Gregg Easterbrook has written a superb piece on the gay marriage issue. “Marriage is, more than anything else, the expression of love. And if two people of the same gender love each other in the fullest sense and wish to express that love by joining their lives, why shouldn’t society be happy about that?”
Precisely.
Movie Review: “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat”
In 1957 Dr. Seuss published “The Cat in the Hat,” a whimsical story of feline misrule written in infectious four-beat anapestic lines, that forever changed the way American children learn to read. The book’s rambunctious main character and its giddy, slightly disconcerting treatment of mischief in the absence of maternal supervision have proven remarkably durable as generations of children have grown to adulthood with its antic rhymes firmly lodged in their heads.
And now Hollywood, perhaps inevitably, has gone and messed it up. Under the supervision of Brian Grazer, who was responsible for the monstrous “Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas” three years ago, and with the permission of Audrey Geisel, the author’s widow and the custodian of his posthumous reputation, the first-time director Bo Welch has put together a vulgar, uninspired lump of poisoned eye candy that Universal has the temerity to call “Dr. Seuss’ The Cat in the Hat.”
was designated a national monument on this date in 1925.
became the 12th state when it ratified the Constitution on this date in 1789.
was born on this date in 1945.
was born on this date in 1904. Listen to his seminal recording of Body and Soul [RealOne Player file]. As writer Len Weinstock noted,
Hawkins himself didn’t think there was anything outstanding about his Body and Soul saying “it was nothing special, just an encore I use in the clubs to get off the stand. I thought nothing of it and didn’t even bother to listen to it afterwards”. But the solo, two choruses of beautifully conceived and perfecly balanced improvisation, caused an immediate sensation with musicians and the public. It is still the standard to which tenorists aspire. A parallel can be drawn between Hawkins’ Body and Soul and Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address . Both were brief, lucid, eloquent and timeless masterpieces, yet tossed off by their authors as mere ephemera.
Lincoln well knew what he had done at Gettysburg, but it’s a nice analogy even so.
Jeff Sagarin has the following ranking for Strength of Schedule (through last Saturday):
1. Notre Dame
2. Colorado
3. Iowa State
4. Alabama
5. Texas A&M
6. Arizona
7. BYU
8. Northwestern
9. Illinois
10. Tennessee
NewMexiKen posted this comment at 3:08 PM MST Wednesday, November 19: “I predict TCU will lose one of its last two games anyway.”
Thursday night, Southern Mississippi 40 TCU 28.
Nice comeback effort by the Horned Frogs nonetheless. Down 31-6 in the fourth quarter, they scored 22 points in four-and-a-half minutes to get within three before Southern Miss pulled away for good.
TCU is now 10-1 with Southern Methodist remaining and is not only out of the BCS picture but Southern Miss will likely win the Conference USA title. The last time TCU had gone 10-0, they beat Carnegie Mellon 15-7 in the Sugar Bowl and were the 1938 national champions.
Literacy in U.S. Cities, a “study compiled in summer 2003, pieces together a literacy profile of America’s 64 largest cities, drawing from U.S. Census data, newspaper circulation rates, library resources, publishers and other public documents.”
NewMexiKen thought it was a drawing.
From News of the Weird
In July, a judge relented and allowed Richard Quinton Gunn to act as his own attorney in his aggravated-murder appeal, following his conviction earlier in the year in Ogden, Utah, by a jury that deliberated just two hours. Gunn had confessed, saying he killed his tenant using a crowbar, a butcher knife, a handsaw, a fireplace poker, a 12-inch bolt, a straight-edge razor, an ax, walking canes, a pool cue and a large salad fork.
Demon Babies: LaFayre Marie Banks, 32, was charged with assault and child abuse in Port Huron, Mich., in May after her 7-month-old baby fell from Banks’ second-story bathroom window, suffering severe head injuries. Banks told a police officer that she was bathing the child when “it reared up and went through the window.” And in Wetumpka, Ala., in August, Melissa Wright, 27, was sentenced to 25 years in prison for putting her 18-month-old daughter in a hot oven. Wright’s version was that the child slipped from her arms, fell to the floor, and rolled into the oven, and then the door closed.
Historian Gordon S. Wood has an insightful essay concerning Benjamin Franklin in the current The New York Review of Books. Unfortunately, only the first paragraph (which is duplicated here) is online without paying a charge of $4. You can buy the whole issue at the newstand for $4.50. (NewMexiKen has a subscription to the print edition.)
Americans cannot seem to get enough of Benjamin Franklin. During the past few years we have had several Franklin biographies, of which Walter Isaacson’s is the most recent and the finest; and more studies of Franklin are on the way. Part of the reason for this proliferation of Franklin books is the approaching tricentennial celebrations of his birth in 1706. But this isn’t enough to explain our longstanding fascination. He is especially interesting to Americans, and not simply because he is one of the most prominent of the Founders. Among the Founders his appeal seems to be unique. He appears to be the most accessible, the most democratic, and the most folksy of these eighteenth-century figures.
was certainly timely with its war/anti-war dialogue and plot last night.
Excuse me, but what a fake and a phony this guy is. His meeting with families of some of the 53 British servicemen killed in Iraq has been “billed as one of the centerpieces of his state visit to wartime ally Britain this week,” Reuters reports, and in pre-trip interviews the President “stressed his plans to meet the [British] families” and to “tell them their loved ones did not die in vain.”
How nice. But isn’t this the same American commander-in-chief who has declined to attend funerals for any of the more than 400 American soldiers killed in Iraq? (Instead, he has occupied his time with more than 75 fundraising trips.)
President Bush has had no shortage of opportunities to honor the men who have died for his mistakes, as in a few short months the war death toll has already exceeded that of the first three years of the Vietnam War.
Yet he has declined to send even a single White House official to a single serviceman’s funeral. He has banned ceremony and news coverage for returning coffins — they are to be shipped in furtively, guiltily, and not in body bags but “are not permitted ? anywhere near the grave site” at honor-guard Arlington funerals.
“Bush and his people sent them out to get killed and now you can’t get one of them in Washington to mention these dead,” notes Newsday columnist Jimmy Breslin. “Your government would prefer that night falls and the dead are buried in darkness. We must keep them remote, names on a list, and concentrate on things like patriotism, exporting democracy and shipping freedom …”
Check out Breslin’s column, with it’s conclusion — “Here is your war so far this week,” followed by a shockingly long list of one week’s casualties. Or check out The Washington Post‘s “Mission Accomplished” banner it’ll drop to the cutting-room floor. Life goes cheerfully on for the “I travel in somewhat of a bubble” presidency.
Note: This article originally said President Bush did not meet the families of US KIAs, but that part was corrected Nov. 20; the President has reportedly met some family members in private.
From The Daily Outrage
The New Republic Online: Easterbrook:
This morning a New York Times reflection on the Kennedy assassination refers to the rifle Lee Harvey Oswald used “to kill the president, according to official accounts.” Please. Forty years and countless investigations later, we can believe that Oswald was the one who did it. All lingering doubts were erased by the 1994 book Case Closed by Gerald Posner.
The New Republic Online: Easterbrook: “CBS has announced that its special ‘Michael Jackson Presents “The Reagans” Sponsored by Victoria’s Secret’ will be postponed.”
The grizzly is a symbol of the American wilderness and one of the nation’s most beautiful and imposing creatures. Lewis and Clark found a healthy grizzly population when they explored Idaho’s Bitterroot Mountains in the early 19th century. As the nation expanded westward, grizzly numbers plummeted due to unchecked hunting and trapping. The grizzly is now “threatened” in the lower 48 states.
To restore grizzlies to the Selway-Bitterroot ecosystem, NWF developed the innovative Citizen Management Plan. Despite widespread support, the plan was recently abandoned by Interior Secretary Gale Norton.
From Writers on the Range at High Country News: “Living with bison at the edge of Yellowstone” (March 17, 2003).
From the Santa Fe New Mexican
SILVER CITY — A necropsy has determined that a bullet killed an endangered Mexican gray wolf in Arizona, federal officials say.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is awaiting necropsy results on seven other Mexican gray wolves found dead since March in Arizona and New Mexico. All eight deaths are considered suspicious, Victoria Fox, an agency spokeswoman in Albuquerque, said Wednesday.
Rewards of up to $10,000 are being offered to anyone who can help in the apprehension of people responsible for the animals’ deaths, she said.
The wolves are part of a federal program to reintroduce them into the wild in southeastern Arizona and southwestern New Mexico.
The 6-year-old wolf, the dominant female of her pack, was found dead Sept. 15 in the Apache-Sitgreaves National Forest. She had been shot in the left hind leg, and gangrene killed her a week or two later, the Fish and Wildlife Service said.
Five other wolves were found dead in Arizona between March and October. Two other dead wolves were found in New Mexico in September.
“One such recent example included the manufacturer’s labeling of equipment where the words ”Master/Slave” appeared to identify the primary and secondary sources. Based on the cultural diversity and sensitivity of Los Angeles County, this is not an acceptable identification label.”
Thomas Boswell, in a column that mostly praises LeBron James, has a reality check, too.
Against the brilliance James showed last night, let’s look at the hard statistical evidence of his first 11 NBA games so we can get some balance. Basketball has an excellent stat for measuring a player’s total contribution to his team. Red Auerbach may have cooked it up first. It’s not a tool for making subtle distinctions between players but rather for identifying the general level of a player’s whole game.
You add up all the good things a player does, subtract all the bad things, then divide by the minutes he played. The good: points, rebounds, assists, blocked shots and steals. The bad: missed shots and free throws and turnovers. Then divide by minutes played to measure actual effectiveness, not just court time.
All the great players jump right to the top. And those who do not belong do not come anywhere close. For example, the career averages of Michael Jordan, Shaquille O’Neal, Magic Johnson, Larry Bird and Charles Barkley are .798, .798, .793, .775 and .768. The average NBA regular ranks far lower — usually in the .450 to .550 range. The Wizards have three players over .500. Through Sunday’s games, Tim Duncan led the league this year at .796. Finally, for reference, the career bests of Garnett, McGrady and Bryant are .792, .731 and .676 — all set last year.
After last night, James’s production average was .450.
Jodie Foster was born on this date in 1962.
From 1946 through 2002 there have been 57 Division I-A Football “National Championships.” According to the NCAA Record Book (pages 79-81), 74 teams from 30 schools have won or shared in the 57 championships (13 times there have been co-champions, twice there have been three teams named).
Thirteen schools have won or shared the title more than once:
Oklahoma (6 outright, 1 tie)
Notre Dame (5 outright, 3 ties)
Miami (4 outright, 1 tie)
Alabama (2 outright, 5 ties)
USC (3 outright, 2 ties)
Nebraska (3 outright, 2 ties)
Ohio State (2 outright, 4 ties)
Texas (2 outright, 1 tie)
Penn State, Florida State, Tennessee (2 outright each)
Michigan State (1 outright, 2 ties)
Michigan (1 outright, 1 tie)
These 13 schools account for 57 out of 74 championship teams (77%). Eight of them are among the BCS top 12 today.
I would argue that to win a national championship you have to schedule (and beat) at least one of the 13.
Seven schools have won the championship once. They are Maryland (1953), Syracuse (1959), Pittsburgh (1976), Georgia (1980), Clemson (1981), BYU (1984) and Florida (1996).
Ten schools have been co-champion once, but have never won the title outright. They are UCLA (1954), Auburn (1957), LSU (1958), Iowa (1958), Minnesota (1960), Mississippi (1960), Arkansas (1964), Colorado (1990), Georgia Tech (1990) and Washington (1991).
was established on this date in 1919.
