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.
Mac Donald: The Real Risks of Amnesty - American competitiveness and educational achievement are the worry, not an increased threat to national security.
Mayor Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to compost their garbage. Where? In the hallway of the Plaza Hotel?
Who is "we", by the way? Royal "we"?
As we (Royal "We") frequently say at Maggie's, "If you're so rich, how come you ain't smart?"
NYC remains the greatest city in the world, and the most fun to visit with endless interesting things to do and jammed with smart, ambitious people from all over the world, but it has plenty of issues to be tackled: public education, debt, too much welfare, union control of everything, governmental over-regulation of everything including the housing market, etc. However, Bloomberg focuses on the small, elitist, feel-good issues: smoking, composting, diet, salt, gays, illegal immigration, and other baloney. Why?
We suspect it's because he gave up on the hard issues a few years ago, and decided to deal with the little stuff. He's a Jewish mother at heart, and a pain in the ass. "It's raining. Don't go out without your rubbers." "They're in my wallet, Ma." Rainy Day Women.
I agree with Palin that Americans, much less tough New Yorkers, do not need to be treated like children and neither need to be, nor want to be, preached to by anybody other than a pastor, priest, or a rabbi. I lived there for a while and love to visit, and it's not a place for sissies. It always was a good place to meet tall, elegant and refined debutantes with pedigrees acceptable to my Mother. I did, a long time ago, and so far, so good.
NOCD was the kiss of death when I was young. Snobs.
Today, Congress exercises police powers never granted by the Constitution. Conservatives who favor federal “wars” on drugs, gambling and other behaviors should understand the damage they have done to the constitutional underpinnings of limited government.
As she says, it's not from The Onion. The guy in the video is smart but pitifully emasculated. I guess it goes with the territory. Every assertion he makes ends with a question mark. Lame, and not a word about education.
Almost every aspect of illegal immigration is illiberal to the core. Respect for the law? The elite decides that for a particular political constituency, the law is now fluid. If you are a Bulgarian M.D. and overstay your visa, beware. A Korean engineer wouldn’t dare to fly to Mexico City and cross illegally into Arizona. Without ethnic bosses and millions of compatriots within our borders, all others are lawbreakers subject to deportation.
When life gets out of control, and there is nothing to eat in the beautiful new Sub Zero fridge (10 year warranty) because nobody has gotten to the market, and you have a day job and the Mrs. has her hands full, it's time for a Thai delivery.
We have mother-in-law in the rehab center with a new steel knee, father in law staying with us, and my dad in the hosp with a new rod in his fractured hip needing rehab as soon as his post-op confusion resolves. Not to mention Father's Day weekend to bury my Mom's ashes at the farm, and not to mention other forms of family medical and other chaos too which I will not mention.
We have two excellent Thai places around, and both deliver. I alternate between the two, because they have different styles. Delivery fellow comes faster if you give a decent tip, which for me is $5. Tonight we're getting this:
Duck Spring Rolls Chicken Satay with hot sauce Penang Curry with Chicken (hot peanut curry sauce) Drunken Noodles with Tofu - plus extra hot sauce, and White Rice (brown rice is disgusting, detracts from the flavor of the dish, and is not fit for human consumption)
Mrs. BD loves flowers and all that - she and her pals call it "plant material" because they use all sorts of things in their design efforts.
Often, however, she will just toss flowers in a vase without too much design except basic color coordination and texture variation, and it is very pleasant.
Here are her tips to keep cut flowers looking good in water for a week or more:
- A fresh sharp cut to each stem at a 45 degree angle, and warm water
- 1 tsp of bleach per quart of water (prevents rotten, cloudy water which destroys the blooms)
- 1 tablespoon of sugar per quart of water (feeds the flowers - they aren't dead yet)
- Never let a leaf be submerged - but you can submerge blooms if you want for cool effects. You can submerge Hosta leaves too.
They will have your medical records too. They need your medical records.Everybody's. Not to worry, because they won't tell anybody about your herpes or your Bipolar Disorder.
Amusing, and heart-warming, to see how this gal who gamed the college diversity scam got in touch with her true inner racial identity, and was able to build a career on it.
At a paltry 6,900 yards, probably the shortest U.S. Open since the last time they played at Merion in 1981, the pundits were all raving about how it wouldn't stand up to the modern beefed-up player and his technological bag of tricks in the form of 12th-generation Big Bertha drivers and multi-faceted computer-generated putters. They were predicting scores of 8 or 9 under par, easy.
The current tied two leaders after two days of play?
1 under.
There are three playing at even par and the entire rest of the field is in the plus column.
Like I said, a spanking.
Of the four masters, the Open is usually considered the 'nastiest' of the lot. While the others might rely upon ultra-long holes, ultra-slick greens and ultra-tough pin placements, the Open is usually defined by a zillion sand traps and rough that goes halfway up your calf.
And there's even more to it than that, such as the toughness of the grass. Merion uses a particularly tough grass around the greens, a lesson Tiger Woods handily learned just yesterday. The ball was a few feet off the green, embedded in some short, gnarly rough. He took the proper swack at it and the ball plopped about 10 inches. He took another swack and it flopped onto the green a few feet and stopped nine feet from the pin. Welcome to Merion Golf Club, Mr. Woods, still catering to that old, pre-modern tough-love style.
They also don't have pin flags at Merion; they use straw baskets which were originally used to store the players' lunches so they'd stay safely out of reach of deer, caddies, and other course varmints. What this means is that the players are forced to use such ancient, archaic means of determining wind direction as "blowing tree branches" and "clouds". This 'getting back to the basics' approach is enough to throw the strongest player off his game.
Broadcast time is noon (ET), NBC. Original info and slideshow here, updates here. Live streaming is here, fairly decent full-screen quality.
What's going to add to a spanking good time is that Merion was drenched with rain in the week up through Thursday, so it's actually been playing slow these last two days. As things dry out, the fairways will become even faster (giving the ball an even greater chance of rolling off into the rough, something that happened over and over again on a couple of particular holes yesterday, even to the greats like Mickelson and Woods) and, of course, the greens will make a big jump on the Stimpmeter. They were already in the 'scary' category yesterday (it was raining Thursday to the point where they were basically putting around small lakes, so yesterday was the first day in which the course could actually be judged), so today should take a fairly dramatic jump in green speeds.
There's something somewhat interesting about the game of golf:
It's not a game.
It's not a sport.
It's not a contest.
It's not a competition.
It's not really much at all.
It's just you, a field, a ball and some clubs, and the only fellow competitor within sight is a man who might have died twenty years before.
It can be made into a sport, of course, but golf, in its essence, involves no one but you and the course designer, perhaps long passed on these many years.
Even when others are on the field, you're not playing against these players. There's none of the sez you mentality you see in normal sports. It's just you, the course, and the fewest number of swings you can make to see it through to the end.
Except for the pros, where they really do have the option of cutting the corner by knocking it over the trees on a par-5 dogleg, for everyone else there's really just one shot in the bag, and you really want nothing more than for it to be your best shot — and the score and fellow competitors be damned.
In that moment you step up to the ball, it is nothing but essence.
This clip from The Legend of Bagger Vance demonstrates this fairly well.
Parents who read their kids stories about happy, human-like animals like Franklin the Turtle or Arthur at bedtime are exposing their kids to racism, materialism, homophobia and patriarchal norms, according to a paper presented at the Congress of the Humanities and Social Sciences.
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road, Healthy, free, the world before me, The long brown path before me, leading wherever I choose.
Henceforth I ask not good-fortune—I myself am good fortune; Henceforth I whimper no more, postpone no more, need nothing, 5 Strong and content, I travel the open road.
The earth—that is sufficient; I do not want the constellations any nearer; I know they are very well where they are; I know they suffice for those who belong to them. 10
(Still here I carry my old delicious burdens; I carry them, men and women—I carry them with me wherever I go; I swear it is impossible for me to get rid of them; I am fill’d with them, and I will fill them in return.)
2
You road I enter upon and look around! I believe you are not all that is here; 15 I believe that much unseen is also here.
Here the profound lesson of reception, neither preference or denial; The black with his woolly head, the felon, the diseas’d, the illiterate person, are not denied; The birth, the hasting after the physician, the beggar’s tramp, the drunkard’s stagger, the laughing party of mechanics, The escaped youth, the rich person’s carriage, the fop, the eloping couple, 20 The early market-man, the hearse, the moving of furniture into the town, the return back from the town, They pass—I also pass—anything passes—none can be interdicted; None but are accepted—none but are dear to me.
3
You air that serves me with breath to speak! You objects that call from diffusion my meanings, and give them shape! 25 You light that wraps me and all things in delicate equable showers! You paths worn in the irregular hollows by the roadsides! I think you are latent with unseen existences—you are so dear to me.
You flagg’d walks of the cities! you strong curbs at the edges! You ferries! you planks and posts of wharves! you timber-lined sides! you distant ships! 30 You rows of houses! you window-pierc’d façades! you roofs! You porches and entrances! you copings and iron guards! You windows whose transparent shells might expose so much! You doors and ascending steps! you arches! You gray stones of interminable pavements! you trodden crossings! 35 From all that has been near you, I believe you have imparted to yourselves, and now would impart the same secretly to me; From the living and the dead I think you have peopled your impassive surfaces, and the spirits thereof would be evident and amicable with me.
The rest of "Song of the Open Road" is below the fold -
Whitman worked on his collection of poems, Leaves of Grass, for almost 50 years, until his death. There were continual revisions and additions to the various editions of the remarkable and somewhat scandalous book. Whitman, like the "I" in the poems, was a self-invented American Everyman, and he fully believed that it was his destiny to write the Great American Epic Poem. It's not one story, but I think he did write an epic in spirit. It's fun to look at, and to read about, this collection of Whitman photos.
Navy to inspect bathrooms for 
Mayor Bloomberg wants New Yorkers to 
Mrs. BD loves flowers and all that - she and her pals call it "plant material" because they use all sorts of things in their design efforts. 
Amusing: 
"What is so rare as a steak in June?"
The U.S. Open golf tournament is on this weekend.
There's something somewhat interesting about the game of golf:
Image via 
AFOOT and light-hearted, I take to the open road,