October 3rd

Gore Vidal is 86 today.

Steve Reich is 75. Let this paragraph from Alex Ross in The New Yorker explain Reich’s compostitions:

In this sense, “Different Trains,” for recorded voices and string quartet, may be Reich’s most staggering achievement, even if “Music for 18” gives the purest pleasure. He wrote the piece in 1988, after recalling cross-country train trips that he had taken as a child. “As a Jew, if I had been in Europe during this period, I would have had to ride very different trains,” he has said. Recordings of his nanny reminiscing about their journeys and of an elderly man named Lawrence Davis recalling his career as a Pullman porter are juxtaposed with the testimonies of three Holocaust survivors. These voices give a picture of the dividedness of twentieth-century experience, of the irreconcilability of American idyll and European horror—and something in Mr. Davis’s weary voice also reminds us that America was never an idyll for all. The hidden melodies of the spoken material generate string writing that is rich in fragmentary modal tunes and gently pulsing rhythms.

The NPR 100 included Reich’s “Drumming” among its “100 most important American musical works of the 20th century.”

Ernest Evans is 70; that’s Chubby Checker. His version of “The Twist” was number one in both 1960 and 1962, though not at my high school where the Carmelite fathers decreed it too impure.

My daddy is sleepin’ and mama ain’t around
Yeah daddy is sleepin’ and
mama ain’t around
We’re gonna twisty twisty twisty
‘Til we turn the house down

Senator Jeff Bingaman is 68 today.

Roy is 67.

Siegfried & Roy met in 1957. Siegfried took a job on an ocean liner, first working as a steward. Roy got a job on the same ship as a waiter. While working one night, Roy heard people applauding and looked over to see Siegfried on a makeshift stage, taking a rabbit out of a hat. The two young men became friends and Roy began to serve as Siegfried’s assistant.

One night Siegfried asked Roy what he thought of the show. Roy got up the nerve to tell Siegfried that he found the magic a little too predictable. Astounded at Roy’s candor, especially considering he was five years Siegfried’s junior, Siegfried asked him how the show might be made better. “If you can make a rabbit and a dove appear and disappear, can you do the same with a cheetah?” Roy inquired. “In magic, anything is possible,” Siegfried responded.

As fate would have it, Roy had smuggled Chico the cheetah onboard, liberating him from the zoo. So Siegfried & Roy began to develop the magic that would become their trademark. Though the next five years were tough, traveling around Europe, playing small, unsophisticated clubs for little pay, they refused to become discouraged. Instead they focused on their magic and presentation.

A Magical Partnership

Lindsey Buckingham is 62.

Keb’ Mo’ (Kevin Moore) is 60.

Dave Winfield is 60.

A true five-tool athlete who never spent a day in the Minor Leagues, Dave Winfield played 22 seasons, earning 12 All-Star Game selections. At 6-foot-6, he was an imposing figure and a durable strongman with the rare ability to combine power and consistency. In tours of duty with six Major League teams, Winfield batted .283, hit 465 home runs and amassed 3,110 hits. He was a seven-time Gold Glove winner and helped lead the Toronto Blue Jays to their first World Championship in 1992.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Dennis Eckersley is 57.

Dennis Eckersley blazed a unique path to Hall of Fame success. During the first half of his 24-year big league career, Eck won over 150 games primarily as a starter, including a no-hitter in 1977. Over his final 12 years, he saved nearly 400 games, leading his hometown Oakland A’s to four American League West titles and earning both Cy Young and MVP honors in 1992. The only pitcher with 100 saves and 100 complete games, Eckersley dominated opposing batters during a six-year stretch from 1988-93, in which he struck out 458 while walking just 51.

Baseball Hall of Fame

Al Sharpton is 57.

Stevie Ray Vaughan would have been 57 today. He died in 1990.

Janel Moloney of The West Wing is 42.

Gwen Stefani is 42, neither “Hollaback” nor “Girl.”

A few times I’ve been around that track
So it’s not just gonna happen like that
Cause I ain’t no hollaback girl
I ain’t no hollaback girl

(A hollaback girl is a girl who lets boys do whatever, then waits for them to call, to holler back. Originally it meant a cheerleader who echoed the lead cheerleader’s call. The song uses both meanings well.)

Emily Post was born on October 3rd in 1873, thank you very much.

She taught as the basis of all correct deportment that “no one should do anything that can either annoy or offend the sensibilities of others.” Thousands found their social problems solved by her simple counsels. Her name became synonymous with good manners.

Mrs. Post’s advice was varied. She gave suggestions about how to inculcate good manners in an active 7-year-old boy and she could and did answer complicated questions about the proper way to address titled persons of Europe.

But for the most part she advised the debutante, the confused suitor and the newly married couple who wished to establish themselves in good relations with the world about them. She always avoided giving lonelyhearts advice and never suggested ways to capture a husband or wife, although many young persons found courtship easier because of what she said.

The New York Times

George Bancroft was born on October 3, 1800. As Secretary of the Navy, Bancroft initiated the creation of the United States Naval Academy in 1846. A historian even more than a politician, Bancroft wrote one of the first great histories of the U.S., the multi-volume History of the United States, from the Discovery of the American Continent.

John Ross was born on October 3, 1790.

John Ross, a man with the legend touch, walked tall upon the earth and cast a long shadow.  He set a precedent in democratic political history that will never be broken.  By free ballot, he was elected to ten successive terms of four years each as principal chief of the Cherokee Nation.

He died in office as chief executive of a government fashioned after that of the United States of America.
Intellectually, he was the greatest chief in the history of the Cherokee people.

. . .

John Ross stood so high in the eyes of his people that they called him Guwisguwi, the name of a rare migratory bird of large size and white or grayish plumage that had one time appeared at long intervals in the old Cherokee country.

He was only one-eighth Cherokee and seven-eighths Scot.  He was as much a Scotsman as his great opponent, Andrew Jackson, and fought just as tenaciously.  But he was forever Cherokee-minded.

Georgia Tribe of Eastern Cherokee

The Albuquerque Box

Conditions for this morning’s mass ascension at the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta were nearly ideal with a great Albuquerque Box. That’s the name for the condition when the heavy cool air flows south down the Rio Grande Valley while the warmer, lighter prevailing wind flows north. By changing altitude the pilot can maneuver in different directions. On TV just now a few balloons were landing back on the field that they left. That is so amazing — and considered a matter of pride for a pilot.

I wasn’t able to go out this morning, but last evening I joined the crew for Iwi the Kiwi, a gorgeous new balloon from New Zealand. Yesterday was the first day out of the bag for this aircraft (this morning, as I write, it’s on its maiden flight). The new shark and butterfly shaped balloons are getting all the attention on TV but Iwi was a big favorite with the crowd last night. He’s 80-some feet high with feet and a very long beak.

Photo taken with iPhone while working crew — just before I was required to add my weight to the gondola to keep this flightless bird on the ground. The twilight makes the balloon appear purplish, but it is actually dark brown.

Iwi doesn't look like much in the bag. The blue tarp is spread in anticipation of laying out the balloon. It wasn't damp, but the tarp, which was considerably shorter than the balloon envelope, gave the crowd notice that the space would soon be occupied.
The essential tool for a hot air balloon — propane burners to heat the air.
It takes a lot of hot air to keep a balloon this large inflated and standing up, even if it's not going to fly. As we deflated Iwi I was thinking I could heat my house for a long time this winter with all this heat.

The first World Series game ever

… was played 108 years ago today.

The Pittsburgh Pirates beat the Boston Americans 7-3.

Cy Young was the losing pitcher that day, but went on to win two games as Boston won the best-of-nine series, five games to three.

The Americans became known as the Red Sox in 1908. They were never known as the Pilgrims, though the name is often cited.

Redux line of the day

First posted two years ago today.

“Life is not measured by the number of breaths we take but by the moments that take our breath away.”

John Dickerson – Slate Magazine

Dickerson’s article is about list-making. He notes: “Digging through the boxes in my garage, cursing the disorganization, I came across an old planner from 1995. ‘Clean garage,’ it said on June 6.”

With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Crucial Climate Protectors

You don’t have to be a scientist to see that the climate is changing, even on a human time scale. Just look at the forests of the west, as the Times does — With Deaths of Forests, a Loss of Crucial Climate Protectors. The article begins:

WISE RIVER, Mont. — The trees spanning many of the mountainsides of western Montana glow an earthy red, like a broadleaf forest at the beginning of autumn.

But these trees are not supposed to turn red. They are evergreens, falling victim to beetles that used to be controlled in part by bitterly cold winters. As the climate warms, scientists say, that control is no longer happening.

Across millions of acres, the pines of the northern and central Rockies are dying, just one among many types of forests that are showing signs of distress these days.

. . .

Oh, and did you know that trees absorb carbon dioxide, so if the trees die, less will be absorbed, more trees will die and … and … and we have a classic feedback loop.

Yosemite National Park (California)

. . . was established 121 years ago today (1890).

Yosemite Falls, 2005 (NewMexiKen photo, click for larger version)

Not just a great Valley…

but a shrine to human foresight, strength of granite, power of glaciers, the persistence of life, and the tranquility of the High Sierra.

Yosemite National Park, one of the first wilderness parks in the United States, is best known for its waterfalls, but within its nearly 1,200 square miles, you can find deep valleys, grand meadows, ancient giant sequoias, a vast wilderness area, and much more.

Yosemite National Park

Last Night’s Photo

Every year on the eve of the Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta we meet on the West Mesa and “Howl at the Moon.”

And the Balloon Fiesta is off to a great start this morning thanks to our pagan festivities — at least it looks good to me on TV (I’m not much of an early riser). It may or may not sound like much to you, but I have to say it’ll be a damn shame if you never get to see this marvelous event. Nothing like it. 555 hot air balloons were expected to launch this morning and the Albuquerque Box is in effect.

Photo taken with an iPhone 4.

September 30th

NewMexiKen’s very own grandfather, John Louis Beyett, was born in Alvord, Wise County, Texas, 130 years ago today. He died before I was born, but I met his mother, my great-grandmother when I was 8-years-old. She was born in 1865 and was just 15 when my grandfather was born; the first of her nine children. She was 87 when I met her (and lived to be 93). It has always amazed me that I met an ancestor who was born the year Abraham Lincoln died.

My grandfather was French-Canadian on his father’s side (the family in Québec for 200 years before moving to Texas); Scots-Irish from Kentucky on his mother’s. His first wife died in 1918 giving birth to their sixth child. That child died then too, but the older five lived normal lifespans, though three had no children of their own. I met my four half-aunts and half-uncle, but just a few times.

Mom and her Dad

A few years after, at age 42, my widower grandfather married my 33-year-old never married grandmother, Lulu Cook. Only she too, his second wife, died in childbirth. That was in 1925 and that child survived. It was my mother. Mom ended up being raised by her mom’s brother and his wife (Grandpa and Grandma to me growing up).

Though I’d never met my grandfather or knew much about him, I always thought how tragic (if not uncommon) to lose two wives in childbirth. What a melancholy man he must have been by the time he died of a heart attack at age 62.*

And then a few years ago, thanks to the internets, I discovered all was not as it had seemed. Just 10 weeks before my mother was born to his newlywed wife, my grandfather had another daughter born. Her mother’s name was Hernandez and it was their third child together. I had two more half-uncles and a half-aunt, Francisco, Eduardo and Ana Maria. This was in Laredo, Texas.

It’s a miracle any one of us is here at all.
_______

* My mother, grandmother and grandfather died at ages 48, 35 and 62. I don’t include them in any life expectancy charts. My dad, grandmother and grandfather died at 83, 90 and 90. I got all my genes from them.

Water year

It isn’t likely to rain today and local science and weather writer John Fleck is reporting a water year final total at my house: 4.94 inches (12.55 cm). 50.5% of normal. I believe John lives near the University of New Mexico in the central part of Albuquerque.

“Water Year” is a U.S. Geological Survey term running from October 1st through September 30th. This is because stream flows in the U.S. are usually at their lowest in October, therefore less variable from day-to-day.

Markets Can Be Very, Very Wrong

Good specific economic analysis from Nobel-winner Paul Krugman:

Even with this restricted vision of costs, they find that the costs of air pollution are big, and heavily concentrated in a few industries. In fact, there are a number of industries that inflict more damage in the form of air pollution than the value-added by these industries at market prices.

It’s important to be clear about what this means. It does not necessarily say that we should end the use of coal-generated electricity. What it says, instead, is that consumers are paying much too low a price for coal-generated electricity, because the price they pay does not take account of the very large external costs associated with generation. If consumers did have to pay the full cost, they would use much less electricity from coal — maybe none, but that would depend on the alternatives.

Facebook Timeline: Important privacy settings to adjust now

With Timeline, every status update, wall post and photo ever posted since the day you joined Facebook becomes easily searchable to you and your friends. For many—early adopters especially—dredging up the past for all to see can be a privacy nightmare.

When your Facebook account is migrated to the new Timeline—which Facebook started rolling out Thursday—you’ll have one week to make any adjustments to your past posts and privacy settings before your Timeline will go live for everyone to see. You can publish it yourself anytime within the five-day waiting period.

Here are what your options are for adjusting your settings, based on the level of privacy you want to achieve.

Macworld

Just watching it WAS fun

“There are several stories that will mark baseball’s fine last evening, but the most agreeable, even for this Red Sox fan, is that of Dan Johnson, who’d spent part of the season in the minor leagues despite being among the team’s great hopes going into the season. His two-strike home run down the right-field line never got very high off the ground, and just barely hooked inside the foul pole. … His teammates didn’t quite believe what had happened either, as they slapped him on the head and seemed to giggle, yes, like little boys. Being good enough to play professional baseball must be fun, and hitting a season-extending home run must be even more fun.”

The Sporting Scene : The New Yorker

Johnson was batting .108.