We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
He is like a pro with Photoshop. As readers can tell from my snapshots, I have never used that program. I have neither the time nor the interest. What I snap is what I get. Were I an artist, I would paint pictures.
These things have all of these buttons and menus. Who wants to bother with that? OK, call me a luddite.
Their "anti-greed message"? What? Seems to me they just want my money and my stuff, so who is greedy? I do not want anybody else's money or stuff. If they wish to purchase something I produce, fine. It's for sale.
Unthinking is the ability to apply years of learning at the crucial moment by removing your thinking self from the equation. Its power is not confined to sport: actors and musicians know about it too, and are apt to say that their best work happens in a kind of trance. Thinking too much can kill not just physical performance but mental inspiration. Bob Dylan, wistfully recalling his youthful ability to write songs without even trying, described the making of “Like a Rolling Stone” as a “piece of vomit, 20 pages long”. It hasn’t stopped the song being voted the best of all time.
Throughout the opening decades of the 20th century, American liberals engaged in a spirited critique of Americanism, a condition they understood as the pursuit of mass prosperity by an energetic but crude, grasping people chasing their private ambitions without the benefit of a clerisy to guide them. In thrall to their futile quest for material well-being, and numbed by the popular entertainments that appealed to the lowest common denominator in a nation of immigrants, Americans were supposedly incapable of recognizing the superiority of European culture as defined by its literary achievements.
This critique gave rise to the ferment of the 1920s, described by the literary critic Malcolm Cowley as the “exciting years…when…the young intellectuals seized power in the literary world almost like the Bolsheviks in Russia.” The writers Cowley referred to—Sinclair Lewis, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, and Waldo Frank especially—had “a vague belief in aristocracy” and a sense that they were being “oppressed” by the culture of Main Street. But they believed America could be rescued from the pits of its popular culture by secular priests of sufficient insight to redeem the country from the depredations of the mass culture produced by democracy and capitalism. They were championed not only by leftists such as Cowley, but also by Nietzscheans such as H.L. Mencken, the critic and editor whom Walter Lippmann described in 1926 as “the most powerful influence on this whole generation of educated people” who famously mocked the hapless “herd,” “the imbeciles,” the “booboisie,” all of whom he deemed the “peasantry” that blighted American cultural life.
They seem to be raising their chicks on pigeons, mostly. Squab is tasty. I've had it several times. Best was with the breast served on top of the liver, with a great liver and sage sauce. I see a sparrow carcass there too. It's amusing to see how the chicks use their future wings as arms.
Thus far, I have seen, in their pantry, meadow vole, bunny rabbit, seagull, sparrow, and plenty of pigeons. No tofu and no vegetables at all.
Parenthood is hard work, and often boring. How loving and devoted are these parents, though? They trade off in warming and feeding the nestlings.
1: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2: He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3: He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
It's the time of year for us to ask our readers, whether occasional or devoted followers, to introduce our website to your friends, neighbors, countrymen, colleagues, etc.
We always want more eyeballs. That's our reward for our efforts - besides our own enjoyment and self-education. We learn things from doing this, and maybe you learn something from reading us.
We may be a boutique, eclectic site and certainly not to everybody's taste, but I have even got my Massachusetts Obama-lib sis reading us, so that's something.
I recently learned from a Maggie's pal visiting China that we are blocked there. Why? Anyway, we aren't blocked anywhere else, so do us a favor and send us around. A little freedom-loving New England Yankee influence can only be a good thing for the world.
A group of students at the University of California, San Diego, claim exclusive rights to wear clown costumes, and accuse anyone else wearing one to be clownaphobic. Ridiculous, right?
Then, keep reading.
After the anti-Israel Students for Justice in Palestine at UCSD lost the vote in the student government for divestment from Israel, they have turned to baseless and in this case utterly absurd attacks upon anti-divestment members of the campus.
First they made up charges against a music professor that he’d intimidated a student, which the official UCSD Office of Prevention of Harassment and Discrimination investigated, clearing the professor.
Now, beclowning themselves, SJP member Noor El-Annan and cohorts accuse a campus-wide elected member of the student government, Ashton Cohen, who voted against divestment, of being Islamaphobic, denigrating Moslems, and being culturally insensitive. The pretext: the student Senator wore an Arabic costume at a costume party.
The student is a Persian Jew, with Moslem family members. He bought the outfit in Dubai, and wore it there for comfort when it was very hot. On that same trip, as a guest of the Indian government along with other US student government leaders, he’d also bought Indian garb, but it was at his family’s house in L.A. If he’d worn that Indian garb, would he be Indianaphobic? Ridiculous.
At the costume party a photo was taken of him, along with three female friends, two of whom are Moslem. One of the females posted the photo with a humorous subtitle, “three wives?” That’s what the pro-Palestinian fanatics call an insult to Moslem polygamy practices. Would they have preferred photos of clitorectomies, which is also a common Moslem practice?
When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are listed as threatened in the Eastern US). They were more plentiful in the past, when Yankeeland was covered with pastures and hayfields.
As with the Bobolink and the Meadowlark, reforestation and suburbanization have taken their toll on these fine meadow dwellers in the northeastern US. The Upland Sandpiper also had to deal with heavy market hunting (as a substitute for the hunted-to-extinction Passenger Pigeon).
The Upland, like our Wilson's Snipe, Woodcock, and Europe's Jacksnipe are all members of the shorebird family Scolopacidae who abandoned the coasts and found a home in the uplands. These birds are still hunted, much as all shorebirds were in the past. However, they are difficult to find these days.
Our Upland Sandpipers winter on the Argentinian pampas. You can read more about the Upland Sandpiper here.
Here's a male Bobolink in breeding plumage, aka Ricebird. They do breed in one of our largest pastures. I still remember the first one I heard calling.
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. My house was on a cliff. The thing could take Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. Then the long pause and then the bigger shake. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
And far too large for my feet to step by. I hoped that various buildings were brought low. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed. The guarded tourist makes the guide the test. Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No. Taxi for her and for me healthy rest. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
The language problem but you have to try. Some solid ground for lying could she show? The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
None of these deaths were her point at all. The thing was that being woken he would bawl And finding her not in earshot he would know. I tried saying Half an Hour to pay this call. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie. Till you have seen what a threat holds below, The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed. The guarded tourist makes the guide the test. Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No. Taxi for her and for me healthy rest. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
The language problem but you have to try. Some solid ground for lying could she show? The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Tell me again about Europe and her pains, Who’s tortured by the drought, who by the rains. Glut me with floods where only the swine can row Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
A bedshift flight to a Far Eastern sky. Only the same war on a stronger toe. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Tell me more quickly what I lost by this, Or tell me with less drama what they miss Who call no die a god for a good throw, Who say after two aliens had one kiss It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
But as to risings, I can tell you why. It is on contradiction that they grow. It seemed the best thing to be up and go. Up was the heartening and the strong reply. The heart of standing is we cannot fly.
An aubade is a morning-after love song. Empson presumably wrote this for/about his Japanese lover while he was teaching in Japan. Was Empson eccentric? Certainly, but no more so than other poets. He was a poet's poet, but his strength was in wriiting about writing. His 7 Types of Ambiguity is a classic.
Who would give up the Iliad for the “real” historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit of freedom.
Picasso expressed the same idea summarily: “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.”
I spoke with Rep. Todd Akin on Thursday night and here is his response to this smear by President Obama.
“He’s good at personal attacks but bad at attacking problems. He uses the same solution on every problem – that is more government and more and more and more debt. Obamacare has taken over one-sixth of the economy and the government has pushed private lenders out of student loans. Now they’re creating the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac of student loans. And as the government takes it over, more and more debt is created. The reason Obama is upset about use of the word socialism is because his administration is asserting the government into what was once private sector areas. The reason Obama is attacking me is that I don’t have the same faith in big government as he does.”
A photo nut pal loves this new one he's been using: 
"Sometimes thinking is a bad idea.
It's the time of year for us to ask our readers, whether occasional or devoted followers, to introduce our website to your friends, neighbors, countrymen, colleagues, etc.
When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are 
Bob Dylan
, by Peter Atkins and 
, by Paul Feyerabend
Miracles Do Happen: 