Judith Guest…

was born in Detroit, Michigan, on this date in 1936. The Writer’s Almanac tells her story:

[Guest’s] written three novels, each of them about adolescent children who have to deal with a crisis in their family: Second Heaven (1982), Errands (1997) and, most famously, Ordinary People (1976).

She didn’t begin writing seriously until she was in her thirties, after all of her children had begun school. She finished the manuscript of Ordinary People in 1974 and sent it to Viking Press without the usual cover letter and plot synopsis. Viking hadn’t published an unsolicited manuscript in over twenty-five years, but an editorial assistant happened to read Ordinary People and recommended it to her publishers. It was published two years later, and it became a bestseller. In 1980, Robert Redford made it into a movie, and it won the Academy Award for Best Picture.

Changes

NewMexiKen has migrated from Blogger to Movable Type, a more comprehensive blogging software. You can see in the left column that there is a listing of the most Recent Entries and a listing of Categories. There is also an effective search tool for all of NewMexiKen.

Comments are now integrated into the Entries. When you click on a single entry — in the Archives or the Recent Entries or on the Posted line — the comments will appear with the orginal posting.

Comments made before now, however, have not been migrated.

There are problems with a few of the entries going back to August; some 1,626 postings. I will repair them as I can and identify Categories.

Please let me know if you come across any bugs or issues with the new software. Thanks.

Update: A section listing Recent Comments has been added and comments made during the past week have been posted to the new database.

Hair today, gone tomorrow

From Morning Briefing in the Los Angeles Times:

In a “SportsCentury” profile of John Wooden airing on ESPN Classic today at 5 and 8 p.m., Bill Walton says that he and Wooden “fought about everything” when he played for Wooden, particularly his hair.

“I’m the two-time NCAA player of the year and he says, ‘That’s not good enough. Your hair is too long,’ ” Walton says.

Says Wooden: “He said, ‘You don’t have the right to tell me how long to wear my hair.’ I said, ‘You’re right, I don’t have that right. But I do have the right to say who will play. And we will miss you.’ ”

Walton: “I jumped in the barber’s chair and said, ‘Cut it all off.’ “

Tax Cuts 101 (or one way of looking at it)

Sometimes Politicians can exclaim; “It’s just a tax cut for the rich!”, and it is just accepted to be fact. But what does that really mean? Just in case you are not completely clear on this issue, we hope the following will help.

Tax Cuts – A Simple Lesson In Economics

This is how the cookie crumbles. Please read it carefully.

Let’s put tax cuts in terms everyone can understand.

Suppose that every day, ten men go out for dinner. The bill for all ten comes to $100. If they paid their bill the way we pay our taxes, it would go something like this:

The first four men (the poorest) would pay nothing.
The fifth would pay $1.
The sixth would pay $3.
The seventh $7.
The eighth $12.
The ninth $18.
The tenth man (the richest) would pay $59.

So, that’s what they decided to do. The ten men ate dinner in the restaurant every day and seemed quite happy with the arrangement, until one day, the owner threw them a curve. “Since you are all such good customers,” he said, “I’m going to reduce the cost of your daily meal by $20.”
Continue reading Tax Cuts 101 (or one way of looking at it)

Scary stuff

From CNN:

A self-described psychic’s tip that a bomb might be on a plane prompted a search with bomb-sniffing dogs that turned up nothing suspicious, but forced the cancelation of the flight.

American Airlines Flight 1304 at Southwest Florida International Airport was canceled Friday because some crew members had exceeded their work hours by the time the search was finished, officials said.

The Heroic Bureaucrat

Joel Achenbach on The Wonk That Roared:

However that high-stakes political battle turns out, Clarke’s book has given America a vivid glimpse of culture clash at the highest level of government. The protagonist is a career civil servant with an ability to amass unusual amounts of power and make himself indispensable in a crisis. The antagonists are politicians and political operatives and other bureaucrats, people who fail to schedule the high-level briefings they need, who don’t heed the civil servant’s warnings, who drop the ball time and time again.

Clarke’s book provides an archetypal figure that has been relatively rare in popular culture or political discourse: the Heroic Bureaucrat. As a general rule, Americans have viewed bureaucrats as irritating figures. In common speech, to be “bureaucratic” is to be obsessed with procedure and prone to inertia.

Bureaucrats are seen as the kind of people who follow rules that make no sense and have nightmares about someone using a No. 1 pencil instead of a No. 2 pencil. A bureaucrat is someone who attends a long-delayed meeting on the topic of whether a task force should examine the chronic shortage of available meeting rooms.

Read more.

Three Mile Island

At 4:00 AM on March 28, 1979, a reactor at the Three Mile Island nuclear power facility near Harrisburg, Pennsylvania, suddenly overheated, releasing radioactive gases.

Before the 1979 accident at Pennsylvania’s Three Mile Island, few had heard of the nuclear power plant on the Susquehanna River. But the crisis…quickly turned the plant and its giant cooling towers into icons in the long national argument over the safety of nuclear energy.

The initial information from the accident in the Unit 2 reactor was sketchy and contradictory. The utility company that ran the plant said the situation was manageable. But officials from mayor’s offices to the Oval Office worried about possible complications that would shower radioactivity on the small communities around Three Mile Island — or perhaps even farther. Government engineers feared that the reactor’s nuclear fuel would melt out of its thick steel and cement encasement, or that a hydrogen gas bubble in the core would explode.

In Harrisburg, less than 10 miles away, the state’s new governor struggled with conflicting advice on whether to begin an evacuation that might affect more than 600,000 people. In Washington, 100 miles south, federal regulators anxiously sought reliable information to guide local authorities and the president, former nuclear engineer Jimmy Carter.

In the two decades since Three Mile Island, the plant has become a rallying symbol for the anti-nuclear movement. But the nuclear power industry, which has not built a single new plant in the United States since 1979, says the accident showed that its safety systems worked, even in the most extreme circumstances.

There is a great deal of information about Three Mile Island on the net. The Washington Post published an extensive review on the 20th anniversary of the incident in 1999, from which the above is excerpted. Frontline has the 1996 ruling dismissing legal claims for radiation health hazards in the community. The U.S. Nuclear Regulatory Commission has a Fact Sheet on The Accident at Three Mile Island.

Henry Rowe Schoolcraft…

was born near Albany, New York, on this date in 1793. Schoolcraft is regarded as the foremost pioneer in American Indian studies.

Schoolcraft College (Michigan) provides this biography:

Schoolcraft maintains a prominent position among the pioneers and builders of America’s intellectual climate. His works in ethnology add an important segment to the folklore of America and filled a gap in the overall information of the aborigines of the continent. Little was known in this country, or the rest of the world, of the American Indian: his origin, customs, legends, language, manners. Schoolcraft was to clarify this. After a second trip through the midwest as geologist and mineralogist for the Department of War, he realized that someone had to study the Indian and his world before we could civilize and educate him. Schoolcraft’s plans to act were formulated after participating in a treaty council held in Chicago where he had the good fortune to see Indians of many American nations and observe their “eloquence and serenity.” Accepting a position as Indian agent in Sault Ste. Marie, Michigan, he commenced, assiduously, to collect and record the life of the Ojibwa Indians, the tribe inhabiting the area around the Sault. His enthusiasm led him to organize the Algic Society, for rehabilitation purposes, and to publish Algic Researches, a text perpetuating knowledge that probably would have been lost had it not been for Schoolcraft’s efforts. Like the monks of Iceland who preserved and recorded Norse mythology from oblivion, Schoolcraft preserved the “dark and dawn of North America” as he called the period of the American aborigine. …

Schoolcraft has also left his mark as an educator and a vital figure in American education. His studies on the middle west were already known to the American public for their literacy, historic and geological merit. To these were added his extensive works on the American Indian. Shortly after arriving at the Sault as Indian agent he opened schools to educate the Indians. Once this was under way he became a member of the Board of Regents of the University of Michigan. In this position he was instrumental in saving the state university from financial disaster. He is also credited with establishing and contributing to the first common school journal in the United States, The Journal of Education. Recognition must also be given him for publishing the first literary magazine in Michigan, The Souvenir of the Lakes.

Probably the most important contribution Schoolcraft made was the essential role he played in the creation of The Song of Hiawatha by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow. This poem “which has made the English critics shout for joy that at length there was an American poem” had immediate and tremendous success. From the time of publication, 1855, the poem has become a part of the cultural background of every English speaking school child and considered a world classic. Of Schoolcraft’s contribution Longfellow states: “…I have woven the curious Indian legends drawn chiefly from the various and valuable writings of Mr. Schoolcraft to whom the literary world is greatly indebted for his indefatigable zeal in rescuing from oblivion so much of the legendary lore of the Indians.”

The Gettysburg of the West

The battle of Glorietta Pass concluded on this date in 1862. Union troops from Fort Union, New Mexico, joined by volunteers from Colorado, effectively ended Confederate attempts to march north up the Rio Grande and on to the gold fields in Colorado.

Estimated casualties: Union 142, Confederate 189.

The Civil War Sites Advisory Commission Battle Summary: Glorieta Pass provides fuller detail.

August Anheuser Busch, Jr. …

was born in St. Louis, on this date in 1899. According to the Library of Congress:

Scion of the famous brewing family, Busch served as Chairman of the Anheuser-Busch Companies, Inc. from 1946-1975. During his tenure, the company his grandfather established emerged as the largest brewery in the world.

Busch’s grandfather Adolphus Busch came to America from Germany in 1857, settling in St. Louis, Missouri. In 1866, he founded the Anheuser-Busch Brewing Company with his father-in-law, Eberhard Anheuser. Busch discovered a way to pasteurize beer, allowing national distribution of his product. By 1901, Anheuser-Busch’s brewery was the nation’s largest. Busch also developed a beer lighter than those commonly sold at the time. This beer, named Budweiser, ultimately became the world’s best seller.

In February 1953, August Anheuser Busch, Jr. rescued a St. Louis tradition by purchasing the St. Louis Cardinals. Busch’s decision was a relief to local baseball fans threatened with the prospect of seeing their team move to Milwaukee or Houston. He became a familiar figure at Cardinal games, entering the Busch Memorial Stadium behind a team of the brewing company’s famous Clydesdale horses.

Xavier

If NewMexiKen were a betting man I’d have to play a hunch and put some cash on Xavier to win the NCAA men’s basketball championship. Playing Scrabble Saturday evening I found the letters X-A-V-I-E-R in my little tray.

The downside of this was, of course, that Xavier is not an acceptable Scrabble word because it is a proper noun.

Sarah Vaughan…

was born on this date in 1924. The PBS web site for American Masters profiles Miss Vaughan:

Jazz critic Leonard Feather called her “the most important singer to emerge from the bop era.” Ella Fitzgerald called her the world’s “greatest singing talent.” During the course of a career that spanned nearly fifty years, she was the singer’s singer, influencing everyone from Mel Torme to Anita Baker. She was among the musical elite identified by their first names. She was Sarah, Sassy — the incomparable Sarah Vaughan.

Most popular blogs

The Truth Laid Bear provides daily weblog rankings, by daily visits, and by the number of sites that link to the weblog.

1. Instapundit 88815 visits/day
2. Daily Kos / Political State Report 81636 visits/day
3. Eschaton (Atrios) 69577 visits/day
4. Gizmodo : The Gadgets Weblog 45908 visits/day
5. Smirking Chimp 37232 visit

1. Instapundit (2626)
2. Talking Points Memo (1653)
3. Eschaton (Atrios) (1514)
4. Daily Kos / Political State Report (1495)
5. Andrew Sullivan (1354)

There are 5 blogs that link to NewMexiKen and about 50 visits/day.

Where do Peeps come from?

From Salon Lisa Gidley tells all about Peeps, including this excerpt:

People don’t just eat Peeps. They take pictures of them. They make crafts with them. They write songs about them. They put them on wreaths. They put them on pizza. They create parody porn Web sites for them. And some curious souls devote countless hours to Peep research, testing the effects of everything from heat to liquid nitrogen on the hardy little fertility symbols.

What is it about Peeps that inspires such passion? Is it their expressions, as winsome as a kitten offering you its paw? Maybe. But hollow chocolate rabbits are cute, too, and nobody writes loving odes to them. Is it their long-standing association with Easter? Perhaps; the Just Born company has been putting Peeps in Easter baskets since 1953. But Cadbury eggs have the holiday-icon thing going on too, and nobody builds little dioramas for them to live in.

Maybe it’s the pure sugar rush that ensues five seconds after you pop a Peep in your mouth. Some folks find it blissful; others shudder in disgust at the mere thought. Arguably, though, those marshmallow Circus Peanuts provide the same result. And, safe to say, nobody devotes parody porn sites to them.

Read more.