Maggie's Farm

Here. What's the big deal? It's your own yard, and it feels cheerful and wholesome to have the summer breeze blowing past your private parts. And why is anybody looking anyway? Keep your eyes to yourself. What goes on in my yard, stays in my yard.

For Santay, Sasha threw on some clothes for the photo, while taking a break from lawn-mowing and dead-heading the roses in the most charming manner.

Who cares for your gardens in the nude? Or am I just lucky?

Reposted from June, 2005:

Music without Magic

That's the title of Hoffman's piece in the Wilson Quarterly. It mainly addresses the psychological effects of art music and the failure of much 20th Century art music to gain an audience. A quote:

But just how does our gracious Art exercise these powers? How does it comfort us, charm us, kindle our hearts? We might start our search for answers by positing two fundamentals: a fundamental pain and a fundamental quest. A fundamental pain of our human condition is loneliness. No surprise here: We’re born alone, we’re alone in our consciousness, we die alone, and, when loved ones die, we’re left alone. And pain itself, including physical pain, isolates us and makes us feel still more alone, completing a vicious circle. Our fundamental quest—by no means unrelated to our aloneness and our loneliness—is the quest for meaning, the quest to make sense of our time on earth, to make sense of time itself.

Where does music come in? Music is both a balm for loneliness and a powerful, renewable source of meaning—meaning in time and meaning for time. The first thing music does is banish silence. Silence is at once a metaphor for loneliness and the thing itself: It’s a loneliness of the senses. Music overcomes silence, replaces it. It provides us with a companion by occupying our senses—and, through our senses, our minds, our thoughts. It has, quite literally, a presence. We know that sound and touch are the only sensual stimuli that literally move us, that make parts of us move: Sound waves make the tiny hairs in our inner ears vibrate, and, if sound waves are strong enough, they can make our whole bodies vibrate. We might even say, therefore, that sound is a form of touch, and that in its own way music is able to reach out and put an arm around us. 

Read entire here, and if you have the time, read the erudite comments posted below the article.

That's Gaelic for "water of life." This site has the history of Scotch whiskey, known around the world as plain Whiskey, except in the US and Canada, where we also have cheap Canadadadian whisky for a cheap drunk, and rich, smoky, earthy, sweet Bourbon from deep in the Southern hollers. We like Maker's Mark, for bourbon. For holiday eggnog - any bourbon, and never rum. But Scotch whiskeys are the ultimate expression of the distiller's God-given art.

Reposted from Feb 20, 2005

This in from Vermont's Northeast Kingdom:

Ayup, well, I shot that fat sucker on Friday night under the barn light while the dogs were sleepin - a nice head-shot but not too difficult from the porch - and took yer advice and marinated that meat in olive oil, thyme and garlic and a bit of vinegar overnight - well, actually til this afternoon, then I gave it a hit of soy sauce and salt and pepper and threw it on that old -----   ----grill out back with a pile of hickory sticks - shagbark it was. Wasn't half-bad. Fancier and Frenchier than I'm used to, but not too bad. Jes don't give me that shallot -----, or tell me to cook my raccoon rare, or over meskeet. Food is done when it is cooked, and if I find some meskeet in my woods, I'll try it. But I ain't goin that far Frenchie. That was a fat son of a b. - got my supper for the next three days too, ayup.

For more of his stuff, click here. He has not written for Maggie's, really, since he got hitched. Maybe he will write some more after the honeymoon phase is over.

As you can see, we are reposting some of our favorite essays we have collected over the past 18 months - none written by us.

In the deep summer, we like to recycle stuff. Yes, that is Cape Cod. Can you name that light?

Why I Became a Conservative, by (the great) Roger Scruton; it begins like this:

I was brought up at a time when half the English people voted Conservative at national elections and almost all English intellectuals regarded the term “conservative” as a term of abuse. To be a conservative, I was told, was to be on the side of age against youth, the past against the future, authority against innovation, the “structures” against spontaneity and life. It was enough to understand this, to recognize that one had no choice, as a free-thinking intellectual, save to reject conservatism. The choice remaining was between reform and revolution. Do we improve society bit by bit, or do we rub it out and start again? On the whole my contemporaries favored the second option, and it was when witnessing what this meant, in May 1968 in Paris, that I discovered my vocation.

In the narrow street below my window the students were shouting and smashing. The plate-glass windows of the shops appeared to step back, shudder for a second, and then give up the ghost, as the reflections suddenly left them and they slid in jagged fragments to the ground. Cars rose into the air and landed on their sides, their juices flowing from unseen wounds. The air was filled with triumphant shouts, as one by one lamp-posts and bollards were uprooted and piled on the tarmac, to form a barricade against the next van-load of policemen.

The van—known then as a panier de salade on account of the wire mesh that covered its windows—came cautiously round the corner from the Rue Descartes, jerked to a halt, and disgorged a score of frightened policemen. They were greeted by flying cobble-stones and several of them fell. One rolled over on the ground clutching his face, from which the blood streamed through tightly clenched fingers. There was an exultant shout, the injured policeman was helped into the van, and the students ran off down a side-street, sneering at the cochons and throwing Parthian cobbles as they went.

Read it all.

Hull Speed = 1.34 X (LWL)^1/2

^{Non-sailors often do not know that the maximum speed of a boat is limited by its LWL (length at waterline).}

^{Very interesting, practical math. Wind load, capsize formula, true and apparent wind - all the cool sailing calculations, here.}

Reposted: Splendid photo courtesy of Peter Nye, NY State Dept. of Environmental Conservation, Endangered Species Unit Leader, Albany

Reposted from May, 2005:

Roger Kimball, author of Tenured Radicals, with an essay: Re-Taking the University

Samples:

"Academic life, like the rest of social life, unfolds within a frame of rules and permissions. At one end, there are things that one must (or must not) do; at the other end, there is rule of whim. The middle range, in which behavior is neither explicitly governed by rules but is not entirely free, is that realm governed by what the British jurist John Fletcher Moulton, writing in the early 1920s, called “Obedience to the Unenforceable.” It is a realm in which not law, not caprice, but virtues such as duty, fairness, judgment, and taste hold sway. In a word, it is the “domain of Manners,” which “covers all cases of right doing where there is no one to make you do it but yourself.” A good index of the health of any social institution is its allegiance to the strictures that define this middle realm. “In the changes that are taking place in the world around us,” Moulton wrote, “one of those which is fraught with grave peril is the discredit into which this idea of the middle land is falling.” One example was the abuse of free speech in political debate: “We have unrestricted freedom of debate,” say the radicals: “We will use it so as to destroy debate.”  "

and:

"Many parents are alarmed, rightly so, at the spectacle of their children going off to college one year and coming back the next having jettisoned every moral, religious, social, and political scruple that they had been brought up to believe. Why should parents fund the moral de-civilization of their children at the hands of tenured antinomians? Why should alumni generously support an alma mater whose political and educational principles nourish a world view that is not simply different from but diametrically opposed to the one they endorse? Why should trustees preside over an institution whose faculty systematically repudiates the pedagogical mission they, as trustees, have committed themselves to uphold? These are questions that should be asked early and asked often."

Read entire.

It is not what the man of science believes that distinguishes him, but how and why he believes it. His beliefs are tentative, not dogmatic; they are based on evidence, not on authority or intuition.

Bertrand Russell

(taken from a piece at Humbug on scientific theory)

TRILLING WAS RESPONDING to the problem George Orwell had posed so dramatically in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Reviewing that book when it appeared in 1949, Trilling made clear that Orwell was not, as liberals liked to think, merely attacking Soviet communism. "He is saying, indeed, something no less comprehensive than this: that Russia, with its idealistic social revolution now developed into a police state, is but the image of the impending future and that the ultimate threat to human freedom may well come from a similar and even more massive development of the social idealism of our democratic culture." A few years later, reviewing another book by Orwell, Trilling repeated this theme: "Social idealism" is not the only thing that can be perverted into tyranny; so can any idea "unconditioned" by reality. "The essential point of Nineteen Eighty-Four is just this, the danger of the ultimate and absolute power which the mind can develop when it frees itself from conditions, from the bondage of things and history."

A repost from Feb, 2005:

From a piece by Gelertner in Daily Standard:

Benjamin Disraeli--twice prime minister of Great Britain, romantic novelist, inventor of modern conservatism--was a neocon in the plain sense of the word, a "new conservative" who began his career on the left. Conservative thinking dates to the dawn of organized society, but modern conservatism--a mass movement, a philosophy not for aristocrats and the rich but for everybody--was Disraeli's creation. That modern conservatism should have been invented by a 19th-century neocon is thought provoking. More surprising: His redefinition of conservatism is still fresh, and his political philosophy has never been more apt.

Conservatism is the most powerful and electric force in the American intellectual landscape. Young people no longer discover the left and get excited; they are far more likely to get their intellectual kicks discovering and experimenting with conservatism. But what exactly do conservatives believe? How do they resolve the seeming paradox that so many conservatives revere the past yet are also progressives, determined to move this nation forward and let it grow, stretch, and inhabit more and more of its own best self? Disraeli produced a definition of conservatism that resolves the problem. It is so terse and compelling, it ranks as a milestone of political thought.

He was a statesman who remodeled Europe and a thinker who examined some of the hardest of all political, social, and philosophical questions: How should democratic government work, what does party politics mean, where do the Jews fit in? I too "would lift up my voice to heaven, and ask," says the hero of his novel Tancred, "What is DUTY, and what is FAITH? What ought I to DO, and what ought I to BELIEVE?" On these and related questions, Disraeli said fantastically improbable things that would be easy to dismiss except that many of them are true.

Read the whole thing.

Modern liberalism, for most liberals, is not a consciously understood set of rational beliefs, but a bundle of unexamined prejudices and conjoined sentiments. The basic ideas and beliefs seem more satisfactory when they are not made fully explicit, when they merely lurk rather obscurely in the background, coloring the rhetoric and adding a certain emotive glow.

James Burnham
(via a Hot Air comment by Publius Forum)

Dr. Sanity said this better than we have or can - but she is right. Rush has been saying this for years, but I have finally come around to being persuaded.

The basic issue for these radical environmentalists is not to end global warming--it is to discredit capitalism and to use global warming and other environmental concerns as a justification to impose their ideological and political agenda. They haven't a clue how to really counter the natural cooling and warming trends of the planet--but if they blame it on human beings, then the solution is to control people.

Global warming is a scientific issue. I can be convinced that the earth is getting warmer, but it will take more than slogans and hysteria to convince me that the warming is something other than a natural cycle in our planet's history that may have some repercussions on human life.

Read the whole thing - it's good.

This came in over the transom:

STORY NUMBER ONE

Many years ago, Al Capone virtually owned Chicago.Capone wasn't famous for anything heroic. He was notorious for enmeshing the windy city in everything from bootlegged booze and prostitution to murder.

Capone had a lawyer nicknamed "Easy Eddie." He was his lawyer for a good reason. Eddie was very good! In fact, Eddie's skill at legal maneuvering kept Big Al out of jail for a long time.

To show his appreciation, Capone paid him very well. Not only was the
money big, but also, Eddie got special dividends. For instance, he and his
family occupied a fenced-in mansion with live-in help and all of the
conveniences of the day. The estate was so large that it filled an entire
Chicago City block. Eddie lived the high life of the Chicago mob and gave little consideration to the atrocity that went on around him. Eddie did have one soft spot, however. He had a son that he loved dearly.

Eddie saw to it that his young son had clothes, cars, and a good education. Nothing was withheld. Price was no object. And, despite his involvement with organized crime, Eddie even tried to teach him right from wrong. Eddie wanted his son to be a better man than he was. Yet, with all his wealth and influence, there were two things he could not give his son; he could not pass on a good name or a good example.

One day, Easy Eddie reached a difficult decision. Easy Eddie wanted to
rectify wrongs he had done. He decided he would go to the authorities and tell the truth about Al "Scarface" Capone, clean up his tarnished name, and offer his son some semblance of integrity. To do this, he would have to testify against The Mob, and he knew that the cost would be great. So, he testified.
 
Within the year, Easy Eddie's life ended in a blaze of gunfire on a lonely
Chicago Street. But in his eyes, he had given his son the greatest gift he
had to offer, at the greatest price he could ever pay. Police removed from
his pockets a rosary, a crucifix, a religious medallion, and a poem clipped
from a magazine.

The poem read:

The clock of life is wound but once,
And no man has the power
To tell just when the hands will stop
At late or early hour.
Now is the only time you own.
Live, love, toil with a will.
Place no faith in time.
For the clock may soon be still.

__________________________________________
STORY NUMBER TWO

World War II produced many heroes. One such man was Lieutenant Commander Butch O'Hare. He was a fighter pilot assigned to the aircraft carrier Lexington in the South Pacific. One day his entire squadron was sent on a mission.

After he was airborne, he looked at his fuel gauge and realized that
someone had forgotten to top off his fuel tank.He would not have enough fuel to complete his mission and get back to his ship. His flight leader told him to return to the carrier. Reluctantly, he dropped out of formation and headed back to the fleet.

As he was returning to the UsS.S. Lexington he saw something that turned his blood cold: a squadron of Japanese aircraft were speeding their way toward  the American fleet. The American fighters were gone on a sortie, and the fleet was all but defenseless. He could not reach his squadron and bring them back in time to save thefleet. Nor could he warn the fleet of the  approaching danger.

There was only one thing to do. He must somehow divert them from the fleet. Laying aside all thoughts of personal safety, he dove into the formation of Japanese planes.

Wing-mounted 50 caliber's blazed as he charged in, attacking one surprised enemy plane and then another. Butch wove in and out of the now broken formation and fired at as many planes as possible until all his ammunition was finally spent. Undaunted, he continued the assault. He dove at the planes, trying to clip a wing or tail in hopes of damaging as many enemy planes as possible and rendering them unfit to fly. Finally, the exasperated Japanese squadron took off in another direction.

Deeply relieved, Butch O'Hare and his tattered fighter limped back to the
carrier.

Upon arrival, he reported in and related the event surrounding his return. The film from the gun-camera mounted on his plane told the tale. It showed  the extent of Butch's daring attempt to protect his fleet. He had, in fact, destroyed five enemy aircraft.

This took place on February 20, 1942, and for that action Butch became the Navy's first Ace of W.W. II, and the first Naval Aviator to win the
Congressional Medal of Honor. A year later Butch was killed in aerial combat at the age of 29.

His home town would not allow the memory of this WW II hero to fade,and today, O'Hare Airport in Chicago is named in tribute to the courage of this great man.

So, the next time you find yourself at O'Hare International, give some thought to visiting Butch's memorial displaying his statue and his Medal of Honor, and an F4F-3 Wildcat similar to Butch's.

It is located between Terminals 1 and 2.
********************************************
SO WHAT DO THESE TWO STORIES HAVE TO DO WITH EACH OTHER?

Butch O'Hare was "Easy Eddie's" son.

When you step in it this many times in a row, it's no accident.

It is way past time, in our opinion, to boycott them. Sisu. Bush's anger was gratifying to many. At Maggie's, we have all quit our subscriptions over the past year. Just could not stomach their propaganda. Miss their Travel Section, though - but who can afford all those trips anyway? 

The NYT has made itself the chardonnay-sippping, 60s-era, radical chic, Manhattan limo liberal mouthpiece rather than a serious national paper. (See post immediately below.)  But to add treason to the mix is just over the top. We can all return to them, if and when they return to sanity - or land in jail. In the meantime, it's The New York Sun for us. And the CSM. The Globe is = NYT.

Greene at American Enterprise takes a look at these questions about US education:

1. Does money matter?
2. What about teacher pay? (they make more than you think, per hour, including benefits)
3. What about social problems?
4. Does class size matter?
5. Does teacher certification matter?
6. Private schools spend half per student of what public schools spend. Why do they do better?

Read the article, and spread the truth. There are tons of great teachers out there, but the public system is a union plantation, with a big megaphone.

"...And this was the failing of détente:  it drew its inspiration more from a sense of democratic weakness than of totalitarian strength.  It was a form of disguised retreat, carried forward in a rapture of exalted dissimulation by persons whose assumption was that the American people would not face reality.” [emphasis added]

Daniel Patrick Moynihan (in A Dangerous Place)

Add his voice, as you read:

If I said to you, "I have a great idea for a business. I'll open a whole new type of coffee shop. Instead of charging 60 cents for coffee  I'll charge $2.50, $3.50, $4.50, and $5.50.

Not only that, I'll have no tables, no chairs, no water, no free refills, no waiters, no busboys, serve it in cardboard cups, & have the customer clean up for 20 minutes after they're finished."

Would you say to me, "That's the greatest idea for a business I ever heard! We can open a chain of these all over the world!"

No, you would put me right into a sanitarium.

And it's burnt coffee! It's burnt coffee at Starbuck's, be honest about it. If you get burnt coffee in a coffee shop, you call a cop. You say,"It's the bottom of the pot. I don't drink from the bottom of the pot.

But when it's burnt at Starbuck's, they say, "Oh, it's a special roast. It's a special bean from Argentina....

"The bean is in your head!!! I know burnt!!!

You want coffee in a coffee shop, that's 60 cents. But at Starbuck's, if it's Cafe Latte: $3.50. Café Creamier: $4.50. Café Suisse: $9.50. For each French word, another $4.00.

Why does a little cream in coffee make it worth $3.50?

Go into any coffee shop; they'll give you all the cream you want until you're blue in the face.

40 million people are walking around in coffee shops with pitchers of cream: "Here's all the cream you want!" And it's still 60 cents. You know why? Because it's called "coffee."

You want cinnamon in your coffee? Ask for cinnamon in a coffee shop; they'll give you all the cinnamon you want.

Do they ask you for more money because it's cinnamon? It's the same price for cinnamon in your coffee as for coffee without cinnamon - 60 cents, that's it.

But not in Starbucks. Over there, it's Cinnamonnier - $9.50. You want a refill in a regular coffee shop, they'll give you all the refills you want until you drop dead. You can come in when you're 27 & keep drinking coffee until you're 98. And they'll start begging you: "Here, You want more coffee?"

Do you know that you can't get a free refill at Starbucks?

A refill is a $1.50, 2 refills, $4.50, 3 refills, $19.50.

So, for 4 cups of coffee - $35.00.

And there're no chairs in those Starbucks. Instead, they have these high stools. You ever see these stools? You haven't been on a chair that high since you were 2. Seventy-three year olds are climbing &climbing to get to the top of the chair. And when they get to the top, they can't even drink the coffee because there's 12 people around one ittle table, & everybody's saying, "Excuse me, excuse me, excuse me....." Then they can't get off the chair.

Do you remember what a cafeteria was? In poor neighborhoods all over this country, they went to a cafeteria because there were no waiters & no service. And so poor people could save money on a tip.

Cafeterias didn't have regular tables or chairs either. They gave coffee to you in a cardboard cup. So because of that you paid less for the coffee. You got less, so you paid less.

It's all the same at Starbucks - no chairs, no service, a cardboard cup for your Coffee - except in Starbucks, the less you get, the more it costs. By the time they give you nothing, it's worth 4 times as much!

SELF-ESTEEM, n. An erroneous appraisement.

CARTESIAN, adj. Relating to Descartes, a famous philosopher, author of the celebrated dictum, Cogito ergo sum — whereby he was pleased to suppose he demonstrated the reality of human existence. The dictum might be improved, however, thus: Cogito cogito ergo cogito sum — “I think that I think, therefore I think that I am;” as close an approach to certainty as any philosopher has yet made.

Those are two from Bierce's The Devil's Dictionary, from Middlebrow, who has a good piece, with good links, on Bierce.

The Downy Woodpecker comes to mind today because they have a nest outside my front door, in a hole in a big old sugar maple, and the endless and almost annoying, rhythmic squeak squeak squeak of the hungry babies sounds exactly like a bad fan belt.

Found across the entire US and most of Canada, these cute little bug-eaters are far more common than the Hairy Woodpecker, its big brother, and is non-migratory.

More about the Downy here, at CLO. Photo borrowed from CLO.

Perhaps, if you understood me, I misspoke.

Alan Greenspan

Another good blog bites the dust. New England Repub - RIP. Running a blog is real work.

Life under siege in the New Orleans swamp: Open Democracy. No-one with any sense would live there.

100 Brit soccer fans held by police in Stuttgart. Haha. Not politically correct.  Sounds like Dartmouth.

Nick at Evangelical Outpost claims that WMDs are simply McGuffins, and that if a nuke were dug up in Saddam's basement, it wouldn't matter.

He got me thinking so much about McGuffins that I know I'll order an Egg McGuffin for breakfast next time. Will I get handed an empty wrapper for $1.99?

Who remembers the theft in Psycho?

Nicotine

Goddess of the murmuring courts,
Nicotine, my Nicotine,
Houri of the mystic sports,
trailing-robed in gabardine,
Gliding where the breath hath glided,
Hidden sylph of filmy veils,
Truth behind the dream is veiléd
E'en as thou art, smiling ever, ever gliding,
Wraith of wraiths, dim lights dividing
Purple, grey, and shadow green
Goddess, Dream-grace, Nicotine.

Goddess of the shadow's lights,
Nicotine, my Nicotine,
Some would set old Earth to rights,
Thou I none such ween.
Veils of shade our dream dividing,
Houris dancing, intergliding,
Wraith of wraiths and dream of faces,
Silent guardian of the old unhallowed places,
Utter symbol of all old sweet druidings,
Mem'ry of witched wold and green,
Nicotine, my Nicotine:

Neath the shadows of thy weaving
Dreams that need no undeceiving,
Loves that longer hold me not,
Dreams I dream not any more,
Fragrance of old sweet forgotten places,
Smiles of dream-lit, flit-by faces
All as perfume Arab-sweet
Deck the high road to thy feet

As were Godiva's coming fated
And all the April's blush belated
Were lain before her, carpeting
The stones of Coventry with spring,
So thou my mist-enwreathéd queen,
Nicotine, white Nicotine,
Riding engloried in their hair
Mak'st by-road of our dreams
Thy thorough-fare.

Ezra Loomis Pound (1885-1972) was indeed an eccentric, self-obsessed, difficult person who died a recluse after finally being released, after many years, from St. Elizabeth's Psychiatric Center in Washington. A rebel without a cause. He had been deemed a traitor to the US during WW2. But who knew he was an expert fencer, and W.B. Yeat's fencing coach? Or that he was William Carlos William's college pal at Penn? I didn't. He has always been more influential than read. An "imagist" poet, his definition of the literary image remains the best: "an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time." Bob Dylan learned story-telling from Woody Guthrie, and "imagism" from Rimbaud, Pound, William Carlos Williams,T.S.Eliot, and the old-time bluesmen like Robert Johnson...not putting him in that Pantheon, but he has music, too.

1967 photo from here.