Maggie's Farm

Many friends in town still without power etc. At some point, it gets a little old. A hot shower is one heck of a fine thing. A few more of my storm photos were posted earlier today. A few observations -

- You can get the phone co. to forward your regular phone to your cell phone on an emergency basis. That's a good service. Problem is, it pretty much wears out your cell battery while trying to get through to them.

- The power of nature is a majestic, frightening, unpredictable, glorious, exciting, humbling thing.

- Throwing out everything in your freezers is a bummer. Furthermore, the smelly garbage draws raccoons from all surrounding counties, who spill and drag it all around. Lovely. Thanks, fellas.

- It might be time to spring for a Home Depot generator like Gwynnie has. I am always the last person to have the techy thing.

- Memo to self: "Call your mother." Don't wait for an 80-something lady to call to see how you are doing. She said "Oh, we're fine. Your Pop and I are having quite an adventure with candlelight and the fireplace and the wood stove all going strong. We keep eachother warm. No stove though, so your Pop keeps sending me out five miles to Dunkin Donuts for coffee."

- The importance of fortunate timing: the BD pupette spent this week skiing in Utah with college pals - Deer Valley, where they offer you a hankie and a VSOP or glass of sherry on the lift line - instead of chilling here in the dark. Nice life to be a BD kid. I'd be happy to be one myself right now, around 20 years old with what I know now.

- No government was needed to get New England back up and running. All it took was neighborliness, dutiful utility companies, and tree companies from all over. The guys clearing our roads came down from NH and Quebec. I believe we also had every cherry-picker truck in Mt. Airy, NC, up here.

- No distractions: When you have no radio, TV, internet, phone, or power, you are pretty much stuck with your own thoughts. Sometimes that is interesting; sometimes it is living hell with memories, regrets, remorse, pain, etc. Dr. Bliss posted on this in A New Way to be Insane and in Try turning off the radio: Obsessions, Distractions and Diversions.

- My preferred living temperature is between 60 and 64 F. Keeps me alert, and comfortable in the proper dress code.

- All fossil fuel is just stored solar power. So is firewood. These things are solar power batteries. "Organic," too.

- It is said that fireplaces draw heat from a house. Perhaps that is true - but not in an unheated house. In an unheated house, a fireplace will radiate fairly well. Of course, a Franklin stove will do a much better job of that while burning less wood. Ol' Ben was quite a fellow, even if he was a jerk in some ways.

- Sheesh, Mr. Bruce Kesler! Now I see why people complain about the cheesecake on Maggie's. Every time I stopped by the library to check my email (they had power) and to see how Maggie's was holding up, out popped that seductive St. Paddy's leprechaun for all the world to see. I have to consider my reputation! However, she is one pleasant leprechaun.

- The problem with socialist solutions is always that there isn't quite enough socialism (or enuf $)

- How Obamacare screws the middle class

- 65% say Do nothing or Start Over

- Virginia: If you ram healthcare through, we'll see you in court next week

- People want coverage of pre-existing conditions, but they don't want to pay for it. So who do they want to pay for it?

Maggie's HQ was fortunate to regain heat, cable, and power last night, after losing those fine modern conveniences on Saturday. Here's how we lost them:

another one:

A photo of the HQ at dusk:

When I was in high school, our Headmaster never praised intelligence in his homilies on God and life in daily Chapel, but he did praise what he called "stick-to-it-iveness" and "going the extra mile" all the time. I thought "banal nostrums" at the time, but now I know better -

In the confrontation between the stream and the rock, the stream always wins - not through strength,  but through persistence.

Buddha

Nothing in the world can take the place of Persistence. Talent will not: nothing is more common than unsuccessful men with talent. Genius will not; unrewarded genius is almost a proverb. Education will not; the world is full of educated derelicts. Persistence and determination alone are omnipotent. The slogan 'Press on' has solved and always will solve the problems of the human race.

Calvin Coolidge

Genius is one percent inspiration and ninety-nine percent perspiration.

Thomas Edison

I have not failed. I've just found 10,000 ways that won't work.

Thomas Edison

If at first you don't succeed, try, try again. Then quit. No use being a damn fool about it.

W.C. Fields

Via Surber:

On Monday, after heavy rains, Gore held a teleconference to leap on the rain as proof of Apocalypse and Armaggedon: “Just look at what has been happening for the last three days. The so-called skeptics haven’t noted it because it’s not snow. But the downpours and heavy winds are consistent with what the scientists have long warned about.

Wasn't he warning us that weather wasn't climate just two weeks ago?

Thanks to our honorary New Englander team for keeping Maggie's flowing with stuff while we are without power up here at Maggie's HQ in Yankeeland (photo).

As of this afternoon, I see utility trucks from Quebec, Ohio, and Maryland buzzing around. I also hear rumors of a union slowdown during contract negotiations...no way to confirm that, of course.

Dad-daughter exchange from early a few mornings ago:

Dad, where's the yellow flashlight?

Honey, if I could find a dang flashlight I could find the yellow flashlight.

Nullius in verba

Motto of the Royal Society.

Paul's second letter to the Corinthians, 5:16-21

5:16 From now on, therefore, we regard no one from a human point of view; even though we once knew Christ from a human point of view, we know him no longer in that way.

5:17 So if anyone is in Christ, there is a new creation: everything old has passed away; see, everything has become new!

5:18 All this is from God, who reconciled us to himself through Christ, and has given us the ministry of reconciliation;

5:19 that is, in Christ God was reconciling the world to himself, not counting their trespasses against them, and entrusting the message of reconciliation to us.

5:20 So we are ambassadors for Christ, since God is making his appeal through us; we entreat you on behalf of Christ, be reconciled to God.

5:21 For our sake he made him to be sin who knew no sin, so that in him we might become the righteousness of God.

Some wonderful windstorm today here. Hurricane-like and packed with the majestic power of Nature. 66 mph gusts.

Most of the screens blown off ye olde cabin, and a few trees down or half-down. If Maggie's goes down for a while, that will be why.

Only comprehensible to those over 40 -

From an essay of the above name by Craig and Fennell in The New Atlantis, which uses Wolfe's novel as a springboard for a discussion of cultural issues, but let me say that I hated the book, but I enjoy Wolfe's writing very much - the book was just too disgustingly real:

"I Am Charlotte Simmons is an indictment of the primary centers of higher education in America today. These institutions do not well serve the real longings and earnest ambitions of the young people who flock to them, at great cost and with great expectations, year after year. Instead of pointing students to a world that is higher than where they came from, the university reinforces and expands the nihilism and political correctness that they are taught in public schools, imbibe from popular culture, and bring with them as routine common sense when they arrive on campus. Of course, these two ideologies are largely incompatible: nihilism celebrates strength (or apathy) without illusion; political correctness promulgates illusions in the name of sensitivity. But both ideologies are the result of collapsing and rejecting any distinction between higher and lower, between nobility and ignobility, between the higher learning and the flight from reason."

Read entire.

When I was a kid, Kedgeree was my favorite breakfast. My Mom was taken by it on all of her trips across the pond, and we kids just did not go for blood sausage. I think I first had it in Scotland.

This Indian-inspired Brit meal is as rare on US menus as Shrimp 'n Grits is on Maine menus. It's great thing for kids in the cool weather, or anytime. Supper too.

Rice, curry, haddock or smoked haddock, etc., and sliced egg on top. I like it with regular haddock, and even the frozen is OK with this. Wonderfully filling, tasty, and rib-sticking.

Here's one recipe, but it need not be so complex.

Men and women, relationships and politics. Villainous

Another runaway Toyota scam

Democratic candidates distance themselves from healthcare reform

Health care: What gimmick? We just pay the taxes for it for a few years before the thing starts to distort the apparent cost.

New poverty measurements to include government income and benefits. Makes sense. Of course, if poverty is defined as a standard percentage, it will never be eliminated no matter how many cars and TVs the poor own.

Jay Cost: It's Time for Moderate House Democrats to Stand Up to Obama

Moran: How the news gave up its objectivity

Climategate: Once Respected Nature Now Staffed By Moaning Ninnies

God's Grandeur

The world is charged with the grandeur of God.
        It will flame out, like shining from shook foil;
        It gathers to a greatness, like the ooze of oil
Crushed. Why do men then now not reck his rod?
Generations have trod, have trod, have trod;
        And all is seared with trade; Bleared, smeared with toil;
        And wears man's smudge and shares man's smell: the soil
Is bare now, nor can foot feel, being shod.

And for all this, nature is never spent;
        There lives the dearest freshness deep down things;
And though the last lights off the black West went
        Oh, morning, at the brown brink eastward, springs —
Because the Holy Ghost over the bent
         World broods with warm breast and with ah! bright wings.

Founder of the American Red Cross Nursing Service. It's her birthday.

She said she didn't do it because she was moved by suffering, but because she liked the work.

I prefer people who do fine things because they want to, not because of pious self-congratulatory virtue or grandiose notions of changing the world.

To those for whom the intellect alone has force, such a witness has little or no force. It bewilders and exasperates them. It challenges them to suppose that there is something greater about man than his ability to add and subtract. It submits that that something is the soul. Plain men understood the witness easily. It speaks directly to their condition. For it is peculiarly the Christian witness. They still hear it, whenever it truly reaches their ears, the ring of those glad tidings that once stirred mankind with an immense hope. For it frees them from the trap of irreversible Fate at the point at which it whispers to them that each soul is individually responsible to God, that it has only to assert that responsibility, and out of man’s weakness will come strength, out of his corruption incorruption, out of his evil good, and out of what is false invulnerable truth.

It's about time people began piling on the arrogantly naive goo-goo prissy academic Woodrow Wilson. See George Will today:

Wilson was the first president to criticize the Founding Fathers. He faulted them for designing a government too susceptible to factions that impede disinterested experts from getting on with government undistracted.

Undistracted by the people, that is. Like the EU. Also, from Jonah at NRO - quoted there:

Wilson, once a professor of political science, said that the Princeton he led as its president was dedicated to unbiased expertise, and he thought government could be "reduced to science." Progressives are forever longing to replace the governance of people by the administration of things. Because they are entirely public-spirited, progressives volunteer to be the administrators, and to be as disinterested as the dickens.

God save us Americans from such disinterested expert mandarins. We are the mandarins, and they are our servants! Makes me wonder who came up with the wacky notion of political "science"?

Here's some real Political Science:

A snippet from 1965, Remember Me When the Candlelights are Gleaming (with Joanie), a wonderful Ernest Tubb tune. You can see that Albert Grossman just loves what he has found in Bob. 

How many songs does Dylan know? 

We recently posted a link to a homey discussion about how God speaks to us. But here's Gagdad Bob:

God's speech (happily) shatters all human containers for the same reason that a three dimensional sphere shatters a piece of paper.