Maggie's Farm

"Tolling for the aching ones whose wounds cannot be nursed
For the countless confused, accused, misused, strung-out ones an' worse
An' for every hung-up person in the whole wide universe
An' we gazed upon the chimes of freedom flashing."

Chimes of Freedom, 1964. Lyrics here.

Big Tea Party in Bridgeport, CT tomorrow afternoon. Why not stop by if you can? Might be fun.

Ann Coulter will be there to help beautify old Bridgeport.

Photo is Bridgeport's Seaside Park.

My friend the piano-man Jimmy Maddox played and sang this song for us last week - with heart, along with a few other tunes we requested (No Dylan requests, tho. He is more of a Hoagie Carmichael guy.) He's a darn good fellow, fun to talk to, seemingly full of good cheer and with keyboard talent to burn. Nice girlfriend too, who flew back with us to NYC.

Every guy has a pirate inside of them - plus his share of regrets, sorrows, and demons. The trick is to keep on keepin' on, and to try to stay on the sunny side of the street. With God's help.

Most of Roman Carthage (which was the third largest Roman metropolis in the 200-400 era, after Rome and Alexandria - the population was around 300,000) is buried beneath the modern town of Carthage, but some that is accessible has been excavated.

After the Third Punic War in 146 BC, very little remained of the old Phoenician Carthage - except things like these boxes. The Phoenicians worshipped Baal, who required that everybody's first-born be sacrificed. The ashes of these kids were buried in these sad little stone boxes.

More of my photos of cool Roman Carthage ruins below -

Mrs. BD thought our readers might enjoy this brief bit from Jose Limon:

From our veranda, near the ship's bridge:

Just two more photos of Naples below - 

Less than an hour outside Tunis is Sidi Bou Said, the blue and white waterfront town made famous by artists and writers. By remarkable coincidence, our Dylanologist had just been reading a piece on organic urban development in Sidi Bou Said: Decoding Sidi Bou Said at Emergent Urbanism.

It's the city of the Jasmine flower. I only took a few snaps, but there are more here. I was too busy bargaining with the Tunisians. In North Africa, nothing has an assigned price. It's all negotiation, and in the souks of Tunis it can get a bit overly-aggressive - almost physical. No, it does get a bit physical at times when they grab your arm to pull you into their shop, or try to block your escape. I did accuse Mrs. BD of possessing Berber blood because she is so good at the game, but I did need to assert a masculine presence one time when the guy didn't want to give her her change for her twenty.

The temperature was 110 F. I sweated until my body ran out of sweat.

Women were advised to wear modest clothing when visiting Tunisia, but the sexy outfits of these local young local women surprised me. However, about half of the women there wore scarves or burkhas.

Some snaps of a glove shop in Rome. Mrs. BD thought our readers of the feminine persuasion might like these top-notch gloves, soft as a baby's bottom. It's Sermoneta Gloves.

Cool colors, I must admit.

 More glove photos below -

I like sitting in European cafes, sipping a cafe or a beer, maybe having a smoke, and watching the world go by. I also like running around trying to see everything noteworthy, but as I get older I appreciate just soaking up the atmosphere and the feel of a place.

I have seen, and prayed in, more medieval cathedrals than my brain can ever absorb, and I do not do shopping.

The isle of Capri (in Italian, accent on the first syllable) helps form the Bay of Naples. It is all steep granite mountains and crags rising out of the sea. The beaches are rocks. You get there from Napoli via high-speed hydrofoil ferries.

Roman emperors (Tiberius, Augustus) had get-away villas there, but the Brits re-popularized it as a fashionable summer spot in the 1800s. We found it to be full of Brits and Italians (the Italian women dressed to the nines, of course and the American women dressed for a visit to WalMart) on holiday.

From our ferry, here's another Capri ferry passing in front of Vesuvius and Naples suburbs in the background. (We opted out of Herculaneum or Pompeii - been there, done that.)

Besides Capri pants and their ceramics, the island is famous for their hand-made women's sandals. Thus Mrs. BD spent a few hours sandal-shopping. Here's the workbench at a sandal shop, when the guy stepped away for a minute. His sandals cost around 160 Euros. He will make one for your feet, with your choice of design and decoration, in about an hour. I guess he makes close to $200/hour or more with his talent, skill, and fashion sense.

More Capri snaps and comments below -

Thanks to all Farmers for pitching in so energetically over the past couple of weeks to keep Maggie's fresh, entertaining, and informative.

Our frenetic writers can throttle back this week because everybody will be back on board.

I, for one, will begin a little series of snaps of my travels. The plan is to not make it dull. I know that other peoples' travel snaps can be. I aim for informative.

For some doggone reason, regardless of the camera used, my photo skills seem to have achieved a new low in quality while the places I have visited have been remarkable. So be it.

Photo is your Editor, perusing a hefty wine list last week. (As is too evident, I do not use fake bow ties when dressed properly for dinner.)

I loved The Avengers.

This episode is a classic, linked via SDA.

 Here they are. (h/t, Smart Christian) Examples:

Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration.

Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general.

Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

Resolved, Never to lose one moment of time, but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.

Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.

Resolved, To be endeavoring to find out fit objects of charity and liberality.

Resolved, To maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking.

Do we find Edwards' life fascinating? Yes, as we have noted previously. We view him as the link between the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers.

Besides writing and thinking and preaching and raising ten kids, Edwards loved to take a boat down from MA to NYC for  lobsters, oysters, and good conversation with the Presbyterians. Probably also to get a break from all of the kids. 

Except for a brief stint in a Presbyterian church in NYC after graduating from college, Edwards spent most of his life in western MA, which in the 1730s and 40s was frontier. He was fired as Pastor of Northampton (actually, voted out by the town government, which hired and paid the pastors in those days) because they felt he was overly harsh about morality. So he moved west to become the pastor of the Indian mission town of Stockbridge.

He ended his career with a brief Presidency of The College of New Jersey (now Princeton), where he died after a smallpox inoculation at age 54. A Yale grad who had excelled in the sciences, Edwards followed fellow Yale grad Aaron Burr Sr, of Fairfield, CT, in that job.

J. S. Bach

A re-post from 2007 -

Paul Davis, author of Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life, has an opinion piece in the NYT: Taking Science on Faith. It begins:

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

Read the whole thing. Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex in a piece titled The Faith of Scientists expands on the topic, referring to the ideas of philosopher V.W.O. Quine. A quote:

When Quine came up with his holistic version of knowledge, he also demonstrated that our most necessary scientific principles are actually the least provable. For example, most scientists, when asked what constitutes the starting principles of reality, will probably say something about one of nature's fundamental laws, like gravity or the theory of natural selection. But these are precisely the same things that we will never see directly. (As Gertrude Stein once wrote, "The laws of science are paper laws, they make believe that they do something.")

Read this whole thing too. The notion that the laws of nature have no existence seems obvious, but it turned on a lightbulb for me. The point, as I see it, is not to discredit the scientific method or scientific theorizing, or to glibly equate science with religion: the point is that we must have humility about the depth of our knowledge.

Photo: Starburst Galaxy NCG 3310 "blazing with star formation", from the Hubble site.

A re-post from our archives -

The Bird Dog family enjoys providing coffee hour at church. It's a gratifying ministry because it promotes fellowship. The more goodies you provide, the more fellowship you nurture, and the longer folks stick around and get to know eachother.

If a church is a manifestation of the living body of Christ, you can't have loose body parts all over the place: a congregation needs to congregate, in small groups and in large. Other churches in the area have copied our tradition of providing more than coffee and a pitiful bowl of goldfish crackers. We do brunch, essentially. Here is what we brought today:

Bagels and cream cheese; red and white grapes; plain pound cake, sesame pound cake, walnut pound cake; Vermont cheddar, brie, and Roquefort cheese and crackers; blanched carrots, broccoli, sugar snap peas and string beans with blue cheese dip; strawberries with sugar to dip them into (no matter how many you bring, they will disappear fast - the kids go for them like piranhas); cheese "Danish" pastries, tortilla chips with that excellent Costco salsa and Costco guacamole; corn muffins, chocolate chip muffins and blueberry muffins; croissants. Coffee, cider, and orange juice. I forgot to bring the sliced red peppers for the vegetable dip, and forgot the strawberry jam for the corn muffins.

I was surprised by how the blue cheese disappeared first today, and I brought a huge hunk. We don't bring doughnuts anymore because the little kids stuff themselves with them and the fussy parents don't seem thrilled with that. Next time, I think we'll bring a spiral-cut ham with honey mustard, and slice up a mountain of baguettes. This would be good with a ton of sliced melons. (Too bad we don't do wine and beer too - people would never go home.)

Information designer Tom Wujec on how the brain makes connections, in 6 quick minutes:

h/t, Wilkinson

It's a heck of a line-up, but, still, Bob does it best alone. For you youngsters, this song was Bob's Goodbye to "causes," and his Hello to the heart and soul. McGuinn's guitar dominates.

When I was coming up, "Ask Andy" was the first thing I read in the afternoon papers after school, even before the funny pages.

Along with my Dad's interests, Andy was the one who got me interested in science. He even used one of my questions once. I think it was about animal camouflage, but I cannot swear to that. I eventually went on to love chemistry and biochem and geology and every miraculous thing in Creation - as a dilettante, of course.

I was delighted to find this piece on Ask Andy. Good memories from an innocent time.

Do any of our readers remember him?

Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.

Anon. h/t, Old Misery Guts, whose site quote is:

"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another's trouble,
COURAGE in your own."

- Adam Lindsay Gordon

This 1947 22' wood Chris Craft Sportsman is for sale here.