Saturday, January 2. 2010
This morning. If you are deprived by not being familiar, that's the eastern edge of Central Park on the right, around 92nd St - a darn pleasant neighborhood.
Skunk Hour (1959)
(For Elizabeth Bishop)
Nautilus Island's hermit
heiress still lives through winter in her Spartan cottage;
her sheep still graze above the sea.
Her son's a bishop. Her farmer
is first selectman in our village;
she's in her dotage.
Thirsting for
the hierarchie privacy
of Queen Victoria's century,
she buys up all
the eyesores facing her shore,
and lets them fall.
The season's ill--
we've lost our summer millionaire,
who seemed to leap from an L. L. Bean
catalogue. His nine-knot yawl
was auctioned off to lobstermen.
A red fox stain covers Blue Hill.
And now our fairy
decorator brightens his shop for fall;
his fishnet's filled with orange cork,
orange, his cobbler's bench and awl;
there is no money in his work,
he'd rather marry.
One dark night,
my Tudor Ford climbed the hill's skull;
I watched for love-cars. Lights turned down,
they lay together, hull to hull,
where the graveyard shelves on the town. . . .
My mind's not right.
A car radio bleats,
"Love, O careless Love. . . ." I hear
my ill-spirit sob in each blood cell,
as if my hand were at its throat. . . .
I myself am hell;
nobody's here--
only skunks, that search
in the moonlight for a bite to eat.
They march on their soles up Main Street:
white stripes, moonstruck eyes' red fire
under the chalk-dry and spar spire
of the Trinitarian Church.
I stand on top
of our back steps and breathe the rich air--
a mother skunk with her column of kittens swills the garbage pail.
She jabs her wedge-head in a cup
of sour cream, drops her ostrich tail,
and will not scare.
You can read a bit about the poem here. |
A melancholy chore to take ye olde tree down. However, it will have an extended life outdoors for a couple of months as the needles slowly drop, providing some cheery outdoor light and a place for the sparrows to hang out in and in which to hide from the Sharpies that haunt our area.
Friday, January 1. 2010
A good one for the beginning of a year. Bob picks it a bit in his Bob way on this version of Watching the River Flow in Sweden this past summer:
If there was no Internets, I'd have to stand on the overpass and yell at cars.
Sippican, who recommends The Colorist to us. Wonderful pictures.
 I have been taking a little time to think about how participating in a website like Maggie's, if you don't watch out, can have the effect of making you run faster and faster to keep up with the latest idea/opinion/reaction etc.
(Here's a clip from Dylan's 1978 No Time to Think from his Street Legal album. Lyrics here)
I can react, but I cannot really think, while looking at a screen - or while reading at all. I can reflect on something when I put down the book or close the page. I can reflect, and perhaps generate a thought, only by getting away for a bit from external input so I can hear some "internal input."
Am I unusual? Almost everybody I know thinks they have some degree of ADD.
I know everybody's mind works differently under different circumstances. My brain tends to think impressionistically, not sequentially and in linear fashion (except when it is demanded of me or, less often, when I demand it of myself - then it kicks into gear), and works best when I am under some sensory deprivation, like in the shower, in the car with the radio off, or with closed eyes. That's when ideas and connections come to me from my pre-conscious.
Giving myself a writing assignment is one way to force myself to think sequentially. Most of the time, no interesting thoughts appear and I end up trashing the piece. Opie likes to say "Those who can, think. Those who can't, link." We link a lot here at Maggie's, but I'd like to try to steer Maggie's away from trying to cover news. Had we the time and the brains, I'd like to post more pieces like neoneo's Give Me Liberty or Give Me Social Justice along with our usual eclectic mix of fun and/or informative non-political stuff.
Having thoughts and ideas is a discipline, like prayer. But disciplines can become good habits over time.
This year, I resolve to think more.
Related, College asks students to power down, contemplate
And here's a Google Tech Talk on the topic from Computer Science Prof. David Levy -
The charming New Year's Babe is via Theo, of course.
 Good fun: A summary of mathematical astronomy
A man and his plan: You have probably never heard of Francis Everett Townsend, but his enormous and controversial legacy is with us today.
Barone: It's a wonderful life working for the government
Mayo Clinic begins dropping Medicare patients
Henninger: America isn't dead. It's just dead in the water.
Just as the warmists want warming to be true to justify their existence, their view of the world, and their political agenda, I always think these Sharpton sorts want to find racism and oppression for the same reason. What ever happened to the "Duke 88"?
Liberal conspicuous agonizing. Thompson:
“Watch me agonise over meat. Look at how concerned I am. See how I fret.”
Allahu Akbar: It's The New "Cry For Help". Poor babies. No wonder they want to be mass murderers: they're lonely ronery.
What's up with this? No Rise of Atmospheric Carbon Dioxide Fraction in Past 160 Years
Thursday, December 31. 2009
Except for the lift lines one can expect this weekend, I wouldn't mind waking up tomorrow morning in Killington:
To Change One’s Life:
1. Start immediately.
2. Do it flamboyantly.
3. No exceptions.
- William James (h/t, Protein). Sounds like a recipe for disaster for 99%.
Here's another, h/t Vermont Tiger:
New Year's is a harmless annual institution, of no particular use to anybody save as a scapegoat for promiscuous drunks, and friendly calls and humbug resolutions.
- Mark Twain
 A more interesting mission than global cooling: asteroid prevention
Let's debate the Crusades again
Why do we delay gratification even when there is no downside?
Cheney wee-wee’d up the left. Related: Planet Janet
Econ 101: water
Rent or buy? Megan.
Now we own GMAC too. Why?
Reisman: The central problem is the central bank
Are Harvard guys sissies? Some of them are, for sure. Plus, insults are fun. What's the big deal? Anybody who cannot handle an insult or two is a sissy.
Via Lucianne:
When we look back at the decade 2000-2009, we may well define it by three crises: the crisis that didn't happen, the crisis that wasn't supposed to happen, and the crisis that we don't realize is happening. We haven't learned the lessons of the first two, and our ignorance of the third may doom us to be slaves to our government, rather than the other way around.
Related: In Intel as in healthcare (as in everything else): Bigger Government Is Worse Government
Related: Is the Dem healthcare bill consitutional? Inquiring minds wonder. I say No, and I have read the thing (the Constitution) many times. Always seemed to be about individual freedom to me, and restricting the reach of government.
Volokh: $150,000 Settlement for Black Public School Students Harassed by Other Black Students for “Acting White”
Wednesday, December 30. 2009
Mr. Nyquist has a post about truth, with abundant cool quotes including this from Nietzche: "Nobody dies nowadays of a fatal truth. There are too many antidotes to them." A quote from his piece:
Truth never grows old, unlike the daily news or petty gossip. The truth, furthermore, requires special handling. Those who bungle had best carry a lie. In this regard, we should think on government and bureaucrats. "It is error alone that needs the support of government," wrote Thomas Jefferson. "Truth can stand by itself." And of course, it usually does stand by itself -- with nobody anywhere near it. "I tell the truth, not as much as I would but as much as I dare," wrote Montaigne. "And I dare more and more as I grow older."
There is also Oscar Wilde's admonition: "If one tells the truth, one is sure, sooner or later, to be found out." Or as they say in Yugoslavia, "Speak the truth and run."
This one came in over the transom a few years ago:
Sales: "You want answers?"
Finance: "I think we are entitled to them!"
Sales: "You want answers?!"
Finance: "I want the truth!"
Sales: "You can't handle the truth!!! Son, we live in a world that requires net license revenue. And that revenue must be brought in by people with elite skills. Who's going to find it? You? You, Mr. Operations? We have a greater responsibility than you can possibly fathom.
You scoff at the sales division and you curse our lucrative incentives.
You have that luxury. You have the luxury of not knowing what we know:
That while the cost of business results are excessive, it drives revenue. And my very existence, while grotesque and incomprehensible to you, drives REVENUE! You don't want to know the truth because deep down in places you don't talk about at staff meetings ... you want me on that call. You NEED me on that call!
We use words like upgrades, another round, top-shelf, medium-rare, on-the-rocks, cabernet, Cohiba and foursome. We use these words as the backbone of a life spent negotiating something. You use them as a punch line!
I have neither the time nor the inclination to explain myself to people who rise and sleep under the very blanket of revenue I provide and then question the manner in which I provide it. I would rather you just said "thank you" and went on your way. Otherwise I suggest you pick up a phone and make some sales calls. Either way, I don't give a damn what you think you're entitled to!"
Finance: "Did you expense the lap dancers?"
Sales: "I did the job I was hired to do."
Finance: "Did you expense the lap dancers?!"
Sales: "You're goddamn right I did!"
If you need "Business Formal" for your work, but are of the thrifty sort who does not like to spend $2-3000 on a suit, the Brooks Brothers winter sale only has a few more days to go.
I make sure I always have a bit of this stuff on hand, if only for weddings, funerals, and special parties. However, my 20 year-old Brooks tux probably gets more use than my suits: I am not in a Business Formal line of work and I have been fortunate lately in not having many funerals to attend.
"[W]hen the resolution of enslaving America was formed in Great Britain, the British Parliament was advised by an artful man, who was governor of Pennsylvania, to disarm the people; that it was the best and most effectual way to enslave them; but that they should not do it openly, but weaken them, and let them sink gradually, by totally disusing and neglecting the militia."
George Mason, speech in the Virginia Ratifying Convention, 1788. h/t, Patriot Post
Tuesday, December 29. 2009
 Sign via Theo
How Manhattan is out to lunch. Olasky
Expel Students Who Might Kill Themselves? Minding the Campus
Last exit to utopia. City Journal
Iran: The stolen election. Am Scholar
Contemporary Art and Reviving Civilisation. New English Review
Bomb suspects were released from Gitmo
The Dem war against the not-so-rich and the aspiring
Via Riehl re the O and Duncan:
Continuing to follow up on what can be learned of Barack Obama's tenure as the Chairman of the Board of the Chicago Annenberg Challenge (CAC), evaluations of the program during his tenure available on line demonstrate that in his only real executive test, Barack Obama was a dismal failure squandering millions of dollars on education programs which had basically no real effect.
Monday, December 28. 2009
I should have known that the line to get into the Guggenheim yesterday would wrap around the block. Thus we just returned the pupette to her apartment with her Christmas loot in time for her to cook a post-Christmas dinner for friends (I think Julia and Julie inspired her), and we banged around town a little. Lousy photographer.
I do love NYC for its vitality. I think this is the Ukrainian mission to the UN on the right:
The walk-up in Yorkville on 85th where Mrs. BD first lived when she moved to NYC. I hiked up those stairs many times to the fifth floor. It was worth the effort.
Very convenient to the dry-cleaners -
More below the fold -
Continue reading "NYC yesterday"
Fallacies do not cease to be fallacies because they become fashions.
G.K. Chesterton (h/t, Dr. Bob)
"The Flanker is by far the most extraordinary, high-performance aircraft you can own. Period."
There are two restored Sukhoi SU-27s for sale to the general public here. Military hardware removed, alas. Travel in style and speed - if not in comfort, and no worry about Jihadist bombers.
Why not buy both of them for a matched pair? When one is in the shop, no problem.
Sunday, December 27. 2009
 Had enuf cookies yet?
Among the host of other Christmas goodies, the BD pupettes produced a couple of dozen Ginger Snaps made with grated fresh ginger. All other Ginger Snaps pale in comparison.
The Holiday Train Show at the NY Botanical Garden runs thru Jan 10.
I am taking the Mrs. down to the Kandinsky show at the Guggenheim today. I am a Kandinsky fan.
Saturday, December 26. 2009
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