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.
JFK drove the nail in the coffin of mens' hats. Trouble is, hats are a good way to stay warm in winter. They say that, if your head and feet are warm, you're warm.
Unless you are bald or wear a crew-cut, hats give you hat hair and you look like a dork when you take it off.
It's a dilemma: comfort vs. vanity.
Do you guys wear hats when it's cold? If so, what hat?
I have a few interesting days in NYC this week. I am happy to report that, thus far, the new commie mayor has had no negative impact on this liveliest and most bustling of places. It's a jolt of vitality every time. I felt the same way as a kid.
Maldacena’s model provides more support than ever for the claim that, when it comes to cosmic ingredients, entanglement is more fundamental than space and time. Time, it turns out, is not present at the most basic layer of reality; it springs from fundamental seeds. But while emerging physics suggests time is an illusion, the forces that conjure it remain at large. “My intuition is that it will take more than just a re-working of quantum physics, it will require a breakthrough that will come totally out of left field,” Seiberg says. “Only time will tell what that revolution will be.”
This was my high chair when I was a kid, used for all of my younger sibs too. My parents had gotten it from their grandparents and kept on using it, and I have no idea how old it is. It has survived many generations of use.
Maybe somebody like Sipp can date it.
It's one of the many items I retrieved from my parents' house. One cool thing about it is that you can climb up it to get into it.
Could this be manufactured today as child furniture? I doubt it. Too dangerous, vulnerable to lawsuits, etc. However, this fine thing will have a long future unless the Feds arrive to charge me with child endangerment.
If a dopey kid falls out of this chair and cracks its head open, it's just Darwinian, isn't it?
Nobody will save your stainless steel and plastic high chairs for posterity, but I think this one has a long future somewhere in the Bird Dog family.
It's funny, but also sad. We forget how relatively poor people were in America during and after the war. People tried to stretch things, and tried to make inexpensive food appealing. Nobody was eating steak or roast chicken for supper the way middle class people do now.
Truman campaigned on a chicken in every pot. Now you can get a delicious fat rotisserie chicken at Costco for $4.99 and $3.99 when it's on special.
Where Life Has Meaning: Poor, Religious Countries - Research indicates that lack of religion is a key reason why
people in wealthy countries don't feel a sense of purpose.
McPhee is near the top of my favorite non-fiction author list, so it's a treat to see him explain how he does it. One quote:
Showing in class the structural diagrams of “Travels in Georgia,” I used to recite, more or less, “It’s the story of a journey, and hence it represents a form of chronological structure, following that journey as it was made through space and time. There are structural alternatives, but for the story of a journey they can be unpromising and confusing when compared with a structure that is chronologically controlled.” Et cetera. Et cetera, in an annual mantra about what I thought to be axiomatic: journeys demand chronological structures. That was before 2002, when I went from a truck stop in Georgia to a product delivery elsewhere in Georgia to an interior wash in South Carolina to a hazmat manufacturer in North Carolina and on across the country to the state of Washington in a sixty-five-foot chemical tanker owned and driven by a guy named Don Ainsworth.
Think about it. Think how it appeared to the writer when it was still a mass of notes. The story goes from the East Coast to the West Coast of the United States. Has any other writer ever done that? Has any other writer ever not done that? Even I had done something like it in discussing North American geology in “Annals of the Former World.” You don’t need to remember much past Meriwether Lewis, George R. Stewart, John Steinbeck, Bernard DeVoto, Wallace Stegner, and William Least Heat-Moon in order to discern a beaten path. If you are starting a westbound piece in, say, Savannah, can you get past Biloxi without caffeinating the prose? If Baltimore—who is going to care if you get through Cumberland Gap? New York? The Hackensack River. If you start in Boston, turn around. In a structural sense, I turned around—once again reversing a prejudice. In telling this story, the chronology of the trip would not only be awkward but would also be a liability.
Ainsworth and I started in Bankhead, Georgia, where I joined him, and, as it happened, met him, after five years of correspondence. He had read my “Looking for a Ship,” and had written to me saying that if I was going to go out on the ocean with people like that I should go out on the road with people like him...
3:13 Then Jesus came from Galilee to John at the Jordan, to be baptized by him.
3:14 John would have prevented him, saying, "I need to be baptized by you, and do you come to me?"
3:15 But Jesus answered him, "Let it be so now; for it is proper for us in this way to fulfill all righteousness." Then he consented.
3:16 And when Jesus had been baptized, just as he came up from the water, suddenly the heavens were opened to him and he saw the Spirit of God descending like a dove and alighting on him.
3:17 And a voice from heaven said, "This is my Son, the Beloved, with whom I am well pleased."
Out walking in the frozen swamp one grey day I paused and said, "I will turn back from here. No, I will go on farther--and we shall see." The hard snow held me, save where now and then One foot went down. The view was all in straight up and down of tall slim trees Too much alike to mark or name a place by So as to say for certain I was here Or somewhere else: I was just far from home. A small bird flew before me. He was careful To put a tree between us when he lighted, And say no word to tell me who he was Who was so foolish as to think what he thought. He thought that I was after him for a feather-- The white one in his tail; like one who takes Everything said as personal to himself. One flight out sideways would have undeceived him. And then there was a pile of wood for which I forgot him and let his little fear Carry him off the way I might have gone, Without so much as wishing him good-night. He went behind it to make his last stand. It was a cord of maple, cut and split And piled--and measured, four by four by eight. And not another like it could I see. No runner tracks in this year's snow looped near it. And it was older sure than this year's cutting, Or even last year's or the year's before. The wood was grey and the bark warping off it And the pile somewhat sunken. Clematis Had wound strings round and round it like a bundle. What held it though on one side was a tree Still growing, and on one a stake and prop, These latter about to fall. I thought that only Someone who lived in turning to fresh tasks Could so forget his handiwork on which He spent himself, the labour of his axe, And leave it there far from a useful fireplace To warm the frozen swamp as best it could With the slow smokeless burning of decay.
Prosecco, beloved by Pliny, seems to be all the rage these days. I picked up a few bottles for Saturday evening's festivities to celebrate several family birthdays - plus a great new job in the family - and a bon voyage to my in-laws who spend several months each winter season in Mexico - Cabo - with all of their lively and enjoyable retired pals from all over America and Canada.
Do they play Mexican Train Dominoes? You bet they do. Good game. They like to go fishing too, and to take walks around Mexico. It's colorful. Fine seafood. The magnificent Pacific Ocean and the Gulf of California. Cabo is their winter home-away-from-home. Much more interesting than Florida.
Good Prosecco is cheaper than the tastiest champagnes. I'll be interested in what people think, but they will all enjoy anything because it's not about the food and drink - it's about the company and the family spirit. As usual, Martinelli's for the teetotalers.
Mrs. BD will cook a crown roast of pork with apple stuffing, with applesauce, mashed Yukon Gold taters with a little garlic in them, broccoli rabe with oil and garlic, and cake with vanilla ice cream, but I am doing work-related things tomorrow so I can't do much more than buy the wine and stuff.
When I first heard that the newest mayor of New York’s first action in office was to denude the city of horse-drawn carriages, I thought it was probably a joke. I figured some card over at Fox News or The Wall Street Journal had taken an obscure quote out of context in order to start His Honor out on the wrong hoof.
I do not own a coal mine. I am a professor of literature at an American college. We professors, like the mine owners, do not do hard manual labor for a living. Unlike those mine owners, if I may speak generally, we spend none of our time around such men. We do not break bread with them, we do not live near them, we do not worship at the same church, our children do not see one another on the streets. We are almost entirely insulated from the exigencies of bodily life. We do not grow our own fruit and vegetables, we do not build our own homes, we do not raise our own livestock, we do not dig our own wells, we do not repair our own vehicles, we do not clear our own fields, we do not pave our own driveways and roads, we do not lay the bricks for our own schools, we do not fight our own fights.
"I argue that autonomy, or the freedom to act in accordance with your own decisions, is overrated—that the common high evaluation of the importance of autonomy is based on a belief that we are much more rational than we actually are. We now have lots of evidence from psychology and behavioral economics that we are often very bad at choosing effective means to our ends. In such cases, we need the help of others—and in particular, of government regulation—to keep us from going wrong."
Two Legends Together! In the spring of 1963 Studs Terkel introduced Chicago radio listeners to an up-and-coming musician, not yet 22 years old, "a young folk poet who you might say looks like Huckleberry Finn, if he lived in the 20th century. His name is Bob Dylan."
Dylan had just finished recording the songs for his second album, "The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan", when he traveled from New York to Chicago to play a gig at a little place partly owned by his manager, Albert Grossman, called "The Bear Club". The next day he went to the WFMT studios for the hour-long appearance on "The Studs Terkel Program". Things were moving fast in Dylan's life at that time.He was just emerging as a major songwriter. His debut album from the year before, Bob Dylan, was made up mostly of other people's songs. The Freewheelin' Bob Dylan, which was finished but hadn't yet been released, contained almost all original material, including several songs that would become classics, like "Blowin' in the Wind," "Don't Think Twice, It's All Right" and "A Hard Rain's a Gonna Fall.
Within a few months Dylan would make his debut at the Newport Folk Festival and perform at the historic March on Washington. But when Dylan visited WFMT, it's likely that many of Terkel's listeners had never heard of him. In the recorded broadcast he plays the following songs:
1) Farewell 2) A Hard Rain's a-Gonna Fall 3) Bob Dylan's Dream 4) Boots of Spanish Leather 5) John Brown 6) Blowin' In The Wind
It's an intriguing interview.This was at age 20 or 21:
Executive
Order: 'Excessively High Temperatures' 'Already' Harming Public Health -
See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/craig-bannister/executive-order-excessively-high-temperatures-already-harming-public#sthash.84xDBkIP.dpuf
Executive
Order: 'Excessively High Temperatures' 'Already' Harming Public Health -
See more at:
http://cnsnews.com/mrctv-blog/craig-bannister/executive-order-excessively-high-temperatures-already-harming-public#sthash.84xDBkIP.dpuf
This is just one small example of why these intertunnels, as Sipp terms them, are so cool.
I posted a pic of a nice oil lamp I picked up at a junk shop in Ohio. An alert reader promptly identified it as a Rayo lamp made by Bradley and Hubbard in Meriden, CT., around or before the turn of the century.
When I was a kid we had a barrel of kerosene with a spigot on a stand in the garage. Kerosene was useful for all sorts of things, including burning the garbage and for taking paint off your hands. Also, to make torches to burn the tent caterpillar things out of the fruit trees. Funny, haven't seen many of those lately. Kerosene has a good garage smell.
Then I learned this at Ebay:
Bradley & Hubbard was one of the inspirational leaders of the Roycroft movement in New York, well known for their arts and crafts industry. Walter Hubbard and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Lyman Bradley, started making cast iron clocks,tables,frames,andirons,chandlers and lamps. The company became Bradley and Hubbard manufacturing co in 1875. They turned out some of the most outstanding leaded glass lamps you'll find.
So they manufactured all sorts of lamps back when CT was a manufacturing center. There are all sorts of old Bradley and Hubbard lamps for sale online.
2014 opens on a dramatic scene. Barack Obama appears to have lost his shirt in the casino of history. Every bet he confidently made in last five years has turned out to be a dud, and the other players are waiting on the turnover of his chips. The beads of sweat stand out on his face as he regards the smug countenances of the saturnine Russians, the poker-faced Persians, and the wheedling Afghans.
The Rough-Legged Hawk breeds in the far north, like the Snowy Owl, but during winter can be found throughout the US, especially in open spaces.
He is a very large hawk with black thumbprints on his wrists - unmistakable in flight. And like most hawks and owls, he is hunting mostly small furry things and vulnerable birds. Like the Snowy Owl, I've seen them in Montauk in the winter.
Also, happily perusing a recent birding book - National Geographic's The Complete Birds of North America. It is complete, with a good section on gulls, which I use as a judge of a bird book. It's a companion to NG's Field Guide, and has plenty of information, including habitat, population trends, migratory details, and where populations are expanding and contracting. Good on trends in "accidental" sightings, too. For example, the book notes the increased sightings of Swallow-Tailed Kite in New England - and makes note of its historic populations in the northern USA.
JFK drove the nail in the coffin of mens' hats. Trouble is, hats are a good way to stay warm in winter. They say that, if your head and feet are warm, you're warm.
My wife and I are atheists, but 
Breathtaking Pool 
This was my high chair when I was a kid, used for all of my younger sibs too. My parents had gotten it from their grandparents and kept on using it, and I have no idea how old it is. It has survived many generations of use.
A Reddit Gun Lover Has A Hilarious Present For Anti-Gun Mother Jones
Prosecco
Roquefort
Re-posted
Feds Sue Buckyballs Founder, Still Ignore Colorado Marijuana
breeds in the far north, like the Snowy Owl, but during winter can be found throughout the US, especially in open spaces.