east Wednesday. She told me that once while she was administering CPR to a passenger who had had a heart attack, the man behind her across the aisle tapped her on the shoulder and asked if she was going to get his drink or not.
… was authorized 20 years ago today.
“Freedom is not free.” Here, one finds the expression of American gratitude to those who restored freedom to South Korea. Nineteen stainless steel sculptures stand silently under the watchful eye of a sea of faces upon a granite wall—reminders of the human cost of defending freedom. These elements all bear witness to the patriotism, devotion to duty, and courage of Korean War veterans.
… of Charlie Daniels. The devil in Georgia is 70.
… of Bill Gates. The former resident of Albuquerque is 51 today.
… of Julia Roberts. The Oscar-winning (Erin Brockovich) actress is 39. Ms. Roberts was also nominated for best actress for Pretty Woman and best supporting actress for Steel Magnolias.
… of Joaquin Phoenix. He’s already been nominated for a best supporting actor (“Gladiator”) and a leading actor (“Walk the Line”) Oscar and he’s just 32.
It’s also the birthday of Dr. Jonas Salk, developer of the polio vaccine. He was born in 1914 and died in 1995. The following is from The Writer’s Almanac in 2004:
In the 1950s, Salk turned his attention to the polio virus. The disease affected children and many of those infected became paralyzed or died. There had been larger and larger outbreaks of polio in the United States since the late 19th century. By 1952, more than 58,000 cases were reported and more than 3,000 children had died of the disease.
It was the height of the baby boom, there were more children in the United States than ever before, and parents were terrified. The outbreaks occurred in the summer, and parents kept their children home from swimming pools out of fear they would be infected.
Salk’s groundbreaking discovery was that a vaccine could be developed from a dead virus. Scientists were skeptical at the time, but Salk believed so strongly that it would work that he first tested the vaccine on himself, his family and the staff of his laboratory to prove it was safe.
When the vaccine was finally released to the public in 1955, polio infection rates were reduced to less than 100 cases a year, and Salk was declared a national hero.
I just marvel that the distance between the bases in baseball was established around 150 years ago at 90 feet and ever since there have been split-second plays at first. The ball has changed, the bats have changed, gloves were invented and evolved, the players are stronger, faster, bigger — yet, after 150 years, 90 feet still works perfectly.
Pitchers and catchers report in 16 weeks.
Everything Rush Limbaugh says means the same thing.
The actual words he uses are irrelevent. He might as well be talking gibberish (Yeah, I know.) or in code. Whatever he says needs to be translated and is as easy to translate as pig-latin.
No matter what he says this is what he means: “Rich white guys like me should run the country and be allowed to do whatever we want, and anybody or anything that gets in the way of that needs to be steamrollered in a hurry.”
— Lance Mannion at the beginning of an excellent essay on the Fox-Limbaugh brouhaha.
“If you can’t—if all you can see is ‘acting’—then you need more help than they do. Fox’s disease can only take your body. Limbaugh’s can take your soul.”
— William Saletan on “The psychosis of Rush Limbaugh.”
Via Kottke, Netflix is offering a $1 million prize for developing a better movie recommendation system. An individual analyzing their data noted that Netflix members have rated some movies either particularly high or particularly low. Here’s the top 10:
1. The Royal Tenenbaums
2. Lost in Translation
3. Pearl Harbor
4. Miss Congeniality
5. Napoleon Dynamite
6. Fahrenheit 9/11
7. The Patriot
8. The Day After Tomorrow
9. Sister Act
10. Armageddon
An interesting list. NewMexiKen has seen eight of these and I understand the strong feelings.
Washington’s importance has been so beyond question that, as one exhibition here shows, 155 towns and counties, 740 schools and 26 mountains in the United States are named after Washington.
But, James C. Rees, the institution’s executive director, said in an interview here, less is being taught about Washington in schools these days, and fewer visitors to Mount Vernon arrive with an understanding of his achievements. So after long planning and annual consultations with a panel of scholars, the expansion was designed to reaffirm his importance, elucidate his character and dramatize his life.
This is not an easy task: there really is a mystery about Washington in a way there is not with other founding fathers. The historian Joseph J. Ellis said that Benjamin Franklin was wiser, Alexander Hamilton more brilliant, John Adams better read, Thomas Jefferson more intellectually sophisticated and James Madison more politically astute, yet each thought Washington his “unquestioned superior.” Why?
From an excellent review of the extraordinary new exhibits at Mount Vernon.
If we’re going to build a wall along the border, let’s at least be smart about it like the Chinese and make it a tourist attraction.
(BTW, the wall is approved, but the funding is not. Ah, politicians, gotta love ’em. It is all smoke and mirrors.)
… of Ruby Dee. The actress and Kennedy Center Honor recipient is 82.
… of John Cleese. He’s 67, which means he doesn’t have too many more years to undermine his reputation from the Monty Python days with a continuing string of asinine TV commercials.
Theodore Roosevelt was born on this date in 1858. Roosevelt is still the youngest President ever. He was 42 when he succeeded McKinley in 1901.
The Welsh poet Dylan Thomas was born on this date in 1914. (He died in 1953.)
My birthday began with the water –
Birds and the birds of the winged trees flying my name
Above the farms and the white horses
And I rose
In rainy autumn
And walked abroad in a shower of all my days
The Pulitzer Prize-winning poet Sylvia Plath was born on this date in 1932. She died, from suicide, at age 30 in early 1963.
“Down in Washington, President Bush has approved a plan to build a 700 mile fence on a portion of the Mexican border. He said he also knows where he can find some cheap labor to build it.”
“A long fence on the border. Something like this I just hope Halliburton can get some money out of the deal. Be nice to see something go their way for a change.”
— David Letterman
Yesterday’s New York Times had an op-ed page piece on the Gunfight at the O.K. Corral.
Today, some 3,000 tourists will jam the streets of Tombstone to watch re-enactments of the event, aiming to come into contact with a piece of distant American history and encounter a time completely separate from our own. What’s odd about this, however, is that the social and political issues that created the context for the gunfight remain alive, and for the most part unresolved, in the American West today.
… federal versus local law jurisdiction
… gun control
… illegal immigration
For “The Anatomy of Influence,” a forthcoming feature in our December issue, we asked ten prominent historians—Joyce Appleby, H. W. Brands, Robert Dallek, Ellen Fitzpatrick, Doris Kearns Goodwin, John Steele Gordon, David M. Kennedy, Walter McDougall, Mark Noll, and Gordon Wood—to each pick and rank the 100 most influential Americans throughout history. We then tabulated their lists to come up with an Atlantic top 100, which will be published in the December issue.
We invite readers to submit their guesses as to who ended up as the top ten names on our combined list. Participants who correctly guess all ten will receive a selection of books by the panel of historians. Entries must be received by Thursday, November 2.
The Today Show (as reported by Digby):
LAUER: And you brought up Michael J. Fox. Let me just ask you: You know, Rush Limbaugh started a lot of controversy when he said perhaps Michael J. Fox was exaggerating or faking these effects of Parkinson’s disease in that ad promoting stem cell research. Didn’t Rush Limbaugh just say what a lot of people were privately thinking?
[…]
LAUER: But also, Susan, last word. If Michael Fox goes out there politically and puts himself in the fray, he has to expect to be, you know, taken to account, correct?
ESTRICH: Correct. And he is being taken to account.
CBS News (as reported by Digby):
The portion of the interview they broadcast was quite decent. But you can see the whole interview here — and listen to Katie Couric push him over and over again on the burning question of whether he manipulated his medication and ask him whether he should have re-scheduled the shoot when his symptoms were manifested as they were. And she does it while she’s sitting directly across from him watching him shake like crazy. Her questions imply that it was in poor taste or manipulative as if he can magically conjure a film crew to catch him in on of the fleeting moments where he doesn’t appear too symptomatic. The press seems to truly believe that it is reasonable to be suspicious of him showing symptoms of a disease that has him so severely in its clutches that if he doesn’t take his medication his face becomes a frozen mask and he cannot even talk.
So they succeeded, Michael J. Fox is the issue.
John the farmer was in the fertilized egg business. He had several hundred young layers (hens), called “pullets”, and ten roosters, whose job it was to fertilize the eggs (for you city folks). The farmer kept records and any rooster that didn’t perform went into the soup pot and was replaced. That took an awful lot of his time, so he bought a set of tiny bells and attached them to his roosters. Each bell had a different tone so John could tell from a distance, which rooster was performing. Now he could sit on the porch and fill out an efficiency report simply by listening to the bells.
The farmer’s favorite rooster was old Butch, and a very fine specimen he was, too. But on this particular morning John noticed old Butch’s bell hadn’t rung at all! John went to investigate. The other roosters were chasing pullets, bells-a-ringing. The pullets, hearing the roosters coming, would run for cover. But to Farmer John’s amazement, old Butch had his bell in his beak, so it couldn’t ring. He’d sneak up on a pullet, do his job and walk on to the next one. John was so proud of old Butch, he entered him in the Renfrew County Fair and he became an overnight sensation among the judges.
The result…The judges not only awarded old Butch the No Bell Piece Prize but they also awarded him the Pulletsurprise as well. Clearly old Butch was a politician in the making: who else but a politician could figure out how to win two of the most highly coveted awards on our planet by being the best at sneaking up on the populace and screwing them when they weren’t paying attention.
“We are all atheists about most of the gods that humanity has ever believed in. Some of us just go one god further.”
— Richard Dawkins quoted at The Official Richard Dawkins Website. Dawkins is blogging his book tour for The God Delusion.
This Washington signing was remarkable for the number who bought not just one copy of The God Delusion but up to half a dozen. ‘Christmas presents?’ I inquired of one man. ‘Winter solstice’, he instantly corrected me.
Cop, taking report of stolen car: Ok, what was the color, make and model?
Metro Guy: It’s cranberry and…
Cop: Cranberry’s something you eat, son, your car was red.
–L.I.C.
“The languages used by the astonishingly diverse cast include Spanish, Berber, Japanese, sign language and English. The misunderstandings multiply accordingly, though they tend to be most acute between husbands and wives or parents and children, rather than between strangers.”
— A.O. Scott in a review of Babel, which I’m not sure he likes, be he sure seems to feel. (Not unexpected from a film that see references to “Amores Perros,” “21 Grams,” and “Crash” in its review.}
Fans with tickets for Game 5 of the World Series, dated Thursday, October 26, should use them tonight for what has now become Game 4.
The rainout of Wednesday night’s game means that fans who had tickets for that game will use them on Friday night for Game 5. The theory behind the juggling is that it inconveniences the fewest number of fans. Rather than having two crowds of 46,000 having to rearrange their schedules, only one will. …
Those plans, of course, assume that a game will be played as scheduled tonight.
… against the Michael J. Fox ad, is that it’s working.
Republicans who indicated that they were voting for a Republican candidate decreased by 10% after viewing the ad (77% to 67%). Independents planning to vote for Democrats increased by 10%, from 39% to 49%. (Yahoo! Finance)
Rolling Stone takes a look at New Mexico 1, one of this year’s most important house races.
“This is a great race,” says venerable political handicapper Stu Rothenberg. “Wilson is tough. She’s admired. But Madrid is a great campaigner. There’s a ton of national money in this race. It’s going to be a squeaker.”
On Oct. 12, in the basement of a Unitarian church on the town green in Lexington, Mass., a carpenter named Michael Cresta scored 830 points in a game of Scrabble. His opponent, Wayne Yorra, who works at a supermarket deli counter, totaled 490 points. The two men set three records for sanctioned Scrabble in North America: the most points in a game by one player (830), the most total points in a game (1,320), and the most points on a single turn (365, for Cresta’s play of QUIXOTRY).
Read more from Slate Magazine
After three words it was 239-169. Three words, three “bingoes” (using all seven letters).
Tombstone, Arizona, now a sleepy retirement community of 1,500 trying to milk its history, was a silver boom town of 10,000 in the early 1880s. Lawlessness was rampant — so much so that martial law was threatened by President Arthur in 1882.
Among the early residents were the Earp brothers, James, Virgil, Wyatt, Morgan, and Warren (ages 40 to 25 respectively in 1881). The Earps were, more or less, itinerant lawmen, politicians, security guards, and gamblers. By 1881, Virgil and Wyatt were established in Tombstone, seeking political office and running gaming tables. When the town marshal disappeared, Virgil Earp was appointed to the job.
The Clantons, father N.H. “Old Man,” and sons Ike, Phin, and Billy, were part of the town rowdy cowboy crowd, probably rustling cattle from Mexico and generally being unsavory — at least as far the the establishment was concerned. They were also Southern Democrats. The Earps were Union men (James had seriously wounded in the war).
The bad blood between the two families seems to have grown out of finger pointing between them. The Earps would accuse the Clantons of some nefarious activity and the Clantons would point right back — and, of course, both were basically telling the truth. Wyatt, intent on a big splash to assure his election as sheriff, negotiated with Ike to reveal the identities of the Contention stage coach robbers and killers so he, Earp, could capture them. The negotiations fell through, but knowledge of them became public, making Ike look like the turncoat he was. He blamed Wyatt.
On October 26, 1881, Virgil Earp arrested Ike Clanton, who had been making threats since the previous evening. As Virgil hauled Clanton to the courthouse, Wyatt ran into a friend of Clanton’s, Tom McLaury. They had a heated exchange that ended when Wyatt hit McLaury over the head with a pistol. After this, Ike and Tom, joined by their brothers Billy and Frank respectively, considered their options, including leaving town. Billy Claiborne joined them. Virgil Earp, the town marshal, enlisted Wyatt, Morgan, and their friend Doc Holliday to help arrest the Clantons and McLaurys.
They met in a vacant on Fremont Street near the O.K. Corral livery stable. Thirty shots were fired in about 30 seconds. Billy Clanton and the McLaury brothers were killed. Virgil and Morgan Earp were wounded. The two prime antagonists, Ike Clanton and Wyatt Earp, were unhurt, as was Claiborne. The Earps were accused of murder, but a justice of the peace found they had acted as officers of the law.
The gunfight was the end of the Earps political plans in Tombstone. Virgil lost his post as town marshal. Family and friends of the Clantons began a vendetta, seriously wounding Virgil in December and killing Morgan in March 1882. Wyatt killed a deputy sheriff and another man suspected of being involved in Morgan’s shooting.
Virgil and Wyatt took their skills and ambitions to California, Colorado, and Alaska. Warren Earp was killed in Wilcox, Arizona, in a gunfight that might have been fallout from the O.K. Corral. Virgil died of pnuemonia in 1906. Wyatt Earp died in 1929. He was 80.
