Maggie's Farm

VDH struggles mightily to identify some theme to make sense out of the ways moral flaws and hypocrisies are played out in the politics of today.

While I admire his effort and enjoy his examples, I think he mostly misses a simple point, the one Lyndon Johnson made about some Central American dictator: "He may be an SOB, but he's our SOB."

It's pure politics, VDH. Politics is not the place to look for moral consistency, moral energy, or intellectual integrity. This is why many believe a degree of sociopathy and narcissism are required in politics.

(As Ace puts it re Sanford: "You can get away with being a bastard, but you can't get away with being a buffoon.")

To the Left, at least, politics is war in which, as they often brag, the ends may justify the means because they like to believe that they are well-intentioned. "By all means necessary.." etc.

I always grant more trust to those who claim to be self-interested - even if they are lying - than to those who claim virtue.

Update: More on public virtue from Rick Moran.

A soulful traditional song (lyrics here).

Not embeddable, but a good tune about desire for a prostitute. Fun video too. 1993. 

Bogus or not, I like these ideas for guys to avoid accompanying their spouses on shopping trips. (It's like the age-old trick of breaking the vacuum cleaner every time one is asked to use it). This is from Mostly Safe for Work:

We support the fish ladders. Government built the dams: government should build the fish ladders too.

The Repub's problem with black voters. Solve it, geniuses. In America, it's crazy for any skin color or ethnic group to vote as a block.

Time to declare victory in Iraq. Tiger

Construction spending:

We say it again: That was no military coup in Honduras.

Insty:

MORE CRUSHING OF DISSENT. I remember when protest was patriotic! Seems like it was just a little while ago . . . .

Health care lawsuits, and how they drive medical costs. If an OB pays $250,000/yr for insurance, you are the one who must pay for it.

Synthstuff:

I call it the SUE defense, the Shut-Up Explanation. Here’s a quick and dirty example of how it works:

Skeptic – “There has been no global warming since 1998.”
Green – “Shut up!”

In which Tom Friedman permanently convinces me that he is a partisan, fad-chasing knucklehead.

More hysteria:

"Today, international action on climate change is urgent and essential. Indeed, there can no longer be any debate about the need to act, because the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), of which I am chairman, has established climate change as an unequivocal reality beyond scientific doubt."

Sorry. There is nothing in science which is "beyond doubt."

Sowell does not want discount medical care.

The hangings have already begun in Iran

The current status of US States' budgets. They love those credit cards, because they spend on our cards, not theirs.

Where did the Madoff money go? Kudlow

Viking:

The law trumps empathy - It was yet another 5-4 Supreme Court split in the Ricci case, but buried in the details is the fact that not a single Justice affirmed the reasoning that SC nominee Sonia Sotomayor used to rule against the New Haven firefighters claiming reverse discrimination.

Extra - Cato: "The Ricci ruling: a victory for merit over racial politics."

The Shrimp and Grits I had on Saturday in Alabama were served hot in large Martini glasses with a tiny silver spoon. It was something new to me. Like a dessert. The shrimp and sauce were spooned on top of the grits.

I detected a faint hint of cilantro and lime in the shrimp sauce, but I do not have the recipe. The shrimp were sweet as sugar, fresh from the Gulf, and bite-sized - about an inch long. I do prefer the tender little ones to the big ones for most purposes.

I learned the below from this site (which includes one of the countless recipes for this treat)

In the Low Country of South Carolina and particularly Charleston, shrimp and grits has been considered a basic breakfast for coastal fishermen and families for decades during the shrimp season (May through December). Simply called 'breakfast shrimp," the dish consisted of a pot of grits with shrimp cooked in a little bacon grease or butter. During the past decade, this dish has been dressed up and taken out on the town to the fanciest restaurants. Not just for breakfast anymore, it is also served for brunch, lunch, and dinner.

It gets no better than this.

Thanks for these from the Golden Gate Quartet, AVI, from your fine music post. Real American music:

At Am Digest, Bungee dating in NYC. The guy is right. He is an idiot. A gentleman never, never takes a nice girl on a date to a Korean whorehouse.

5 minutes ago. I love storms. Cameras cannot capture thunder, wind, and driving rain:

I like to explore and learn a bit about the places I go to.

Birmingham, Alabama is a rather new city, by Eastern standards. Even the "old" stuff there isn't very old. There wasn't much of anything there until after the Civil War. Railroads (it has no navigable river), coal and iron ore were the key to that city's wealth, hence the borrowing of the name from the Brits. Amost all of that is now gone.

A new city in the New South.

With a metropolitan population of around 1 million, it's a good-sized city, but the city proper lacks downtown residences. It's a biz center now (most recently a banking center) - not a hopping urban scene. The Univ of Alabama Medical Center also is growing like crazy.

Still, there is no visible urban scene: life happens in the leafy, lovely, quiet suburbs. 

On a weekend, there is not a soul to be seen on the streets yet it looks clean, prosperous, and safe. No "mixed use" as you find in NYC. A Jane Jacobs case study, because I have seen photos of the downtown in the 1920s which were packed with people on weekends and holidays, with the streets lined with storefronts. 

In recent decades, the suburbs which had been part of the city spun themselves off so as to be independent of the constantly-alleged and often court-confirmed corruption of the Dem machine which runs it, and which seems determined to drive people out of town.

One cool thing about cities this size: you can get from Mountain Brook, Homewood, or downtown, to the airport in about 15 minutes. Everything seems easy to do. It's manageable and friendly. For the comfortable, golf seems to be king in Birmingham. Too darn hot for tennis, if you ask me.

Beautiful: the tee of the 4th (or 14th?) hole at Shoal Creek:

A free ad for the nifty mag Garden and Gun, with another golf course in the background:

Every city carries its burden of woeful history. The 16th St. Baptist Church, where the Civil Rights movement tragically obtained energy when some KKK killed four choir girls in church in 1963. The reputation of the fine people of the city was smeared for a generation by the behavior of a handful of murderous scumbags.

More below on continuation page -

Thanks, y'all, for putting us up in these fine lodgings in Birmingham (photos below), for the fine very Southern-style party (with excellent grits 'n shrimp), and for showing us around.

Can any reader name this good old club?

 View from our balcony:

More reminiscences from our friend, during his time in the Indian Health Service. He is probably referring to the Prairie Rattler:

From afar, it might have sounded like "Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk"; at the base of my skull, it was more like "K'thunk, K'Thunk, K'thunk, K'Thunk."  What I didn't know was what how it sounded to a rattlesnake in the dusk of the Dakota scrubland.  My second day's doctoring done on Eagle Butte, the heat dissipating quickly at sunset, I hit the asphalt's edges to jog. 

In Chicago, I had snagged a pair of Nikes, the early waffle-sole design, discovered by Bill Bowerman when he poured urethane onto his wife's waffle iron. Then, Bowerman and Knight's company was still called Blue Ribbon Sports; word was that their victory shoe would protect knees and add speed. I came up in an era when leather was treasured for feet; once yearly, before Pesach, we visited the leather shoe store, where we played with this tall contraption, like a scale, into which you could insert your feet and see your skeleton; a time more innocent, before parents knew to protect their children from Xray exposure.  Good money, hard-saved dough, was spent on a pair of Oxfords. High-tops of flimsy cloth and thin sole were for basketball and any other weekend activity.  It was an era before I knew the difference between an Oxford and a Brogue, between open- and closed-lacing, nor would have cared; a time when I most admired my pediatrician's penny-loafers, shining coppers adorned.  Loafers I desired, but parents believed that laces protected growing feet.  Now, I had laid out precious bucks on some rapidly evolved descendant of polyester to protect my feet and knees.

Minimally dressed -- white T, running shorts (the days before wick-a-ways)  and my Nikes -- I ran with traffic, not yet knowing the treacherous combination of Sioux and cowboy drivers in pick-ups.  But, it was the K'Thunking in my head, the tatooing of my feet in the desert eve that should have hinted to me why the Indians came out to look, some pointing, some waving  -- not quite a greeting, not a hello, a different sort of wave; a mother stepped onto her veranda holding her child, pointing;  words were shouted, muddled in the evening breezes so I understood them not; I thought it was a welcome to the new doc.

Nurse Alpern greeted me in the lot between hospital and my apartment building.  Rattlers are out. Like this M.D., Crotalus Horridus also leave their rocks in the eve, but looking for meals. Rattlers also hear K'Thunking or Thunking, or some rattled version of this to find their meal: they too are served, who simply listen and wait.  Mrs. Alpern, the ever practical:  Don't do this again; can't afford to lose docs.  The Indians who came out to see the doc in shorts and Tee?  They thought I was dumb; wondered how far I would get.

It was a few weeks later that I saw my first snake bite. 

This is long, wonderful, nerdy, and informative. h/t, Language Log:

2 Samuel 1:1, 19-27

¹⁹ "A gazelle lies slain on your heights, Israel.
       How the mighty have fallen!

    ²⁰ "Tell it not in Gath,
       proclaim it not in the streets of Ashkelon,
       lest the daughters of the Philistines be glad,
       lest the daughters of the uncircumcised rejoice.

    ²¹ "Mountains of Gilboa,
       may you have neither dew nor rain,
       may no showers fall on your terraced fields. 
       For there the shield of the mighty was despised,
       the shield of Saul—no longer rubbed with oil.

    ²² "From the blood of the slain,
       from the flesh of the mighty,
       the bow of Jonathan did not turn back,
       the sword of Saul did not return unsatisfied.

    ²³ Saul and Jonathan—
       in life they were loved and admired,
       and in death they were not parted.
       They were swifter than eagles,
       they were stronger than lions.

    ²⁴ "Daughters of Israel,
       weep for Saul,
       who clothed you in scarlet and finery,
       who adorned your garments with ornaments of gold.

    ²⁵ "How the mighty have fallen in battle!
       Jonathan lies slain on your heights.

    ²⁶ I grieve for you, Jonathan my brother;
       you were very dear to me.
       Your love for me was wonderful,
       more wonderful than that of women.

    ²⁷ "How the mighty have fallen!
       The weapons of war have perished!"

Time to repost this fine piece. h/t, Gates:

An annual re-post -

Everybody has an opinion on pruning tomato plants. Here's my view of the subject.

First, I'll assume we are growing "Indeterminate" types of tomatoes, i.e. vine tomatoes as opposed to the tree-like ("determinate," aka "bush" tomatoes) ones often grown in pots. Left alone, vine tomatoes will grow 10+ feet along the ground, as you can often see in gardens in Bermuda, but we stake them.

Up here in New England (Yankeeland), we need to prune them because our short growing season doesn't allow much time for good fruit formation. We have to prune most of the suckers and plenty of their leaves, and we cut their tops off in July or August - all so they will put their energy into good fruit and not into further pointless growth.

Further south, diligent pruning is less important.

And even though I grow mine in fine soft soil, I fertilize them with liquid fertilizer whenever I think of it. I usually have lots of plants, but only ended up with 10-12 this year of around 5 varieties.

Here's the best site I have seen on indeterminate tomato vine gardening. For all of the effort, and despite our short season, it is well-worth it when you pick one on a hot day and eat it in the garden like an apple. A little salt on it.

Image: Commercial tomato picking in North Carolina

Blogger and frequent Maggie's commenter AVI mentioned historian David Hacket Fisher a while ago in a comment here. It reminded me of Fisher's fine book, which I once meant to read but never did: Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought. 

From a post on that book from this site:

Fischer, David Hackett, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1970). In only approximately 300 pages, Fischer surveys an immense amount of background historical literature to point out a comprehensive variety of analytical errors that many, if not most, historians commit. Fischer points out specific examples of faulty or sloppy reasoning in the work of even the most prominent historians, making it a useful book for beginning students of history. While this book presumably did not make Fischer popular with many of his peers, it should be noted that his contributions as a historian have not been limited simply to criticizing the work of others; since 1976, he has published a number of well-received books on other historical topics. 

Via BSBFB's It's all downhill from here

Insty is on the job:

A TV LOW POINT: Turned on the TV to see Geraldo interviewing Tommy Mottola about Michael Jackson’s death. In the background, footage of the body being delivered to the coroner’s office by helicopter. Glad to see Fox is keeping us up on what’s really important, the night before a big cap-and-trade vote in Congress, while revolution simmers in Iran, and people are trying to nationalize healthcare.

On the upside, Mark Sanford is probably pleased.

Obamacare would not apply to Pres, Congress, high Fed officials. Same as in Cuba.

It's just for us little people. Cost savings, ya know? Megan: Healthcare Economics: Standing Athwart History, Shouting "Stop!"

Or, as Surber puts it, Never buy a Ford from a guy who drives a Lexus.

Do not deceive yourselves. If any one of you thinks he is wise by the standards of this age, he should become a "fool" so that he may become wise. For the wisdom of this world is foolishness in God's sight. As it is written: "He catches the wise in their craftiness"; and again, "The Lord knows that the thoughts of the wise are futile."

1 Corinthians 3:18-20

Newport, 1965

Who is funding this health care campaign? Michelle

Via Insty: 

EPA Suppresses Internal Global Warming Study

Facts can be so darn annoying. As I always say, facts are what make life difficult. Fantasy is much better - and our brains are so much better at it.

Related: How many sleeper catastrophes in the Waxman bill?

Europe's empty sense of superiority. Is it simple envy?

My apologies for the obvious links. No time today, and the NJ is out of pocket. And darn, some of the links don't work? Will fix

"Were you out there praying in the garden?" Mrs. BD asked me later. "No." I said. "I was watching ants."

I spent around a half hour on Satuday afternoon sitting in the dirt watching ants. Few things can be more absorbing. (Or maybe I should say that everything in life can be absorbing if you sit for a minute.)

In doing final garden clean-up, I had to move a big old 4X4 garden edger to another spot and, naturally, uncovered a black ant nest full of eggs or pupae - I think pupae because you could see something inside the egg-like shape.

Almost instantly, the worker ants (both the big ones and the little) and the soldier ants grabbed an egg and ran for cover, scattering in all directions. After about 5 minutes, each ant with egg in mandible headed over to the right, over a rock and into a hole in a pile of garden mulch. In about 15 minutes, every one of around 200 eggs had been carried off to safety by a line or marching ants, back and forth like Chinese coolies.

Ants are said to represent 18-25% of the animal biomass of the planet - higher in the tropics. There is nothing as adaptible as the family Formicidae. They are hymenoptera - evolved from wasps, and all still have tiny stingers.

Ant social behavior is interesting, but their specialization, their physical specialization, and their chemical communication is more so.

Here's a good brief intro to ant behavior. The Wiki entry isn't too bad.

From Smithsonian:

The first wheels were not used for transportation.

Evidence indicates they were created to serve as potter’s wheels around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia—300 years before someone figured out to use them for chariots.

The ancient Greeks invented Western philosophy…and the wheelbarrow.

Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way of Byzantium or the Islamic world. Although wheelbarrows were expensive to purchase, they could pay for themselves in just 3 or 4 days in terms of labor savings.

I spent my young youth on Cape Cod, while my Dad was stationed at Camp Edwards. (1st. Lieut., US Army. Drafted out of Harvard College and never went back but, along with his fellow draftees, he was granted alumnus status and afterwards went on to grad school at the great University of Chicago, then, after a stint at the also great University of Rochester, to Yale to teach in a scientific field.)

Readers know that the salty air, the fog and the foghorns, the frigid water, the mud flats, and the clam broth seeped deep into my soul and, despite all of the development and the ticky-tacky that happened up there in the past 30 years, it's still my soul's home base. I can put up with some ticky-tacky, if it's American.

Sipp on Cape Cod (he still lives near there). Here's one of my recent Wellfleet photos. Always buy the Toro (Bluefin Tuna fatty belly meat, and grill flaming hot 3 minutes per side). As you can see in the photo, they cannot spell their own name; that's a Striper eating a lobster (as they love to do); and Cape Cod is not for the fancy set, the Country Club set, the Hamptons set, or even the Nantucket set (or, when it is, they would never let it show: that is the Yankee rules):

Via RCP:

Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Age described his challenge:

Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.

Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:

Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….

As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.

What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.

Read the whole thing. The magnitude of the hoax is finally coming clear to the general public. It's about time.

From Dr. Bob's The Temperature of Hell (no, it's not about "climate change"):

In our therapeutic culture, where all is tolerated but the good, the assertion that there are consequences for our behavior, either temporal, or especially eternal, is a truly noxious notion. The idea of Hell is perceived as an anachronistic anathema, promoted cynically by clergy controlling the poor, ignorant fools who follow them. Even those with a nominal belief in a deity will attest, with a pretense more wishful than wise, that a God of love would never condemn those who reject Him to Hell. In some sense–surely not that which the proponents of such pop theology intend–this may well be true. It will be, for those who enter that dark, hopeless, and agonizing eternity, not something dictated from on high by a vengeful God gleeful at our torture. It will be our own choice, fully, to reject the mercy and grace which has been offered to us without cost by Him who gave everything to draw us toward an eternal relationship, filled with unspeakable joy and peace, with Him.

The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.

One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)

In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.

Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria:

I don't know how we missed this story. Never a bad idea to be armed in Cougar Country.

Their dog wasn't too helpful, was he?

A lunchtime tune from from Levon Helm's new record. It has some of the old Band sound. Pure, cheerful, Christian, sentimental Americana. The guy can play anything, but he loves his drums - and he thought he was a lousy singer even before his throat cancer. 

Gotta love it, Sipp:

When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.

Anon.

The Madame Hardy Rose, a Damask Rose, was bred by Alexandre Hardy in 1832.

My brother in CT emailed the photo with this note: "You gave this plant to me 15 years ago, and it's still doing well. I have never had a rose survive this long."

Eric Anderson. I thought Tin Can Alley was his best album.

From Jim Bishop's reminiscences of his father, A Father's Love Goes on Forever and Forever, one quote:

Being a father is an awesome calling and responsibility. Granted, just about anyone can father a child, but what an awesome calling and responsibility it is to be a father. At 64, I’m still learning, even though both our daughters have long flown the nest, are married and have put Anna and me squarely in the grandparenting stage of life, something we thought old people did.
A lot of who I am today and how I act, as a parent and as an individual, can be attributed to my dad’s influence.
Among those things I learned at my father’s knee: to be honest and reliable in daily dealings and to give the other person the benefit of the doubt - until he or she proves unworthy of trust; to be on time and don’t make others wait; to devote oneself fully to an honest day’s work; to make church a priority; to know how to have fun; to be there for your kids; to be an encourager; to say “please,” “thank you” and “I love you” often; to know when to say “no” and don’t jump too quickly on the bandwagon; to not wait for a funeral to give someone flowers; to set goals and persevere to meet them.

For Father's Day, I am recommending Matthew Crawford's 2006 essay about work, of the above title, in The New Atlantis. One quote:

...the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.

I see he has expanded his thoughts into a new book. An excerpt from the book appeared in The NYT Magazine last month: The Case for Working with your Hands. A quote from that:

High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.

When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.

Some days, definitely. Other days, more abstract work is just fine. 50/50 might be ideal for me, but a work-out in a gym is no substitute for doing something physical and real. We men need to engage mind and muscle together to feel whole.

You can see it in any little boy, and it never goes away. Chain saws, brush wackers and tractors are my skill level. It's called unskilled (at best, semi-skilled) work.

Is it summer yet? 60 degrees F here this morning with fog and a cool rain. It's what we call Cape Cod weather. Here are some normal summer waves at Orleans. (the constant misspellings on YouTube titles bugs me):

Nice autumn surf at Nauset:

A sucky day. Two tooth extractions last evening as prep for some implants, and then today the basement flooded (17/20 of the past days with heavy rain). It's raining as I type, too.

Six guys here all day with a dumpster and suction hoses removing everything from the basement (old tax records and other records too, totally soaked), the carpet, the tiles and linoleum underneath, the wood shelving, etc etc. How heavy is soaked carpet? Plus the wallboard took a terrible hit: it's done. Fans and dehumidifiers humming away right now. What an f-ing mess.

Glad I have homeowner's insurance. Sorry I do not have dental insurance - but I'd be uninsurable in that regard.

I tell myself that if these are my worst problems, I am probably in pretty good shape. But my jaw hurts. Don't you hate it when people complain? It makes others feel like they should say or do something to make it better, or to fix it. 

Well, at least I am not in an iron lung ward. That must have really sucked. The last iron lung inhabitant died last year. My brain makes me wonder how they avoided bedsores, how they pooped, and why they didn't unplug the damn thing late at night while the nurses were dozing:

If you don't have unlimited funds and if you are not the sort of experienced traveller who likes to do everything yourself, your own way, check out our friends at Club ABC before the summer is over.

As you can imagine, times are tough in the travel biz but that means that there are still ways to go someplace interesting without breaking the bank. The prices are better than they should be.

The folks at ABC have been generous to Ducks Unlimited. Enuf said.

Ali Akbar Khan, master of the sarod, died today. He has been considered by some to have been the greatest living musician, but I have no idea how anybody could, or would want to, determine that.

Here he is pickin' a raga.

As we grow up, we realize that no Dads are "great men" in the usual sense. Just as flawed as we are. But, in my view, any Dad who sticks by his kids and keeps 'em in sneakers is a darn good one.

Neptunus discusses his Dad for Father's Day.

A CT friend emailed these (you can readily tell in what sorts of directions his interests lie):

Danbury Railway Museum

Connecticut Antique Machinery Association

The Shore Line Trolley Museum

and, if your travels happen to take you near Coalbrookdale, England,

Ironbridge, Birthplace of Industry.

Photo: An old trolley at the Trolley Museum. I remember how the old trolley tracks could twist your bike tires when you rode over them as the tracks were gradually consumed by layers of asphalt. The bus lobby beat out whatever trolley lobbies there were and roads, unlike tracks, were built and maintained by government. A shame.

Photo below: Cylinder of a Corliss Steam Engine at the Machinery Museum

Our engagement kid ran off with one of our cars to get to his Dartmouth reunion. That's OK, we have spare cars.

But what is it about Dartmouth that loyalty would lead to such felonious behavior?

My uncle went there, and he was a D nut too. Wa-hoo-wah!