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 make my practices real hard because if a player is a quitter, I want him to quit in practice, not in a game." Bear Bryant / Alabama
"It isn't necessary to see a good tackle, you can hear it!” - Knute Rockne / Notre Dame
"At Georgia Southern, we don't cheat. That costs money, and we don't have any." Erik Russell / Georgia Southern
"The man who complains about the way the ball bounces is likely to be the one who dropped it." - Lou Holtz / Arkansas - Notre Dame
"When you win, nothing hurts." - Joe Namath / Alabama
"A school without football is in danger of deteriorating into a medieval study hall." - Frank Leahy / Notre Dame
"There's nothing that cleanses your soul like getting the hell kicked out of you." - Woody Hayes / Ohio State
"I don't expect to win enough games to be put on NCAA probation. I just want to win enough to warrant an investigation." - Bob Devaney / Nebraska
"In Alabama , an atheist is someone who doesn't believe in Bear Bryant." - Wally Butts / Georgia
"I never graduated from Iowa. But I was only there for two terms - Truman's and Eisenhower's." Alex Karras / Iowa
"My advice to defensive players is to take the shortest route to the ball, and arrive in a bad humor. - Bowden Wyatt / Tennessee
"I could have been a Rhodes Scholar except for my grades." - Duffy Daugherty / Michigan State
"Always remember Goliath was a 40 point favorite over David." - Shug Jordan / Auburn
"I asked Darrell Royal, the coach of the Texas Longhorns, why he didn't recruit me ." He said,"Well, Walt, we took a look at you, and you weren't any good." - Walt Garrison / Oklahoma State
"Son, you've got a good engine, but your hands aren't on the steering wheel." - Bobby Bowden / Florida State
A few years ago I posted a photo of a garden shrub that I see occasionally thriving on the Outer Cape. Many of our readers concluded that it was Mexican Sage. It is not. I wasted some money buying a couple of Mexican Sages online, and they will not survive my winter.
I finally got to the bottom of it today. It is Vitex (aka Monk's Pepper, or Chaste Tree). The leaves look like marijuana leaves.
Vitex can grow into a small tree or, if pruned, can remain a small shrublike perennial. In northern climes, it tends to die back to the ground in cold winters (like buddleia) but comes right back up in spring.
I think most techies would agree that the biggest innovation in recent years has been the introduction of the solid state drive. Rather than a clunky spinning disc, it uses a microchip, so obviously it's going to be blazingly faster. And, simply because there are no moving parts, it's a lot less subject to failure.
Pic: Result from using incorrect wiring with the new fast hard drives.
Actually, I should correct something I said up above. I said a digital drive is "blazingly" faster. I probably should have said screamingly faster. I mean, there's really no comparison, as you'll see in the figures below the fold.
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower
The force that through the green fuse drives the flower Drives my green age; that blasts the roots of trees Is my destroyer. And I am dumb to tell the crooked rose My youth is bent by the same wintry fever.
The force that drives the water through the rocks Drives my red blood; that dries the mouthing streams Turns mine to wax. And I am dumb to mouth unto my veins How at the mountain spring the same mouth sucks.
The hand that whirls the water in the pool Stirs the quicksand; that ropes the blowing wind Hauls my shroud sail. And I am dumb to tell the hanging man How of my clay is made the hangman's lime.
The lips of time leech to the fountain head; Love drips and gathers, but the fallen blood Shall calm her sores. And I am dumb to tell a weather's wind How time has ticked a heaven round the stars.
And I am dumb to tell the lover's tomb How at my sheet goes the same crooked worm.
I had to explain the news to a young gal at work today. I told her that Charlottesville did not deserve any of her mental bandwidth. I explained that, if there had been no camera crews, there would have been nothing. I said that the would-be white supremacists were an insignificant handful of pathetic losers undeserving of any attention, and that the antifa were delusional loser nutjobs in the employ of Soros. I said the implicit deal between protesters and the media is that the media need drama and excitement to sell Subarus and furniture and Verizon accounts, with a side benefit of trying to make their political enemies look bad. But mostly just to sell shit that people don't really need.
Selling emotional "news" to get people talking is a desperately-competitive big business. It's not about keeping you "informed." She confessed that she had never thought about it that way, that the media makes the news so people will watch it instead of CSI re-runs. She is young and innocent, but capable of learning.
Media amplifies what it wants to, and mutes what it wants to. In some ways, though, we all fall for it. This post itself is evidence for that. Are you excited about statues and Nazis, etc? Switch to Verizon and buy a new car. Next week, the media will create a fresh excitement for us suckers. Enuf said.
When you are hiking and pond-hopping in the sandy back roads of the Cape Cod National Seashore and encounter signs like this, ignore them. Everybody does. Just go on through to a lovely isolated ocean beach. In the 1950s and 60s, it was a nude beach for the artists, writers, bohemian free-love intelligentsia from Boston and NYC, and the horny modernist architects from the US and Germany.
More random pics of the place we love below the fold -
In how many ways can we live, today, like kings of olden times? For one, we don't need a court orchestra to keep our ears stimulated, altho that would be pleasant for sure.
My house radio music has always been WQXR (live streamed or sometimes regular radio), but on the Cape I discovered Chatham's Cape Classical 107.5. They are at least as enjoyable as WQXR and they also live stream. OK, I do CDs also, but only radio introduces me to music I haven't heard before.
My perennial question to my readers is this: How do I get live-streamed music to go through my fancy speakers? Or is streamed music of such lousy quality that it doesn't matter?
What about a Bluetooth audio receiver? I don't know how those work.
Charlottesville is what happens when you normalize racism and street violence. Every normalization of extremism equally normalizes the extremism of the opposite side.
The movie "Jaws" ruined beach fun for millions of people. Like "Psycho" with showers and "Snakes on the Plane" with airplanes, the idea was to make money by creating disturbing mental images for people who live lives blessedly free of elemental terrors. Shark attacks on humans are extremely rare, and probably mostly accidental. Still, the thought of it is disturbing and resonates with our deepest "monster under the bed" terrors.
I never saw Jaws. Didn't want to. I do know the famous lines from it, though. Great Whites are cold-water eating machines. They congregate where the food is. They will live on fish, but seem to prefer delicious mammalian flesh so they go where they can find it.
Does the Bird Dog family swim with the seals? Yes, and the gals often with wet suits that make them look like cute seals. You can't have a life if fear dominates every aspect of it. I do not frequent golf courses in thunderstorms, but I do not frequent golf courses anyway.
The idea of retirement from work was a 20th Century invention, growing out of Bismarck's utopian vision of the welfare state. It may turn out to have been a short-lived social phenomenon as people live longer, in better health. It's to the point that many people spend more yours in retirement than they did in their productive years.
My observations are that people (mostly men) tend to feel useless if not emasculated by retirement, and end up finding new challenges. Forced retirement, due to health or being let go for whatever reason, is particularly crushing to the male self-image. A vacation is one thing, but a permanent vacation is not so special for most people. You can only play so much golf, and a wife usually does not want a guy hanging around a house all day.
What's your view? Is retirement a life goal or an ending of some sort? I clearly feel that it is a lousy life goal, because life is only today regardless of age.
I don't want to write a commentary on the violence in Charlottesville. What happened is terrible, wrong, and any discussion of violence begins and ends with the violent acts themselves, not the activity commentators choose to associate it with. I rarely take part in group protests or political gatherings because the likelihood of one outlier who wants to impart damage is very high and I neither want to be associated with, nor a victim of, poor individual choices.
I do want to write a commentary on the removal of icons and monuments. In Tuesday's morning news, Bird Dog posted an article about Confederate statues in the Capitol building.
Before I dig in, I want to point out that if a statue triggers your emotions, I suggest you think long and hard about why you're having an emotional response to an inanimate object. I'd further point out that if these emotions regarding the statue are related to taking offense, or increasing your anger or hatred, you may want to see a therapist. I'm not a psychologist or psychotherapist, and maybe one of our other writers who are in that field can elaborate (or even tell me I'm wrong) about this point.
Consider one fact. Since Monday, monuments around the US have been removed, sometimes forcibly, in an angry response to Charlottesville. Taking this further, New York's governor, and NYC's mayor, have decided to review and remove 'symbols of hate'. One NYC councilman said "if not hate, at least symbols of hurt." I'll have to send him my list of statues that 'hurt' me.
I think politicians, and people, get bent out of shape over strange things. When I see virtually any protest forming, I begin to think "Don't those people have better things to do?" It's been a long time since I marched or protested or did anything political in a group setting. I generally don't like aligning with large groups that claim to speak for me. But a bigger personal issue is the current mindset is the assumption that if you don't agree with removal, you must somehow be sympathetic to the white supremacists. Thought Police abound in today's society, driven by emotions of hurt and hate. Moral equivalency is employed with alarming regularity, often unnecessarily and ignorantly.
I'll relate one experience I had in which I'd have to admit I was emotionally 'triggered'. It was a great learning lesson. I was in college. I was working on a TV show about hunger for the college station. A speaker arrived and handed out leaflets. One person pasted several of them on the set. It was an elephant with "GOP" written across his chest, preparing to drop a nuclear bomb. This was 1984, I was 22 years old and Reagan was being protested regularly on campus. I stood up, stated my opposition to the leaflet on the set, saying it neither had anything to do with hunger, and had everything to do with politics which we weren't discussing. I was told to be quiet and do my job. I protested again, saying it "offended my sensibilities" and that I couldn't work on a project like this. The professor who managed the station walked over, put his arm around me and said "you will be asked to do difficult and uncomfortable things throughout your life, and on your job. If you allow your emotions to get the better of you, it will cost you your job. Today, if you walk off the set, you will fail the day's project." I walked off the set, took my "F" for the day and still got an "A" for the class. But I learned a lesson. Don't let your emotions overwhelm you. I could have done the work and still been effective at my job. Today, I guess I could've sued for a "hostile workplace."
Cloud Atlas — Marvelous, just marvelous. One of Tom Hanks' best.
The Martian — One of Matt Damon's increasingly good roles.
The Great Wall — Superb special effects, great monsters, seriously hot Chinese chick. What more do you want?
Rogue One — This is the '½' flick. It is, by no means, a 'great' movie, but there's an important point to be made.
As always, you're encouraged to click on the icon on the lower-right of the player's tool bar to open them up to full-screen size. Hit ESC to get back to windows mode when through.
The hate is terrible. Why can't people with different views tolerate each other? I can, no problem. Just change the subject when they get rabid. NEVER argue. It's not worth it because views arrived at by emotion or fashion can not be changed with logic.
Early this year, to deliver on my New Year's resolution, I started working out. I found this brilliant exercise for people who have a hard time getting into the habit of working out.
Here's how it goes - begin by standing on a comfortable surface, where you have plenty of room at each side.
With a 5-lb potato sack in each hand, extend your arms straight out from your sides and hold them there as long as you can. Try to reach a full minute, and then relax. Each day you'll find that you can hold this position for just a bit longer.
After a couple of weeks, move up to 10-lb potato sacks. Then try 50-lb potato sacks and then eventually try to get to where you can lift a 100-lb potato sack in each hand and hold your arms straight for more than a full minute. (I'm at this level.)
After you feel confident at that level, put one potato in each of the sacks...
A few years ago I posted a photo of a garden shrub that I see occasionally thriving on the Outer Cape. Many of our readers concluded that it was Mexican Sage. It is not. I wasted some money buying a couple of Mexican Sages online, and they will not survive my winter.
I think most techies would agree that the biggest innovation in recent years has been the introduction of the solid state drive. Rather than a clunky spinning disc, it uses a microchip, so obviously it's going to be blazingly faster. And, simply because there are no moving parts, it's a lot less subject to failure.
Cereal Box 
I don't want to write a commentary on the violence in Charlottesville. What happened is terrible, wrong, and any discussion of violence begins and ends with the violent acts themselves, not the activity commentators choose to associate it with. I rarely take part in group protests or political gatherings because the likelihood of one outlier who wants to impart damage is very high and I neither want to be associated with, nor a victim of, poor individual choices.