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.
Body type is relevant to health, exercise, and appearance. It's worth bearing in mind that few people are a pure type, and that, for example, endomorphs can be fat (often termed "skinny fat" - ie a belly on a slender frame) and ectomorphs are not necessarily fat.
The body types are genetic, products of inborn bone and muscle structure. In other words, the body frame.
For carving beef or lamb, maybe pork, it's hard to control the thickness or thinness without a pique.
Old-fashioned carving sets used to include one, but usually not long enough and the knives with them were not top-notch. I like a slightly-serrated meat knife so I can go as thin as I want. The Pique gives good control.
Amazon, of course, has good stainless ones. Once a hot meat has rested a few minutes, use that thing and get exactly the clean slices you want.
Early one morning the sun was shining. I was laying in bed. Must be Saturday.
In my grandparent's lifetime, everyone was expected to work at least half a day on Saturday. Sunday was the only day of rest. My great-grandparents didn't even get that. They had to ask for a whole day off from working far in advance, and their wish might not necessarily be granted.
The peasant working class is reappearing everywhere. Tugging their forelock and saying, "Morning, Guvna" as they hold the door open for their latest Uber cab customer. Hawkers and pedlars don't take the weekends off. That's when they hunt their prey. Er, that didn't sound right. Leisure hours for others are target rich environments. Hmm. That sounded a trifle violent as well. Anyway, they work weekends.
Even the hoity toity don't get Saturday off in the traditional sense anymore. Unless they're smart enough to claim their cellphone ran out of batteries on the weekend. That doesn't work on a steady basis. After all, excuses must be refreshed from time to time. You can only attend your grandmother's funeral like four or five times before the boss catches on.
This is nothing. Wait until someone in the government notices laws do count on the Internet. A lawsuit for money will seem trivial when jail time is in play. Cue Attorney General Pocahontas.
While everyone was busy worrying where a doltish swimmer lost his wallet, the NSA was teaching every bad actor and tinpot dictatorship how to hack even the most secure systems. It's OK, I imagine, because they didn't mean to. Comey means never having to say you're sorry.
Look at the headline. It's magnificent. I love watching Millennials trying to operate punctuation and spelling. Apparently all twelve years of regular schooling now consists of the advice: Take a stab at it. Anyway, we ran a link yesterday that mentioned that internet security warnings often get ignored. This is why ignoring them is usually a good idea.
Half of that list is stupid. The other half would be useless if it were practical, which they won't be. Self-driving cars aren't a problem to be solved, because there's no problem there. Why do Millennials want to sit in a booster seat clutching a ziploc bag of Cheerios and a Gameboy until they're ready for a nursing home? Drive your own damn car. It's not that hard if you're not texting.
Wow, it really is Jimmy Carter's second and third term. BEOG grants are coming back. Can roller disco be far behind? They really did call them BEOG grants back in the day. It's like calling a cash-hole an ATM machine.
This is news? The Pentagon also planned nuclear strikes against the Vatican and Turks and Caicos back in the '60s. That's what they do. If they didn't plan fourteen different ways to move the Soviet Union six inches to the right, the hard way, they should have been fired.
You could have figured this out on your own. Ask yourself, WWTCLTOPED? What Would The Creepiest Little Turd On Planet Earth Do? You can reverse engineer it from there.
I don't really know why you would care, since an apple is just a sugary dessert with minimal food value. However, market apples can be up to one year old. It doesn't matter.
They are stored in a high-tech versions of the olde root cellar, cool and dark until needed.
I wrote about 500 words of screamingly hilarious text, filled with mordant observations, into the Maggie's Farm website editor. It was like leaving a bucket of corn next to the paddock. It done got et. That means the links for today are late, and they're not funny. Sorta like Game of Thrones. Maggie's makes do with a coal oil powered website, with alcohol lamps on the desks to light our compositing machine, and that's the way we like it.
No text is as funny as the text that gets erased. The fish that got away is always the largest. Writers never can reproduce lost work, even five minutes after they wrote it. Every manuscript is a foreign country as soon as it's written. If the printer accidentally burned Anna Karenina, and you asked Tolstoy to re-write it, he'd probably say something like, "I'm pretty sure it's about Russia, but don't hold me to it."
So if you need a laugh, you'll have to do without my erased observations. Picturing me putting needles in a doll that looks like the webmaster will have to do.
If software warnings from multinational tech companies didn't read like Hop on Pop, maybe people wouldn't ignore them. All the examples I see say things like, "Whoopsie, that shouldn't have happened! Our code monkeys have been dispatched to check into it. Here's a picture of a penguin!"
Another begged question. No cities are liveable. We'll give the article a pass for sticking the mealy-mouthed word "most" in there. Tallest midget in the circus. I like that the first reason a city is "liveable" is healthcare. If your first consideration for where you live is finding a doctor, you'd be happiest in a nursing home, I think.
Not many people know what Cisco does. My impression of the company is that it's 500 times more important than Google, Apple, Facebook, Snapchat, and several hundred other tech companies combined. The Internet is really just a bunch of switches, and Cisco made them all. They're hemorrhaging workers because the CEO decided he (she? I refuse to look it up) wants to be in the Software as a Service business for some reason. After everyone loses their job, and the company tanks, maybe Barnes & Noble will hire him.
I'm confused. I've been assured that it's only trailer parks with confederate flags in the trailer windows where this sort of thing goes on. And we all know that only hillbillies marry their relatives. Woody Allen could tell you that. Is it possible that low-rent behavior isn't about money?
I find Oetzi the Iceman to be the most interesting story of the last 50 years or so. Hmm. Shot in the back with an arrow, and left to die. Dude was a burglar.
If you're unfamiliar with the term, a VPN is a Virtual Private Network. It masks your IP address while you travel the Internet. Well, it sorta does, apparently.
You're right. I don't. Unlike Annabel and Emily from the Daily Mail, I've heard of Photoshop and publicity stunts. Still funny, though. Enjoy!
Say, it's Friday, isn't it? That's like the fifth Monday in a row. I hope our list of links helps you power through until they light the smoking lamp, and the blessed weekend begins. A votre sante, Maggie's readers!
I'll begin with an apology. This post may come across as a bit curmudgeonly, but I will try to keep it somewhat light. After all, it's been several months (4, to be exact) since I posted anything. It's not as if there hasn't been plenty going on, with the election, the Olympics, and a host of crazy events in the world occurring. It's not even that I haven't wanted to write. But everything we do carries a price, and we have to determine where are efforts are best applied.
For me, the corporate world has become a bizarre scenario. Recent management changes in my office have led to responsibility shifts, and being a white male over 50, I'm in an unusual position. I have to continually prove my relevance. That shouldn't be unusual, it's the kind of relevance I have to prove which is unusual. We should all have to prove ourselves capable and competent in our jobs, regardless of age. This seems to be less important today. What I have to consistently prove is how well I 'fit' in the organization. In other words, it's now what you do or say, but how you do or say it. Results aren't gauged by how quickly or efficiently they are accomplished, but by how well they are 'socialized'. To a large degree, it has required a considerable bit of effort to run in place. I've found that my days are spent as much determining strategies to move forward as they are spent trying to get the job done.
Arthur Hiller has passed away. If the name doesn't ring a bell, he's a movie director. The Hollywood Reporter, charged with identifying him in their headline to a public that left him behind years ago, called him the "director of Love Story." Why they would choose that as his epitaph is telling. About the author, and the industry. Not Arthur Hiller.
Love Story made a lot of money. People in Hollywood find a way to like things that make a lot of money. They prefer working on cranky, obscure things that pay them a lot of money, and don't make anyone else any money, but they sit up straight when a rainmaker like Arthur Hiller walks in the room. Money is power and it's all Hollywood knows.
Arthur Hiller made some fun, interesting movies. You can still watch The In-Laws with Peter Falk and Alan Arkin and get a few laughs from it. He made the pilot for the 60's TV show The Addams Family, which is still very funny to look at. Like its contemporary The Beverly Hillbillies, it was really witty for a short while, before it became like every other dreary thing on TV.
I remember Love Story. It's a bad movie, and must be unwatchable today, even for its devotees. It's not my fault it made money. It got none of mine. It's not Arthur Hiller's fault, really, that it made a lot of money, so don't blame him either. He put his best effort forward for everything he worked at, and people liked him for it. They gave him an award for being generous, once. He remarked, “It’s so embarrassing to receive an award for doing what you should be doing, but I must admit it pleases me greatly.”
That's a better epitaph for the man, surely, than the director of Love Story. RIP
Begging the question in the headline again. Tsk. Tsk. The Pieta is Michelangelo's best work. Even seated Moses could give Dave a run for his money. Moses' ankles are fine. Hell, Dave might not be the most enjoyable statue outside the Palazzo Vecchio. Hercules and Cacus is a blast, and it gives you a two-for-one discount on your sculpture-gazing budget. A statue of a guy about to get his brains beat in is more appropriate than David, when it's outside the town hall where you pay your taxes.
This will be misidentified by conservative pundits as an assault on free speech. It isn't. It's more like wanting to leave the poker game early if you have all the chips.
A true expert in valuation buys companies, he doesn't scratch away in a cubicle estimating value. And he would never tell you what he was thinking. Uber could be worth next to nothing overnight, so valuing it at par with General Motors is silly. There's no scrap metal value in Uber if it goes belly up.
This article is interesting to me for the wrong reasons. I'm amazed at the Colorforms-Highlights-infomercial style that younger generations demand for everything they look at.
All the really old persons I've known in good shape never exercised. They did physical labor out in the landscape. No one with a farmer tan ever needs a sports watch.
This will be quoted far and wide. It equates gullibility in the young with virtue, and wisdom in the elderly as stupidity, so I'm sure the Internet will love it.
So why was George Washington great? Let’s start with the word ‘disinterested,’” Dr. Wood said. Although in modern parlance, it’s often used to mean “uninterested,” George Washington was disinterested in the sense that he was impartial and cared a great deal about appearing so. He was a gentleman in the 18th-century sense, concerned about propriety and virtue—meaning reputation—and in doing things as they were meant to be done.
I've been wrong on the Internet more times than I can count. I am only "corrected" when I'm right.
Well, there's the links. Go and have an interesting, disinterested day, all you beautiful people!
The first post on this website years ago, an utterly unknown site at the time (and still not too well-known) was my pics of Christo's Gates in NYC's Central Park.
Art? Don't ask me. Fun and interesting for sure. An attraction for sure too. A gay spectacle that you moved through.
Posture is complicated, because it involves habit, training, psychological attitude, and muscle strength. Further, good posture makes you more presentable and makes you look more confident even if you do not feel that way.
Medically, good posture helps prevent back problems.
Computer monitors, age, shame and shyness, muscle atrophy, and general slovenliness are the enemies of good posture: shoulders back, head up, no slouch, belly tucked in, etc. Look good, not proudful but self-respecting.
I hate sunscreen. I at least should use it on my nose when I expect to be outdoors for hours, but I often forget to.
In recent years, Americans have become so heliophobic that they become Vit D deprived, raising the risk for many diseases. My dermatologist told me that many American kids are now Vit D-deprived due to excessive sunblock use. Oral Vit D is an unreliable source. Your skin produces sufficient Vit D via exposure to the UV rays in natural sunlight for about an hour per week (assuming your body is not mostly covered up).
Nobody wants skin cancer, but the scary one is the rare but dangerous Melanoma. It seems to be associated with sunburn. Do dark-skinned people get Melanoma? Yes.
Can you get sunburned on cloudy days? I did an experiment on myself last week. After 4 hours of kayaking on a hazy day with thin clouds, I got semi- scorched. Can You Still Get A Sunburn When It’s Cloudy Out?
I think it makes sense to get some time in unprotected sun but if you are going to be outside all day nude or in a bathing suit, spray the stuff on after that and use a hat. It can't hurt.
Reading news reports from other countries is fun. You have no chips on their intellectual poker table, so you can read about things with an unjaundiced eye. I think George Washington called the attitude disinterestedness. He meant you shouldn't have a dog in any fight that you stand to benefit from. Old Muttonhead was somewhat phlegmatic, so it's hard to know what he might be thinking about any particular topic, but I've gotten the impression by reading about him that if he saw the capital city that bears his name, he'd bust out the fire and sword. Disinterestedly.
Anyway, I went to Europe this AM and poked around, looking for things I could be disinterested in, hoping they'd interest me. I hope they interest you, too.
That's the actual headline from a Swedish news outlet. I am so very disinterested in all that. The 21st Century is making Hieronymus Bosch look like Thomas Kinkade.
From Austria. Yes, Turkey, the problem is that this information is in the newspaper, not that it's accurate. I'd read the Turkish newspaper, but there aren't any.
Snicker. For some reason I have a Cab Calloway song playing in my head. Won't they just have to turn over all the proceeds to Troy? Hi di hi di hi di ho!
I think this comes under the heading of "slow news day" in Germany. Shouldn't you be shopping for a bottle of ouzo and a spray of flowers for some Greek, to go along with your reparations check? Get busy.
Well, there you have it. Europe. And I though the United States was a silly place. Good night, Mr. and Mrs. Europe, from border to border and coast to coast, and all the ships at sea. You were fun while you lasted.
Many Americans live for hours in virtual realities at least part of the time. You might be amazed to learn that many Americans without enough to do spend over an hour daily playing computer simulation games. It's sickening and pathetic when you think about it.
Nothing against games themselves because chess and checkers are also war simulations, but there is a mental difference between chess and Sim City. Or is there? Movies and fiction are virtual realities too. So are gas fireplaces and the Pokemon Go fad.
What prompted this survey is that a friend's parents recently moved to The Villages in Florida. This place is 100% phony, to the point of being creepy. The people are real, but in a fake place. It is as fake as Disney World, but people go to Disney for a day or two to try to enjoy the fakery, not to live in it. Many resorts are experiences in fake realities.
Many of my pals enjoy fake hunts. They plant 30 pheasants in a hayfield then send the dogs after them. It's a fake hunt, a virtual hunt. Those "flying mattresses" have never even flown before in their lives. I am not saying that it is not fun, but it is a fake hunting experience.
Pic above: A di Lampedusa sitting room in the family palazzo in Palermo
Il Gattopardo -The Leopard (1956) - was the only novel the Sicilian aristocrat Giuseppe di Lampedusa wrote. It is a world masterpiece, but he did not live to see it published.
As you can imagine, I adore the Internet. The Internet is like a bad writing contest with 6 billion contestants and no prize. It's the Telephone Game played in semaphore by myopics. It's a vast playground for hunches about grammar, with capitalization carbuncles appearing here and there, garnished with improvisational spelling, in a passive voice reduction. Not to mention the mixed metaphors.
Some wags went on a safari looking for bad writing, and called it the Bulwer-Lytton Contest. We all know its humble beginnings. Poor Georgie B-L was just doing his best to write a novel back in 1830:
“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents — except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”
That ain't Shakespeare, but honestly, it can't compete with the Huffington Post for triteness. It's just the sort of writing that makes you put the book back on the library shelf, and pick up the next one. No. Big. Deal.
But they've made it a contest, so it is a big deal. I hate it. Encouraging people on the Internet to write badly on purpose is a fool's errand. That's what they do. Encouraging them to write well, or even write gooder, would strike me as a worthier task. But then again, the contest is presented by Writer's Digest, whose raison d'etre is encouraging girls who should have flunked out of jo school to write another sparkly vampire bodice-ripper using their specious advice. Yawn.
I want bad writing that turns out that way on accident, to use the parlance of our times. I want bad writing written in dead earnest. Apparently, I wanted the Bad Writing Contest.
The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power.
Now that's what I'm talkin' about. I'm slightly confused, though. It says a girl wrote it, but she forgot to put three exclamation points at the end. A minor oversight, but telling.
Now, on to our quotidian dose of bad writing from all over:
Ah, the Internet, where every question is begged. Are computer coders part of the Elite Class? No. They'll revert to the equivalent of journeyman plumbers in the near future. Perfectly respectable, but hardly elite. The author's inability to order concrete without an iPhone app is telling. It's telling about him, not the concrete company. And the word "into" in the headline should be "to."
Along the same lines as Mr. I Retired at 28 and Want a Medal. They always say the answer to any question posed in a headline is invariably, "No." All I needed to see was a long table covered with Apple computers to know nothing productive was going on.
Can a free coding school run by Russian mobsters be the cheap ticket into the Elite Class? More likely than the last two entries. I bet they run Linux.
There's a question in the headline again. It's a fake though. The question is begged, not answered with a "No." Diesel engines have been obsolete for a long time. The reasons they keep making them are weird.
The practice of screwing a bizarre melange of merde to the walls in taverns is a lot older than all the chains mentioned in this interesting article. Every barroom, from the '30s on, put memorabilia from the patrons on the walls to keep them coming back. After they died, it looked randomly chosen to a new crop of drunks.
Boy howdy, the title of that blog, IN ALL CAPS, isn't exaggerating. Do they watch Danish children's television in Belgium? It seems to have broken them in some fundamental way.
Every generation has something that brings a tear of remembrance to the eye. It's a moving target. You'd kill to play Knock Down with your old baseball cards, and people younger than you want to play Donkey Kong Junior on a tabletop.
Some day, everyone will realize that the last ten years has consisted of nothing but skimming. Nothing of value was created. Google stole the Yellow Pages, Facebook stole the dry-erase board hanging on a girl's dorm room door, and Apple gave you a little handheld television to watch while driving.
Well, there's the links for today. When you're done reading, I hope you find a cheap ticket "into" the Elite Class that doesn't require learning javascript. It sucks. Happy Tuesday!
For carving beef or lamb, maybe pork, it's hard to control the thickness or thinness without a pique.
In 20 years, we have had two significant water pipe leaks and at least one mess from very heavy rains.
I'll begin with an apology. This post may come across as a bit curmudgeonly, but I will try to keep it somewhat light. After all, it's been several months (4, to be exact) since I posted anything. It's not as if there hasn't been plenty going on, with the election, the Olympics, and a host of crazy events in the world occurring. It's not even that I haven't wanted to write. But everything we do carries a price, and we have to determine where are efforts are best applied. 
The stuff from the can tastes and smells like dog food.
The first post on this website years ago, an utterly unknown site at the time (and still not too well-known) was my pics of Christo's Gates in NYC's Central Park. 
