Maggie's Farm

Sipp, with Peggy Lee's killer tune Is That All there Is?,  reminded me that we were way past due a Peggy Lee day. Here's I Don't Know Enough About You.

I think the guitar man was her husband.

 

Origin of April Fool's Day. Related: U.S. Government To Save Billions By Cutting Wasteful Senator Program

How to be a Good Wife, via Retriever's Who Wants to be a Wife? via Vanderleun

Uncle Dave Macon, and his recording of Way Down the Old Plank Road

Preachers who do not believe. Whited sepulchres indeed, as the lady says.

Not an April Fool prank: Who elected this Congressman? OK, perhaps it was a deadpan joke. Yes, the latter is a real prank.

VDH asks Why are charges of racism and political extremism suddenly in the air?

Henninger: Would the Founders Love ObamaCare?

When Media Become Obama PR Agents

Change! Economist: Get Ready For Worst 20 Years of Subnormal Growth in All of American History

Prager: Where Do Jews and Christians on the Left Get Their Values?

Insty links to Victorian Sex

I have today's hot topics here, but had no time to link them due to the News Junkie's surprise announcement.

American solvency hangs in the balance.

Earth's water supply hangs in the balance.

Middle East peace hangs in the balance.

Freedom hangs in the balance.

Future of humanity hangs in the balance.

Leftist control of the US government hangs in the balance.

Fate of earth's climate hangs in the balance.

Immigration reform hangs in the balance.

Success in Afghanistan hangs in the balance.

Feel free to help out today by adding your own news flashes below -

One never knows where Lent will take you. A month or two ago, I was fairly certain that I knew what painful, self-flagellating things I needed this Lent for, but it has led me in another direction entirely, and a direction which offers more joy than pain.

It has led me to another level of the relational aspect of faith, as my posts during this Lent have indicated. It crystallized in my mind when I was contemplating my relationship with dogs during a recent night-time post-prandial dog-walk with my pal with ceegars. I generally connect with dogs pretty well, and think I have a good idea of how much of the bond is real and how much is imaginary.

Everything we experience in life is relational, in a sense - including to inanimate things and abstract things. It's how we are constructed. If I can delight in the slobbering kisses of a dog, what is it in me that prevents me from fully delighting in the (not-slobbering) kisses of God?

I won't go on with this because it's too personal and probably boring for anybody who isn't exactly where I am, but maybe you can get my drift. I am a work in progress.

Saturday evening, out the car window en route to the theater -

The great ocean currents are an interesting tangle, global cooling aside. Our Gulf Stream is just one segment of this thing:

- "Authentic" classical music, with original instruments and strict constructionists directing (eg John Eliot Gardiner) was popular over the past couple of decades. Interesting too. But is it time to Forsake Authenticity?

- In praise of PG Wodehouse. Without doubt the best author to read when you are sick - except for Peter De Vries.

- I am having a good time going through Jacquetta Hawkes' The Atlas of Early Man: The Rise of Man Across the Globe, From 35,000 B.C. to A.D. 500 With Over 1,000 Maps And Illustrations. It is structured like a timeline so you can see what was going on across the globe with civilization and pre-civilization during different periods.

- No Christian heroes, please.

- I have been advised to watch Ridley Scott's 2005 Kingdom of Heaven. Anybody seen it?

"I have a feeling that climate change may be an issue as severe as a war. It may be necessary to put democracy on hold for a while."

James Lovelock, via Samiz. Comments at Wizbang's Still Think Climate Change is About Climate? (and elsewhere).

"I have a feeling..."!?!? Well, I have a feeling too, and it is that such people give me the creeps.

I like the look of David's new place (Never Yet Melted). Sort of a Virginia version of Maggie's Farm.

Cruel but amusing: tons of photos from WalMart, America's favorite store, here.

Wide Load below -

When Christ rode into Jerusalem down from the Mount of Olives on a colt (or small horse, or donkey - whatever) on Palm Sunday, he was greeted with Hosannas by excited crowds who believed him to be the Messiah.

His teachings and his miracles had become famous. People threw their cloaks on the road and, presumably, palm leaves, for his horse to walk on.

Much of their enthusiasm was unwarranted, however: the Jews were hoping for a political messiah (using the word "king"), more than they were hoping for the messiah who came to tell them that much of what they believed about being in relationship with God was wrong - and claiming that he had the authority to say so.

"Salvation," for the crowds, meant salvation from the Romans, and "the kingdom of God," in the Hebrew Bible, referred to the literal restoration of a nation of Israel under God, as had been promised to David. There was no concept at the time, I believe, of the now-Christian idea of salvation or the Christian idea of "the kingdom of God." Furthermore, Jesus had no interest I am aware of in politics or governance and had no beef with the Romans.

A radical for sure, in his apparent renunciation of the ordinary world.

There is plenty of discussion about what is understood by the kingdom of God.

My own view is that it refers to God's domain, ie the universe of those souls who seek relationship with God - not any literal kingdom but a "spiritual" (I hate that word), unworldly kingdom. Maybe "transcendent" is a better word.

I suspect that the Jews who welcomed Jesus to Jerusalem were deeply disappointed to discover that Jesus' mission was not worldly, but other-worldly: only a few handfuls of people remained to constitute what the scholars term the "Christ cult" after the crucifixion. It took Paul's inspired work to rebuild on the foundation.

(That's just my amateur take on it all. I am no expert.)

Image: Fra Angelico's Entry into Jerusalem

Alinsky on rubbing raw the sores of discontent.

It has already worked: I am entirely sore about Alinsky and his minions. As I always ask, "What sane human would want State power over a fellow citizen?"

Jamie Oliver's Ministry of Food Control.

Governments love controlling people, don't they? It's a mental disease. Power is a drug for those susceptible to its perverse appeal.

Deresiewicz begins his 2008 essay The Disadvantages of an Elite Education thus:

It didn’t dawn on me that there might be a few holes in my education until I was about 35. I’d just bought a house, the pipes needed fixing, and the plumber was standing in my kitchen. There he was, a short, beefy guy with a goatee and a Red Sox cap and a thick Boston accent, and I suddenly learned that I didn’t have the slightest idea what to say to someone like him. So alien was his experience to me, so unguessable his values, so mysterious his very language, that I couldn’t succeed in engaging him in a few minutes of small talk before he got down to work. Fourteen years of higher education and a handful of Ivy League degrees, and there I was, stiff and stupid, struck dumb by my own dumbness. “Ivy retardation,” a friend of mine calls this. I could carry on conversations with people from other countries, in other languages, but I couldn’t talk to the man who was standing in my own house.

It’s not surprising that it took me so long to discover the extent of my miseducation, because the last thing an elite education will teach you is its own inadequacy.

 

Luke 19: 29-40

²⁹When he had come near Bethphage and Bethany, at the place called the Mount of Olives, he sent two of the disciples,
³⁰saying, “Go into the village ahead of you, and as you enter it you will find tied there a colt that has never been ridden. Untie it and bring it here.
³¹If anyone asks you, ‘Why are you untying it?’ just say this, ‘The Lord needs it.’”
³²So those who were sent departed and found it as he had told them.
³³As they were untying the colt, its owners asked them, “Why are you untying the colt?”
³⁴They said, “The Lord needs it.”
³⁵Then they brought it to Jesus; and after throwing their cloaks on the colt, they set Jesus on it.
³⁶As he rode along, people kept spreading their cloaks on the road.
³⁷As he was now approaching the path down from the Mount of Olives, the whole multitude of the disciples began to praise God joyfully with a loud voice for all the deeds of power that they had seen,
³⁸saying, “Blessed is the king who comes in the name of the Lord! Peace in heaven, and glory in the highest heaven!”
³⁹Some of the Pharisees in the crowd said to him, “Teacher, order your disciples to stop.”
⁴⁰He answered, “I tell you, if these were silent, the stones would shout out.”

Mrs. BD is now considering this idea for an August trip: barging through Provence on the Rhone and the canals.

I told her the choice was between that trip and finishing getting my teeth fixed. It's called Fun With Implants. (Of course, if Obama would pay for my teeth then I could do both. Maybe I should write a note and cc Reid and Pelosi and tell them I'm ready for my new choppers right now.)

My Mom and Dad took one of these trips a few years ago. She said their plump Chef decided to try the balloon ride one time, got about 10" in the air and leaned out to tell the Sous-chef some last minute cooking detail and fell out of the basket into the canal. Hilarity ensued.

Also on my bucket list: Sailing cruise down the coast of Turkey. Yes, I do want to visit Turkey again - with digital camera this time. I like the people, the food, the landscape, the markets, the history, the ruins, and their fruit and wines.

Carpe diem. Cave canem. Gnothi sauton, too.

Our pal Sipp is moving to Maine. All of us at Maggie's wish him and his wonderful family an enjoyable "moving experience."

But who moves to Maine? Maybe Texas, but Maine? I recall that Abe Lincoln's dad always believed that you should move on whenever you could see the smoke from another settler's fireplace. (Not sure I believe that story about Thomas Lincoln, however.)

Speaking of presidents, Who's U.S. Grant minus John Quincy Adams?

COMPOSED DURING A STORM (1819) 

Written in Rydal Woods, by the side of a torrent.

One who was suffering tumult in his soul,
Yet failed to seek the sure relief of prayer,
Went forth - his course surrendering to the care
Of the fierce wind, while mid-day lightnings prowl
Insidiously, untimely thunders growl;
While trees, dim-seen, in frenzied numbers, tear
The lingering remnant of their yellow hair,
And shivering wolves, surprised with darkness, howl
As if the sun were not. He raised his eye
Soul-smitten; for, that instant, did appear
Large space ('mid dreadful clouds) of purest sky,
An azure disc-shield of Tranquillity;
Invisible, unlooked-for, minister
Of providential goodness ever nigh!

On medical care (I refuse to term it "health" care. Health requires no care.), from AVI:

Health care costs are rising, not because of inefficiency or heartless business practices or stunning malpractice claims – though these all deserve significant attention – but because the products and services provided simply are very expensive. And they are going to get more expensive - much, much more expensive – for the foreseeable future. We can do magical things we were never able to do. We can keep people alive (such as a family friend with CF) far longer than we could. We can save people who simply died not very long ago. And it costs a fortune.

The first comment there is good, too, about how government interventions increase costs.

The brave escape of Curious George

Cell phone photos: A pal visited NASDAQ HQ yesterday:

Elvis covers Dylan's Tomorrow is a Long Time:

Dylan covers Heartbreak Hotel:

 

Well-organized amateur gardeners keep some sort of calendar or journal of annual tasks to be done (eg April: prune forsythias when blooms done), and a record of things planted (with exact names and maintenance needs).

I keep a casual record and to-do list on my computer with links to tips and info that I tend to forget (I do have a lot of plants with Special Needs), but some more serious folks prefer these pre-printed formats.

Quiz here.

McCotter talks just like a Maggie's Farmer. Government is a special interest. h/t, Sissy's Are tea parties like sex?