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 promised that we would bring the Dylanologist, who is stationed in Rome for the summer, a supply of peanut butter. I guess the Italians don't have it. It's their loss. You would think the southern Italians would get sick of tomato sauce. I am, for sure. They would quickly learn to appreciate a PB&J on white.
Fortunately, they do not use much pasta or really any tomato sauce in northern Italy where I am headed tomorrow.
Despite the glories of Italian (non-pasta) cuisine, sometimes a fellow just needs some peanut butter - and not the unpleasant organic kind. Skippy's ultra-chunky always hits the spot. I will squeeze two large things of it into my bag for the guy.
Hope Italian Customs doesn't give me a hard time for this act of smuggling. After all, it would be easy to suffocate somebody with a face full of Skippy's Creamy.
A book review. The sonnet form has a punchy compactness that has let it survive and thrive while other antique forms have been mostly abandoned. I have tried my hand at more than a few, and it is good challenging fun.
The authors use data for a sample of OECD countries from 1960 to 2000, and they find that, on average, the creation of 100 public jobs eliminated about 150 private-sector jobs...
Saw many of these in bloom on Cape Cod, growing in sandy dry soil. Seems to be a succulent variant of some wildflower. (I do not know what they are, but I know they are not Joe Pye Weed.)
It's hot. Wellfleet would be a good place to be today. In the cool water, floating like flotsam. Plymouth Rock is across the bay, below the horizon. It's a good-sized bay.
What’s so remarkable — people of supposedly that high level, opinion-makers and teachers, speaking with unbelievable venom, never crediting the opposition with ideas, sincerity, evidence or principle, talking about them as Nazis.
I was also impressed by the low level of the discussion ... If this is the best liberal journalism can do, that is probably why our side is winning the argument
As an antidote, I assume, to political insanity (like my shirt and duck hunting posts were today) Buddy emails this timely post:
Oscar Greeley Hammerstein's birthday was a few days ago. The New Yorker wrote nearly 1000 songs in his career. In the "Rogers & Hammerstein" partnership enterprise, he wrote the lyrics while Richard Rogers wrote the melody.
OH's parents were immigrants - father a German Jew, mother a - Scots-English (the son was raised Episcopalian). The father is credited with inventing the 'pie in the face' vaudeville routine.
Oscar pronounced his name not as 'hammer-styne' but in the German 'ohmer-schteen'. He spanned the time of America's great rise, born in Belle-Epoch 1895, and left this earth in in the JFK era, as we began to go the moon, in 1960.
Only in America.
And this clip from the eponymous 1955 film of the wartime Broadway hit (it opened in bloody and depressing 1943, when the Axis was yet rampant, and won a Special Pulitzer in the dark year 1944) depicts a time from the turn of the 19th to 20th century.
So we get a layered helping of entertainment here - the great talent and performance, but also three looks at America, all roughly a half-century apart per each.
Wiki doesn't (but should) mention that the familiar hollywood supporting actors are by-and-large not professional singers. The effect of the common (AKA "not all that technically good") voice seems to "break the fourth wall" and charm the audience plumb silly.
Of course the leads, Gordon MacRae and Shirley Jones, are sher-nuff professional singers (Jones makes her debut here, but still you have to call that voice 'professional').
For generations (since 1818), those who need to look well put-together but not Wall Street glam have relied on Brooks Brothers for their basics.
I kinda like the feel of a rumpled normal cotton Brooks shirt, but Mrs. BD and Mrs. Gwynnie recently chatted about how much they can save in dry cleaner bills with the Brooks Non-Iron shirts, which can be washed in the washer and refuse to reach that rumpled look.
Maybe Leftism really is a mental illness. I have always regarded that claim as hyperbole, while acknowledging the totalitarian impulses implicit in "Progressivism."
"Who are these people?", as a snobby pal often says in his obnoxious way. But really, who do these people think they are? And why do they think they are better or smarter than me? I do not want to control them, so why do they want to control what I do or read or think? It is strange.
He says:
Sean Hannity says that journalism died in 2008, when the mainstream media discarded even the pretense of professionalism and objectivity for the sake of installing an unqualified, ultra-radical community organizer in the White House.
The latter even offers an Eider recipe: Eider Cape Cod. If you aren't planning to eat 'em, you shouldn't shoot 'em.
Here's one of Capt. Perez' Eider hunts in Cape Cod. These guys are good shots, and make it look far easier than it is even though Eiders decoy readily:
The story is being posted all over. This bit at Surber's post:
Nixon had his White House Plumbers.
Obama has his JournoList.
And yes, Obama’s campaign coordinated this. Three-quarters of a billion dollars buys a lot of people, although not all of these schleps had to be bribed.
Hey remember Michael Corleone’s line to Tom Hagen: “Don’t we have some reporters on our payroll?”
This reminds me of a Winston Churchill story that Stephen Fry likes to tell. During Churchill's last stint as Prime Minister, in the fifties, he was regretfully informed that one of his backbench MPs had been arrested the previous night for exposing himself on Hampstead Heath. After a pause, Churchill asked about the weather. Was it not very cold last night? Indeed sir, one of the coldest nights on record. Said Churchill after another thoughtful pause: "It makes you proud to be British."
The Phlogistians were not a bunch of cranks. They were serious scientists who helped resolve some of the basic questions of chemistry, by being the devil's advocate against the Antiphlogistians, and by discovering important experiments. And, for almost the entire 18th century, the phlogiston theory was more satisfying than the alternative, in some ways. The Antiphlogistians deduced that combustion was when a substance combined with oxygen (Priestley's dephlogisticated air). But, they could not tell why substances combined with oxygen, or even why all substances didn't just burn up. Phlogiston theory explained why, because some substances were rich in phlogiston, and burned. It was only later that more satisfactory explanations were discovered.
More of my pics taken last week. Nice little town, Wellfleet. Resident population 2700. Nothing fancy about it. Unpretentious summer getaway with more spots to swim and beach than anywhere I know of, but it is not for those who require warm water.
For those in driving distance of lovely and historic Southport, CT, the annual Pequot Library Book Sale is a blast, and coming up soon. Last year, they had 140,000 used books for sale, all sorted by category by the volunteers.
You can purchase, for a pittance, a year's worth of reading material, and will surely stumble into some serendipitous finds that could enrich your life. It's happened to me at that sale, many times over the years.
They have hot-dogs and soda pop, too. You have to bear in mind that the book dealers get there the first day to grab up the valuable and rare stuff, but the prices go down each day.
You know, I rather think I agree with those poet-and-philosopher Johnnies who insist that a fellow ought to be devilish pleased if he has a bit of trouble.
All that stuff about being refined by suffering, you know. Suffering does give a chap a sort of broader and more sympathetic outlook. It helps you to understand other people's misfortunes if you've been through the same thing yourself. As I stood in my lonely bedroom at the hotel, trying to tie my white tie myself, it struck me for the first time that there must be whole squads of chappies in the world who had to get along without a man to look after them. I'd always thought of Jeeves as a kind of natural phenomenon; but, by Jove! of course, when you come to think of it, there must be quite a lot of fellows who have to press their own clothes themselves and haven't got anybody to bring them tea in the morning, and so on. It was rather a solemn thought, don't you know. I mean to say, ever since then I've been able to appreciate the frightful privations the poor have to stick.
We’ve allowed—nay, in many cases encouraged—our government to become unlimited in its goals, bloated in its size, and arbitrary in its action. In this respect Obama-care is more the culmination of decades of policy-making than a deviation from them. We’ve indulged in the fatal conceit that we can ask the state to attend to all our cares and invite the government to correct all our perceived problems, without considering either the counterproductive practical consequences ...
In many arts subjects, especially those tethered only loosely to evidence, logic or practical verification, there’s often pressure to avoid the obvious and prosaic, even when the obvious and prosaic is true.
Angelo M. Codevilla wonders how long two-thirds of America can possibly be ruled by a well-entrenched elitist third.
One quote from Codevilla:
The polls tell us that only about a fifth of Americans trust the government to do the right thing. The rest expect that it will do more harm than good and are no longer afraid to say so.
While Europeans are accustomed to being ruled by presumed betters whom they distrust, the American people's realization of being ruled like Europeans shocked this country into well nigh revolutionary attitudes.
10:38 Now as they went on their way, he entered a certain village, where a woman named Martha welcomed him into her home.
10:39 She had a sister named Mary, who sat at the Lord's feet and listened to what he was saying.
10:40 But Martha was distracted by her many tasks; so she came to him and asked, "Lord, do you not care that my sister has left me to do all the work by myself? Tell her then to help me."
10:41 But the Lord answered her, "Martha, Martha, you are worried and distracted by many things;
10:42 there is need of only one thing. Mary has chosen the better part, which will not be taken away from her."
We promised that we would bring the Dylanologist, who is stationed in Rome for the summer, a supply of peanut butter. I guess the Italians don't have it. It's their loss. You would think the southern Italians would get sick of tomato sauce. I am, for sure. They would quickly learn to appreciate a PB&J on white.
Racial group 
PART ONE 
For generations (since 1818), those who need to look well put-together but not Wall Street glam have relied on Brooks Brothers for their basics.
For those in driving distance of lovely and historic 