Exactly

Arizona at USC — 37-14, 37-10, 56-31. Arizona’s past three games. The Wildcats are the 14 and the 10 and the 31. And another loss coming up, at USC. Finished last season with five straight losses, three of them blowouts, did the Wildcats. At some schools, coaches build credit they can ride through tough times by winning a national or conference championship. In Tucson, apparently, an 8-5 season earns you that credit. Before two of those eight-win gems, Mike Stoops went 5-7, 6-6, a couple 3-8’s, maybe even a 2-10 way back there. Is this guy’s seat finally hot? Or hot again? Or genuinely hot? I’m asking. I don’t hear much news out of Arizona and I’ve spent two days of my life in Tucson — saw the Mission San Xavier del Bac, then built up an appetite walking around campus, and then relented to that appetite at one of the finest Outback Steakhouses I’ve ever been to. Let’s take this hot-seat talk in a different direction. If the Arizona athletic department doesn’t care about the football team, hire a head coach who needs the money. Hire a guy with two 11-dollar-an-hour jobs and four kids. This is a chance to help someone, to transcend sport. You can still hire regular assistant coaches to install their systems and call plays. Down South, we honestly don’t see much of a difference between losing most of your games (41-48, the Internet tells me) and losing all of them.

John Brandon: The Week in College Football – Grantland

This alum frankly doesn’t see much of a difference between losing most of your games and losing all of them either. And the record is more like 34-48 because beating Northern Arizona five times and Stephen F. Austin and The Citadel don’t count for much.

Best political analysis of the day

Pierce explains Chris Christie. An excerpt:

Rachel Maddow made this point in lovely fashion last night, running a succession of YouTube videos of which Christie and his people are so proud that they’ve taken to using them to establish his bona fides as a national figure. Here’s Chris berating a public-school teacher. Here’s Chris blowing off an uppity constituent on a radio show. Here’s Chris explaining that he’s a ruff-tuff guy from Joisey who can give your attitude back to you if you cop one with him.

If there were any political advantage to pulling the wings off of flies, Chris Christie would have his own show on the Outdoor Life Network by now.

A sex ed exam — for adults

Last week, news broke that Washington, D.C., will require kids in public schools to complete a standardized sex ed test — the first of its kind in the nation. The announcement sparked controversy, per the usual, as well as bad jokes about “extra credit requirements.” Meanwhile, I was left wondering in all seriousness how many adults could actually pass just such an exam.

So, I decided to call upon some experts in the fields of sex research and education to help devise a multiple-choice exam for grown-ups, one that incorporates the key knowledge they find most lacking in the real world — but without being a total snooze. . . .

A sex ed exam — for adults – Salon.com

I’m not giving my score.

Today’s Photos

Yesterday Donna and I took a little day road-trip (in the Z, of course). First stop was the Bradbury Science Museum in Los Alamos. This fine museum is a must for anyone with an interest in science or history. We stayed about an hour, but promised each other to return soon for a more in-depth look. If you’ve never been, go. It’s free. And watch the short film.

Next we went over the pass west of Los Alamos, shaking our head at the bald hills, forested before the 2000 Cerro Grande fire, and at the newly burned trees, dead and dying, from this summer’s Las Conchas fire. Destruction as far as the eye can see in some cases. (156,000 acres burned this summer.) We saw where the fire had crossed Highway 501 onto Los Alamos National Laboratory property. (Where they keep the plutonium!)

Though encircled on the east and south by burnt, brown trees, and not as green as usual due to the drought, the Valles Caldera is still one Earth’s sublime sights. And the National Preserve was open to visit. We drove down the 2-mile gravel road to the visitor center, expecting just to enjoy the view from inside the valley, rather than only along the ridge from Highway 4 as usual. To our delight, we were offered a shuttle ride back into the Preserve to pick up some hikers (for $8 apiece, senior rate). We let them twist our arms.

It was wonderful to see — mostly in isolation as personal vehicles are not allowed — some of the other valleys and ridges in the Preserve, the original ranch buildings and old movie sets. Most exciting was seeing scores of elk enjoying the single-bar action of their fall rut (and if you’ve never heard a bull elk bugling, it is one of the great natural sounds — here’s a short Elk Call video from Yellowstone, if you can get by the people talking and the camera sounds. Why must people always talk?).

Alas I had forgotten my Nikon at home, so was forced to rely on the iPhone. Click any image for a version twice as large.

Looking south across the Valle Grande. That's the visitor center that appears as a white speck in the center. Highway 4 is on the distant ridge. The hills in the distance were all burned.
This bull had a large harem, apparently all to himself. One bull often controls a large number of females during the fall but exhausts himself in the process. It's not unusual for the dominant bull to die during the winter, so run-down he is from the effort.
Elk, including several bulls, bugling and challenging each other and trying to assure immortality for their DNA.
Looking east. A third of the Preserve's 89,000 acres was burned during this summer's Las Conchas Wildfire.

We ended the day at the Los Ojos Saloon in Jemez Springs in beautiful Jemez Canyon with green chile (fresh!) cheeseburgers, God’s personal gift to New Mexico.

Best line of the day

“I love sports. I think that’s what sportswriting on the Internet is all about. There’s a connection between writer and reader on the Internet that goes beyond the printed page. There are comments, easy ways to reply, polls and video and audio embedded, arguments, agreements, feelings hurt, exclamation points, it’s a lot like talking sports in a bar. In some ways it’s even better than talking sports in a bar because there isn’t crappy music playing too loud and the drunk who is screaming ‘Yankees RUULLLLE!’ is easily skipped over in the comments section. It’s not as good as talking sports in a bar, however, because the Internet does not offer beer. I expect Apple to fix that with their next version of the iPad.”

Joe Posnanski

Best line of the day

“A few strokes before midnight Sunday, a motorcycle policeman turned on his red and blue lights and led four Oregon Ducks buses from Arizona Stadium to the airport.

“It was the only time all night that anything red and blue had a step on the Ducks.”

Greg Hansen, Tucson Arizona Daily Star

Red and blue are Arizona’s colors.

Arizona has gone 63-84 since its 12-1 season in 1998.

Best line of the day

“This is what I was thinking when I walked up to the kid who was wearing a t-shirt emblazoned with the images of Thomas Jefferson and Ron Paul. I asked him if Congressman Paul would have supported President Jefferson when the latter pole-vaulted over the powers of his office, and over almost everything he’d ever said in his life regarding the authority of the federal government, in order to buy the Louisiana Territory so we could all one day have a whole lot of college football. He looked dimly at me as though I had taken to speaking in Finnish. And, in my mind’s eye, Clio, the Muse of History, gulps 12 Quaaludes and reaches for the tequila.”

Charles P. Pierce

Pierce has a new politics blog. Awesome!

“Rick Perry was in the Air Force. Herman Cain did ballistics analysis for the Navy. Jon Huntsman has worked government jobs for 20 years, and Mitt Romney’s father was governor of Michigan. Rick Scott proudly admits he grew up in public housing, and Paul Ryan got through high school and college on Social Security survivor’s benefits. And this is how they all came to become small-government conservatives who didn’t need a hand-out.”

How Do You Say ‘Economic Security’?

Turn back the clock to June 1934. Millions of Americans are out of work, losing their homes and facing more of the same. President Franklin D. Roosevelt responds by creating the Committee on Economic Security. To Congress, he stresses that he places “the security of the men, women and children of the nation first.” All Americans, he emphasizes, “want decent homes to live in; they want to locate them where they can engage in productive work; and they want some safeguard against misfortunes which cannot be wholly eliminated in this man-made world of ours.”

…

Fast forward to February 2010. With millions of Americans out of work, home foreclosures at historic highs and little prospect of relief for those in need, President Obama acts, establishing a National Commission on Fiscal Responsibility and Reform. The commission’s task is to “improve the fiscal situation,” to “achieve fiscal sustainability over the long run” and to address “the growth of entitlement spending.” The commission recommends, true to its charge, cuts in entitlement spending — that is, the programs established in 1935 and later years to aid the unemployed, aged, disabled and sick.

From a piece by Theodore R. Marmor and Jerry L. Mashaw in The New York Times

None of that mamby-pamby lethal injection stuff

“In case we’re not sure exactly what happened here, Pinker explains that Harrison was ‘partly strangled, disemboweled, castrated and shown his organs being burned before being decapitated.'”

Now that’s what I call capital punishment. And I’m guessing Harrison wasn’t sedated during this. (The event took place at Charing Cross, London, in 1660.)

From the Scientific American blog Cross-Check reviewing Steven Pinker’s The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined.

Latest iPhone 5 rumor is an awesome one

Want to send an iMessage without typing? I could just say “send a text to Barb saying I’m going to the bank” and the message is created and sent. You can also use Assistant with the location-based reminder feature in the iOS Reminders app, by using commands like “Remind me to buy Vitamin D when I’m at Whole Foods Market.” Voice requests for directions are also a feature — asking “How do I get to Carnegie Hall?” won’t result in the expected response (“practice, practice, practice”) but directions from your current location to 881 7th Avenue in New York City.

Assistant also has a conversation view, in which the system literally converses with the user in order to provide the best results. Let’s say set up a meeting with Tim Cook on October 4th. You’d say “Set up a meeting with Tim Cook,” and the iPhone would respond by asking “Which email address should Tim Cook be notified at, home or work?” When you’d respond “Work,”, the iPhone would ask the time and date you want to schedule the meeting for. At the end of the conversation, you’d be shown the details of the calendar event for confirmation.

We’re told that you can speak to the Assistant in your normal tone and speed of voice; it’s that accurate. Assistant is also integrated with Wolfram Alpha, so you could also ask your iPhone questions like “Convert 10.2 acres to hectares” or “What’s the cube root of 924?” and get an immediate answer.

TUAW – The Unofficial Apple Weblog

It can always get worse

So some kid carrying twice the legal limit of alcohol in his system was driving the UNM football coach’s SUV when arrested yesterday. He said he was a recruit, but it appears he was possibly just a friend of the coach’s son. Whatever.

He was driving through the football game crowd when stopped. Not that he could have done any harm there — it was the smallest crowd at a New Mexico home game in 19 years. (They lost to a FCS school, Sam Houston State, in OT 45-48. Now 0-4.)

Meanwhile the most recent former UNM coach, Rocky Long, was coaching the San Diego State Aztecs in front of 110,707 at Ann Arbor.

Didn’t Sam Houston State used to be Sam Houston Institute of Technology?

Update: The 19-year-old was charged with aggravated DWI, minor in possession of alcohol, reckless driving and driving without a license.

Best lines of the day about Texas

I can’t be the only person watching Rick Perry’s performance as a presidential candidate and wondering, how did this guy become a Texas political legend, an unstoppable force who never lost? Did nobody ever ask him a slightly hard question before?

So I asked my favorite Texan, aka my wife, and she said, “Texas is feudal”. Meaning that Perry was the candidate of the bidness community, and in Texas, what bidness wants, bidness gets.

Of course, he might yet become president. And if so, soon all of America will be like that.

Paul Krugman

Dolphins Are Deep Thinkers

At the Institute for Marine Mammal Studies in Mississippi, Kelly the dolphin has built up quite a reputation. All the dolphins at the institute are trained to hold onto any litter that falls into their pools until they see a trainer, when they can trade the litter for fish. In this way, the dolphins help to keep their pools clean.

Kelly has taken this task one step further. When people drop paper into the water she hides it under a rock at the bottom of the pool. …

Go read about Kelly and see what she does.

“Mankind has always assumed that he was more intelligent than dolphins because he had achieved so much — the wheel, New York, wars, and so on — while all the dolphins had ever done was muck about in the water having a good time. But conversely, the dolphins had always believed that they were far more intelligent than man — for precisely the same reasons.”

Douglas Adams, The Hitch Hiker’s Guide to the Galaxy

A New Term I’m Sure You’ll Be Hearing and Seeing

Second Screen

What’s the Second Screen? It’s the laptop, iPad or other device 85-million Americans use WHILE watching TV. At the Online News Association conference this morning there was a presentation on How ESPN and The New York Times Build A Second Screen For Readers. I didn’t bother with the details, but I thought the concept was one we’d all see much more about.

Browsing Music

Just music, no video, but none is really needed.

But here’s a very different version with video. That’s Sonny Boy Williamson II with the harmonica.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P5gADTQsM_Y

And last. Bessie Smith and Louis Armstrong, 1925.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WGJv4cmmj3M

Katmai National Park & Preserve

… was proclaimed a national monument on this date in 1918. It became a national park and preserve in 1980.

Katmai National Park

Katmai National Monument was created in 1918 to preserve the famed Valley of Ten Thousand Smokes, a spectacular forty square mile, 100 to 700 foot deep ash flow deposited by Novarupta Volcano. A National Park & Preserve since 1980, today Katmai is still famous for volcanoes, but also for brown bears, pristine waterways with abundant fish, remote wilderness, and a rugged coastline.

— Katmai National Park & Preserve