Cocoposts

Who Killed Cricket Coogler?

From the Duke City Fix archives:

Her real name was Ovida and she was only 17. She was a pretty waitress who got a nickname for wearing heels that chirped out a rhythm of wood on concrete when she walked. March 31,1949 was the last night of her life. Four rabbit hunters found her battered body on Easter Sunday out near the cemetery in Mesquite, 12 miles south of Las Cruces. She'd been raped, beaten and run over by a car.

The Silence of Cricket Coogler: A Political Murder, is a documentary produced and filmed in New Mexico in 2000 by Cine Productions, a local company. Here's a You Tube short.

The story is almost quaint in comparison to the murder, femicide, rape, and  general violence in the border region today.  Eileen Welsome describes a violent land dispute in a  place called Lomas del Poleo in Mexico near Sunland Park- a stones throw from Anapra where The Mecca was located in Cricket’s day. 

Asking who killed Cricket in an annual headline was  regular practice when New Mexico Governor Ed Mechem was in office.  He ran on a promise of finding her murderer. They never did.

So the movie is my new Spring tradition.  Meting out a tiny and distant fraction of the violence of the world at a time in order to think about it more carefully.     Along with watching big dog destroy the easter bunny, I remembered Cricket. 

Fiery Foods Show

20th Annual - Sandia Resort and Casino

Peppers make people happy.  This is about thousands of pepper-happy people in a big room together. 

Moon, Rings, Lion

From The Denver Post:

The last total lunar eclipse until 2010 occurs tonight, with cameo appearances by Saturn and the bright star Regulus on either side of the veiled full moon. Sky watchers viewing through a telescope will have the added treat of seeing Saturn's rings.

As the moonlight dims — it won't go totally dark — Saturn and Regulus will pop out and sandwich the moon. Regulus is the brightest star in the constellation Leo. Jack Horkheimer, host of the PBS show "Star Gazer," called the event "the moon, the lord of the rings and heart of the lion eclipse."

Italian Film Festival

Pranzo degli Spuintini at Embassy Suites Hotel         

Undecided 08

In the San Francisco Chronicle, California Epicenter of Dem's Epic Balloting.   

For Democrats, the difficulties of the choices with the impassioned last-minute entreaties were clearly - even painfully - evident.  It's hard ... a hard decision," said Dr. Lois Parker, a Los Angeles-area educator as she stood at the back of the Brookings AME listening to Bill Clinton's address. She said the former president's message about the future, and his avowals that his wife has the experience and the record to deliver change, "touches my heart, and he's where many of us are at. And it's what we need to hear."

But as to her vote, she sighed, "I'm still wrestling with it." (...)
 

While the tight contest between Clinton and Obama is forcing hard choices on Democrats across the state, that can only be good news for the party, said Bob Mulholland, senior campaign adviser to the California Democratic Party.

 "It's the greatest primary battle we've had in decades, and it's good for the Democratic Party and good for the system," he said. "We'll come out with a nominee that California Democrats can hardly wait to put against the Republicans."

I'm glad he thinks it's good for the party, because it's driving me nuts.  Is this Mulholland any relation to the William Mulholland of Los Angeles Department of Water and Power?  I'd rather contemplate that than who to vote for. 

From Rebecca Traister at Salon is this post title that about sums it up.

Undecided '08: Should I vote for Clinton or Obama? On Super Tuesday, for the first time in my life, I will walk into the voting booth without knowing who to vote for. I blame John Edwards.

State of the Smirk

Watched our President give his last State of the Union last night  - which is to say I made a margarita and yelled at the TV.  This worries the dog who figured the TV as a one-way thing and looks concerned when I curse at smirking man.   

What really gets me is the cheering.  Cheering for tax breaks and war.   At one point, at the end of a noisy ovation for some Rambo-talk, one ass actually shouted "You Rock!" 

Bush "waxed amnesiac" said Walter Spapiro in Salon:

"There is little that Bush could say at this point about Iraq that has credibility. And it seems almost unsporting to waste time parsing his words for omissions, misstatements and contradictions. Yet it was dizzying Monday night to hear Bush invoke Osama bin Laden -- He who shall not be named -- to justify his Iraq policy. It was a feat of presidential logic to argue, in essence, that multiplying two failures together (bin Laden and Iraq) equals success."

John Dickerson in Slate.

"But the speech did have an overarching political philosophy: The American people should be trusted with the solutions to their problems. "We must trust in the ability of free people to make wise decisions. … We must trust people with their own money. … The people's trust in their government is undermined. … We must trust Americans with the responsibility of homeownership. … We must trust students to learn … trust in the good heart of the American people. … We must trust American workers to compete. … We must trust in the creative genius of American researchers.

There were more examples. Trust me.

This is the first part of a standard GOP refrain: We trust the people; Democrats trust the government. If you oppose Republican policies, it is because you don't have faith in the American people."

Colorado Legislature Opens

Denver Democrat, Peter Groff, was sworn in as the first African-American president of the Senate. He called for lawmakers to "rise above pandering to the whims of the moment to seek the wisdom of long-term solutions."

The House proceedings will be on TV for the first time and there are plans to expand coverage to the Senate and committee rooms.

From the Denver Post is a summary of issues that sound familiar.

Health care: Lawmakers will hear five multibillion-dollar proposals from a state panel that studied health care, but they are backing off any plan to hit up taxpayers for major reform in 2008.  Instead, the road to insuring the estimated 790,000 Coloradans without health care will take years. "You'll be able to look back at this moment and say that's when it started," Groff said.

Education: Debates on the horizon include a nearly $1 billion plan to fix school buildings in the poorest districts, put more at-risk kids in preschool and full-day kindergarten and let schools seek autonomy from district and union rules. Republicans are focused on strengthening graduation requirements to include four years of math and an English-proficiency test.

Economic development: Democrats want to create a $3.5 million fund to help lure bioscience researchers in private enterprise, make a majority of small businesses exempt from the personal-property tax and rewrite unwieldy corporate income-tax policy. Republicans have called the business agenda "lackluster" in the face of Ritter's property tax freeze that prevents local school mill levies from dropping and his partnership agreement with unions.

Severance tax: Combined with federal mineral lease revenue, the twin moneymakers of Colorado's oil and gas boom represent perhaps the brightest hope for cash to pay for big-ticket items.  Lawmakers will talk about setting up a permanent fund to support local governments and higher education. And they will likely look at raising the severance tax rate, which would set up a battle with the oil and gas industry.

Elections: Likely the first big issue to come up in the session is a bill to give the secretary of state more latitude to fix and recertify subpar voting machines Less clear is what the 2008 elections will look like: mail-in ballots, electronic ballots or paper ballots.

Labor: The governor has said he would sign a bill barring strikes by state employees. The legislation is fallout from Ritter's executive order granting state workers the power to negotiate with state management. A subsequent opinion from Attorney General John Suthers said state workers have long had the right to strike and still do, despite the no-strike clause in Ritter's order.

Constitution: Colorado's knotted constitution could come up for an untangling again, but this time legislators want to have a more "substantive conversation," as Groff put it. Translation: Think big.

Winter Feasting

Tonight is the 11th night of Christmas.   

Do you know where your little pig is?   

New Years Party Report

Good sign to arrive at 9:00PM and everyone is already dancing.  We hear Michael Jackson’s Thriller from a quarter mile away – lots of cars.  A friend once said, look in the window first when you if you arrive at a party. If you don’t see anyone you know, or if no one is dancing, don’t bother going in. In this case, we knew almost everyone and everyone was dancing. And it was very cold out there looking in the window.

Good sign also when you enter and everyone starts cheering.  Entering behind me was a guy holding roasted meat on a platter.

Someone greets me and asks how the alpacas are.  She has a thick European accent and it's very loud and takes several tries for me to understand her.  It sounds like she's shouting “apuckas! ”   When I told her don't have any alpacas she asked about llamas and insisted that I had once given her a business card for my ranch.  She eyed me suspiciously the rest of the evening like I'd eaten them maybe.  I'm thinking it's prophetic and I should consider small livestock for 2008.

My used clothes collection comes in handy for these parties. Dressing to impress – if dog hair, moth holes and safety pinned lining in 60 year old mink coats are impressive.   Nothing  better than disco moves in patent leather cowboy boots.   

::Raised eyebrows, shaking heads::

I must look like an alpaca rancher.   

Happy New Year!

(updated text and photos 1/2/08) 

Phaeton - Parent of Geminids and German Car

Interesting astronomy in Santa Fe New Mexican, by Peter Lipscomb:

(...) The parent body of the Geminids was a mystery that persisted well into the 20th century. In early 1983, a satellite survey of objects moving through the solar system discovered a previously unknown asteroid. Its orbit was a close match for the Geminid stream. The link was further strengthened through photographic study of Geminid fireballs. Density measurements showed that the meteors were heavier than typical of cometary debris, but the density was still lower than most asteroids. Analysis of the spectral data, or colors, of the meteor flashes revealed a composition consistent with asteroids. So, while 3200 Phaethon is almost certainly the source of the Geminids, it is a very strange asteroid that has a "comet-like" orbit.(...)

The Geminid shower is one of the most reliable and observer-friendly of the annual meteor showers. This time of year, the constellation Gemini is well placed in the eastern sky in the late evening, so you don't have to give up a good night's sleep.

The best times to watch will be tonight starting at 9:30 and on Friday and Saturday from midnight to dawn.The brilliant red beacon of Mars is an easy catch southwest of Gemini's brightest star Castor. If you can trace a meteor's path back to near Castor, you can count it as a Geminid.

This bit in Wiki about Phaeton,  son of the Helios, is entitled the "Extra-terrestrial impact theory":

It has been noted by a number of commentators, including the astronomers Victor Clube and Bill Napier, that, if stripped of its obviously mythological elements, the story of Phaethon reads like a genuine account of the impact of an asteroid or a piece of cometary debris. They compare the description of an intensely bright light and searing heat with eyewitness accounts of the Tunguska event and point out that the after effects of Phaethon's fall, including flooding and a darkening of the sun, are consistent with the dust veil and tsunamis which an impact might be expected to cause (Clube & Napier 1982, The Cosmic Serpent, pgs 206-9).

Phaeton is not just the luxury sedan that I'm curiously drawn to test drive for Christmas?  It's a giant VW they named for a guy who loses control of his Daddy's chariot  and powerful horse team on a tragic joyride.   

Greek myth?  At least there is some certainty about cometary debris and big German cars.  I don't know about the good night's sleep.