We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
It's outdoor grilling season (well, that is all year-long for many of us regardless of snow), but I want to convey our Cordon Bleu-trained chef friend's advice for oven-roasting meats of all kinds: Always 400 degrees.
Even chicken. Ignore the cookbook. Use a meat thermometer if you can't tell doneness by touch.
More meat advice from our expert:
- Remember (everybody knows this anyway) that meat continues to cook for at least 10 minutes after removing from the heat. That fact has ruined many a rare steak or butterflied leg of lamb.
- Rib-eye is best pan-cooked, no matter how thick. Otherwise many or most meats can be pan-seared and roasted. She says grills are best for burgers and hot dogs, but I disagree. I love a grilled butterflied leg 'a lamb. Possibly my favorite meat. Rare, please.
I have skied Mount Mansfield countless times (at the Stowe ski area) but I have never hiked it. Hiking to the top in summertime would be quite the challenge for me but I'd love to give it a shot. Or maybe not. Mansfield is the tallest peak in Vermont. New Hampshire has higher peaks.
In winter, you can get up there on skis, cruise along the ridge, and go down Madonna Mountain into the Smuggler's Notch ski area.That's really a better ski area - fewer people.
Ace posted this painting of a guy taking a leak picnic party atop Mt. Mansfield, by Jerome Thompson (1858). I wonder how they got up there with their dresses and picnic baskets but in that era nature hiking was all the rage for the gentry.
Beacon Hill is a charming 19th neighborhood in Boston, close by the Massachusetts State House. It can't really be compared with the West Village of New York because the current charming West Village was built for the poor and working class, while the Beacon Hill development was built for the gentry.
Mrs. BD and friends were visiting colleagues on Beacon Hill a little while ago. She wondered where the beacon was. I checked it, and discovered that most of the hill and its warning beacon were taken away by horse and wagon in 1811.
It is still hilly, though.
Some major urban areas still have delightful, quiet, antique neighborly enclaves, untouched by modernity or urban renewal. I'm thinking Brooklyn Heights - and large parts of Harlem. Outside the northeast, I think of the entire downtown of Savannah, GA, which was spared the devastation of the Union armies and of urban renewal.
Ocean liners, aka Cruise Ships, still dock on Manhattan's remaining Hudson River piers. The Normandie was one of the great liners but not the last one as the article wrongly suggests (eg The France, QE ll, the Nieu Amsterdam, the Queen Mary, the United States, etc)
6:12 Therefore, do not let sin exercise dominion in your mortal bodies, to make you obey their passions.
6:13 No longer present your members to sin as instruments of wickedness, but present yourselves to God as those who have been brought from death to life, and present your members to God as instruments of righteousness.
6:14 For sin will have no dominion over you, since you are not under law but under grace.
6:15 What then? Should we sin because we are not under law but under grace? By no means!
6:16 Do you not know that if you present yourselves to anyone as obedient slaves, you are slaves of the one whom you obey, either of sin, which leads to death, or of obedience, which leads to righteousness?
6:17 But thanks be to God that you, having once been slaves of sin, have become obedient from the heart to the form of teaching to which you were entrusted,
6:18 and that you, having been set free from sin, have become slaves of righteousness.
6:19 I am speaking in human terms because of your natural limitations. For just as you once presented your members as slaves to impurity and to greater and greater iniquity, so now present your members as slaves to righteousness for sanctification.
6:20 When you were slaves of sin, you were free in regard to righteousness.
6:21 So what advantage did you then get from the things of which you now are ashamed? The end of those things is death.
6:22 But now that you have been freed from sin and enslaved to God, the advantage you get is sanctification. The end is eternal life.
6:23 For the wages of sin is death, but the free gift of God is eternal life in Christ Jesus our Lord.
Matthew 10:40-42 10:40 "Whoever welcomes you welcomes me, and whoever welcomes me welcomes the one who sent me.
10:41 Whoever welcomes a prophet in the name of a prophet will receive a prophet's reward; and whoever welcomes a righteous person in the name of a righteous person will receive the reward of the righteous;
10:42 and whoever gives even a cup of cold water to one of these little ones in the name of a disciple -- truly I tell you, none of these will lose their reward."
Besides opera tix, the other Christmas present I received (besides stinky cheeses) was an island-hopping rugged hiking trip in the Outer Hebrides. Well, Mrs. BD likes remote rugged places as readers know - as long as there are cozy B&Bs at night.
I checked the weather for our trip: 40s (F) at night, high 50s (F) daytime. Some precipitation 21 out of 30 days/month in summer (more in winter). North Atlantic weather. I've done a few ship crossings in the north Atlantic and know what it's like: cool mist and drizzle, no need for sunscreen.
Gwynnie lent me his waterproof Olympus.
My Mom and Dad were partial to trips to northern climes. Dad wrote the poem below to document the habit (with a photo of the poet at the farm).
I first learned about Feynman from his Feynman Lectures on Physics.This was, and maybe still is, scripture for undergrads curious about Physics. What undergrad is not?
Nobel prize and all that, but what Feynman could do best was to communicate, and he could communicate in humorous, self-deprecating, and humble ways. I believe that he truly believed that he wasn't too smart, just curious and persistent.
Here's Feynman's speech titled What Is Science? delivered to the National Science Teachers Association, 1966, in New York City. He talks a lot about how his father inspired his curiosity. Read it. One quote:
I listened to a conversation between two girls, and one was explaining that if you want to make a straight line, you see, you go over a certain number to the right for each row you go up--that is, if you go over each time the same amount when you go up a row, you make a straight line--a deep principle of analytic geometry! It went on. I was rather amazed. I didn't realize the female mind was capable of understanding analytic geometry.
She went on and said, "Suppose you have another line coming in from the other side, and you want to figure out where they are going to intersect. Suppose on one line you go over two to the right for every one you go up, and the other line goes over three to the right for every one that it goes up, and they start twenty steps apart," etc.--I was flabbergasted. She figured out where the intersection was. It turned out that one girl was explaining to the other how to knit argyle socks. I, therefore, did learn a lesson.
In DC, D.C.’s massive Woodner apartment building has lived many lives—from fancy hotel to one of the last bastions of affordable housing in a gentrifying neighborhood. Now, it’s on the brink of another change.
Low wage jobs are not meant to be living wages. They are entry-level. Higher min wage laws drive jobs out of the country, or just close businesses. Wonderful only for unions who peg wages to min wage.
How the media was able in a matter of hours after the election to rebrand Democrats as anti-Russian hawks and Republicans as colluders with Putin is one of the strangest and yet most successful political fabrications in recent history.
...
The media fed off the hysteria. In its fusion role with the Democratic Party to delegitimize Trump, journalists saw collusion as the most effective way to create a sort of national madness directed at the Trump presidency.
Pleasant waterfront summer cottage in New England, as seen on an outing last week. Either our boat was rocking, or I was. Or it was global warming tilting everything.
‘Ignorance more frequently begets confidence than does knowledge.’
Charles Darwin, via an Aeon piece on the Dunning-Kruger Effect (how poorly-informed people tend to over-estimate their competence, while the best-informed tend to doubt themselves)
Interestingly, really smart people also fail to accurately self-assess their abilities. As much as D- and F-grade students overestimate their abilities, A-grade students underestimate theirs. In their classic study, Dunning and Kruger found that high-performing students, whose cognitive scores were in the top quartile, underestimated their relative competence.
Moral: Self-doubt is always a rational position, and a good foundation for a realistic self-confidence. Maggie's Farmers tend towards wholesome skepticism about everything, including oneself.
Darn Tough Socks.
Beacon Hill i
For summer get-togethers or any other festive occasion, along with beer and wine it's fun to have a cocktail theme, like one kind of pitcher cocktail.
American Houses: A Field Guide to the Architecture of the Home 
I first learned about Feynman from his 
James Beard's 