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.
Tons more wonderful snow and cold this morning, and a bigger dump coming tonight - an Ice Age thanks to the crisis of global warming. From the news, you'd think it was the end of the world.
How do they manage in places like Moscow or Montreal or Winnipeg? They just keep going - and they don't close the schools or the airports either.
This young lady speaks of her experiences and feelings as many gay friends have described them to me. She is eloquent and, as far as I can know, correct. -- I'm sure there are as proportionately many straight kooks as gay. I'm sure that, if there are proportionately more among gays, it may largely come from evolving in an atmosphere of fears. I, or you, may not support some aspects of the gay political agenda, but let's never discriminate against honesty and love.
The first to seize on the political potential of government workers was New York's Mayor Robert F. Wagner. The Kennedy White House took notice of his success.
I think this guy seems reasonable, fine as infotainment. Wants to be a TV professor. Not sure he can tell me much that I don't know. Anyway, I have a day job.
There are an infinite number of ways to live life fully and energetically. I was thinking about that topic since I read the bio of a fellow I admire and have heard speak in the past, Sander Gilman. I am a fan.
Dr. Gilman spoke at a medical meeting I attended in NYC in December. He is a polymath. Here's his bio:
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in that same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University; 2007 to the present as Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College; 2010 to 2013 as a Visiting Research Professor at The University of Hong Kong. He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, and New Zealand. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995. He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007).
I work hard, make myself as useful as I can, and read quite a bit, but I am a slouch. I stand in awe of such productive people, who are blessed with abundant talents and use them to the full.
...“calm and collected” are not the words that come to mind to describe the feminist response to the governor from Alaska. The young feminist Jessica Grose, writing on the popular website Jezebel just after the Republican convention, was—well, we’ll let her describe it: “When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. . . . What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage.” Grose’s readers left more than 700 comments, according to the late New York Sun, including one from a reader who wanted to “vomit with rage.” Other haters damned Palin as a traitor to her sex or an “insult to women,” as Judith Warner spat in the New York Times. “Turncoat bitch!” the comedian Sandra Bernhard railed in a performance caught on YouTube. “You whore in your cheap fucking . . . cheap-ass plastic glasses and your hair up!”
Part of the problem was the very design of the projects. Aping the bad ideas of Swiss architect Le Corbusier (Theodore Dalrymple suggests “Le Corbusier was to architecture what Pol Pot was to social reform”), CHA planners had created islands of social pathology lacking almost all human connections.
Have you heard the one about how postmodern extremists on a vendetta against science have overrun anthropology? Hugh Gusterson has, and he’s not amused.
Took this pic of a cute in-town house on Saturday morning. That's a real home, isn't it? You could grow up in its cozy nooks, and happily come home from the Army to it. "Hey, Mom. I'm home."
The New Victory Theater, on 42nd St. in the heart of the theater district. We saw the new Cymbeline there on Sunday afternoon. The Fiasco Theater Company. Six recent Brown MFA grads played all the roles, and the entire stage set was as seen: three wooden boxes. They spoke the Bard's lines in pure American accent and tone, and every word was comprehensible. Each actor played a musical instrument too. Delightful comedy - and the audience got all the jokes. This play is a farce, a sit-com about love, evil, treachery and vengeance, with a happy ending. Entirely lacking in Shakespearian grandiloquence.
We got there a bit early, and I chatted with the lighting board gal about the theater. It's the oldest operating theater in NYC, built in 1900 by Oscar Hammerstein's grandfather for vaudeville. Holds around 500. It's a jewel-box theater.
Its history reflects the history of 42nd St in the 20th Century. Vaudeville, then Burlesque (Gypsy Rose Lee stripped there) under the Minskys, then legit theater (Belasco himself had the electric lights put in), then a porn movie house in the 70s, then shuttered for 20 years, then reopened in the 90s as what it is now: a venue for family-friendly productions.
Thank you, Rudy Giuliani, for civilizing 42nd St.
The Fiasco's Cymbeline is only there for two weeks and is, I think, thanks to a pile of good reviews, sold out. They let me take pics before they began, as people were arriving. The actors hung around on stage talking to people and stretching:
A couple more pics of this jewel of a theater below.
I forget where this fine recipe came from (maybe Mr. Free Market. No, it was The Englishman), but I'd think it would work fine for any game bird except duck, and certainly for chicken:
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Peel the potatoes first thing in the morning as the second cup of tea and Aspirin take effect. Put in a pan with lots of cold water and handful of salt, bring to the boil on the Aga as your bacon and eggs cook. Finish breakfast, ablute and then pour the boiling water out of the pan over your breakfast plate in the sink to clean the eggy stains off. Leave pan lid off for the potatoes to steam dry as you walk the dogs.
On your return, sniff the grouse hanging in the woodshed and pick a couple, or more, of the ripe ones. Do the dirty deeds and return indoors with your fresh plucked grouse.
Rummage in the larder and pull out all the root vegetables you can find. Cut off the grotty bits, put in the hen food bucket (it's legal as long as you don't take them into the kitchen first).
Open up the Sunday paper on the kitchen table and put the vegetables on it; read, cut, slice and swear all at the same time. When finished screw up the soiled paper and use in the bottom of the fire grate.
Open a bottle of red.
Heat a large knob of dripping [fat from roasted meat] in your largest roasting pan until it is smoking, drop in the potatoes, swirl about and sprinkle with lots of salt. A sprig of rosemary can be added on top. Bung in the oven. Pour a glass of wine.
Second roasting tray, butter and oil and put to heat. When you have finished the wine, take out of oven and put the veg in, shake and return.
Your frying pan that you cooked your bacon in this morning should be returned to the hot plate and all that lovely bacony grease heated up. Pour another glass of wine.
Take birds and roll around in hot pan until they are brown and your fingers hurt.
As Agas only fit two roasting trays you will probably now need to add them to the potato tray.
Drink the glass and check how laying the table in the dining room is going.
Your guests should now arrive, have a sherry with them; make your excuse as soon as he mentions his work at the bank, retreat to the kitchen, open another bottle of really meaty red, get all the stuff out of the oven, birds on the carving plate on the table to breathe, veggies in the bowls that were warming in the bottom oven. Splash some wine in a glass to check it and then into the meat roasting pan, pinch of this, spoon of that and your gravy is made.
Take through and carve and let the guests help themselves to vegetables.
From being a marginal and even mocked issue, climate-change litigation is fast emerging as a new frontier of law where some believe hundreds of billions of dollars are at stake.
Suppose someone - say, the president of United States - proposed the following... I've got a great idea for deficit reduction: We increase spending by $540 billion while we increase taxes by $770 billion. He'd be laughed out of town.
If you have been away from Maggie's this weekend, catch up on our posts. Good fun, as always.
Readers who have not strolled down West 42nd St. in the past ten years would be amazed by it. Clean, no sense of menace, no porn, no creeps, tons of regular people on the streets day and night. I didn't even see any cops - there always used to be patrol cars everywhere there. Multi-million dollar luxury apartments going up between 10th Ave. and the West Side Highway.
Funky, funky Broadway is now a place you can take your kids.
I took a few pics before and after the matinee yesterday:
A fun walk to the parking garage, despite the 15 degree temps and strong wind. NYC is all about walking. New Yorkers walk more miles just in their daily lives than any country folk do. That's why the gals are all so svelte compared to country gals. Streets filled with people. Wonderful.
I really do need to plan a 15-mile NYC Official Maggie's Farm walking tour of Manhattan this spring or summer, with an architectural/cultural guide. I meant to do it last year, but life got busy. The Battery to Central Park, with a snakey route hitting some old joints and pubs. Maybe I will plan it. If I build it, will you come? (I refer to our bigcityphobes.)
There's quite an embarrassment and brouhaha that the Chinese pianist chosen to perform at the state dinner at the White House on January 19 for China's Chairman Hu Jintao played a melody that extols the Chinese entry into Korea during that war against the US military "jackals."
I'm informed by a Chinese lover of his homeland that a more appropriate choice would have been China's equivalent of the US' "America The Beautiful," emphasizing the land. Here's the well-known Chinese song, "Wodi zuguo (My ancestral land)," that he'd learned as a child in Hong Kong. His eyes tear up at the hearing of it, just as Americans' eyes tear up at the hearing of "America The Beautiful." It is very lovely, and would have been far more appropriate. Perhaps next time our State Department can get a better translator and coordinator of such state events.
"A mighty river, wide with foamy waves A breeze blows Wheat blossoms fragrant on its shores My home is on that shore I hear the call of the boatmen I see the boats' white sails This is the beautiful ancestral land The land where I was born and raised On this expansive wide-ranging soil Everywhere the sun shines...."
Having things to look forward to, whether a good snow storm, or a trip someplace new, a new lamp, a new Teaching Company series, a possible new friend, or reservations for a good dinner out, is part of the charm of life.
Mrs. BD has just laid on me our trip adventures for 2011 which she has kindly planned and paid for. (It seems like the villa in Provence or Tuscany for the whole family, plus the Gwynnies and the Sipps and some other fun pals, will have to wait 'til 2012 - God willing - because the gal wants to get me back to Turkey, and to the Holy Land, first. Maybe she is wondering how long I will last...)
For one thing, I know she is planning supper at this joint:
Screw the Death Tax. The grim reaper is forever snapping at our heels while we run like hell to keep one step ahead of him. Die broke. They keep reminding me that it's a big, inviting world out there, full of interesting, confusing, and exciting things. Ruts are bad because they shorten life. Comfort zones are mainly valuable as places to return to. I have learned this, in life. Timidity fails, constricts life, creates regrets that just accumulate and grow mold.
It's just kinda odd, though, that Mrs. BD had none of my hunting trips to my old familiar places on her list: Maine, New Brunswick, Manitoba. What's up with that? She has lots of theater and opera tix done too, but never even bothered to check out Bob's tour this year. Guess that's my responsibility.
What adventures are y'all planning this year?
Pic on top is the club where some of us Maggie's Farmers like to go to hunt critters with wings in Manitoba in early October.
Aristotle's "Man is a political animal" means, as you know, that man is an animal who lives in a polis. Most normal folks prefer to live amongst others, to cluster, whether for convenience, socializing, or for security. I happen to enjoy both town and country, and find suburbia to be an imperfect if often necessary compromise.
Urbanism is about studying cities and towns. The topic has always been of interest to me, whether from the archeological view or from the present view.
Our blog colleague with his shiny new site The Old Urbanist (a word-play on The New Urbanism) blogrolls several sites which I have found quite absorbing and informative:
The Guardian recently published a wicked satire of moral relativism, a Swiftian send-up entitled “End human rights imperialism now” with the classic sub-heading “Groups such as Human Rights Watch have lost their way by imposing western, ‘universal’ standards on developing countries.” Brilliant! Hahahahaha! I didn’t know the Guardian had branched out into humor.
But about five minutes after my laughter subsided, a horrible suspicion dawned on me: Could it be that the author was serious?
The notion of human rights is about as Western as it comes.
"I'm not racist, I know people who voted for Obama, although I try not to talk politics with them because we'll just get into an argument and they'll accuse me of being racist when they're losing in order to end the discussion."
That should work like a charm.
No it won't, Prof. That sounds very racist to me. The below is just a figment of Vanderleun's imagination:
Tons more wonderful snow and cold this morning, and a bigger dump coming tonight - an Ice Age thanks to the crisis of global warming. From the news, you'd think it was the end of the world.
Sander L. Gilman
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Aristotle's "Man is a political animal" means, as you know, that man is an animal who lives in a polis. Most normal folks prefer to live amongst others, to cluster, whether for convenience, socializing, or for security. I happen to enjoy both town and country, and find suburbia to be an imperfect if often necessary compromise.
The American: 