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.
Since we're on a month of our push-up challenge, a few ideas:
- go as low as you can - squeeze your glutes and tense your belly. Perfect plank. It should be a total body exercise, not just chest and triceps - don't let your elbows flare out - keep them tight - to vary it a bit, do them with your feet on a bench, chair, or box of whatever height. The higher, the better, with the ultimate being handstand pushups. I am going to do half of mine on a decline now.
Slavery, torture, and cannibalism—tell me why we’re celebrating “Indigenous People’s Day” again? And we’re getting rid of Columbus Day to protest—what? The fact that one group of slavery-practicing violent people conquered another group of violent, blood-thirsty slavers? That’s a precis of the history of the Americas before Columbus arrived.
This has always been the fatal flaw of the Left’s politics of race guilt: Name the race that’s not “guilty”? Racism, violence, and conquest are part of the human condition, not the European one.
The deal appears to be, however, a largely symbolic concession to Ms. Merkel’s Bavaria allies that may change little in practice, partly because the right to asylum is enshrined in Germany’s constitution.
My genius trainer thinks these are ridiculous, but they are a routine part of the calisthenic classes I take. All I can say is that they keep your heart rate up and your body in explosive and fatiguing motion. Basically, explosive jumping jacks.
Most of us here are in favor of Puerto Rican independence. US Territories are an obsolete concept. Evil colonialism. Blame Columbus, and let PR free. To help erase Columbus more completely, let's ban the colonial Spanish language from Latin America as soon as possible. It's a painful remnant of oppression.
They are known to like damp habitats or stream edges, but they grow well, and spread, almost anywhere. They like sun. I have found them very easy to grow, and highly productive of fruit in Sept/Oct.
What are they good for? Jam and pies. I have never had Elderberry Wine, and most likely neither have you. Why bother?
. "We're pretending we're having a debate about gun control," Mollie said, "but we're really having a debate about the nature of evil and whether a big enough government can contain it." It was an observation so womanly wise that a mere news discussion couldn't address it. The rest of the panel ignored her and the talk immediately turned to the utterly meaningless effort to ban bump stocks.
In Brandenburg, as in Trump-world, there’s plenty of political energy against globalized, mealy-mouthed, quinoa-loving, inequality-fostering, immigrant-embracing elites with their gender spectra, climate doomsdays, multilateral organizations, mainstream parties and smug no-alternatives views of existence.
We don't have a "Sports" category, but maybe we should. I normally wouldn't call out a seemingly obscure sports obituary. However, it seems worthwhile, particularly in these 'racially troubled' times (let me be clear, I don't feel we are in any troubled times, but Connie Hawkins' story goes to show just how far we've come).
I was surprised to learn Hawkins passed away. In fact, I'd forgotten about him, more or less. Not an extremely well-known NBA player after the early 70's, in his early years he had been blacklisted by the NBA because he was implicated in a point shaving scandal. The problem, of course, was he was a freshman in college, ineligible to play, and couldn't have been involved in any point shaving. During the investigation, he was denied the right to legal counsel while being interviewed by NYC police.
As a result, he was expelled from school, and the NBA blackballed him. He played for the Globetrotters, the Wizards and eventually joined the fledgling ABA and proved he was every bit as good as expected. Unfortunately toward the end of the 1968-69 season, he injured his knee and it required surgery. That same year, his suit against the NBA's blackball was settled and he received a large payment as well as having his rights assigned to the Phoenix Suns.
His first season, he again set out to prove he was a top tier player. But after 8 years of being denied the right to play professionally, many of his best years were behind him. Despite this, he averaged 24.6 points per game, 10.4 rebounds and 4.8 assists. There's little doubt that, fully healthy, Hawkins would have been a premier talent, probably even an NBA legend, if not for circumstances lining up against him.
7 years later, his career was over. He remained a regular at Phoenix poker rooms for years, where his affable nature and celebrity kept him in good company. He was honored by the NBA and inducted into the Hall of Fame because of his overall contributions to the game, in 1992. The Phoenix Suns retired his number, 42.
In the genre of sports literature, 2 books stand out to me. Ball Four and Foul! The Connie Hawkins Story. I read both in my early teens, and they taught me as much about life as they did about sports and celebrity. They are, in various ways, classics and paved the way for all the stories in that genre which followed. They broke the rules of silence surrounding sports, exposing the soft underbelly and dirt which were previously ignored because athletes were icons, and sports leagues seemingly incorruptible (despite the Black Sox Scandal, Americans had a love affair with sports leagues and even today these flawed organizations are viewed as leaders and examples for young athletes). Hawkins was a victim, as opposed to a perpetrator (unlike Jim Bouton), of bad behavior.
What may have made him most well-known, toward the end of his injury-riddled NBA career, was a sketch on the second episode of Saturday Night Live, in which he played Paul Simon in a game of one-on-one.
Here is a link to the video (there is no embed capability, unfortunately). The Paul Simon/Connie Hawkins sketch occurs about the 17:20 mark.
The Southern Flying Squirrel is found throughout the eastern US and southeastern Canada. They inhabit good-sized mature deciduous woodlands.
Because they are entirely nocturnal, you probably don't know whether you have them around or not but if you are neither in, nor on the edge of a forest, you likely do not. Big eyes, to see in the dark.
Owls eat them.
Cute little buggers. They use their tails as rudders. I have never seen one in the wild. Have you?
The wrath of country club Republicans never burns so hotly nor are they ever so energetic as when they have base Republican voters in their sights. Democrats they can deal with, but a peasant voter uprising within their own ranks? That deserves a pogrom.
21:33 "Listen to another parable. There was a landowner who planted a vineyard, put a fence around it, dug a wine press in it, and built a watchtower. Then he leased it to tenants and went to another country.
21:34 When the harvest time had come, he sent his slaves to the tenants to collect his produce.
21:35 But the tenants seized his slaves and beat one, killed another, and stoned another.
21:36 Again he sent other slaves, more than the first; and they treated them in the same way.
21:37 Finally he sent his son to them, saying, 'They will respect my son.'
21:38 But when the tenants saw the son, they said to themselves, 'This is the heir; come, let us kill him and get his inheritance.'
21:39 So they seized him, threw him out of the vineyard, and killed him.
21:40 Now when the owner of the vineyard comes, what will he do to those tenants?"
21:41 They said to him, "He will put those wretches to a miserable death, and lease the vineyard to other tenants who will give him the produce at the harvest time."
21:42 Jesus said to them, "Have you never read in the scriptures: 'The stone that the builders rejected has become the cornerstone; this was the Lord's doing, and it is amazing in our eyes'?
21:43 Therefore I tell you, the kingdom of God will be taken away from you and given to a people that produces the fruits of the kingdom.
21:44 The one who falls on this stone will be broken to pieces; and it will crush anyone on whom it falls."
21:45 When the chief priests and the Pharisees heard his parables, they realized that he was speaking about them.
21:46 They wanted to arrest him, but they feared the crowds, because they regarded him as a prophet.
I visited Breezy Point last weekend. It's a small private beach community on the western end of Rockaway on the other side of Jamaica Bay and not far from JFK airport. No high-rises are allowed.
It doesn't feel like New York City, but you can see the Manhattan skyline in the distance. Is it heavily Irish? Yes. Very comfortably rustic. Since Rockaway is an Atlantic barrier beach, the land (sand) is always in motion. It was hit hard by Sandy.
NYC has so many unique neighborhoods that only one man, Curtis Sliwa, knows them all.
My chef friend told me that home-made Reese's are better than store-bought, and you can make whatever sizes you want. (I wonder whether you can make them pie-sized and cut them in slices. Why not? Might be good with ice cream on top)
Easy:
- Buy whatever sort of peanut butter you want. Put it in silicone candy molds and freeze in freezer. - Make some tempered chocolate.That's the specialized part. - Dip the frozen pieces of peanut butter in the tempered chocolate, and let air-dry at room temperature on waxed paper. Done.
- To make them even better, sprinkle a little kosher salt on top before the chocolate hardens.
After more research and experience, and taking into account reader comments, I have come up with two or three good ideas for rugged hiking, eg Europe's "Moderate hill-walking, or Level 2" which is what they call "Difficult" or "Challenging" in the wimpy US hiking ratings.
For colder weather, you can just use winter underwear with them. These are not really hunting and brush-busting pants, or for happy weekend walks-in-the-woods either, but for extended hikes in mixed weather with some mud, mountains, boulders, and scree, etc. White Mountain, Rockies, and Dolomites hikes. I am eager to get on Mt. Washington, but next on our schedule is good old Storm King.
BTW, what is it with the word "pant" ? I always thought it was a plural.
Reason has little to do with the firearms issue. I'm sorry, cutie, but The Second Amendment isn't about hunting and shooting sports. It's about freedom.
Can we please make murder illegal? It might help, or do the guns kill people? Can't we just Do Something?!?!?
I suspect that they are just terminally, willingly, spinelessly naive. Willingly naive is a kind of denial of reality so it is not too far from insane. They will not admit to themselves that they are being played because that would expose their moral and spiritual frailty.
The world, and academia, needs more Prof. Petersons and fewer profs and administrators who fold like a cheap camera, as they used to say.
The argument that introducing modern civilization to more primitive societies may have been more of a blessing than a curse in many cases seems to be One Of Those Things You Can Not Say.
What would India be without the British Raj? Well, hard to say, but debatable.
She is so wrong. Under British law, commoners were not allowed to own swords for centuries. Commoners want weapons too for whatever reason. Now the elites want their armed bodyguards but they don't want me to have my .22?
Harsanyi: Come And Take Them, Bret Stephens - As an American-Jew whose ancestors came here escaping both Nazism and communism, I totally 'get' the Second Amendment 'fetishists.'
Of course, the grandstanding hacks and moral midgets in DC are going for the guns; most shockingly (or not, really, when you think about it) some in the GOP are going wobbly as well. What-the-actual-F**K; I mean, here we are, with majorities in both houses and holding the Oval Office, a political third rail to end all third rails, science, statistics, reason, history, the friggin' US Constitution and 200 million legal, responsible gun owners to back us up and McYertle meat-puppet John Cornyn is stuttering and muttering about a possible bump-stock ban. For the love of all that is righteous and good, will no one who is putatively on our side in the Senate or Congress rise and shut these tyrants up once and for all? You've sold us out on healthcare, the budget, prosecuting the IRS and other bureaucratic tyrants and laughing at us while you do it. But on the Second Amendment, is it too much to ask to reject the propaganda and fight?! I guess it is.
My traveling pal emailed me his bowl of goulash in Budapest. 
Yes, 
No, you probably 
Don’t 
The 
The Science 
A book: