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.
As I have often said, there is no useful general definition of happiness. Unhappiness and misery are much more easily defined.
Do all people need a sense of mission or purpose to be "happy" - other than the basic mission of survival and comfort? I very much doubt it. The wonderful psychiatrist Victor Frankl was indeed sustained by his search for meaning in the camps, but that is far from ordinary life and he was far from an ordinary man.
For me, contentment is a good, loyal husband, a good love life, good work, enjoyable if sometimes difficult kids, good friends and good acquaintances, exciting hobbies and sports, integrity and a clean conscience, a dog, a relationship with God, and books to read. Changing the world is a fool's errand for crazy people and narcissists who do not want to focus on the substance of their own brief lives. Can't do without them, though. Part of the fabric.
It's a major issue. Everybody is a criminal. I am willing to guarantee it. Nobody has read the million pages of federal regs and codes, and no citizen can understand them. A defendant is anybody the feds or the DA want to be one. Nobody is innocent, no matter how hard they try to be.
Is this a Walleye, a Pickerel, or a Pike? (Photo below the fold)
I am looking forward to Opening Day.
I am not a skier and I do not play paddle, so this season between the end of my hunting season and freshwater Opening Day is lacking in outdoor fun. I can think about, and prep for, Opening Day for trout, which is in April. Regarding the photo, I have been soaked but happy fishing too.
I have never caught a mermaid yet. What's the best mermaid bait, Capt. Tom? OK, never mind.
13:1 If I speak in the tongues of mortals and of angels, but do not have love, I am a noisy gong or a clanging cymbal.
13:2 And if I have prophetic powers, and understand all mysteries and all knowledge, and if I have all faith, so as to remove mountains, but do not have love, I am nothing.
13:3 If I give away all my possessions, and if I hand over my body so that I may boast, but do not have love, I gain nothing.
13:4 Love is patient; love is kind; love is not envious or boastful or arrogant
13:5 or rude. It does not insist on its own way; it is not irritable or resentful;
13:6 it does not rejoice in wrongdoing, but rejoices in the truth.
13:7 It bears all things, believes all things, hopes all things, endures all things.
13:8 Love never ends. But as for prophecies, they will come to an end; as for tongues, they will cease; as for knowledge, it will come to an end.
13:9 For we know only in part, and we prophesy only in part;
13:10 but when the complete comes, the partial will come to an end.
13:11 When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like a child; when I became an adult, I put an end to childish ways.
13:12 For now we see in a mirror, dimly, but then we will see face to face. Now I know only in part; then I will know fully, even as I have been fully known.
13:13 And now faith, hope, and love abide, these three; and the greatest of these is love.
I have to confess that I'm a person who far prefers playing almost any sport badly to watching other people do it well. When I was in grad school, we had the best "touch" - read "shove very hard so the guy falls in the mud" - football games, weekly. A joy. Being quick and agile then, I was usually a runner (and a ball-dropper). That football is a slippery bugger.
Since every TV sports fan in the US is either hosting or attending a party today (any excuse for a party, or for buying a new big screen), and because I do like to make and eat chicken wings, I offer Alton Brown's very good Buffalo Chicken Wing instructions.
As usual with Alton, the show is a kick - and educational - even if you don't care about the recipe.
For Alton, everything simple is an adventure. Great production.
Our editor has been inspiring with food this winter.
My serious girlfriend and I are having a little dinner party for 12 friends tonight. Acquaintances with whom we feel we would like to be better friends, and who could enrich our life.
Building new friendships as a couple is a complicated dance, isn't it? Do I enjoy their company? Do they think I'm boring, or a jerk? Do they wonder what I am doing with her, or she with me? You never know unless they call you back to do something after you have extended your hand in friendship.
Whether formally or informally, inviting people into your humble abode for supper is generally a social signal of warm and positive feelings unless it involves business. No space at my kitchen table, so will need my whole humble Lower East Side 1 BR apartment for seating. Who cares, if it's a good time?
I had braised (Massachusetts White-Tail) venison shoulder and various scraps in the crock pot all day yesterday, and later we'll whip up some cheese grits for a side and reheat the stew. About 8 lbs. of meat. I agree that stews are always better a day later.
We're having people who never ate a Bambi before. Actually, it's from a sweet-tasting and tender doe I bowed last month up at the Bird Dog homestead, but I will not mention that. Baguette to sop up the juice. A relatively cheap California cabernet, and good beers for the beer people. I am too cheap and modest to pay for some good Burgundies.
Then a tiny scoop of mango sorbet with a mint sprig on it.
After that, the Stinky Cheese Board (thanks, Fairway cheese man) with fruit, dried fruit, and nuts, for dessert or, I suppose, a savoury. Fig preserves and walnutty French breads to accompany the cheeses which have been out of the fridge all day to soften up. Bottle of nice port that my Dad gave me for Christmas, for those who enjoy Sunday morning headaches.
Entertaining people with whom you want friendship is easy, the Maggie's Farm Way. The secret ingredients, it seems to me, are not food, decor, or fancy homes or restaurants, but intelligent people with interesting and varied interests, charming gals, lively conversation, controversial topics, and snappy repartee. It requires just one or two people who are willing to rise to the occasion to be the life of the party without over-drinking. I will do that if nobody else will, but I'd rather leave that to others.
The meaning of tasty or interesting food is to honor guests who take the trouble to come to your place.
I stumbled into this interesting, somewhat scholarly essay: WHAT IS RELIGION? by Prof. Thomas A. Idinopulos. A quote:
...take the case of Theravada Buddhism. Here is a something called "religion" which is not a religion. Although Theravada Buddhism is usually included in any book on the world's religions, it is not theistic, recognizes no sacred being or beings, and does not officially encourage worship of Buddha or any "higher being" (despite popular veneration of the Buddha-ideal). Theravada Buddhism appears to be a technique or program for human self-purification or self-fulfillment or self-negation. If the word religion is attached to Theravada Buddhism, it must be done so loosely as to allow the differences from other religions to prevail.
What then are we to do about the books like those of the late Alan Watts, Aldous Huxley, and more recently Huston Smith, that stress the similarities of religion? Such works will always be in demand because human beings want to believe that there is an inner core of common religious meaning that provides an intelligible unifying structure of meaning to the bewildering multiplicity of world religions. No matter how much we stress the differences among religions, the public desire for assurance about religious unity will inspire authors to continue to invent overarching pseudo-philosophical categories like "Eternal Wisdom," "Universal Spirit," or "Cosmic Soul," and promote them as the "truth" to which the various religions point. Perhaps there is a universal religious truth and perhaps there is not. If there is, however, I believe we should look for it not in what a religion asserts as truth but in how it asserts its truth. As we shall see in discussing W. C. Smith's ideas, it is form not content that religions have in common.
There are other problems in comparing religions...
I don't know how Theo got this pic of my new girlfriend on my fishing boat last summer, in Southington CT harbor. The cool, smart chicks seem to like me. I have no idea why.
When Two People Click - Finding a mate used to be a long quest to uncover a few worthy people, but dating sites now offer hundreds of potential mates at a keystroke.
I have come to the conclusion that current energy and climate policy is probably more dangerous, both economically and ecologically, than climate change itself. This is not the same as arguing that climate has not changed or that mankind is not partly responsible. That the climate has changed because of man-made carbon dioxide I fully accept. What I do not accept is that the change is or will be damaging, or that current policy would prevent it.
Mom came through the procedure despite her general frailty. Brand-new stainless steel hip. A little confusion from the morphine: "Where are my dogs?"
Thanks for your good wishes for the gal. Heading back over there this morning, then will make dinner for Dad. Making plans today to get her back into good shape at a joint rehab place in a couple of days.
Told my Dad we should get them twin beds at a rehab. He could definitely use 4 hrs of PT plus exercise and three squares daily, for a couple of weeks.
Not marble, nor the gilded monuments Of princes, shall outlive this powerful rhyme; But you shall shine more bright in these contents Than unswept stone besmear'd with sluttish time. When wasteful war shall statues overturn, And broils root out the work of masonry, Nor Mars his sword nor war's quick fire shall burn The living record of your memory. 'Gainst death and all-oblivious enmity Shall you pace forth; your praise shall still find room Even in the eyes of all posterity That wear this world out to the ending doom. So, till the judgment that yourself arise, You live in this, and dwell in lovers' eyes.
A reader emailed me his cell phone pic of a pal, skiing a couple of days ago in Loveland, CO.
Dang, that is such great fun. Happiness is being on top of a big gnarly mountain, on top of the world, in frigid temperatures, with skis and friends and family, and some cold beer at the bottom.
Mass killings, and serial killings, are in decline. Murder overall, in fact, is in decline except for in some (Blue) cities like Chicago and Detroit which nobody seems to get excited about very much.
Everybody is seeking scapegoats for mass killing, especially when it's white suburban kids instead of the slow mass murder of inner city black kids, and everybody hops onto the hobby horse they want to ride. Movies and video games, firearms, bomb ingredients, the mentally ill, etc.
The problem is that these mass events are so rare as to be utterly upredictable. We cannot put an armed guard at the door of every classroom. And trust me, you cannot lock up, indefinitely, every paranoid or angry person who has thoughts of killing people. You'd have to lock up half the commenters at Daily Kos. Thoughts about killing, like thoughts of suicide, are very common.
Furthermore, mass killers like Timothy McVeigh and serial killers like Ted Bundy were not even mentally ill in any usual sense. Evil, not ill. Not to mention Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood killer. A military Psychiatrist, no less (and a presumed Jihadist). Or the 9-11 killers.
Terrible events are black swans and probably not preventable. Dangerous people rarely seek help with their problems anyway, and criminals ignore laws. Nobody who is hell-bent on mass killing is likely to tell anyone.
I have mixed feelings about the author's prescriptions, and doubts about "education" education in general. If schools of education are so worthwhile, why is it that expensive private schools avoid hiring their graduates?
For my money, the single most talented voice in the modern history of talk radio is retiring later this month. Not "one of" the most talented — the most talented.
The thing is, I'd tend to agree, except for one little hitch:
Outside of a few brief spots on cable talk shows, I've never heard him utter a peep.
The difference between Neal and — as far as I know — every other radio talk show host on the planet, is that Neal would spend hours writing a for-real blog every morning, whereupon he'd punch out three or four posts on different subjects, some of them fairly lengthy, then finish it up with a handful of must-read links. He took it as seriously as any of us do.
So I'm saying goodbye to Neal Boortz, blogger.
On the subject, though, I would note that, while he's officially retiring from radio and blogging, he's still keeping his hand in when it comes to mouthing off about pet topics now and then. He had an article on Townhall just the other day.
Whisky Tango Foxtrot!
How upside down can things be in America? Mickelson is being called "greedy." Really? So now we define "greed" as wanting to keep more of the money you earn? If that’s greed, what do you call the moochers who go to the poll to vote for the politician that’s going to take that money away from you and give it to them? Oh wait! I know! Obama voters!
Yep, same ol' Neal.
(Whiskey Tango Foxtrot, for the uninitiated, is Boortzspeak for "WTF??")
Below the fold I'll continue this tribute with some of my favorite moments and quotes. A search on my Rainy Day site for "boortz" pops up five articles where I mention him, so I'll include the links. And, just to quell any claims of blatant partisanship, I'll toss in a couple of criticisms. That is, if you call my referring to him as a total dogshit asswipe when it comes to his attitude toward cigarette smokers a 'criticism'.
So thank you, Neal. That was a terrific run — even if you are a total scumbag butthole for redesigning your web site a few years ago.
This time, she fractured her right hip. Emergency hip replacement today. I'll be busy joining the family rotation to help out Dad, cook casseroles, and to keep her company.
She requested no flowers to be sent to her hospital room so it would not feel like a funeral. She's the sort of person who, when you visit her in the hospital, feels she has to entertain you regardless of pain. Old Yankees do not do self-pity.
A post today at NYM reminded me of my Mom's champion riding career. (She was also a champ trap and skeet shooter.) When I was young, she still had a show jumper and a hunter at the farm, but by the time there were five of us kids she had no time for it, and her horses were getting old - I've told readers in the past about how old Jimminy Cricket would mosey over to the kitchen door, push open the screen door, and try to get his tall shoulders through the kitchen door. Mom had been coached, for a time, by the great Bill Steinkraus.
Her favorite thing to do was the hunt. I joined her on a couple of them when I was around 9 or 10. I have not been on a hunt since then, but have messed with plenty of horses since then in New England, Ireland, Montana, and New York City. That's a good sequeway to the post about The Scarteen Hunt in Ireland.
With all of the recent reports of fake news stories, grossly-distorted or fraudulently-edited news stories, and incurious repetition of administration talking points, alert followers of the happenings of the world grow increasingly distrustful of anything coming (or censored and thus not coming) from the MSM.
America's Baby Bust -
Maybe we all need to learn the hard way, but there is so little time to fail. It's a truism that we can learn more from failures than from successes. 
All you can do is laugh. 
I have to confess that I'm a person who far prefers playing almost any sport badly to watching other people do it well. When I was in grad school, we had the best "touch" - read "shove very hard so the guy falls in the mud" - football games, weekly. A joy. Being quick and agile then, I was usually a runner (and a ball-dropper). That football is a slippery bugger.
Our editor has been inspiring with food this winter. 
I don't know how 
The thing is, I'd tend to agree, except for one little hitch: