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.
I have more or less stopped watching Saturday Night Live, but it is intriguing to read that Dave Chappelle, who I find to be very funny, is hosting. What is more intriguing is that a large part of the writing staff has said they will boycott the episode. This is a benefit of youth, and one I'm interested in because I have my own story in this regard.
One of my majors in college (I had 2) was Television Production. I wrote, produced, directed and filled various roles in the studios at the university for both class and the university television network. Top-tier stuff, mind you. The kind of stuff you watch at 1am in the dorm lobby when you're half in the bag or snogging with your latest love interest. Nevertheless, it's what you did to learn the ropes. Back then, I was hoping to make documentaries.
One day I had to prepare a news piece for the 1984 election. It was a talk show with some local luminaries talking about various topics like nuclear war (it was right around the time that ABC ran The Day After, which some of you may remember), feeding the poor/welfare, deficits, etc. Standard fodder for any political news program. One fellow who showed up hung flyers on the set showing elephants dropping nuclear bombs on poor people of the world. I took them down. He put them back up, I took them down. My job was set design and management. The producer that day, a fellow student, came by and asked what I was doing. I told him the set was my responsibility and I felt the flyers would imply a bias of the programming, and that they personally offended my own sensibilities. The producer told me to honor the guests' wishes and put them up. I told him "since this is my set, then I'm asking to be relieved of my responsibility, I'd rather sit this one out."
I took a few pics of our Luberon trails and routes, but not many of the challenging trails. Too busy clambering over stoney trails. Various routes wind down dirt roads, some through little paths, some past farmhouses, vineyards and olive groves. As I mentioned, the hardest part is following directions and trail marks.
The Brit hiking company (The Carter Company) that organized our trip gave us hiking guides (no maps). They also left off huge picnics each morning for us to carry, and transported our luggage from hotel to hotel. How long were the hikes? 5-6 hours.
As usual with hiking, it's mostly uphill but this bit was just easy and pleasant. Olive grove on the right, woodlands on the left::
Bird-hunting is basically walking, or hiking, with a dog and a gun. Maybe with a pal or two.
Our Sunday hunt was not productive of meat, but we must have seen 50 Bluebirds. Whether a migrating flock or a local population, who knows? They do not migrate much, depending on food supply. Berries in winter, bugs in summer. They are a kind of thrush, like robins and lots of other birds.
The Eastern Bluebird likes large fields, meadows, pastures, beaver marshes, and golf courses. Backyards, not much. Woodlands, no.
If you scatter 5 or 10 Bluebird houses around a large meadow, they will find them sooner or later. Tree Swallows will find them too, and they can fight about it.
Recently, I've had a number of bad events occur. Supposedly, these things happen in threes, and I'm hoping that's how it goes. I won't share the first two event details. Needless to say they are both very upsetting and expensive events. The third event was VERY expensive. And very avoidable.
What made it particularly galling was how it happened to me, someone who is ridiculously careful online because among the roles of previous jobs I've held, one has been the management of online privacy and data. Compelling partner companies to take extra effort, steps or other precautions to protect user data and information.
If your company is like mine, you take tests each year to identify several different forms of potential identity capture. Phishing, Spearphishing, downloading Trojan horses, etc. There are many ways to do it, and I'm familiar with all of them. I've always passed these tests with flying colors, and I've even caught several transgressors over the years.
Before I tell my own, very humbling, story, let me say this kind of event is not just an issue of being online. My stepmother is not as adept online as I am, so does not engage the internet to nearly the degree I do. Yet several years ago she was scammed out of several thousand dollars in attempting to do something good for her grandchild - so she thought. Unfortunately, she (much like I am about to detail) missed one or two key details in her situation, and fell victim to a con over the phone. Anyone can be a victim.
Fennel grows like a weed - and literally as a roadside weed - all over Europe. A celery-like thing, with a cool licorice flavor. You can munch on it raw, sautee it, or pickle it either as refrigerator pickles or real pickles. Fenuil in French, finocchio in Sicily and Italy.
It's perfect with simple seafood. Here's my first course (lousy photo): Warm salad of sliced octopus on a bed of sauteed fennel.
Main course (which was not really needed) - a rare filet of French beef with a jus with olives, not mushrooms. And usual Euroland runny mashed taters.
The decision to stop requiring the SAT or ACT, which was taken up by nearly every élite college in the country, most likely did not come out of some sudden collective epiphany about the harms of standardized testing. Rather, I’d imagine that those scores could be the potential evidentiary basis for lawsuits that compared admissions rates between applicants of different races. It’s far easier to explain gaps in grade-point average, extracurricular activities, and the like than it is to explain why someone who got a 1590 didn’t get in, but someone who got a 1350 did.
“What colleges and universities will need to do after affirmative action is eliminated is find ways to achieve diversity that can’t be documented as violating the Constitution,” Erwin Chemerinsky, the dean of the University of California, Berkeley, School of Law, told me. “So they can’t have any explicit use of race. They have to make sure that their admissions statistics don’t reveal any use of race. But they can use proxies for race.”
Yeah, the mighty mighty deadlift. Nothing does it better. Even though I have done these for years, a technical tip always confuses my brain. Best to begin your set light to groove the movement in, then raise the weight until it's stressful as hell to do 2-4 reps.
This youtube is correct, but makes it sound complicated. It's not. Main tip is that you push the world away with your legs. And keep back straight. No way to hurt yourself with this.
I would hire more help and maybe a driver, avoid making new "friends", and consume much better wines. Buy some good land, and get a Netjets account. But what's the deal? You win $1.5 billion and have to give back a third.
The Court's interest in revisiting racial affirmative action got me thinking a bit more about the idea of meritocracy.
Merit, say, for employment in my field, is relatively easy to assess. We want to hire people who are personable enough to be good colleagues, bright, eager, good writers and speakers, and easily-trainable. If they don't work out, they have to leave. We do not care about your golf game.
So, in my view, merit has to do with the right fit for a job or task. The right talent stack, as Adams would put it.
I know that many private secondary schools (the PSSAT) and, of course, still most higher ed wants test scores. The SAT and ACT are basically proxies for IQ or, at least, functional IQ as it has to be applied to a test. But is IQ a measure of general merit as a human being? Of course not. It matters, but how much?
Let's say you are head of admissions at a competitive higher ed school with far more applicants than spaces. Your job is to try to field a group of smart kids with enough talents to field sports teams, an orchestra, some math geniuses, etc. Fill each bucket.
Oldest known sentence written in first alphabet discovered – on a head-lice comb
Bird-hunting is basically walking, or hiking, with a dog and a gun. Maybe with a pal or two.
The wonderful movie 