Believe it or not, the famous editorial appeared 109 years ago today.
Yup, in the September 21 edition of the New York Sun.
This Week Is “Unmarried and Single Americans Week”
You probably don’t get a floating holiday for it though.
Still, in honor of people like me (as opposed to, say, certain other people), here are some fun facts:
95.7 million
Number of unmarried and single Americans. This group comprises 43 percent of all U.S. residents age 15 and over.54%
Percentage of unmarried and single Americans who are women14.5 million
Number of unmarried and single Americans age 65 and over. These older Americans comprise 15 percent of all unmarried and single people.63%
Percentage of unmarried and single Americans who have never been married. Another 23 percent are divorced, and 14 percent are widowed.13.3 million
The number of people, ages 25 to 34 in 2000, who have never been married; this number represents 35 percent of all people in this age group.6.9 million
The number of people, ages 35 to 44 in 2000, who have never been married; this number represents 15 percent of all people in this age group. [Hey, that’s me!]86
Number of unmarried men age 15 and over for every 100 unmarried women in the United States52.6 million
Number of households maintained by unmarried men and women. These households comprise
48 percent of households nationwide.28.8 million
Number of people who live alone. These one-person households comprise 26 percent of all U.S. households.25.1 and 26.8
The estimated U.S. median ages at first marriage in 2000 for women and men, respectively. The age for women equaled the 20th century high reached in 1999 and is up 4.3 years since 1970. The age for men, even though it dipped 0.3 years since reaching a 20th century high in 1996, was still up 3.6 years from 1970.
Yup. "Unmarried and single" is the new black.
McDonalds Might Sell Breakfast Meals All Day
Good. Because their breakfast menu is better than their regular one.
Woodsy The Owl To Be Cremated
"Give a hoot, don’t pollute".
That’s what Woodsy the Owl used to say.
I guess that message no longer conforms to the Bush Administration, who now wants to do away with the environmentally-correct mascot.*
In fact, they really want to do away with him. Here are actual instructions from the USDA Forest Service website:
Destroying Old Woodsy Owl Costumes – Guidelines
1. Incinerate the complete costume with the oversight of an official
USDA Forest Service law enforcement officer*. 2. The entire Woodsy Owl costume including each of the separate pieces is to be destroyed beyond recognition.
* If you do not have access to an official
USDA Forest Service law enforcement representative, arrangements will be made for dealing with your costume by contacting the USDA-FS Washington Office at: Woodsy Owl
C/o National Symbols Program
* Okay. They’re not really doing away with Woodsy Owl. They’re just updating his look, so he now has a new costume.
Still, one wonders why the old costumes have to be burned to a crisp and "destroyed beyond recognition". I guess we don’t want them to fall into enemy hands.
Quote Of The Day
"I am sick of Karl Rove’s bullshit." – Bill Clinton in the latest New Yorker.
Sadly, the New Yorker doesn’t have the interview in its online version, but apparently that’s what the Big Dog actually said.
Other Clinton quotes from the article:
Presidential Doodles
Match each doodle with one of the following five Presidents: Rutherford B Hayes (1877-1881), Benjamin Harrison (1889-1893), Warren G Harding (1921-1923), Franklin Delano Roosevelt (1933-1945), and Richard Nixon (1969-1974)
Take another quiz here.
Something Which May Make MySpace Bearable
There are a lot of reasons I hate Myspace, but mostly I hate the idea of it. It’s like one huge crowded online pickup bar, except with tacky decor, no booze, and a high school cafeteria mentality. It’s easy to understand why college students abandon Myspace and go to something like Facebook. And why adults prefer Blogger or Typepad or LiveJournal.
I mean — sure, it’s nice to visit "friends" on Myspace — if you have to — but it’s all the same.
Sure, some people try to individualize the "look" of their Myspace space, but mostly what you end up looking at (assuming you can navigate through to their space) is tiny unreadable words against a LOUD backdrop.
People, people, people — you don’t need to take a class in website design to know what is and isn’t crappy looking. If you want me to visit your Myspace, make it an enjoyable experience for me — don’t throw buckets of flashing neon pixels in my face. It gives me seizures.
Fortunately, there may be a solution. This program, a script for Greasemonkey, removes all the "style sheets’ that Myspace users force on you. Instead, everything appears in Myspace’s bland (but readable) default style.
Unfortunately, Greasemonkey is an add-on program for the Firefox browser, and not Microsoft’s Internet Explorer. Still, it’s a step in the right direction.
Irony Alert
Glenn Greenwald points out that Michelle Malkin supports fair trials and due process for Christian terrorists… but has claimed in the past that fair trials for Muslim detainees is "coddling" terrorists. Strange how her attitude changes when the religion of the terrorists changes.
An Average Day In The Life Of Joe Republican
A pretty decent explanation of why I’m a bleeding heart liberal pinko commie:
Joe gets up at 6 a.m. and fills his coffeepot with water to prepare his morning coffee. The water is clean and good because some tree-hugging liberal fought for minimum water-quality standards. With his first swallow of water, he takes his daily medication. His medications are safe to take because some stupid commie liberal fought to ensure their safety and that they work as advertised.
All but $10 of his medications are paid for by his employer’s medical plan because some liberal union workers fought their employers for paid medical insurance – now Joe gets it, too.
He prepares his morning breakfast, bacon and eggs. Joe’s bacon is safe to eat because some girly-man liberal fought for laws to regulate the meat packing industry.
In the morning shower, Joe reaches for his shampoo. His bottle is properly labeled with each ingredient and its amount in the total contents because some crybaby liberal fought for his right to know what he was putting on his body and how much it contained.
Joe dresses, walks outside and takes a deep breath. The air he breathes is clean because some environmentalist wacko liberal fought for the laws to stop industries from polluting our air.
Joe begins his work day. He has a good job with excellent pay, medical benefits, retirement, paid holidays and vacation because some lazy liberal union members fought and died for these working standards. Joe’s employer pays these standards because Joe’s employer doesn’t want his employees to call the union.
If Joe is hurt on the job or becomes unemployed, he’ll get a worker compensation or an unemployment check because some stupid liberal didn’t think he should lose his home because of his temporary misfortune.
It is noontime and Joe needs to make a bank deposit so he can pay some bills. Joe’s deposit is federally insured by the FSLIC because some godless liberal wanted to protect Joe’s money from unscrupulous bankers who ruined the banking system before the Great Depression.
Joe has to pay his Fannie Mae-underwritten mortgage and his below-market federal student loan because some elitist liberal decided that Joe and the country would be better off if he was educated and earned more money over his lifetime. Joe also forgets that his in addition to his federally subsidized student loans, he attended a state-funded university.
Joe is home from work. He plans to visit his father this evening at his farm home in the country. He gets in his car for the drive. His car is among the safest in the world because some America-hating liberal fought for car safety standards to go along with the taxpayer- funded roads.
He arrives at his boyhood home. His was the third generation to live in the house financed by Farmers’ Home Administration because bankers didn’t want to make rural loans.
The house didn’t have electricity until some big-government liberal stuck his nose where it didn’t belong and demanded rural electrification.
He is happy to see his father, who is now retired. His father lives on Social Security and a union pension because some wine-drinking, cheese-eating liberals made sure Dad could take care of himself so Joe wouldn’t have to.
Joe gets back in his car for the ride home, and turns on a radio talk show. The radio host keeps saying that liberals are bad and conservatives are good. He doesn’t mention that the beloved Republicans have fought against every protection and benefit Joe enjoys throughout his day. Joe agrees: “We don’t need those big-government liberals ruining our lives! After all, I’m a self-made man who believes everyone should take care of himself, just like I have.”
Jim Wallis vs. Ralph Reed
Jim Wallis, author of the book God’s Politics, has a new blog discussing, well, religion and politics. Wallis is often thought of as a "liberal Christian", but that would be an inaccurate charactorization. The theme of Wallis’s book is quite simple: God belongs to no single political party and true faith transcends political categorization.
This week, Wallis is having an on-going (and extremely civil) on-line debate with former Christian Conservative leader Ralph Reed. Good reading.
Boo Hoo
Looks like UNC denied full professorship to "Prof" Michael Adams.
Gee, I can’t imagine why.
NASA Scientists Want To Turn Moon Into Earth’s Attic
There’s one place you may not have thought to store your valuable computer information. Just look up.
Hollow lava tubes on the Moon could be used as a giant digital library. That’s one commercial possibility for the Moon put forth in a white paper by a NASA scientist.
In addition to being able to relay information to Earth like geosynchronous satellites, a lunar-based system could also process and store information, says David McKay.
The lunar computers could be buried in lunar soil, put at the bottom of craters or set into lava tubes, which are subsurface caves in which lava used to flow. Previously, scientists have suggested using lava tubes for human habitation.
Commercial data stored on Earth can be destroyed by natural disasters, wars or fires. In 500 BC, the Royal Library of Alexandria in Egypt housed records of the ancient world, and the entire library or at least some collections were ruined in a fire. The benefits of lunar storage are that there is no oxygen to erode the material, constant sub-freezing temperature and the Moon is currently free of all of the havoc wreaked by humankind.
Astronauts on lunar missions could set up the data communication and storage system if they return to the Moon.
The Moon could be used like Noah’s ark, hosting a collection of plant and animal material, proposes McKay, who made headlines a decade ago when he and others announced that Martian meteorite ALH 84001 had rod-like structures that appeared to be fossilised microbes.
Families could even pay a fee to preserve photographs in the lunar library for future civilizations. McKay calls it the "ultimate time capsule."
Betty And Barney Hill
I was sooo into this story when I was young. It happened 45 years ago today:
On September 19, 1961, Betty and Barney Hill were heading home to Portsmouth when they encountered aliens — or so they believed. Whether true or not, their story catapulted them into national celebrity.
***
It was September 19, 1961, and the weather report predicted a hurricane along the New Hampshire coast, so Betty and Barney Hill cut their long weekend in Montreal short and headed back to Portsmouth in their 1957 Chevrolet Bel Air.
They stopped at a restaurant in Colebrook, where Betty ate a piece of chocolate layer cake and Barney ate a hamburger. At 10:05 p.m. they were back on Route 3 heading toward the White Mountains.
The sky was clear, and just past Lancaster Betty noticed a bright light close to the nearly full moon. As it got closer and brighter, she pointed it out to Barney, a World War II veteran who knew something about planes. He assumed it was a satellite, perhaps off-course.
Their dachshund, Delsey, was getting antsy, so they pulled over to let her out. Betty took binoculars from the car. With hyperbolic finesse, Fuller described the moment this way: "Betty put the binoculars up to her eyes and focused carefully. What they both were about to see was to change their lives forever, and as some observers claim, change the history of the world."
Afterward, Barney was disinclined to discuss what he had seen, but Betty did so in a letter she wrote soon after to the National Investigations Committee on Aerial Phenomena. "He did see several figures scurrying about as though they were making some kind of hurried type of preparation. One figure was observing us from the windows . . . and seemed to be dressed in some type of shiny black uniform," she wrote. "At this point, my husband became shocked and got back in the car, in a hysterical condition, laughing and repeating that they were going to capture us."
Back in the car, Barney drove wildly in an effort to escape. Past Franconia Notch they left Route 3 and headed down a smaller road.
Betty Hill said recently she was more curious than afraid at the time. "I understood something’s going to happen and I don’t know what it is, but I’m ready for it. At that point I rolled down the window and waved hello to the craft," she said, laughing into the crook of her arm. "At this time I was sure it was a flying saucer, but I didn’t say so."
Suddenly a cluster of beings was blocking their way. Barney stopped the car, but could not restart it. The men came toward them.
For almost three years, their memories would stop at that scene, only to pick up sometime later that night, when they found themselves driving south near Ashland.
The following day Barney, a fastidious dresser, noticed the tops of shoes were badly scuffed. Betty’s dress, which she still can retrieve in a flash from her living-room closet, was ripped near the zipper and covered with powdery pink stains. There were shiny spots on the car trunk that caused a compass to flutter.
Against Barney’s wishes, Betty told her sister about the incident. On her sister’s advice, she reported it to Pease Air Force Base, which took the sighting seriously. According to Pease records, officials there, too, had logged an "unknown" at about 2 a.m. the same morning.
Only after investigators from NICAP and other scientific organizations visited the Hills did they realize their trip had taken at least two hours longer than it should have. They remained haunted by the feeling that something unexplained had happened to them. Betty had recurring nightmares.
In February, the Hills began making pilgrimages to the White Mountains to try to retrace their route. They were unsuccessful, but they did meet many people in the region who had seen strange lights and flying objects.
"Actually, that was just the beginning," Hill said of the initial encounter.
Their public lives continued more or less as usual after their UFO encounter, but by 1964 their psychological anxiety still had not abated. Barney had an ulcer that was not responding to treatment. He missed work and both were depressed.
Eventually they were referred to the Boston office of Dr. Benjamin Simon, a noted psychiatrist who specialized in hypnosis. The conversations that transpired during their trances became a permanent chapter in the annals of ufology.
Fuller made liberal use of the tape recordings of the hypnosis sessions, which revealed episodes of rapture and terror.
"BARNEY: Heh, heh, Betty. That’s the funniest thing, Betty. They funniest thing. I never believed in flying saucers but – I don’t know. Mighty mysterious. Yeah, well, I guess I won’t say anything to anybody about this. It’s too ridiculous, isn’t it? Oh yes, really funny. Wonder where they came from? Oh gee, I wish I had the – I wish I had gone with them . . .
DOCTOR: You wish you had gone with them?
BARNEY: Yes. Oh what an experience to go to some distant planet. (A pause as he reflects, then:) Maybe this will prove the existence of God. (Another brief pause.) Isn’t that funny? To look for the existence of God on another planet?"
Betty was interviewed separately. "BETTY: (She is beginning to get upset again.) It won’t hurt me. And I ask him what, and he said he just wants to put it in my navel, it’s just a simple test. (More rapid sobbing) And I tell him, no, it will hurt, don’t do it. And I’m crying, and I’m telling him, ‘It’s hurting, it’s hurting, take it out, take it out!’ And the leader comes over and he puts his hand, rubs his hand in front of my eyes, and he says it will be all right. I won’t feel it."
MUFON’s Geremia has listened to the tapes. "It’s enough to make you not sleep at night," he said. "There’s one particular portion, when Barney is reliving what happened, really reliving every moment, and he lets out a scream on that tape that’s absolutely bone-chilling."
After months of hypnosis, a fantastic story had emerged. Simon could not entirely dismiss or accept the results; he did not think they were lying, but he attributed their story to some kind of shared fantasy, perhaps a folie a deux.
The Hills recounted that they were taken on board by beings whose eyes were disproportionately large and slanted. Betty said one of them spoke English to her, though not very well.
They were medically examined – flakes of skin scraped off Betty’s arm, her reflexes tested, and a needle inserted in her navel. Although it does not appear in Fuller’s book, Mack reports that a semen sample was taken from Barney, who was examined in a different room from Betty.
When they finished with her, Betty asked the "leader" where he was from and he showed her a complicated cosmic map, which Betty later drew. She asked for proof of their visit and he gave her a book written in strange symbols, but then changed his mind and took it back.
"I recognized the importance of what was happening," Hill said recently. "I knew these were astronauts from another solar system. I told the leader, ‘This has been the most wonderful experience of my life,’ and that I really appreciated meeting him and would he please come back because I had a lot of friends who would like to meet him."
I basically bought into the Betty and Barney Hill story, chronicled in the book "The Interrupted Journey". But years after the publication of that book, Betty just kept on seeing those UFOs, right up to her death in 2004 (Barney died back in 1969).
She claims to have more than 250 photographs of UFOs. To this day she sees them, sometimes flying over her house in Portsmouth, or hovering above her yard, where her cats and chickens roam.
And when those stories started coming out, that’s when I got off the bus.
[H/T: Mom]
RELATED: Today there’s news that the space shuttle Atlantis spotted a UFO — 45 years to the day after Betty and Barney’s abduction. Coincidence?!?
The truth is out there.
Maybe Not The Best Example
Bush to the UN at roughly 11:30 EST:
We have seen the forces of freedom and moderation transform entire continents. …Asia has seen freedom progress and hundreds of millions of people lifted out of desperate poverty.
Halfway around the word, at roughly the same time: