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.
Kenyon College, founded by Episcopal Bishop Philander Chase in 1824. It's considered one of the "Hidden Ivies" or "New Ivies."
Alumni will be relieved to know that even Kenyon now offers a useful major in "Womens' and Gender Studies" but, other than a little token faddish nonsense, it's a serious and rigorous place.
A pal had good luck last weekend, in upstate New York. Luck, and you have to get up early. 12 ga., turkey choke, try to call the gobblers in and hope they are around, head shots only.
The return of the Wild Turkey populations is a remarkable conservation success story. No, they do not taste like supermarket turkeys. They taste like Turkey.
I believe that good writing is a talent, like music. You have a feel for it, or you don't. However, adequate, functional, expository writing ought to be within the grasp of most people who know how to talk and who read things. Clear writing requires clear thinking, but I often clarify my thinking by the task of writing.
However, this is High School training, not college.
I happen to love biscuits and pork sausage gravy. I had a friend from Harlan, Kentucky whose Mom always made "Hot Dog Gravy" for biscuits, substituting Coke for water and substituting sliced hot dogs for sausage. That is not for me.
Yankees often do not know that you split your biscuit, then spoon a pile of the custardy stuff on top of the halves. Yum. If you don't fall asleep after, it will fuel a good day's work.
Let's talk about how smart women are for a minute. There have been many very smart women throughout history. First there was Joan of Arc, who was burned alive at the stake, then there was Madame Curie, who irradiated herself to death, then there was Amelia Earhart, who died in a plane crash, then there was, um..., oh, Susan B. Anthony, who was so famous they named a $1 coin after her.
Smart women, all!
Pic: Artist's concept of what smart women think about
Well, under the same heading, I just love what this lady did. It goes to the very core of pragmatism.
To wit:
You're a cigarette smoker. You're seriously hooked. You've tried everything to stop, but you just keep failing.
Last Tuesday, 5-foot 1-inch Lopez went up to Sacramento County sheriff’s Deputy Matt Campoy outside the main jail and slapped him in the face, apparently for no reason. He grabbed the woman and took her inside the jail, where she again slapped his arm as soon as he turned her loose. Confused, Campos handcuffed her again, and that’s when the woman told him she had picked him because he was in uniform and she knew getting arrested was the only way for her to quit smoking, as tobacco is forbidden in prison.
When it comes to your health, you just gotta do what you just gotta do.
I was actually surprised how many commenters took the "Moron!" approach. I thought it was brilliant and daring. And the blotch on her 'permanent record' really won't make any big dif in the future, and any lawyer could get it expunged. But that week or two she spends in the hoosegow might make a very big difference when her grandchildren have a grandmother around to love and grow up with.
Well, now that we've got that 'smart' stuff out of the way, let's get down to the intrinsic, elemental, key role women play in the interwoven society of modern day life and what they bring to the table:
Boobies.
No, wait...
Other stuff and boobies. Right, that's it. I mean, I wouldn't want to shortchange the other body parts. That just wouldn't be manly.
And, speaking of boobies, what does a man really, really hunger for in life?
Good food.
Good food surrounded by pleasant women who, as we've already proven, can be quite smart. You combine your smarts with hers, your wallet with her good looks (to make up for the lack of yours), and we're talkin' an equal deal here with no 'objectification' in sight.
I had the same experience as Insty did. I refused an MRI because I had zero interest in shoulder surgery and there is no point in paying for a medical test if you have no intention of doing anything about it. (Yes, I pay for my medical care.)
I did not bother with physical therapy, rested it from tennis and weights for a year, and it's pretty good now except that I have had to replace my fast serve with a spin serve - which is probably more effective anyway. It gets sore after four hours juggling a chain saw, but that's ok with me.
“Women in particular often fall prey to an extreme environmental agenda, and it’s important to offer a fact-based educational documentary that offers a different view on these important energy issues, like the film, FrackNation,” Brown said.
The banning of catastrophic-only plans infuriates me the most. Those are the only plans that are actually financially sensible for a healthy individual to purchase. Everything else on the market is a perverse by-product of the employer-based insurance system.
Scholars of Islam like Prime Minister David Cameron and London Mayor Boris Johnson insisted that the gruesome murder of a British soldier by two Muslims shouting “Allah Akbar” and quoting the Koran had nothing to do with Islam.
However Imam Omar Bakri Muhammad, who influenced Mujaheed Adebowale, the London beheader, disagrees saying, “Under Islam this can be justified”
Our friend at the Q&O site is having problems with his semi-expensive watch, so I thought I'd repost this.
We posted a while ago about expensive watches, Vacheron Constantin, Patek Phillippe, and all that. I've had a couple of moderately-expensive ones over the years but over time the repair and maintenance seemed foolish and, sad to say, an Accutron cannot be effectively repaired anymore.
As cheap watches go, I don't like digital watches. I like to see the sweep of time.
When I last went for a dreaded and long-delayed medical check up on the insistence of Mrs. BD, I noticed that my fancy doc wore the same one I did - a Timex Expedition. They are good for about ten years or more, and when you need to replace the leather band it comes with with a nice leather band, the band costs 3X more than the watch.
Any watch I wear gets banged around quite a bit, but I feel naked without one. Are they male jewelry, social signals, or are they tools?
Amazon sells them, real cheap. $31. That is indeed a fashion statement: it declares that you are a sensible person.
Surely not by our bourgeois standards. Given the human brain and the human adaptability which is a gift from the most creative of us over the past 150,000 years, I think it's impossible to say what is "natural" for people other than to claim that it is natural for humans to make things and to live in cultures.
Are Savages Noble? The parts about war and sex (naturally) are especially interesting. So I guess war and sex are natural, too.
“In Sweden you’ve got welfare, access to the educational system – up to university level, you got access to public transport, libraries, healthcare – to everything. And still they feel that they [immigrants] need to riot through stones and Molotov cocktails. It’s ridiculous and a bad excuse,” Swedish Democrats MP Kent Ekeroth told RT.“Police can put down these riots in five minutes – if the politicians were to allow them,” Ekeroth added.
Admittedly, some words become meaningless over time.
Buggy whip industry.
Herewith, I am going to spell out my own little list, dismantling each word in turn. While I'm aware some harsh critic could come along at any minute and point out how this is nothing more than an academic exercise in sophistry, solipsism and semantics, I'd like to go on record as stating that that's exactly what it is.
In a generally ascending order of interest and/or importance:
If that is what brown-skinned Americans are all about, I guess I don't get out enough because I never see people talking or acting like that, regardless of skin tone.
I can report, first-hand, that electronic medical records double the doc's time doing "paperwork," and thus halve their time with patients. There is only so much time in a day. As a private Psychiatrist, I have thus far been able to avoid it. Who would speak freely to me if my notes went into the cloud? I was offered a $40,000 check by the government to go to electronic records linked to the hospital and thence elsewhere, and I refused the offer even though the money would come in handy.
Obama’s Medical-Records Crony- Electronic medical records are being heavily subsidized — to one Democratic donor’s benefit.
If you have a problem with this government-subsidized trend, ask your doc whether he, she, or it - or they - puts your records on the internet. Most hospitals require it, nowadays, as it is required of hospital-employed physicians. FYI, you may not know whether your doc is a hospital employee or not because many are selling their practices to hospitals in anticipation of Obamacare. Times are changing.
You might have heard of that social anarchist who runs Coyote Blog. I wrote a scathing exposé on this scurrilous scofflaw here.
As for coyotes, he seems to think they're a cute, cuddly bunch, but a Google search proves otherwise:
Well, this menace to society is back in the news, again preaching his particular brand of anarchy, this time against the very foundation of our language, and thus society, itself:
By the way, if anyone read the fabulous book "Barbarians and the Gate," they** will remember RJR Nabisco's construction of a...
[...]
** I know this is grammatically incorrect, but I am exhausted with English's lack of a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun and hate saying "he or she." English is a language built bottom up from actual usage, so lacking any better idea, I support "they" as the solution.
I've been using "they" in this regard for over 20 years.
In fact, you could even say that the subject is a part of blog history. As I note in my bio, I was 'blogging' on a daily basis on my BBS a decade before the word was coined. In one of the first pages I wrote for the board, the 'Welcome' page, I told everyone that they'd see two variations from standard English in my articles; using 'they' for 'he or she' and putting punctuation outside of quote marks. (I'll cover the latter some other time.) So it could be said that one of the first blogs in history mentioned this very subject. Twenty-two years ago.
Here's the famed James Taranto quoting other people in his daily column. James is a stickler for following the rules.
"But there's something disappointing in giving your sparring partner exactly what they [sic] want."
"Of course what Ferraro said is that "nobody is going to say they [sic] don't ..."
"Where a person lives, their [sic] immigration status or who they [sic] love should not ..."
"... if a black person killed a white person they [sic] were more likely ..."
"If a 5-year-old can't sit still, it is unlikely that they [sic] can do well in a kindergarten class ..."
What this is really saying is, Broken is okay. I'm sure James and associated sticklers would like to fix every other broken thing on the planet, but for some reason they happily exclude this one obvious blow-it from their agenda. The question for James is, Are you planning on doing this for the rest of time eternal?
Here's the bottom line:
They does not necessarily equal plural. And I can semi-prove it.
My very first week in the South, I was alone in a diner. The waitress walked up and asked, "How y'all doin' today?" The exact same thing happened at a different diner a few days later.
That's when I realized that y'all doesn't necessarily equal 'plural', and 'they', in this context, is no different. To refine it even further, you could say that 'he or she' is the they, because more than one person is involved.
Coyote got it exactly right. Unlike any other language on the planet, English was built; constructed; formed from a collage of many languages, even varying forms of English, itself, and is thus designed to change with the times as the building process continues. While a total bitch for the outsider to learn, we who are fluent in it are offered an immense, descriptive vocabulary that no other language comes close to. In many, if not most languages, the exact meaning of a spoken word is based upon inflection. In English, we have a whole different word for every single variation, and then we still have inflection for the nuance.
Put another way, using 'they' for a singular person might feel a little awkward, but [sic]'ing every use of it for the rest of time eternal sounds a lot more awkward.
Rather than the Somalis becoming British, shards of Britain have become little Mogadishus.
The Somalis are not alone in this regard. Muslim immigration to the UK has brought the norms of Somalia, Afghanistan and Egypt to the streets of London. Individual acts of violence can be overlooked. But there is nothing individual about all these cases. This is a culture of violence.
Forbes Magazine has hailed it as the most lovely campus in the US. Maybe so. That's a tough call. It's a tiny campus on a hill in the middle of a very pleasant and serene rural "nowhere." Feels more like a New England prep school than a college. One thing I can say is that the kids they admit are committed to the life of the mind, and the faculty is committed to each kid in a personal way. A good combination indeed.
Rigorously-demanding, too. While most famous for their literary and theatrical pursuits (The Kenyon Review, plus Paul Newman and Jonathan Winters at the same time), Kenyon has the highest graduate admit rates to medical school in the US.
My pupette's poetry prof, to my delight, knew Elizabeth Hardwick who was one of my poetry profs (along with the brilliant and inspiring...wait for it...Edward Said. He was not doing Palestinian politics then). Cool.
I happen to love biscuits and pork sausage gravy. I had a friend from Harlan, Kentucky whose Mom always made "Hot Dog Gravy" for biscuits, substituting Coke for water and substituting sliced hot dogs for sausage. That is not for me.
Let's talk about how smart women are for a minute. There have been many very smart women throughout history. First there was Joan of Arc, who was burned alive at the stake, then there was Madame Curie, who irradiated herself to death, then there was Amelia Earhart, who died in a plane crash, then there was, um..., oh, Susan B. Anthony, who was so famous they named a $1 coin after her.
The London Terror Attack Was More Than 'Unforgivable' - 
How far can you bend over to make it convenient to have your head cut off? 
