Saturday, January 9. 2010
Beware the Brit Humes, etc, from Politics Daily. A quote:
"Beware the Brit Humes in Your Office," blared the headline from another Huffington Post blogger. This one, penned by business columnist Eve Tahmincioglu, included the following passage: "The fact that a journalist -- and I use that term loosely as it pertains to Hume -- would go on a national news show and put down another high-profile individual's faith should tell all of us that religious bigotry, and bigotry as a whole, is a growing problem in this country."
Imagining It
At eighteen, in Paris,
I just woke up out of a dream
just before dawn, and stepped through the long window
from my cold room with its red silk walls.
Shivering a little in my dressing gown,
I leaned on the balustrade
and, look, overnight a light snow had fallen;
no car had driven over it yet, it lay in the street
as white, as innocent, as snow on the open fields.
Then something approached with a calm rhythm
of hoof-beats made softer by the snow, the sound
of a quiet heart. It was a heaped-up wood cart
pulled by a gray horse who walked along slowly,
head down, while the driver
sat at the back of one shaft and hunched over
to light his cigarette.
From above, I saw clearly
the lit match in the old man's cupped hands, its glow
on his long jaw, the small well of flame
between his living palms like the flare
of the soul in his body. He went on
down the street, and the sky went on
growing lighter, and I saw how he left
his dark tracks behind him on the whiteness
of the snow, just the lines of the two wheels,
slightly wavering, and the dints of the horse's hooves
between them, a writing in an undiscovered
language, something whose meaning
we feel sure we know, and still can't quite
translate.
When I stepped inside again,
I stopped thinking about love for a minute — I thought about it
almost all the time then — and thought instead
about being alive for a while in a world
with cobblestones, new snow, and the unconscious
poem printed by hooves on the maiden street.
Of course I was not yet ready to be grateful.
(Barnes lives in Maine. She is the daughter of Henry Beston, author of The Outermost House - a book that was a mainstay of my family. There is a brief interview with Barnes here, with a listing of her books.)
Friday, January 8. 2010
 Wines for fast food. Prof B
Nutrition and Tradition The Science of Food and the Culture of Cooking
A small Canadian seaside town in New Brunswick has been warned lobsters that wash ashore cannot be eaten because they weren't caught under license.
Whole Foods' John Mackey: Food Fighter
How school lunch programs manage to promote obesity and hunger at the same time.
Photo: Butterflied lamb from the grill. There is nothing better. Lamb must be cooked rare or it isn't worth eating, and the butterflied leg in the photo looks overcooked for my taste. Costco has great butterflied leg of lamb.
When my sibs were too young to ski, I would take ski buses with pals on weekends to ski at Mohawk Mountain and Butternut for the day.
When the other kids got older we would ski all around New England as a family (my Mom skied, but Dad read books by the fire and shepherded), but most regularly at Stowe, Stratton, Bromley and good old Magic Mountain where I got skewered with a ski pole by my cousin one time.
Thursday, January 7. 2010
We used to ski the places on Rte. 93 quite a bit when the pups were younger. Wildcat and Gunstock Mtns, too. Less crowded and, truth be told, more genteel folks on average than on the Vermont slopes. I am partial to Loon, but Cannon Mtn. gets the prize for NH's funkiest, old-style place. Here's a brochure from the 1970s (Mittersill has been closed since the 70s):
Krauthammer is right, at NRO:
On Ben Nelson’s statement that “I think it was a mistake to take health care on as opposed to continuing to spend the time on the economy”
Nelson is right on two counts. A, it was a distraction, as the citizenry sees it, from the main issue, which is the recession and unemployment. And secondly because the bill itself, the proposals themselves are so appalling that on the merits, on the substance, there's huge opposition. ...
Very smart. Read it all (link above)
Jacob Burkhardt did. First Principles.
...my friend saw a leaf floating down from a tree in a peculiar swirling pattern. He then asked, "Dr. Einstein, why is the leaf falling from the tree like that rather than straight down?" Einstein replied with a smile, "I don't know."
Via a piece at Am Thinker by Lauri Regan. I find "I don't know" to be one of the most useful sentences in the English language.
Wednesday, January 6. 2010
Our readership grows each year. It used to double, but now it only grows at around 20-25%. Bummer.
Cybersluts that we are, we want to keep on growing. It's our only reward for our efforts - besides our own private pleasure in posting.
I know that we are a boutique site - not to everyone's taste - but there are probably millions out there around the world who would like to partake of the Farm's offerings.
(Remember that politics is just one part of what we discuss here. Even if people are further Left than we are, they can read us because we try to discuss things half-intelligently and with facts - except when we need to perform a therapeutic rant.)
Do us a favor, and do your friends and email list people a favor, and send the link to Maggie's around. It's a free subscription! Plus no annoying advertisements!
Thank you, Readers.
(Photo of one of our farmworkers, organizing our archives for posterity.)
This graph is making the rounds today so we might as well pile on. It's from Clusterstock. I think the problems this represents are obvious:
"The United States does not have a security system; it has a system for bothering people."
Shlomo Dror, an Israeli air security expert (h/t, Vanderleun)
Tuesday, January 5. 2010
It's about the Conspiracy to Keep Them Poor and Stupid. One of our favorite guys writes a piece in City Journal about another one of our favorite fellows. One quote:
Like A Nation at Risk, Cultural Literacy came under fierce attack by education progressives, partly for its theory of reading comprehension but even more for its supposedly elitist presumption that a white male college professor should decide what American children learn. Critics derided Hirsch’s lists of names, events, and dates as arbitrary, even racist. The progressives often lumped him in with the three “killer Bs”—Bennett, (Allan) Bloom, and (Saul) Bellow—whom they loved to hate at the height of the 1980s culture wars. Because Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind appeared just above Cultural Literacy on the bestseller lists for most of 1987, many liberal commentators paired the two writers, calling them conservatives agitating for a return to a more traditional, elitist education.
In fact, Hirsch is and always has been a liberal Democrat. Far from being elitist, he insists, cultural literacy is the path to educational equality and full citizenship for the nation’s minority groups. “Cultural literacy constitutes the only sure avenue of opportunity for disadvantaged children,” Hirsch writes, and “the only reliable way of combating the social determinism that now condemns them to remain in the same social and educational condition as their parents.
Cool graphic, showing how it grew and spread across the US.
The wonderful states of Nebraska and Kansas seem immune. That's the Heartland.
Via Thompson. One of them:
Monday, January 4. 2010
New Year's Eve. Thanks for the pic, BL.
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