25 years ago today…

President Jimmy Carter took abrupt and sweeping action to preserve 17 endangered areas of Alaska. Vastly increasing the national park system, Carter used the 1906 Antiquities Act to prevent exploitation while the Congress deliberated.

Admiralty Island National Monument
Aniakchak National Monument
Becharof National Monument
Bering Land Bridge National Monument
Cape Krusenstern National Monument
Denali National Monument
Gates of the Arctic National Monument
Enlarging the Glacier Bay National Monument
Enlarging the Katmai National Monument
Kenai Fjords National Monument
Kobuk Valley National Monument
Lake Clark National Monument
Misty Fiords National Monument
Noatak National Monument
Wrangell-St. Elias National Monument
Yukon-Charley National Monument
Yukon Flats National Monument

Woman knocked unconscious by trampling shoppers

NewMexiKen continues to be your source for Wal-Mart news. From CNN.com: “A mob of shoppers rushing for a sale on DVD players trampled the first woman in line and knocked her unconscious as they scrambled for the shelves at a Wal-Mart Supercenter.”

Key quote: “Ellzey said Wal-Mart officials called later Friday to ask about her sister, and the store apologized and offered to put a DVD player on hold for her.”

Absurdity alert

From The Cavalier Daily

University President issues statement regarding alleged racial epithet used by Medical Center employee….

Howell reported that the offender “said something like this: ‘I can’t believe in this day and age that there’s a sports team in our nation’s capital named the Redskins. That is as derogatory to Indians as having a team called Niggers would be to blacks.'”

Though Howell said no staff members said they were personally offended by the remark, they said they would have preferred if the word had not been used….

Counterpoint to Frank Solich firing

Denver Post writer Bill Briggs toured the Big 12 this fall dressed in the colors of the opposing team. His tour included Lincoln on the day of the Nebraska-Kansas State game; a game Nebraska loss by the largest margin at home since 1958. The scene he describes might surprise you.

NewMexiKen read only a few of Briggs’s other Big 12 articles but those I read were amusing and interesting. Colleagues at the National Archives used to spend autumn Saturdays attending games at various colleges. It doesn’t seem like a half-bad pastime. Offhand NewMexiKen remembers going to games at eight different campuses. Seems like a good beginning.

“[D]ocudramas are the enemy of thought, history, fact, and public understanding”

Easterbrook

Even if the show was totally fair to the Reagans, Easterblogg is glad CBS cancelled it, because all docudramas should be cancelled. News programs are good and pure fiction is fine; docudramas are the enemy of thought, history, fact, and public understanding. When a viewer sees something in a docudrama, he or she has no way of knowing, not the slightest clue, whether what’s being presented is real or fabricated. Docudrama producers claim they are driving at “higher truth,” blah, blah, but what they are driving at is lower drek.

“I never wanted to kill anybody,
but if a man had it in his mind to kill me,
I made it my business to get him first.”

The History Channel tells the fascinating story of Elfego Baca for This Day in Old West History

Elfego Baca, legendary defender of southwestern Hispanos, manages to hold off a gang of 80 cowboys who are determined to kill him.

The trouble began the previous day, when Baca arrested Charles McCarthy, a cowboy who fired five shots at him in a Frisco (now Reserve), New Mexico, saloon. For months, a vicious band of Texan cowboys had terrorized the Hispanos of Frisco, brutally castrating one young Mexican man and using another for target practice. Outraged by these abuses, Baca gained a commission as deputy sheriff to try to end the terror. His arrest of McCarthy served notice to other Anglo cowboys that further abuses of the Hispanos would not be tolerated.

The Texans, however, were not easily intimidated. The morning after McCarthy’s arrest, a group of about 80 cowboys rode into town to free McCarthy and make an example of Baca for all Mexicans. Baca gathered the women and children of the town in a church for their safety and prepared to make a stand. When he saw how outnumbered he was, Baca retreated to an adobe house, where he killed one attacker and wounded several others. The irate cowboys peppered Baca’s tiny hideout with bullets, firing about 400 rounds into the flimsy structure. As night fell, they assumed they had killed the defiant deputy sheriff, but the next morning they awoke to the smell of beef stew and tortillas–Baca was fixing his breakfast.

A short while later, two lawmen and several of Baca’s friends came to his aid, and the cowboys retreated. Baca turned himself over to the officers, and he was charged with the murder of one of the cowboys. In his trial in Albuquerque, the jury found Baca not guilty because he had acted in self-defense, and he was released to a hero’s welcome among the Hispanos of New Mexico. Baca was adored because he had taken a stand against the abusive and racist Anglo newcomers. Hugely popular, Baca later enjoyed a successful career as a lawyer, private detective, and politician in Albuquerque.

Baca was 19 at the time of the shootout and lived until 1945. In 1958, Walt Disney Studios produced The Nine Lives of Elfego Baca. Robert Loggia played the title role, with a cast that included Annette Funicello (as Chiquita), James Coburn and Alan Hale, Jr. (Gilligan’s skipper).

A golf tournament of sorts, the annual Elfego Baca Golf Shoot in Socorro, New Mexico, celebrates the deputy — “competitors are loaded into four-wheel drive vehicles to ascend Socorro Peak, 7,243 feet above sea level. Here they will battle in a one-hole shoot. The hole, a fifty foot patch of dirt, is located on the New Mexico Tech campus, about 4 hours long, 2550 feet down, and almost three miles away.”

You can read more about Elfego Baca here.

Yesterday, November 28, 2003…

a date which will live in University of Arizona infamy. The football ‘Cats lose to ASU 28-7 to complete their worst season — won 2, lost 10. Last in the Pac 10 in offense, defense and special teams. Two freakin’ field goals all season!

Then the basketball ‘Cats lose to Florida 78-77. No points in the final 2:37. Hello, the game is played for 40 minutes!

Coach Olson: “I’ve often said I would rather lose a game like this than beat some team by 40. We can take a lot out of this game. We have a lot to learn.”

NewMexiKen agrees, the games don’t mean a lot until March if you win enough of them (and Arizona surely will). But Coach, can we run a few more plays? The team with the best athletes doesn’t always prevail.

New Mexico Big Star in Film “The Missing”

From the Santa Fe New Mexican

Georgia O’Keeffe came later and settled at Ghost Ranch, one of the locations in The Missing.

It’s a ranch said to have been named for the chilling screams that were heard echoing off canyon walls — some said from witches or tortured spirits, some said from unknown wild beasts. O’Keeffe painted the striated bluffs that nowadays find their way into motion pictures.

Another key location, according to the New Mexico Film Office, was Valles Caldera, now federal park land, which geologists nonetheless warn is still a threat to erupt like Mount St. Helens.

A flash-flood scene was filmed at the Tino Griego Swimming Pool in Santa Fe.

Other shooting sites were:

  • The Bonanza Creek Ranch outside Santa Fe.
  • The Cerro Pelon Ranch, formerly known as the Cook Movie Ranch.
  • La Cienega, south of Santa Fe.
  • El Rancho de las Golondrinas, south of Santa Fe.
  • Zia Pueblo northwest of Albuquerque.

Says [Director Ron] Howard: “In making a suspense film that takes place primarily outdoors, it was important to use the landscape, primarily in its most threatening kind of way.

“It’s one thing to be alone in a dark alley, an abandoned street,” he said, “but it’s another thing to be all alone out there. There’s just an element of threat despite the beauty.”

And like so many Westerns, The Missing uses the vastness of the landscape to give evil a script and a stage and the freedom to operate that kept people looking over their shoulders.

Louisa May Alcott…

was born on this date in 1832.

Garrison Keillor has this interesting background on The Writer’s Almanac.

It’s the birthday of Louisa May Alcott, born in Germantown, Pennsylvania (1832), but brought up in Concord, Massachusetts, among the Transcendentalists, of which her father was one. She’s remembered now for Little Women (1869), which she found tedious to write. In her journal she wrote, “I plod away, though I don’t enjoy this sort of thing.” She much preferred writing lurid, Gothic stories, about women who sold their souls to the devil, and governesses who looked sweet and innocent by day but who ruined the souls of little children by night. She published these stories under several different pen names. Her publishers offered her more money if she would agree to publish under her own name, but she could not bring herself to embarrass her father and his colleague, Ralph Waldo Emerson. She wrote to a friend, “To have had Mr. Emerson for an intellectual god all one’s life is to be invested with a chain armor of propriety.”