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.
1: The LORD is my shepherd; I shall not want. 2: He maketh me to lie down in green pastures: he leadeth me beside the still waters. 3: He restoreth my soul: he leadeth me in the paths of righteousness for his name's sake. 4: Yea, though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil: for thou art with me; thy rod and thy staff they comfort me. 5: Thou preparest a table before me in the presence of mine enemies: thou anointest my head with oil; my cup runneth over. 6: Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life: and I will dwell in the house of the LORD for ever.
It's the time of year for us to ask our readers, whether occasional or devoted followers, to introduce our website to your friends, neighbors, countrymen, colleagues, etc.
We always want more eyeballs. That's our reward for our efforts - besides our own enjoyment and self-education. We learn things from doing this, and maybe you learn something from reading us.
We may be a boutique, eclectic site and certainly not to everybody's taste, but I have even got my Massachusetts Obama-lib sis reading us, so that's something.
I recently learned from a Maggie's pal visiting China that we are blocked there. Why? Anyway, we aren't blocked anywhere else, so do us a favor and send us around. A little freedom-loving New England Yankee influence can only be a good thing for the world.
When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are listed as threatened in the Eastern US). They were more plentiful in the past, when Yankeeland was covered with pastures and hayfields.
As with the Bobolink and the Meadowlark, reforestation and suburbanization have taken their toll on these fine meadow dwellers in the northeastern US. The Upland Sandpiper also had to deal with heavy market hunting (as a substitute for the hunted-to-extinction Passenger Pigeon).
The Upland, like our Wilson's Snipe, Woodcock, and Europe's Jacksnipe are all members of the shorebird family Scolopacidae who abandoned the coasts and found a home in the uplands. These birds are still hunted, much as all shorebirds were in the past. However, they are difficult to find these days.
Our Upland Sandpipers winter on the Argentinian pampas. You can read more about the Upland Sandpiper here.
Here's a male Bobolink in breeding plumage, aka Ricebird. They do breed in one of our largest pastures. I still remember the first one I heard calling.
Hours before dawn we were woken by the quake. My house was on a cliff. The thing could take Bookloads off shelves, break bottles in a row. Then the long pause and then the bigger shake. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
And far too large for my feet to step by. I hoped that various buildings were brought low. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed. The guarded tourist makes the guide the test. Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No. Taxi for her and for me healthy rest. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
The language problem but you have to try. Some solid ground for lying could she show? The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
None of these deaths were her point at all. The thing was that being woken he would bawl And finding her not in earshot he would know. I tried saying Half an Hour to pay this call. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
I slept, and blank as that I would yet lie. Till you have seen what a threat holds below, The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
It seemed quite safe till she got up and dressed. The guarded tourist makes the guide the test. Then I said The Garden? Laughing she said No. Taxi for her and for me healthy rest. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
The language problem but you have to try. Some solid ground for lying could she show? The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Tell me again about Europe and her pains, Who’s tortured by the drought, who by the rains. Glut me with floods where only the swine can row Who cuts his throat and let him count his gains. It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
A bedshift flight to a Far Eastern sky. Only the same war on a stronger toe. The heart of standing is you cannot fly.
Tell me more quickly what I lost by this, Or tell me with less drama what they miss Who call no die a god for a good throw, Who say after two aliens had one kiss It seemed the best thing to be up and go.
But as to risings, I can tell you why. It is on contradiction that they grow. It seemed the best thing to be up and go. Up was the heartening and the strong reply. The heart of standing is we cannot fly.
An aubade is a morning-after love song. Empson presumably wrote this for/about his Japanese lover while he was teaching in Japan. Was Empson eccentric? Certainly, but no more so than other poets. He was a poet's poet, but his strength was in wriiting about writing. His 7 Types of Ambiguity is a classic.
Who would give up the Iliad for the “real” historical record? Of course the writer has a responsibility, whether as solemn interpreter or satirist, to make a composition that serves a revealed truth. But we demand that of all creative artists, of whatever medium. Besides which a reader of fiction who finds, in a novel, a familiar public figure saying and doing things not reported elsewhere knows he is reading fiction. He knows the novelist hopes to lie his way to a greater truth than is possible with factual reportage. The novel is an aesthetic rendering that would portray a public figure interpretively no less than the portrait on an easel. The novel is not read as a newspaper is read; it is read as it is written, in the spirit of freedom.
Picasso expressed the same idea summarily: “Art is the lie that helps us to see the truth.”
I spoke with Rep. Todd Akin on Thursday night and here is his response to this smear by President Obama.
“He’s good at personal attacks but bad at attacking problems. He uses the same solution on every problem – that is more government and more and more and more debt. Obamacare has taken over one-sixth of the economy and the government has pushed private lenders out of student loans. Now they’re creating the Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac of student loans. And as the government takes it over, more and more debt is created. The reason Obama is upset about use of the word socialism is because his administration is asserting the government into what was once private sector areas. The reason Obama is attacking me is that I don’t have the same faith in big government as he does.”
A woman and a baby were in the doctor's examining room, waiting for the doctor to come in for the baby's first exam. The doctor arrived, and examined the baby, checked his weight, and being a little concerned, asked if the baby was breast-fed or bottle-fed.
'Breast-fed, ' she replied..
'Well, strip down to your waist,' the doctor ordered.
She did. He pinched her nipples, pressed, kneaded, and rubbed both breasts for a while in a very professional and detailed examination.
Motioning to her to get dressed, the doctor said, ' No wonder this baby is underweight. You don't have any milk. '
‘I know,' she said, 'I'm his Grandma, But I'm glad I came.’
The story of Newark, New Jersey is a classic of the Northeast's Blue City woes with corrupt, plunder-oriented politicians, corrupt and greedy unions, the Mafia, unskilled blacks from the South coming for industrial opportunities which disappeared, drugs and drug gangs, welfare, white flight - all of it.
You can see the same sad story in Bridgeport, CT, Camden, NJ, or Hartford, CT. Newark Mayor Cory Booker has sought the chance to turn things around.
Is Booker a Don Quixote or a Rudy Giuliani? Time will tell.
NY Times Public Editor: The Times' Coverage of Obama Has Been More Favorable Than Any Recent President; It's Time For A Skeptical Look At Obama and His Record
Joel Kotkin: The Great California Exodus - A leading U.S. demographer and 'Truman Democrat' talks about what is driving the middle class out of the Golden State:
... the Golden State's fastest-growing entity is government and its biggest product is red tape. The first thing that comes to many American minds when you mention California isn't Hollywood or tanned girls on a beach, but Greece. Many progressives in California take that as a compliment since Greeks are ostensibly happier. But as Mr. Kotkin notes, Californians are increasingly pursuing happiness elsewhere.
Nearly four million more people have left the Golden State in the last two decades than have come from other states. This is a sharp reversal from the 1980s, when 100,000 more Americans were settling in California each year than were leaving. According to Mr. Kotkin, most of those leaving are between the ages of 5 and 14 or 34 to 45. In other words, young families.
Are we allowed to make them clean their rooms? How about mowing the lawn? My kids have split wood, stacked wood, mowed fields, cleared brush, cleaned the bathroom.
Spent a couple of hours on the Connecticut coast this weekend. A vast swath of Common Slipper Shells had washed up during winter storms, a couple of feet deep. People don't eat this mollusc.
(These limpets are different from the European Common Limpet.)
They attach themselves to rocks and other hard objects. Also, to eachother. They move, extremely slowly, if they want to. I tried to figure out whether they have any predators. Supposedly some crabs can eat them, and some of those little snails can bore holes into them. I wonder whether diving ducks can pry them off their attachments, as they do with mussels.
Our pal Sipp sent us the following missive, as a corrective to this morning's link on the topic:
The recipe for barn red is right here:
-Boiled Linseed oil. (Dullards like the writer don't know there's two kinds of linseed oil. Boiled linseed oil is what's used for paints. It's deadly poison. Regular linseed oil is what Amish type people use for this and that. I had a boss in the painting business way back when that heard of all the health benefits of a tablespoon of raw linseed oil, and used to eat Boiled linseed oil until I explained the difference. Raw linseed oil never dries, properly, so you can't use it for painting a structure) -Red lead powder. This goes back to the Roman Empire. It's really cheap, and a fantastic pigment. Has a tendency to make your children into dullards, though, even moreso than TV does. -Turpentine. Just old-fashioned paint thinner, distilled from pine sap. -Japan Drier. A dash of this metallic salt makes paint films dry much faster. It's poison, too. Counter-intuitively, if you add a lot, the paint never dries.
Old-fashioned barn stain used to be called OVT. Cabot still call some of their stuff OVT, but lord knows what it is. Oil, Varnish, Turpentine.
Sugar of white lead can be substituted for red lead. It's more expensive, so red got used more. People still called primer "red lead" when I was a kid, and it came in red even after the lead was removed from it. You can still find real red lead in use in shipyards, I bet. Muffy and Biff's yacht often had a coat of it on the bottom despite their Sierra Club protestations. Barns shifted from being painted red to being painted white when the idea of a farm became synonymous with "where the milk comes from." It's just a representation of cleanliness. And colonial era barns, as well as almost everything else, were pretty much never painted in any way. If you'd have seen Salem, Mass or some such place before 1800, the whole place, every stick of it, would have been weathered brown.
The sense of entitlement, and the lack of a sense of reality in this NYT union-sponsored vid is astonishing to me.
Haven't these people ever heard of "saving money" and "investing money"? They almost sound like petulant children.
Do these people imagine that anybody gets pensions anymore, except for some government employees and some unions? Sheesh. Normal people haven't gotten pensions for decades. Mead discusses here.
I’ve never had the pleasure of having a black person as a best friend, or anything beyond a casual acquaintance. I’ve never dated a black woman, nor have I ever asked one out. I grew up in the ’50s and ’60s in an all-white suburb of Chicago. I went to an all-white Catholic boys high school and a nearly all-white private college.
I’ve never lived in a town that is more than 10% black, nor have I ever lived in a city run by blacks. I’ve never had a black next-door neighbor, nor have I lived in a neighborhood where blacks were more than a scattered presence. I have never had occasion to visit an all-black neighborhood or attend an event where a majority of the crowd is black. And I’ve never been approached by a black man while walking down a dark street at night, wondering if I should cross the street or not.
I suppose this makes me sheltered, naive, even ignorant of the way the world works and the how the racial divide colors our attitudes in our everyday lives. Frankly, I don’t care.
When you strip out all of the excessive and grandiose rhetoric, what the president is attempting to argue in these speeches is that the keys to higher economic growth in the United States are higher marginal tax rates on the successful, no reforms to entitlement programs, and more government spending on selected “investments.” To say that this is a pathetic plan for growth would be to give it too much credit.
Arab Spring 3.0 What’s more revolutionary in the Middle East: Facebook or porn?
"The problem is we don’t know what the climate is doing. We thought we knew 20 years ago. That led to some alarmist books – mine included – because it looked clear-cut, but it hasn’t happened,” Lovelock said.
That's a big deal. He's the guy who thought up the Gaia Hypothesis, or religion, or whatever. Humility can arrive at any age.
It's the time of year for us to ask our readers, whether occasional or devoted followers, to introduce our website to your friends, neighbors, countrymen, colleagues, etc.
When I was a kid, we referred to the Upland Sandpiper as a "snipe." They used to be officially named "Upland Plover." It's been a long time since I have seen an Upland Sandpiper in New England. (They are 
Bob Dylan
, by Peter Atkins and 
, by Paul Feyerabend
Miracles Do Happen: 
That pic of a Texas tan-line is going around
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