From The Week Newsletter:
Good Week For…
Dumb luck, after a Colorado man complaining of a persistent toothache went to his dentist for an X-ray. The dentist found a 4-inch nail imbedded in the man’s skull, fired there the week before in an accident with a nail gun.Bad Week For…
Survivors, after Richard Hatch, who became famous as the winner of the first season of Survivor, was charged with tax evasion for failing to report his $1 million prize.
or did the lack of flu vaccine story just go away?
From a series of interviews with video store clerks in The Albuquerque Tribune:
Now, if the choice is root canal or Brad Pitt Film Festival, then I’ve got to go with the root canal. In every freakin’ movie, he’s just atrocious. Have you noticed that in every single movie, he uses three fingers to point at things? Every single one. ‘Troy,’ ‘Fight Club,’ whatever, he uses three fingers to point. What’s up with that?”
Does $4 a square foot (for carpet, pad, installation, moving furniture and removing old carpet) sound like a good value?
Update: Apparently so, for good quality. I’ll let you know once it’s installed.
Maria Full of Grace, starring Catalina Sandino Moreno in the title role, is a moving, dramatic film.
A Colombian, Maria swallows pellets of drugs to bring them to New York. She is, in drug parlance, a mule. She does this simply enough for money — and to escape a loser boyfriend (the father of her unborn child), a demanding mother, an irritating sister and a degrading job.
Maria Full of Grace is almost documentary in style. But it is Maria’s story, not the story of drugs or the drug cartel that is documented. And it is Maria’s story that you should see.
The film is in Spanish with English subtitles.
Five ristras on NewMexiKen’s scale of one-to-five (five being best).
(In the beginning of the film Maria works at a flower plantation trimming the torns from roses. I’d never thought about it before, but I guess the florist doesn’t just snip them out back in his little green house anymore.)
Personal Technology from The Wall Street Journal:
I’ve been testing the Mac mini under just that scenario for several days, and it does indeed work, quite well. I connected a mini to a Dell flat-panel screen and a Hewlett-Packard keyboard and mouse, all about three years old. The little Mac fired up and worked perfectly at every task I threw at it.
The Christmas package is on a truck for delivery. I’m so excited and I’ve put my Christmas decorations back up.
Update: The package arrived this afternoon. FYI It is a wonderful framed, panoramic photograph of the Albuquerque Balloon Fiesta during inflation and mass ascension. A true delight. And well-traveled.
Caitlin is such a popular name among teenage girls that Reno Galena High, according to NevadaPrep.com, used a starting lineup of four Caitlins and one Kaitlin on Tuesday night in a 65-30 victory over Reno Damonte Ranch.
From Morning Briefing
“Don’t get me wrong: I think today’s inauguration is going to cost us dearly, but it’s not the $40 million for the party that I’m thinking of.”
Eric Muller at Is That Legal?
David Pogue praises the Picasa is free from Goggle.
Today’s is the 55th presidential inauguration.
The 20th Amendment to the Constitution states that the “terms of the President and Vice President shall end at noon on the 20th day of January.” The Amendment was ratified in 1933 — the first inauguration on the new date was January 20, 1937.
Before the 20th Amendment, the Constitution did not provide the date when the terms began and ended. The terms of the first President and Vice President were fixed by an act of the Continental Congress adopted September 13, 1788. That act called for “the first Wednesday in March next to be the time for commencing proceedings under the Constitution.” It happened that the first Wednesday in March was the 4th day of March, and hence the terms of the President and Vice President and Members of Congress began on March 4, 1789. (Washington did not take the oath of office until April 30, 1789, but technically his term began March 4th.)
The Constitution set the terms of the President and Vice President at four years. Any change from March 4th then required an Amendment because a date change would mean that the incumbents would not serve exactly four years. Indeed, Franklin Roosevelt’s and John Nance Garner’s first terms were 43 days less than four years — March 4, 1933 – January 20, 1937.
According to the Kitsap Sun, a 22-year-old man from Vancouver held up a local gas station at knifepoint last week. The unnamed robber then sped off in a red Honda, leading police from four towns on a wild 100-mph chase. Thanks to the winding back roads of the area, the robber managed to lose his pursuers. Unfortunately, he became lost on the rural roads and had to pull into a gas station to ask for directions to nearby Seattle. Even more unfortunately, he had gone in circles and ended up at the exact same gas station he had just robbed.
Reported by the Albuquerque Alibi.
From The Albuquerque Tribune:
High Tech High Albuquerque is the new name of the charter school Mayor Martin Chavez sponsored.
The Albuquerque Board of Education is scheduled to approve the name today.
The tech school – originally called MAST High – is planning to open on schedule in August with 90 ninth-graders, Principal Robin Troup said. MAST is an acronym for math, science and technology.
High Tech High. Other secondary schools in Albuquerque include El Dorado, Manzano, Sandia, Cibola, La Cueva, Rio Grande.
From Reuters — Apple Says Up to 4-Week Wait for IPod Shuffle
There is a two-to-three-week wait for the $99 iPod Shuffle, which holds about 120 songs, while customers face a wait of three to four weeks for the $149 model, which has double the capacity, according to the Apple website.
The Carmen San Diego of Christmas shipments arrived at the FedEx facility in Phoenix today.
Dwight Perry tells me that this is the Jim Jackson of shipments. Jackson is the NBA journeyman who has played for 10 franchises in 13 years. As the The [New Orleans] Times-Picayune reports, Jackson’s “photograph and biography should serve as the face and definition of the phrase “much-traveled.”
was established on this date in 1929. From the National Park Service:
Located on the rugged coast of Maine, Acadia National Park encompasses over 47,000 acres of granite-domed mountains, woodlands, lakes and ponds, and ocean shoreline. Such diverse habitats create striking scenery and make the park a haven for wildlife and plants.
Entwined with the natural diversity of Acadia is the story of people. Evidence suggests native people first lived here at least 5,000 years ago. Subsequent centuries brought explorers from far lands, settlers of European descent, and, arising directly from the beauty of the landscape, tourism and preservation.
A new study reported on at The Onion: Watching Fewer Than Four Hours Of TV A Day Impairs Ability To Ridicule Pop Culture.
Snow Causes Traffic Problems Across Region (washingtonpost.com):
The weather, in a city that quakes at flakes, also threatened to further complicate the coming and going of traffic in a downtown already locked down for the most secure inauguration — perhaps the most secure anything — in the history of the nation’s capital.
More than 100 square blocks of Washington will be closed for the inauguration, some starting this afternoon.
Link via Rox Populi. Similarly, I am without comment.
NewMexiKen watched the film Before Sunset this afternoon and recommends it highly. (There are, however, no shootings, crucifixions or car chases.)
Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy played a young couple during a brief romantic encounter in Vienna in the 1995 film Before Sunrise, a warm telling of boy-meets-girl. (I haven’t seen that film.) This is the sequel — they meet again in Paris, now in their early 30s. The film, shot as if in real time, is essentially their conversation over about 75 minutes as they walk through Paris (they also have coffee, take a boat ride, ride in a car). The dialogue is simply superb as they analyze love and life.
Five ristras on the NewMexiKen scale (five being the best).
“I have a college degree and there’s no way I’d last half a shift working at the Waffle House.”
Sports writer Ken Burger in The Post and Courier of Charleston, South Carolina.
This brief essay is well worth a click.
Thanks to Dwight Perry at The Seattle Times.
From a correspondent at Altercation:
Interesting business model: Like Netflix, you set up a queue, only it’s comprised of CDs instead of DVDs. They have a fairly extensive — though by no means comprehensive — list. In fact, YourMusic.com is owned by BMG, and the selection is quite similar is to that of BMG record club.
Each month, the next CD in your queue gets mailed to you, for $5.99, including mailing. That’s a very reasonable deal. That’s right, all CDs are $5.99, and there is no charge for shipping or handling. Even better, the DVD/CD combos are also $5.99, And best of all, any of the many boxed sets are sold for (all together now) $5.99 per disc. From simple 2 disc sets, to all of the Led Zeppelin sets, to most of the Sinatra multi disc sets, to the wonderful and complete Ella Fitzgerald Songbooks (16 CDs!), are all $5.99 per disc. That is a fabulous deal.
You can always buy any disc from their catalog at any time, independent of the queue. You can add, delete and rearrange the queue at anytime.
The catch is that if you do not have a disc queued up, you get billed $5.99 anyway. When I set mine up, I added 57 CDs, so I won’t have that problem until 2010. They have a decent collection of Jazz (Sinatra, Ella, Armstrong, Coltrane, Miles,) — again, nothing exhaustive, but good starters and fill ins. Same for rock and pop.
I suspect that some of the A-list newer releases aren’t available for very long. The Best of Sheryl Crow disappeared, and so I moved Modest Mouse’s Good News For People Who Love Bad News up to the front of the queue.
So far, I received my first CD — came on time, and I was charged $5.99 (plus tax). This looks promising for those of us who like our digital music in a higher fidelity than MP3 or AAC.
Kottke has found an older interview with the ever insightful writer Malcolm Gladwell at ESPN.com. Well worth reading on baseball and drugs, including this, the best description of choking I’ve seen.
For example, if you gave me a picture of blank keyboard and asked me to write in appropriate letters in the right places, I’d have to think really hard before I could do that accurately. My conscious knowledge of a keyboard is pretty weak. But right now I’m typing at perhaps 40 words per minute, and I’m having absolutely no trouble finding the right letter on the keyboard without thinking at all.
That’s my unconscious knowledge system at work, and in that mode I’m a great typist. These two systems are quite separate. And on tasks that we are good at — like typing, in my case, or throwing a baseball in, say, Derek Jeter’s case — our unconscious systems are way better than our conscious system. But sometimes under pressure, we get forced out of unconscious mode. And what are we left with? We’re left with painstakingly going over the keyboard, trying to remember what button goes with what letter. This is what choking is. It’s when you get jolted out of unconscious mode. You start thinking too much.
