Maggie's Farm

In the pomo world anything is better than Christmas, and Saturnalia was much more fun - no rules - a festival of disinhibition like Mardi Gras or Bacchanalia.

So if we must have a Winter Solstice holiday, let's get rid of this "offensive-to-many" Jesus stuff and reach back to the Romans, before the church fathers got rid of all the pagan fun and replaced it with a Christ's Birthday Holy Day. Fort Collins, CO surely agrees.

Sorry - no room at that inn anymore.

That is of course, a too-skinny Callas, with her weakened and beaten-up voice at the end of her career - but who wants to judge Callas?

Having seen the rarely-performed 1917 comic opera Gianni Schicchi for the first time yesterday, I can finally put Mio babbino caro into full context. As the Bird Dog daughter said yesterday, "It's not even an aria. It's too short, and there is no refrain. It's just sung lines. Should be longer."

In the plot, Gianni (we call him "Johnny"), the crafty lawyer, manages to create a fake will for a wealthy Florentine family friend giving everything to himself, thus providing his daughter with a sufficent dowry to marry the aristocratic boy she loves. Gianni, in Dante's Inferno, can be found in the 9th circle of hell - yet there was redemption in love: her little song was what persuaded her dad cross the line. What dad could not be similarly moved?

A propos the link this morning about lying about infant mortality (but also a propos everything else) we urge all readers and all Americans to read Darrell Huff's classic How to Lie with Statistics.

You do not need to be a math whiz to understand it, but if you don't know this basic stuff, you will be easily duped. Duped expecially by the MSM, which is not only biased in data presentation but is also widely ignorant about the most basic statistics.

In the link we mentioned above, the report was making an "apples and oranges error", known as a "Category Error."  It's the same error involved in the report that showed the world's best cancer center, Sloan-Kettering Memorial in NYC, as having the worst mortality rates of American hospitals. Data can be technically accurate, yet meaningless. Similarly, the most talented docs often have the lowest success rates because they take on the toughest cases.

Money manager acquaintances have told me how they make their numbers look good: they select their best time frame to present, and they decide whether to include or exclude new money added during that time frame. That is a fallacy known as selection bias. A good example at the bottom here: how different would the impression be if you just charted June to November?

Speaking of money managers, I have also enjoyed Jones' How to Lie with Charts and Graphs. Fun to peruse.

From It Takes a Church last year:

God of the ages,
We thank You for all who have served in the armed forces of this country.
We thank You for the freedom their sacrifice has earned and guarded for us. Help us to prize this freedom and use it well.
We ask You to bless all living veterans in a special way today, as well as the families of all veterans.
Comfort those who grieve for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.
Strengthen those who bear physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds.
Stand with those who provide care to them.
Move us to reach out to sisters and brothers who are veterans, or relatives of veterans, or who currently serve in the military.
We pray for the day when no one needs to serve in the military. Help us to live now in anticipation of that day, as people who long for peace, who pray for peace, and who seek to be peacemakers in this world.

"Just because you're 83 doesn't mean you have to sit around and drool."

George H.W. Bush, yesterday:

Luke 20: 27

27 Some Sadducees, those who say there is no resurrection, came to him ²⁸and asked him a question, ‘Teacher, Moses wrote for us that if a man’s brother dies, leaving a wife but no children, the man shall marry the widow and raise up children for his brother. ²⁹Now there were seven brothers; the first married, and died childless; ³⁰then the second ³¹and the third married her, and so in the same way all seven died childless. ³²Finally the woman also died. ³³In the resurrection, therefore, whose wife will the woman be? For the seven had married her.’

34 Jesus said to them, ‘Those who belong to this age marry and are given in marriage; ³⁵but those who are considered worthy of a place in that age and in the resurrection from the dead neither marry nor are given in marriage. ³⁶Indeed they cannot die any more, because they are like angels and are children of God, being children of the resurrection. ³⁷And the fact that the dead are raised Moses himself showed, in the story about the bush, where he speaks of the Lord as the God of Abraham, the God of Isaac, and the God of Jacob. ³⁸Now he is God not of the dead, but of the living; for to him all of them are alive.’....Then some of the scribes answered, ‘Teacher, you have spoken well.’ ⁴⁰For they no longer dared to ask him another question.

A snap of the interior of St. Peter's Church (1837), where we saw Pucchini's one-act Gianni Schicchi yesterday performed by the Chelsea Opera.

Exterior:

23rd St. in Chelsea, down from the church:

From What Bob Dylan Is Not, by Sean Curnyn in the Weekly Standard, 2006, a quote:

He really should have known better. In an interview several months later with Edna Gundersen in USA Today, Dylan was asked about the absence of any song about the current war on his own latest album, Modern Times.

"Didn't Neil Young do that?" he jokes . . . "What's funny about the Neil record, when I heard 'Let's Impeach the President,' I thought it was something old that had been lying around. I said, 'That's crazy, he's doing a song about Clinton?'"

With his sly and somewhat wicked response, Dylan had (1) desperately frustrated the considerable number of more obvious Dylan fans who have been waiting on the edge of a cliff for him to say or sing something--anything!--against President Bush and the Iraq war and (2) told Neil Young none-too-subtly that he found his recent ultrapolitical songwriting essentially pointless.

Somehow, after over 40 years of evidence to the contrary, much of the world seems to continue to expect the man who is arguably America's greatest songwriter to sign on to left/liberal causes at the first opportunity. If nothing else, it is proof that in attempting to kidnap Dylan's songs (in Dylan's own words, his songs were "subverted into polemics" in the 1960s), the left succeeded in convincing the average person that both the work and the man did, indeed, belong to them.

Nobody owns Bob. Read the whole thing. (h/t, reader)

Ringo's hair salon bit is the best: "Would you like a cuppa tea, Madam?"  More good Beatles links at Grow A Brain

A school voucher debate, at Pajamas

Dissecting Asus' EEE PC

Where was your car made? Cafe Hayek

The politics of planted questions. Patterico

Beer, Harp and Horns: Always a good listen

A unique blog: Indexed

Tort awards on free speech, Pretty interesting.

They call this reporting the news? The Globe just cannot stand the fact that Sarkozy - or anyone - likes America.

Peggy Noonan on Hillary vs. Thatcher.

Fort Worth, TX deals with "nigger" intelligently. There are many ugly and rude words in English. Sticks and stones...

I hope the Supremes take on the DC 2nd Amendment appeal.

How many academics feel like frauds? Norm. How many people, in general?

Hate speech: If you are Conservative or Libertarian-minded, you will surely recognize yourself in these words.

The Vioxx settlements. Worstall. Thus was an excellent drug taken off the market, and a great, innovative business damaged. It's probably just about greed that these lawsuits are brought. Does anybody really expect medicine to be without side effects? No free lunch.

From a piece on Venezuela at Devil's Excrement:

There is no milk but there is yogurt. There is no sugar, but there is Splenda. There are no eggs, nor meat, nor rice, but there is caviar, salmon and all the things to make Sushi. What type of economy is this? Who are the geniuses that play politics in the name of the poor and the result is that all that is available are the goods for the rich?

From the sane Joe Lieberman:

"There is something profoundly wrong — something that should trouble all of us — when we have elected Democratic officials who seem more worried about how the Bush administration might respond to Iran's murder of our troops, than about the fact that Iran is murdering our troops.

Photo: Wine shop in Florence

Neurologist V.S. Ramachandran does a great job explaining the mysteries of neuroscience to the general public. He's the author of A Brief Tour of Human Consciousness.

It's about mind and brain. If you have a few minutes to be enlightened, watch his video, Journey to the Center of Your Mind. 

(My only beef with him is that he sets up some very superficial and wrong straw-man Freudian notions to knock down, seemingly forgetting that Freud's career was in Neurology - he was a prominent one: his papers on aphasia are still read, plus he invented the use of cocaine for eye anesthesia. Used it a bit recreationally, too, I am told. He became curious about all of the hysterics he was seeing in the office, dumped on him by the other docs because he was a Jewish doctor and therefore not welcomed in the upper echelons of academic medicine in Vienna. Hence psychoanalytic theory. However, Freud was not a Psychiatrist.)

(h/t, Attack Machine)

Gateway, with video. Isn't totalitarian socialist revolution a beautiful thing? But where are Cindy and Sean and the rest of the American Chavistas today, when they could be helping to shoot freedom-seeking students to advance the cause? Maybe they are too busy today? Well, then call Warren Beatty.

And why, why, do potentially prosperous and happy South American countries keep falling for this dictator business, socialist or otherwise? It's a damn shame.

I am a democrat [believer in democracy] because I believe in the Fall of Man. I think most people are democrats for the opposite reason. A great deal of democratic enthusiasm descends from the ideas of people like Rousseau, who believed in democracy because they thought mankind so wise and good that every one deserved a share in the government. The danger of defending democracy on those grounds is that they’re not true. . . . I find that they’re not true without looking further than myself. I don’t deserve a share in governing a hen-roost. Much less a nation. . . . The real reason for democracy is just the reverse. Mankind is so fallen that no man can be trusted with unchecked power over his fellows. Aristotle said that some people were only fit to be slaves. I do not contradict him. But I reject slavery because I see no men fit to be masters.

CS Lewis, 1943 (h/t, Dr. Bob)

With thanks to Chris Muir:

Still cannot find Abbott and Costello doing their immortal Susquehanna Hat Company routine on YouTube, but the Stooges originated the concept in the 1930s, called "Slowly I turned":

The apparent popularity of our recent philosophical post on Track Geometry Cars motivates us to post this photo of monitors from the rear window of a BNSF 80 car, from this fine foto Foamer site. Thanks, reader.

If you like Track Geometry and Inspection cars, here are tons of them.

Did I ever want to acquire the Sixties? No. But if I own the Sixties, I'll give 'em to you if you want 'em. You can have 'em.

Bob Dylan (h/t, K)

One of the amusements of idleness is reading without the fatigue of close attention, and the world therefore swarms with writers whose wish is not to be studied, but to be read.

Samuel Johnson, The Idler, #30, 1758, via a piece on reading real books from Vanderleun

I stand in awe of the people out there in the world who can design and make the real things that make the real world work, while the rest of us take it all for granted as we pursue other things.

There is an entirely unjustified arrogance, I think, often found in those of us who have more purely abstract work and interests, as if there were something lesser about building things that make trains run. There is surely some insecurity hiding behind that superiority - the insecurity of knowing eternal Shakespeare perhaps, but not having a clue about magnetic detection of invisible flaws in rails - or even about how trains really work.

Like me, many of us would be lost and helpless - thrown back into the stone age - if the everyday, underpaid and underappreciated practical  geniuses disappeared.

The Sperry Rail-flaw detector is my case in point today. You could not run a safe railroad without these funky yellow machines, which you can see around regularly, perched on sidings, if you ride rails. Nowadays, they use ultrasound probes. Photo of an older one below, and details of Dr. Elmer Sperry's remarkable career here. As you can see, his useful company - one of 8 manufacturing businesses he created - is still in business in good old Danbury, CT, once the hat-manufacturing capital of the US (and the home of Charles Ives). Thanks, C., for the inspiration.