Maggie's Farm

The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Brennan on the Moor. Only Liam remains of the original group. A piece by Rick Moran here.

The big sale is on until the end of August.

Long-time readers know how much we all love the Teaching Company. It's one of the ways we all try to continue to learn. But it's much more fun than school, because no single school could contain so many suberb and enthusiastic communicators - plus no tests or term papers. We use the CDs in the car and while working out.

I cannot praise these people enough. Look through their catalog to find the gaping holes in your education. In my family, we trade them around, but we only buy them during the sales.

h/t LGF. The Brit Left is shocked!

Like him or not, he is an impressive and accomplished fellow. h/t, RCP. I like Fred, but I suspect Giuliani wants the job more. The nation might be ready for a black president, but is it ready for an Italian? Not many Italians outside of the Northeast, and even I cannot spell his name. OK, OK - we're all Americans, I know.

Put this sticker on your car, and no eco-nazi will key your new  Esplanade. Good protection.

I am going to buy one for the Barrister to put on his new Ford F-250.

Eighty percent of success is showing up.

Woody Allen

I cannot explain why we are re-posting this bit from last year's Bovine of the Week Series. Just accept that there is a good reason.

Yes, unlike the Musk Ox, the Yak is a bovine, and a cousin of the ancestor of our Western domestic cattle, the mighty Auroch.

Yaks come in a wild and domesticated form. 85% of these cold-climate creatures are said to be in China, and are still used for plowing, meat, milk, wool, and as beasts of burden. They are capable of hybridizing with domestic cattle, yielding a breed which is commonly used as a pack animal in Tibet.

Why yurts with yaks? They begin with a Y. Yurts are Mongolian houses, of course, but I recently learned that you can buy plans for them, and the structures, from several American manufacturers, such as Pacific Yurts. Cozy dwellings for snowy places, cheap and practical - but I'll take a log cabin.

Robert Frost's notebooks have been published. A quote from Ormsby's review at New Criterion:

As the Notebooks show, Frost was a sophisticated reader of philosophy; he knew the Greeks from Thales on and had read Hegel, Schopenhauer, William James, and Bergson (a particular favorite), among others. Here he isn’t making a case for some relativistic notion of truth (indeed, he isn’t making a case at all but having what he liked to call “a think”). Instead, he is winkling out the capacity of poetry to capture, in a single dramatic image or synechdoche, a “confluence” of colliding truths. The object of a poem wasn’t to concoct some slick “unity of opposites;” it was to find those words—“words that have been mouthed like a common tin cup,” as he put it—through which multiple oppositions could flash forth from a single point of compression. An early jotting states, “I thought I was an {acromatic} lense. I’m afraid I am a prism” (his brackets and spelling). Metaphor was one obvious “prismatic” device but for Frost’s purposes, the aphorism, the proverb, and, especially, the figure of synechdoche, offered higher powers of refraction.

Texas guide for a dove shoot: "Hey fellas, let's shoot some of them crows for warm-up practice."

Sport: "Sure, why not?"

The guide calls the crows into range and the sports shoot some crows.

Guide: "OK, I'll just go pick up them crows to take home, and we'll go find them doves."

Sport: "Pick them up? What for?"

Guide: "To cook 'em."

Sport: "Eat a crow? What do they taste like?"

Guide: "Well... tastes kinda like owl."

My one regret in life is that I am not someone else.

Woody Allen

Amazing footage. (a big h/t to Driscoll). I forwarded the YouTube to Dr. Bob, who has been doing a series of photo essays on the construction of the new bridge). Watch the guy rescuing his dog from the bridge. 

Pulling the army out of Northern Ireland, that is.

After 38 years of counterinsurgency  operations, they are turning it over to the local cops.

You can't really find vast fields of wild Lowbush Blueberry south of Maine. They especially seem to grow where there has been forest fire or clear-cutting. Always keep an eye out for bears in a lowbush blueberry field.

And Rightly So has a little photo essay on the subject. Here's one of her fine photos:

Building on flood plains. Free Market Fairy Tales

The generic blog post. Sippican. Just fill in the blanks.

Harry Reid wants power without power plants. Miller

Counting hurricanes. How can you compare the present with the pre-weather satellite era? Wizbang

Adding a blog to our Education category: Minding the Campus. (h/t, Classical Values)

Cartoon from Leo Cullum's excellent Scotch and Toilet Water?

This moth on a window (thanks, reader) reminds me of Billy Gibbons, with the RayBans and the dirty beard. I think I'll post a ZZ Top tune (below).

Correction: That is two moths, facing in opposite directions, mating. It's more farm p*rn from Maggie's Farm. I did think the leg count was strange.

How do they produce so much sound? Every girl crazy about a sharp-dressed man.

Some folks like to read and think about reason and revelation. For some reason, when I think about it much my brain gets numb. Maybe I believe that existence itself is a mysterious dream from the mind of God. 

Dr. Bob takes on the subject of reason and faith once again. A quote:

Sweeping generalizations about what “most Christians think” seem common among those who understand little of what any Christian thinks, and miss the mark anyway: the standard is not what “most Christians” believe, but what Christianity as a faith has taught and maintained throughout its two-thousand year history. And while Christianity maintains that aspects of its core beliefs may be reached through reason alone — such as the existence of God, the nature of the soul, and the existence of a natural moral law — Christianity is above all a faith based on revelation. It maintains that God exists, that He is personal, and that He has intervened in human history, making Himself known both by written revelation and through the person of Jesus Christ. While the secular materialist views such a position as irrational – contrary to reason — Christianity maintains instead that it is supra-rational: not contrary to reason, but above reason by the very nature of God. It stands to reason that man — confined by his very nature to space and time — cannot through reason alone understand a Being who transcends space and time — eternal and self-existent in nature, unlimited in intellect and power, unchanged and unbound by time, having existed both before time and throughout eternity.

From American.com:

The U.S. now has 125 opera companies. That’s more than Germany or Italy, and roughly as many Americans attend live opera performances as attend NFL football games. Jonathan Leaf examines a surprising phenomenon—beyond the Met.

If that is true, then why don't we have more opera on TV? I wish we did. Read the article here. Readers know that we like the Met, but are also very happy with the NYC Opera just next door. Other than in Lincoln Center, where in the world are there two opera companies performing next door to eachother?

He died at 89. A genius, or just pretentious? I don't know.

He always had excellent cinematography, and The Seventh Seal, which was ostensibly about The Plague, was darn interesting to watch.

I saw it the first time at The Thalia.