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.
When Isaac Newton went to the University of Cambridge several centuries ago, he studied seven days a week, at least ten hours a day, and actively avoided the revelry that some Cambridge undergraduates engaged in even then. No one expects American undergraduates to work as hard as Isaac Newton or as medieval monks. However, what seems to be happening on many American college campuses is the development of such a powerful "fun" culture that a quarter of the students or more arrive thinking that having fun is the main reason they are at college and that the pursuit of knowledge should be resorted to only when they have nothing better to do.
There was a time when the upper classes approached college casually, more as a rite of passage than anything else because they were confident about their futures, while the aspiring classes put their noses to the grindstone the way Newton did. That was in a time, however, when probably 1% or less of the population even considered higher education. It has been democratized, which might be another way of saying that many colleges are now glorified high schools.
My son Jason, 12, is volunteering at a local senior citizens facility. A project called COME ALIVE through music revives residents in its acute care and Alzheimer wings to make contact with themselves through the music they loved in their younger years. Residents who are otherwise inert and non-communicative are sparked to move and verbalize their memories and feelings. If you think this isn't possible, please watch the entire video below.
Jason's project is to rip 20s and 30s Swing and Big Band, 40s-50s Show Music, and even some of the best 60s rock (there are some disabled younger residents) music and songs from CDs onto individualized mixes that can be played for the residents on their iPods and earphones. College students who are majoring in therapy track the results and tweak the mixes. The benefit to the residents is astounding and heart warming.
For legal copyright reasons, the music can't be simply ripped from Youtube. It must come from CDs.
Many of you have CDs at home that you no linger listen to of these types of music. PLEASE donate the CDs to this project. Just Comment below and I will directly email you, or email me directly at BNKSD1@aol.com and I will quickly get back to you with the address to mail the CDs.
A BIG Thank you in advance.
P.S.: The Post Office has good rates for mailing packages using their boxes.
Rugg proposed “new materials of instruction” that “shall illustrate fearlessly and dramatically the inevitable consequence of the lack of planning and of central control over the production and distribution of physical things. . . . We shall disseminate a new conception of government—one that will embrace all of the collective activities of men; one that will postulate the need for scientific control and operation of economic activities in the interest of all people; and one that will successfully adjust the psychological problems among men.”
A simple jump rope is possibly the best cardio exercise device one can own. It is also the cheapest and most portable.
Jumping rope will burn also 11 calories per minute (more than anything else) while offering almost total body fitness. If you have the fitness and endurance to jump rope for half an hour, you can burn off one candy bar or one donut but few people could go that long even if they wanted to. At a very fast pace, maybe a donut in less than half an hour. However, nobody I've seen can go that long.
At my gym, it's mainly men who jump. Amazon has all sorts of jump ropes. Many people like the beaded ones and the weighted ones.
Done properly on the toes, it's a low-impact exercise. Most people seem to jump in 30-second to three- or six- minute stints. It is demanding for people over 25.
This will only be of interest to those of you using high-CPU programs. I just made a very clever discovery that tied up the one loose end and figured it deserved a post.
This deals with taking a program that uses high CPU and lowering its 'priority' so it won't drag the system down, but will still hustle along as fast as it can otherwise. I suppose this is mainly for the field of video, because traditionally video conversion programs are power-hungry and slow, but it would relate to any CPU-hungry situation.
We'll be dealing with batch files, DOS, strings and variables.
A friend from Chicago, involved in Illinois politics who has known Obama since his early days in the Illinois State Senate, told me that two things that trump everything else in Obama’s mind: redistributing the wealth and empowering labor unions. Look at everything the President does, my friend says, and you will find one or the other lurking in the background.
When Israel announced that planning would begin for some housing in an area known as E1, the New York Times led the media howling that building there would cut off the northern from the southern parts of a future Palestine in the areas of the West Bank. Despite the Palestinians publicly announcing at the UN their breaking the Oslo Accords, a reason had to be found or created to hold Israel to blame for obstructing peace!
This map (courtesy of Honest Reporting), for example, shows that not to be true.
The New York Times must have bought a map, and just ran two corrections to its prior reporting, if it can be dignified as such. Blind ignorance is blamed on an “editing error.” Yeah, and Delaware is our largest state.
That area has never been offered to Palestinians in any of the many proposals for 98% of the West Bank to be theirs for a state. See this map:
In the course of our basement water pipe flood this summer, I seem to have lost my couple of pairs of light shooting gloves. I like to shoot with gloves even when it isn't too cold. Most of the hunting I do tends to be in cold weather so I like to get used to the feel of gloves on a trigger.
And I have a very mild but uncomfortable case of Raynaud's.
Glovemakers vary in what they mean by L,M, S, etc. Here's a great way to determine your numerical glove size when ordering online. Leather, of course, tends to stretch a bit with use. (That image in the link might need to be reduced before printing)
The right gloves for hunting grouse in the snow or ducks in the sleet at 10 degrees F is another topic. The perfect gloves for those things do not exist, as best I have been able to determine. Heavy waterproof gloves, obviously, do not fit rapidly and easily inside a trigger guard, and if you are using a double-triggered old s/s, it's really a problem.
Ideas are welcome. I wonder what the Army uses in Afghanistan in the winter. Maybe things like this.
Her post reads a bit like an old fogey complaining about "these kids today," but she is talking about adult-aged kids, not real teenagers. Some of the comments are interesting. I am convinced that difficult realities and challenges are what creates adults.
I suspect that many of our readers are seeing this happening around them these days. It is a terrible time to be a graduate, whether of college or of grad school, and this seems unlikely to change any time in the next four years. There will be a glut of job-seekers such that a job - even a job without great career-building prospects - will feel more like a privilege than like an opportunity.
It's sad to see eager talent going unused. What young people in this economy need to do is to ramp up their job-seeking skills to a level of intensity rarely required in the past 40 years, or to make something interesting happen themselves, on their own initiative. Necessity is the mother of invention.
Compared to these youngsters, I feel like I had it easy. And I didn't because I went eight years going from place to place with little kids, never with a real or even semi-permanent home, trying to find my right niche, never making much money at all. Constructing the life or career one dreams of is never easy and often impossible, but it's far more difficult now.
Sipp says this is his favorite version - whorehouse-piano style:
Wilbert was good on Let's Stick Together too (1962):
Buddy likes Joe Morello's drum solo here on Take Five:
For people like me who know nothing about drums, this is fascinating: Around the Drum Kit by an older Joe Morello. (It's mostly introductory after his initial solo). After watching it, I can sorta get what he was doing on the previous Youtube. Drums do talk:
And for something completely stupid, here's a Boston Christmas (h/t reader):
Since 1498 - the Vienna Boy's Choir. They have four touring groups of 25 kids each. They sing like angels. We caught their Christmas in Vienna concert at Carnegie Hall today with Mrs. BD's music-loving parents after a very pleasant brunch at Petrossian down the block (the prix fixe, friends - but festively with caviar and blini, and champagne). Mrs. BD got us good parterre seats.
As a reprise, they sang the beloved but cornball Leise rieselt der Schnee. Give the tune a listen if you don't know it. You might end up humming it for 48 hours. With all of our German-origin Christmas songs (eg Stille Nacht), it's a wonder we English never took this one. Maybe because of the bland lyrics (but this translation stinks - I can do better even though my German is not very strong anymore). Here's a version of it.
Sippican found some Flame Birch, and finally figured out what to do with it - photo. "Flame Birch" is just birch with ripples in its meat. Birch's desire to be like Tiger Maple.
It’s a week before the biggest day of her life, and Anna Williams is multitasking. While waiting to hear back from the Ivy League colleges she’s hoping to attend, the seventeen-year-old senior at one of Manhattan’s most exclusive private schools is doing research for a paper about organic farming in the West Bank, whipping up a batch of vegan brownies, and, like an increasing number of American teenagers, teaching her dog, José Saramago, to use an iPad.
Language trivia: Greeks use two words for wine. "Oinos" of course, and "krasi." Hence "crazy," or so I am told.
Pic is the East Haddam, CT, Congregational Church. 19th C. Congo churches do tend to have a similar look. They are the old meeting house, basically, with a steeple, and sometimes a portico, tacked on. I don't know why or how they decided that steeples were acceptible.
Luke 3:1-6
3:1 In the fifteenth year of the reign of Emperor Tiberius, when Pontius Pilate was governor of Judea, and Herod was ruler of Galilee, and his brother Philip ruler of the region of Ituraea and Trachonitis, and Lysanias ruler of Abilene,
3:2 during the high priesthood of Annas and Caiaphas, the word of God came to John son of Zechariah in the wilderness.
3:3 He went into all the region around the Jordan, proclaiming a baptism of repentance for the forgiveness of sins,
3:4 as it is written in the book of the words of the prophet Isaiah, "The voice of one crying out in the wilderness: 'Prepare the way of the Lord, make his paths straight.
3:5 Every valley shall be filled, and every mountain and hill shall be made low, and the crooked shall be made straight, and the rough ways made smooth;
3:6 and all flesh shall see the salvation of God.'"
Since when does the federal government control school lunches? When I was a kid, my Mom made my lunch and I carried it in a lunchbox. Mom controlled it. Apple, banana, or plum, a sandwich on white bread, a couple of cookies. Usually baloney sandwich, Fluffernutter, or PB&J as I recall but sometimes ham and swiss as a luxury. With four of us kids, it was the early morning lunch-box assembly line. School provided only those little cold cartons of milk, chocolate or plain, with a straw. I turned out just fine.
And since when does the federal government control school curricula? Catcher is a dumb book and not worth the read, but who decides these things?
Since when do the feds have anything at all to do with local education anyway?
Today, I am doing layered winter clothing, which is only of interest if one is spending more than just a few hours out in the weather.
Dressing for spending hours out in cold weather is a tricky business, because it depends so much on what you are doing and how active you are. If you dress too warmly for a day of aggressive skiing in 10 degree (F) weather, you can easily get soaked with uncomfortable and chilling sweat. On the other hand, underdressing for a 6-hour stint sitting in a Maine duck blind can ruin the entire experience. When it's cold out, you want to be cool enough to enjoy the weather - and maybe just a little bit cold. It's all about layers.
I have spent many hours cold, wet, and happy in Yankee winters, but I have become more of a pussy as I get a bit older. It's impossible to get it right, because if you are hiking uphill at 15 degrees, you get too hot, and when you are sitting, you get too cold. But that's why you aren't being a sloth, sitting by the fire.
None of these are particularly worthy of their own post, but they add up to a fun little collection. Well, except for that horribly sad thing that happened to Bird Dog.
Bring a tissue.
First, some really good news from the political front:
That should only eliminate about 90% of this liberal dishrag's readership. Like the NYT, the news will still be open to the public, but to read the op-eds is going to cost a little something, and the only people who'll shell out the bucks are such ardent Lefties that we don't care about them, anyway. But it's a very good thing to keep these creeps away from the average reader.
Next, kind of good news/bad news story. First, the good news:
Johnstown, PA (GlossyNews) – Local and state police scoured the hills outside rural Johnstown, Pennsylvania, after reports of three animal rights activists going missing after attempting to protest the wearing of leather at a large motorcycle gang rally this weekend. Two others, previously reported missing, were discovered by fast food workers “duct taped inside fast food restaurant dumpsters,” according to police officials.
"Something just went wrong," said a still visibly shaken organizer of the protest. "Something just went horribly, horribly, wrong." The organizer said a group of concerned animal rights activists, "growing tired of throwing fake blood and shouting profanities at older women wearing leather or fur coats," decided to protest the annual motorcycle club event "in a hope to show them our outrage at their wanton use of leather in their clothing and motor bike seats."
“In fact," said the organizer, "motorcycle gangs are one of the biggest abusers of wearing leather, and we decided it was high time that we let them know that we disagree with them using it, ergo, they should stop."
According to witnesses, protesters arrived at the event in a vintage 1960?s era Volkswagen van and began to pelt the gang members with balloons filled with red colored water, simulating blood, and shouting "you’re murderers" to passersby. This, evidently, is when the brouhaha began.
"They peed on me!!!" charged one activist. "They grabbed me, said I looked like I was French, started calling me ‘La Trene’ and duct taped me to a tree so they could pee on me all day!"
Still others claimed they were forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs under duress. Those who resisted were allegedly held down while several bikers "farted on their heads."
Forced to eat hamburgers and hot dogs? The horror!
The bad news is that it's just another urban myth, as Snopes debunks here. It's to note, though, as Snopes does, just how easy it was to believe.
Below the fold, two very similar topics. First, one of the most disgusting, foul-mouthed rappers you've ever heard, then a note on Bird Dog's reputation.
My pic is a Nantucket "3/4 house." December is a good time to throw on a sweater and a scarf and stroll the streets of downtown Nantucket to admire the early 19th C. architecture with the leaves off the trees and the limousine Liberal vacationers off the streets.
Einstein, Newton, and Pascal are hanging out one afternoon.
Einstein is bored, so he suggests, "Let's play hide-and-seek. I'll be it!"
The others agree, so Einstein begins counting. "One... Two... Three..."
Pascal runs off right away to find a place to hide.
But Newton merely takes out a piece of chalk and draws a mid-sized square. He finishes and steps into the square just as Einstein shouts, "Ready or not -- here I come!"
Einstein looks up and immediately spots Newton standing right in front of him. He says, "I found you, Newton!"
Newton replies, "No, you found one Newton per square meter -- You found Pascal!"
23.8 percent of men, and 19 percent of women, between the ages of 35 and 44 have never been married. Tick back a cohort to the people between 20 and 34—the prime-childbearing years—and the numbers are even more startling: 67 percent of men and 57 percent of women in that group have never been married. When you total it all up, over half of the voting-age population in America—and 40 percent of the people who actually showed up to vote this time around—are single.
What does this group look like? Geographically, they tend to live in cities. As urban density increases, marriage rates (and childbearing rates) fall in nearly a straight line. Carville and Greenberg put together a Venn diagram which is highly instructive. Of the 111 million single eligible voters, 53 million are women and 58 million are men. Only 5.7 million of these women are Hispanic and 9.7 million are African American. Nearly three-quarters of all single women are white. In other words, the cohort looks a lot like the Julia character the Obama campaign rolled out to show how the president’s policies care for that plucky gal from the moment she enrolls in Head Start right through her retirement. You may recall that because of President Obama, Julia goes to college, gets free birth control, has a baby anyway, sends her lone kid to public school, and then—at age 42—starts her own business (as a web designer!). What she does not do is get married.
Is this a general cultural phenomenon, or class-related? I understand that Julia feels married to the government, but don't most people feel the need for a loyal human partner and helpmeet anyway? Marriage may be fraught with challenges, but I cannot even imagine trying to run my complex life single-handedly. Even four hands often do not seem like enough. Speaking just practically, romance and friendship aside.
Your job rut 
A simple jump rope is possibly the best cardio exercise device one can own. It is also the cheapest and most portable.
This will only be of interest to those of you using high-CPU programs. I just made a very clever discovery that tied up the one loose end and figured it deserved a post.
In the course of our basement water pipe flood this summer, I seem to have lost my couple of pairs of light shooting gloves. I like to shoot with gloves even when it isn't too cold. Most of the hunting I do tends to be in cold weather so I like to get used to the feel of gloves on a trigger.
Real estate investing, small scale: 
Sippican 
Today, I am doing layered winter clothing, which is only of interest if one is spending more than just a few hours out in the weather.
None of these are particularly worthy of their own post, but they add up to a fun little collection. Well, except for that horribly sad thing that happened to Bird Dog.
My pic is a Nantucket "3/4 house." December is a good time to throw on a sweater and a scarf and stroll the streets of downtown Nantucket to admire the early 19th C. architecture with the leaves off the trees and the limousine Liberal vacationers off the streets.
From