The number one British single today in 1959:
The number one album today in 1971 was Crosby Stills Nash & Young’s “4 Way Street”:
No comments on Presty the DJ for May 15
Month: May 2013
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Barack Obama went to Texas on his perpetual-campaign tour Thursday.
Texas is the state that, in terms of job growth, has basically propped up the entire U.S. economy, according to Texas Gov. Rick Perry:
The Texas Model works:
• While the U.S. lost 2.5 million net jobs over the last five years, Texas created 530,000 net new jobs.
• Over the last 10 years, Texas created 33 percent of the net new jobs nationwide.
• Texas has been the top exporting state in the nation for 11 straight years.
• Texas is ranked #1 on CNBC’s 2012 Top States for Business list.And just this week, Chief Executive magazine ranked Texas the best state to do business for the ninth year in a row, and Site Selection Magazine ranked us the most competitive state in 2012. Mr. President, the Texas Success Story can be the American Success Story.
Investors Business Daily adds:
And since the recovery started in June 2009, Texas has outperformed Obama on every important economic measure.
Jobs: Private sector jobs have shot up 10% in Texas since June 2009, which is twice the national growth rate. And while U.S. employment is still 2% below its pre-recession peak, in Texas it’s 5% above the state’s previous high.
Labor force: Nationwide, the labor force — the number of people who have jobs or are actively looking — has remained virtually flat since the recovery started, climbing just 0.3% over the past 45 months. Texas, in contrast, has seen its labor force climb 6.2%, as workers flood the state.
Wages: According to the Bureau of Labor Statistics, average annual wages in the U.S. rose 5.4% from May 2009 to May 2012. In Texas, they rose 6.1%.
Per capita income: Texans have also seen their per capita personal income grow faster than the nation as a whole, increasing 13.3% compared with 10.5% nationwide, Bureau of Economic Analysis data show.
GDP: And Texas’ economy has grown faster than the overall economy since Obama took office. Between 2009 and 2011, real GDP in Texas expanded 8.7%, while the nation’s overall GDP managed just 4.6% growth, according to the BEA.
And while Obama and his backers complain that austerity is now standing in the way of economic growth, Texas proves that more government spending and government jobs aren’t needed to grow the economy.
Overall state spending has been flat since 2010, according to the National Association of State Budget Officers, and BLS data show that state and local government jobs dropped 16,500 since the recovery started.
The two statistics that stand out like sore thumbs are personal income growth, which in Wisconsin has trailed the national average since the late 1970s, and government spending, which is twice what it would have been had the state had controls on spending on taxes back in the 1970s.
With discontent in this state over its subpar job growth, and of course the pathetic national economic “recovery,” Perry says Texas’ economy is based on:
Low taxes Lawsuit abuse reform Predictable and effective regulations Balanced budgets Accountable schools and a competitive workforce.Which of these apply to Wisconsin or the nation? Definitely not low taxes. (Wisconsin is fifth highest in state and local taxes and eighth worst in business tax climate, and when state taxes are added, the U.S. has the highest corporate income tax rate in the world.) Lawsuit abuse reform? According to the Institute for Legal Reform, Wisconsin’s legal environment ranks 15th. (Texas ranks 36th, which probably is the reason for Texans for Lawsuit Reform.) “Predictable and effective regulations”? In Wisconsin? The land of Damn Near Russia?
Wisconsin has a legally but not factually balanced budget. Our schools are definitely overrated (while the education establishment screams bloody murder about attempts to make schools accountable), and our workforce appears to be overrated as well in the opinion of the only people who count, employers. And on each of these points where more needs to be done, the Legislature, which according to media reports is controlled by the Republican Party, has done next to nothing.
What is the Wisconsin Model? High taxes, 3,120 levels of government, grossly excessive regulation, slavish financial devotion to public schools, and, by the way, below-average business and personal income. Three and a half decades (or more) of the same old thing isn’t working.
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The number one British album today in 1983 (with the clock ticking on my high school days) was Spandau Ballet’s “True”:
The number one British album today in 2000 was Tom Jones’ “Reload,” which proved that Jones could sing about anything, and loudly:
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Jonah Goldberg:
… a couple of weeks ago I was on a panel at Hillsdale College. It was sponsored by my friends at Liberty21, a scrappy new think tank.
The topic: “Can Conservatives Reclaim the Culture?”
First, I am not sure that conservatives ever claimed the culture in the first place. Sure, in retrospect it almost always seems like the past was more conservative than the present. But that doesn’t mean the conservatives were dominating the culture in the past. It might mean that we’ve just gotten even more liberal since then.
But we can debate all that another time. The thing I wanted to get to is that I think the way the Right talks about popular culture is deeply flawed. If conservatives are going to persuade non-conservatives to become more conservative — which is nearly the whole frickin’ point of the conservative movement — then going around wagging our fingers at every popular movie and TV show is probably not the best way to do it.
One way you persuade people to become more conservative is to explain to them how conservative they already are and build out from there. Persuasion is hard when your main argument is: “You’re a complete idiot and everything you think you know is ridiculous and/or evil.”
Moreover, there’s a Jedi-like Manichaeism running through youthful liberalism: The Light Side is liberal; the Dark Side is conservative. It’s like with little kids; tell them some food is good for them or that some dish has vegetables in it, and they’ll preemptively hate it and refuse to eat it like a jihadi at Gitmo dodging a spoonful of peach cobbler. Tell college kids that something is conservative and they’ll immediately assume it’s not for them. We can spend all day talking about how stupid this pose is, but that won’t do much for the cause.
The better way is to identify things that are popular and celebrate the conservative aspects of them. For instance, as I’ve written before, whenever a sitcom character gets pregnant, the producers make sure to talk up the character’s “right to choose.” But, at least since the painfully unfunny show “Maude,” the character always chooses to keep the baby, and once she does she acts like a pro-lifer. She talks to the fetus. She cares about what she eats. While NARAL considers what is in her belly to be nothing more than uterine contents, the mother-to-be gives those contents a name and acts like it’s already a member of the family. I understand a big part of the pro-life agenda is to make abortion illegal. I get that. But if you could get more people to think abortion is wrong it would A) be easier to make it illegal and B) less necessary to do so.
Or just think about crime. Going by what liberals say they believe about the criminal-justice system, never mind the War on Terror, they should be denouncing vast swaths of what Hollywood churns out. Cops play by their own rules. Good guys use outright torture to get valuable information in order to save lives. But with the exceptions of 24 and Zero Dark Thirty I can’t think of a time when the Left seriously complained about any of it.
Now if you point this out to some liberals, they’ll say that’s because “it’s just TV” or “it’s just a movie.” But you know that if a TV show or movie came out demonizing gays, they’d be screaming bloody murder.
My point is that the Left has quietly surrendered the argument over big chunks of the popular culture, and because they don’t complain about it, conservatives don’t press our advantage. We spend too much time reacting to liberal bait and liberal cues. We act like the opposition, being more against them than for anything of our own. One small place to start is to understand this is our culture too.
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The number one British single today in 1957 gave a name to a genre of music between country and rock (even though the song doesn’t sound like the genre):
The number one single today in 1967:
The number one British album today in 1967 promised “More of the Monkees”:
(Interesting aside: “More of the Monkees” was one of only four albums to reach the British number one all year. The other three were the Beatles’ “Sgt. Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” the soundtrack to “The Sound of Music,” and “The Monkees.”)
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The number one single today in 1958:
Today in 1963, the producers of CBS-TV’s Ed Sullivan Shew told Bob Dylan he couldn’t perform his “Talking John Birch Society Blues” because it mocked the U.S. military.
So he didn’t. He walked out of rehearsals and didn’t appear on the show.
The number one album today in 1973 was Led Zeppelin’s “Houses of the Holy”:
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The number one British single today in 1958 was a cover of a song written in 1923:
The number one British album today in 1963 was the Beatles’ “Please Please Me,” which was number one for 30 weeks:
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Good morning. Hungry?
Well, if you’re not, you will be after you read this post, the inspiration for which came from Facebook and Imgur: Breakfasts of the World!
The problem with the concept of this post is that the breakfasts depicted here take time to prepare, and time is something you usually don’t have on weekday mornings.
For most of my life, breakfast at least occasionally has been an obscure product, CoCo Wheats, which according to its manufacturer dates back to 1930. CoCo Wheats, according to Wikipedia (and you know Wikipedia is always right) is “chocolate flavored breakfast hot grits.”
My mind was temporarily blown by the idea that I’d been eating chocolate-flavored grits all these years, but that is not correct. Grits are made of ground corn. A product named CoCo Wheats obviously is not made of corn. CoCo Wheats should not be confused with Cream of Wheat, which is also made of wheat farina, but by a different company.
(How did I know I’d met the right woman to marry? Because she and I share the same tastes in breakfast and toothpaste (Colgate). In fact, Mrs. Presteblog is the only unrelated-by-blood person I know who likes CoCo Wheats.)
Wikipedia goes on to say that CoCo Wheats competes with chocolate-flavored Malt-O-Meal. That is interesting, because MOM Brands purchased CoCo Wheats in 2012. The difference, according to their nutrition labels, is that CoCo Wheats contains “wheat farina, cocoa [and] natural and artificial flavor,” while chocolate Malt-O-Meal also contains sugar, malted barley and assorted other ingredients. So if you have an urge for malted barley in your chocolate breakfast cereal, I guess Malt-O-Meal is your choice. (And to confuse matters further, yes, Cream of Wheat now has a chocolate flavor. Don’t you love free enterprise?)
The biggest issues with CoCo Wheats, Malt-O-Meal or Cream of Wheat are (1) cooking it and (2) cleaning it up. It’s very easy to boil it over in the microwave, creating a mess you have to clean up. And whether you cook by stovetop or microwave, cleaning up the container in which CoCo Wheats was cooked is like trying to move concrete after it’s set.
If you don’t have the time to make CoCo Wheats, there are numerous choices in breakfast cereal. Our cousin stayed with us a couple of times when I was growing up in Madison, and she was always amazed at the numbers of different boxes of cereal Mom purchased for us. Apparently her house had fewer than seven choices.
Growing up, my cereal tastes were somewhat less sugary than Calvin and Hobbes’ (well, Calvin’s) favorite Chocolate Frosted Sugar Bombs. The three sugariest were probably Count Chocula (which came and went), Sugar Pops (which became Sugar Corn Pops and then just Corn Pops), and Sugar Smacks (which now are Honey Smacks). More often, I would eat Corn Flakes, Frosted Mini Wheats, Special K, Product 19 or Wheaties. (Often accompanied by Pop-Tarts.)
Some of those cereals are from Kellogg’s, the best known breakfast cereal maker in the U.S. I am part of a finite group of Americans because, on a vacation to Michigan, our family toured the Kellogg’s plant in Battle Creek, Mich. I am part of a finite group because Kellogg’s discontinued cereal factory tours in 1986. (The plant tours have been replaced by something called Cereal City USA.)
The rest of this really has to do with weekend breakfasts, or brunches, when you have time to prepare and/or eat more than a bowl of cereal or toast bread or bagels. My regard for breakfast is such that when I go to a weekend brunch, I usually make breakfast, not lunch, selections. Except for prime rib and carved ham, and chicken if that looks good, and shrimp cocktail since shrimp is my favorite food, and of course dessert.
The first brunch I recall was at, of all places, a hotel (possibly a Sheraton) somewhere in Los Angeles during our California vacation in late 1978. (It was somewhere between Rancho Palos Verdes, where my aunt and uncle lived, and Diamond Bar, where my great-aunt lived.) It was the first time I ate chocolate mousse. Three, to be precise.
If you live remotely close to Appleton, you should end up at the Radisson Paper Valley Hotel’s Sunday brunch. Tables and tables and tables of food.
I have fond memories of the University Marriott in Salt Lake City, Utah. We went there intending to spend four days for the Ripon College basketball game against the University of Utah. Except that our three days became one week because the airport we flew out of and into, O’Hare International Airport in Chicago, was hit by 18 inches of snow during the basketball game, pushing our Sunday flight to Wednesday. Happily, the Marriott not only gave us the same room rate we had paid for the first four days, but that room rate included a daily breakfast buffet. The first big decision of the day was whether I should have a(nother) Belgian waffle.
Imgur posted photos of what it claims is the prototypical breakfast in a variety of countries, beginning (I decide) in the United States:
My favorite non-buffet restaurant breakfast is pancakes, preferably with real maple syrup (which my in-laws make every spring from real maple trees), and bacon. In our previous home, where the schools opened one hour late on Wednesdays, that became Pancake Day, first made by me, and then by our sons. Our daughter likes chocolate chip pancakes. Between pancake or baking mixes and paternal ingenuity, I came up with a chocolate chip oatmeal pancake recipe.
The best bacon on the planet, as far as I’m concerned, comes from Weber Meats in Cuba City. According to its website, Weber’s sells sliced bacon, pepper bacon, maple bacon, cottage bacon, bacon ends and Canadian bacon (which is more like extremely salted ham than bacon).
The other homemade breakfast I like is eggs — not just eggs purchased from a supermarket, but brown eggs purchased from a farmers’ market or similar place. If you’ve never had them before, there is simply no comparison. The yolks are bigger and practically orange.
One egg option is sunny-side up over a bed of some potato product. (Say, potatoes fried in the aforementioned bacon grease.) The egg yolks leak nicely into the potatoes. Another option is scrambled with cream cheese (an idea of Mrs. Presteblog), which makes the eggs pleasantly creamy.
Sometimes pork products aren’t available for breakfast. So I have been known to substitute the previous night’s main course — fish, pork chops, and so on — to go with the eggs and potatoes. Not usually steak or roast beef, though, because I prefer those in salads.
(For those wondering: I now weigh less than I weigh when we got married 20 years ago, though I still regard the word “diet” as spelled D-I-E with a T added. The trick of weight loss is for activity to exceed caloric intake. We won’t mention how much I weighed before I discovered this.)
Elsewhere …
Great Britain is not known for the quality of its food. However, it’s probably hard to mess up “Sausages, bacon, eggs, grilled tomato, mushrooms, bread, black pudding and baked beans. Knocked back with a cup of tea.” Although I’m not sure about black pudding (defined as “a blend of onions, pork fat, oatmeal, flavourings — and blood (usually from a pig).”
My Polish relatives apparently would eat “Jajecznica,” defined as “scrambled eggs covered with slices of kielbasa and joined by two potato pancakes.” Straightforward, although I’m not sure of the purpose of all of the greenery. (I enjoy salad, but not for breakfast.)
Related to the previous two is Canada …
… and pierogies, “boiled, baked or fried dumplings made from unleavened dough and traditionally stuffed with potato filling, sauerkraut, ground meat, cheese, or fruit. Then you’ve got some sausages and toast to mop it all up.”
My great-aunt (maiden name Merchlewicz, who was not Canadian, sister of the aforementioned Diamond Bar, Calif., relative) made pierogies. The last time I saw her, I ate, I believe, six of them.
Elsewhere in the gastronomic family tree is Germany …
… with, of course, “Wursts, local cheeses and freshly baked bread, all washed back with a strong coffee.”
This is, apparently, beef tips, chilequiles and other assorted goodies,” with “nachos, cheese and beans,” found in Mexico.
The rest of Imgur’s list is less than appealing. I understand different cultures are, well, different. It’s not that I wouldn’t eat some of these; they just don’t seem particularly appealing or filling as breakfast; for instance …
… Cuban bread dunked in coffee …
… stuffed croissants in Portugal (though it depends on what’s inside the croissant) …
… Venezuelan empenadas, filled with some combination of cheese, meat, vegetables and beans …
… Bolivian saltenas, described as “a bit like empanadas crossed with Cornish pasties … usually filled with meat and vegetables, and slightly sweetened with sugar” …
… Thai pork porridge, with “Chinese doughnuts, beansprouts, pork intestine stuffed with peppery pork mince, sliced pork heart, stomach slivers and blood pudding,” described as “a bit more interesting than toast and jam anyway” …
… toast and Vegemite or Marmite (both yeast extract paste) in Australia …
… croissants in France or Italy …
… Chinese breakfast, which apparently is pretty much like Chinese lunch or dinner …
… and Ghana’s favorite, waakye, “basically rice cooked in beans.”
The last — actually first in chronological order — requirement for breakfast is coffee. This is because (1) I work in journalism, which is powered by caffeine, and (2) I am clinically dead before the alarm goes off. I’ve been drinking coffee since I was 4 years old, even though my mother warned me it would stunt my growth. I am 6-foot-4 and I weigh 190 pounds. I guess she was right.
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This is an interesting answer to a question posed to Packers.com writer Vic Ketchman. Question in regular type, answer in bold type:
“I’d like to remind my fellow Packers fans that from the ninth game in 2009 until the 16th game of 2011, the Packers went 36-9.” I’d like to remind everyone that it’s Super Bowls the average fan remembers, not year-to-year records. Fans don’t care about how well we fought in a losing effort, how far we went in the playoffs or what rank our offense was that year, fans care about that final W. “Winning is not a sometime thing, it is an all-the-time thing.”
That sounds nice, but in what season was winning an all-the-time thing for Vince Lombardi’s teams? You want the truth? OK, here’s the truth. Those teams that won five NFL titles played in a league that was watered down by the emergence of the AFL. The NFL of the 1960s was a league full of cash-strapped franchises that had no chance of competing for a title. They were just trying to stay alive in the NFL-AFL wars that were skyrocketing salaries and making it impossible for cash-strapped teams such as the Steelers to even be competitive. In 1966, the Steelers selected a running back named Dick Leftridge in the first round. It was such a reach pick that it was a terrible embarrassment for the franchise. They picked him because he agreed to sign a contract far beneath what a first-round pick would earn. The Packers of the 1960s played in a 14-team NFL that included two expansion franchises (Dallas and Minnesota) and a third (Atlanta) on the way. Of the 15 teams in the league in 1966, more than half of them were not competitive and, frankly, weren’t even attempting to be competitive. They were just trying to outlast the AFL. With all due respect to those wonderful Packers teams of the 1960s, they would not have won nearly as many titles if they had played in today’s 32-team, ultra-competitive NFL. In this NFL, a Super Bowl title is a sometime thing; it’s a very special thing. In this NFL, the record the Packers have achieved since 2009 is extraordinary.
In 1959, Vince Lombardi’s first season as Packers general manager and coach, the NFL had 12 teams, each of which had rosters of 36 players. One year later, the American Football League and its eight teams entered the pro football world, the same year the Dallas Cowboys joined the NFL. I couldn’t find the AFL’s roster size rules, but assuming they were similar to the NFL’s the number of people who could call themselves pro football players expanded by three-fourths from 1959 to 1960. One year later, the NFL added Minnesota. Atlanta joined the NFL and Miami joined the AFL in 1966, New Orleans joined the NFL in 1967, and Cincinnati joined the AFL in 1968. Between the NFL and AFL and roster size growth, between 1959 and 1968, the number of football-team roster spots grew by nearly 2 1/2 times.
Between 1960 and 1969, the Packers played in six NFL championship games, winning all but in 1960. The New York Giants lost their three championship game appearances, 1961 through 1963. The Cowboys lost their two, 1966 and 1967. Cleveland won one (1964) and lost three (1965, 1968 and 1969). Philadelphia (1960), Chicago (1963), Baltimore (1968) and Minnesota (1969) won their only title game appearances of the ’60s. Los Angeles got in the playoffs three consecutive years, but not the NFL title game, in the late ’60s.
So from this we can conclude that the best NFL team of the ’60s was indeed the Packers, followed by the Browns. The Colts (they also tied for a division title in 1965, forcing a one-game playoff with the Packers that ended in overtime) dipped and then revitalized under Don Shula, the Cowboys, Rams and Vikings were on their way up, the Giants were on their way down, and the Eagles and Bears were one-year wonders. That leaves the rest — St. Louis, Detroit, Washington (the last NFL team to use black players), Pittsburgh, San Francisco, Atlanta, New Orleans, and, not counting one season each, Philadelphia and Chicago — as almost being out of the running for the playoffs after their first game.
The other difference between then and now is the bigger role of the general manager. Recall that most of Lombardi’s Glory Years players — Bart Starr, Paul Hornung, Jim Taylor, Jerry Kramer and so on — were already there when he showed up in 1959, courtesy of the late Packers scout Jerry Vainisi, who did his job much better than the coaches he worked for did his jobs until Lombardi arrived. GM Lombardi was less successful — he drafted Herb Adderly, traded for Willie Davis, and signed Willie Wood as a free agent — than coach Lombardi. Numerous NFL observers will tell you that there is little difference in overall talent level between the best and worst NFL teams.
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You may remember a couple weeks ago I noted the first known meeting of the Beatles and the Rolling Stones. Today in 1963, upon the advice of George Harrison, Decca Records signed the Rolling Stones to a contract.
Four years to the day later, Stones Keith Richard, Mick Jagger and Brian Jones celebrated by … getting arrested for drug possession.
I noted the 53rd anniversary May 2 of WLS in Chicago going to Top 40. Today in 1982, WABC in New York (also owned by ABC, as one could conclude from their call letters) played its last record, which was …
Four years later, the number one song in America was, well, inspired by, though not based on, a popular movie of the day:
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 