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.
4:12 Beloved, do not be surprised at the fiery ordeal that is taking place among you to test you, as though something strange were happening to you.
4:13 But rejoice insofar as you are sharing Christ's sufferings, so that you may also be glad and shout for joy when his glory is revealed.
4:14 If you are reviled for the name of Christ, you are blessed, because the spirit of glory, which is the Spirit of God, is resting on you.
5:6 Humble yourselves therefore under the mighty hand of God, so that he may exalt you in due time.
5:7 Cast all your anxiety on him, because he cares for you.
5:8 Discipline yourselves, keep alert. Like a roaring lion your adversary the devil prowls around, looking for someone to devour.
5:9 Resist him, steadfast in your faith, for you know that your brothers and sisters in all the world are undergoing the same kinds of suffering.
5:10 And after you have suffered for a little while, the God of all grace, who has called you to his eternal glory in Christ, will himself restore, support, strengthen, and establish you.
You can't make this stuff up. What's this country coming to? The government doesn't have enough to do? If something is copyrighted, should it be embeddable on YouTube in the first place? No.
Crazy thing is, lots of people use YouTube for self-promotion. If you are a would-be performer or show or whatever, and copyright your stuff, do not make it embeddable. Simple. Can't have it both ways. Can't tell me not to post a photo of your billboard along the road.
YouTube is good fun, a vast resource, and one of the best time-wasters ever invented. If George Shearing's estate, or the Feds, come after Maggie's for embedding his YouTube vid, I have good defenses planned already. Make my day!
Liberals just love hearing America denounced as "parochial." It makes them feel worldly and superior. This phony posture in part explains the tasteless joke we now have in the White House.
This saying good-bye on the edge of the dark And cold to an orchard so young in the bark Reminds me of all that can happen to harm An orchard away at the end of the farm All winter, cut off by a hill from the house. I don't want it girdled by rabbit and mouse, I don't want it dreamily nibbled for browse By deer, and I don't want it budded by grouse. (If certain it wouldn't be idle to call I'd summon grouse, rabbit, and deer to the wall And warn them away with a stick for a gun.) I don't want it stirred by the heat of the sun. (We made it secure against being, I hope, By setting it out on a northerly slope.) No orchard's the worse for the wintriest storm; But one thing about it, it mustn't get warm. "How often already you've had to be told, Keep cold, young orchard. Good-bye and keep cold. Dread fifty above more than fifty below." I have to be gone for a season or so. My business awhile is with different trees, Less carefully nourished, less fruitful than these, And such as is done to their wood with an axe-- Maples and birches and tamaracks. I wish I could promise to lie in the night And think of an orchard's arboreal plight When slowly (and nobody comes with a light) Its heart sinks lower under the sod. But something has to be left to God.
Better yet, let's take a WW 2 Vet fishing. A pal's hunting and fishing club had their annual Saturday Take a Vet Fishing Day last weekend, and he sent me this snap. Some guys in wheelchairs:
George Shearing died on Valentine's Day 2011. He was blind from birth and died at the age of 91. George started playing piano and accordion at age 5 and his only formal musical education consisted of four years of study at the Linden Lodge School for the Blind. Later, finances would force him to turn down university scholarships to play piano in a neighborhood pub for $5 a week.
Years later he became a prolific songwriter, known for expanding the boundaries of jazz by adding an orchestral sensibility and a mellow aesthetic to the music. In 1947, Mr. Shearing moved to America where he became one of the most popular performing and recording artists. He won earned many prestigious awards, honorary doctorate degrees, Grammy Awards, and three presidents have invited him to play at the White House.
In 2007, this once poor, blind kid from Battersea, the youngest of nine, whose father delivered coal and his mother cleaned trains at night after caring for the children during the day, travelled with his wife, Ellie, to London to be Knighted by Queen Elizabeth II in the Ballroom of Buckingham Palace.
After the ceremony he is quoted as saying, "The poor, blind kid from Battersea became Sir George Shearing. Now that's a fairy tale come true." He once introduced his composition "Lullaby of Birdland" by saying: "I have been credited with writing 300 songs. Two-hundred-ninety-nine enjoyed a bumpy ride from relative obscurity to total oblivion. Here is the other one".
They're the ultimate Sherlock Holmes mysteries. You're given mere scraps of information, the wreckage is usually twisted beyond recognition, and you're faced with the knowledge that nine times out of ten you're looking for a chain of failures, not just a single part that suddenly went kaflooey.
And unless it's an actual bomb, which is fairly easy to detect afterward because of the micro-pitting that takes place during an explosion, the one thing that modern airliners almost never, ever, do is suddenly just go poof and drop off the radar screen without a peep from the crew.
As Air France Flight 447 did two years ago, taking 228 people to a watery grave.
Below the fold I'll present a 1-hour video on the mystery and an update on the recent findings. Unlike normally, where the black boxes provide the vital clues that solve the enigma, this time around the complete opposite occurred.
We are not going to participate in the Weiner roast (because what regular middle-aged guy hasn't sent pics of his trouser pup tent to young girls he doesn't know on Twitter now and then?), but lawyer Ace has a good related post on what lawyers term Bad Facts.
Dealing creatively with Bad Facts is one thing lawyers get paid the big bucks for. It is always a fun challenge. Life is simpler if we are careful to avoid Bad Facts in our own lives, but sometimes Bad Facts find us, and nobody is perfect.
Never try to be your own lawyer, because you do not know how the game is played.
People seem to feel it's pretty lousy, unless you are lucky enough to have a government job. Since we all work as serfs for the government from January 'til May, and since the Chinese are loaning us money to pay the bills, no surprise there.
Speaking of the economy, my neighbors down the road are adding a fancy new master bath, and I stopped by to take a look. I like construction. Things are not universally bad, I guess. Those are legal Mexicans working on it, of course. The jobs Americans don't want to do.
We stumbled by accident into a little ristorante in the dreary (and definitely not touristy) medieval hilltop village of Amelia around 2 pm, and found the place in the otherwise dead town packed with jolly Italians chowing down and drinking wine. We were the only foreigners there. The Hosteria dei Cansacchi. A simple neighborhood place with a simple menu: you order either the Mare or the Terra. I ordered the Mare, Mrs ordered the Terra, and halfway through lunch we had to "stop the menu." However delicious, it was just too much. That's when we decided we needed to share meals.
Here's their menu - no choices - they just bring it all, one course after another. The English translations in the fine print are imperfect, eg "Wild Board."
I've lived all over the US, and traveled all over Italy. The gold standard of pizza is New York's, developed by its Neapolitan immigrants to perfection. At least it used to be before all those fu-fus moved in with their taste buds permanently deformed by the chain crap elsewhere, and then added more fu-fu crap on top. Jon Stewart takes Donald Trump to task for taking Sarah Palin to a chain pizzeria, and proves Trump is another fu-fu crapper. If Trump ever visits Alaska, I hope Palin feeds him a mooseburger made from veggies.
The one mistake that you'll see in this video is that Stewart's slice is not dribbling hot olive oil down his arm, olive oil being one of the secrets to good pizza. At least, get your notepad ready, Stewart points out some of the good places in NYC to go for pizza. They used to be on almost every block, but the fu-fuers have chased them out. -- After decades, I found a place in San Diego that was almost up to snuff, but that neighborhood became yuppified and its pizza fu-fued.
When you drive around the northeastern US in late May-early June, the blooming Black Locust trees are everywhere. Their white flower bunches put on a good show and stand out strongly from the green background - the locust trees are a big puff of white.
As a tree which is not native to the northeast, it is often considered a weed tree. An illegal alien, as it were. The are fast-growing, and tend to form stands which crowd out native trees. Pleasant glades, however.
Black Locust was transplanted to the north because locust makes the best, longest-lasting fence posts and fence rails. 50 years. It still does.
Snap above is on the country road in the hilly Tiber Valley driving from Todi to Montefalco, with the charming town of Todi in the distance, on the hill. Italy is good about having a sharp distinction between town and country. Little-to-no sprawl. Except in the big cities, you go from urban density directly to vineyards, olive groves, or forests full of deer, cinghiale, eagles, even wolves and, best of all, the ferocious and dangerously-expensive Wild Black Truffle. People like to live in towns, where they can walk to work and shop, and can say bon giorno to their neighbors.
Bit of history
A quick history and geography of Umbria in central Italy, northeast of Rome, to put my forthcoming travel pics in context. It is generally similar to the history of the entire area we now term Italy.
Central Italy was the prehistoric land of the Etruscans (hence "Tuscany" - land of the Etruscans) and of the less-known Umbri. They were, relatively speaking, peaceful and prosperous farmers and traders. When Rome began its imperial expansion around 250 BC, Umbria up along the old trading route to the Adriatic (which the Romans later termed the Via Flaminia) seemed like an obvious target.
The Romans did their Roman thing there for 600 years until the empire began to unwind and Goths and Lombards moved into Tuscany and Umbria both by immigration and by arms in the 400s-500s. In many ways, these waves of invasion became sort of Romanized and Christianized, in time. The Byzantines were in the mix then, too.
Warring feudal duchys and kingdoms dominated the dark ages in this part of Italy, during a time when the declining Roman regions were also set upon by piratical Saracens (mainly seeking slaves for the Middle Eastern slave trade) and Normans (seeking adventure), until Papal power exerted itself and built an authoritarian, theocratic peace by the 1100s and 1200s. They were big on building castles with which to assert their powerful churchly presence, but from the days of the late empire people were building their own keeps and walls to defend themselves from foreigners and also from their neighboring towns. The Roman Legions had previously made walls and keeps unnecessary: the Roman armies had been the wall. The Pax Romana.
The Papal State pretty much controlled central Italy, perhaps to its detriment, until the Italian nation was invented 150 years ago. Roman Catholicism was pretty much corrupted by money and politics, during that era, including the Benedictines.
2011 is the 150th anniversary of that political event. Garibaldi, etc.
Geography
Geographically, southern Umbria divides itself into three regions: The north-south-running Tiber Valley where the Tiber flows south towards Rome, the fertile north-south running Valle Umbra which is like a mini version of California's Central Valley, and the eastern Valnerina which is the area in the majestic Appennines where the river Nera flows down to eventually join and magnify the Tiber.
We visited and stayed in incredible hotels in each of those three areas of Umbria. As in Roman times, rural and quaint Umbria is a popular Roman getaway place, full of bikers, motorcyclists, foodies, and hikers. It's only a 2 or 3 hour drive from Rome, and it is packed with "unspoiled gems."
Most of the towns were Umbrian first, Roman later, and then Medieval-Renaissance. Except for towns damaged by the war (like Terni) or by earthquakes (like Foligno), there is a lot of Renaissance, generally built on Medieval town footprints.
Except for Assisi with its bus-loads of pilgrims, we saw few non-Italian tourists and only one American couple - friendly folks from Montgomery, Alabama! Some Brits, Aussies, Austrians, and Dutch. We tend to meet people when we travel. That's part of the fun.
Todi, Amelia, Orvieto, Montefalco, and Perugia are on hills in the Tiber Valley. Towns in Umbria tended to be built on hills for defensive purposes, which is why exploring Italy is such a good physical workout. Assisi, Spoleto, Spello, and Terni are along the western edge of the Apennines where they rise from the plain. Norcia, and our monastery hotel, are in the mountains themselves near where the Nera emerges from the mountains.
Weather
Best times for Italy or any Mediterranean travel are Spring and Fall. May and October are perfect. Italy climate here.
I will have lots more fun travel pics soon - Pic below of the Valle Umbra, looking west from the Assisi hillside:
Pic below from the garden of our 6th C. Benedictine monastery hotel in the Valnerina in the Apennines, with a small hillside olive grove (doubling as parking area) below the wall. It is no wonder that people love to visit Italy: it has the food, the history, the scenery, the quaintness, the vino, the art and architecture, and the delightfully tough and fashionable Italian gals.
One of the problems facing the United States is deteriorating infrastructure. Everything from highways, byways, airports and freight facilities are in need of some sort of repair, renovation or downright replacement.
Recently at the launch/commissioning ceremony for the USS William McClean (part of the Navy’s Prepositioning Program) Fred Harris President and CEO of General Dynamics NASSCO (NASSCO is a large shipbuilding complex outside of San Diego) spoke of the need for a National Marine Highway System . Mr. Harris made the case that vital part of the national transportation is being neglected – mainly the Maritime Coastal routes and facilities.
What Harris is talking about is using what used to be called “coasters” – basically small ships to handle freight movementalong coastal routes. His point addresses a larger issue – that our maritime industry has fallen on some hard times.As a nation that relies on sea power to extend our military and diplomatic reach across the world, we have basically relegated our Merchant Marine to other nations to build ships and transport goods.Our Maritime tradition not only extended from the Merchant Marine through the Navy and Coast Guard, but at one time, the world’s second largest Navy was the United States Army!
The problems, of course, are simple – we just aren’t competitive in terms of labor costs and building/maintenance facilities. Our Merchant Marine is highly unionizedwith the attendant costs associated with union shops – including feather bedding.We’ve lost our ability to produce the tons and tons of high quality steel needed for a vibrant ship building industry.And the same infrastructure problems facing our highway and railway system also affect the Maritime routes that already exist.Our intracoastal waterways system is seeing less and less dredging needed to keep it open and traffic flowing.While the Gulf system seems to be fairly stable in terms of maintenance, the Atlantic system is in dire need of dredging and width repair in several places along it’s length. The last time I brought a boat down that route (a53 foot Viking sport fisher) there where places in the Atlantic system where we were plowing through the sand and silt – not a good thing for raw water cooled engines. Tugs and barges are also restricted in certain parts of the Atlantic system.
There are otherchallenges facing a new, bigger and better maritime system.NIMBY is a huge factor in the placement of facilities to off load or on load goods and raw materials. The recent contretemps in Narragansett Bay over the LNG facility is a good example.“Honest” Dick Blumenthal when he was Attorney General of Connecticut killed the Long Island Sound LNG/oil platform facility with misinformation and downright lying about the facilities impact on both the LIS ecosystem and it’s financial impact. Last, but certainly not least, access to distribution points are almost not existent due to the sale of port facilities to real estate developers to build hotels, convention centers, sports stadiums and private marinas. Harbor real estate is expensive and the competition is fierce to obtain and develop it.
Mr. Harris has the right idea – a strong national maritime system able to move cargo, goods and materials using our long seacoasts and river systems should be a priority.I’m certain private investors would welcome the opportunity to be involved in building small ships, tugs, barges and facilities – as long as the government and the Maritime and Port labor unionscan be kept at bay.
I must confess before God and a jury of my peers:
When you drive around the northeastern US in late May-early June, the blooming Black Locust trees are everywhere. Their white flower bunches put on a good show and stand out strongly from the green background - the locust trees are a big puff of white. 
Transportation in Bob Dylan's Music 