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.
If you take a nice hike from the center of Florence across the Arno and up the hill to San Miniato (an active abbey), you will walk past and even clamber over some of the defensive walls designed by Michelangelo. The monks at San Miniato are friendly fellows, and they can sure chant the vespers.
Pic above is one of our hikes in heavy rain through the higher terrain of Scalpay along the Hebrides Way.
- I'll post a few more photos when I get my over-200 photos organized and edited (mostly taken with Gwynnie's waterproof Olympus pocket camera - man, that was necessary), but a few introductory comments with some photos - below the fold -
I need a funny quote about Saturday. I have to paste something in here. You fine readers deserve more than just a few links to digital fishwrap. You merit inspiration. You're worthy of something stimulating. The day itself warrants an attaboy.
Quotes about Saturday are thin on the ground, however. It's the day of rest of days. Saturday is for putting on go to hell pants and painting the fence. Mucking out plugged gutters off rickety stepladders. Going to the dump. Wags and deep thinkers alike have given Saturday a pass. The Saturday sojourn of sol across the firmament just doesn't move the apothegmatic meter.
I say no! Saturday must get its due. Let's see what we can find to tickle our Saturday intellect, and send us to the transfer station with a spring in our step:
Most of the time you're too busy to think about it. But every now and then you say, "I work at 'Saturday Night Live,' and that is so cool. -- Tina Fey
No, it isn't.
Satire is what closes on Saturday night. -- George S. Kaufman
See: Fey, Tina.
I'm blessed by the fact I only need five hours of sleep on a daily basis. I do tend to regard Saturday and Sunday as work days. -- David Rubinstein
David strikes me as the kind of person who mentions his SAT scores to everyone he meets, even though he's 54. I don't know about you, but I'm not inspired by this quote. I don't want to add any weekend toil to the good, solid, fourteen hours of work I perform during the week. Let's move on.
Every man has a right to a Saturday night bath. -- Lyndon Johnson
Oh, dear. Old Lyndon Baines wasn't exactly Cicero, was he? I get the impression that this quote is an adulteration of a quote from Lady Bird Johnson, "Lyndon, every man has a need for a Saturday night bath, whether he's president or not."
I enjoy Saturday night racing. -- Dale Earnhardt
Sorry Dale, but by Friday afternoon, I feel as though I've hit a wall.
Wait, that came out wrong. Never mind. Forget the whole thing. Here are the Saturday links. You're on your own for inspiration:
More good dad goodness. Now that I think of it, Saturday is a dad kind of day. I can guarantee that this dad gets comped at Disney five times over. The video is more viral than the doorknob at an Ebola clinic.
A worthy topic, and the article isn't entirely fanciful or stupid. There's no way the surveys aren't skewed to the boneheaded side of the ledger. This fellow seems to think Generation Z are all Bernie supporters, face painters, and sign holders. Not hardly. Let me sum up the generational divide from my personal experience. Millennials have wasted their useful working and reproductive lives with childish agitation and untenable social and work situations. They're already toast if they haven't cashed out their failed startup stock options. Generation Z has learned to be circumspect, won't answer surveys, don't like Millennials, and will make Eisenhower look leftist.
Anecdata: I was in the phone store on Wednesday. I had to choose a phone to go along with my new plan. I said, "Anything but Apple." Clerk said, "Everyone says that now."
By gad that webpage is a nightmare. Self-playing video that follows you around. Sidebar picture of a woman who got her makeup done at a funeral parlor hectoring you to change three sentences on your LinkedIn page to go from dumpster diving to six figures, and Jeff Bezos smiling or having a stroke, I can't tell the difference with him. You have to wade ten paragraphs in to find out anything important:
Those considered out of the labor force declined by 170,000 to 94.8 million while the labor force increased by 361,000 to 160.1 million.
People who have been shut out of the labor market since Nancy Pelosi hove into view are getting jobs again. It makes me happy to hear of it.
Everyone pretends to be angry at the airlines, but it's the TSA they hate, but don't have the nerve to confront. Making people who fight with flight crews and police into celebrities encourages more of that sort of thing. This guy probably thinks he'll be on Oprah next week, sitting next to Gloria Allred, and clutching big checks from the airline and the company that makes Ambien. I have my doubts.
DeVry University has agreed to a $100 million settlement in connection to ads federal officials said misled students about their job and earning prospects.
Oklahoma City Police Department reports show that Whyte and another man were in the living room of an apartment in the 1400 block of NW 16 Street when they began arguing if Star Wars or Star Trek was better. The victim told police he became frustrated and stated "You're just a trick" before walking back to his room.
Surprisingly, the combatants weren't pasty, obese neckbeards wearing trilbys and My Little Pony tee shirts.
It's outdoor grilling season (well, that is all year-long for many of us regardless of snow), but I want to convey our Cordon Bleu-trained chef friend's advice for oven-roasting meats of all kinds: Always 400 degrees.
Even chicken. Ignore the cookbook. Use a meat thermometer if you can't tell doneness by touch.
More meat advice from our expert:
- Remember (everybody knows this anyway) that meat continues to cook for at least 10 minutes after removing from the heat. That fact has ruined many a rare steak or butterflied leg of lamb.
- Rib-eye is best pan-cooked, no matter how thick. Otherwise many or most meats can be pan-seared and roasted. She says grills are best for burgers and hot dogs, but I disagree. I love a grilled butterflied leg 'a lamb. Possibly my favorite meat. Rare, please.
The Maggie's Farm editor ate my homework. It does that once out of every five tries or so. It keeps me guessing in the most piquant fashion. The Maggie's Farm computer console is hooked up by a leather strop to the hub of Bird Dog's Farmall, and sometimes, if the humidity is high, the belt slips. Oh well. You'll have to skip my scintillating insights for today, and just read the boring old newspapers:
But aren’t there any supercomputers that don’t require this much energy to run? Indeed there are: The human brain is a great example – its processing power is estimated at about 38 petaflops, about two-fifths of that of TaihuLight. But all it needs to operate is about 20 watts of energy. Watts, not megawatts! And yet it performs tasks that – at least up until now – no machine has ever been able to execute.
Your brain is 2/5ths as powerful as the most powerful computer ever built. It's not your brain's fault you use it to watch pro wrestling and worry about vaccines and autism. You could be doing something useful with it.
This is an instance not of judicial activism, but of judicial populism. It is, albeit in clotted legal language, a pandering to popular, or at least very common, notions of causation, such that where two notable events take place in close temporal proximity, it stands to reason that the first must have caused the second. We are not far from the Azande belief that no death is natural, and each death is caused by malign witchcraft.
Theodore Dalrymple is one of maybe five intelligent persons currently writing for the internet.
The GPS measurements in the Taupo volcanic zone reveal that it is widening east-west at a rate of 6-15 millimetres per year - in other words, the region, overall, is expanding, as we anticipated from our previous geological understanding. But it was surprising to discover that, at least for the past 15 years, a roughly 70-kilometre stretch is undergoing strong horizontal contraction and is also rapidly subsiding, quite the opposite of what one might anticipate.
Real scientists observe things and ask questions. Fake scientists make pronouncements and ask for edicts. This is real science.
In the interview Eno confesses that “Roxy Music was an aberration in my life” and also intriguingly asserts that he has never owned a copy of the Velvet Underground’s third album because he does not want to spoil it by overplaying it. But the most startling portion of the interview comes towards the end, when he describes an illicit art adventure he experienced three years earlier, in 1990, when he decided to pee in Marcel Duchamp’s famous “ready-made” from 1917, a urinal with the title “Fountain” bestowed upon it.
So he stopped his car, pulled out his medium-format camera, and took a few photos using color Fujifilm. Those brilliant greens and pure blues were totally unedited when O’Rear uploaded them to Corbis, a stock photo and image licensing site founded by Bill Gates. A few years later, he got a call from Microsoft asking to use his shot of Sonoma County as the default background for its newest operating system.
How a grape blight resulted in the most famous photograph of all time.
High-end consumers are shifting toward fresher items with fewer processed ingredients while cost-conscious shoppers are buying inexpensive store brands. The makers of staples including Chef Boyardee canned pasta and Hamburger Helper meal kits failed to spot the threat and didn’t innovate in time.
Got that? Hamburger Helper is too hoity toity for poor people now.
Dramatic photos showed helmeted officers battling to keep order after 100,000 protesters poured into the city for their 'Welcome To Hell' protest against the meeting of world leaders. Police say they repeatedly asked a group of demonstrators to remove their masks and hoods but instead officers were hit with bottles and bricks - breaking the window of a riot van.
It's agitprop. Posing. The police pretend to police while the rioters wreck stuff. The world has raised an entire generation of Wild Ones: What are you protesting? What have you got?
The Hawaii Attorney General's Office noted after the ruling that the district court did not address the substance of either party's arguments and instead focused on the procedural question about which court is the appropriate forum to decide the issue.
The nonsensical rulings are over. Not because the judges have gotten religion. They just know they'll be overturned and they'll look like fools. To paraphrase Jennifer Cavalleri, Gorsuch means never having to say you're sorry.
Called the Panda Power Plant, it will be able to produce 3.2 billion kilowatt-hours of solar energy in 25 years, according to the company. That will eliminate approximately million tons of coal that would have been used to produce electricity, reducing carbon emissions by 2.74 million tons.
Goofy projects deserve a goofy design, I guess. If arithmetic isn't your strong suit, coal costs maybe $40 a ton. It cost 55 million dollars to build a solar array to avoid buying 40 million dollars-worth of coal.
She said: "When you use antibiotics to treat infections like a normal sore throat, this mixes with the Neisseria species in your throat and this results in resistance." Thrusting gonorrhoea bacteria into this environment through oral sex can lead to super-gonorrhoea.
Super Gonorrhoea? They'll probably make him into a Marvel superhero in the next edition.
After making contact with the woman, Devine loaded the scooter in his patrol car and gave her a ride home. Vehicles such as Amigos cannot operate on the expressway safely since they are unable to maintain the minimum speed limit of 45 mph. Most mobility scooters cannot travel faster than 5 miles per hour.
It was kind to help her out instead of citing her.
The four teenagers “will not be arraigned for at least six months,” Judge Robert Welsh III said on Wednesday. He agreed to delay the arraignments while the four attend a program for first-time offenders.
First-time offenders? What does that mean? They were all virgins? There's a program? Back in my day my friends just slapped me on the back and said attaboy.
I have skied Mount Mansfield countless times (at the Stowe ski area) but I have never hiked it. Hiking to the top in summertime would be quite the challenge for me but I'd love to give it a shot. Or maybe not. Mansfield is the tallest peak in Vermont. New Hampshire has higher peaks.
In winter, you can get up there on skis, cruise along the ridge, and go down Madonna Mountain into the Smuggler's Notch ski area.That's really a better ski area - fewer people.
Ace posted this painting of a guy taking a leak picnic party atop Mt. Mansfield, by Jerome Thompson (1858). I wonder how they got up there with their dresses and picnic baskets but in that era nature hiking was all the rage for the gentry.
Playing a woman's body like a violin? Wonderful. Bonded men and women ought to try to please each other as best they can in all sorts of ways. That is what it is about, partly. Fun, however, is no replacement for a spiritual emptiness.
"This is a book about how it happened," the author writes. "In particular how we went from there being nothing at all to there being something, and then how a little of that something turned into us, and also what happened in between and since." What follows is a brick of a volume summarizing moments both great and curious in the history of science, covering already well-trod territory in the fields of cosmology, astronomy, paleontology, geology, chemistry, physics and so on. Bryson relies on some of the best material in the history of science to have come out in recent years. This is great for Bryson fans, who can encounter this material in its barest essence with the bonus of having it served up in Bryson's distinctive voice. But readers in the field will already have studied this information more in-depth in the originals and may find themselves questioning the point of a breakneck tour of the sciences that contributes nothing novel. Nevertheless, to read Bryson is to travel with a memoirist gifted with wry observation and keen insight that shed new light on things we mistake for commonplace. To accompany the author as he travels with the likes of Charles Darwin on the Beagle, Albert Einstein or Isaac Newton is a trip worth taking for most readers.
Adolescence became a social construct. Most of the research into adolescence, often viewed in pathological terms, began in the 1940s. Removed from genuine, real-life experiences and confined to a restrictive, artificial mass schooling environment, it is no wonder that adolescents often respond with apathy, angst, and anger. But this is not how teenagers have historically behaved, nor how they behave today in many parts of the world.
What makes it all worse is that summer jobs have disappeared with the volume of low-skilled immigration. Even relatively-prosperous kids have trouble finding the sorts of manual work they need to learn about life. I did summer "landscaping" each year during high school. It was an excellent education.
The world is moving strongly into a period of hostile takeovers.
For the purposes of our discussion, a hostile takeover is the subversion of an existing power structure from its current owners without shooting. I'll skip questions of merit. Deserve's got nothing to do with it, according to William Munny, the famous philosopher. Of course that line is a hostile takeover itself, from Lawrence of Arabia:
Lawrence: Tell the politicians to burn their paper now.
Allenby: Fair enough.
Lawrence: Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.
Sexual harassment lawsuits in the tech industry are a minor form of hostile takeover, for instance. Tech businesses were founded on circumventing established laws and customs by simply putting an http in front of your name. It worked for a while. They created nothing. They were hostile takeovers of existing power structures. They ignored laws and customs to get between the customer and the providers of goods and services they desire, as surely as Paulie in Goodfellas did to the restaurant and the patrons. Tech titans don't understand business much. That's why they're in charge of great affairs, but still sitting through TED talks about the productivity gains they'll enjoy by sorting their intellectual crayons by color. Their businesses are now big and established enough to be pillaged in turn, however, and the lady lawyers will have them, easy. They looked at my client funny, your honor. Make her CEO. You wouldn't look at Joe Pesci funny, and he's a walk in the park compared to any given woman in an office setting. I don't care. Uber run by Yahoo management doesn't bother me.
On a larger scale, shooting wars don't accomplish much anymore. Assad fights because he's weak, not because he's strong, for instance. If you order your affairs correctly, opportunities for plunder fall in your lap. People who are fighting are generally proxies of obscure power syndicates. For the most part, the world is a being ruled by syndicates. Gangster states. China is a syndicate. Russia is a syndicate. Their outward forms do not reveal their inner power structure. You simply watch what they do to identify what they're driving at. Russia wants a port on the Black Sea. They will keep the Crimea. That's not fair, say the Ukrainians. Fair? What's fair got to do with it? It's going to happen.
It appears that America is being run by a syndicate. There was a hostile takeover by an outsider who understood a proxy battle. The in crowd is attempting to put humpty dumpty back together again by any means they can muster. Looking for a head for this hydra is a waste of time. They do not need marching orders. They simply understand, as a group, that power is slipping away from them, so they might as well go all in, because if they don't, they'll be on the outside. You know, in the dreaded private sector.
They believe they deserve to run the United States, and signal their merit to rule by a series of categorical blandishments they swap with each other. They're a fraternity without Greek letters on the front. They don't think it's fair that they devoted their lives to the nomenklatura career track, only to have their skillset made superfluous by an outsider.
What's fair got to do with it? It's either going to happen, or it isn't.
The article's author inexpertly tries to flip the script back to: No one went to Trump's inauguration. He's not popular. There's 2500 words of foot stamping, and then a very interesting item I'd missed:
A White House official confirmed on Tuesday that part of Trump's globally televised speech will focus on energy issues, a reference to the Three SeAs Initiative meant to unite a dozen central European countries in a north-south economic alliance that will weaken Russia's regional power.
If that map at the top of this page looks like a nothingburger to you, you're not paying attention. I have found myself, completely by accident, doing business with businesses in three of the green countries, and the Ukraine, too. That's where the action is. Trump knows where the action is. His wife is Slovenian, after all, and she looks like she's still ready for action.
I think it is telling that most psychologists don’t seem to be able to recognize data patterns that are too large to be caused by psychological mechanisms. There are simply no plausible psychological effects that are strong enough to cause the data pattern in the hungry judges study. Implausibility is not a reason to completely dismiss empirical findings, but impossibility is.
Ah, statistics. Did you know that 94.73 percent of statistics are made up on the spot?
An empire like Byzantium does not last for a thousand years without its own share of political intrigue. Here are three accounts of murder told by medieval chroniclers in vivid detail, in which the plot did not go as smoothly as the conspirators hoped, but in end resulted with a new emperor on the throne.
Kathy Griffin and James Comey seen furiously taking notes.
Independent analysts told History the photo appears legitimate and undoctored. Shawn Henry, former executive assistant director for the FBI and an NBC News analyst, has studied the photo and feels confident it shows the famed pilot and her navigator.
Ooh. Independent analysts. I love those. They're better than anonymous sources. Did they prove that Amelia refused to show up for her physical in the Texas Air National Guard, too? I'm asking for a friend. Alright, alright, I'm asking for Dan Rather.
Davila said that plaintiffs could have taken steps to keep their browsing histories private, for example by using the Digital Advertising Alliance’s opt-out tool or using “incognito mode”, and failed to show that Facebook illegally “intercepted” or eavesdropped on their communications. “Facebook’s intrusion could have easily been blocked, but plaintiffs chose not to do so,” said Davila, who dismissed an earlier version of the five-year-old case in October 2015.
"Can" is not le mot juste. Does, and will be allowed to continue to do so, is more like it. The judge's reasoning is piquant: Did you see the way the plaintiff was dressed online? They were asking for it.
Volvo will only offer electrified powertrains in models that it launches starting in 2019, a move that signals its intention to phase out the internal combustion engine from its lineup, the automaker said Wednesday.
Younger people increasingly want more egalitarian relationships in which men and women can both pursue their careers and share household duties. But career pursuits have won the battle for the last decade or so, while starting or growing families has taken a backseat on a mass scale.
I see the kamikaze ethos is alive and well in the land of the rising sun.
“They’re not hard to pick out at the end stage,” Dr. Zabel said. “They have a vacant stare, they have a stumbling gait, their heads are drooping, their ears are down, you can see thick saliva dripping from their mouths. It’s like a true zombie disease.”
The deterioration in physiological function normally associated with aging is, in fact, caused by a combination of reduced physical activity and the aging process itself. By maintaining an active lifestyle, or by increasing levels of physical activity if previously sedentary, older persons can maintain relatively high levels of cardiovascular and metabolic function, including ˙VO2max (Kohrt et al. 1991), and of skeletal muscle function (Rogers and Evans 1993). For example, Fiatarone and colleagues (1994) found an increase of 113 percent in the strength of elderly men and women (mean age of 87.1 years) following a 10-week training program of progressive resistance exercise. Cross-sectional thigh muscle area was increased, as was stair-climbing power, gait velocity, and level of spontaneous activity. Increasing endurance and strength in the elderly contributes to their ability to live independently.
The saddest part of the story is how quickly training gains are lost during periods without regular (meaning 3+ days/wk) strenuous activity. There is measurable decline in cardio functioning and muscle strength in weeks, and training gains can be lost in a few months. Use it or lose it. That is just how it is after age 30 or 35.
Physical fitness, like mental fitness, is a life-style choice.
This will be a two-part post. I'm going to cover two Internet-related topics. If you have a bunch of siblings, kids and in-laws, definitely read the second part.
Avoiding The Domain Havesters
Pic: artist's conception of average domain harvester
If you ever, ever, think you might want to start up a blog or web site one day using your name (or future business name) as the domain, you need to do it ASAP, then hold onto it with both hands. The problem is that once a domain expires, the domain harvesters will grab it up, and then they'll charge you a pretty penny if you want to buy it back. I've seen them ask for upwards of $3,000.
And you can see why they do it. If you want to open Mary Brown's Boutique, and desperately want the 'marybrownsboutique.com" name, well, you'll probably be willing to shell out some bucks for it. And that'll be especially true since you'll then be able to write it off on your income tax as a business expense. In your mind's eye, that might be enough to justify it.
So, the answer is to get the rascal registered now, then desperately hold onto it until the day you want to use it. I'd suggest you use BlueHost, the web hosting company I've been using for 15 years. The domain will only cost you $3.95/mo, which beats the heck out of paying some domain harvester their blood money down the road. And BlueHost will help you keep the domain, either by billing you automatically every year, or notifying you by email when it's due.
Some tips on grabbing a unique domain:
— If you're looking to register "jimcrawford.com", but it's already been taken, try using your middle initial, your full middle name, or perhaps "james" instead of "jim".
— You can use hyphens, so if all the above are taken, try "jim-crawford.com".
— If you're opening a fun blog site and "coolestblogintown.com" is taken, try adding "the" to the beginning, or "a", "another", "yet another", "my", "your", etc.
As for using domain suffixes other than ".com", I tend to recommend against it. If someone's trying to remember your domain name from memory, and it finally comes to them, they're going to use ".com" just by default. And if someone else already has your domain but with a ".com" (which is likely, or you would have used it), that's where they'll end up.
BTW, there's no web site involved. All you're buying is the domain. Come the day you want to use it, that'll be when you either hire a webmaster or do it yourself using the remarkable WordPress software and my easy step-by-step guide.
Here's the link to BlueHost. The sign-up process is pretty simple. At one point you'll make up a BlueHost password. Scribble it and the domain into a Notepad file and keep that rascal safe. You might also print out a copy and stick it in some file folder.
Below the fold, the wonderful adventure of opening a family blog. If you've got a bunch of siblings, kids and in-laws, it's a great experience for everyone involved.
I could never figure out if Christopher Plummer was any good. He's been a fixture in movies I like to watch for a long time. He wouldn't get carved into any cinematic Mount Rushmores or anything, but he was always hanging around. He's more important than a That Guy in the movies, but I have trouble picturing people plunking down the shekels because his name was above the fine print on the poster.
He was Kipling and Arthur Wellesley and Rommel to good effect. He flounced around as Commodus pretty well in The Fall of the Roman Empire. The Sound of Music was approximately the most successful movie ever made, so it looks good on a resume, but he was just a bright moon in Julie Andrews' orbit in that one. The Battle of Britain is movie worth rewatching, but he's hardly the star of it. And no one pays any attention to anyone else when Peter Sellers is eating the scenery, so his turn in the Pink Panther series is also a secondary one. He and Cato have to fight it out for second place.
I got the impression he takes himself pretty seriously. Or, perhaps, wants us to take him seriously. That can be deadly. It leads to Charlton Heston trying to do Julius Caesar (shudder). Plummer has also declaims Shakespeare, but only in places where Canadian pigeons act as critics, so I have no idea to what effect. He's Canadian himself, and they ladle awards and titles all over him, but I don't know if that matters. They give statues out at random these days, based on a virtue-signalling order I can't bother to figure out.
So I get this movie Barrymore. It's a more-or-less one-man-play set to celluloid. Plummer is John Barrymore, a famous actor you never heard of if you're under the age of 93. Anyway, it's Barrymore ten minutes before his liver became an insuperable sea anchor. Washed up, bank account hoovered by Hoover and alimony. A man who made a bundle in bad movies, got serious about his work, and became a formidable Shakespearean stage actor. The movie is just Barrymore, wandering an empty stage with a reader offstage to give him cues. He wants to do Richard III, one last time, but he has to prove to some backers that he can still find the lines in the fog of his alcoholism. He still needs the work, every which way.
So Plummer plays Barrymore, a man born to a stage family, who works in Hollywood for dough and entree to the high life, but who wants to be taken seriously. Plummer has a chair or two, a drinks cart, a rack of costumes, and a basket of swords and flyswatters to work with, and a man in the canyon of the curtains to yell something back when he yells LINE! That's it. Plummer has to conjure up a man, bigger than life, then make him small, and somehow resurrect the greatness in fits and starts. He has to cook envy and pity for the audience on a hobo stove while they wait.
Identity thieves don't honor HIPAA rules? And an obese clerk with Mary Tyler Moore clothes and Post-It notes all over her monitor isn't good at safeguarding your medical records? I'm shocked. This is my shocked face.
Beacon Hill is a charming 19th neighborhood in Boston, close by the Massachusetts State House. It can't really be compared with the West Village of New York because the current charming West Village was built for the poor and working class, while the Beacon Hill development was built for the gentry.
Mrs. BD and friends were visiting colleagues on Beacon Hill a little while ago. She wondered where the beacon was. I checked it, and discovered that most of the hill and its warning beacon were taken away by horse and wagon in 1811.
It is still hilly, though.
Some major urban areas still have delightful, quiet, antique neighborly enclaves, untouched by modernity or urban renewal. I'm thinking Brooklyn Heights - and large parts of Harlem. Outside the northeast, I think of the entire downtown of Savannah, GA, which was spared the devastation of the Union armies and of urban renewal.
I have no desire to mock our British brethren on Independence Day. They are required by their circumstances to live on a pile of rocks and peat in the North Atlantic. We got the amber waves of grain. No sense rubbing it in. I'm not sure they'd acknowledge the slight. I imagine the reaction in Old Blighty at the occasion of the original Brexit was a shrug. The who, with the what now, where, has declared independence? Does that mean Lord Cornwallis will be back for the season in London? Jolly good!
The very idea that the United States would hold a grudge against England over the War of Independence seems odd to the modern American. There are plenty of European countries in line for mockery before we skip on down to the Anglo-Saxon-Norman-Scots-Irish-Welsh-Cornish-Manx-Chav conglomerate. Personally, I'd heap derision on, oh, I don't know -- Luxembourg -- before I'd mention Merry Olde. I mean, honestly, Luxembourg is a zip code, not a country. Their navy is a joke. Britain's navy has never been a joke. England expects that every man will do his duty, and they know how to get it out of him. In Luxembourg, mentioning Rum, Sodomy, and the Lash just means that Claus von Bulow is invited to your cocktail party.
Canada burned down the White House back in the day. Forgive and forget, I say. England shot Congreve rockets at Andrew Jackson. Water under the bridge, if you ask me. The Welsh may be swearing at us, but there's no way to tell by listening to them, so it's pointless to take offense. Australians do punch Americans with amazing regularity. But they punch everybody, so nobody takes umbrage. The United States is celebrating its 241st birthday today, and in the spirit of a guy who landed on his feet, I hereby invite the nation-state version of our crazy ex-wives, ne'er-do-well brothers in law, and illegitimate children to the barbecue. Happy Independence Day to one and all!
Watch a hyperlapse of the world's oldest commissioned warship the USS Constitution "Old Ironsides" entering dry dock for a planned multi-year restoration. The critical restoration work will allow her to continue her mission for years to come.
The USS Constitution is interesting as all get-out. It's made more interesting by the fact that it's basically a Ship of Theseus at this point. The United States is a Ship of Theseus. All the parts have been replaced a few times, but it's still basically the same thing.
Using a combination of traditional and modern tools and techniques in keeping with the ship’s original construction, Mystic Seaport’s shipwrights are helping to preserve the art of shipbuilding.
I've been on that boat. It's basically a studio apartment with wood paneling you can drown in. People used to be brave.
The “legendary” Moshulu is indeed the world’s oldest and largest square rigged sailing vessel still afloat. She is in fact the one and only restaurant venue on a Tall Ship today in the World. Built by William Hamilton & Co., Port of Glasgow, Scotland in 1904 for the G.J.H Siemers Co. of Hamburg, Germany as the four-masted barque Kurt. This “state-of-the-art” sailing ship was the finest and latest of man’s achievement in the world’s shipbuilding industry for the construction of bulk or packaged cargo sailing ships.
All male humans know the Moshulu is the boat packed with immigrants that cruises past the Statue of Liberty in The Godfather Part II. We also know that Han shot first. We don't know much else.
The U.S.S. Massachusetts was the worst battleship ever made. That has a lot to do with why it has spent the last 95 years rusting on the seafloor just outside the mouth of Pensacola Bay. Today, the ship is an Underwater Archaeological Preserve managed by the state of Florida. The rusting hulk is considered the oldest battleship still in existence. Scuba diving among the fish swarming over the steam-era wreck provides a portal to another time, when the nation's fledgling Navy was first beginning to flex its muscles.
Oh, THAT USS Massachusetts. The one they have in Fall River, Massachusetts is easier to visit, but it's just as rusty, I think. They have a submarine, too. It's basically a studio apartment with metal wallpaper you can drown in.
As the numbers dwindled of those who actively fought, focus turned toward others who had some sort of connection to or memory of the war. In 1868, the Anderson Intelligencer reported on an African-American man known as Old Father Robinson living in Detroit. Robinson had been born on the plantation of a Colonel in 1753 in Maryland. When the Colonel went to serve in the Revolutionary War, Robinson served alongside him as his bodyguard and was present for Cornwallis’ surrender at Yorktown which ended the war.
One of the Founding Fathers, John Adams, predicted that Independence Day would become America’s greatest holiday. This is what he wrote to his wife Abigail on July 3rd 1776: “(This) the Second Day of July 1776 will be the most memorable Epocha, in the History of America. I am apt to believe that it will be celebrated, by succeeding Generations, as the great anniversary Festival. It ought to be commemorated, as the Day of Deliverance by solemn Acts of Devotion to God Almighty. It ought to be solemnized with Pomp and Parade, with Shews, Games, Sports, Guns, Bells, Bonfires and Illuminations from one End of this Continent to the other from this Time forward forever more.” Adams got the day wrong, though. Congress voted for independence on July 2nd 1776, but didn’t approve the text of the declaration until the Fourth.
Men who fought in a real, live shooting war weren't afraid of sparklers.
Don’t put accelerants on bonfires? Says who? You’re not my real dad. You’re not my supervisor. Who died and put you in charge? Yeah, well, you and whose army is going to stop me?
As Sam Adams used to say, "Hold my brandy smash and watch this!"
Due to their lust for drink, early Americans came up with a baffling variety of proto-cocktails from their slim culinary arsenal of rum, cider, ale, cream, sugar, molasses, eggs, spices and citrus. Some of the drinks they consumed—such as shrubs and hard cider—are again on the ascendance behind the bar; others, such as Whistle-Belly Vengeance (bits of stale bread dropped into warm, sour beer, then sweetened with molasses) might deserve to stay lost to history.
Goes to show what I know. I thought "Whistle-Belly Vengeance" was a reference to the Taco Bell drive thru. Silly me.
The Department of Historic Foodways was created in 1983, with the purpose of researching and recreating the foods of the 18th century. The department currently operates daily in the Governor’s Palace kitchen and the Armoury Kitchen.
Pro Tip- Don't stick your knife in the salt cellar. Old Muttonhead gets sore if you do. Viz:
As a young schoolboy in Virginia, George Washington took his first steps toward greatness by copying out by hand a list of 110 'Rules of Civility & Decent Behavior in Company and Conversation.' Based on a 16th-century set of precepts compiled for young gentlemen by Jesuit instructors, the Rules of Civility were one of the earliest and most powerful forces to shape America's first president, says historian Richard Brookhiser.
George Washington is the greatest man who ever lived. I mean it. He refused to become the king of America, though it was offered to him. When he turned over the reins of government to John Adams, it was the first peaceful transfer of real power by election in the history of the world. Many of his rules of civility still are intelligent, actionable advice for today's world. For instance:
Utter not base and frivolous things among grave and learned men, nor
very difficult questions or subjects among the ignorant, or things hard
to be believed; stuff not your discourse with sentences among your
betters nor equals.
Apparently, the internet needs to be abolished. George said so.
Happy Independence Day to Maggie's Farm readers, and all the ships at sea!
Darn Tough Socks.
Avoiding The Domain Havesters 
Beacon Hill i