Wednesday, June 24. 2009
 From Smithsonian:
The first wheels were not used for transportation.
Evidence indicates they were created to serve as potter’s wheels around 3500 B.C. in Mesopotamia—300 years before someone figured out to use them for chariots.
The ancient Greeks invented Western philosophy…and the wheelbarrow.
Researchers believe that the wheelbarrow first appeared in classical Greece, sometime between the sixth and fourth centuries B.C., then sprung up in China four centuries later and ended up in medieval Europe, perhaps by way of Byzantium or the Islamic world. Although wheelbarrows were expensive to purchase, they could pay for themselves in just 3 or 4 days in terms of labor savings.
I spent my young youth on Cape Cod, while my Dad was stationed at Camp Edwards. (1st. Lieut., US Army. Drafted out of Harvard College and never went back but, along with his fellow draftees, he was granted alumnus status and afterwards went on to grad school at the great University of Chicago, then, after a stint at the also great University of Rochester, to Yale to teach in a scientific field.)
Readers know that the salty air, the fog and the foghorns, the frigid water, the mud flats, and the clam broth seeped deep into my soul and, despite all of the development and the ticky-tacky that happened up there in the past 30 years, it's still my soul's home base. I can put up with some ticky-tacky, if it's American.
Sipp on Cape Cod (he still lives near there). Here's one of my recent Wellfleet photos. Always buy the Toro (Bluefin Tuna fatty belly meat, and grill flaming hot 3 minutes per side). As you can see in the photo, they cannot spell their own name; that's a Striper eating a lobster (as they love to do); and Cape Cod is not for the fancy set, the Country Club set, the Hamptons set, or even the Nantucket set (or, when it is, they would never let it show: that is the Yankee rules):
Via RCP:
Fielding has issued a challenge to the Obama White House to rebut the data. It will be a novel experience for them, as Fielding is an engineer and has an Australian's disregard for self-important government officials. Here is how The Age described his challenge:
Senator Fielding emailed graphs that claim the globe had not warmed for a decade to Joseph Aldy, US President Barack Obama's special assistant on energy and the environment, after a meeting on Thursday…. Senator Fielding said he found that Dr. Aldy and other Obama administration officials were not interested in discussing the legitimacy of climate science.
Telling an Australian you're not interested in the legitimacy of your position is a red rag to a bull. So here is what Fielding concluded:
Until recently I, like most Australians, simply accepted without question the notion that global warming was a result of increased carbon emissions. However, after speaking to a cross-section of noted scientists, including Ian Plimer, a professor at the University of Adelaide and author of Heaven and Earth, I quickly began to understand that the science on this issue was by no means conclusive….
As a federal senator, I would be derelict in my duty to the Australian people if I did not even consider whether or not the scientific assumptions underpinning this debate were in fact correct.
What Fielding's questioning represents is just the tip of the kangaroo's tail. He speaks for a growing number of Australians who will no longer take green propaganda on trust.
Read the whole thing. The magnitude of the hoax is finally coming clear to the general public. It's about time.
Tuesday, June 23. 2009
From Dr. Bob's The Temperature of Hell (no, it's not about "climate change"):
In our therapeutic culture, where all is tolerated but the good, the assertion that there are consequences for our behavior, either temporal, or especially eternal, is a truly noxious notion. The idea of Hell is perceived as an anachronistic anathema, promoted cynically by clergy controlling the poor, ignorant fools who follow them. Even those with a nominal belief in a deity will attest, with a pretense more wishful than wise, that a God of love would never condemn those who reject Him to Hell. In some sense–surely not that which the proponents of such pop theology intend–this may well be true. It will be, for those who enter that dark, hopeless, and agonizing eternity, not something dictated from on high by a vengeful God gleeful at our torture. It will be our own choice, fully, to reject the mercy and grace which has been offered to us without cost by Him who gave everything to draw us toward an eternal relationship, filled with unspeakable joy and peace, with Him.
The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.
One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)
In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.
Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria:
I don't know how we missed this story. Never a bad idea to be armed in Cougar Country.
Their dog wasn't too helpful, was he?
Monday, June 22. 2009
A lunchtime tune from from Levon Helm's new record. It has some of the old Band sound. Pure, cheerful, Christian, sentimental Americana. The guy can play anything, but he loves his drums - and he thought he was a lousy singer even before his throat cancer.
Gotta love it, Sipp:
It would not be amusing if a guy did this. "It was great," one (the only honest?) fellow admitted.
When in danger or in doubt, run in circles, scream and shout.
Anon.
The Madame Hardy Rose, a Damask Rose, was bred by Alexandre Hardy in 1832.
My brother in CT emailed the photo with this note: "You gave this plant to me 15 years ago, and it's still doing well. I have never had a rose survive this long."
Sunday, June 21. 2009
From Jim Bishop's reminiscences of his father, A Father's Love Goes on Forever and Forever, one quote:
Being a father is an awesome calling and responsibility. Granted, just about anyone can father a child, but what an awesome calling and responsibility it is to be a father. At 64, I’m still learning, even though both our daughters have long flown the nest, are married and have put Anna and me squarely in the grandparenting stage of life, something we thought old people did.
A lot of who I am today and how I act, as a parent and as an individual, can be attributed to my dad’s influence.
Among those things I learned at my father’s knee: to be honest and reliable in daily dealings and to give the other person the benefit of the doubt - until he or she proves unworthy of trust; to be on time and don’t make others wait; to devote oneself fully to an honest day’s work; to make church a priority; to know how to have fun; to be there for your kids; to be an encourager; to say “please,” “thank you” and “I love you” often; to know when to say “no” and don’t jump too quickly on the bandwagon; to not wait for a funeral to give someone flowers; to set goals and persevere to meet them.
For Father's Day, I am recommending Matthew Crawford's 2006 essay about work, of the above title, in The New Atlantis. One quote:
 ...the time is ripe for reconsideration of an ideal that has fallen out of favor: manual competence, and the stance it entails toward the built, material world. Neither as workers nor as consumers are we much called upon to exercise such competence, most of us anyway, and merely to recommend its cultivation is to risk the scorn of those who take themselves to be the most hard-headed: the hard-headed economist will point out the opportunity costs of making what can be bought, and the hard-headed educator will say that it is irresponsible to educate the young for the trades, which are somehow identified as the jobs of the past. But we might pause to consider just how hard-headed these presumptions are, and whether they don’t, on the contrary, issue from a peculiar sort of idealism, one that insistently steers young people toward the most ghostly kinds of work.
I see he has expanded his thoughts into a new book. An excerpt from the book appeared in The NYT Magazine last month: The Case for Working with your Hands. A quote from that:
High-school shop-class programs were widely dismantled in the 1990s as educators prepared students to become “knowledge workers.” The imperative of the last 20 years to round up every warm body and send it to college, then to the cubicle, was tied to a vision of the future in which we somehow take leave of material reality and glide about in a pure information economy. This has not come to pass. To begin with, such work often feels more enervating than gliding. More fundamentally, now as ever, somebody has to actually do things: fix our cars, unclog our toilets, build our houses.
When we praise people who do work that is straightforwardly useful, the praise often betrays an assumption that they had no other options. We idealize them as the salt of the earth and emphasize the sacrifice for others their work may entail. Such sacrifice does indeed occur — the hazards faced by a lineman restoring power during a storm come to mind. But what if such work answers as well to a basic human need of the one who does it? I take this to be the suggestion of Marge Piercy’s poem “To Be of Use,” which concludes with the lines “the pitcher longs for water to carry/and a person for work that is real.” Beneath our gratitude for the lineman may rest envy.
Some days, definitely. Other days, more abstract work is just fine. 50/50 might be ideal for me, but a work-out in a gym is no substitute for doing something physical and real. We men need to engage mind and muscle together to feel whole.
You can see it in any little boy, and it never goes away. Chain saws, brush wackers and tractors are my skill level. It's called unskilled (at best, semi-skilled) work.
Saturday, June 20. 2009
A sucky day. Two tooth extractions last evening as prep for some implants, and then today the basement flooded (17/20 of the past days with heavy rain). It's raining as I type, too.
Six guys here all day with a dumpster and suction hoses removing everything from the basement (old tax records and other records too, totally soaked), the carpet, the tiles and linoleum underneath, the wood shelving, etc etc. How heavy is soaked carpet? Plus the wallboard took a terrible hit: it's done. Fans and dehumidifiers humming away right now. What an f-ing mess.
Glad I have homeowner's insurance. Sorry I do not have dental insurance - but I'd be uninsurable in that regard.
I tell myself that if these are my worst problems, I am probably in pretty good shape. But my jaw hurts. Don't you hate it when people complain? It makes others feel like they should say or do something to make it better, or to fix it.
Well, at least I am not in an iron lung ward. That must have really sucked. The last iron lung inhabitant died last year. My brain makes me wonder how they avoided bedsores, how they pooped, and why they didn't unplug the damn thing late at night while the nurses were dozing:
If you don't have unlimited funds and if you are not the sort of experienced traveller who likes to do everything yourself, your own way, check out our friends at Club ABC before the summer is over.
As you can imagine, times are tough in the travel biz but that means that there are still ways to go someplace interesting without breaking the bank. The prices are better than they should be.
The folks at ABC have been generous to Ducks Unlimited. Enuf said.
Ali Akbar Khan, master of the sarod, died today. He has been considered by some to have been the greatest living musician, but I have no idea how anybody could, or would want to, determine that.
Here he is pickin' a raga.
As we grow up, we realize that no Dads are "great men" in the usual sense. Just as flawed as we are. But, in my view, any Dad who sticks by his kids and keeps 'em in sneakers is a darn good one.
Neptunus discusses his Dad for Father's Day.
 A CT friend emailed these (you can readily tell in what sorts of directions his interests lie):
Danbury Railway Museum
Connecticut Antique Machinery Association
The Shore Line Trolley Museum
and, if your travels happen to take you near Coalbrookdale, England,
Ironbridge, Birthplace of Industry.
Photo: An old trolley at the Trolley Museum. I remember how the old trolley tracks could twist your bike tires when you rode over them as the tracks were gradually consumed by layers of asphalt. The bus lobby beat out whatever trolley lobbies there were and roads, unlike tracks, were built and maintained by government. A shame.
Photo below: Cylinder of a Corliss Steam Engine at the Machinery Museum
 Our engagement kid ran off with one of our cars to get to his Dartmouth reunion. That's OK, we have spare cars.
But what is it about Dartmouth that loyalty would lead to such felonious behavior?
My uncle went there, and he was a D nut too. Wa-hoo-wah!
A friend sent a photo he took of the Darien, CT train station. At 5:45 am the southbound platform would be jammed with riders to NYC:
Friday, June 19. 2009
All about grit, at In Character.
 Ruling cleric warns protesters. I know it doesn't take 51% of a population to make a revolution: it only takes a 5% highly-motivated core or, as in our American Rev, about 30% support.
But what if their election was relatively legit, with only Chicago-style fraud?
We would all be pleased to see Iran return to modern civilization, but what if the majority do not think that way? What if the majority want a combative Islamic theocracy with a dopey selected figurehead in his Members Only jacket?
What if a majority value their religion over modernity and the Western community, and the protesters are mainly the urbanites and students? Then what?
Photo: Esfehan protest this week, via Gateway who is constantly on top of this story
Related: No hope and change for Iran. Krauthammer
I thought it was just an Alaska-style lawn sculpture, but the thing moves, too. Battlefield potential no doubt. Can you picture 30 of these, heavily armed, at the Battle of the Somme? h/t Jonah at NRO
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