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.
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day I paused and said, "I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther--and we shall see." The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went down. The view was all in straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather-- The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled--and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was grey and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
Prosecco, beloved by Pliny, seems to be all the rage these days. I picked up a few bottles for Saturday evening's festivities to celebrate several family birthdays - plus a great new job in the family - and a bon voyage to my in-laws who spend several months each winter season in Mexico - Cabo - with all of their lively and enjoyable retired pals from all over America and Canada.
Do they play Mexican Train Dominoes? You bet they do. Good game. They like to go fishing too, and to take walks around Mexico. It's colorful. Fine seafood. The magnificent Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. Cabo is their winter home-away-from-home. Much more interesting than Florida.
Good Prosecco is cheaper than the tastiest champagnes. I'll be interested in what people think, but they will all enjoy anything because it's not about the food and drink - it's about the company and the family spirit. As usual, Martinelli's for the teetotalers.
Mrs. BD will cook a crown roast of pork with apple stuffing, with applesauce, mashed Yukon Gold taters with a little garlic in them, broccoli rabe with oil and garlic, and cake with vanilla ice cream, but I am doing work-related things tomorrow so I can't do much more than buy the wine and stuff.
If you go back more than 40 years, you find that few occupations were closed to people who did not have college degrees to their names. What changed? In short, I think it was a combination of these factors: the erosion of high-school standards (which used to bring about at least respectable basic competence in young people but began to slide in the ’70s), the subsidization of college, which led to more and more people earning degrees and thus casting doubt on the capabilities of those who did not, and the Supreme Court’s decision in Griggs v. Duke Power (1971), which turned testing of job applicants into a legal hazard for employers and thus encouraging them to look at a safe alternative means of identifying individuals who might have the right characteristics.
As an employer, I have to agree with all of the above.
"...our operating, unchallengeable baseline is that anthropogenic global warming (which we now call “climate change” so as to be more encompassing) is behind every weather phenomenon that has ever happened since we decided that there’s something called anthropogenic global warming. . . . er, climate change.”
Andrew Freedman, science writer, via Bookworm. It's a fascinatingly ahistorical view that weather began in the 1990s. You have to like that "unchallengeable."
When I first heard that the newest mayor of New York’s first action in office was to denude the city of horse-drawn carriages, I thought it was probably a joke. I figured some card over at Fox News or The Wall Street Journal had taken an obscure quote out of context in order to start His Honor out on the wrong hoof.
I do not own a coal mine. I am a professor of literature at an American college. We professors, like the mine owners, do not do hard manual labor for a living. Unlike those mine owners, if I may speak generally, we spend none of our time around such men. We do not break bread with them, we do not live near them, we do not worship at the same church, our children do not see one another on the streets. We are almost entirely insulated from the exigencies of bodily life. We do not grow our own fruit and vegetables, we do not build our own homes, we do not raise our own livestock, we do not dig our own wells, we do not repair our own vehicles, we do not clear our own fields, we do not pave our own driveways and roads, we do not lay the bricks for our own schools, we do not fight our own fights.
"I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated—that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others—and in particular, of government regulation—to keep us from going wrong."
Two Legends Together! In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel introduced Chicago radio listeners to an up-and-coming musician, not yet 22 years old, "a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan."
Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called "The Bear Club". The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on "The Studs Terkel Program". Things were moving fast in Dylan's life at that time.He was just emerging as a major songwriter. His debut album from the year before, Bob Dylan, was made up mostly of other people's songs. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which was finished but hadn't yet been released, contained almost all original material, including several songs that would become classics, like "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall.
Within a few months Dylan would make his debut at the Newport Folk Festival and perform at the historic March on Washington. But when Dylan visited WFMT, it's likely that many of Terkel's listeners had never heard of him. In the recorded broadcast he plays the following songs:
1) Farewell 2) A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall 3) Bob Dylan's Dream 4) Boots of Spanish Leather 5) John Brown 6) Blowin' In The Wind
It's an intriguing interview.This was at age 20 or 21:
Not trying to defend Christie but this is clearly battlespace prep by the Hillary camp. I am thoroughly amused watching the high dudgeon about this from a media that has remained steadfastly silent through scandal after scandal of the Obama Administration.
Closed lanes on the approach to the GWB... please. How 'bout the dead people in Mexico and our own border agent here in the US? How 'bout the dead Americans in Benghazi? How 'bout the IRS targeting the Admin's political opponents? How 'bout election fraud and intimidation?
No interest in any of that but suddenly closing lanes approaching the GWB is slaughtering the old people.
Chris Christie may harbor dreams of winning the presidency in 2016, and for the last few years he has done a moderately good job acquitting himself. Sure, he's got the persona of a bully, but in New Jersey that's a positive trait if you want to get things done. Christie has gotten many things done. However, his road to the White House is starting to his some snags.
For the record, I have no issues with Christie calling a reporter an "idiot". Most of them are idiots. Unfortunately, they are the heralds of his public personality. It would help if he managed his tongue a bit.
Executive
Order: 'Excessively High Temperatures' 'Already' Harming Public Health -
See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/craig-bannister/executive-order-excessively-high-temperatures-already-harming-public#sthash.84xDBkIP.dpuf
Executive
Order: 'Excessively High Temperatures' 'Already' Harming Public Health -
See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/craig-bannister/executive-order-excessively-high-temperatures-already-harming-public#sthash.84xDBkIP.dpuf
This is just one small example of why these intertunnels, as Sipp terms them, are so cool.
I posted a pic of a nice oil lamp I picked up at a junk shop in Ohio. An alert reader promptly identified it as a Rayo lamp made by Bradley and Hubbard in Meriden, CT., around or before the turn of the century.
When I was a kid we had a barrel of kerosene with a spigot on a stand in the garage. Kerosene was useful for all sorts of things, including burning the garbage and for taking paint off your hands. Also, to make torches to burn the tent caterpillar things out of the fruit trees. Funny, haven't seen many of those lately. Kerosene has a good garage smell.
Then I learned this at Ebay:
Bradley & Hubbard was one of the inspirational leaders of the Roycroft movement in New York, well known for their arts and crafts industry. Walter Hubbard and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Lyman Bradley, started making cast iron clocks,tables,frames,andirons,chandlers and lamps. The company became Bradley and Hubbard manufacturing co in 1875. They turned out some of the most outstanding leaded glass lamps you'll find.
So they manufactured all sorts of lamps back when CT was a manufacturing center. There are all sorts of old Bradley and Hubbard lamps for sale online.
No, it's unpossible. But it could be Bill has himself a minor scandal less than 2 weeks on the job.
Horse-drawn carriage bans wouldn't seem to be the kind of thing a new mayor would care to endorse, unless there's money in it for him. This isn't out of the realm of possibility.
It's still early in Billy-boy's tenure, so if this is just smoke and no fire, there will be plenty more to come. I'm sure he likes money. Most people do. I just prefer it be earned the old-fashioned way, not through political power-brokering. In most cases like this, all you have to do is follow the money.
The message is that magical thinking about health and food, etc., doesn't accomplish very much. Neither does magical thinking accomplish very much in any other area of life - except in fiction.
The fundamental issue in the academic job market is not that administrators are cheap and greedy, or that adjuncts lack a union. It’s that there are many more people who want to be research professors than there are jobs for them. And since all those people have invested the better part of a decade in earning their job qualifications, they will hang around on the edges of academia rather than trying to start over. Such a gigantic glut of labor is bound to push down wages and working conditions.
Unfortunately, I’m essentially arguing that professors ought to, out of the goodness of their heart, get rid of their graduate programs and go back to teaching introductory classes to distracted freshman. Maybe they should do this. But they’re not going to.
It's an amusing update on food fashion. Everybody likes new tastes, dining out, food adventures. I had the best steak tartare in my life last night. Right now, all of the restaurants are trying to outdo each other with their steak tartare.
2014 opens on a dramatic scene. Barack Obama appears to have lost his shirt in the casino of history. Every bet he confidently made in last five years has turned out to be a dud, and the other players are waiting on the turnover of his chips. The beads of sweat stand out on his face as he regards the smug countenances of the saturnine Russians, the poker-faced Persians, and the wheedling Afghans.
The Rough-Legged Hawk breeds in the far north, like the Snowy Owl, but during winter can be found throughout the US, especially in open spaces.
He is a very large hawk with black thumbprints on his wrists - unmistakable in flight. And like most hawks and owls, he is hunting mostly small furry things and vulnerable birds. Like the Snowy Owl, I've seen them in Montauk in the winter.
Also, happily perusing a recent birding book - National Geographic's The Complete Birds of North America. It is complete, with a good section on gulls, which I use as a judge of a bird book. It's a companion to NG's Field Guide, and has plenty of information, including habitat, population trends, migratory details, and where populations are expanding and contracting. Good on trends in "accidental" sightings, too. For example, the book notes the increased sightings of Swallow-Tailed Kite in New England - and makes note of its historic populations in the northern USA.
An excellent review of the state of higher ed in the US from VDH: The Outlaw Campus. He begins:
Colleges have gone rogue and become virtual outlaw institutions. Graduates owe an aggregate of $1 trillion in student debt, borrowed at interest rates far above home-mortgage rates — all on the principle that universities could charge as much as they liked, given that students could borrow as much as they needed in federally guaranteed loans.
Few graduates have the ability to pay back the principal; they are simply paying the compounded interest. More importantly, a college degree is not any more a sure pathway to a good job, nor does it guarantee that its holder is better educated than those without it. If the best sinecure in America is a tenured full professorship, the worst fate may be that of a recent graduate in anthropology with a $100,000 loan. That the two are co-dependent is a national scandal.
In short, the university has abjectly defaulted on its side of the social contract by no longer providing an affordable and valuable degree. Accordingly, society can no longer grant it an exemption from scrutiny.
"There were no resources available to send me to college, and if there were, I did not have the GPA to justify it. I have never been college material. But I was raised to solve problems. I did that, and life has been good to me. I am not a candidate to be interviewed on Mike Rowe’s Dirty Jobs…although, I should be, and if it were to happen, I would consider it a very high honor. I do not wear my first name on a badge on my shirt. Although, in my mind’s eye, I do. I do not think of computer programming as any kind of white-collar, let alone savant-intellectual, affair. I never have. I have always thought of it as on par with stacking lumber. Just problem-solving. Nothing more than that. More blue-collar than white-collar. Just implementing stuff, so that the people way-up-there who have to make real decisions, can concentrate on those decisions, after I make sure the machines do what they’re supposed to be doing. All these years, on some level, I’ve always thought of myself as a sort of janitor or something.
And, I’ve always thought of myself — always had to think of myself — as the beneficiary of an uncommon bit of good fortune. No, wait. That is an understatement. An historical bit of good fortune. Fantastic fortune. Like, you fire a bullet out of your gun, someone else fires a bullet that hits your bullet and knocks your bullet out of the air. That kind of good fortune.
Since about the seventeenth century or so, we have had this institution we have called “college” that is supposed to — let’s be honest, okay? — put on this good show about trying to educate the masses so everyone can be moar-better-equal, while in reality, laboring tirelessly to preserve and perpetuate a caste system..."
The best way to go, many feel, is to get pneumonia in old age and to die quietly, peacefully. Most are not so lucky and some darn doc will try to treat your pneumonia at age 92 to extend your life for a few weeks in the ICU on a respirator. However, for many, if you outlive heart disease cancer will get you: Why Everyone Seems to Have Cancer.
We don't call it "dying of old age" anymore because we have much better diagnostic tools. Everybody has to die from something or other.
A Reddit Gun Lover Has A Hilarious Present For Anti-Gun Mother Jones
Prosecco
The War on the Way We Were:
Roquefort
Re-posted
Feds Sue Buckyballs Founder, Still Ignore Colorado Marijuana
breeds in the far north, like the Snowy Owl, but during winter can be found throughout the US, especially in open spaces.