Same-Sex Couples Line Up In Sandoval County To Get Married

From the Associated Press (don’t miss the part about the pink newlywed bags)№

BERNALILLO, N.M. — Gay and lesbian couples lined up Friday outside the courthouse to tie the knot after the county clerk said she would grant marriage licenses to same-sex couples.

At least 15 couples had been granted licenses by late morning, the Sandoval County clerk’s office said. A sign-up list had grown to 20 couples, with some waiting in line for applications in the hall outside the clerk’s office in this sleepy New Mexico town.

Among the first to get their license were two women who got married in a brief ceremony in front of the courthouse.

“When we heard the news this morning, we knew we couldn’t wait. We had to come down here,” Jenifer Albright said after she and Anne Schultz, 34, both of Albuquerque, exchanged vows in front of the courthouse.

James Walker and Michael Palmer took extended lunch breaks from work for a moment they said they’d waited 26 years for. The men were married in Toronto last year, but that didn’t give them rights in the United States.

Walker said a marriage certificate from Sandoval County “would give us a lot of rights and benefits that have been denied us as a couple, including the rights associated with property ownership and the rights associated with medical decisions.”

Bernalillo is a few miles north of Albuquerque, New Mexico’s largest city.

Victoria Dunlap, the county’s clerk, said Thursday that she was unaware of any laws prohibiting licenses from being issued for same-sex couples.

“This has nothing to do with politics or morals,” she told the Albuquerque Journal. “If there are no legal grounds that say this should be prohibited, I can’t withhold it . . . This office won’t say no until shown it’s not permissible.”

She said she made the decision after asking for an opinion from David Mathews, the county’s attorney, who said New Mexico law is unclear on the issue.

Melinda Foster, a clerk’s administrative assistant, said people have been calling from across New Mexico, interested in filing. Dunlap was not immeditately available for comment Friday.

To get an application, would-be married couples had to show up with a photo ID, social security card and $25 to receive an application. In getting their stamped licenses, they were handed pink “newlywed bags” with coupons and other items.

Meanwhile, two state senators — one Democrat and one Republican — asked for an opinion Friday from state Attorney General Patricia Madrid. A spokeswoman for Madrid said an opinion could be issued next week.

Madrid “does realize that this is of great public interest and so has asked her staff to address this as thoroughly and promptly as possible,” spokeswoman Sam Thompson said.

Wow! NewMexiKen bets his Bernalillo T-shirt is worth something on eBay now!

Hybrid luxury car? What a concept!

Colorado Luis tells us about a paradigm shift for automobiles — a hybrid Lexus. Check out the whole post, but here’s some highlights:

So what’s your image of a hybrid car? I’ve thought “small, underpowered, the kind of car you would get if you were, well, more committed to good gas mileage than I am.” ….

I just found out that Lexus is coming out this year with the Lexus h, the first luxury hybrid car. It even uses the energy generated during breaking to power the car! And don’t worry, they say, it will have all the power of a Lexus V-8. Damn I should have seen this coming. After all, Lexus is owned by Toyota, and Toyota is the world leader in hybrid technology.

Maybe I’m just showing my weakness for really nice cars, but seems to me this is going to change everything.

Colorado Luis describes his blog as “Political and social commentary with altitude.”

Sidney Poitier…

is 77 today.

American Masters from PBS sums it up nicely:

More than an actor (and Academy-Award winner), Sidney Poitier is an artist. A writer and director, a thinker and critic, a humanitarian and diplomat, his presence as a cultural icon has long been one of protest and humanity. His career defined and documented the modern history of blacks in American film, and his depiction of proud and powerful characters was and remains revolutionary.

Lilies of the Field — with Poitier’s Oscar winning performance — has been one of NewMexiKen’s favorites since it was released more than 40 years ago. If you don’t know the film, you should.

America by dialect

From Andrew Sullivan:

Bored of red and blue states? How about states where people say “Grammy Hall” as opposed to “Grandma Hall”? Or states where students call an easy course a “gut”? It’s all here, if it’s a very slow day in the office. Bonus fun: use the results to find out if you’re more Yankee or Dixie! Believe it or not, I came out marginally Dixie. It’s the residue of my English accent, I suppose.

The first three sites listed by Sullivan are the Harvard Dialect Survey; it’s informative and quite interesting. The last, the Yankee/Dixie quiz, is interactive. It takes just a few minutes and is fun.

NewMexiKen was a Yankee (barely) but a lot of the individual answers revealed my Great Lakes childhood.

To be complete, the quiz should have included — green chili or red?

Wildcats win

Arizona 100 Oregon 87 at the most hostile venue west of Durham. Stoudamire scored a career-best 37 to overcome serious Arizona foul trouble and Oregon’s great all-American Luke Jackson, who had a career-high 42. The ‘Cats have been solid since the second half at Stanford.

Amusing—almost—to see Hall of Fame coach Lute Olson get T’d up.

Arizona plays Oregon State at Corvallis Saturday, then the Washington schools and ASU in Tucson before the Pac 10 tournament.

Those Arizona athletes are great fun to watch.

‘Cats basketball

The Wildcats men’s basketball team is at McArthur Court in Eugene tonight to play the Ducks for second place in the Pac 10. (Oregon is tied with Cal a half game behind Arizona; Washington is another half game back.)

The ‘Cats have great athletes this year but don’t always succeed as a team. They’ve lost games to USC and Washington that they should have won.

To this observer the key seems to be Salim Stoudamire. When he’s hot, they’re nearly unbeatable. Last week he averaged 28.0 points against USC and UCLA and Arizona blew them both away. (Stoudamire was Pac 10 player of the week.)

A month ago I figured the Wildcats wouldn’t make the Sweet 16. Now I’m not so sure. After all, a fourth seed in the NCAA (which they’re on target for now, ranked 13/14) was ideal in 1997 (National Champions).

Tonight will be a good indication.

Trolling

In his weekly email newsletter David Pogue defines trolling:

Trolling, as Internet veterans can tell you, is when somebody deliberately makes an inflammatory remark, just to get a rise out of you. If you join a gun-control mailing list, for example, and you “innocently” post a message that says, “Why are you guys against guns? Guns don’t kill people, people kill people!” — then you’re trolling. Your knowing aim is to get the other members all heated up.

The comments area of NewMexiKen is so under attended that I may have to troll.

Car bowling

Dave Barry’s Blog has reproduced a column he wrote 10 years ago about a sport called Car Bowling. The object of the sport is to drop bowling balls on cars from low-flying aircraft. Money quote:

At this point, many of you women are thinking, “They drop WHAT? On WHAT? From WHAT??” Whereas you men, because of your complex and subtle psychic interplay, are thinking: “When can I do this?”

Barry suggests that Car Bowling could be a benefit in shopping-mall parking enforcement.

Concened about the iPod battery (NewMexiKen was)

In his weekly email newsletter, David Pogue of The New York Times sets it straight:

But here’s the thing: The typical iPod battery does not, in fact, die after 18 months. That’s possible, but not typical; I have two, and they’re still going strong after about three years.

The iPod literature makes clear that the battery can be charged between 300 and 500 times. So to burn out the battery in 18 months, you’d pretty much have to charge and deplete the battery (eight hours of playing) almost every day. That’s probably not how most people use their music players.

A new battery is $100.

Edwards vs. Kerry

Mark Kleiman has some thoughtful analysis of the differences between Edwards and Kerry:

Edwards seems to be by far the better natural politician. If he looked older and had some foreign policy or national security credentials he’s make a great candidate. But as it is, he’s almost as unqualified to be President as GWB was four years ago, and that’s pretty scary. Plus he carries the “trial lawyer” baggage, which offsets somewhat his man-of-the-people appeal.

Kerry seems to have found his voice; I just hope his war-hero record will insulate him against some imprudent post-Vietnam remarks on military and security issues.

Which would make the better President? Search me. The record tells you much less than you think it does.

Harry Truman and JFK were both long-service Senators with negligible records of legislative accomplishment, and both performed more than adequately as President. No one predicted — or, I submit, could have predicted based on his Senate record — that LBJ would be the manager of the Second Reconstruction, but so he was.

Jimmy Carter was, as far as I can tell, a pretty damned terrific governor of Georgia, and Bill Clinton had a solid record in Arkansas and a sky-high IQ. Both of them were piss-poor Presidents, who never figured out the Neustadtian lesson that a President’s first job is to make the people who nominally work for him actually work for him, and to convince the other players that their interests will be served better by helping the President than by obstructing his path.

Kleiman concludes he’s “planning to relax, help remind my readers of Mr. Bush’s inadequacies, write checks to both Kerry and Edwards…and support the winner enthusiastically.”

It’s a good piece; worth reading it all.

Sometimes NewMexiKen writes like a girl

The Gender Genie uses an algorithm to predict with 80 percent accuracy the gender of the writer.

Crudely put, men talk more about objects, and women more about relationships.

Female writers use more pronouns (I, you, she, their, myself), say the program’s developers, Moshe Koppel of Bar-Ilan University in Ramat Gan, Israel, and colleagues. Males prefer words that identify or determine nouns (a, the, that) and words that quantify them (one, two, more).

Source: Nature

The Gender Genie works best on texts of more than 500 words, so plan to cut and paste something you’ve written.

Iwo Jima

Two Marine divisions landed on Iwo Jima on this date in 1945; 30,000 troops came ashore that first day. Their first objective was Mt. Suribachi.

Bush at 43 percent

Andrew Sullivan has an astute observation:

…I have absolutely no doubt that there has been a profound mood-change in the country toward president Bush. Some of this is a result of the Democrats’ dominating the media during primary season. But much of it is also due to the president’s extraordinary drift, incoherence and – at the same time – cockiness. That’s a lethal combination…

Music and mail

Walt Mossberg reviews Mailblocks, a free (or with additional features very inexpensive) web-based mail program that seems to have an effective antispam system.

The program is called Mailblocks, and despite a few downsides, I like it a lot. It’s aimed at consumers and small businesses…But it has lots of sophisticated features, and can consolidate all of your e-mail accounts — even AOL accounts — into a single in-box.

In Mossberg’s Mailbox he describes how to play an iPod (or other portable music device) through a car stereo.

Is Refusal to Show ID “Probable Cause”?

IN THE SUPREME COURT OF THE UNITED STATES
LARRY D. HIIBEL, Petitioner
v.
THE SIXTH JUDICIAL DISTRICT
COURT OF THE STATE OF NEVADA,
IN AND FOR THE COUNTY OF
HUMBOLDT AND THE HONORABLE
RICHARD A. WAGNER, Respondents
and
THE STATE OF NEVADA, Real Party in Interest.

Meet Dudley Hiibel. He’s a 59 year old cowboy who owns a small ranch outside of Winnemucca, Nevada. He lives a simple life, but he’s his own man. You probably never would have heard of Dudley Hiibel if it weren’t for his belief in the U.S. Constitution.

One balmy May evening back in 2000, Dudley was standing around minding his own business when all of a sudden, a policeman pulled-up and demanded that Dudley produce his ID. Dudley, having done nothing wrong, declined. He was arrested and charged with “failure to cooperate” for refusing to show ID on demand. And it’s all on video.

On the 22nd of March 2004, the U.S. Supreme Court will decide whether Dudley and the rest of us live in a free society, or in a country where we must show “the papers” whenever a cop demands them.

Read Dudley Hiibel: The Facts and watch the police video of the incident.

Link via Eschaton.

One of his 1,093 patents

Thomas Edison received a patent for the phonograph on this date in 1878.

The phonograph was developed as a result of Thomas Edison’s work on two other inventions, the telegraph and the telephone. In 1877, Edison was working on a machine that would transcribe telegraphic messages through indentations on paper tape…This development led Edison to speculate that a telephone message could also be recorded in a similar fashion. He experimented with a diaphragm which had an embossing point and was held against rapidly-moving paraffin paper. The speaking vibrations made indentations in the paper. Edison later changed the paper to a metal cylinder with tin foil wrapped around it. The machine had two diaphragm-and-needle units, one for recording, and one for playback. When one would speak into a mouthpiece, the sound vibrations would be indented onto the cylinder by the recording needle in a vertical (or hill and dale) groove pattern. Edison gave a sketch of the machine to his mechanic, John Kreusi, to build, which Kreusi supposedly did within 30 hours. Edison immediately tested the machine by speaking the nursery rhyme into the mouthpiece, “Mary had a little lamb.” To his amazement, the machine played his words back to him. …

The invention was highly original. The only other recorded evidence of such an invention was in a paper by French scientist Charles Cros, written on April 18, 1877. There were some differences, however, between the two men’s ideas, and Cros’s work remained only a theory, since he did not produce a working model of it.

Source: Library of Congress

Didn’t look much like an iPod.

I second that emotion

Happy birthday to William “Smokey” Robinson, born in Detroit on this date in 1940.

Some Smokey Robinson trivia:

  • The nickname Smokey was given him as a child by an uncle.
  • The Robinsons were neighbors of the Franklins; Smokey is two years older than Aretha.
  • They both attended Detroit’s Northern Senior High School (as did NewMexiKen’s mom).
  • Smokey wrote both “My Guy” and “My Girl.”
  • Bob Dylan called Smokey “America’s greatest living poet.”
  • Smokey has written more than 4,000 songs.

Flying by

Channel 4 News in Albuquerque has been running a series on speeding where they actually go out on the streets and clock cars with a radar gun. Tonight they showed a car doing 67 in a 20 mph school zone. Another was doing 46 in a 25 mph school zone and smiled for the news crew without so much as tapping the brake.

My favorites though were last week when they clocked two Albuquerque police vehicles at more than 15 over the limit.