Paul Murray's weblog, with news you may have missed and my $0.02 worth on a number of topics.

"You can't make up anything anymore. The world itself is a satire. All you're doing is recording it."
- Art Buchwald

I bet you don't have a friend who's an acupuncturist

E-mail me: pmurray [at] despammed.com

Random facts. This is a collection of unrelated facts that I've stumbled across in my recent reading:

• "The average American household with a DVD player now has a library of 70 DVDs, according to Adams Media Research." (NY Times)
• "[Sen. Edward] Kennedy was the first member of Congress to connect to the Internet and pioneered online discussions in usenet forums." (Sunlight Foundation via rc3.org)
• "Since 1975, [California] has led the nation in adopting tough energy standards for household appliances, homes and buildings. As a result, California's per-capita electricity consumption has remained flat for nearly three decades, while the rest of the country's power demand has grown 50%." (LA Times)
• "In 1990, refrigerator efficiency standards went into effect in the United States. Today, new refrigerators are fancier than ever, but their power consumption has been slashed by about 45 percent since the standards took effect. Likewise, thanks in part to standards, the average power consumption of a new washer is nearly 70 percent lower than a new unit in 1990. ... [On the other hand, newer, larger] TVs ... can draw more power in a year than some refrigerators now on the market." (NY Times)
• "Conceived just before the beginning of the design-by-committee era, Elwood Engel's magnum opus [the 1961 Lincoln Continental Sedan] was the last mass-produced automobile to be designed by a single man." (Hagerty Insurance PR)

(Photo credit: Morven)

Labels: random facts

posted by Paul Murray at 2:17 PM | permanent link |

"Death to all juice." Worth a look: The 50 Best Protest Signs of 2009. Some are just wrong, some are deliberately funny, and others are unintentionally funny. (Contains a bit of NSFW language.)

Labels: humor, protests

posted by Paul Murray at 11:33 PM | permanent link |

Mixed blessings. I stopped at McDonald's the other night for dinner and ordered one of my regular combinations from the dollar menu. The total was less than the usual amount, so I naturally suspected that the girl misunderstood my order (this happens to me a lot).

I scanned the receipt to figure out the reason for the reduced cost, and discovered they had charged me only 69 cents for the small Coke. I mentioned this to the girl, who helpfully explained that she had rung me up for a "senior Coke."

For the record, I don't qualify for that category even by AARP's generous standard (50), and won't for several years.

Labels: aging, mixed blessings

posted by Paul Murray at 4:09 PM | permanent link |

Good-bye 2009. And good riddance. Ever have the feeling of deja vu?

Labels: year-end

posted by Paul Murray at 11:07 PM | permanent link |

We apologize for the technical difficulties. You may have noticed that some images are missing from my posts. You can thank my 1&1 hosting service for this. After losing my data (along with many others), they claimed it would be be restored from a backup. Unfortunately their backup of my files omitted this blog. I had to resort to an old backup of mine, and republish from Blogger, which restored the text but no images from the missing 21 months.

Labels: errors

posted by Paul Murray at 2:17 PM | permanent link |

Oops. The end of a year always brings far too many lists and summaries of things that happened. Here's a rather specialized one that fits my sense of humor: The Year in Media Errors and Corrections. A few (tame) examples:

News Tribune (Washington State):

A photo caption on Tuesday’s Page A8 said a student was performing the Heimlich maneuver on a dummy. The student was actually playing around and pretending to choke the dummy.

Denver Post:

Because of a reporter’s error, Bill Husted’s column on Page 3B on Sunday contained an item about a tombstone for “Elway the Drug Sniffing Dog.” The tombstone was digitally fabricated for a blog and does not exist.

Los Angeles Times:

Bear sighting: An item in the National Briefing in Sunday’s Section A said a bear wandered into a grocery story in Hayward, Wis., on Friday and headed for the beer cooler. It was Thursday.

The Justice (Brandeis University)*:

The original article provided the incorrect location of New York University’s new institution. It is in Abu Dhabi, not Abu Ghraib.

Canadian Press:

The Canadian Press moved a story April 3 that erroneously reported The Wilkins Ice Shelf was originally part of Jamaica. In fact the Ice Shelf, located on the western side of the Antarctic was originally the size of Jamaica.

Labels: corrections, errors, year in review

posted by Paul Murray at 1:41 PM | permanent link |

A space shuttle launch as you've never seen it. If Hollywood ever dramatizes the launch of a space shuttle (a la the launch sequence from Apollo 13), it should look something like this. Not as long (they wouldn't show everything here), but with the ambient sound and dramatic music.

I suggest you make it full screen and crank the sound up (assuming you're somewhere that's okay, or you have headphones). There's actually lots of ambient sounds worth hearing. And be patient -- the first 2:40 are just okay, but they're only the opening credits. The real action kicks in at about 3:50.

STS-129 Ascent Video Highlights from mike interbartolo on Vimeo.

Via Metafilter

Labels: launch, NASA, space shuttle

posted by Paul Murray at 11:28 PM | permanent link |

A surprising collaboration. This certainly sounded intriguing when I read it this morning:

In a surprise union of two quintessentially American composers from different eras, one the 1960s mastermind of "Good Vibrations," the other the Jazz Age creator of "Rhapsody in Blue," former Beach Boy Brian Wilson has been authorized by the estate of George Gershwin to complete unfinished songs Gershwin left behind when he died in 1937.

He plans to finish and record at least two such pieces on an album of Gershwin music he hopes to release next year.

The Gershwin-Wilson project may strike some as an odd coupling: one New York musician famous for sophisticated 1920s and '30s pop songs including " 'S Wonderful" and "Someone to Watch Over Me" as well as such expansive, classically minded compositions as "Rhapsody"; the other the driving force behind Southern California beach culture hits such as "Surfin' U.S.A.," "I Get Around" and "California Girls."

But their career paths and evolution of their artistry have common threads, noted people involved with the project and some independent scholars, and that gives the proposed collaboration logic.

I like both halves of this collaborations, so hopefully it will turn out well.

Labels: music

posted by Paul Murray at 12:13 AM | permanent link |

New Mozart. I always find it interesting when musicologists announce they have a previously unknown work by a great composer. This typically happens in one of two ways: either someone finds sheet music that no one was aware of, or they study a known work and decide that it definitely/probably/maybe was written by someone famous.

Today's example is the latter. While preparing a facsimile edition of "Nannerl's Music Book" -- "Nannerl" being the nickname of W.A. Mozart's older sister Maria Anna -- an expert noticed two short compositions that were written in their father Leopold's hand, but were stylistically different from his works. They were previously unattributed, but he now believes they were written by Wolfgang at age seven or eight. (Not his first, in case you're wondering; those he composed at age five.)

As a New York Times blog explains:

[T]he concerto movement, labeled Molto Allegro, contains a multitude of notes and technically demanding, sometimes awkward, passages.

"This is nothing you would use to teach your children," Mr. Leisinger said. It was composed by "someone with high ambitions" but lacking the expertise to write out the music, he said.

Mr. Leisinger said an anecdote, recounted by a Mozart family friend shortly after Mozart’s death, provides circumstantial evidence to support his theory. The friend, a trumpet player named Johann Andreas Schachtner, said he and Leopold were looking at a blotchy effort by Wolfgang the child to write down music.

"At first we laughed at what seemed such pure gibberish, but his father then began to observe the most important matter, the notes and music," Schachtner recounted. "He stared long at the sheet, and then tears, tears of joy and wonder, fell from his eyes. 'It is so very difficult that no one could play it,' Leopold said. And Wolfgang replied: 'That’s why it’s a concerto. You must practice it till you can get it right.' "

Another expert, not directly involved, finds the new attribution "highly plausible" but doubts we'll ever know for sure.

You can listen to the piano piece and the concerto movement here.

Labels: classical music, Mozart

posted by Paul Murray at 10:04 PM | permanent link |

The pandering continues. "Every time I think I'm a Republican, they do something crooked. And every time I think I'm a Democrat, they do something stupid." That's how Jay Leno answered a question from a 60 Minutes correspondent about his political leanings. It's the most insightful thing I've ever heard him say, and current events frequently remind me of it.

Keeping track of stupid proposals by politicians would be a full-time job. I cataloged the Bush Administration's bad ideas for awhile, but eventually gave up. (Six months after they left office, we're still learning more.)

This week's political stupidity comes from Mark Brewer and the Michigan Democratic Party. Brewer was secretly behind last year's atrocious would-be ballot proposal that would have made about 120 changes (if memory serves me correctly) to the state constitution. He denied involvement until a Democratic PowerPoint presentation about it turned up on a union website. Courts ultimately threw it out.

Brewer's now back with more shamelessly pandering ballot proposals:

Party officials declined to release details on any of the plans, but said the potential measures include:

• Hiking the minimum wage to $10 an hour for all workers.

• Imposing a blanket moratorium on home foreclosures for 12 months.

• Cutting utility bills by 20% across the board.

• Requiring all employers to provide health care to employees and their dependents.

• Hiking by $100 a week -- and extending for six months -- unemployment benefits, while expanding eligibility.

Rather than document the overwhelming stupidity of these proposals, I'll just refer you to this Daniel Howes column.

We deserve better than absurd unrealistic promises.

Labels: bad ideas, politics

posted by Paul Murray at 3:30 PM | permanent link |

Changes for another "safe" profession. For years, it's been well-known that there's a shortage of nurses in this country. That's why a lot of people choose it as a profession: the comforting knowledge that you'll always be able to find work.

Well, chalk up another thing our current economic recession has changed, at least temporarily, according to PRI's Marketplace:

[Reporter Cathy Duchamp:] There are still job openings for nurses. But vacancy rates nationwide are lower than they have been for years, says Peter Buerhaus. The Vanderbilt University professor is lead author on a recent study of the nursing labor market. He says in the last two years a record number of nurses have returned to full-time hospital work.

Peter Buerhaus: The numbers were absolutely beyond our comprehension.

Buerhaus says the reason experienced nurses are coming back has to do with family finances.

Buerhaus: Seventy percent of nurses are married. When their spouses either lose their jobs or are worried that they might, then some RNs who are not working decide, "Aha, I need to pop back into this labor market." And others who already may be working, but say, part-time, they increase their hours of work.

The story goes on to say that hospital administrators predict this is only temporary, and they're pressing ahead with their efforts to encourage more people to enter the profession.

Labels: jobs, professions, recession

posted by Paul Murray at 2:35 PM | permanent link |

Robert McNamara, 1916-2009. Some people lead lives that would seem appropriate as the subject of a Shakespeare play (in the tragic sense, although there are probably some appropriate examples for comedy as well). The first person who always comes to my mind in Richard Nixon, whose positive attributes were thoroughly undone by his negative ones. I've come to think that another may be the late Robert McNamara.

Some supporting evidence:

• Wikipedia biography
• New York Times obituary
• The Fog of War at Google Video (2003 Academy Award-wiinning documentary by Errol Morris -- 1:47 long)
• "The Outsider" in American Heritage, about his years at Ford

As a biographer concluded: "For better and worse McNamara shaped much in today's world -- and imprisoned himself. A little-known nineteenth century writer, P.W. Bornum, offers a summation: 'We make our decisions. And then our decisions turn around and make us.'"

(Last two links via Metafilter)

Labels: biography, history, obituary

posted by Paul Murray at 11:50 PM | permanent link |

Incandescent innovations. I seem to have stumbled into writing about light bulbs on a semi-regular basis (the Google ads on this page are testimony to that). In today's installment, courtesy of the New York Times, we learn that incandescent light bulbs may survive the 2012 Federal standards, thanks to some recent innovations:

“There’s a massive misperception that incandescents are going away quickly,” said Chris Calwell, a researcher with Ecos Consulting who studies the bulb market. There have been more incandescent innovations in the last three years than in the last two decades.”

The first bulbs to emerge from this push, Philips Lighting’s Halogena Energy Savers, are expensive compared with older incandescents. They sell for $5 apiece and more, compared with as little as 25 cents for standard bulbs.

But they are also 30 percent more efficient than older bulbs. Philips says that a 70-watt Halogena Energy Saver gives off the same amount of light as a traditional 100-watt bulb and lasts about three times as long, eventually paying for itself.

The line, for now sold exclusively at Home Depot and on Amazon.com, is not as efficient as compact fluorescent light bulbs, which can use 75 percent less energy than old-style bulbs. But the Energy Saver line is finding favor with consumers who dislike the light from fluorescent bulbs or are bothered by such factors as their slow start-up time and mercury content.

Read the article to find out some of the approaches they're using.

Labels: CFLs, energy, Light bulbs

posted by Paul Murray at 11:31 PM | permanent link |

Wow. How's this for an amazing photograph?

Pretty impressive, especially when you read about how narrow the window of opportunity was.

(Via Metafilter and many other sites.)

Labels: photography, space

posted by Paul Murray at 1:20 AM | permanent link |

The perfect crime? In August 1911, the Mona Lisa was stolen from the Louvre. It was recovered in December 1913 when Vincenzo Perugia tried to sell it in Italy. At his trial in June 1914, Perugia claimed that, acting alone, he stole the painting to return it to Italy (although he had admitted trying to sell it to someone in London). He was convicted and was imprisoned for seven months. Case closed.

Or not.

Mind-boggling as it is that someone could simply hide in the museum overnight, then walk out the next morning with one of the world's most famous paintings, there may be more to the story, as you can read in this book excerpt in Vanity Fair.

Apparently it's not a new story, but I'd never heard it before.

(via kottke)

Labels: crime, history, Mona Lisa

posted by Paul Murray at 11:42 PM | permanent link |