From the USA Today story on the worst songs:
The entry most likely to peeve fans is Simon & Garfunkel’s The Sounds of Silence.
“It’s the freshman-poetry meaningfulness that got our goat,” Marks says. “With self-important lyrics like, ‘Hear my words that I might teach you,’ it’s almost a parody of pretentious ’60s folk-rock.
“If Frasier Crane wrote a song, this would be it.”
Blender magazine’s list of the “50 Worst Songs Ever,” has these sprightly melodies at the top:
1. We Built This City Starship 1985
2. Achy Breaky Heart Billy Ray Cyrus 1992
3. Everybody Have Fun Tonight Wang Chung 1986
4. Rollin’ Limpbizkit 2000
5. Ice Ice Baby Vanilla Ice 1990
6. The Heart of Rock & Roll Huey Lewis & The News 1984
7. Don’t Worry, Be Happy Bobby McFerrin 1988
8. Party All the Time Eddie Murphy 1985
9. American Life Madonna 2003
10. Ebony and Ivory Paul McCartney, Stevie Wonder 1982
A song had to be a hit to qualify and novelty songs intended to be outrageous were not included, for example Who Let the Dogs Out. According to USA Today, “The jury also whittled down the bulk of ‘rotten, excruciatingly bad low-hanging fruit from the ’70s.'”
NewMexiKen doesn’t know if militarily Iraq is like Vietnam, as some are saying, but the “you’re not a patriot if you don’t support the war” contagion sure evokes a strong sense of déjà vu.
From The Albuquerque Journal:
The Sandoval County Republican Party doesn’t want County Clerk Victoria Dunlap as a member.
“Other than assassination, all we can do is censure her,” committee chairman Richard Gibbs said before the vote. The resolution of censure says the clerk “has brought disgrace to the party as a whole.”
Victoria Dunlap is the county clerk who continues to fight for the legalization of same-gender marriage.
[Note: The Albuquerque Journal does not make its stories available on-line unless you subscribe to the rag paper.]
Troubled by the realities of war? So is Doonesbury.
According to a report in The Santa Fe New Mexican, candidates for a state Senate seat were asked “whether they had been arrested for drunken driving, and each answered that he or she had not.”
It turns out that one had, in 1984.
What on earth was she thinking, saying no? Her one arrest — 20 years ago — would likely have been a non-starter with the voters. Indeed, a wise candidate could turn it into a “I’ve been there, done that, know what we need to do” strategy. Instead she lies and, presumably, her candidacy is over. According to The New Mexican she wasn’t returning calls.
The candidates we get are as stupid it seems, as they think we are.
The Banana Guard does exactly what it says. Take a look.
Link via Dave Barry.
Elizabeth the Second, by the Grace of God, of the United Kingdom of Great Britain and Northern Ireland and Her other Realms and Territories Queen, Head of the Commonwealth, Defender of the Faith.
Her Majesty is 78 today. Her name is Elizabeth Alexandra Mary Windsor. She signs Elizabeth R.
The Official web site of the British Monarchy is nicely done.
This from Popcultablog*:
I’ve got bad news and bad news about Bill Rancic’s new gig as head honcho of Trump’s Chicago skyscraper project. The bad news is that so far, the financing and approvals for the building have not come through and it’s not a sure thing (although one could imagine Trump trying to drum up interest in said funding using his
infomercialreality show as a marketing tool). The bad news is that Mark Burnett is thinking about making a reality show that will follow Rancic (and possibly some of the other Apprentice stars) as the building goes up. Which is all a long way of putting the city of Chicago on a code-red Omarosa alert.
continues to generate about 15% of the search engine driven visits to NewMexiKen. What is it with this obsession? It’s not as if NewMexiKen has photographs of Omarosa, or somehow the naked truth about Omarosa, or even Omarosa’s birthdate.
OK Google, take that.
Dan Neil is at it again in the Los Angeles Times, One is unique, two is too many. Neil takes a look at the Chevy SSR (Super Sport Roadster). He begins:
The most lucid thing the Marxist critic Walter Benjamin ever wrote is the essay “The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction,” written in 1936, during an apparent dry spell in Berlin’s hashish supply.
Benjamin’s famous essay, a staple of film-lit classes, puts a dope-scented finger on a central issue in aesthetics: If the art object is special — if it has an authenticity, an “aura,” Benjamin calls it — what is the status of the duplicate, the mechanically reproduced copy?
“That which withers in the age of mechanical reproduction is the aura of the work of art,” says Benjamin. Reproduction “substitutes a plurality of copies for a unique existence.”
In other words: The first David by Michelangelo is art, the second is a lawn ornament.
From the Christian Science Monitor, ‘Lost in Translation’ doesn’t translate well in Japan:
The Oscar-winning film by Sofia Coppola opened to a lukewarm reception in Tokyo this past week . Critics say it draws on ‘unpleasant’ stereotypes.
Maybe the Japanese just have a low threshold for boredom.
was born on this date in 1838. The Writer’s Almanac has a nice essay.
It’s the birthday of writer and naturalist John Muir, born in Dunbar, Scotland. When he was eleven years old, he immigrated with his family to Fountain Lake Farm in Wisconsin. He went to college, but left after three years to travel through the northern United States and Canada, working at odd jobs to earn a living. In 1867 he was working at a carriage parts shop in Indianapolis when he almost lost one of his eyes in a freak accident. He later said, “I felt neither pain nor faintness, the thought was so tremendous that my right eye was gone—that I should never look at a flower again.” He was so affected by the incident that he decided to quit his job and walk across the country, living as close to nature as possible.
He walked for a thousand miles, from Indianapolis to the Gulf of Mexico, and then he sailed to Cuba, Panama, and finally California, which would become his home for the rest of his life. He fell in love with the Sierra Mountains in California, and spent much of his time hiking and camping there. He also visited Alaska, South America, Australia, Africa, China, Europe, and Japan, studying plants, animals, rocks, and glaciers. He came up with innovative theories of glacial formation that contradicted the theories of earlier scientists and that have proven to be mostly correct.
In 1889, he wrote a series of articles arguing for a national reserve to be created in the Sierra Mountains. The next year, Yosemite National Park was created, and Muir became known as the “Father of our National Parks.” In his final years, he wrote most of the nature books for which he is known—The Mountains of California (1894), Our National Parks (1901), The Yosemite (1912), and many others.
Muir said, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.”
The top three search terms people have used to find NewMexKen:
You can see why NewMexiKen tries to remain the web site for the naked truth about Omarosa.
From Christopher Reynolds in the Los Angeles Times, Cold and alone, yes. Crazy? Not yet, the story of Craig Peterson who “spends winter at Crater Lake Lodge with an ax and 520 inches of snow. Yeah, he’s seen ‘The Shining.'”
Clint is 45 today. He has appeared in many of his brother’s films — Cocoon and Apollo 13 come to mind, but most will remember Clint Howard as the 8-year-old kid in the TV series Gentle Ben. (Dennis Weaver was the dad.) Howard was also the voice of Roo in the Disney Winnie the Pooh films.
From the The Salt Lake Tribune:
The Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument — whose rugged beauty was formed over the ages by ice, wind and water — has weathered its biggest legal storm.
On Monday, a federal judge upheld former President Clinton’s use of the Antiquities Act to designate the embattled reserve in southern Utah nearly eight years ago.
In a 47-page ruling, U.S. District Judge Dee Benson rejected each of the “myriad claims” offered by the Utah Association of Counties (UAC) and the Colorado-based Mountain States Legal Foundation, a group that represents grazing, mining and motorized-recreation interests in the West.
President Clinton, joined by Vice President Al Gore on the North Rim of the Grand Canyon in Arizona, signs a [proclamation] declaring 1.7 million acres of southern Utah’s redrock cliffs and canyons as the Grand Staircase- Escalante National Monument in September 1996.
Try to imagine Bush and Cheney doing this.
Colorado Luis discusses two new, as he calls them, “Blogs with Altitude.”
The first is SLV Dweller, “San Luis Valley History, Culture, News and Information.” As the San Luis Valley really should be part of New Mexico, NewMexiKen has added a link in the Blogs of Enchantment.
The second blog Luis describes is Howling At A Waning Moon, “Tracking the Bush Administration’s assault on the environment, our health, and our children’s quality of life.” Now that’s a full-time job. Take a look at the photos on This is my home town.
When Henry Kissinger left Harvard and went to Washington to serve in the Nixon administration, he was asked by one his new colleagues about the poltical infighting in academia. “In Washington we’re famous for political intrigue – it’s our job,” someone asked, “but we’re pikers compared to the backstabbing and dirty politics at universities. Why do you people fight like that?”
Kissinger is said to have responded in his low gravelly voice, “It’s because the stakes are so low”.
From The New York Times:
President Bush’s nominee to be archivist of the United States — an ordinarily low-profile job that includes overseeing the release of government documents, including presidential papers — is generating an intense controversy among historians, some of whom accuse the White House of trying to push through a candidate who is prone to secrecy.
The nominee, Allen Weinstein, is a former university professor who for two decades has worked to bring about democracy in former dictatorships. As a historian, he is best known for a 1978 book on Alger Hiss, a work that still stirs anger among historians who say Mr. Weinstein refused to make his notes public.
In an interview Monday, Mr. Weinstein did not address that accusation specifically, saying he felt he should reserve discussion of that until his Senate confirmation hearings. But he did defend himself, taking the rare step of speaking to a reporter while his nomination is pending, describing himself as a registered Democrat and saying, “I am not in anybody’s pocket, and I am committed to maximum access.”
Thanks to David for the link.
Click on photo to enlarge.
Thanks to many for the link and to the The Seattle Times for the photo and article.
New Zealand professor Denis Dutton On Peter Jackson and Lord of the Rings, from which the following is excerpted.
Films promise so much. Yet what have they delivered? Between 1939 and 1942, barely a decade after the advent of sound, Hollywood could produce Citizen Kane, Gone with the Wind, The Wizard of Oz, His Girl Friday, Casablanca, Fantasia, and The Maltese Falcon. Ask yourself, how much better have movies gotten since then?
The Wizard of Oz, like the Rings, is a fantasy-adventure plotted around a quest. It has Munchkins for its Hobbits, flying monkeys for its Orcs, a malevolent witch who lives in a castle, and even humanoid trees. Although the tornado is still a tour de force, its 1939 special-effects are not there to astonish so much as to push the action along. The Wizard of Oz possesses an eternal freshness, its witty, beautifully-paced tale told with singing and dancing actors of phenomenal talent: Judy Garland, Ray Bolger, Jack Haley, and Bert Lahr. Who can remember anything out of Howard Shore’s vapid, overblown score for Lord of the Rings? Who can forget Harold Arlen’s for The Wizard of Oz?
Add it all up — acting talent, script, pacing, humor — and you have in The Wizard of Oz an essential feature completely missing in Lord of the Rings: charm. Most importantly, the 1939 film presents the audience with the vulnerabilities and idiosyncratic interior lives of Dorothy, the Scarecrow, the Tin Man, and the Cowardly Lion. They are as much fantasy characters as any elf out of Tolkien, but they are at the same time deeply human personalities. Margaret Hamilton’s Wicked Witch of the West expresses a sense of authentic menace that Jackson’s flaming, computer-generated evil-eye cannot match. Among the Rings characters, only Gollum comes near to having an intriguing internal life.
This year’s Albuquerque International Balloon Fiesta is October 2-10. 
NewMexiKen understands that a major character in The Sopranos will be killed during this season. I thought earlier on it might be Chris, but now I’m thinking it’s Tony himself.
NewMexiKen realizes that I am no longer a member after the sought-after movie audience, and further that I might just be sophistication-challenged, but what exactly was Lost in Translation about? And more to the point, what was the buzz about? While grateful for any film where no one is tortured, mutilated or shot, or where no cars explode, Lost in Translation had no action, not much plot, and two rather blah characters. Seinfeld episodes had more of all three.
And while Bill Murray was fine, wasn’t he just playing Bill Murray?
Indeed, I’d rather watch Groundhog Day over-and-over than see Lost in Translation again.
