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.
Those are old twin stables, the Scott's and the Beinecke's, in the East Village. Hard to imagine how many stables there were in NYC in 1870. Many converted to modern purposes. The paired red buildings.
I've been inside functioning NYC stables. Usually 3 stories: 1st floor for office, carriages and saddles, horse ramp to second floor with stalls, 3rd floor as a hayloft. Hole in floor of second storey to dumpster below. Perfect firetraps.
Caught a grim play about the Armenian genocide at the Atlantic Theater Co, then grabbed a very early supper at Gemma (335 Bowery St) - acceptable Italian food, great atmosphere, busy bar scene, full of happy, attractive young folks.
In fact, the East Village, the Lower East Side and Alphabet City have undergone an astonishing change in the past 10 years. It's been gentrified by throngs of youth, and they all look good. No dirty hippies or addicts there anymore, or, it seems, many people over 40.
Killing some time before preparing my last meal........that is, the last meal before fasting for Yom Kippur until tomorrow night, I looked for videos about fasting at Youtube. I came across this parody video about the semi-fast imposed on our school children by Michelle Obama. Her "brainchild" is the national school lunch policy, limiting calories and pushing foods that children often don't care for.
Children protest that they are being starved. OK, a bit of exaggeration from the younguns, but not too far off the mark for growing kids and teens' needs. Here's their video:
The creation of a massive diversity bureaucracy to police the faculty for bias against women and URMs can be justified only if there is evidence that the faculty need such policing. No one has yet presented a single example of UC San Diego’s faculty discriminating against a highly ranked female or URM candidate because of skin color or gender. The opposite is of course the case: female and URM Ph.D.s enjoy enormous advantages in the hiring market at UCSD and everywhere else. A professor in the Geosciences Research Division of the Scripps Institution of Oceanography, whose wife is a UCSD “faculty equity advisor,” sent me a self-righteous rebuke for my initial criticism of the new VC for EDI. I asked him if he knew of any instance where a UCSD hiring committee had merely overlooked a top-notch female or URM candidate because the department was not trying hard enough to “diversify.” He responded that the supply of qualified “diversity” candidates was “so low that the policing of faculty . . . is virtually irrelevant.”
Hall Monitors, at $250,000/yr. It reminds me of how every Russian vessel used to have a Political Officer on board.
When I was in high school, there were no choices. Lunch was lunch, but all you could eat. When you're growing and playing sports, you need lots of food and it does not need to be gourmet. They never had desserts at lunch. They had a giant fruit basket if you wanted to take an apple, banana or an orange.
It is no surprise that investigations into voting fraud yield no meaningful results. Why should they? Whoever is looking into it is ignoring the fraud their own party perpetrates, while seeking only the least likely forms employed by their opponent. The idea is to give the perception of doing 'something' about a problem so you look responsive. The hint of a problem is all you need to focus voter attention.
Eric Holder (of all people) once said "You constantly hear about voter fraud...but you don't see huge amounts of voter fraud out there." Maybe. It's unusual a comment of this sort would emanate from Holder. After all, Democrats often claim the Republicans are seeking to disenfranchise voters, and that's just fraud in another format.
Perhaps that suspicion of fraud enhances the flavor. ~C.S. Forester
Maybe politicians are just looking in the wrong place? Fraud is best performed out in the open, where it won't be questioned. Like a magic show. Misdirection and illusion. Paying people to vote, providing transportation to the polls in exchange for votes, blocking access, even having the dead vote are all versions of fraud which are time-honored.
It seems unlikely fraud is happening on a wide scale. But at a local level it could happen fairly frequently, and in ways which are pretty visible. We tend not to question what we see everyday, or that with which we've become comfortable.
With deer fence. Nice garden. Mine is a complete mess right now, needs to be rebuilt. Dad has rows of raised beds, around 10 of them, inside the split-rail fence. One bed is asparagus, one is for my Mom's cut flowers. Peonies, Dahlias, Zinnias, etc.
As the trees have grown and begun to shade, the old folks want me to to come up with my chain saw and do some work. Dad's too old to be safe with a chainsaw, to put it mildly (Korean War vet, Second Lieut., US Army). Well, that's one more source of free firewood, but he needs some too. They have a wood stove in the kitchen. Yankees are cheap and proudly so, but we like to keep things looking orderly and respectable. Never know when the Pastor will stop by.
Maybe I will enlist my men's Bible study group for the job. Maybe my brother and my lad too. We like to do that sort of work, and all of them are young, strong, and enjoy chainsaws and wood-splitting. And we all enjoy doing hard work as a team. Lots of laughs, with beer. "Praise the Lord - the tree didn't fall on the truck." Wait until the ground freezes and I can get a truck back there.
That is happy Autumn Clematis growing on their garden gate.
Late September and early October is the time to re-seed and fertilize your lawns in the temperate zone. At this point, we have weeds, crab grass, holes from skunks and possums digging for grubs, chipmunk holes, wild strawberry infestations, and all sorts of other lawn miseries. (I do not have lawn irrigation - too much lawn to cover.)
Even though, in theory, we encourage minimizing lawn space (except for a good square for Croquet) and pleasant grass walking paths between gardens and borders, we do believe in pleasing, healthy lawn grass as a part of garden design.
...our government isn’t running trillion-dollar deficits because we’re letting the working class get away with not paying its fair share. We’re running those deficits because too many powerful interest groups have a stake in making sure the party doesn’t stop.
When you look around the richest precincts of today’s Washington, you don’t see a city running on paternalism or dependency. You see a city running on exploitation.
Not long ago I asked readers what my time is worth on a per-hour basis. Collectively and independently, they settled on a number of about $500/hr (see the comments). Now look for a moment at what Medicare pays, even at its highest level of billing for a physician’s time for evlauation and management of a medical problem: for 40 minutes of a physician’s time, it’s $140 (or $210/hr) before taxes. Again, we see another disconnect as to how doctors are valued in our current system.
The Obama administration's version of Aretha Franklin's R-E-S-P-E-C-T is its reverse, C-O-N-T-E-M-P-T. Contempt for the American people and for our institutions. How else can they baldface lie about most everything and anything, with the assistance of much of the liberal media covering-up for the lies. It is little wonder that either through patriotism, animus or self-serving that there are enough leaks to expose enough lies that any sentient being can see them for what they are. Events that are reported are making a hash out of administration deceptive contempt for truth and facts. For those less aware, the problem is penetrating the cover-up wall erected and defended by much of the liberal media. That will take a concerted effort. It doesn't have to be anything beyond factual ads swamping the airwaves in this final six weeks of the campaign, getting the truth over the media's wall. Romney better be going all in on getting those ads on the airwaves.
The neurosciences were the sexy new frontier in the 1990s, but popular writers often offered the impression that any basic science of the central nervous system might have clear implications for understanding the workings of the mind.
The idea that a neurological explanation could exhaust the meaning of experience was already being mocked as “medical materialism” by the psychologist William James a century ago. And today’s ubiquitous rhetorical confidence about how the brain works papers over a still-enormous scientific uncertainty. Paul Fletcher, professor of health neuroscience at the University of Cambridge, says that he gets “exasperated” by much popular coverage of neuroimaging research, which assumes that “activity in a brain region is the answer to some profound question about psychological processes. This is very hard to justify given how little we currently know about what different regions of the brain actually do.” Too often, he tells me in an email correspondence, a popular writer will “opt for some sort of neuro-flapdoodle in which a highly simplistic and questionable point is accompanied by a suitably grand-sounding neural term and thus acquires a weightiness that it really doesn’t deserve. In my view, this is no different to some mountebank selling quacksalve by talking about the physics of water molecules’ memories, or a beautician talking about action liposomes.”
A superior and useful breed. Tollers prance around in a way which seems to attract ("toll") ducks - at least the stupid ones. (As in "Ask not for whom the bell tolls,...")
Why? It's a mystery. Who can read a duck's mind? Except another duck. Why do we think we have to cover Labs with camo and make them lay still? Because we are stupider than ducks? The Tollers get all of the fun. Multi-purpose animals.
And if you shoot the duck, they are very fine retrievers.
Nice bouncy red dogs which look like mutts. Which is a compliment, on Maggie's Farm. Mutts Is Us. Love 'em. But Tollers are AKC.
9:30 They went on from there and passed through Galilee. He did not want anyone to know it;
9:31 for he was teaching his disciples, saying to them, "The Son of Man is to be betrayed into human hands, and they will kill him, and three days after being killed, he will rise again."
9:32 But they did not understand what he was saying and were afraid to ask him.
9:33 Then they came to Capernaum; and when he was in the house he asked them, "What were you arguing about on the way?"
9:34 But they were silent, for on the way they had argued with one another who was the greatest.
9:35 He sat down, called the twelve, and said to them, "Whoever wants to be first must be last of all and servant of all."
9:36 Then he took a little child and put it among them; and taking it in his arms, he said to them,
9:37 "Whoever welcomes one such child in my name welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes not me but the one who sent me."
We're doing NY this weekend. The New York Botanical Garden's Monet Show will be closing soon. They recreated his garden in Giverny, inside the Conservatory, right down to his lily pond and his bridge - painted in his own bridge color.
His gardens were a blooming frenzy of uncoordinated color. Dominant? Roses, Helianthus, and Dahlias this time of year. He scoured the world for interesting plants, and threw them in. In his later years, he only painted his garden.
We love gardens and gardening ideas, getting ready for Spring right about now. I believe that Mrs. BD is finally in recovery from her historic, purist insistence on not mixing annuals with perennials.
Since lead shot was (rightly) outlawed for waterfowl hunting in North America in 1991, the varieties of alternatives have been growing.
Steel shot was the first to appear but steel has low density (hits softer, travels shorter, and thus requires larger shot size than lead). Many folks were reluctant to put magnum steel loads through older or valuable shotguns, it altered choke functioning, and many felt that steel produced too many crippled birds. (I thought so, but I am usually not a very good shot with waterfowl unless I am in the groove.)
Then came Bismuth, and Bismuth-Tungsten - all much more expensive than steel, but with densities closer to those of lead, and presumably gentler on the barrel than steel. Plus you use the same shot sizes as with lead, say, #4 for decoying ducks and BB for geese.
The non-toxic shot I've been hearing about lately i Hevi-Steel, an iron-tungsten shot which is as cheap as regular steel but with a density approaching that of lead. There's a good, detailed review of Hevi-steel here. Given the price, it sounds like an excellent choice for those giant flocks of Snow Geese.
I think Bismuth is my first choice for ducks, especially since I can do everything the same way I used to do with lead, but I wonder what our readers like to use for ducks and geese because I am no expert on this.
"I confess that there are several parts of this Constitution which I do not at present approve, but I am not sure I shall never approve them: For having lived long, I have experienced many instances of being obliged by better information or fuller consideration, to change opinions even on important subjects, which I once thought right, but found to be otherwise. It is therefore that the older I grow, the more apt I am to doubt my own judgment, and to pay more respect to the judgment of others."
Actually, I'm going to Georgia first, to visit a whole passelful of relatives I haven't seen since I was a teenager.
Wail, howdee, nay-bah! Whuzzup heah in ol' Jo-ja?
Just practicing.
For those of you just tuning in, I'm off to beautiful Mehico to have a cancerous tumor removed. Or, in doctor's parlance, I'm "being treated for my condition". Doctors never use ugly words like "cancer" and "tumor" because it'll cause me to dwell in the depths of despair forever. The back story is here, and it's not too late to donate a few shekels to the cause. I'm still facing some serious post-operative costs.
And certainly my deepest thanks to those who helped make this possible. I honestly thought when I first heard the verdict diagnosis that it was a death sentence, simply because I knew I'd never have the money even for a cut-rate (no pun intended) operation down in Mexico. But, between selling almost everything I own (they can have my Honda Civic when they pry it from my cold, dead fingers), the gang at my mom's rest home (they actually held an official PBS-style 'fundraiser', with skits and songs and magic acts by the residents to entertain the troops during the event), and, of course, the generous people here and on Instapundit.
As for my recuperation and getting back to blogging, I have no idea what to expect. Naturally, I've been hearing wildly different scenarios, although I think the worse ones are referring to a full-fledged colostomy, which is a far cry from what I'm getting, thank God. I have an extremely comfortable computer chair, and, being on a boat, the galley and head are just five feet away, so I should be able to get along just fine. Because the boat's a liveaboard, I've got tons of food and water at the ready should the global warmists be wrong and dirt reaches the point of spontaneous combustion far sooner than expected and I need to quickly head out to sea so I can be boiled alive.
(there's something wrong with that last sentence, but I just can't place it)
And, of course, no Big C update would be complete without a cartoon or two from my two dear, dear friends who have done their utmost to keep my spirits buoyed by sending me every gruesome, morbid, soul-eviscerating cartoon they come across. Bless their little hearts.
And it occurs to me that not only do Americans live longer than Britons, Australians and Canadians, but Hispanics, as well. Or, to be precise, "have more liveable time' than the others.
You know all those extra letters Britons use in words like "colour", "neighbour", "programme", etc? Well, all those little seconds it takes to type those extra letters adds up over time. If it takes 1 second to type the 'u' in 'colour', 'neighbour', etc, times one million uses over a lifetime, that's 12 days, or almost two weeks of wasted life.
And then we notice the unnecessary upside-down exclamation and question marks in Spanish. Again, countless days, wastefully thrown away.
In other words, compared to every Briton, Australian, Canadian and Spanish-speaking person in the world, you just gained 12 days of life.
Please, No More Apologies For Free Speech
Late September and early October is the time to re-seed and fertilize your lawns in the temperate zone. At this point, we have weeds, crab grass, holes from skunks and possums digging for grubs, chipmunk holes, wild strawberry infestations, and all sorts of other lawn miseries. (I do not have lawn irrigation - too much lawn to cover.)
Photo: A Lotus blossom at the NYBG
Since lead shot was (rightly) outlawed for waterfowl hunting in North America in 1991, the varieties of alternatives have been growing. 
¡Hola!
