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.
The busy dive shop at our place. Mrs. BD wanted to dive, but didn't really have time to get re-certified. Best to do that at home before a dive trip. However, the snorkeling was excellent, and Mrs. can do a 20' surface dive easily. I can't. I can do 10', no problem, but I prefer to just float around and observe.
The weather is here. Wish you were nice.
More pics, etc, below the fold - including a pic our our suite's cool bathroom!
What's your name? "Puddin Tain." What's your other? "Bread and Butter." Where do you live? "Down the lane." What's your number? "Cucumber." What do you eat? "Pork pie." Greedy pig you ought to die!
P values have always had critics. In their almost nine decades of existence, they have been likened to mosquitoes (annoying and impossible to swat away), the emperor's new clothes (fraught with obvious problems that everyone ignores) and the tool of a “sterile intellectual rake” who ravishes science but leaves it with no progeny. One researcher suggested rechristening the methodology “statistical hypothesis inference testing”, presumably for the acronym it would yield.
The irony is that when UK statistician Ronald Fisher introduced the P value in the 1920s, he did not mean it to be a definitive test. He intended it simply as an informal way to judge whether evidence was significant in the old-fashioned sense: worthy of a second look.
At Maggie's we are all perennial skeptics, and we think that the average business "murder board" is far more rigorous and critical than any academic peer review. There is more at stake.
Yesterday most of us here in the Northeast spent the day digging out of yet another big snow pile. I grew up with snow, in the mountains of Pennsylvania, then four years of Syracuse nastiness. It doesn't bother me in the least, and I'm more than happy going out with a snow shovel to dig, dig, dig.
I figure you need at least 4+ inches to call off school, and at least that much to prevent me from heading in to NYC and the office. Yesterday was one of those days, with my younger son having yet another snow day and me staying home for probably the fifth time this winter.
But Bill de Blasio was having none of it. His point of view was to get the kids into school at all costs.
This is a mayor who is slowly destroying any popularity he has with voters by making decisions which are difficult to support in any way. I couldn't believe NYC schools were open yesterday, until I heard the press conference. Bill's words go far in explaining how important he feels school is. It hasn't got anything to do with education, it has everything to do with having daycare so parents can work.
"It's always a tough decision based on imperfect information."
Really? The Weather Service had said, with regularity, that it was going to be a minimum of 6 inches, Bill. They warned of potential for a foot or more. Sure, the Weather Service may be wrong about climate change, but you believe that, so surely you must have some level of trust in their observations?
"There are huge number of parents for whom the consistency of the school schedule is absolutely necessary," de Blasio said. "They are going to work, they have no choice. If they can't get their kid to school, they don't have another option. There are huge numbers of parents for whom their kid getting to school also means their child will have a good meal, and in some cases, two meals. And so, the fact is, it's a very big deal to some parents."
Ohhhh...OK, now I get it. You just wanted to make sure daycare was in session. Fine, everything is understood and all is well. I'm sure the teachers will be happy to know they are part of your daycare plan.
Sometimes Maggie's seems like an echo chamber because there is only one point of view, so try this one for me:
While everyone celebrates the freedom to blow your foot off or have your five year old shoot his four year old friend while playing cowboys and liberals, why are all of the news stories about men shooting other men for no justifiable cause? The retired sheriff who felt threatened by a man texting his babysitter was justified because the popcorn thrown at him had many hard unpopped kernels? The man who shot the black teenager for playing loud music in a parking lot PMWB (playing music while black) had cause because he didn't like the tunes? Please. Where are the stories of self defense? Oh, I forgot Zimmerman.
(Editor's note: If you disagree, do so kindly and explain yourself reasonably. No need to talk about deaths in car accidents. Azeff is a good-hearted guy who did not grow up with firearms in the farm kitchen, as I did. Somebody asked me the other day how many firearms I have. Between home and the Farm, I dunno, I replied. Never counted. I asked "How many hammers do you have? A hammer is a lethal weapon, just like a baseball bat. Nobody knows how many hammers they have. Firearms are just more expensive than hammers and baseball bats.")
Pics from her runway show at Fashion Weekat the Javits Center, NYC, last week. Fashion Week is a big deal. That's Nora Gardner in the middle. She has a good story - four years on Wall St. doing billion-dollar muni deals, identified a need, now a far-happier entrepreneur in the rag trade. That's the American Way.
(Just like select organizations like Bob Dylan Inc., Dunkin Donuts, Sippican Cottage Furniture, Sierra Trading Post, Bird's Custard Powder, Billy Bob's Auto Body, and other major brands, Gardner pays us really big bucks to promote her conservative, practical clothing line.)
Tomorrow, I will have one 3 lb. steamed lobster, with home-made cucumber cole slaw, home-made potato salad with vinaigrette. Bottle or two of Oregon Chardonnay. And I will make a Trifle, all home-made (except I bought the pound cake at the supermarket). Bottom layer of pound cake soaked with rum, then drizzled with raspberry jam. Then a layer of homemade custard. Then a layer of cut-up strawberries, plus raspberries and blueberries. Then whipped cream, and then decorated with semi-sweet chocolate shavings and raspberries. Hope she likes it.
We have an English Trifle bowl like the one in the photo somewhere. I can't find it. It's somewhere buried in the basement pantry, A mere trifle to please She-Who-Must-Be-Obeyed.
Photo: This German lass was with us on a hike to the hot springs waterfall. She's a zoo manager from outside Hamburg, was visiting with her grandparents.
Many of our readers travel far more than we do, for business, recreation, adventure, or relaxation.
The BD family tries to strike a good balance of around 3 weeks of vacation per year plus some number of long weekends and as much work time at the Farm as we can do. Brit acquaintances think that is insane workaholism, but I just laugh. Work is good for the soul, I tell them. Man's Fall, and all that. We Maggie's Farmers tend to be self-employed, so there is no such thing as "paid vacation time." (No "sick days" either, which remarkably means that one is never too sick to work.)
Mrs. BD and I will admit that we are a sort of travel snobs. We like boutique places, tenudos, etc., with local flavor and no commercial feeling - eg no Sandals or chain hotels like Four Seasons - and have only stayed in a high-rise hotel once (the Southampton Princess, on our honeymoon).
Here's today's travel tip: Always pack a few plastic trash bags. They're good for stashing dirty clothes and wet clothes, and I always stick one in my pocket when hiking to protect the camera if it rains.
St. Lucia gets direct flights - not necessarily daily - from NYC, Miami, Atlanta, Toronto, London, Manchester, and Hamburg. Our little resort, (Anse Chastenet), far from the mass market area around Castries is in southern St. Lucia, has only 35 suites/cabins, and there were Americans, Canucks, Germans, and lots of Brits. One Swedish family. There were a few obvious honeymooners (Anse Chastenet is on many lists of most romantic destinations), and a few families with kids. A few more pics and random info below the fold -
Our back porch this morning, as today's snow is just beginning and the wind moaning. Lovely, ain't it? A good day to stay home by the fire, take the dog for a walk down the road, and a hot toddy later. Wonderful stuff, but not too easy to mine the firewood out of the snowdrifts.
I half-hope Jose and his minions get here soon with the plow. (Why is it always Central American immigrants from the tropics doing the plowing and shoveling instead of native white or black guys? Is this a racist industry? Or am I an evil racist to even wonder?)
Mrs. BD and a pupette tell me that this Twelfth Night on Broadway was the best theater performance they have ever seen - of anything. See it before it closes.
Like Social Security, which provides a safety net so people can retire, the health law may have the effect of leading some Americans to stop working…they called the impact positive, arguing that people have for too long been stuck in jobs that are a poor fit or that they dislike, simply for the benefits. While some people may make the calculation to just work less to keep more generous benefits, many will use their time to do something more productive, such as start their own business or take care of family members.
OMG. Some people don't love their jobs? That's a terrible tragedy.
America is drifting into totalitarianism because of the left's exploitation of social failures. The critical mass of social breakdowns, from gang violence to terrorism to poverty, justify the nanny state, the police state and all the other totalitarian states of authority. When there is nothing and no one else to trust, a failed society turns to a tyrant who can cut through all the red tape and govern with pen and phone.
A photo for a snowy day. Daytime temps 79-82 F all year, nighttimes cooler, a gentle trade wind most of the time. Water temp last week was a pleasant but not bathtub-hot 79 degrees F: comfortable but refreshing, and perfect for swimming laps of the beach which is what I tend to do. If you plan to snorkel or dive for a few hours, a shortie wetsuit is not a bad idea but I do not like wetsuits.
You can leave your stuff on this beach for hours all day while swimming, snorkeling, kayaking, etc - camera, watch, wallet, pocketbook. Nobody will touch your stuff. We left our stuff there every day.
Quite pleasant, but I do love our snowy winters. Today's snow is a beaut. Wish I were at a ski place instead of letting this good powder go to waste. If I find time, will take the pup on a snowstorm walk. Few cars out today in the blizzardy conditions - just Mexicans with their plow trucks.
We took a two- or three-hour hike each day of our trip. That doesn't sound like much, but it's mountains so it's uphill all the way. Sore legs.
We took one jungle birding hike with Mano, who knows all of the plants, trees, and birds. His granny was a herbalist, so he picks all sorts of leaves and makes you eat them for health. Why not?
He gives his walking stick a bath in the sea each evening to keep it happy. "Happy, happy, tank God for dis day" is the Caribbean mantra, isn't it?
Had we more time, I would have done some serious birding, but we saw many of the common critters. Some, of course, are our northern summer breeders in their wintertime vacation home.
We also saw a bat cave filled with thousands of fruit bats. At dusk, the fruit bats zipped through our little porch and filled a night-blooming tree outside the dining room, sucking nectar and pollinating the blossoms. Remarkable creatures for sure, and a wondrous sight.
My Mom fell through ice once, rescuing her doggie who fell through a thin spot of ice on a pond. Luckily, her feet reached the bottom so she was able to carry the pup and break through ice to the shore. She was alone in the woods at the time. She jogged home to try to stay warm, took a hot shower, and had a couple of hot toddies. She and the pup were just fine after a while.
He makes good points. My main hobbies are shooting and hunting, boating, skiing, and hanging out in NYC pubs with pals and gals. Each can be dangerous to some degree. I am heading out to Big Sky tonight for 6 days of off-trail reckless tree skiing with old skiing pals, risking life and limb in deep powder. It's more dangerous than smoking.
We will have a blast, and drink lots of beer too. My theory is that safety is for pussies but, since I have a little sense, there are some things I just won't do. Cave scuba diving is one of them. I can handle fear, but cave diving scares me too much. Once was enough, at 65 feet. A very cool experience, though, and I am glad I did it.
How Iowa Flattened Literature - With CIA help, writers were enlisted to battle both Communism and eggheaded abstraction. The damage to writing lingers.
Morning fishermen on our beach in St. Lucia. The locals speak Creole at home and with each other, but good English otherwise. On St. Lucia, the educational, legal, and governmental systems are on the British model.
These guys visually search for a school of small fish, then throw the net in, and then dive into the water and splash to drive the fish into the net.
I know, I know. If you're from New York City and you hear Iowa mentioned, you think it stands for Idiots Out Walking Around. But Maggie's Farmers know the value of a good Farmall driver, and farmers in Iowa can square dance with their tractors. Ain't that America?
Tractor Square Dancing Is Real, And It's Spectacular.
Editor's note: Dr. Azeff will be a regular contributor on medical topics
"Surviving Anxiety" was the cover story of The Atlantic magazine for January/February written by its editor, Scott Stossel.
One is a little flabbergasted when reading this man's story. While portraying himself as virtually crippled by anxiety in all of its forms, generalized anxiety, post traumatic stress, panic disorder and multiple phobias, he functions as the editor of a prestigious magazine which means likely conflicts with aggressive publishers and super-sensitive, if not querulous, writers. He is a writer himself and therefore a person expected to show up for promotional talks and for lectures. How does he do it? He begins his article, excerpted from his book, by describing his drug regimen for public speaking; xanax, inderal and scotch or vodka. As a clinician one is immediately tempted to take the bait and challenge the doses of his medication and balk at his use of ethanol which he acknowledges is risky at best, dangerous more honestly. From there we are led on a trip through his life and through the evolution of psychiatric treatments over the past thirty years, the good the bad and the ugly.
His first doctor who started treating him at age eleven and saw him twice a week for 25 years is roughly of my generation, I'll be 75 in a few months, Dr. L as he is called is probably in his early eighties. Analytically oriented therapy mixed with play therapy mixed with pharmacotherapy at the outset, progressing over decades to everything as it came along including EMDR and self-actualizing therapy whatever that means. One can appreciate the changes over the years as a picture of the evolution of a modality seeking a scientific framework. Just as edema was initially seen as a unitary "disease" called dropsy until science deconstructed the multiple causes of this symptom, so many of our psychiatric illnesses may be no less than psychological dropsy. I'll wager in the next ten years "schizophrenia" will be at least four different conditions of different etiology, and anxiety may follow suit as well.
But what I take away from this verbose, sometimes wry, sometimes antic, sometimes prolix piece is the transgressions of some of his caretakers. Well into Scott's treatment, Dr. L takes his father into treatment as well and uses Scott's sessions to get information about Stossel senior. The porous boundary is something we all grapple with but this is a destruction of the boundary that calls the treatment into question, perhaps from the start. After all, we may change course with a patient but usually with caution and discussion. I hope we are beyond the point of arguing that one cannot do both psychotherapy and psychopharmacology, but can one start with a classic dynamic model and wander into EMDR? Then there is the behavioral psychologist, Dr.M (both of these caretakers are "Boston" and Harvard trained and perhaps even faculty so we all must be clear that they definitely and unimpeachably know what they are doing) who determined his core problem was emetophobia, fear of vomiting, which she would treat with exposure therapy. Using the emetic ipecac which had cured other emetophobes, Stossel attempts the exposure with two doses of ipecac that produce retching and gagging but no vomiting in the course of four hours.
The next day he speaks to Dr. M who eventually relates that she was so shaken by his experience she cancelled all of her afternoon patients and spent the day at home nauseated and vomiting and taking to bed. Once again a transgression of questionable purpose. That treatment was fractured and collapsed fairly soon afterwards. We all have seen patients who are difficult to treat, who have disabling symptoms of anxiety or depression or psychosis, which are not easily medicated. How often do we ask ourselves about the possibility that the patient is consciously or unconsciously engaged in an attempt to make us feel as helpless and demoralized as he feels? Is it "blaming the patient" to weigh this possibility as a cause of intractable symptoms?
There is nothing glaringly obvious pointing to this in the story Stossel tells us and his brave walking through fire story is to be admired, but I'm just saying . . .
Robot 
Sometimes Maggie's seems like an echo chamber because there is only one point of view, so try this one for me:
There Are 
Photo: This German lass was with us on a hike to the hot springs waterfall. She's a zoo manager from outside Hamburg, was visiting with her grandparents.
Image via Sultan's post, linked at the bottom 
We took a two- or three-hour hike each day of our trip. That doesn't sound like much, but it's mountains so it's uphill all the way. Sore legs.