Joan Collins has a lot of very expensive luggage.
Also LAX has a rich-person-only private terminal now.
I think it was Walt Disney's daughter.
That pic of Muhammad Ali is exceptional.
I bet her father was terrible before that.
Your own jet. I know a couple of people who got in to flying enough to have their own plane. It's an expensive hobby, like horseback riding.
You could still enjoy celebrities in airports in more recent before times!
https://www.gofugyourself.com/its-time-to-revisit-celebrities-in-airports-03-2019
The only celebrity I've seen in an airport is Tom Osborn, but I've seen him twice. I've also seen him in a Village Inn pancake house.
I guess I saw the Walk Away guy at my high school too.
I ran into Derrick Bell in an airport once, a couple of years after I'd taken a seminar from him at NYU. Never a real celebrity-type celebrity, though.
I was in line behind Howard Dean once at National -- maybe 15 years ago? I told him anyone wanting to move from Vermont to DC should have their head examined. He reacted exactly anyone would who was trying to decide whether the nut who'd spoken was dangerous or not.
I suppose we can assume Joan Collins's luggage was the real stuff?
I know a couple of people who got in to flying enough to have their own plane.
I had a boss once with his own plane. Flew with him on a couple of sales trips to the NY area. A few years after I left the company, his aviation career ended very poorly.
Moderate to severe hitting the ground is tough to treat because nobody wants to be in the clinical trials.
20: Aviation in itself is not inherently dangerous. But to an even greater degree than the sea, it is terribly unforgiving of any carelessness, incapacity or neglect.
-- Captain A. G. Lamplugh, British Aviation Insurance Group, London. 1930's
3, 5:. Yes, but she's not Walt Disney's daughter, she's the granddaughter of Walt's brother and business partner, Roy.
I not only saw Dikembe Mutombo in the airport, we were on the same flight from LA to Philly. He was traded to the 76ers mid-season and mid-afternoon, and had to join the team the next day. He is not optimized for commercial flight: in the second row aisle seat (first class), his feet were touching the cockpit door.
A hard worker: press conference at the gate at LAX flight. His flight landed at 3 a.m. but he did an interview with a Philly stastion before 9 am, and played for his new team the same night.
I did not sex him.
I wonder if he can go to the bathroom on a plane.
But did you want to?
For some reason the only "celebrity" I can remember seeing in an airport or plane is when I was a kid and my brother and I were traveling as unaccompanied minors to my grandparents. Some guy in the row with us said that he was Spider Man on the Electric Company on PBS. I didn't tell him I was only familiar with Sesame Street. We let him sign something for us because he seemed eager to do so.
I did see Regis one time when I was in line at the movies. He was coming out of Titanic and did not look like he had enjoyed it.
No. They aren't very clean and I don't like to leave my laptop there.
Live free or die: Baby shower edition.
No more masturbating to Shock G. You missed your chance to do the dance they call the hump.
21: On the contrary! The British Medical Journal published a paper exploring that issue.
I once saw good old Tucker Carlson at the airport. I think he's short, but he was a ways away.
31: Shock G, the one who put the satin in your panties?!
||
Any opinions on the Great Seal of the State of New Mexico?
|>
30: Baby showers are ok-ish. Those gender reveal parties have always creeped me out, and this is Further confirmation of that.
Does Doris Kearney Goodwin count as a celebrity? My aunt was very excited to see her in a restaurant once.
I'm sure I've seen a few celebrities in airports but am blanking on most of them.* The only one I remember is Chloe Sevigny, sitting on her own, eating at the bar--ordinary person bar, not some fancy pants/VIP place--in the same bar I was sitting in while waiting for a flight at JFK. She was dressed quite stylishly, I suppose, in something vaguely Gaultier/sailor-ish.
* I've seen a ton in London or Oxford, so they blur together a bit.
36: ? Google is not helping me figure out what you mean.
Not a trick question. You see the seal, whaat do you think?
It was part of one of the most awkward state flag designs of all time.
(It was apparently not the "official" flag.)
Joan Collins could have learned a thing or two about packing from Muhammed Ali. Or maybe about checking in..
It's just an American eagle taking a snake from an Aztec eagle.
42, obviously.
But it's so weirdly in between. Why not erase the Mexican eagle, or have the American eagle straight up eating the Mexican? Or have the two of them equal sized, cheerfully sharing the snake between them? Did they believe their own paternalist bull? What did/do the Chicanos* think? And then for the flag they appropriate somebody's (Very attractive!) mandala?
*Correct term? Still platformed?
45: As usual I'm not entirely sure if Moby is joking, but what struck me about this seal (other than that state seals are a very odd genre) is that the Mexican Eagle and the American Eagle appear to be comrades in the fight against Evil.
The eagle eating a snake is a whole big deal in Aztec mythical history. Like turning someone into a horse and having them get pregnant with a foal that they then have their father ride is to a Norwegian.
Precisamente.
46: Teo would know better than I, but I think that while Chicano is still a valid word for Californians of Mexican origin in some contexts, it wasn't ever conventional for New Mexicans of Mexican origin. Not a slur, but people would look at you funny for using it wrong.
Well, not exactly New Mexicans of Mexican origin, but Mexicans of New Mexico predating the American conquest. The Old New Mexicans, if you will.
I think those are mostly people who identify with a particular Native American group.
Apologies. Post-Hispano-American conquest, pre-Anglo-American. The Old Mexican New Mexicans, as it were.
One thing that makes this even more complicated is that New Mexico has a sizable very old population of Spanish settlers (often referred to as Hispanos, and who usually identify as Spanish on the census), and also a sizable number of more recent Mexican immigrants and their descendants (typically identify as Mexican on the census). These two groups are quite different in terms of history and geographic distributions (Hispanos mostly in the North), and my impression is that a lot of Hispanos really don't like being grouped together with Mexicans. My not entirely informed guess is that LB's 50 would is accurate for Mexicans in New Mexico (i.e. it's a little strange but probably not insulting) but for Hispanos might be taken as actively insulting because they don't identify as Mexican-American regardless of which word you use.
Right. I understood, but I think that's a pretty small group. I could be wrong, but I don't think the Spanish or Mexican presence in the area was the cultural power washing you see in other areas.
55 before seeing 54. So I am wrong.
2000 census has NM at 16.3% Mexican, 9.3% Spanish.
Right, I was oversimplifying by not distinguishing between Mexican immigrants in New Mexico and New Mexicans whose families resided in the area that is now New Mexico before the Mexican-American War, but I'm pretty sure Chicano is wrong for either group.
I had forgotten how short was the window for independent Mexican indoctrination. So, the New Spanish New Mexicans.
it's a little over a year since i ate lunch at a bev hills resto next to an actress, one of the fannings, who's own midday meal consisted of various zero cal beverages: tea, fizzy water & there was something else - lemon juice & h20, no sugar??? seemed grim! but i assumed she had var professional dates with dresses over the next few days. i was on a conf call so never figured out which sibling it was, i think elle? like h b carter it was really interesting to see how great a job the prof makeup folks do as in mufti their complexion do not radiate, let's say. & i'll be back in good ole bh in a couple of weeks, honestly the suspension of work trips to that strange town has been wonderful. oh well!
e taylor, r burton & louis jourdain made a spectacularly bad movie set in an airport that i have watched in its entirety, just amazingly shitty, absolutely sctraches the itch for that sort of thing.
re: 60
It's funny how that attractiveness in person vs in photographs/movies thing works. A friend of mine once interviewed Emma Thompson, circa "Nanny McPhee", and said she was amazingly attractive in person. Glowing skin, real presence about her, etc. The interview was for a serious social cause she was promoting, and not for some junket, so she was "in mufti". My friend is a news journalist who meets lots of quasi-well-known people, and isn't someone who gushes about celebrities in any way, but was quite taken with her.
true! charisma def a thing! also true that acne scarring not an impediment to a movie star career, even for women.
Emma Thompson's face seems preternaturally suited to warmth and specifically smiling, compared to most actors.
50-54: Here is teo weighing on the subject back in 2010. (I thought the discussion had been more recent than that, perhaps a lster one touched on it as well.)
It's one of the notable peculiarities of NM specifically that "Hispanic" is the generally preferred term for most people, despite its more controversial status elsewhere. Similarly, "Mexican" is strongly disfavored in northern New Mexico, and "Chicano" even more so. This seems to be a bit more muted in southern New Mexico, which has more recent immigrants from Mexico, so the article, which is based on interviews with students at NMSU in Las Cruces (in southern NM), has rather mixed results on that. Some of the students (presumably the ones of recent Mexican ancestry) seem to like "Mexican" or "Mexican-American" okay, although no one seems to like "Chicano." The term "Spanish-American" also seems to be popular, presumably for the old New Mexican families, which I find interesting since my impression is that it's not at all common in northern NM. And, of course, there's a bunch of weird racial stuff behind all these distinctions and preferences.
Oo, it occurs to me I could download the PUMS data for New Mexico and break out Spanish vs Mexican ancestry vs. race (white/indigenous/other)...
Similarly see New Mexico on the map in Figure 3 here (originally linked by teo back then).
OK, I'm going to try to divide out the NM statistical areas into: Albuquerque (801-806); Santa Fe (500); the rest of the North (100, 200, 300, 400, 600, 700); and the South (900, 1001, 1002, 1100, 1200). teo, if you get the signal, interested in your feedback on cultural regions.
66: It's grimly perfect how "American" and "African-American" are imbricated in that map.
I don't feel like I've been surrounded by Germans my whole life.
We get that a lot.
A recent podcast that crossed my radar discussed an apparently woefully bad book on Genízaro identity, but the podcasters did not do a good job of providing me, personally, with an alternative and better reading list. FWIW, one of the guests was a New Mexico native who self-identifies as Chicana but was well aware of the loaded history behind the word. Wikipedia gives a reasonable overview.
The European ancestry data seems pretty close to meaningless, tbh, apart from culturally unified enclaves like that Hispano population in NM (and Colorado, I think?). I don't even think there's a meaningful trend in who specifies German vs American vs European, and the ways it would change from decade to decade would be arbitrary and noisy. (Lately, I imagine, influenced by those ethnicity DNA tests.)
Ran into Willie Nelson in the Amsterdam airport back in the 1990s. Smiled and waved at him, and he winked at me. It was sweet.
OK, here we go. Of New Mexicans in the "Spanish/Hispanic/Latino" universe:
* Albuquerque: 42% identify first ancestry as Spanish, Spaniard, Hispanic, etc., 25% as Mexican, Chicano, etc., 9% as Mexican Indian
* Santa Fe: 48%, 25%, and 5%
* Rest of North: 50%, 20%, and 7%
* South: 24%, 42%, and 17%
In all the areas, people identifying as Spanish/Hispanic do seem to be higher income than people identifying as Mexican/Chicano - 41% of the former have personal incomes over 300% FPL, vs. 27% of the latter. (Median incomes $18,890 vs. $15,230.)
However, not a big difference between Spanish/Hispanic and Mexican/Chicano in how many of them identify as white racially. The difference there, interestingly, is by region - across all people Spanish/Hispanic/Latino, 71% in Albuquerque are white; 79% in Santa Fe; 69% in the rest of the North; and 87% in the South.
I might have done this linkdump before, but we're all goldfish now, so: there is controversy over the alleged population of crypto-Jewish descendants in New Mexico-- with some scholars claiming there's more evidence for Seventh Day Adventist missionaries propagating ideas like a Saturday sabbath than for actual persistence of Jewish practices for 400 years-- but I still thought the story of the BRCA mutation in the San Luis Valley was fascinating.
Huh, 73.last is really interesting.
More just out of general curiosity, here's the top 20 ancestries among Spanish/Hispanic/Latino in New Mexico, in the first-reported space (there's room for 3 in the survey):
24%: Mexican
19%: Hispanic
15%: Spanish
10%: Mexican American
10%: Not reported
4.1%: Mexicano
3.9%: Spaniard
1.7%: American
1.0%: White
1.0%: Mexican State [I think this means they named a particular state]
0.9%: Chicano
0.7%: Spanish American
0.6%: American Indian
0.6%: Latino
0.6%: Native American
0.5%: Puerto Rican
0.4%: German
0.4%: Mexican American Indian
0.4%: Irish
0.4%: Italian
(I don't know why the Census has different codes for Spaniard vs. Spanish.)
"I've known too many Spaniards."
Oh, and this is not surprising in context but:
* Ancestry Spanish/Hispanic: 2% naturalized citizens, 2% non-citizens
* Ancestry Mexican/Chicano: 12% naturalized citizens, 24% non-citizens
79.1: Interesting. Any way to tell country of origin on those?
Ha, of course I would miss a thread on NM demographics. (Moving is a lot of work, turns out!) Minivet's analysis seems spot-on in both design and results to me.
A recent podcast that crossed my radar discussed an apparently woefully bad book on Genízaro identity, but the podcasters did not do a good job of providing me, personally, with an alternative and better reading list.
Captives and Cousins is the best place to start. "Genízaro identity" wasn't really a thing between about 1880 and, like, 2018, so it's not surprising a book framed that way would be bad.
As for the seal, I think it's a pretty good symbolic encapsulation of the self-image of NM elites as of 1912 and for decades afterward (in some ways still today).
Same for the flag, but using a different symbolic vocabulary and set of referents.
I would love to retire to the mountains down in New Mexico.
80: No, just continent (WAOB). If they lived in a foreign country a year previous, that country is identified (MIGSP). Full data dictionary.
AIMHMHB, a friend of mine had a Mexican brother-in-law, and her rural TX parents always referred to him as "Spanish" rather than "Mexican" because it was "more polite."
OT: I learned a new word today. "Lakh." The covid statistics from India are high enough that you can use that word for the official, daily number of cases.
Also, "arab" is "billion". That's confusing me.
They don't use billions with whatever vocabulary imx - more likely to say 100 crore.
I had no idea that when they spoke English in Indian, they had their own set of words for numbers. I guess I shouldn't have been surprised. Australian people do the same for vomiting.
The first link in 74 is really worth clicking through.
2nd 90, 92.
a pretty good symbolic encapsulation of the self-image of NM elites as of 1912 and for decades afterward
Care to elaborate? Seal and flag both strike me as rather unlike the US norm.
The U.S. norm for state flags and seals is really poor graphic design.
Texas has a good seal. They have a theme and keep to it.
Every US place is different, but some, like NM and New Orleans, are more different than others.
This, by the way, is not a bad capture of that movie, for people who haven't seen it.
I don't think I have seen it. I probably should.
Also, I've been thinking about what I saw the fox carrying the other night. It was probably a rabbit. I think you're right that a groundhog is likely too big. And there's about 100 rabbits on every block.
I forgot about rabbits because I have not seen them often in the past month or so. Which is exactly what would happen if a fox moved in.
Sx͏ʷix͏ʷ͏uytis Smx̣e!
I mentioned a while back that there was an effort underway to rename the downtown bridge over the river. Here's a story about that, and the broader effort of which it is a part: http://www.charkoosta.com/news/reminding-present-day-of-ancestral-past-with-place-names/article_a02aa452-7d29-11eb-b23c-8f029cbc4d21.html
Anyway, the state transportation commission approved the renaming of the Higgins Avenue bridge on Thursday.
Seal and flag both strike me as rather unlike the US norm.
Indeed they are, and as Charley says NM is one of the parts of the US that's distinctly different from most of the rest of it. (Moby is also right that seal and flag design in most of the US states are terrible.)
Basically, I see both the seal and the flag as part of the larger attempt by (predominantly but, importantly, not entirely Anglo) elites in the late territorial/early statehood period of NM history to recognize and coopt the state's distinctive multicultural history and present situation. The end result of this was a distinctive "tri-cultural" ideology of NM identity (Native American, Hispanic, and Anglo) that has strongly endured to the present, with symbols of the state being designed to incorporate motifs from the three cultural traditions into an organic whole. Not every symbol has equal representation from all three, but the combinations are creative and often unexpected.
The flag is the best example of this. It was designed by an Anglo doctor in the early twentieth century to showcase a sun symbol from a well-known pot made at Zia Pueblo in the late nineteenth century (and acquired under murky circumstances by an early anthropologist studying the Zia), but in the Castilian royal colors. There's no explicit Anglo element to the design, but the dominant position of Anglo society is implicit in the identity of the designer and the need for a state flag in the first place.
The seal is a little less on-brand for the emerging tri-cultural model, the Hispanic part of which focuses strongly on Spain rather than Mexico, but it's definitely an attempt to combine the American eagle symbol with the Mexican one in a friendly, collaborative way but with the American one definitely in the dominant position. I don't know if there's a deliberate reference to NM Native American symbols, but obviously the snake and cactus are core parts of the Aztec tradition as incorporated into modern Mexican patriotic ideology.
Super interesting! But why co-option instead of annihilation?
Annihilation was the thing in California.
On NextDoor, somebody is asking people to let the wildlife people know if they have seen the fox. I'm not dropping a dime on one. Frankly, the animal rescue people on NextDoor seem kind of unhinged.
The fox knows many delicious things; the animal rescue person one fuzzy one.
They bring a rabbit to a vet if their cat catches it.
But why co-option instead of annihilation?
Relative numbers. New Mexico is unique among the formerly Spanish/Mexican territories that became part of the Continental US in that it had a substantial population of civilian settlers which was not immediately swamped by massive Anglo immigration. Florida, Texas, California, and Arizona were all sparsely populated primarily by missionaries and military personnel, many of whom left or were just overwhelmed when the Americanos swarmed in. (There was also a substantial surviving Native population in NM, but that's less unusual.) NM was never quite the magnet for Anglo immigration that those other places were, probably due in part to the number of Spanish settlers already there, so the Anglos who did show up had to assimilate into/accommodate the preexisting social system to an extent that wasn't the case elsewhere.
That got me to look at CA numbers: 1840 estimated 8K non-Native population, 1850 120K, 1860 380K. I guess I sort of knew about the gold rush, but boy is that a big fast change!
Money makes the world go around.
Just think how different things would have been if the government had told Austin and his colonists 'hey, this is Mexico, if you're going to immigrate here, you need to learn Spanish.'
They were supposed to learn Spanish and Catholicism. And later to stop with the slavery.
Moby, if you can stand another science fiction recommendation from me, River of Gods by Ian McDonald is a wild vision of India on the centennial of independence. It's where I first encountered "lakh" and "crore," though I have not retained how much each is other than "a lot." Careful, though, the book is longer than Mort.
Teo, any views on The Comanche Empire by Pekka Hämäläinen?
Mine are here, though I hasten to add that it was probably the first book I read on this region's history.
111: NM was never quite the magnet for Anglo immigration that those other places were, probably due in part to the number of Spanish settlers already there, so the Anglos who did show up had to assimilate into/accommodate the preexisting social system to an extent that wasn't the case elsewhere.
And presumably not very much cheap/free land available.
120: I haven't read it, though I've been meaning to for a while. I have a general sense that it's well-regarded in the field.
121: Hm, I'm not sure about that. The US made a point of honoring Spanish land grants, but that didn't prevent unscrupulous American immigrants from engaging in various machinations to acquire those lands from the grantees.
122: Ah, to be sure, but I assume it took more effort than many other places (and some personal resources). And probably not handed out gratuitously by the US government? Although maybe the difference is only on the margins.
But then again, looking at this graph of % of acreage in each state successfully "homesteaded," New Mexico is not anomalously low for being a Western state (unlike Arizona and Nevada).
You can really see the Moses P. Kincade in that chart.
119. "Brasyl" and "The Dervish House" by McDonald are also good. Shockingly, the former (set in Brazil) has a fair amount of stuff about futbol and the latter (set in Turkey) has a lot about conspiracies and honey.
120 that is a great book. I was really surprised that Empire of the Summer Moon did not cite it as a source. It seems definitive.
I read about a quarter of it and stopped, though not through any fault of the book. Should finish it. (Although that said, he uses more adjectives than I like and reports some narrative details with a confidence I doubt the sources could support.)
Hemingway didn't like adjectives or sharks.
NM always strikes me as awfully damn dry. And kind of hot. Do they grow wheat on the eastern plains?
124 Does successfully homesteaded mean they won the 3 year bet? Or does it mean economically viable 10-15 years in?
I think most of them in Nebraska made it until the Dust Bowl.
124: The homesteading laws applied everywhere that hadn't been a Spanish land grant (and wasn't reserved for something else), so most of the land area of the state, really. A lot of that was mountainous and not suitable for agriculture, but there's a big chunk of the southern plains in the east and various patches elsewhere away from the Rio Grande valley that were reasonable for homesteads.
Did they give more acres in parts of the state where the land wasn't going to work for farming so that they could ranch?
"Oh, the farmer and the cowman should be friends...."
I earwormed myself, except I can't remember the tune so it's coming out to "she'll be coming round the mountain."
136: Yeah, they did. Not just in NM but throughout the more arid parts of the west.
I'm getting all these flashbacks to binge-reading the Edge of the American West during grad school. I totally spent more time there than here for a few years (albeit not commenting).
129: Haven't read Empire of the Summer Moon but from online descriptions it looks like Gwynn is aiming for a different audience than Hämäläinen. And they were published not far apart, so it's possible that Gwynn was finished or nearly so when Comanche Empire came out and he either didn't know about the book or didn't see the need to incorporate academic research into a popular biography.
128: Totally agree about both. McDonald is a good person to follow on Twitter. He's interesting, if not prolific there. Lucas Corta, a character in McDonald's Luna trilogy also has an amusing Twitter account.
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