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 had no idea snails had a preference for handedness, since they have no hands. Apparently they do, however. There's lots of interesting stuff before the final paragraph, where they discuss the issue of dextral or sinistral snails.
I'm taking turns lifting my eyelids. One seems to force the other down, like a teeter totter would.
I dislike teeter totters. Playgrounds should be free of physics examinations. Weight, lever arms, torque... bah! Archimedes has ruined my life. Taken the whimsy right out of it.
What Ruth’s doctor had done was unusual, or maybe even inappropriate, they told me—delivering bad news, especially over the phone, before it needed to be conveyed. When I asked them when the right time was to tell someone that death is unavoidable, they most often told me that the moment occurs after several successive attempts at stopping the cancer have failed. Only then, when the patient is cornered by cancer, that’s the time.
I'm not your buddy, guy. If you need a friend, get a dog. A doctor is supposed to give you competent care and then leave you alone.
He was the profane rube who had a mystical obsession with grammatical
punctilio and syntactical clarity. He was the untutored knucklehead (“Is
Moby Dick the man or the whale?” he famously asked) who lived on
unfiltered cigarettes, poker chips, and Scotch and yet somehow managed
to hire James Thurber and E. B. White, Janet Flanner and Lillian Ross,
Edmund Wilson and Vladimir Nabokov, A. J. Liebling and Joseph Mitchell.
Duh. Writers like money. Writers really don't like anything but money. In this country, the man who gives victory in battle is prized beyond every other man.
In the new Internet economy, pious leftist code jockeys found companies that do nothing but put people out of work, then use the money they make to support redistributionist leftist politicians. It's the circle of life.
For example, say there's limited food in the environment. In such a
context those persons that associate food with anger and turn aggression
into an attack response to get the food are more likely to survive. "If
the food does not make you angry or doesn't produce aggression in your
system, you may starve and lose the battle," Aarts says.
I see the scientific community has discovered the Taco Bell drive through lane. Keep up the good work, guys.
In my day, you whippersnapper, "walk up music" was salsa music I heard through the door, being played at 90 decibels by the guy in 7A when I walked up the stairs to my third floor apartment. Don't get me started on the trumpet player.
Let's have a good day, people. And be careful out there
A Cholagogue containing Iron, Quine, Strychnine, and who knows what else:
I found this somewhere:
ABOUT VERACOLATE
REPORT FROM THE 1916 TEXAS STATE JOURNAL OF MEDICINE
Veracolate ~ The Council on Pharmacy and Chemistry reports that "Veracolate manufactured by The Marcy Co. of Boston, Massachusetts, is semisecret in composition, unscientific in combination and exploited under unwarranted claims. It reports that the same criticisms apply to Veracolate with Pepsin and Pancrea and Veracolate with Iron, Quinine and Strychnine. For Veracolate, the following non-quantitative formula is given ~ A compound containing the bile acids, sodium glycocholate, sodium taurocholate with cascara sagrada and phenolphthalein. Vercolate with Pepsin and Pancreatin is said to contain, in addition to the indefinite plain Veracolate, the two mutually incompatible ferments, pepsin and pancreatin, and oil of peppermint. The complexity of Veracolate with Iron, Quinine and Strychnine has increased so that this unscientific mixture is claimed to contain seven constituents. These products are discreditable to the medical and pharmaceutical profession alike and their use is against the public good. (Jour. A. It. A., April 24, 1915.)
Camille Paglia is my favorite Lefty, feminist lesbian. A quote from Camille Paglia: A Feminist Defense of Masculine Virtues - The cultural critic on why ignoring the biological differences between men and women risks undermining Western civilization.
Ms. Paglia relishes her outsider persona, having previously described herself as an egomaniac and "abrasive, strident and obnoxious." Talking to her is like a mental CrossFit workout. One moment she's praising pop star Rihanna ("a true artist"), then blasting ObamaCare ("a monstrosity," though she voted for the president), global warming ("a religious dogma"), and the idea that all gay people are born gay ("the biggest canard," yet she herself is a lesbian).
...we have reached a moment in Western history when, despite all appearances, no meaningful public debate over belief and unbelief is possible. Not only do convinced secularists no longer understand what the issue is; they are incapable of even suspecting that they do not understand, or of caring whether they do. The logical and imaginative grammars of belief, which still informed the thinking of earlier generations of atheists and skeptics, are no longer there. In their place, there is now—where questions of the divine, the supernatural, or the religious are concerned—only a kind of habitual intellectual listlessness.
I tried to read the Drudge Report this morning but it's like TMZ from some alternate universe where slime molds sit on golden thrones and the statues in their temples are fashioned from earwax after a Pantheon of lesser gods like the god of thunderjugs and the demigod of Big Gulps. But other than that, Happy Tuesday!
And all the ones that are being created are just four Asperger agoraphobes in San Francisco that haven't run out of angel funding yet for their potential Twitter app that will let you post reviews of artisanal pottery clay in real time.
A Florentine Steak is generally considered the ultimate of Secondis in Tuscany cuisine, but it can be had in provinces close to Tuscany too.
It's usually a Porterhouse cut, but it's huge because it comes from the Chianina cattle - the tallest and heaviest breed of cattle. One steak feeds several people. They are all free-range, and no feed-lots, so they aren't as juicy as American steaks.
Florentine steak is cooked over a wood fire, and flavored with fresh Lauro - the Mediterranean Bay leaf which is nothing like the American Bay Leaf - and salt and pepper. Simple, and served rare.
Gwynnie gets to spend part of her summers protecting a unique forest preserve in the Sierra Nevada range in a valley which was once used in the summers by the Martis Indians (see The Martis Indians: Ancient Tribe of the Sierra Nevada by Willis Gortner). According to Gortner and others, the Martis occupied the region from a time of global cooling and increased rain around 2000 BC to about 500 AD, when the climate again changed and became drier. Also at about that time, more aggressive tribes like the Paiutes had developed the bow and arrow which required obsidian not found in the area. There could have been conflict with the Paiutes or the Washoe to the East, or with the gentler gatherers, the Maidu, to the North. It was the Maidu which occupied the valley after the Martis departed to an unknown fate.
The Martis Complex left their mark on the land, however, in the form of what scholars call “High Sierra Abstract-Representational petroglyphs” as shown in the picture. All petroglyphs are on horizontal or sloping granite bedrock, with none on cliff faces or boulders, and each site has an unimpeded view of at least three peaks.
The neuroscientist discovers that he has a sociopathic brain:
The same dark regions in Fallon’s neuroimaging self-portrait that shocked him and instantly captured his attention, had captured the attention of other researchers interested in biological psychiatry years earlier. When Fallon points to the section of his brain scan that looks like the brain of a murderer, he points to a part of the frontal lobes called the prefrontal cortex.
They say that only boring people get bored. If skiing, boating, hanging out in the City, attending shows, going hunting, traveling to new places, starting a new business, etc. is not enough stimulation, try this:
Roger Scruton is in the Maggie's Farm pantheon because he is a deep thinker. (Nice work if you can get it, but most of us are not capable of it, especially me. I count myself fortunate to be able to follow him.)
Just as there is an understanding of art, which forms the domain of criticism, and which is a rational exercise with its own standards of validity, so there is an understanding of people, which forms the domain of interpersonal relations, and which is a rational exercise obedient to norms of its own. And just as it is an error to think you can replace art criticism with the neuroscience that allegedly explains the experience of art, so too is it an error to think you can replace interpersonal understanding with the neuroscience that allegedly explains our behavior. This shift requires describing human behavior in terms that remove it from the context that gives it sense; it requires becoming a reductionist, someone who fails to see that the most important features of the human condition are emergent features, ones that inhabit the surface of the world and are invisible to those whose eyes are fixed on the depths.
At dinner with friends last weekend, a pal said to me "When it comes to important things like health and education, I'd rather have Washington make the decisions than my dopey neighbors."
I replied "But is that Washington's proper role, given our inheritance of supposedly limited central government? "
He said "All that really matters is what is effective."
I said "All that really matters is our dopey neighbors. In America, we're all somebody's dopey neighbor - and the dopiest end up in politics."
Anyway, I dropped the topic, but felt like I was not conversing with an American. I do like the guy otherwise. Yes, he is a Progressive.
Ah, remember Orson Welles? Not skinny Orson Welles. I mean Fat Orson. He grew a big beard so he'd have the semblance of a chin, and hawked cheap wine on television in between reminding Merv Griffin (thanks, Bulldog) or Mike Douglas how big a deal he used to be. Whatever those brigands at Paul Masson paid the talented dirigible to utter their slogan, it wasn't enough. I remember it as clearly, and with affection, as the day it was uttered. I remember the only glass of Paul Masson I ever tried too, for other reasons.
By many estimates, more than half of online video ads are not seen, either because they are buried low on web pages or run in tiny, easily ignored video players on those pages, or run simultaneously with other ads. Vindico, an ad management platform company, deemed 57 percent of two billion video ads surveyed over two months to be “unviewable.”“The advertiser sees a report on an Excel spreadsheet that says, ‘Yeah, these ads ran,’ ” says Matt Timothy, Vindico’s president. “But more than half of them ran without being seen by a human being.”
Oh look: The Great Unread wants to point out their competitors for ad revenue are the Great Unwatched. Awesome concern trolling.
Let's be jerks. Let's read it, and then run away without leaving a quarter.
There you go. Have a great Monday. I have no idea why I said that. And I have no idea in the hell what a great Monday might look like. I've never seen one.
Moonshine, as all of our southern readers surely know, is colorless like vodka.
Roger Scruton is in the Maggie's Farm pantheon because he is a deep thinker. (Nice work if you can get it, but most of us are not capable of it, especially me. I count myself fortunate to be able to follow him.)