From report in the Los Angeles Times:
Later, Sen. Gordon Smith (R-Ore.) accused Kerry of advocating socialism within the United States and appeasement overseas.
“It’s not John Kerry’s fault that he looks French,” Smith told reporters on the conference call arranged by the Bush campaign.
NewMexiKen wonders what other ethnic groups Senator Smith can disparage.
to Cortés on this date in 1521.
Historian Hugh Thomas recently published Rivers of Gold: The Rise of the Spanish Empire, from Columbus to Magellan. The book was reviewed by Paul Kennedy in The New York Times.
”Rivers of Gold” takes just about 700 pages to describe only the first 30 years of the Spanish conquests, from Columbus’s first voyage and return in 1492-93 to Magellan’s circumnavigation of the globe in 1519-22. It is an old-fashioned, almost self-indulgent narrative, and thus rich in its descriptions of characters, events and landscapes (it is also admirably illustrated). …
[Rivers of Gold] stands on its own firm historical ground as a grand and sweeping account of the world’s transformation half a millennium ago. But to those who enjoy analogies, it can equally serve as a memorial about empire and about imperial ambition.
is 78 today. Or possibly 77.
NewMexiKen actually was able to view a speech Castro gave outside the Hotel Nacional in Havana in 1993. It was interesting to see the man who has been so much a focus of America for more than 40 years.
Castro wrote a letter to President Franklin Roosevelt in 1940. (He says he was 12, but should have been 13 or 14.) “If you like, give me a ten dollars bill green american in the letter [back] because never have I not seen a ten dollars bill green american and I would like to have one of them.” Castro went on to say, “I don’t know very English but I know very much Spanish and I suppose you [FDR] don’t know very Spanish but you know very English because you are American but I am not American.”
A more complete copy of the letter is here.
Biography.com has more information about Castro.
Gail Sheehy, writing for the Los Angeles Times, asks the right question:
How is it that civilians in a hijacked plane were able to communicate with their loved ones, grasp a totally new kind of enemy and weaponry and act to defend the nation’s Capitol, yet the president had “communication problems” on Air Force One and the nation’s defense chief didn’t know what was going on until the horror was all over?
Read her whole column.
Attorney Benjamin Bycel suggests some unusual penalties for crime in the Los Angeles Times:
A 9th Circuit Court of Appeals decision this week has made these fantastical “what ifs” a little more realistic. It upheld a lower court’s decision to punish a convicted San Francisco mail thief by having him stand for one day outside a post office, wearing a sign that said, “I stole mail. This is my punishment.” He also received jail time.
In their appeal, the mail thief’s lawyers argued that wearing a sign in public amounted merely to “humiliation as an end in itself” and was unreasonable, a violation of sentencing guidelines. But two of the three judges on the 9th Circuit panel disagreed, holding that, among other things, public shame could relate to rehabilitation.
Bycel suggests Ken Lay walk through Houston “wearing a sandwich board that reads: “I cheated my shareholders, employees and retirees.” Sounds right, if Lay is convicted, and if he’s wearing an orange jumpsuit.
died on this date in 1995.
1952 was Mantle’s first full season. He’d come up the year before and taken over centerfield with DiMaggio’s retirement. And it was in 1952 that NewMexiKen attended my first major league baseball game — as a 7-year-old. I was MichiKen in those days and the game was at Detroit’s Briggs Stadium (later Tiger Stadium) against the hated New York Yankees. (I was taken by my 13-year-old uncle. Can you imagine two kids 13 and 7 going to a major league game on their own these days? I mean, who’d drive?)
Anyway, to be honest I don’t remember the moment, but The Mick hit his first career grand slam homerun that day. Even so, the last-place Tigers won with a walk-off grand slam by Steve Souchock in the 11th.
I do remember seeing Mantle hit one out of the stadium, over the right-field upper deck onto Trumbull Avenue in 1956.
Update: I do remember Souchock’s homerun. I also remember my first ice cream sandwich; and that my 13-year-old uncle smoked. I think he convinced me not to tell Grandma.
Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, reports:
Our computer died on Wednesday. Well, maybe it didn’t die. But it is seriously ill.
Anyway, I have books due to my evil editor, so I’ve been in a panic.
Byron set up his office laptop for me last night. He hooked it all up and wrote me a long description of how to log in and use it.
I came down this morning and couldn’t get it to work, no matter what I did.
I would turn it on, but I couldn’t get it to do anything once I had it on. I hit Ctrl-Alt-Delete and nothing happened. I couldn’t even get the cursor to move, using the mouse.
I called Byron in a panic. “The laptop is freezing up, just like our regular computer was! Maybe the problem is with the line, not the computer.” He told me that was ridiculous, and walked me through two restarts, eventually wondering aloud if perhaps it was a ghost doing this.
Which is when I realized the problem. I was typing and using the mouse for our regular computer, not the laptop.
… reading this and go read Charles Pierce at Eric Alterman’s Altercation. Pierce is just a few paragraphs down the page.
Then come back.
NewMexiKen scored nine correct out of ten. Try your knowledge with The Week Quiz.
It’s more fun if everyone reports their score (in Comments).
they’re not tax cuts. With a $450 billion deficit this year, they’re tax deferrals.
From The New York Times:
Fully one-third of President Bush’s tax cuts in the last three years have gone to people with the top 1 percent of income, who have earned an average of $1.2 million annually, according to a report by the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to be published Friday.
The report calculated that households with incomes in that top 1 percent were receiving an average tax cut of $78,460 this year, while households in the middle 20 percent of earnings – averaging about $57,000 a year – were getting an average cut of only $1,090.
was born on this date in 1899. The director was nominated for an Academy Award six times (five as director, once for best picture), but never won. The best director nominations were for Rebecca, Life Boat, Spellbound, Rear Window and Psycho.
CNN did a nice retrospective on Hitchcock on his 100th birthday five years ago. It includes a list of his “ten best” films.
10. “Strangers on a Train” (1951)
9. “The Man Who Knew Too Much” (1934, 1956)
8. “To Catch a Thief” (1955)
7. “Dial M for Murder” (1954)
6. “The 39 Steps” (1935)
5. “North by Northwest” (1959)
4. “The Birds” (1963)
3. “Psycho” (1960)
2. “Vertigo” (1958)
1. “Rear Window” (1954)
Jill, official oldest daughter of NewMexiKen, reports that Shrek 2 is a couple of weeks away from becoming the number three all-time domestic grosser. Here’s the top ten with box office receipts (in millions):
Titanic $600.8
Star Wars $461.0
E.T. The Extra Terrestrial $435.0
Shrek 2 $432.5
Star Wars: The Phantom Menace $431.1
Spider-Man $403.7
LOTR: The Return of the King $377.0
The Passion of the Christ $370.3
Jurassic Park $357.1
Spider-Man 2 $344.4
Four of the ten were released in the last eight months.
premiered on this date in 1942. Is there a sadder movie ever than this Disney classic?
Roger Ebert wrote an excellent review when Bambi was released yet again in 1988. He starts generally positive:
In the annals of the great heartbreaking moments in the movies, the death of Bambi’s mother ranks right up there with the chaining of Dumbo’s mother and the moment when E. T. seems certainly dead. These are movie moments that provide a rite of passage for children of a certain age: You send them in as kids, and they come out as sadder and wiser preteenagers.
And there are other moments in the movie almost as momentous. “Bambi” exists alone in the Disney canon. It is not an adventure and not a “cartoon,” but an animated feature that describes with surprising seriousness the birth and growth of a young deer. Everybody remembers the cute early moments when Bambi can’t find his footing and keeps tripping over his own shadow. Those scenes are among the most charming the Disney animators ever drew.
But then he questions the whole effort:
Hey, I don’t want to sound like an alarmist here, but if you really stop to think about it, “Bambi” is a parable of sexism, nihilism and despair, portraying absentee fathers and passive mothers in a world of death and violence. I know the movie’s a perennial clasic, seen by every generation, remembered long after other movies have been forgotten. But I am not sure it’s a good experience for children – especially young and impressionable ones.
His is an excellent, thoughtful brief review.
was born on this date in 1860. Larry McMurtry’s excellent essay “Inventing the West” from the August 2000 issue of The New York Review of Books tells us all about this famous performer.
Annie Oakley (Phoebe Ann Moses—or Mosey) grew up poor in rural Ohio, shot game to feed her family, shot game to sell, was pressed into a shooting contest with a touring sharpshooter named Frank Butler, beat him, married him, stayed with him for fifty years, and died three weeks before he did in 1926.
When Annie Oakley and Frank Butler offered themselves to Cody the Colonel was dubious. His fortunes were at a low ebb, and shooting acts abounded. But he gave Annie Oakley a chance. She walked out in Louisville before 17,000 people and was hired immediately. Nate Salsbury, Cody’s tight-fisted manager, who did not spend lavishly and who rarely highlighted performers, happened to watch Annie rehearse and promptly ordered seven thousand dollars’ worth of posters and billboard art.
Annie Oakley more than justified the expense. Sitting Bull, normally a taciturn fellow, saw her shoot in Minnesota and could not contain himself. Watanya cicilia, he called her, his Little Sure Shot. Small, reserved, Quakerish, she seemed to live on the lemonade Buffalo Bill dispensed free to all hands. In London she demolished protocol by shaking hands with Princess Alexandra. She shook hands with Alexandra’s husband, the Prince of Wales, too, though, like his mother the Queen, she strongly disapproved of his behavior with the ladies. In France the Parisians were glacially indifferent to buffalo, Indians, cowboys, and Cody—Annie Oakley melted them so thoroughly that she had to go through her act five times before she could escape. In Germany she likened Bismarck to a mastiff.
In 1901 she was almost killed in a train wreck. Annie claimed that it was the wreck that caused her long auburn hair to turn white overnight; skeptics said her hair turned white because she left it in hot water too long while at a spa. She continued to shoot into the 1920s. In her last years she looked rather like Nancy Astor. Will Rogers visited her not long before her death and pronounced her the perfect woman. Probably not until Billie Jean King and the rise of women’s tennis had a female outdoor performer held the attention of so many people. She became part of the “invention” that is the West by winning her way with a gun: a man’s thing, the very thing, in fact, that had won the West itself.
Paraskevidekatriaphobia — fear of Friday the 13th
So where does it come from — the fear of 13? Its origins can be traced to Norse mythology and a dinner party at Valhalla, home of the god Odin, where Odin and 11 of his closest god-friends were gathered one night to party. Everyone was having fun, but then Loki, the dastardly god of evil and turmoil, showed up uninvited, making it a crowd of 13. The beloved god Balder tried to boot Loki out of the house, the legend goes, and in the scuffle that followed he suffered a deathblow from a spear of mistletoe.
From that mythological start, the number 13 has plowed a path of devastation through history. There were 13 people at Christ’s Last Supper, including the double-crossing Judas Iscariot. The ill-fated Apollo 13 lunar mission left the launching pad at 13:13 hours and was aborted on April 13. Friday hasn’t been much kinder to us. Friday was execution day in ancient Rome — Jesus was crucified on a Friday. Put it all together, and Friday the 13th spells trouble for triskaidekaphobics. It’s a testament to the phobia’s prevalence that Hollywood was able to parlay our fear into a hugely successful series of slasher movies starring a hockey-masked guy named Jason.
But triskaidekaphobia isn’t an exclusively American affliction. Italians omit the number 13 from their national lottery. There is a hush-hush organization in France whose exclusive purpose is to provide last-minute guests for dinner parties, so that no party host ever has to suffer the curse of entertaining 13 guests.
— Excerpted from Jon Bowen, writing at Slate.
About.com has five pages of background on the superstition.
The perfect gift for those afraid of the bogie man.
This news story from Stuart, Florida, reported by WFTV.com:
A 480-pound Martin County woman has died after emergency workers tried to remove her from the couch where she had remained for about six years. …
Removing her from the couch would be too painful, since her body was grafted to the fabric. After years of staying put, her skin had literally become one with the sofa and had to be surgically removed.
She died at Martin Memorial Hospital South, still attached to the couch.
From Outside Magazine:
Seeking an underpopulated—and undiscovered—slice of paradise? Drop in to any of our 20 adventure towns, from burly Haines, Alaska, to serene Cedar Key, Florida, where you’ll find cush, affordable base camps for spontaneous long weekends or a lifetime of wild fun.
The towns:
Intro
Lanesboro, MN
Etna, CA
Cashiers, NC
Hood River, OR
Haines, AK
Lander, WY
Sandpoint, ID
Mountain View, AR
Silver City, NM
Cedar Key, FL
Lincolnville, ME
Salida, CO
Brattleboro, VT
How To Buy
Border Towns
Six of the towns are listed under “border towns.”
From The Washington Post:
Hot sauce adds a kick to salsa, barbeque, falafel and hundreds of other foods. But some parents use it in a different recipe, one they think will yield better-behaved children: They put a drop of the fiery liquid on a child’s tongue as punishment for lying, biting, hitting or other offenses.
“Hot saucing,” or “hot tongue,” has roots in Southern culture, according to some advocates of the controversial disciplinary method, but it has spread throughout the country. Nobody keeps track of how many parents do it, but most experts contacted for this story, including pediatricians, psychologists and child welfare professionals, were familiar with it.
The use of hot sauce has been advocated in a popular book, in a magazine for Christian women and on Internet sites. Web-based discussions on parenting carry intense, often emotional exchanges on the topic.
The book, Creative Correction: Extraordinary Ideas for Everyday Discipline, is by actress/mom/author/Christian Lisa Whelchel (Blair on Facts of Life).
uggabugga took a look at the Amazon.com reviews for the book (he includes no quotes from those who liked it).
We took a look at the Customer Reviews over at Amazon to get a sense of what Lisa Whelchel’s book, Creative Correction (pub. Oct 2000), advises. Here is what we found:
- … she mentions spraying water into the face of a toddler who has a temper tantrum. I’d feel like I was treating my child as a housepet if I did that.
- … she mentioned things like letting a child go without a meal for failing to do a chore. I do believe strongly that you should never threaten to withhold food from a child, for any reason.
- What kind of sadistic things is Lisa Welchel trying to communicate to parents? How could making a child run thru dog crap teach him to have a more spiritual walk.
- I would like to know how burning your childs favorite possesion will help them in any posative way at all.
- The example with toilet water is to put water from the faucet in one cup and water from the toilet in another. With the child watching, pour the water out and pour some koolaid or juice in each cup. Ask them which cup they want to drink out of. The lesson here is that talking “dirty” has lingering effects.
- [Whelchel uses] Bible verses to tell your children that if they look at bad things ravens will peck out their eyes.
- Lisa Welchel’s “correction” ideas are not only frightening, they’re mad!! I fail to see how pinching a child’s tongue with a clothespin will help that child learn about the love of God, the compassion of Jesus, or the Truth of His Spirit.
- Got a kid who yells in public? Make him hold his tongue–literally, with his fingers.
- At one point her son is honest enough to admit that he’s angry at her after she’s been away for a long time and plans to then go out again that evening. Does she tell him she can understand why he feels that way? Does she make arrangements to spend time with her kids after a long absence? No, she threatens to beat him if he can’t promise he’ll “be good” for the babysitter.
- … can you imagine … making a child stand still and not move until he’s ready for bed?!?
- Using schoolwork and the Bible as forms of punishments is a terrible idea.
- … absolutely frightening in every way. please spare your children the torture and emotional abuse that this woman’s children must suffer from these insane ideas. i can’t believe that any normal human could believe that these punishments could be anyway helpful to raising a healthy child. if you must read this book, do it only for the sheer humor of this woman’s ludicous ideas…no seriously it is hilarious.
And finally, this Word From The Author:
I have three children, ages 8,9 & 10, including a son diagnosed with ADHD. It was out of sheer desperation that I came up with many of the discipline ideas in this book.
This guy is running for U.S. Senate as a Libertarian in Illinois. He should have tried for President. He could have swept the dyslexic vote.
From John Noble Wilford in The New York Times:
Paleontologists now think they have the answer: a teenage growth surge in which a T. rex normally put on an average of 4.6 pounds a day over four years.
A new study of tyrannosaur bones, scientists reported yesterday, has determined that from about 14 to 18 years of age, a meat-eating T. rex with a humongous appetite gained about 6,600 pounds to reach its full adult weight of more than 11,000 pounds, length of 42 feet and height of about 14 feet at the hips.
These dinosaurs were at least 15 times the size of the polar bear, today’s largest living terrestrial carnivore, and were about the same weight as an African bull elephant.
From The Daily Texan:
A 76-year-old prisoner walked out of jail, a free man for the first time in 41 years, after a judge dismissed the conviction against him.
Robert Carroll Coney, convicted of a 1962 robbery, exhibited a surprising lack of bitterness as he left Angelina County Jail with his wife on Tuesday.
“I’m going to try to pick up the pieces,” Coney told the Lufkin Daily News in Wednesday’s editions. “If I was angry, what could I do about it?”
Coney said his identity had been confused with a man he had carpooled with through Lufkin on the day of the crime: March 7, 1962. Court documents state Coney falsely confessed to the crime after Angelina County deputies broke his hand, the Daily News reported.
Not only was his confession inadmissible, but 41 years for a robbery? (Though, apparently he escaped from time-to-time and no doubt prolonged his jail time.)
Link via Talk Left.
“If I know Republicans and their grass-roots operations, they’ll spend most of their time trying to phone bank the Amish,”
Kerry spokesman Mark Nevin
Found at The Rittenhouse Review.
… of Zerna Sharp, born in Hillisburg, Indiana, on this date in 1889. According to The Writer’s Almanac, Ms. Sharp is the woman who —
invented the characters Dick and Jane to help teach children how to read…Sharp’s idea was to use pictures and repetition to teach children new words. She took her idea to Dr. William S. Gray, who had been studying the way children learn to read, and he hired her to create a series of textbooks. She didn’t write the books, but she created the characters Dick, Jane, their sister Sally, their dog Spot, and their cat Puff. Each story introduced five new words, one on each page.