The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1965:
The number one British album today in 1967 was “The Monkees”:
The number one single on both sides of the Atlantic today in 1978:
No comments on Presty the DJ for Feb. 4
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Farmers are important only to those who eat. This spot, narrated by one of the great salesmen of all time, makes me want to run out to Louisburg Garage Monday.
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And now, via Facebook and Twitter, the best comments on the third-quarter power outage in Super Bowl XLVII (the headline was my contribution):
New Orleans Power & Light just got back at Roger Goodell.
This is evident testimony of a lights-out performance by the Ravens tonight.
Just play, pretend you’re outside and clouds are covering the sun! Geez!
Looks like Ray Nagin ran off with the power bill money.
I wonder if they will blame Bush for the lights going out since Katrina hit New Orleans?
Don’t worry. The last time the power went out New Orleans they had back on in four weeks.
I’ll bet Al Gore had something to do with this!
I’d rather be watching the Go Daddy commercial over and over again than listening to these knuckleheads.
Guess the NFL shouldn’t have held the Super bowl in New Orleans the same year they suspended Saints’s coach Sean Payton.
Clark Griswold: Sorry just testing my 2013 Christmas lights display!
As the lights start to come back on, I can see about 20 cans of Deer Antler spray laying around the Ravens’ sideline.Oh Oh…. Lights out, lots of drunk people, limo’s parked outside…. SOMEBODY KEEP THEIR EYE ON LEWIS !!!
@OnionSports: Superdome lights return as all 53 49ers are lying motionless on ground. Whereabouts of Ray Lewis unknown
This wouldn’t have happened on Fox
if the lights are gonna be out and we have to watch nothing plus commercials, at least break the monotony with a 100 yard mascot dash or something… holy hell NFL
Just talked to my cousin the Sports Mechanic, (fixes games) Chinny, Cup o Vino and he said he had the power outage and points.
Somewhere Don Meredith is smiling!
Thinks its like Christmas lights? One goes out and the whole strand is shot!
Get Tulane stadium ready! Or Tiger Stadium [presumably LSU’s]
We’re down to mood lighting in here. Sexiest third quarter ever.
Gee Thanks Obama for shutting the Coal plant down in New Orleans…. How is that working out for New Orleans right now?
“Just kidding!” Why couldn’t the power fail about 20 minutes ago?
Alright…which Beyonce hater cut the power at the Super Dome? You’re a few minutes too late, buddy. 😉
Too bad it didn’t happen when Beyonce was singing.
Terrorist attack that was half successful? At least the press booth was knocked out.
Did they lose power in the booth, too? YAY!! #dreamscometrue
That’s what they get for having a Super Bowl without the Packers!
Next year’s super bowl will be outdoors in New Jersey. That could be a disaster
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Today in 1959, one night after their concert at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and J.P. “The Big Bopper” Richardson got on a Beechcraft Bonanza in Mason City, Iowa, to fly to Fargo, N.D., for a concert in Moorhead, Minn.
The trio, along with Dion and the Belmonts, were part of the Winter Dance Party Tour, a 24-city tour over three weeks, with its ridiculously scheduled tour dates connected by bus.
Said bus, whose heater broke early in the tour, froze in below-zero temperatures two nights earlier between the scheduled concert in the Duluth, Minn., National Guard Armory, and the next scheduled location, the Riverside Ballroom in Green Bay.
Holly’s drummer had to be hospitalized with frostbite in his feet, and Valens also became ill. The tour got to Green Bay, but its scheduled concert in Appleton that evening was canceled.
After the concert in Clear Lake, Holly decided to rent an airplane. Holly’s bass player, Waylon Jennings, gave his seat to the Big Bopper because he was sick, and Valens won a coin flip with Holly’s guitarist, Tommy Allsup. Dion DiMucci chose not to take a seat because the $36 cost equaled his parents’ monthly rent.
As he was leaving, Holly told Jennings, “I hope your ol’ bus freezes up,” to which Jennings replied, “Well, I hope your ol’ plane crashes!”
Shortly after the 12:55 a.m. takeoff, the plane crashed, instantly killing Holly, Valens, the Big Bopper and the pilot.
The scheduled concert that evening went on, with organizers recruiting a 15-year-old, Robert Velline, and his band the Shadows. Bobby Vee went on to have a good career.
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First: I have been asked to say that it’s a great day for groundhogs. Thus, a decades-long tradition is not only maintained, but expanded online.
(By the way: If a groundhog near you predicts six more weeks of winter, you are authorized to kill the groundhog to prevent that prediction from ever happening again. The fact that winter in Wisconsin lasts more like 12 weeks from now regardless of groundhog predictions is beside the point.)
Today in 1959, Buddy Holly, Richie Valens and the Big Bopper all appeared at the Surf Ballroom in Clear Lake, Iowa.
That would be their final concert appearance because of what happened after the concert.
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The Minnesota Vikings are getting a replacement for the Hubert H. Humphrey Metrodome. All should be just fine in the Land of 10,000 Lakes (which are fewer than in Wisconsin), right?
Not so fast, min venn, reports the Minneapolis Star Tribune:
The football team wants its fans closer to the action. The baseball guys simply want a baseball field that’s not an embarrassment.
But in the fast-track exercise of designing a new Vikings football stadium, a dispute over 20 feet of baseball foul line has made mixing the two a tricky fit.
With the architect’s first schematic design only weeks away, Vikings officials and members of the public authority supervising the project are at odds over how to squeeze a baseball field into a stadium designed primarily for football.
The impasse not only threatens to delay a nearly-billion-dollar project already facing tight deadlines, but also appears to be an early test of just how accommodating the Vikings will prove in the development of a multipurpose “people’s stadium.”
“The problem is you can’t put a diamond in a rectangle,” said University of Minnesota baseball coach John Anderson. His team hopes to take advantage of playing in the new downtown Minneapolis facility that will replace the Metrodome, which for decades has served as a warm and dry venue for hundreds of college and high school teams seeking an early start to the baseball season and refuge from nature’s worst. “Something’s got to give,” Anderson said.
The Vikings, hoping to put ticket holders and stadium suites as close to the action as any team in the NFL, favor a preliminary design that places the first row of seats 44 feet from the football playing field. Only one other recently built NFL stadium — Lucas Oil in Indianapolis, designed by HKS Inc., the architect for the Vikings stadium — puts ticket holders that close.
But that design squeezes some baseball dimensions.
The most glaring — a right-field foul line that extends 285 feet from home plate and a right-field power alley 319 feet away. Both distances are short by college and professional standards, and both are about 20 feet shorter than the design, already scaled back, favored by baseball coaches and the public stadium authority.
The Strib graphically demonstrates the issue, with the blue showing the “perfered” Vikings option:
You may have thought the replacement of the Metrodome with a domed football stadium ended indoor baseball in Minnesota as soon as the Metrodome deflates itself for the last time. After all, the Twins wanted and got an outdoor stadium.
For those unfamiliar, this is what outdoor football looked like in the state of Minnesota:
I hate to be on the Vikings’ side of anything, but the baseball coaches are conveniently forgetting some history. In days of old, baseball parks were built shaped on city blocks. That was how Fenway Park has the Green Monster, the previous Yankee Stadium had its short right-field corner and deep left-center-field power alley, and the Polo Grounds, where the New York Giants played, had short fences but deep power alleys and center field. For that matter, before Dodger Stadium was built, the Los Angeles Dodgers played their first four seasons at the Los Angeles Coliseum, whose left field foul line was 251 feet east of home plate. (The joke was that the Coliseum was the only ballpark in the world that could seat 100,000 people and two outfielders.)
On the other hand, the state of Minnesota and/or its baseball and NFL teams got it reversed. Irrespective of the fact the Vikings played more games at the Metrodome than Metropolitan Stadium in Bloomington, football is meant to be played outdoors. It’d be nice to play baseball outdoors, but the spring doesn’t often cooperate when your stadium is as close to the North Pole as the Equator.
Meanwhile, on the other side of Interstate 94 (from WTMJ):
Could the Cubs new home be in Milwaukee (at least temporarily)? According to Gordon Wittenmeyer with the Chicago Sun-Times, the possibility may be closer to reality than many realize.
According to Wittenmeyer, the owners of the Cubs have always denied the possibility of having the team play at U.S. Cellular Field, where the White Sox play, temporarily during renovations of Wrigley Field.
“Cubs spokesman Julian Green said the plan — which called for all home games in April and May in 2014 and 2015 to be moved to Miller Park in Milwaukee — was just one of ‘a number of different options’ being considered and is now ‘off the table,’” said Wittenmeyer.
But they did say that playing at Miller Park have been considered “seriously” and the Brewers had been consulted.
“For now, the Cubs say they’ll play all their home games at Wrigley Field while the anticipated work is completed,” said Wittenmeyer.
“For now.”
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Today in 1949, RCA released the first 45-rpm record.
The seven-inch size of the 45, compared with the bigger 78, allowed the development of jukeboxes.
The number one single today in 1964:
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It’s not clear to me what makes Christie Hefner, former CEO of Playboy Enterprises, qualified to have an opinion on this subject, but MSNBC thought so (from Daily Caller):
On Wednesday’s broadcast of MSNBC’s “Morning Joe,” the Center for American Progress’ Christie Hefner said that Chicago’s sky-high murder rate could be blamed — at least in part — on climate change.
“Yes, last year we hit a record number of murders from guns [in Chicago],” Hefner, the former chairwoman and chief executive officer of Playboy Enterprises, said. “And this year we are already outpacing last year’s numbers. Now, there are contributing factors that are not under anybody’s control and may seem odd, but it is factually true. One of them is actually the weather. There is a dramatic increase in gun violence when it is warmer. And we are having this climate change effect that is driving that.”
The average high temperature July, the hottest month in both Chicago and the much-safer New York City, is the same for both cities at 84 degrees Fahrenheit. Scarborough took a moment to sardonically thank Hefner for that statement on behalf of conservative bloggers.
“Christie, can I just stop you and say conservative bloggers across America, thank you for saying that climate change is responsible for the rising murder rates in Chicago,” Scarborough said. “You have just made a lot of people in their basements of their mothers’ homes very happy.”
(For the record: I have never lived in my mother’s basement.)
It’s unclear, though widely claimed, that crime rates increase in the summer. Apparently they do in Chicago. (By the way, Wednesday’s Chicago high was 48; today’s is predicted to be 16, which doesn’t seem like high-crime weather, but never mind.) Hefner must not be on TV very often, or perhaps she’s gotten bad media training (which would be ironic, wouldn’t it?), since she was unable to introduce any, or anyone’s, evidence to even begin to support her bizarre theory. And because she’s a lefty, she obviously can’t be bothered to consider the connection between Chicago’s famously tough gun laws and Chicago’s famously high crime rate.
Hefner cannot even get the theory she’s espousing correct. The global warming — oops, global climate change — types claim that a warming planet means not necessarily universally warmer weather, but more extreme weather. Since, as noted, Chicago and New York have the same average July high (as do a lot of places in this country), perhaps she neglected to mention that since it didn’t fit into her goofball theory.
Even the beginning of her theory fails. Follow Joe Bastardi on Facebook or Twitter, and you will discover the inconvenient truth that the planet is not warming.
The solid and dashed lines are predictions of global temperatures. The squared and dotted lines are the actual temperatures. Notice which direction those are going, and have been going since approximately 2004.
Or read Mike Smith, who acts like an actual scientist in evaluating whether global warming is taking place, as opposed to the hysterical scientists who go to Algore and Hefner for affirmation these days.
One wonders if Hefner feels a bit guilty for her own role in (allegedly human-caused) global warming. Those who read Playboy beyond the photos read many photo features espousing conspicuous-consumption lifestyles, which, you know, used energy, which overheated the planet, blah, blah, blah.
I won’t even bother to ponder whether Hefner — who is old enough to be her stepmother’s mother — feels guilty for her father’s magazine’s work in objectifying women and coarsening the culture by demonizing such bourgeois pastimes as marriage, family and church to the point where an average of a murder per day would be an improvement from Chicago’s current murder rate.
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The number one British single today in 1963:
The number one single today in 1970:
The number one British single today in 1976 replaced a single that had the title of the new number one in its lyrics:
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Bill Lueders quotes Mark Grapentine of the Wisconsin Medical Society:
“It has been interesting to watch how there has been a lack of progress in an area where there seems to be a tremendous amount of agreement on the need to do something,” Grapentine says. Wisconsin remains the only state where first-offense drunken driving is not a crime, although the civil penalties include license suspension and substantial fines.
Two state lawmakers, Sen. Alberta Darling, R-River Hills, and Rep. Jim Ott, R-Mequon, plan to re-introduce bills to hike state drunken driving penalties. Darling aide Bob Delaporte said the bills have been redrafted “exactly the same” as last session, but could yet be revised.
One bill would make first-offense drunken driving with a high blood-alcohol content a crime, and raise penalties for a second offense. Another would make third and fourth offenses felonies, and increase the severity of subsequent charges.
Last time around, the bills were backed by the Wisconsin Medical Society and a law enforcement association. No lobby group registered in opposition and, according to Grapentine, no one spoke up at the hearings to say, “Oh, this drunk driving stuff, it’s not really a problem.”
But the bills went nowhere, due to what Grapentine calls “the dollar factor.”
Higher drunken driving penalties increase prosecutors’ workloads as well as county jail and state prison costs. A fiscal estimate from the state Department of Corrections put the cost of the bill regarding third and subsequent offenses at between $169 million and $204 million annually. Other agencies also weighed in, predicting higher costs.
Finances are a significant factor when, unlike the federal government, you cannot spend more money than you have. (By the legal definition of “balanced budget,” if not the actual definition.) You can talk all you like about the societal costs of drunk driving, but government isn’t paying those beyond the costs of law enforcement, medical services, and the cost of prosecuting and imprisoning those convicted of drunk driving. And the first and last of those increases if penalties for drunk driving are increased. For that matter, alcohol and drug abuse rehabilitation isn’t cheap either, and rehab has a high failure rate.
The drunk drivers who get the most media attention are those with multiple drunk driving convictions. (Including, recently, an Ohioan who picked up his 10th drunk driving conviction while driving through southwest Wisconsin. Before him, there was the man who on Labor Day was arrested for 11th-offense drunk driving, while he was out on bond on drunk driving charge number 10.)
It seems obvious that the current penalties for felony drunk driving (which begin with fifth-offense drunk driving) do not dissuade such people from driving drunk. Add to that group the surprising (at least to me) number of people arrested multiple times for driving after their driver’s license has been suspended or revoked. The only way those people apparently can be dissuaded from driving drunk is to physically separate them from any motor vehicle. That means locking them up.
There is a billboard on U.S. 151 near Presteblog World Headquarters that claims that a drunk driving conviction costs the drunk driver $10,000. I don’t know if this is correct (and I don’t intend to find out through experience), but if it is, that fact clearly isn’t dissuading drunk drivers either. You would think that one of those $10,000 tickets would dissuade someone convicted of first-offense drunk driving from picking up conviction number, but apparently you’d be mistaken.
(It’s analogous to one of the main problems with the death penalty — the inability of advocates to prove its deterrent ability. Most homicides are crimes of passion, which don’t fit the usual legal definition of first-degree murder. For the death penalty to be a deterrent would require much more widespread use — for any degree of murder, and possibly even such instances as homicide by drunk driving — with much less time between conviction and execution.)
Traffic tickets, including first-offense drunk driving, are civil forfeitures. The standard for conviction is strict liability, or “preponderance of the evidence.” The standard for conviction for criminal charges — misdemeanors and felonies — is, remember, “beyond a reasonable doubt.” The stiffer the penalties, the more expensive prosecution is, in part because the increased incentive to fight the charges.
There are other costs to stepping up enforcement or penalties. Police cannot pull over a vehicle for no reason; police must have probable cause — such as speeding, driving too slowly, driving at night without headlights, inability to stay in the correct lane, etc. Sobriety checkpoints are used in some states, even though they are an unconstitutional abuse of our Fourth Amendment rights. (Sobriety checkpoints treat everyone as guilty.) Police officers who are looking strictly for drunk drivers are officers who are not able to do anything else, such as deter crime in high-crime areas by driving or walking through the neighborhood.
Unless Wisconsinites want to increase enforcement to police-state levels, drunk driving seems to be one of those things that won’t be reduced by more laws, but only by cultural attitude change — by taking driving more seriously than merely getting in the car, turning it on, and leaving point A in search of point B.
Steve Prestegard.com: The Presteblog 