America’s First National Monument (Wyoming)

President Theodore Roosevelt proclaimed Devils Tower a national monument 105 years ago today. It was the first landmark set aside under the Antiquities Act.

Devil's Tower

The nearly vertical monolith known as Devils Tower rises 1,267 feet above the meandering Belle Fourche River. Once hidden below the earth’s surface, erosion has stripped away the softer rock layers revealing Devils Tower.

Known by several northern plains tribes as Bears Lodge, it is a sacred site of worship for many American Indians. The rolling hills of this 1,347 acre park are covered with pine forests, deciduous woodlands, and prairie grasslands. Deer, prairie dogs, and other wildlife are abundant.

Source: National Park Service

NewMexiKen, who has circumnavigated Devils Tower, thinks it should be renamed Bears Lodge.

Roosevelt added several more monuments after Devils Tower, including El Morro, Montezuma Castle, Petrified Forest, and Chaco Canyon within the first year of the Act.

Sec. 2. That the President of the United States is hereby authorized, in his discretion, to declare by public proclamation historic landmarks, historic and prehistoric structures, and other objects of historic or scientific interest that are situated upon the lands owned or controlled by the Government of the United States to be national monuments, and may reserve as a part thereof parcels of land, the limits of which in all cases shall be confined to the smallest area compatible with proper care and management of the objects to be protected: Provided, That when such objects are situated upon a tract covered by a bona fied unperfected claim or held in private ownership, the tract, or so much thereof as may be necessary for the proper care and management of the object, may be relinquished to the Government, and the Secretary of the Interior is hereby authorized to accept the relinquishment of such tracts in behalf of the Government of the United States.

God Is the Answer

The wrong answer, but whatever …

Next, the participants took a three-question math test with questions such as, “A bat and a ball cost $1.10 in total. The bat costs $1 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost?”

The intuitive answer to that question is 10 cents, since most people’s first impulse is to knock $1 off the total. But people who use “reflective” reasoning to question their first impulse are more likely to get the correct answer: 5 cents.

Sure enough, people who went with their intuition on the math test were found to be one-and-a-half times more likely to believe in God than those who got all the answers right. The results held even when taking factors such as education and income into account.

Belief in God Boils Down to a Gut Feeling | LiveScience

Often wrong, never in doubt

Last night that foolish woman from Minnesota said President Obama had the lowest modern presidential approval ratings ever.

Gallup says Obama has a 41% approval rating.

Here are the presidents who apparently were pre-modern:

LBJ 35%
Nixon 24%
Ford 37%
Carter 28%
Reagan 35%
G.H.W.Bush 29%
Clinton 37%
G.W.Bush 25%

Update: Actual statement, “President Obama has the lowest public approval ratings of any president in modern times.”

The lowest Obama has gotten is 38% (last month). His average is 51%.

Moneyball

From Roger Ebert’s review:

“Moneyball” is not a traditional sports movie, and indeed should be just as gripping for non-sports fans. It’s not a series of Big Games. When it goes to the field, it’s for well-chosen crucial moments. Its essence is in terse, brainy dialogue by the two accomplished screenwriters Aaron Sorkin (“The Social Network”) and Steven Zaillian (“Gangs of New York”). As in “The Social Network,” abstract discussions reflect deep emotional conflicts. There are a lot of laughs, but only one or two are inspired by lines intended to be funny. Instead, our laughter comes from recognition, an awareness of irony, an appreciation of perfect zingers — and, best of all, insights into human nature.

From Joe Posnanski’s review:

This is a pretty long movie — more than two hours. And there are a lot of scenes where nothing happens. We spend a good chunk of time alone with Billy Beane in the car. There are plot swings that don’t go anywhere. There’s a lot of actual baseball footage — probably more than has ever before been in a major motion picture. And, let’s face it, some of the crucial questions of the movie are: (1) Will Beane be able to acquire Ricardo Rincon? (2) Will the A’s beat a terrible Kansas City Royals team? (3) Will A’s manager Art Howe realize he should have Chad Bradford, and not Mike Magnante, as the first man out of the pen?

These aren’t exactly, “Will Luke be able to destroy the Death Star,” or “Does Ilsa choose Rick or Victor” sorts of questions.

September 22nd

Tommy Lasorda, the former Dodgers manager, is 84 today.

Former University of Arizona basketball coach Lute Olson is 77.

Harry’s daughter Shari is 57 and Pat’s daughter Debby is 55. Belafonte and Boone, respectively.

Joan Jett is 53.

Joan Jett last year

I saw him dancin’ there by the record machine
I knew he must a been about seventeen
The beat was goin’ strong
Playin’ my favorite song
An’ I could tell it wouldn’t be long
Till he was with me, yeah me, singin’

I love rock n’ roll
So put another dime in the jukebox, baby
I love rock n’ roll
So come an’ take your time an’ dance with me

Chachi is 51. That’s Scott Baio.

Ronaldo Luiz Nazario de Lima, the Brazilian football star, is 35.

John Houseman was born on this date in 1902. This from the Times obituary when Houseman died in 1988:

John Houseman, who spent more than half a century in the theater as an influential producer and director but who did not achieve fame until, at the age of 71, he portrayed a crusty law school professor in the film “The Paper Chase” and its subsequent television series, died of spinal cancer yesterday at his home in Malibu, Calif. He was 86 years old and despite his failing health had been working on various projects until three days ago.

Professor Kingsfield, the role he played in “The Paper Chase,” led to another well-known part, that of a haughty spokesman for a brokerage house in its television commercials, delivering the lines: “They make money the old-fashioned way. They earn it.”

http://youtu.be/_wOUMd3bMRI

The sound seems out of sync with the action in the video; still a great scene. Houseman won a supporting actor Oscar for his portrayal of Professor Kingsfield.

Nathan Hale was hanged by the British as a spy on this date in 1776. Hale was in fact spying on the British for General Washington — he had volunteered for the duty.

A statue of Nathan Hale is located between the [CIA] Auditorium and the Original Headquarters Building. Hale was the first American executed for spying for his country. This statue is a copy of the original work created in 1914 for Yale University, Nathan Hale’s alma mater. The Agency’s statue was erected on the grounds in 1973, 200 years after his graduation from Yale.

There is no known portrait of Nathan Hale; this life-size statue portrays what little written description there is of him. The statue captures the spirit of the moment before his execution – a 21-year-old man prepared to meet his death for honor and country, hands and feet bound, face resolute, and his eyes on the horizon. His last words, “I regret that I have but one life to lose for my country,” circle the base around his feet.

He stands vigilant guard on the Agency and is a continuing reminder to its employees of the duties and sacrifices of an intelligence officer.

Central Intelligence Agency

The first issue of National Geographic was published 123 years ago today (1888).

The preliminary Emancipation Proclamation was released on this date 149 years ago (1862). It stated that the President would emancipate the slaves in the Confederate states on January 1, 1863, unless a state returned to the Union by then. None did and so he did.

It was 51 years ago today that I was “rescued” flailing away in a swimming pool inches from the side. Thank you Alain, wherever you are. My children and The Sweeties thank you, too.

And today is my baby brother’s birthday. Happy birthday, John.

What Facebook Really Wants

The longtime goal of Facebook, and of founder Mark Zuckerberg…has been to build a separate Internet. … In the minds of people who work at Facebook, there’s the cold, confusing, open Internet that is managed by Google and its algorithms. You go there and you never quite know what you’re going to get. And then there’s the Facebook sub-Internet, where everything is kinder and organized by your friends.

From What Facebook Really Wants : The New Yorker.

Facebook now hosts 4 percent of all the photographs EVER taken.

If Facebook gets its way it will soon also be where you read your news, watch videos and listen to music — all shared with your “friends” of course.

Staking a Life

The last hanging in Britain occurred in 1964. Across the channel in France, the peine de mort was done away with by the Mitterrand administration in the early 1980s. So the two great historic homelands of theatrical capital punishment—conservative Britain with its “bloody code” and exemplary gibbetings described by Dickens and Thackeray, and Jacobin France with its humanely utilitarian instrument of swift justice for feudalism promoted by the good Doctor Guillotin—have both dispensed with the ultimate penalty. The reasoning was somewhat different in each case. In Britain there had been considerable queasiness as a consequence of a number of miscarriages of justice that had led to the hanging of the innocent. In France, in the memorable words of Mitterrand’s Minister of Justice, M. Robert Badinter, the scaffold had come to symbolize “a totalitarian concept of the relationship between the citizen and the state.”

Since then no country has been allowed to apply for membership or association with the European Union without, as a precondition, dismantling its apparatus of execution. This has led states like Turkey to forego what was once a sort of national staple. The United Nations condemns capital punishment—especially for those who have not yet reached adulthood—and the Vatican has come close to forbidding if not actually anathematizing the business. This leaves the United States of America as the only nation in what one might call the West, that does not just continue with the infliction of the death penalty but has in the recent past expanded its reach.

From “Staking a Life,” by Christopher Hitchens

Line of the day

“In the final hours, Kim Kardashian tweeted, ‘There’s still hope! The Supreme Court has delayed Troy Davis’s Execution for 1 hour to review his case!!!’ Ann Coulter tweeted, just moments before Kardashian’s, ‘ONE TROY DAVIS FLAME-BROILED, PLEASE.’ America’s brightest, divided.”

Mark Anthony Green — The New Yorker

Green’s essay is a very good take on the matter.

Hallelujah

http://youtu.be/ckbdLVX736U

  1. Hallelujah was first released in 1984 on Leonard Cohen’s album, Various Positions.
  2. Cohen once told Bob Dylan that it took him two years to write the song.
  3. Dylan himself has sung it live, and there are bootleg versions in circulation of his performance. It has also been sung by Bono and Bon Jovi.
  4. More than 100 versions of the song have been recorded.
  5. The best known is by Jeff Buckley, whose unadorned version was on his 1994 Grace album.
  6. Cohen has recorded two versions – the second one appeared on a live album in 1988 – with very different endings; one upbeat, one dark.
  7. Buckley’s version was used in the soundtrack to the American TV series, The OC.
  8. Other TV shows to have used the song include The West Wing, ER, Scrubs, and Holby City.
  9. The full version of the song has 15 verses.
  10. Cohen, a notorious perfectionist, is said to have originally written 80 verses.
  11. Cohen is set to earn £1 million in royalties from sales of singles by X-Factor winner Alexandra Burke.
  12. Burke’s version is the fastest selling download single in history.
  13. Former Velvet Underground member John Cale’s version was used in the film Shrek.
  14. The Shrek soundtrack album featured a version by Rufus Wainwright, who also sang it in the Leonard Cohen tribute film, I’m Your Man.
  15. Cohen was once asked why the song is so popular. “It’s got a good chorus,” he replied.
  16. It has become a mainstay of live shows by Cohen’s fellow Canadian singer-songwriter, kd lang.
  17. The English singer and songwriter Kathryn Williams once introduced her version of Hallelujah in a live show by saying, “I really, really, really want to shag Leonard Cohen.”
  18. The song is broadcast at 2am every Saturday night by the Israeli defence force’s radio channel.
  19. Hallelujah is a Hebrew word, meaning “praise Yah”.
  20. Cohen has said of the song’s meaning: “It explains that many kinds of hallelujahs do exist, and all the perfect and broken hallelujahs have equal value.”

20 facts about Leonard Cohen’s Hallelujah – Telegraph

Redux post of the day

From five years ago.

Just three Tuesday, Aidan found out from his mother Wednesday that Abraham Lincoln was dead and they couldn’t go visit him. The little guy cried for 20 minutes.

I feel the same way some times.

Which reminded me of a meme I saw at Shakespeare’s Sister.

“If you could sit down to a meal with a president (any president) and ask him one question: who is the president and what is the question?”

Shakes’ Sister suggested George W. Bush and her question was “What the f**k?”

I think I’d have to choose Lincoln. And, being from New Mexico, of course I’d have to ask him, “Red or green?”

September 21st

Leonard Cohen is 77.

There are few artists in the realm of popular music who can truly be called poets, in the classical, arts-and-letters sense of the word. Among them are Bob Dylan, Lou Reed, Joni Mitchell and Phil Ochs. Leonard Cohen heads this elite class. In fact, Cohen was already an established poet and novelist before he turned his attention to songwriting. His academic training in poetry and literature, and his pursuit of them as livelihood for much of the Fifties and Sixties, gave him an extraordinary advantage over his pop peers when it came to setting language to music. Along with other folk-steeped musical literati, Cohen raised the songwriting bar.
. . .

In his notes for The Essential Leonard Cohen, writer Pico Iyer noted, “The changeless is what he’s been about since the beginning…Some of the other great pilgrims of song pass through philosophies and selves as if through the stations of the cross. With Cohen, one feels he knew who he was and where he was going from the beginning, and only digs deeper, deeper, deeper.”

Cohen’s artistic outlook might best be expressed in his own words with this lyric from “Anthem”: On Anthem (1992), he wrote: “There is a crack, a crack in everything/ That’s how the light gets in.” He remarked, “That’s the closest thing I could describe to a credo. That idea is one of the fundamental positions behind a lot of the songs.”

The Rock and Roll Hall of Fame and Museum

“I’ve also studied deeply in the philosophies and the religions but cheerfulness kept breaking through. But I want to tell you something that I think will not easily be contradicted. There ain’t no cure for love.” — Leonard Cohen

Leonard Cohen, Live in London

Larry Hagman, who dreamt of Jeannie before moving to Dallas, is 80 today.

Bill Murray is 61. Nominated for an Oscar for Lost in Translation, NewMexiKen still thinks Murray’s best effort was as Phil Connors in Groundhog Day.

Cheryl Hines is 46.

Faith Hill is 44.

Owen and Andrew Wilson’s brother Luke is 40 today.

September 21st is an important date in fantasy literature. Stephen King is 64 today. He was born on H.G. Wells’ birthday (1866-1946) and on the 10th anniversary of the publication of J.R.R. Tolkein’s The Hobbit (1937).

Chuck Jones (Charles Martin Jones) was born on September 21st in 1912. Jones animated and directed more than 300 Looney Tunes and Merry Melodies cartoons featuring Bugs Bunny, Daffy Duck, Wile E. Coyote and the Road Runner. He won three Oscars for direction and a lifetime achievement statue as well.

“Fog and smog should not be confused and are easily separated by color. Fog is about the color of the insides of an old split wet summer cottage mattress; smog is the color and consistency of a wet potato chip soaked in a motorman’s glove.” — Chuck Jones

Henry Lewis Stimson was born on September 21st in 1867. He served in five presidential administrations and had been appointed U.S. Attorney by another, Theodore Roosevelt. Most of his service was after he was 60.

As President Truman’s senior adviser on military use of atomic energy, Henry L. Stimson made the deciding recommendation to drop the first atomic bomb, one of the most significant events in the history of mankind.

In addition to this great responsibility, Mr. Stimson assumed heavy burdens as President Hoover’s Secretary of State (1929-1933) and again as Secretary of War in the cabinets of President Franklin D. Roosevelt and President Truman (1940-1945). His unusually long period of public life which established him as an elder statesman in the American scene included an earlier period (1911-1913) as President Taft’s Secretary of War, then a relatively minor post.

When he was in his late seventies Mr. Stimson was the civilian administrative head of a victorious army of more than 10,000,000, the largest ever raised by the United States.

New York Times Obituary (1950)

415 years ago today (1596) Spain named Juan de Oñate governor of the colony of Nuevo México. 227 years ago today (1784) the nation’s first daily newspaper, the Pennsylvania Packet and Daily Advertiser, began publication. The Library of Congress has a little more about each.

Sandra Day O’Connor was approved by the Senate as the first woman Justice of the Supreme Court, 30 years ago today.

The Angel Moroni began visiting Joseph Smith 178 years ago today.

Summing up

Reacting to Tom Friedman is knee-jerk unless you’re smart enough not to bother. Dean Baker reads Friedman for us — his running debate is which Times columnist is sillier, David Brooks or Friedman. You really should be following Baker everyday. Today Baker’s take is Thomas Friedman Is Upset That President Obama Is Not Kicking the Elderly.

Thomas Friedman joined the ranks of the Peter Peterson deficit hawks and criticized President Obama for not wanting to beat up the elderly. Specifically, he is upset that President Obama did not propose cuts to Social Security and Medicare.

Apparently Friedman is not aware of the upward redistribution of income over the last three decades. Nor does he seem to understand that the government just needs to spend money to create jobs now.

The current crisis is the result of the collapse of a housing bubble that he and his deficit hawk friends allowed to grow unchecked. The construction and consumption demand created by the bubble was driving the economy. Now that the bubble has collapsed there is nothing to replace this demand.

In the short-term this demand can only come from the government. In the longer term it will have to come from more a smaller trade deficit as domestic production replaces foreign production. This will only come about from a lower-valued dollar.

The long-term deficit is driven entirely by the broken health care system in the United States. If the United States paid the same amount per person for care as people in any other wealthy country we would be looking at large budget surpluses, not deficits.

Social Security is already largely in balance. According to the Congressional Budget Office it can pay all scheduled benefits until the year 2038 with no changes at all. After that date it can pay more than 80 percent of scheduled benefits indefinitely. A tax increase equal to 5 percent of the wage growth projected over the next three decades would be sufficient to allow it to make all scheduled benefits indefinitely.

Rookie

Ken Levine is an Emmy winning writer/director/producer/ and part-time major league baseball announcer. Among shows he has been associated with are M*A*S*H, Cheers, Frasier, The Simpsons, Wings, Everybody Loves Raymond and Dharma & Greg. As the baseball season ends he writes an Open Letter to Seattle. I loved this story.

Another sensational rookie story is Steve Delebar.  A former lower-minor league pitcher, he broke his elbow two years ago and was out of baseball. He became a substitute high school teacher in Kentucky.  He discovered a program that would help add to your velocity and recommended it to the high school baseball team.  He started the program himself and pretty soon was throwing 95 miles an hour.  So he went to a tryout, got signed by the Mariners, worked his way up the minors, and made it to the major leagues.  And last Wednesday beat the Yankees.  He’s just like Dennis Quaid in THE ROOKIE but better.  He doesn’t have to pay alimony to Meg Ryan.