… of Richard Wayne Penniman. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame inductee Little Richard is 72.
… of Jose Carreras. The tenor is 58.
… of Jim Messina. The one-time member of Buffalo Springfield (with Dewey Martin, Neil Young, Richie Furay and Steven Stills) is 57.
… of Frankie Muniz. Malcolm is 19.
From The New York Times, its list of the 100 notable books of the year.
The book titles are linked to the full reviews. Next week we’ll present the 10 Best Books of the Year, chosen from this longer list.
How ’bout them Hokies!
No doubt encouraged by the long-distance support of Jason and Rob, official son and son-in-law of NewMexiKen respectively, the Hokies beat the dreaded Miami Hurricanes to win the ACC championship in their first year.
Thanks primarily to the in-person cheering of Mack, official oldest grandchild of NewMexiKen, the College of William and Mary scored 21 fourth quarter points to tie Delaware, then defeated the Blue Hens in two overtimes. The Tribe advances to the semi-finals of the NCAA I-AA football championship.
Mack’s mother and aunt, William and Mary alumnae, were probably instrumental in the cheering as well.
And all I can say is that it is crazy hard to “watch” a football game strictly by monitoring the ESPN internets scoreboard.
“The president sent out two million Christmas cards whereas President Clinton only sent out a half a million. But to be fair President Clinton did send out five million valentine cards.”
Jay Leno
As reported by Morning Briefing:
Pete Carroll spent a year out of football before accepting the USC coaching job. When Jeff Fellenzer had Carroll as a guest on his “One-on-One” Charter cable show, he asked Carroll if during that time there were any college coaching opportunities that interested him.
Carroll said he’d called North Carolina to inquire about the opening at that school, but no one called back.
Wonder if the person who was supposed to call back now realizes that he or she might have made a mistake?
Dr. Aubrey de Grey, University of Cambridge, writing for BBC News:
Ageing is a physical phenomenon happening to our bodies, so at some point in the future, as medicine becomes more and more powerful, we will inevitably be able to address ageing just as effectively as we address many diseases today.
I claim that we are close to that point because of the SENS (Strategies for Engineered Negligible Senescence) project to prevent and cure ageing.
It is not just an idea: it’s a very detailed plan to repair all the types of molecular and cellular damage that happen to us over time.
And each method to do this is either already working in a preliminary form (in clinical trials) or is based on technologies that already exist and just need to be combined.
…So, will this happen in time for some people alive today? Probably. Since these therapies repair accumulated damage, they are applicable to people in middle age or older who have a fair amount of that damage.
I think the first person to live to 1,000 might be 60 already.
Link via kottke.org.
Gainesville? South Bend?
How tough could it have been?
As you may notice, NewMexiKen is having some issues with MovableType and WordPress. Sorry for any inconvenience.
Update Saturday 4PM: All should be OK. Please let me know if you discover any problems. Decided to stay with MovableType.
From USATODAY.com
HARRISBURG, Pa. (AP) Police followed a trail of doughnuts to find a stolen Krispy Kreme delivery truck.
“It has a happy ending,” Swatara Township Sgt. Robert Simmonds said. “The evidence was brought back to the police station, and the cops are eating the doughnuts.”
It was 12:45 a.m. Thursday when Krispy Kreme deliveryman Tim Trostle stopped at a Swatara Township convenience store and left the engine running as he made the delivery. Someone fled with the truck, but since Trostle had left the back doors open, police were able to follow a trail of doughnuts.
The doughnut trail ended before long, but police in a nearby township found a doughnut cart near the Harrisburg city line. City police found the truck near a downtown bar.
…Although Simmonds had been joking about police taking the contents of the truck, he acknowledged seeing Krispy Kreme doughnuts in a station conference room Thursday.
From The Arizona Republic:
PETRIFIED FOREST – As paleontologist Bill Parker slowly moves his fingers across the skull of a crocodile-looking phytosaur, his voice quickens while he discusses future dinosaur discoveries in an expanded Petrified Forest National Park.
The head of this 30-foot-long creature is so impressive in its detail that it is about to be shipped for prominent display to the Smithsonian Institution.
Two weeks ago, Congress gave its long-anticipated blessing to a bill that will more than double the size, to 222,000 acres, of this northeastern Arizona national park, famed for its calcified wood, dinosaur remains and petroglyphs.
The expansion will protect the new acreage, allow blight removal and yield many new archaeological sites.
entered the Union on this date in 1818, the 21st state.
Illinois is named for the Illinois Confederation — a group of Algonquian-speaking American Indian tribes indigenous to the area. Illinois means tribe of superior men.
became law on this date in 1980, more than doubling the size of the national park system.
According to America’s National Park System: The Critical Documents edited by Lary M. Dilsaver:
In the waning days of the Carter Democratic administration, Congress acted to further protect and expand preserved areas in Alaska, many rescued from exploitation two years earlier by presidential proclamation. This complex and lengthy act defines preserved parks, forests, wilderness areas, wildlife refuges, wild and scenic rivers, and Native American corporation lands and the degrees of preservation and usage for each. It prescribes timber, fish, and wildlife protection and use by Native Americans and other citizens.
New areas for the national park system included Aniakchak National Preserve, Cape Krusenstern National Monument, Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve, Kenai Fjords National Park, Kobuk Valley National Park, Lake Clark National Park and Preserve, Noatak National Preserve, Wrangell-St. Elias National Park and Preserve, and Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve. The act also added new lands to Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Katmai National Monument and Preserve, and Denali National Park and Preserve (renamed from Mount McKinley National Park).
New wild and scenic rivers under Park Service administration included Alagnak, Alatna, Aniakchak, Charley, Chilikadrotna, John, Kobuk, Mulchatna, Noatak, North Fork of the Koyukuk, Salmon, Tinayguk, and Tlikakila rivers. Other wild and scenic rivers are designated or expanded in wildlife refuges and in other areas.
The vast majority of acreage in the Denali, Gates of the Arctic, Glacier Bay, Katmai, Kobuk Valley, Lake Clark, Noatak, and Wrangell-St. Elias units is designated wilderness.
The most popular television program in America for the week ending November 28th was Desperate Housewives. According to Nielsen, 27 million Americans watched the program Sunday.
That means that 268 million Americans didn’t watch it.
Popular is a relative term.
Jason Kottke is worried:
Things may be a little quieter around here in the short term as I deal with some stuff going on in the real world. One of the reasons for the silence is that my legal difficulties with Sony about the whole Ken Jennings thing have yet to be resolved. I can’t say too much about it (soon perhaps), but it sure has had a chilling effect on my enthusiasm for continuing to maintain kottke.org. As an individual weblogger with relatively limited financial and legal resources, I worry about whether I can continue to post things (legal or not) that may upset large companies and result in lawsuits that they can afford and I cannot. The NY Times can risk upsetting large companies in the course of their journalistic duties because they are a large company themselves, they know their rights, and they have a dedicated legal team to deal with stuff like this. In the current legal climate, it may be that the whole “are blogs journalism?” debate is moot until bloggers have access to a level of legal resources similar to what large companies have. I’m certainly thinking very seriously about whether I can keep this site going in this kind of environment.
In short, Sony got on Kottke for publishing an audio clip of Ken Jennings’ final Final Jeopardy (in advance of the broadcast). That seems like copyright fair use to me. No? If someone acquired the recording inappropriately and passed it along to Kottke, my understanding is the issue is with the person who made the recording not the person who published it. Anyone?
From AP via The Santa Fe New Mexican:
The Bush administration on Wednesday won a Supreme Court stay that blocks a New Mexico church from using hallucinogenic tea that the government contends is illegal and potentially dangerous.
The government has been in a long-running legal fight with the Brazil-based O Centro Espirita Beneficiente Uniao do Vegetal over hoasca tea, brewed from plants found in the Amazon River Basin.
…The 10th U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals in Denver found that the church probably has a religious-freedom right to use the tea. The Bush administration plans to appeal, but wants the church barred from using the tea in the meantime.
Link via dangerousmeta!, who located the recent Court of Appeals document.
NewMexiKen does not understand the Constitutional basis for banning naturally-grown substances.
From Sideline Chatter:
The end of the NHL lockout just might be in the cards.
“ESPN2 has been airing poker tournaments in place of the missing hockey broadcasts,” wrote Roger Brown of Cleveland’s Plain Dealer. “For the most part, the poker games have been drawing better ratings than the hockey contests did last year.”
Byron sent me some thoughts on Notre Dame firing its football coach.
I was upset that Willingham was fired until I really thought about it.
Here are the facts:
ND lost to BYU to open the season. A BYU team that went 5-6 and lost to UNLV one of the worst teams in the country. Inexcusable for a much more talented team (ND) to not be ready to play BYU. Answer: they were outprepared and outcoached.
ND lost two games on last second field goals. Once is a fluke, twice is poor preparation and execution (poor coaching).
ND was outscored in the second half of the games they lost by 35 points (82-47). This was never more egregious than in the USC game where they were outscored 24-0 in the second half. They allowed USC to score the last 38 points of that game. They were outcoached. Consistently all year long, they were outcoached.
Willingham is a helluva guy. I respect him, I love the way he carries himself and I think he represented Notre Dame very well in every aspect save one: in between the lines on Saturday.
NewMexiKen agrees with this and is offended by commentary to the effect of, “See, Notre Dame is a football factory like the rest.”
Hello! Notre Dame is the football factory. My god, they call the mural on the library “Touchdown Jesus” for heaven’s sake.
From David Pogue’s weekly Email:
Last March, in this column, I described my fondness for Dragon NaturallySpeaking, the dictation software for Windows that lets me “write” at 120 words per minute. You wear a headset microphone, you speak normally (except that you speak the punctuation), and NatSpeak pumps the words into whatever program is frontmost.
Last week, the company (ScanSoft) unveiled its new version 8. The shocking twist: the best feature is improved accuracy. That’s it. Not bells, not whistles, just doing what it’s supposed to do, only 25 percent better. (The company calls it 99 percent accurate, but that’s hard for me to measure; I’ll generally dictate an entire column without a single mis-transcription. For that document, it’s 100 percent.)
David Pogue notes that 60 Minutes can’t even get it right when it comes to child prodigies:
I was a little disappointed with the voice-over line, “Talented composers might write five or six symphonies in a lifetime. [12-year-old Juilliard student] Jay’s written five at the age of twelve.” As a quick Google check could have ascertained, Beethoven wrote nine symphonies, Mozart wrote 41, Haydn wrote 104, Dittersdorf wrote 120, and so on.
It’s funny about Social Security, isn’t it? The only non-means-tested, universally-implemented social-welfare program in the country, and it’s paid for by the most regressive tax on the books– remember, not a single penny over the $87,900 income level is taxed– and conservatives still hate it.
Kevin Drum sums up Social Security as well as anything I’ve seen. You should read this. Whether you agree with its underlying point of view or not, the facts are correct.
Social Security is funded by payroll taxes. In 1983, Alan Greenspan headed up a commission that recommended saving Social Security from imminent doom by raising those payroll taxes to cover expected increases in Social Security payouts. But there was a twist: Greenspan recommended raising payroll taxes above what was required to actually pay current benefits to retirees, with the resulting surplus used to buy treasury bonds that would be piled up each year in Social Security’s trust fund. And since these bonds were sold to the trust fund by the federal government, this means that the federal government got a big chunk of extra money every year for use in the general fund.
Under this scheme, payroll taxes were sufficient to cover payouts plus bond purchases until about 2018. Then, from 2018 to 2042, when payroll taxes would no longer be enough to cover payouts, the difference would be made up by cashing in the bonds in the trust fund. In other words, the feds would tap into the general fund to give back all the money that Social Security had handed over between 1983 and 2018. This money would come from the same place all general fund money comes from: income taxes.
Still with me? Here’s what this means:
- Between 1983-2018, this plan calls for payroll taxes to be higher than they need to be to cover payouts to retirees. However, because the surplus payroll taxes are handed over to the feds, it means income taxes are lower than they would otherwise be.
- Then, between 2018-2042, payroll taxes will be less than they need to be to pay benefits to retirees. However, the difference will be made up by higher income taxes, which will be used to pay off the trust fund bonds.
Payroll taxes are paid mostly by the middle class and the poor. Income taxes are paid mostly by the well off.
So: for 35 years the middle class and the poor pay excess payroll taxes and the well off get a break on their income taxes. However, for the following 24 years the middle class and the poor get a break on their payroll taxes and the well off finance it by paying higher income taxes.
Now, this may sound like a dumb idea to you, but that was the deal. The bottom 80% take it on the chin for a few decades, followed by a couple of decades in which the well off get socked.
But suppose — as conservatives are laying the groundwork for — that Bush decides the trust fund is a mirage, just a giant IOU from one part of the government to the other. And as part of his “reform” plan he proposes a complex scheme that, when stripped to its essentials, entails doing away with the flim flam of that illusionary trust fund and the higher income taxes it will require when 2018 finally rolls around. What would that mean?
It would mean that the middle class and the poor got suckered into overpaying their taxes for three decades, and then when the bill came due the well off ducked out of their end of the bargain.
Off Wing Opinion
Selena Roberts, The New York Times
Shaun Powell, Newsday
Chris Dufresne, Los Angeles Times
And, again, Michael Wilbon, The Washington Post
What do you think? Who will have gotten higher ratings? Tom Brokaw in his last appearance as anchor of the NBC Nightly News after 21 years or Ken Jennings in his last appearance on Jeopardy! after 75 shows?
