Sunday, April 13. 2008
Acts 2:42-47 - The Fellowship of the Believers 42They devoted themselves to the apostles' teaching and to the fellowship, to the breaking of bread and to prayer. 43Everyone was filled with awe, and many wonders and miraculous signs were done by the apostles. 44All the believers were together and had everything in common. 45Selling their possessions and goods, they gave to anyone as he had need. 46Every day they continued to meet together in the temple courts. They broke bread in their homes and ate together with glad and sincere hearts, 47praising God and enjoying the favor of all the people. And the Lord added to their number daily those who were being saved.
Brockton, MA, 1940, by Jack Delano, from the Library of Congress collection 
Saturday, April 12. 2008
“Every secular religion...comes with its own Liturgies, Rubrics and Rituals, its own Sins, Laws and Saviors." The Anchoress
Friday, April 11. 2008
Changes in Latitude, Changes in Attitude - with lots of Parrotheads in evidence.
Good poll news for John McCain NYT writes unbiased article on Iraq Truth-telling about immigration in Swedish MSM. Gates An illustrated history of data storage (h/t, Thompson's Friday Ephemera) The disastrous 17th Amendment (h/t, Right Wing Prof) Shipping containers and the economy
Thursday, April 10. 2008
Barry Obama has a race problem: he is pissed off at whites despite his charmed life in America. The guy misses the point that almost everybody in America is post-racial these days (not in Euroland, however). White folks do not spend one second of their lives thinking about oppressing black, brown, yellow or red people, and to imply that they do is hateful, malicious, manipulative, - and wrong. Character and behavior, not skin, is what folks are interested in. I do not give a damn about skin, and I believe that very few people are hung up on skin these days, and we would be even less so except for the Left constantly pushing skin and genitalia and transgender-mixed-frozen-vegetables in our faces. Honestly, would Obama be a presidential candidate today if he were a white guy? Of course not. Hillary would have eaten him as an hors d'oevre by now. It's plain as day, but people don't say it. Heck, Congress is full of glib Leftists: consider the always-charming and articulate Barney Frank. Obama is a phee-nom because he is half-black (and he is a likeable fellow, as pols go). The Obama effect is pure reverse-racism - mixed with ageism (he's a kid) and a touch of jaunty metrosexual bias (the American MSM press is not known for its comfort with manliness). I find this video disturbing, insulting, dumb, and offensive (from piece at Gateway):
"New publishing industry needs new editors," at Pajamas. Fascinating. (h/t, Flares)
Wednesday, April 9. 2008
Yes, we send Chris some money every time we borrow, and occasionally wonder whether to post his stuff daily: 
 From a CNN piece on the Pulitzer announcements, which includes this about Bob:
Long after most of his contemporaries either died, left the business or held on by the ties of nostalgia, Dylan continues to tour almost continuously and release highly regarded CDs, most recently "Modern Times." Fans, critics and academics have obsessed over his lyrics -- even digging through his garbage for clues -- since the mid-1960s, when such protest anthems as "Blowin' in the Wind" made Dylan a poet and prophet for a rebellious generation. His songs include countless biblical references and he has claimed Chekhov, Walt Whitman and Jack Kerouac as influences. His memoir, "Chronicles, Volume One," received a National Book Critics Circle nomination in 2005 and is widely acknowledged as the rare celebrity book that can be treated as literature. According to publisher Simon & Schuster, Dylan is working on a second volume of memoirs. No release date has been set.
Why reporters persist with that "prophet for a rebellious generation" nonsense I don't know. Maybe it's to put the guy in a box with a label. Of course, he is not the corporate guy in the grey flannel suit, but if that's rebellious, then bring it on. I'd call him a prodigious and ambitiously truth-telling singer-songwriter whose work, over 45 years, covers everything from love to God to war, from joy to despair, and which borrows - or steals - heavily from the Great American Songbook using folk, blues, country blues, country, ditties, jazz, nursery rhymes, rock, and love ballads...not to mention the Great Irish and Great Scottish Songbooks - and from movies, books, and especially from the Bible. Many folks don't seem to realize that most of Dylan's best stuff is post-60s. We do get a kick out of olde Maggie's Farm though, because all of us have learned to dislike working for other people (what's with the headdresses? Pure loony frivolity, methinks):
Newport Mountain, Mount Desert Island, Maine. 1851. The fellow in the foreground seems to be pulling in a mast from a wreck. 
Tuesday, April 8. 2008
If there is no self, whose flu is this? Be here now. Be someplace else later. Is that so complicated? Drink tea and nourish life; with the first sip, joy; with the second sip, satisfaction; with the third sip, peace; with the fourth, a muffin. Wherever you go, there you are. Your luggage is another story. Accept misfortune as a blessing. Do not wish for perfect health, or a life without problems. What would you talk about? The journey of a thousand miles begins with a single Oy. There is no escaping karma. In a previous life, you never called, you never wrote, you never visited. And whose fault was that? Zen is not easy. It takes effort to attain nothingness. And then what do you have? Bupkis. The Tao does not speak. The Tao does not blame. The Tao does not take sides. The Tao has no expectations. The Tao demands nothing of others. The Tao is not Jewish. Breathe in. Breathe out. Breathe in. Breathe out. Forget this and attaining Enlightenment will be the least of your problems. Let your mind be as a floating cloud. Let your stillness be as a wooded glen. And sit up straight. You'll never meet the Buddha with such rounded shoulders. Deep inside you are ten thousand flowers. Each flower blossoms ten thousand times. Each blossom has ten thousand petals. You might want to see a specialist. Be aware of your body. Be aware of your perceptions; Keep in mind that not every physical sensation is a symptom of a terminal illness. The Torah says, Love your neighbor as yourself. The Buddha says “There is no self.” So, maybe we're off the hook.
That reminds me of this old, old one:
Shirley returns home to Miami from her big Africa trip. Her friends ask her about it, as she sits crying at the Mah Jong table.
"Oy," she says. "In the jungle, I was carried off by a huge gorilla, who took me up into a tree and had his rough, animal way with me for hours."
"You poor thing. It must have been terrible." "No, it was more wonderful than you could ever imagine. Nothing like Marvin." "Then why are you crying?" "It's been two weeks, and he doesn't write, he doesn't call."
and there's a good Passover joke at Theo
Documentary filmmaker Errol Morris discusses the making of The Thin Blue Line in the NYT (h/t Neuroanthropology via Dr. X). My bolds: Personally I have never been averse to the use of reconstruction, generic archive footage, still photographs, or whatever techniques exist or we can create for ourselves as film makers so that we can become better story tellers, but the unbreakable rule must surely be that the audience MUST always know what it is they are seeing, at least when it comes to documentary. I know that there is no such thing as objective truth, particularly when it comes to film-making, but if audiences are being tricked without their knowledge, and worse still, when the film makers themselves are unable to distinguish between fact, fiction and distortion, what chance will they or future generations have of being able to disinter even a semblance of truth about what happened?
Huh? If the guy is hopeless about facts and truth, why does he bother worrying, and why doesn't he simply call his own stuff "fiction"? This guy is an exemplar of the pomo notion of "narrative." I guess nobody killed the police officer, or maybe the chocolate shake did it - probably the same chocolate shake that shot JFK. Al Gore, Michael Moore, Oliver Stone: all fully-conscious propagandists seeking to mess up the minds of the ignorant for their own purposes. Malignant people, clever but not wise.
 A quote from Dr. Bob's post, The Prayer of Java:
There is one secret ingredient to make prayer work: trust. Gotta have it. Can God work without your trust? Sure — the rain falls on the just and the unjust, as the proverb says. Our problem is we want to understand God before we trust Him. We want Him to strut His stuff, lightning bolts and miracles and the like, before we’ll acquiesce and maybe give Him a break. Sorry, that’s not trust — just the opposite. But God cannot be understood — even in a limited way with our most enfeebled minds — until we first trust Him. Sounds like a bum deal, a Catch-22, but that’s just the way it works. Get over it — you won’t regret it. And one last thought in this long-winded essay: If you’re new to this prayer thing (or even not so new), start small. Praying for world peace or a cure for your cancer is fine, but a bit grandiose for starters. Pray about your misplaced car keys, finding a parking spot, the wisdom to deal with that difficult patient, or co-worker, or child, or situation. Then open your eyes, your ears, your heart for the response. You won’t hear it every time — but I bet you’ll be surprised how often you do, and you’ll learn something about God, about yourself, and in some small way about how this spiritual world works.
Just grow them, dry them out, punch a 1" hole in them, and hang 'em in a tree. Instant House Wren house. A house is not a home unless you have these members of the chattering class around. (Ours haven't arrived yet this Spring. Global cooling is to blame.)
I learned recently that this bright Vermont lad is now completing his doctorate at MIT (at 16).
Elizabeth Samet teaches Literature at West Point. A quote from a review of her book, Soldier's Heart, in Newsweek: It's hard for any good teacher of English to get away from war; great literature is soaked in it. Along with love, war supplies us with the greatest human drama. And war, like love, seems to somehow be essential to the human condition. "You may not be interested in war," Leon Trotsky once wrote, "but war is certainly interested in you." For Samet, teaching these young cadets, the trick is to reconcile romantic notions of honor and glory with harsher realities, the randomness of death by IED or the savagery of bombing civilians—all the great and terrible things that humans do when fighting for their lives against other humans. In her new book, "Soldier's Heart," she does it beautifully. The book, named after an archaic term for combat fatigue or, to use the modern acronym, PTSD, is a recollection of her 10 years of teaching English at West Point, but it is much more than that: a meditation on the need for both myth and reality in preparing young officers for war.
From Sipp: 
Monday, April 7. 2008
Thanks for the photo, Chris 
 Christopher Buckley, on his dad. (h/t, Am. Digest) A quote:
And so off we sailed into the storm. This was in my father’s last sailboat, a 36-foot fiberglass sloop named Patito. We somehow made it across Long Island Sound, through a screaming, dark night and 15-foot seas. I kept the radio tuned to the Coast Guard frequency. I thought of my two young children. I thought of my warm bed in Washington. I thought, What the __ am I doing out here?
The next morning, after a sleepless night at anchor listening to the halyards slap furiously against the mast, dawn arrived greasily. The wind had increased. It was now gusting to 55 knots. The radio reported that half a million homes in New England were without power. Various governors had declared a state of emergency. We had gone for an overnight sail in a state of emergency.
I proposed that we row ashore and flag down a passing car. Or perhaps a passing FEMA vehicle.
“No, no,” said my father. “We’ll be fine.”
It was daylight now, so we could see the seas we were up against and there was nothing pleasant about them. Perhaps you’ve seen the movie The Perfect Storm?
Somehow we made it back across Long Island Sound. My mother had spent the morning on the phone to the Coast Guard. The Coast Guard kept saying, “But Mrs. Buckley, what are they doing out there in this?”
Good question, I thought, gulping down a brandy with trembling hands.
I simmered for a few days, and wrote my father a blistering letter. Never again, I vowed.
Read the whole thing. Photo from the piece at National Review.
Moon Over Peacham (VT), by Larry Miller. Available at Silver Print Press. 
Sunday, April 6. 2008
 We reach down to the Gold Coast of suburban Fairfield County, CT for today's New England house for sale.
This 1920 4-bedroom house, with 4800 sq. feet, sits in the Tokeneke area of Darien's Long Island Sound waterfront in what realtors still call "Aryan Darien." Darien: Cheaper and more homey than Greenwich, more pleasant than Stamford, and less than an hour from NYC by train. Average house price in town: over one million, and every kid in town is above average and plays hockey and lacrosse. House looks modest and civilized enough to me. Asking $3,995,000, which seems quite reasonable for the area. More photos of the charming place here. But can I farm it, and shoot on it?
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