Bobcat

My pal Walter took this remarkable photo in northern Litchfield County, CT, on Sunday. A hell of a photo of this elusive critter. Info about this wonderful predator here.

Site Meter

It seems as if most of the population of New England has hit the slopes today. I have always found this to be an annoyingly crowded weekend for skiing: by noon in Vermont or New Hampshire, you need skates, not skis.

So I am on duty at the olde blogge while everyone else plays in the snow, and I am here to inform our loyal and beloved readers that we finally have a Site Meter, which means that we will be properly listed at Truth Laid Bear in a week or two - if it all works. Not that we care....well, we do. Kinda sorta.

Hope I at least get the chance to do some shooting this weekend.

He is a [sane] man who can have tragedy in his heart and comedy in his head.

G.K. Chesterton

Limericks are the Haiku of Western civilization. They seek associative, allusive, connotative, and humorous revelation, rather than the mystical and ineffable, mostly. I will get it started:

There once was a judge named Alito
Who the Left did dislike con spirito,
So they smeared him with slime,
But ran out of time,
So left crying in their beer and Doritos.

Update: Emailed from an Italian-American reader "Vinny in NJ":

There was a paysan named Alito,
To us Dems he's a nasty mosquito.
He's a working class wop
but he ain't union shop,
I'd rather vote for a friggin' burrito.

It's a difficult rhyme. One more, emailed in from who knows where:

There once was a judge named Alito,
They claimed he had gone incognito,
And hates women and blacks
Like all Reagan hacks,
But he stuck like a chunk of granito.

Waste some time. Send us more. Email, or via Comments.

Paul Berman's new book: Euro-leftys

A plug for the excellent new book by my college classmate Paul Berman, Power and the Idealists. It's about how Europe's Leftist elite came to power. Excerpted from an excellent review in Seattle's The Stranger:

How did Western Europe come to be ruled by monolithic ideologues? Short answer: the "'68ers," which is what Europeans call those who came of age in the radical movements of the 1960s, revering Mao and reviling the U.S. as Nazi Germany's successor. Remarkably, after the protests were over, an extraordinary number of '68ers—those who'd stood on the barricades denouncing the system—ascended into positions of political and cultural power, shaping a New Europe (and an EU) in which the anti-Americanism of the barricades became official dogma. Paul Berman's absorbing, elegantly written Power and the Idealists recounts the political journeys of three of the most influential of these '68ers. Joschka Fischer, once head of the militant group Revolutionärer Kampf (Revolutionary Struggle), became German foreign minister in 1998. Daniel Cohn-Bendit, a leader of the May '68 Paris demos, now sits in the European Parliament. And Dr. Bernard Kouchner, boy Communist, went on to found Doctors Without Borders in 1971 and to serve as an EU and UN official. The ultimate point of Berman's 100-page opening chapter is that ethnic cleansing in Kosovo compelled these three to move "from radical leftism to liberal antitotalitarianism"—that is, to reject their longtime view of the U.S. as the world's supreme menace and support NATO action against Milosevic. Many '68ers, Berman suggests, made the same move.

Writing is an adventure. To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement. Then it becomes a mistress, then it becomes a master, then it becomes a tyrant. The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your servitude, you kill the monster and fling him to the public. 

Winston Churchill

Motherhood, Religion, Sex, and Money

Excerpts from "The Well-Connected Mother: The Centrality of Motherhood is not just an Idea" by Juli Wiley:

Motherhood starts with conception. Pope John Paul II said that the Annunciation, the conception of Jesus in the womb of Mary, is a high point not only of the history of the human race but of the universe. At the Annunciation, the Word became flesh, became flesh in the body of a woman. This reminds me of how women’s bodies are different from men’s, and what this meant for Mary and what it means for us.

Men are often tempted to think that their bodies were made for their own use. To a great extent this is true for everyone: Your hands, sir, are yours, they are for your use, and mine are for my use. A man can indulge this illusion of autonomy even further by supposing that even his genitals are there for himself. They’re a source of at times almost compelling drives and intriguing sensations. Even his testes are useful for him, in that the hormones they produce provide certain secondary sexual characteristics he has an interest in maintaining.

But a woman’s body has all these nooks and crannies which are no use to us but evidently were put there for someone else. Don’t get me wrong: We women have our pleasure doodads and our own hormonal self-interest as well. But then, well, there’s the womb. That’s not there for me. I can do without it. It was obviously put there for someone else. The same is true of mature mammary glands, rich with branching ducts and reservoirs, as they are found in nursing mothers and as they are not found in childless females, however nubile and Partonesque they may be.

Our female bodies are connectors: Inter-connectedness is not just a concept, it’s built into us. This gives us the sense that we find in Mary’s Magnificat, of being, within our own bodies, the living link between past and future: “Behold, all generations will call me Blessed. . . . His mercy is on those who fear him, from generation to generation. . . . As he spoke to our ancestors, to Abraham and to his posterity forever.”

Read the whole thing at Touchstone.

Reward excellent failure - punish mediocre success.