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.
Preaching (ie Teaching) seems over-emphasized. I think people go to be part of a community which is body of Christ. Jesus clubs. When teaching becomes performance, I turn off.
Vernal Pools are (usually temporary except in high-rain years) marshes. "Wetlands," aka swampy areas. They are a cool and productive part of an ecosystem because they contain no fish or turtles to eat all of the baby amphibians.
Generally the spring pools are fed by snow melt, early Spring rain, or slow seeps from springs which do not produce enough water to keep the area wet in high summer. Springs are interesting things.
Critters that breed in vernal pools clearly need to lay eggs which produce rapidly-maturing young who can leave the pools before they dry up. For example, Bullfrog tadpoles take a long time, up to a year, to grow and mature via that crazy amphibian metamorphosis so large frogs require permanent bodies of water.
Around here, typical Vernal Pool breeders are Spring Peepers, Common Toad, Wood Frog, Cricket Frog, various salamanders. Spring Peeper eggs - tadpoles - tiny frogs are ready to leave the water in 8 weeks. Toads can do it in 12 weeks.
Early Spring is here and, anyway, I am at the end of my bird seed.
Seen today at the HQ: An Easter Bunny laying colorful eggs, Mourning Dove, Cardinal, Common Grackle, Red Bellied Woodpecker, Downy Woodpecker, Common Flicker, Tufted Titmouse, Chickadee, House Finch, Song Sparrow, Chipping Sparrow, WT Sparrow, a few remaining SC Juncos, Blue Jay, Goldfinch, RW Blackbird and overhead a RT Hawk.
Weakness relates us profoundly with other people. It allows us to feel with them the human condition, the human struggle and darkness and anguish which call out for salvation. For to be a human being is to take a certain amount of suffering into life. It is hard to get at this consideration, since so much in Western civilization attempts to disguise it or affects to despise it. One of the most debilitating aspects of American society is that we do not authentically admit the cost in a struggle and almost never allow real fear to surface. Yet most of us must struggle to make a living, must wonder about our future and about our sense of personal value in a market economy, must deal with the half-articulated and half-understood problems of our children, must fear what our death will be like—what it will mean to die; we must deal with the temptation to believe that life is without meaning, that actions are inconsequential and selfish, and that other people are to be used...
Now the nature of man Is to beg and to steal I'd do it myself It's not so unreal The call of the wild is Forever at my door Want me to fly like an eagle while Being chained to the floor, but
You changed my life Came along in a time of strife In hunger and need You made my heart bleed You changed my life
"People stay up at nights thinking of what next to put on the racist list. Next it will be mayonnaise for glorying whiteness…"
There is so little racism in this great country -that "they" have to hijack the English language and invent new definitions for "racism" -in order to have something to point at and say "see?".
With actual threats from their Committee of Public Safety. Somebody needs to remind them that this is America, the land of the free and home of the brave, and not North Korea.
My hate and hate speech is directed to those totalitarian idiots at Wellesley and everywhere else they work their malevolent schemes. At an earlier point, my reactions were of amusement but at this point my hate for this sort of crap is fierce, ruthless, and righteous.
There is another circle of hell for the spineless administrators who aid and abet this sort of nonsense by not standing up to the crybullies. They should know better. On the other hand they might be quietly on those kids' side (See Tenured Radicals).
We recently heard a performance of Bach's St. John Passion, with the same small-size choir that Bach had (but with far better voices now, for sure), and with the original instruments. Bach pretty much always bitched about the lousy choirs he had to work with. Bitched about the musicians too.
Loveliest live music I have heard in a while and, even though you know the story by heart, and when Pilate asks Jesus Was ist Wahrheit? you get a chill. Pilate was a good guy, really.
Bach wrote St. John Passion in 1774 to be performed on Good Friday. The experts say it is as close as Bach got to operatic music. It was designed as an entire Lutheran church service, with a break between Part 1 and Part 2 for a homily. Some of the choruses were familiar German hymns. It's a shame to perform it outside a church.
As with all ambitious and complex music like this, it takes me more than 3 hearings to begin to get it.
A question to which I cannot find an answer is whether Bach wrote the notes for the recitative sections, especially by Evangelist, or whether they are singer's choice. Can a reader find out?
Below, St. John Passion with a larger choir and orchestra than Bach had. Why did Gardiner use an organ instead of a harpsichord in this performance?
One by one, getting them done for better or worse. Business guys just try to get through their checklists as fast as they can regardless of nuances and sensitivities. Promised he would blow the shit out of ISIS.Had this chance to do it without civilian damage, and he just did it. That's a bigtime traditional NYC F- you from a rough New Yorker from Queens. Manhattanites can be refined and delicate sometimes, but people from the boroughs can be tough as nails. Just ask any WW2 vet if you can find one. I have.
I had thought we were done with Afghanistan. Must have missed something. Remind me where it is again. Z-man is right: it is today's Balkans. Nobody really cared about the Balkans then either, and nobody cares about the Middle East now. Or the Balkans.
However, it's a message to the world: Don't f- with Trump. With Trump, nothing is predictable so watch your back, as they say in NY. Anyway, this is the only language the Islamists understand clearly.
When you think about it, without 9-11 little or none of this Middle East involvement would have happened. So was 9-11 a success for them, or not? I want the USA out of there. And I want those baboons to leave me alone.
We are nearing the end of Lent, and I am reminded that I have reflected in the past about the idea that a function of life is to teach us enough humility to bring us to God - while our self-love fights to hold onto our precious fantasies of specialness, extraordinary integrity, appealingness, brilliance, and self-sufficiency despite the world's giving us abundant evidence to the contrary. Everybody's foot of pride comes down sometime, and often more than once. It can be brutal, but I guess we need it. Still, we must push forward as best we can and if we can do it with Christ as companion, so much the better.
This is a mystifying, rambling song which might sort-of be about a funeral, sins of pride and grandiosity, and man's Fall. Like a voice crying in the wilderness thing. Thus the contradictions of this half- crazy genius. It begins:
Like the lion tears the flesh off of a man So can a woman who passes herself off as a male They sang “Danny Boy” at his funeral and the Lord’s Prayer Preacher talking ’bout Christ betrayed It’s like the earth just opened and swallowed him up He reached too high, was thrown back to the ground You know what they say about bein’ nice to the right people on the way up Sooner or later you gonna meet them comin’ down...
He was never satisfied with any production of the song. That above with the lyrics which err: I believe it is "sordid" love affair with Errol Flynn, not "sword" , but who knows? Full lyrics here.The guy can pack more words into a line than anybody - or make fewer words fill a line completely.
For what it's worth, Lou Reed took a stab at the song:
... Christian leaders, friom Pope Francis and the Archbishop of Canterbury on down, seem to have more to say about potential, hypothetical upticks in "Islamophobia" than about the sustained attempt to eradicate the oldest adherents of their own faith. Western politicians don't seem to have much to say about it, either, perhaps out of shame: On America's watch, public expression of Christianity was obliterated in Iraq, and the last Christian church in Afghanistan razed to the ground. Almost exactly two years ago, when 148 students were slaughtered at a school in Kenya, President Obama could not bring himself to identify them as Christian, even though their killers had gone to great pains to separate their captives according to their faith, releasing the Muslims and killing the Christians. As I remarked somewhat mordantly, apparently black lives don't matter when they're Christian.
The Islamic supremacists' assault on Christianity is not confined to the Holy Land and the more benighted parts of the developing world. Monday's subway bloodbath in St Petersburg was also celebrated by Isis as making "a metro to Hell for worshipers of the Cross". It's doubtful that most of the victims, who included many students, would have seen themselves as such. But that's the point: you might not think of yourself as a "worshiper of the Cross", but that's how the guys who want to kill you see you.
"This was just about the time of that Woodstock festival, which was the sum total of all this bullshit. And it seemed to have something to do with me, this Woodstock Nation, and everything it represented. So we couldn't breathe. I couldn't get any space for myself and my family, and there was no help, nowhere. I got very resentful about the whole thing, and we got outta there. So we moved to New York..."
If you want to fertilize gardens, shrubs, lawns, trees, etc, we recommend doing it in March or early April before there is any significant budding or growth. In any event, as soon as the soil thaws. Why is that? It is because roots wake up and get hungry before anything appears visibly on plants. Some years I have fertilized right on top of a late snow.
Also, because it can take time (and plenty of rain) for surface fertilizer to dissolve and to get deep into the soil.
Well-established perennial and shrub borders in half-decent soil only need a sprinkling of all-purpose fertilizer. I imagine that it makes for better blooms. In nature, the fertilization would come from rotting leaf litter, etc. and, besides, the plants would be growing where they want to grow instead of where you want them to grow.
Do plants grow at night? Not much because they prefer to be solar-powered. However, roots do reach out in the dark (obviously) on stored energy as soon as the soil thaws to provide the nutrients to produce later foliage and bloom. Think of Sugar Maples, or spring bulbs. Sugar Maples (and all trees) have enough deep roots below the freezing level to begin sending nutrients up the tree while the surface soil is still frozen.
For later Spring, seasonal vegetable gardens do need fertilizer of any and all sorts. They love it. Vegetables are so far from natural that they would never survive without special care. Same goes for ornamental plants. Never fertilize herbs, though, because their fragrances benefit from poor nutrition.
The college’s conduct was craven. The fact that leftists planned to disrupt Mac Donald’s speech was well known, and the administration had plenty of time to prepare. It made a conscious decision to let the barbarians rule. Hiram Chodosh, president of Claremont McKenna College, said in a statement that “the school will develop strategies to make sure a mob of students cannot shut down a sanctioned campus event again.”
I have used them a few times but the change disrupts my accustomed form. The idea (which makes sense) is that the centering of weight, the more natural grip, and the kindness to a sore lower back permit you to pile more weight on the bar, thus stressing your body more.
We look back and criticize the major powers in 1914 for getting involved in the constant squabbles in the Balkans but do the same thing in the Middle East, the 21st century's Balkans.
Why do you attend church? 
Leg of
Third Wheel 
We recently heard a performance of Bach's St. John Passion, with the same small-size choir that Bach had (but with far better voices now, for sure), and with the original instruments. Bach pretty much always bitched about the lousy choirs he had to work with. Bitched about the musicians too.
An Everly Brothers' tune from Bob's 1970 
If you want to fertilize gardens, shrubs, lawns, trees, etc, we recommend doing it in March or early April before there is any significant budding or growth. In any event, as soon as the soil thaws. Why is that? It is because roots wake up and get hungry before anything appears visibly on plants. Some years I have fertilized right on top of a late snow.
You can use