Maggie's Farm

iPhone pic of the light show at Saks Fifth Avenue in NYC yesterday, emailed by a friend.

To keep things fair and to level the playing field, there should be a law that all photos in the US must be taken with iPhones. Not fair for some to have better equipment.

The end of Kodachrome (with the song)

Coffee-spew warning - and strong language warning, but it's all in a good cause.

Sheesh. Sounds just like my 7th Grade English teacher.

The Englishman's 7 steps to health in 2011

The most important book of 2010?

Mead takes on the Trinity: Yule Blog 2010: Meaning in Three Dimensions

God is beyond our petty distinctions, boxes, and categories.

Black Bears: This guy is insane

Reckless denial of what "wild" means.

Q&O: The usual "self-absorbed baby-boomers" article

King Coal: The Future Looks A Lot Like The Past

At No Left Turns:

...the American people are in the midst of a serious struggle to figure out what it is that they stand for--what it means to be an American.  Obama, Pelosi and Reed have performed the extremely useful service of clarification.  We may not fully know what we are, but it is pretty safe to say that after 2010, we certainly know what we are not. 

Two Americas: the Americans who want to be given free stuff, and the Americans who do things and make things. The latter just barely out-vote the former - which is to our credit.

How Libs Explain Bush Book Success: It’s Because “He Was So Hated”

Must be why Sarah's books sell so well too - and O'Reilly's.

Via Ross:

By examining ice core samples for the past 10,500 years we learn that approximately 9,100 of the past 10,500 years were warmer than 2010... Thus, regardless of which year ( 1934, 1998, or 2010) turns out to be the warmest of the past century, that year will rank number 9,099 in the long-term list.

Related at Powerline: Relatively Speaking, It's Still Cold

Ron Paul: 'Moral hazard' to keep the scope of big government programs

Via NYM:

Where do I apply? I want to return wampum for Manhattan.

Last Psychiatrist: Taboos Are The Ways Christians Try To Control Us

Timing matters. Burst bubble, and return to normal trendline. Via theo:

97% of climatologists think what?

Radosh: The Second Time is Farce: Frances Fox Piven Calls for a new Cloward-Piven Strategy for Today

From a comment at B&R on Sadie Hawkins online dating:

Here’s my profile: 30 years old; tall 6’3″ male with Doctorate in Finance; recently inherited a substantial sum from my uncle; I’m a loving and caring man who has three shelter dogs and spent his weekends caring for his sick uncle; picked in High School as most likely to succeed in a campaign run exclusively by female students; I’m extremely fit and have continued in sports after winning acclaim at college; I desire an intelligent, progressive minded female; who’s unconcerned with money and seeks to make this world a better place using my base of substantial assets.

Pajamas: The Environmental Protection Agency’s End-Run Around Democracy

Medical care by bureaucrat

For our own good

Insty: More on the higher education bubble

From the drippy Archbishop of Canterbury:

"Whether you're a Christian or belong to another religion or whether you have nothing you'd want to call religion at all, some kind of big picture matters."

Pic reminds me of how thrilled the lad and I were to stand in front of Breughel's large painting in Vienna in August. One of the high points of 2010.

I Like The Christian Life (from Sweetheart of the Rodeo - a wonderful record):

I meant to re-post this in December. Is it too late?

Red-neck Yankees wear lined overshirts (like the one in the photo, from Moose Creek) much of the year. Few things are more comfortable, and you don't care what happens to them. They keep you cozy at 50 degrees and at 20 degrees - and lower if you are working hard and moving around.

These things are made for outdoor work. You often need to buy them one size up for layering underneath, depending on your personal size range. They look better and feel softer with some dirt and grease on them, and a small tear or two.

If you want to go a bit upscale from that sort of thing, these are always acceptable (even though they are from LL Bean). They are also made with quilted linings like this for colder weather.

Variants on the theme of overshirts and "shirt-jacs" is this Woolrich wool classic:

Filson's Wool Cape Coat:

A zippered, Windstopper-lined LL Bean Maine Guide wool jacket:

Carhartt's basic canvas, flannel-lined work shirt:

Lined flannel from Woolrich:

Lastly, Caribou Creek quilt-lined, at Cabelas:

Disclosure: Four dump trucks of wool and cotton overshirts were dumped in our Maggie's Farm driveway, blocking all tractor traffic and causing all sorts of problems with the hogs, in exchange for the above post. Please, everybody - Stop giving us free stuff and money! We don't want it! We have enough money and stuff, and it costs money, time, and effort to get rid of excess stuff. Ever try to take a Filson wool cape shirt off a dirty ole 800 lb. hawg who wants to put on airs? Dang.

A re-post - not snowing here today.

Cold, snowy day up here. It makes you want mashed potatoes and meat and stuff.

I have some nice big white onions left over from making my onion pies this weekend. Some onion fritters would be good with last night's left-over roast. It's really sort of like a spidery mess of onion rings.

I never bother with the deep oil frying, though, for fritters. I just fry them in some canola oil, and it works fine. Best if you sautee the onions lightly first (with some chopped garlic) before mixing the onions with the batter. That way, they are certain to be sweet.

It's nice to have a little dipping sauce for them. A chili-garlic-soy sort of thing with chopped chives is good. Lime, as pictured, is interesting too.

Lots of folks I know spend their spare time sitting in Deer stands, with bow or shotgun at hand. Here's the conversation from earlier this season:

How did it go this morning?

Nothing. No buck. A waste of time.

See anything at all?

Saw the sun come up.

Anything else?

A small doe, didn't want to take her.

See anything else?

A Sharp Shinned Hawk buzzed past my head.

Anything else?

Flock of Wild Turkeys walked by.

Anything else?

A Bobcat. No, two Bobcats.

Anything else?

A Box Turtle walking through the leaves.

What are we waiting for? I don't think I need to explain my parable...

From Texas, from BL:

These two NOLA piano-men did a few duets at the festive event I went to a couple of weeks ago. Yes, including Iko Iko and Let The Good Times Roll. Good to see Dr. John - hadn't seen him perform in many years, but I always enjoyed that cranky SOB. Found this duet on Youtube:

A few lines from Eliot's magnificent No. 4 of The Four Quartets, "Little Gidding":

What we call the beginning is often the end
And to make an end is to make a beginning.
The end is where we start from...

We shall not cease from exploration
And the end of all our exploring
Will be to arrive where we started
And know the place for the first time.

Our family likes de Kooning, so we'll probably go to the the current show at the MOMA. Here's a brief review of Abstract Expressionist New York. I am still annoyed that we missed the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim - lines to get in were always too long for me.

Even if I don't really get Jackson Pollock, we'll get a very good lunch someplace.

There was an amusing short book a few years ago about how to write ambiguous lawsuit-proof recommendations for people in whom one had little confidence. One of my favorites lines this one:

"You will be very fortunate if you can get him to work for you."

This one, via Wizbang, might not be law-proof:

"Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap."

Off topic, but I heard an amusing ambiguity on the radio news this week: "This holiday season, people spent more money than they had since 2006."

The World's Worst Invasive Mammals

Am Thinker: Manmade famine in America

WaPo: 'Don't ask, don't tell' has been repealed. ROTC still shouldn't be on campus.

What's the next excuse?

Related: Elis for ROTC

Princeton has ROTC. Why not Yale? Speaking only for myself, though, I'd rather be led into a firefight by a Lieut. from SMU than one from Princeton or Yale.

Jonah: The moral  mush of pacifism

Busy With Afghanistan, the U.S. Military Has No Time to Train for Big Wars

Herbert London on The Mullen War Strategy

Send in the social workers!

An Ivy League epiphany on charity and taxes

Hmmm. Why don't they want to donate to the US Treasury?

O'Grady: A Cuban Fairy Tale From PBS - What public television didn't tell you about health care in Castro's socialist state.

Will: China has seen the future, and it is coal

Commies love cheap energy

Also performing at the cool event I attended: Davell Crawford, with the Davell Crawford Singers (a 25-person NOLA gospel group). I had a nice chat with Davell afterwards. His grandpa wrote Iko Iko.

This is the only bit I could find on YouTube.

All about monotheism, Abraham, and a mental experiment creating religion amnesia: How Did God Get Started?

One quote from the lengthy essay by Colin Wells:

...faith is the unassailable citadel to which religion withdrew after reason had overrun much of its original territory. And, let’s be honest, storming religion’s territory is what rational inquiry came into this world doing. In the face of such relentless, even terrifying, psychological pressure, it makes sense that our collective embrace of the supernatural, if it was to persist without dissolving completely, would have to tighten to the point of obsessiveness.

But faith is also a mobile citadel, a portable fortress. Having evolved precisely to occupy the territory inaccessible to reason, faith evolved mechanisms to move fluidly with the boundaries of that territory, or, as with apocalypticism, to blithely revise its truth claims about the imminent end of the world as fast as they’re discredited by the world’s contrarian perseverence. Faith’s quicksilver essence can never be rationally pinned down: the harder you press, the faster it squirts out from under your finger. Like the alien monster in countless movies, faith only gets stronger every time you shoot at it.

If this model is correct in its psychology, monotheistic faith will spread across the globe together with reason—as indeed it seems to be doing already, whether through outright conversion or the subtle moulding of older traditions such as Hinduism and Buddhism into more monotheistic forms. Faith and reason help define the package we call Western civilization. We might even say that they do define it, and that they also account for its stunning global success.

h/t, Wizbang:

You're with Stupid (meaning yourself)

A Plague of Pigs in Texas - Now numbering in the millions, these shockingly destructive and invasive wild hogs wreak havoc across the southern United States

Via Hot Air, Delaying Sex Makes Better Relationships, Study Finds

Hewitt: Obama's EPA and the 2012 Elections

Rauh and Novy-Marx: The crisis in local government pensions in the US

NYC babies complain about the snow: "I'm Angry Too": Mayor Mike on City's Snow Response

Reason: Carbon Rationing By Other Means

Examiner: As governments go broke, public employee unions must share the pain

GREEN SCOTLAND Relies on French Nuclear Power During Deep Freeze

Via Insty, Lunchbox mix-up leads to charges for Sanford teen

Stossel: Please Stop "Helping" Us

Via Powerline:

Mayor Bloomberg may be receiving an unfair amount of criticism for his lackluster performance in coping with Mother Nature, given the almost unprecedented nature of the storm, but the unplowed city streets provide a metaphor for the nanny state: It can order us to do anything, but it can't take care of the basic obligations of government.

 Examiner: A truce in culture wars as voters focus on economy

Voters flee to states with less government intrusion

Am Spectator on government medical care: Is It a Right or Isn't It?

Michelle: Un-merry Christmas from the ACLU

The ACLU was co-opted by the radical Left years ago. Sad.

Global Warming Skeptic Predicts Brutal Winter, Warns “You Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet”

Another NOLA performer I saw over the holidays was this dude Trombone Shorty, with his band, Orleans Avenue:

From the Chimney Safety Institute of America.

Even if you rarely use it, have it checked regularly. Birds, animals, or leaves could make an obstruction up there, leading to a fire.

Dyson uninvents the vacuum cleaner

Social Security: The Chilean Model

Sarah serves S'mores!

The Utter Futility of Reducing Carbon Emissions

Dalrymple: When Predators Don’t Prey - Another good word bites the dust.

The Death Panels are back.

Mead: Give The People What They Want. A snippet:

Twentieth century liberalism started with Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson; FDR rejiggered it somewhat for the New Deal.  In the 1960s and beyond liberalism continued to build on the basic concept that a powerful federal government was the friend rather than the enemy of individual liberty, and that the truly liberal thing to do was to help that government grow and take on more missions.  While I don’t want to throw out the baby with the bathwater, it does seem to me that this road has reached the point of diminishing returns.

On both the left and the right today there are many people who believe that the real ideological contest in America today is between liberalism 3.0 (the more individualistic, laissez-faire kind of liberalism that dominated 19^th century thought) and the more state-oriented, collectively minded liberalism 4.0 of the 20^th century.  3.0 liberals denounce 4.0 liberals as betrayers of the liberal legacy who’ve taken a philosophy grounded in individual freedom and limited government and turned it into a charter for Big Government.  4.0 liberals respond that 3.0 liberals are simple reactionaries who don’t understand how the complexities of modern life make the outmoded, simplistic pieties of liberalism 3.0 wholly inadequate to the problems we face today.

Attended an event recently where Buddy Guy was performing (along with some other NOLA folks I'll mention later). Sweet guy, heavenly-sweet music. He played this set, same band.  

Toon via Theo

On Palin's Reading List, C.S. Lewis

Kudzu: A Lesson in Big Government Failure

DADT: Don’t Fret, Don’t Whine

Under the Christmas Tree This Year? The Return of ‘Death Panels’

Pete Du Pont: Turning America Around - Voters send Republicans to Congress with a mandate for a new direction.

Rick Moran: 2011: The year of insolvency for some states

Krugman: I’ve repeatedly found that people just won’t believe me.

It's because we're brainwashed, he claims.

State-Run Media Gives Obama-Pelosi Regime One Last Wet Kiss: “Congress the Most Productive Since Great Society”

More laws to confuse us, more government. Great. That's called "progress."

Obama's Reversal on 'Indigenous Peoples' Rights Stirs Concern Over Legal Claims

Can the Neaderthals get Europe back?

How Government Failure Caused the Great Recession

Pickens abandons wind power

Why Public Charity Doesn’t Work and Will Bankrupt Us All

SANDERS: A global food fight that's going to get worse

Powerline: Gangster government, HHS edition

From a BD daughter, re Christmas: "It's A Mall and the Night Visitors."

She likes Macy's in NYC at Christmastime. Who doesn't? (You know Amahl, right? I've seen it twice, which is enough.)

We've had only 15-18" thus far, I think, but the drifts are the real problem. It's been blowy and blustery, with gusts up to 60 knots. See NYT: “Bundle Up, It’s Global Warming”. Ya gotta laugh - unless it's intended as satire.

I'll try to get some links up when I can, but shoveling and getting things plowed comes first. In the meantime, catch up on our recent posts.

This is early this morning. I love it: 

I took the pup for a walk in the snowy dark, strolling - no, trudging - down the middle of the roads, after my excursion to Dunkin. The old Explorer plowed thru the drifts, with some difficulty. This blacksmith's storefront looked pretty in the snow. He'll make custom stuff, and shoes for your horses too. Anything iron -

Dunkin, this morning. Their 2 am Donut delivery couldn't get through, but the nice Mezzican gals were there making coffee. Dunkin is one of those things in life that you can count on.