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.
40:1 I waited patiently for the LORD; he inclined to me and heard my cry.
40:2 He drew me up from the desolate pit, out of the miry bog, and set my feet upon a rock, making my steps secure.
40:3 He put a new song in my mouth, a song of praise to our God. Many will see and fear, and put their trust in the LORD.
40:4 Happy are those who make the LORD their trust, who do not turn to the proud, to those who go astray after false gods.
40:5 You have multiplied, O LORD my God, your wondrous deeds and your thoughts toward us; none can compare with you. Were I to proclaim and tell of them, they would be more than can be counted.
40:6 Sacrifice and offering you do not desire, but you have given me an open ear. Burnt offering and sin offering you have not required.
40:7 Then I said, "Here I am; in the scroll of the book it is written of me.
40:8 I delight to do your will, O my God; your law is within my heart."
40:9 I have told the glad news of deliverance in the great congregation; see, I have not restrained my lips, as you know, O LORD.
40:10 I have not hidden your saving help within my heart, I have spoken of your faithfulness and your salvation; I have not concealed your steadfast love and your faithfulness from the great congregation.
40:11 Do not, O LORD, withhold your mercy from me; let your steadfast love and your faithfulness keep me safe forever.
The extinction of species and genera is the earth's history. In recent history, some extinction has been brought about by mankind, mainly hunting for food. The giant ice-age mammals of North America probably were all hunted out like the White-Tailed Deer in nothern New England are today. Mountains of good meat which seemed endless.
The North American Bison barely escaped that fate, but the European Bison did not.
The sentimentally-sad story of North America's Passenger Pigeon is similar. The complete eradication of those vast, sun-blocking flocks was inconceivable. They were tasty birds, and there were no hunting laws. The smaller, and not large-flocking Mourning Dove stayed around, thankfully. It is tasty too, with a slab of bacon in the oven.
LL Bean is a wonderful store with excellent footwear and outerwear, fine hunting and fishing gear, etc. Not high end, and eminently practical stuff. Excellent return and repair policies. They will stand by their outerwear and footwear, even after ten years.
The country elected a bull for the effete china shop of the greedy federal government and all of its sinecures and parasites. At least, thought they did. Entertaining, too. Big cojones, a Honey Badger, a tough crude person for our times. A common-sense liberal, I believe, to restore some balance of sanity. Good circus for all news junkies and big $ for the networks. Reality TV.
Half the country, it seems, is glad to finally find somebody to really hate. I guess their lives lack a little something and I don't mean money. Many people need something to hate. Sad for them, but life is too short for that.
Going skiing. Nothing to hate at all. Another happy American tax-paying citizen having fun in the global cooling. Cold beer, pretty athletic girls, good pals from church. Good life. The whiners need to get with the program and make the most of it. Soon enough, they will be old.
I am not delving into the psychology of empathy. I'm not trained in it, and I don't know enough to make a statement from that position. I can, however, write about its effect on my own experiences, from my own therapy, and from a recent event which sparked a challenging debate.
That event was Meryl Streep's Golden Globes acceptance speech. I watched about 5 minutes of it, then left. Because I can, and I chose to. While I agreed with a bit, there was far more there than I was interested in hearing. To begin with, I don't watch award shows, I happened to switch it on at just that moment and thought I'd like to see her receive her award. If I am going to watch an awards show, I want to be entertained, not lectured. I turned it off. I did read the text the next day when the brouhaha around it began. Mainly because New York, the center of 'if you disagreed with her, you're insane and wrong and must have something wrong with you' began to show its ugliness. In other words, "Hillary lost and WE STILL HAVE NO CLUE HOW AND WHY IT HAPPENED SO WE MUST LASH OUT!" Meryl was offered a moment to lash out, and she did. Following some kind of empathic tribal code, her supporters rushed to demonize anyone who didn't 'feel' the same way Meryl did.
As we and others have documented countless times, the liberal world has gone bonkers over Donald Trump. It is an odd thing: Trump isn’t even a conservative, or wasn’t until recently. Yet liberals have gone nuts over his ascendancy in a way that is unprecedented. They make fools of themselves hour by hour, and, weirdly, don’t seem to notice.
I use "calisthenics" as an umbrella term for exercise which is not heavy weights (except kettlebells) and is not pure cardio. These are exercises which involve bursts of intense cardio combined with muscle use so they contribute to agility, muscle "toning" and "maintenance", power, speed, endurance, coordination, balance - all good things except strength-building.
A good thing about these calis is that they are varied and fun even when they hurt. If it doesn't hurt, you aren't challenging yourself enough. Muscle pain is your friend and ally.
We suggest a total of 1 1/2 to 2 hrs/wk of calis in a 5/hr/week fitness program. There is no need to do them for an hour at a time. Lots of people will do a session of 40 mins of weights and then 20 mins of calisthenics to loosen up. The 2 hours includes 30-second to one-minute rests between sets to catch your breath without lowering your heart rate very much.
We suggest repeating three circuits of each pairing or triplet (3X3 or 2X3) with each individual item to take around 30 to 60 seconds with little to no rest between items in a set so each pairing or triplet takes under ten minutes to complete and recover. Thus about 3-5 circuits in an hour depending on your vigor and fitness. It should take your pulse and/or respiratory rate up to an hour to return to normal after an hour of calisthenics. Your metabolic rate will remain increased for a couple of hours.
Begin with a 5-min cardio warm-up, then some sumos, side stretches, band walks, etc to wake up your body. Below the fold is my list of double and triplet circuits to try. I use each of them every two weeks. Give it a try - you will feel good.
If I were forced to do one part of the Fitness Triad, I would do calis.
nb: Advise no more than one squat routine/day, or burpees and mountain-climbers on the same day. You can do all the planks you want, and mix them up.
Wall St. hates Trump, the elites look down on Trump, and the rich fear that Trump will put an end to crony capitalism. Trump was elected by Main St.: Will Donald Trump Embrace Main Street Capitalism?
The main job is to get government out of the way of job formation and growth especially in America's sad towns - and for small and start-up businesses.
Few birds store much fat. Fat adds weight which makes flying inefficient. Generally (with exceptions like ducks), birds burn what they eat during the day for energy and heat.
Most active people over 35 or 40 have at least one physical problem that limits the exercises they can tolerate or that they should do. One of the values an expert trainer can offer is to provide work-arounds, especially after getting the advice info from a medical consultation.
For examples close to home, Mrs. BD had a bum knee, a meniscus repair, but still achy and unstable knee. Could hardly do body-weight leg exercises. After a year of carefully-graded and cautious leg strengthening, she is now pain-free with full mobility and is doing squats, lunges, and deadlifts.
In my case, a traumatic arthritis in one shoulder prevents me from overhead presses and push-ups. There is a knife-like pain which forces the effort to fail and collapse. It's too bad, because those are two excellent compound exercises but there are plenty of work-arounds for shoulder strength with slightly difference force vectors which are pain-free and so probably will not do any further damage to the joint - things like cable rows, lateral raises, and Farmer Walks.
Thus there are work-arounds for almost every frailty so a frailty is not an excuse to become frail.
Since winter has arrived in the Northeast, I thought a couple of pictures from my bonefishing trip in Mexico, back in September were in order. You know, to keep the fisherpersons interested and all that.
This was my first time fly fishing for bonefish. www.costadecocos.com The lodge is in Xcalak, Mexico which if it isn’t the end of the world, you can see it from there. It’s about 12 miles north of the Belize/Mexico border and about a 4.5 hour drive south of Cancun.
I fished an 8 weight with little shrimp patterns. I can tell you unequivocally, this is the hardest technical fishing I have ever done. You need to be able to cast 50 feet into the wind and put the fly in about a 3’ diameter circle when the guide points and says “aqui” “aqui”!
I fished about 5 hours each day (30 minute boat ride from lodge to the back bays) and caught 3 bonefish the first day and 2 the second day. The first day, I know I lost at least three that hooked up but couldn’t land and another 2 on the second day, same thing. There are a lot of bonefish. Lots, but I’d be kidding if I said they are easy to catch. However, you’ll get more chances than you will in the Keys and fishing down in Ol’ Mexico is nowhere near as expensive as Abaco and the Bahamas (where the fish are bigger but get lots more pressure).
The flats are amazing – two to three feet deep at high tide and you see small sharks, rays, barracuda and permit in 18 inches of water. Like most saltwater fishing, you try and catch the tides right as the fish will hold in different spots, depending on an ebb or flood tide and where the baitfish sit. Very, very cool fishing and of course, I now have to work on my Grand Slam of a Bonefish, Tarpon and Permit, all on a fly rod.
Under any circumstances, the rest of the country -- with the exception of a few markets such as Manhattan and downtown Chicago -- could not absorb the costs for housing or the taxes California imposes on its residents and businesses. Part of the reason stems from the fact that California is indeed different; its climate, topography, cultural life cannot be easily duplicated in Kansas City, Dallas or anywhere else. People will pay for the privilege of living in California, particularly along the coast. Would they do so to live in Minneapolis or Charlotte?
“I don’t look past right now,” he said. “Now there’s this fame business. I know it’s going to go away. It has to. This so-called mass fame comes from people who get caught up in a thing for a while and buy the records. Then they stop. And when they stop, I won’t be famous anymore.”
We became aware that a young waitress was standing by diffidently. Dylan turned to her, and she asked him for his autograph. He signed his name with gusto, and signed again when she asked if he would give her an autograph for a friend. “I’m sorry to have interrupted your dinner,” she said, smiling. “But I’m really not.”
Some crackin', breakin' sounds in this recent song, Scarlet Town. Edgy lyrics here. A poor audience recording below but the heating flame adds something hellish. Ominous banjo like in High Water. I don't think Bob has made a recording of it, but maybe.
Dylan mainly on piano these days - arthritis it is said. Sucks to grow old in some ways.
The talent to be a spell-binding storyteller is rare. I suspect that Homer was one of those talents. I have known a couple of talented story-tellers, but most people who try to tell a story just bore you unless it's less than two minutes long.
The ability to write down a story seems to be much more common. Film scripts, short stories, novels, plays are all constantly written but rarely published or performed. It seems to me that written stories do not need high-level wordsmithing to be successful, but high-level wordsmithing can turn the simplest story into art. Shakespeare, for example. Good plays and good TV scripts can do fine with simple conversational dialogue if the tale has a good engine and cool characters.
When I think of wonderful written storytelling with mediocre wordsmithing, I think of people like Tom Clancy and Robert Parker. When I think of extraordinary wordsmithing with uninteresting stories, I think of Updike. When I think of current transcendent prose, cosmic imagination, truthful expression, giant intelligence, knowledge, and life experience - and simple stories raised to the level of art, right now I think of Mark Helprin. Perhaps because I am in the middle of his collection of short stories, The Pacific and Other Stories.
Especially his story about Ralph, the possible baal shem tov, but the story about falling in love on the Staten Island ferry was soul-piercing too. Over the years, he has opened my eyes to many things which I will not recount now.
But back to story-telling. Much of TV writing is formulaic. It has to be. I think The Sopranos was brilliant TV, great story-telling. So was Downton Abbey even though that was more of a chick thing.
For those who are filled with stories to tell, but are not naturals like Mark Twain, there is a now-classic book: The Anatomy of Story: 22 Steps to Becoming a Master Storyteller by John Truby. It's not a formula except in the broadest sense: he just tells you how all successful stories work. It is like a textbook.
Can the wordsmithing be taught? I dunno. I doubt it, given that the talent is rare and life is short.
Why People Are Boycotting LL Bean Over Donald Trump
Outside Truckee, big rig driver 
For the first time in decades, 
That is, near us - in summertime. 
Academia
Photo: Salvador Dali and Walt Disney
I use "calisthenics" as an umbrella term for exercise which is not heavy weights (except kettlebells) and is not pure cardio. These are exercises which involve bursts of intense cardio combined with muscle use so they contribute to agility, muscle "toning" and "maintenance", power, speed, endurance, coordination, balance - all good things except strength-building.
Tyler Cowen's 
Newly Discovered Photographs 