was born on this date in 1913. Lombardi is the legendary football coach; you know, the one the Super Bowl trophy is named for.
Some Lombardisms:
From a report on the Lakers:
Luke Walton brought it down to one word: “Execute.”
Yeah, but who?
Michael Rosenberg in the Detroit Free Press on the 1,500 media credentials issued for the NBA Finals:
With a ratio of 62.5 reporters for every player, you might wonder what the hell we’re all doing here. Well, first of all, we’ll ask the damn questions, OK? And second of all, I have no clue.
How many times in one day can you ask Karl Malone about his knee? My rough estimate: 147. And I guarantee you that when Malone walks away after a thorough grilling about his knee, a reporter will turn to the guy next to him and ask, “Which knee is it again?” …
To accommodate the masses, the Pistons cleared off 16 rows behind one baseline for reporters and their portable solitaire machines, also known as laptops.
From Mitch Albom in the Detroit Free Press:
Their one guard was supposed to outshine the entire Pistons backcourt. Heck, after Kobe Bryant’s miracle shot in Game 2, he threatened to outshine the entire Pistons roster. It was Kobe this and Kobe that. Kobe’s destiny. Kobe’s greatness. That kind of stuff can give you an upset stomach — especially if you’re the other guards. You know, the ones who play against him?
Little wonder then that there were a few extra fist shakes and head nods from Chauncey Billups and Richard Hamilton as they banged down one three-pointer after another Thursday night, as they laid up a fast break here, a banker off the glass there. Oh, it might not have been a last-second desperation heave with the whole world anticipating it. But you know what? It counts the same. Points are points. Two guards are better than one. And on this night, Billups and Hamilton were twin klieg lights at a shopping mall opening, and Kobe was a 25-watt bulb.
From Dwight Perry, Sideline Chatter:
Bill Davidson, whose Tampa Bay Lightning won the Stanley Cup and whose Detroit Shock is the reigning WNBA champion, will make it three if his Detroit Pistons win the NBA title.
Davidson, not taking any chances, is refusing all collect calls from Smarty Jones.
was born on this date in 1925. The Writer’s Almanac tells his story:
It’s the birthday of William Styron, born in Newport News, Virginia (1925). He enlisted in the Marines as a teenager, to fight in World War II, but by the time he’d finished training and set sail for Japan, the war had ended. He moved to Brooklyn, New York, and got a job as an office boy at the McGraw-Hill publishing house. He was supposed to write book jacket copy, but he was so disgusted with most of the books that he filled all his summaries with insults and foul language. After throwing several paper airplanes and water balloons out the window of his office, he got fired. So he decided to try to make it as a writer.
Styron had always wanted to be a writer, but, he said, “At twenty-two … I found that the creative heat which at eighteen had nearly consumed me with its gorgeous, relentless flame had flickered out to a dim pilot light registering little more than a token glow in my breast.” His first idea was to write a novel about slavery. It amazed him that his grandmother could remember when her family owned slaves, and he was always fascinated by the story of the slave uprising led by Nat Turner. But when he told a creative writing teacher about his idea, the teacher said he should wait until he had written a few novels before he tackled something so ambitious.
Then, he learned that a girl he’d once dated had committed suicide. He took a train to her funeral, and on the journey back to his hometown a novel took shape in his head about a girl’s suicide and its effect on her family and community. That novel was Lie Down in Darkness (1951), and it got great reviews. He wrote two more novels before he went back to his first idea, and in 1967 he published The Confessions of Nat Turner, which became a bestseller and won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His most recent book is A Tidewater Morning: Three Tales from Youth (1993).
Styron’s compelling Darkness Visible: A Memoir of Madness (1990) describes his crippling, nearly suicidal depression at age 60.
NewMexiKen agrees with TBogg:
You wanna put someone new on the ten dollar bill? [Ray Charles’s] your man…
According to an article by Selena Roberts in The New York Times, Ignorance and Arrogance Collide, Live and Off-Color, Larry Bird made the following remark during the taping of an ESPN program to be aired tonight.
“But it is a black man’s game, and it will be forever. I mean the greatest athletes in the world are African-American.”
Unable to pick up his dribble, Bird, the homespun folk legend from French Lick, Ind., went on to say that he loathed being guarded by a “white” guy during his Celtics days, adding: “As far as playing, I didn’t care who guarded me – red, yellow, black. I just didn’t want a white guy guarding me, because it’s disrespect to my game.”
This may not work because most visitors to NewMexiKen don’t leave comments, but let’s try anyway. Mario’s comments on soccer vs. basketball got me thinking about it.
Which team sport has the best athletes?
I guess that best would include the attributes of strength, endurance, speed and — of course — skill (finesse, balance, hand/eye coordination).
but don’t you think a name change might be in order, or at least an alternative spelling?
Link via Functional Ambivalent.
A pretty significant fire burning in Albuquerque late this afternoon — apparently spread from a structure into the grove (bosque) that lines both banks of the Rio Grande. The fire has jumped the river. One can never tell watching TV news how bad something is, as each event is treated as Armageddon, but at any rate this isn’t good. Homes have been burned, many more are in danger and the wind is gusting to 30 mph.
The last measurable rain in Albuquerque was in early April.
An amiable critique of Reagan written as a letter from Ronnie in heaven.
Dave Eggers at Mother Jones on how teachers make ends meet.
The latest statistics put the average teacher’s salary at about $46,000; some teachers earn a little more, some a little less (the average teacher’s salary—not the starting salary—is $38,000 in Kansas, $36,000 in New Mexico, and $32,000 in South Dakota). Overall, that’s about the same that we pay pile-driver operators ($45,980) and about $8,000 less than the average elevator repairman pulls down. Meanwhile, a San Francisco dockworker makes about $115,000, while the clerk who logs shipping records into the longshoreman’s computer makes $136,000.
The first step to creating an education system full of the best teachers we can find is to pay them in line with their importance to their communities. We pay orthodontists an average of $350,000, and no one would say that their impact on the lives of kids is greater than a teacher’s. But it seems difficult for everyone, from parents to politicians, to shake free of a tradition in which teaching was seen as something of a volunteer project for women whose husbands brought home the real money.
“I guess the people I feel worst for are Carter and Ford. Because they have to be watching all this thinking, we’re not getting that.”
Jon Stewart, on media coverage of Ronald Reagan’s death
“CIA Director George Tenet resigned last week. Here’s the sad part, the FBI just found out today.”
Jay Leno
From Discovery News:
Language skills once thought exclusively human are also within the reach of dogs, say German researchers studying a nine-year-old border collie that has a 200-word vocabulary. …
In a game where Rico is told to fetch an unfamiliar object with a name he hasn’t heard before, Rico runs into a room where the new object is on the floor among several familiar objects, of which he already knows the names. Rico reliably figures out that the new word must go with the new object in a single try. Then, after a month of not seeing the new object or hearing the new word, he remembers them.
What’s scary is that he’s 9, which means 63 in human terms, right? I’m younger than that and I can go into a room and forget what I went into it for.
was born 82 years ago today. We know her as Judy Garland. She was just under 5-feet tall and the need for weight-control lead her to drugs, which controlled much of her adult life. She died of a barbiturate overdose at age 47.
Ms. Garland was nominated for Best Actress in a Leading Role for A Star is Born (1955) and Best Actress in a Supporting Role for Judgment at Nuremberg (1962). She won a special “Juvenile Oscar” for The Wizard of Oz (1940).
From Sideline Chatter in The Seattle Times:
Bill Scheft of Sports Illustrated, on the Williams sisters’ misfortune at the French Open: “Serena had 45 unforced errors against Jennifer Capriati. Forty-six, if you count her outfit.”
From Reuters via CNN:
A Texas woman convicted of neglecting her two horses will get only bread and water for the first three days of a 30-day jail sentence, a judge said Tuesday.
From Wonkette:
Just when we thought we wouldn’t actually learn anything from all this Reagan coverage, Chris Matthews gives us a real history lesson. Vamping a bit between MSNBC correspondents’ interviews of Stepford Republicans, Matthews noted that, thanks to all of Reagan’s war movies, “He seemed understand the experience of the Greatest Generation better than the guys who were actually in battle could.”
Steve Olson is the author of The Royal We, an article in The Atlantic in May 2002, which claims: “The mathematical study of genealogy indicates that everyone in the world is descended from Nefertiti and Confucius, and everyone of European ancestry is descended from Muhammad and Charlemagne.”
According to Steve Olson, Mapping Human History, “Medical students are taught that 5 to 10 percent of the fathers identified on birth certificates are not the true biological fathers.” Genetic studies confirm this number. “[N]onpaternity tends to be higher for first-born and last-born children.”
“Adding up the numbers, approximately 81 billion modern humans have lived altogether. For every person alive today, twelve have died. If people really go to heaven after death, then the afterworld is a crowded place.”
Steve Olson, Mapping Human History
NewMexiKen spent this afternoon reading Steve Olson’s Mapping Human History: Discovering the Past through Our Genes (2002). The book is informative and interesting, though it gives the vague impression of articles strung together. Some items of interest:
Every single one of the 6 billion people on the planet today is descended from the small group of anatomically modern humans who once lived in eastern Africa. The group occasionally came close to extinction, but it never died out completely, and eventually it began to expand. By about 100,000 years ago, modern humans had moved north along the Nile Valley and across the Sinai Peninsula into the Middle East. More than 60,000 years ago they made their way along the coastlines of India and southeastern Asia and sailed to Australia. About 40,000 years ago, modern humans moved from northeastern Africa into Europe and from southeastern Asia into eastern Asia. Finally, sometime more than 10,000 years ago, they made their way along a wide plain joining Siberia and Alaska and spread down the length of North and South America. (Page 3)
In comparing the DNA sequences of people from many locations around the world, geneticists have been able to measure the genetic differences between individuals and between groups. What they have found is that about 85 percent of the total amount of genetic variation in humans occurs within groups and only 15 percent between groups. In other words, most genetic variants occur in all human populations. Geneticists have to look hard to find variants concentrated in specific groups.
The pattern is quite different in other large mammals. Among elephants of eastern and southern Africa, 40 percent of the total genetic differences occurs between groups. For the gray wolves of North America, group differences account for 75 percent of the total genetic variation. Most conservation biologists hold that group genetic differences have to exceed 25 to 30 percent for a single species to divided into subspecies or races. By this measure, human races do not exist. (Page 63)
From Dan Neil in the Los Angeles Times:
In some atmospheric conditions — a brown day in San Bernardino, for instance — PZEV vehicles actually clean the air, which is to say, their emissions are cleaner than the air sucked into the engine.
In terms of noxious emissions, your spouse pollutes more than a PZEV.
Despite automakers’ long and litigious assertions to the contrary, they have been able to develop the compliant technologies. There are currently more than 30 PZEV vehicles on the market (visit http://www.driveclean.ca.gov ), including BMW’s 3-Series cars and wagon, Honda’s Accord, Subaru’s suite of Legacy cars and wagons, and Volvo’s big V70 wagon — not exactly hair shirts of eco-martyrdom.
So let’s hear it for big government. Had California not used its enormous leverage in the marketplace — the state is the biggest vehicle market in the country — the automakers would not have been motivated to develop the engineering that will, now that it is available, become integrated into the larger vehicle market. California’s zero-emissions mandate has been adopted, with some variation, in the “green states” of Maine, New York, Vermont and Massachusetts. Why, clean air is spreading like a prairie fire.