Saturday, January 9. 2010
Imagining It
At eighteen, in Paris,
I just woke up out of a dream
just before dawn, and stepped through the long window
from my cold room with its red silk walls.
Shivering a little in my dressing gown,
I leaned on the balustrade
and, look, overnight a light snow had fallen;
no car had driven over it yet, it lay in the street
as white, as innocent, as snow on the open fields.
Then something approached with a calm rhythm
of hoof-beats made softer by the snow, the sound
of a quiet heart. It was a heaped-up wood cart
pulled by a gray horse who walked along slowly,
head down, while the driver
sat at the back of one shaft and hunched over
to light his cigarette.
From above, I saw clearly
the lit match in the old man's cupped hands, its glow
on his long jaw, the small well of flame
between his living palms like the flare
of the soul in his body. He went on
down the street, and the sky went on
growing lighter, and I saw how he left
his dark tracks behind him on the whiteness
of the snow, just the lines of the two wheels,
slightly wavering, and the dints of the horse's hooves
between them, a writing in an undiscovered
language, something whose meaning
we feel sure we know, and still can't quite
translate.
When I stepped inside again,
I stopped thinking about love for a minute — I thought about it
almost all the time then — and thought instead
about being alive for a while in a world
with cobblestones, new snow, and the unconscious
poem printed by hooves on the maiden street.
Of course I was not yet ready to be grateful.
(Barnes lives in Maine. She is the daughter of Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House - a book that was a mainstay of my family. There is a brief interview with Barnes here, with a listing of her books.)
Friday, January 8. 2010
Don't give up. MA may be a Dem machine state with the SEIU and ACORN etc on board, but it has plenty of Yankee free thinkers too. The Public Policy Polling report.
 Wines for fast food. Prof B
Nutrition and Tradition The Science of Food and the Culture of Cooking
A small Canadian seaside town in New Brunswick has been warned lobsters that wash ashore cannot be eaten because they weren't caught under license.
Whole Foods' John Mackey: Food Fighter
How school lunch programs manage to promote obesity and hunger at the same time.
Photo: Butterflied lamb from the grill. There is nothing better. Lamb must be cooked rare or it isn't worth eating, and the butterflied leg in the photo looks overcooked for my taste. Costco has great butterflied leg of lamb.
I believe that we all have an immature side which wishes - or sometimes pretends - that our unwise and ill-considered actions might not have negative consequences. Some people have more of that wish, some less. Also, some people learn from bad experience better than others.
(I am not talking about neurotics who unconsciously or semi-consciously invite trouble upon themselves.)
As parents, we often have to invent consequences, eg a spanking if they run into the street, or grounding if they defy a curfew. However, the best teacher of consequences isn't parental discipline: it's Mr. Reality, aka The School of Hard Knocks.
Dr. Dobson has a brief simple discussion of the topic: Behavior and Consequences - The effective use of a powerful parenting tool
When my sibs were too young to ski, I would take ski buses with pals on weekends to ski at Mohawk Mountain and Butternut for the day.
When the other kids got older we would ski all around New England as a family (my Mom skied, but Dad read books by the fire and shepherded), but most regularly at Stowe, Stratton, Bromley and good old Magic Mountain where I got skewered with a ski pole by my cousin one time.
A widely accepted truism in marketing is that sex sells. A recent academic study of movies finds that sex doesn’t sell. The study’s co-author found those attached to the truism resistant to the facts:
"When I presented these results at European Science Days this summer, I was struck by how hard it is to overcome preconceptions about the box-office consequences of highly graphic sexual content," says co-author Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis. "But not all truisms are true."
It wasn’t until I noticed a small squib in this morning’s newspaper that I was aware of the research report, which CNN reported about December 29th. (I wasn’t distracted by watching porn or looking at the lovelies occasionally appearing here at Maggie’s Farm. Actually, I’ve been enjoying the unfolding of my Optimist’s Prediction For 2010, as the portents darken for liberal-left activism and brighten for center-right activism.)
According to the study of 914 films released between 2001-2005, the largest sample yet studied, CNN leads with: “A recent study concluded that nudity and explicit sex scenes don’t translate to success for major motion pictures,” at US or international box offices or at the Academy Awards. A researcher at the Culture and Media Institute finds similar results for 2009:
This research also holds true for the 10 highest grossing movies of 2009. None contained graphic sex scenes and only one, "The Hangover," a raunchy comedy about a bachelor party in Vegas, featured a lot of sexual content. Others on the list, such as "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" "Star Trek" and "Avatar" contained mild sexual content while the rest contained little or no sexual content.
CNN quotes an author of the study:
"Sex did not sell, whether in the domestic or international box office, and even after controlling for MPAA rating," said Simonton, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. “In other words, even among R movies, less graphic sex is better."
What did sell? “The top-grossing films in the study included movies like "Shrek 2;" "Spider-Man;" "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," all of which contained mostly minor to mild sex and/or nudity.”
What about horny young men?
Tom Jacobs, staff writer for the research-driven consumer magazine Miller-McCune, wrote about the study and said there has long been the belief that the many young males who make up movie audiences are enthralled by female nudity.
"These researchers really put that belief to the test and crunched the numbers," Jacobs said. "What I took from the study is that a hint of sex is perhaps more enticing than out-and-out nudity."
That isn’t a surprise to those of us who love the great movies from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, where romance flourished, scenes faded away after the kiss, and viewers projected their own emotions and desires on to the screen, rather than today having to sit through another repetitive graphic humping on the screen.
At Maggie’s Farm, a few of us contributors enjoy occasionally posting a salacious photo, but the success of Maggie’s Farm is mostly owed to its cultural observations and photos. Our chief Bird Dog keeps that at the forefront of focus.
Let’s take an informal poll: readers please comment on our blog’s mix.
The arguments pro and con in detail at Lizards.
Thursday, January 7. 2010
What are "intellectuals" anyway?
When I was young and vain I thought I was one. I read lots of books, got myself overly-eddicated, used to read the New York Times daily, and robotically held most of the socially-acceptable, arrogant, bien pensant views. Now I know I am a regular person who just tries to live in reality as best I can, fully aware that many non-tweedy, non-Ivy grads understand life far better than I do. Uncommon sense and sensibilities can replace common sense. From Tom Sowell's new book, with interview video, at SDA:
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society - intellectuals certainly can renounce war, “and that does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you.”
We used to ski the places on Rte. 93 quite a bit when the pups were younger. Wildcat and Gunstock Mtns, too. Less crowded and, truth be told, more genteel folks on average than on the Vermont slopes. I am partial to Loon, but Cannon Mtn. gets the prize for NH's funkiest, old-style place. Here's a brochure from the 1970s (Mittersill has been closed since the 70s):
Krauthammer is right, at NRO:
On Ben Nelson’s statement that “I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy”
Nelson is right on two counts. A, it was a distraction, as the citizenry sees it, from the main issue, which is the recession and unemployment. And secondly because the bill itself, the proposals themselves are so appalling that on the merits, on the substance, there's huge opposition. ...
Very smart. Read it all (link above)
Send a few spare bucks to Scott Brown.
Jacob Burkhardt did. First Principles.
...my friend saw a leaf floating down from a tree in a peculiar swirling pattern. He then asked, "Dr. Einstein, why is the leaf falling from the tree like that rather than straight down?" Einstein replied with a smile, "I don't know."
Via a piece at Am Thinker by Lauri Regan. I find "I don't know" to be one of the most useful sentences in the English language.
A sad end for the Tavern on the Green. They closed down last week.
Wednesday, January 6. 2010
Our readership grows each year. It used to double, but now it only grows at around 20-25%. Bummer.
Cybersluts that we are, we want to keep on growing. It's our only reward for our efforts - besides our own private pleasure in posting.
I know that we are a boutique site - not to everyone's taste - but there are probably millions out there around the world who would like to partake of the Farm's offerings.
(Remember that politics is just one part of what we discuss here. Even if people are further Left than we are, they can read us because we try to discuss things half-intelligently and with facts - except when we need to perform a therapeutic rant.)
Do us a favor, and do your friends and email list people a favor, and send the link to Maggie's around. It's a free subscription! Plus no annoying advertisements!
Thank you, Readers.
(Photo of one of our farmworkers, organizing our archives for posterity.)
This graph is making the rounds today so we might as well pile on. It's from Clusterstock. I think the problems this represents are obvious:
"The United States does not have a security system; it has a system for bothering people."
Shlomo Dror, an Israeli air security expert (h/t, Vanderleun)
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