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.
We drove down from the Dolomiti and the Alps to Verona, which is immediately south of the foothills. Straight shot on the Autostrada (#22). Nice little Renaissance town. We stayed in the Old City (an old Roman city on the bend of the Aldige River) instead of venturing out into the modern city (pop. 275,000). Tourists hang around the old city, but plenty of Italians come into the old city for fun and shopping.
Verona is a charming old town, walkably-manageable in size although we did get a little lost walking out to see St. Zeno. Getting lost is not a bad thing because you see things. It is a bitch to drive into, though, once you get off the highway. Cops keep yelling at you for going the wrong way. Gotta laugh.
The Passagiata in Verona is wonderful, between 5 and 8 pm. It's a town of lovely women of all ages, and the Italian men look great with their fitted shirts and tailoring. We tourist men, not so great. All the kids in strollers and backpacks look good, and the women look feminine. Lots of real blondes in northern Italia.
In my view, all women and all men ought to try to look their best, in public at least. Being over 40 or 50 doesn't mean that you are dead. I just have no talent for style. I shoulda brought my red trousers with me.
Dinner is around 8-8:30, and afterwards the young and/or single people, looking good, fill the narrow streets and piazzas - I call them pizzas - and bars with laughter and flirtation. A jolly scene. Women hold hands, men kiss. Everybody drinks and smokes.
La dolce vita.
Lots more pics below the fold - Mrs. BD thought our lady readers might enjoy the clothing shops -
I go every 3 yrs when my doc gets pissed at me for not coming in. I hate it. I do like him, though and I understand that he needs some money to keep me on his roster.
Today’s Orange County: Not Right Wing—and Kinda Hip - Immigrants
have dramatically altered the California county that was a birthplace
of conservatism. But two things haven’t changed: perfect weather, and
the beach.
An October surprise timed to maximally hurt the Republican candidate is no surprise at all. It is so predictable that the term “October surprise” has become commonplace.
It is no news, either, that the MSM tries to elect the Democrat. No news at all.
The Clintons are attracted to corruption the way that flies are drawn to offal. The media can spot no flies on Hillary. Its fact checkers excuse every scandal. They even invent a positive spin for a fly landing on her. The ordinary fly visiting Hillary may hold no special meaning. But flies are notoriously attracted to rotting things. And no political figures in this country are as rotten to the core as the Clintons.
Women used to be praised as a civilizing influence on men, bringing the responsibilities of love and loyalty to marriage and children. Hillary has spent her adult life enabling the most irresponsible men on the block, thereby setting an example for a whole generation of Millennials, who have now created a pickup scene that is surprisingly depressing. Millennials seem to get that they could stay home to watch fantasy porn on the web instead of being with real human beings. Fantasies are more hygienic, and they never disappoint. "Can I pick you up?" is inevitably followed by "Where will I drop you off?"
If you were to add up the number of killings by people in pursuit of what they think are moral aims, whether it’s personal vengeance, implementing justice, or hastening a utopia or messianic age, the body count would surely be higher than the victims of amoral predation and exploitation.
That’s why pure moralism does more harm than good, and why a legitimate moral concern with human welfare must work together with a scientific drive to understand the causes of wrongdoing. If, as moralists, our responsibility is to reduce suffering and enhance flourishing, then the most powerful way to do that is through analytic engagement: moral philosophy, reasoned jurisprudence, legal scholarship, and the sciences of human nature. When we can say what makes us tick, we can rearrange our environments in ways that inhibit aggression and enhance empathy, compassion and reason.
Busted pipe, flooded basement last May. We have three 1/2 rooms down there: a bedroom with good windows and bath, a pantry, and two storage rooms (one for tools and hunting and boating stuff, and one for general saved stuff). Mostly finished rooms. Allstate sent their teams over for a couple of months and it's all better than it was before. We never had to lift a finger. Now we have a water-warning system. Thanks, Allstate.
The new pantry (minus the old second fridge which had to be cut up to get out of there. Can't live without a Sawzall.):
"Government is not reason, it is not eloquence, it is force; like fire, a troublesome servant and a fearful master. Never for a moment should it be left to irresponsible action."
A lot is packed into this seemingly simple blues song. 1964. I can tell you what it's about, but not now. You can start with the image of a mail train if you know what they looked like. When Bob was young, they were around in Duluth if not in Hibbing.
Never look for good character in politicians. They indeed are our inferiors in most cases. The Citizen is King. Mrs. BD makes a distinction between 2 sorts of Presidential Sins. A Venial Presidential Sin is hitting too hard on females. Mortal Presidential Sins are lying to investigators, secret emails, uranium to Russia, creating instability in the world, etc.
The old Hospital of St. Katherine Brewery, with a delightful beergarden on the bank of the Danube in pleasant Regensburg. Like many beer joints in Bavaria, they make their brews on premises and throw out the unused after one week.
Regensburg, interestingly, marked the northermost outpost of the Roman Empire. Augustus visited there, and I hope he had some brew.
You stroll over the c. 1100 stone bridge to get to the Spital brewery and beer garden. The lad and I went over the bridge a couple of years ago and hoisted a couple of their fresh brews. I never should have had their Bock, delicious as it was. The steins are large, of course.
We recommend that town for classic German food and drink, many medieval remnants, and some old Roman walls and stuff. Not a touristy town like Salzburg, just a fine small Bavarian city where you can walk everywhere.
Why this post? Cuz I was drinking my protein shake out of a Spital stein I picked up there. Yes, I paid a euro or two for it, as a souvenir. It says SPITAL...Regensburg...Seit 1225. That's an old brewery.
The Standard Poodle was bred in Germany in the 1600s as the Pudelhund for duck and upland hunting. They are retrievers, and some lines (such as mine) are pointers also.
Later, the French adopted them and turned them into status symbols with crazy haircuts. They bred them for style and ignored the hunt aspect. Several poodle breeders have been breeding the hunting and retrieving talent back into poodle lines. Our breeder does that.
In 1942, the Poodle was one of 32 breeds officially classified as war dogs by the Army.
Poodles are smarter than humans.
Poodles have hair, not fur (which is why they are hypoallergenic and why they need haircuts). They love to swim, but do not enjoy being cold and wet at the same time. No insulation.
Pic is a Red (aka Apricot) Standard Poodle with a "Pet Cut," aka "Puppy Cut." That's the haircut I like in a poodle. With that cut, they are the cuddliest pups in the world. We give ours a full-body crew cut for summertime.
Phizzicle phitness consists of strength, endurance, and athleticism (plus body composition). A balanced fitness program will address all aspects.
Ordinary guys often tend to emphasize the strength component because it seems more rewarding, but if you have bulging biceps to impress the girls at the beach but can not sprint a mile or a half-mile, what good are you? Fact is, biceps are not very important in functional fitness. Triceps? More useful.
Ordinary gals tend to emphasize the cardio aspect but that is just as unbalanced. That's why we always say Weights + Cardio + Calisthenics (with sports counting as calisthenics unless it is TV football).
Today, more fun info re strength-building (for men and women).
- You can gain strength without dramatic growth in visible muscle size.
- An adult body can not grow new skeletal muscle cells. However, muscle cells can develop new and larger muscle fibers within the cells you were born with.
-Usable strength can only be increased by pushing, pulling, and carrying progressively heavy resistances (eg weights). Cardio and calisthenics do not generally build strength. Running one mile vs. 10 miles is not strength - it's endurance. Distance runners are often not very strong or powerful.
- Steroids work remarkably well to increase strength and size. Do not use them - go natural.
- After an initial phase of neuromuscular adaptation, strength improvement is discouragingly slow. Few good things come easily.
- Strength, endurance, and athleticism are rapidly lost without use. The older you are, the faster they disappear. Fitness is like money: Hard to get, easy to lose.
- Serious strength-building programs require a diet high in protein and fats, plus adequate carbs unless overweight. A good dose of protein immediately after a painful work-out is recommended.
- Strength building is a mind-body challenge. Very difficult and unpleasant unless you love pain and extreme effort. Most people prefer comfort - just look around at people. It's more fun with a trainer or a group so there is a relational aspect to it.
For strength-building for men and women, we recommend working one's way up over months or years to being able to condense a program down to multi-muscle exercises like bench press, deadlift, barbell squat, pull-up, rows, military press/inclined bench press. Together, those will stress pretty much every functional muscle group. That is my goal - a simple, basic, efficient strength regimen.
Google Analytics tells us that Maggie's Farm gets around 330,000 page views per month, and has around 45,000 regular readers (comparable to subscribers, with the others more like newsstand buyers). About 25% of our visitors are new visitors, which I think is good. Some will return. We do not count "hits" on the site anymore. Last I saw, hits ran into the millions, but I do not think that meant much.
The metrics are pretty solid for a boutique, middlebrow, eclectic, redneck, hobby website. For many reasons (including not being clever enough, and not having enough original material), we'll never be able to compete with the big dogs. It has to be good enough for us that some of the big dogs check in with us regularly.
By space, we have around 25-30% political material but since everything is politicized these days including Zumba workouts and reading Shakespeare, maybe it all is. Regardless, I wish we had more Lefty David Brooks types checking us out if only to see what the great unwashed might be thinking about. Actually, though, I am well-washed today and well-dressed too, having taken a long extremely hot shower after my deadlifts and pull-ups this morning.
I also wish we had more international readers. We have a share, but I thought we'd have more who are interested in some views of Yankee life.
Anyway, send our site around to people who might be interested. Our readership is our only reward.
Far more power than you need to find the keys you dropped in the dark. Designed for hunters, these are also good for spotting owls. You can temporarily blind a bad guy with it, too.
The period before the first presidential debate when Trump pulled close to a tie with Clinton feels like an eon ago. He had come back with a month of relative discipline beginning in mid-August that now looks like a parenthesis in an otherwise recklessly selfish campaign.
That Trump would become a poisonous wedge issue within the GOP was always a plausible worst-case scenario. Now, it is upon us.
Why did his decade-old locker-room talk matter? A cruder and raunchier America of Miley Cyrus and Beyoncé is now far more sexually sensitive than was the staid America of half a century ago — as if the dirtier we become, the more sanctimonious we end up. Past presidents, such as John F. Kennedy and Bill Clinton, trumped even Trump in unleashing their reckless libidos on quite young White House staffers, an array of mistresses, and random women. But they were then young, liberal, loved by the media, and skilled incumbent politicians holding the power of the country at key moments in history.
Watching one traitorous fink after another decry Trump’s locker room talk from a decade ago, I was reminded once again that these people were never on my side. It was always a con, a grift, to fool otherwise decent people into putting down their weapons and surrendering to the Left. Buckley-style conservatism, whatever it was, is now just a tool of the managerial class to clear the field for nation-wrecking policies to benefit the ruling elite at the expense of the middle class.
Last night, I was reminded of why Trump was able to obliterate the GOP field despite being out spent a million-to-one. He is not a pussy. Any other Republican faced with the dirty trick pulled on Friday would have gone into the debate prepared to grovel and plead, begging for a second chance. It is not all all inconceivable that he would have offered to step aside. Trump went into the debate prepared to deliver a counter bunch designed to knock the old fat cow on her ass.
(Note to our non-American readers: today we celebrate Columbus Day in the USA. Had he sailed in the service of his homeland, the Republic of Genoa, the language of much of the New World would be Italian instead of Spanish. An interesting detail is that he never acknowledged that he had found a new continent.)
If Columbus had not carried some shoots of sugar cane from the Canary Islands to the West Indies on his second voyage, somebody else would have, eventually.
(Sugar cane, a grass, is native to some Pacific Islands, but it spread to India and then around the warm parts of the world. Sugar is good.)
The West Indies proved to be a good place to grow sugarcane. Once the natives were wiped out in hard labor on the Spanish and French cane plantations, importing slaves from Africa was economically sensible if morally indefensible. Thus began the slave trade to the New World and, eventually, the cane/molasses/rum/slave circuit.
We visited Columbus' nice house on Grand Canaria in Las Palmas last fall. By sailing ship, of all things. It is still a nice big handsome house.
Cane is still grown to some extent on the Canaries, and they are proud of their rum, Arehucas.
“I’m at the breaking point,” said Gretchen Gardner, an Austin artist who bought a 1930s bungalow in the Bouldin neighborhood just south of downtown in 1991 and has watched her property tax bill soar to $8,500 this year
“It’s not because I don’t like paying taxes,” said Gardner, who attended both meetings. “I have voted for every park, every library, all the school improvements, for light rail, for anything that will make this city better. But now I can’t afford to live here anymore. I’ll protest my appraisal notice, but that’s not enough. Someone needs to step in and address the big picture.”
As it stand now you’ve already shocked the world. Any additional garrulous speeches on women as sexual objects for men’s gratification is just more of the same at this point.
NARRATOR: Trump said Scandalous, Sexist, Repulsive Thing Number 1! AUDIENCE: Oh My God! That’s terrible! How could he have been nominated! NARRATOR: Trump said Scandalous, Sexist, Repulsive Thing Number 2! AUDIENCE: Oh dear! That’s pretty bad too. NARRATOR: Trump said Scandalous, Sexist, Repulsive Thing Number 3! AUDIENCE: Yes. We know. We get it. Wasn’t there something on The Weather Channel about a hurricane?
When the great Tao is forgotten, goodness and piety appear.
From the Tao Te Ching (as quoted in the Introduction to Stephen Mitchell's The Book of Job. Buy the book if only for his Introduction, then stay for his translation of Job. I've been through it twice.)
Image via 
Harvard’s New Diversity Veto:
There are 
A few poodle facts:
Phizzicle phitness consists of strength, endurance, and athleticism (plus body composition). A balanced fitness program will address all aspects. 
The next ‘oppression’ threat: Zumba classes
Bill McKibben is off the rails: 
Drone