Saturday, May 9. 2009
From a Vandy graduation yesterday. I saw no signs directing folks towards tofu and organic water -
The Law School:
Tent, Lily Turf, and daisies -
If you have never been there, it's a nice leafy, parklike 300-acre campus in the city, but unfortunately it lacks a large open central gathering place: no landscape core like a town green, or like the Sheep Meadow in Central Park. Olmstead would have designed a serenely dramatic psychological center to it all.
and it has tons of gigantic Magnolias:
and plenty of other good scenery, as the South always has (view from the front was even better. She had that pouty but cool look that said "I doubt you are worthy of talking to me, but I know you want to and I know what you're thinking. F- off."):
The newly-minted and doubtless rapacious young lawyers:
No skimping. Mountains of strawberries with accompanying mountains of confectioner's sugar - and too much champagne to keep up with the rate of serving. You just had to man up and do your best. As I said to the servers, "Can't let it go to waste. Think of all the thirsty people in Arabia."
Thanks to the good old New Yorker Commodore Vanderbilt, a very interesting fellow, for all he did to improve the world with the riches he just could not help but to accumulate due to his energy and his entrepreneurial and savvy spirit back in the days before income taxes:
As we enter graduation season, it's time to re-post P.J. O'Rourke's 2008 Commencement speech. His first piece of advice:
1. Go out and make a bunch of money!
Here we are living in the world's most prosperous country, surrounded by all the comforts, conveniences and security that money can provide. Yet no American political, intellectual or cultural leader ever says to young people, "Go out and make a bunch of money." Instead, they tell you that money can't buy happiness. Maybe, but money can rent it.
There's nothing the matter with honest moneymaking. Wealth is not a pizza, where if I have too many slices you have to eat the Domino's box. In a free society, with the rule of law and property rights, no one loses when someone else gets rich.
Read the whole thing.
 Fire and Ice
Some say the world will end in fire;
Some say in ice.
From what I've tasted of desire
I hold with those who favor fire.
But if it had to perish twice,
I think I know enough of hate
To know that for destruction ice
Is also great
And would suffice.
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h/t, Chequerboard
Friday, May 8. 2009
Another reminiscence from our shrink friend Nathan about his days in the Indian Health Service -
 A limp and a death among the Lakota Sioux marked my first day at Eagle Butte, devoid of eagles and buttes. Two days’ drive from Chicago, I am greeted from afar by John Running Horse, he dipping and rising like a Venetian gondolier, waving aloft what from afar seemed to be the plaster sculpture of a leg. Up close, it is.
Before I could stop completely, John Running Horse lay one hand on the open window of my red Fiat 128, bowed in head and cast, asked, “You the new doc?” I was. “Put this thing on again”; hands me the cast, then points to his gondoliering leg. I park and head in.
The Indian Health Service had told me that there were two docs; arrive Sunday.
But, by Sunday, Dr. K. had been flown out with her atrial flutter to be cardioverted eighty miles up the road to Mobridge; Dr. L. was riding shotgun with a mother in active labor also to Mobridge. No docs in Eagle Butte.
I wrapped a new cast on John Running Horse’s right leg and asked as I did so -- dipping plaster rolls in warm water, smoothing them first around, then smoothing downward along the fracture to make it seamless -- how his old cast got cut off. Itched, he said; cut it off himself, as he unsheathe his James Black/Musso pattern S-guard bowie knife. White plaster still dusted its curved Stainless steel back tip and brass quillion; hadn’t even wiped it clean.
I told John Running Horse that his skin would itch again after a few days; dried skin flakes. I found a metal coat hanger, bent it straight and showed him how he could insert it within the cast to scratch itches. He found this marvelous; made a special leather sheath for it to hang from his belt. Later, he returned; brought a water color gift; painted himself on his horse; he wearing Sioux gear. In his right hand, born aloft like some victorious banner is not a leg cast, but his Winchester Model 1894 lever-repeating rifle -- the gun that won the West, the weapon of choice for the Rifleman of TV.
Continue reading "A Limp and a Death"
The only reward of virtue is virtue.
Ralph Waldo Emerson (h/t, Vanderleun)
Stanley Fish reviews Terry Eagleton's Reason, Faith, and Revolution. A quote:
Progress, liberalism and enlightenment — these are the watchwords of those, like Hitchens, who believe that in a modern world, religion has nothing to offer us. Don’t we discover cures for diseases every day? Doesn’t technology continually extend our powers and offer the promise of mastering nature? Who needs an outmoded, left-over medieval superstition?
Eagleton punctures the complacency of these questions when he turns the tables and applies the label of “superstition” to the idea of progress. It is a superstition — an idol or “a belief not logically related to a course of events” (American Heritage Dictionary) — because it is blind to what is now done in its name: “The language of enlightenment has been hijacked in the name of corporate greed, the police state, a politically compromised science, and a permanent war economy,” all in the service, Eagleton contends, of an empty suburbanism that produces ever more things without any care as to whether or not the things produced have true value.
Kingston Farm, Concord, MA (h/t, And Rightly So). One heck of a fine barn/garage deal.
Thursday, May 7. 2009
"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the falls azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -
and I lived on..."
 I read Nabokov's Pale Fire when it came out. I've read all of Nabokov, or almost all. None of his butterfly texts.
From Mary McCarthy's 1962 review:
Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor's preface, notes, index, and proof-corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer's directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these "levels" are not the customary "levels of meaning" of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided.
 It's part of wisdom to know the limits of one's knowledge (and the limits of one's wisdom, if that is possible).
When I post a photo of a rug I like, aka a floor mat, my taste and lack of expertise are invariably corrected by one or another rug pro who likes Maggie's. And rightly so. I am the kind of person who welcomes correction and education even as it injures my fragile self-esteem and self-worth.
But this time I am determined to show something to wow the experts: this highly-collectible museum quality semi-antique 3X5 Barbie rug.
Now that is a special rug. It's the Barbie 50th Anniversary Rug! The sensitive rendering of Barbie permits the depth of her wonderful personality to shine through. The vibrant, sensual pink is very special, as are the beautifully stylized background flowers.
Any person of discriminating taste would be proud to have this carpet in their parlor.
The words of Blind Willie McTell begin:
Seen the arrow on the doorpost
Saying, "This land is condemned
All the way from New Orleans
To Jerusalem."
I traveled through East Texas
Where many martyrs fell
And I know no one can sing the blues
Like Blind Willie McTell.
Dylan on piano:
Wednesday, May 6. 2009
I just had to highlight Dr. Clouthier's site today. She must write fast, or have no time to take care of patients. From her today:
Who owns the Republican brand?
 It begins:
It’s not Republicans. And it’s not Rush Limbaugh–much as Obama, his minions and the press would like to paint it so.
I’ve got bad news: The opposition owns the Republican brand. Oh yes, they do. Democrats define Republicans and the Republicans accept the definition by operating from their false premises.
How do I know Republicans are owned by the Left? Because the Republican message is consistently negative and defensive: “I’m not mean.” ” We don’t believe that.” “I’m not extremist like them“. And by them, Republicans are defining themselves against the press-Obama-grassroots caricature of Republicans. In doing so, the Republicans with a national voice diminish their own party.
All of her stuff is good.
The Slipstream Media: A New American Network. A quote from Vanderleun's essay:
This is the first in a series of articles on how to go about building a new American media; a media composed of newspapers, television, radio, film, music, publishing, and the multi-media capabilities of the Internet; an American media open to all and founded on the five bedrock principles of “Duty, Honor, Country, Truth, God.”
When dinosaurs die large opportunities for growth bloom within the ecosystem. The death of the old media is such an opportunity. It affords a wide range of possibilities to create a new media, a media that runs to the side of the mainstream media, but ultimately supplants it by slipping by it. For now I call it, The Slipstream Media.
A pipe dream?
Tuesday, May 5. 2009
Populus Vult Decipi, Decipiatur.
h/t, AVI
Good grief. Imagine if Bush...or Palin.
Monday, May 4. 2009
Wizbang has a piece on the Osprey today. Can you name that fish?
 As traditionalist/Centrists here at Maggie's, we tend to prefer Repub candidates because they at least pretend to sound like the word "freedom" matters to them.
Right now, the Repubs are searching the earth, looking for ideas. Wrong. Waste of time. Major national elections are won by appealing, likeable candidates who come across well on TV, have a bit of charisma and energy, and offer some inspiration, celebrity, and excitement to us benighted masses.
The wonkery and the ideology has little to do with it. Very few voted for Obama because he promised to nationalize (ie politicize) our major industries and businesses.
As Riehl rightly says,
The terrific irony here isn't that it's a Bush saying no more Reagan, it's that exit polls showed individual policies actually had little to do with Obama's win. National elections tend to be more thematic, than they are wonkish. All the Democrats really did was demonize Republicans, call for change and voice a lot of platitudes.
GOP turns to Bush aides for advice
Forget Reagan - be like Liberals
My final word on this: It's the candidate, stupid. Any reasonably smart person can make an issue out of anything, but it takes a powerfully convincing talker to reach over the head of the biased MSM and speak directly to people.
As Roger de H says, a party picks a figurehead to decorate their pirate ship.
Never frighten a little man. He'll kill you.
Robert A. Heinlein (h/t, Villainous' The Politics of Fear)
 Pete Seeger, at Powerline. Gotta admit that Pete did a good job with Abiyoyo and Sam the Sailor or the Whaler or whatever it is called. I heard him perform years ago at Tanglewood.
His dangerous innocence has made him good with kids' songs, and a fervent supporter of mass-murdering totalitarian oppressors of the common man - provided they were of the Commie variety. Thus his inscription on his banjo, Woody Guthrie-style, "This machine kills fascists," has an unintended irony which Jonah Goldberg would appreciate.
Thanks, Chris -
Sunday, May 3. 2009
 Sipp is very fond of John Singer Sargent. So are we.
Portrait is his Dr. Pozzi at Home (1881).
Ah, for the days when a gent could don his at-home robe or smoking jacket after work and on weekends. Chair by the fire, glass of Scotch or brandy, nice Habana ceegar, book or the internet, kids in the kitchen or upstairs or wherever being very quiet because "Your Father is at home." No treadmill exercise, no weight-lifting, no driving kids to summer hockey practice, no running to the dry cleaner or to Home Depot.
Diapers? Are you kidding? What is "yard work"?
Today, a gent's work never ends no matter how wealthy. The wives have taken over, and the modern wife ain't got no respect. But she might show some, if you dressed like Dr. P.
Fathers are half-emasculated these days, unlike the diabolical Dr. Pozzi.
The lowest level of Hell, according to Dante, is reserved for those who betray their benefactors.
The Circles of Hell. h/t, Thompson's Friday Ephemera.
Psalm 23
1 The LORD is my shepherd, I shall not want.
2 He makes me lie down in green pastures,
he leads me beside quiet waters,
3 he restores my soul.
He guides me in paths of righteousness
for his name's sake.
4 Even though I walk
through the valley of the shadow of death,
I will fear no evil,
for you are with me;
your rod and your staff,
they comfort me.
5 You prepare a table before me
in the presence of my enemies.
You anoint my head with oil;
my cup overflows.
6 Surely goodness and love will follow me
all the days of my life,
and I will dwell in the house of the LORD
forever.
Saturday, May 2. 2009
The pup just ate two baby bunnies (Cottontail rabbits). One baby ran away. He found their nest while we were doing outdoor clean-up. The pup was helping, of course.
It's always been my philosophy that too much outdoor clean-up is bad for the wild critters, and we love our wild critters. The early Mother's Day present to the Mrs. was the work of 4 yard guys for 4 days, plus however-many truckloads of black mulch, plus a couple of dumpsters. Three loads of mulch did the job, barely, but the garden beds look spiffy for the moment. But, sadly, with fewer bunnies.
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