Maggie's Farm

From our veranda, near the ship's bridge:

Just two more photos of Naples below - 

Less than an hour outside Tunis is Sidi Bou Said, the blue and white waterfront town made famous by artists and writers. By remarkable coincidence, our Dylanologist had just been reading a piece on organic urban development in Sidi Bou Said: Decoding Sidi Bou Said at Emergent Urbanism.

It's the city of the Jasmine flower. I only took a few snaps, but there are more here. I was too busy bargaining with the Tunisians. In North Africa, nothing has an assigned price. It's all negotiation, and in the souks of Tunis it can get a bit overly-aggressive - almost physical. No, it does get a bit physical at times when they grab your arm to pull you into their shop, or try to block your escape. I did accuse Mrs. BD of possessing Berber blood because she is so good at the game, but I did need to assert a masculine presence one time when the guy didn't want to give her her change for her twenty.

The temperature was 110 F. I sweated until my body ran out of sweat.

Women were advised to wear modest clothing when visiting Tunisia, but the sexy outfits of these local young local women surprised me. However, about half of the women there wore scarves or burkhas.

Some snaps of a glove shop in Rome. Mrs. BD thought our readers of the feminine persuasion might like these top-notch gloves, soft as a baby's bottom. It's Sermoneta Gloves.

Cool colors, I must admit.

 More glove photos below -

I like sitting in European cafes, sipping a cafe or a beer, maybe having a smoke, and watching the world go by. I also like running around trying to see everything noteworthy, but as I get older I appreciate just soaking up the atmosphere and the feel of a place.

I have seen, and prayed in, more medieval cathedrals than my brain can ever absorb, and I do not do shopping.

The isle of Capri (in Italian, accent on the first syllable) helps form the Bay of Naples. It is all steep granite mountains and crags rising out of the sea. The beaches are rocks. You get there from Napoli via high-speed hydrofoil ferries.

Roman emperors (Tiberius, Augustus) had get-away villas there, but the Brits re-popularized it as a fashionable summer spot in the 1800s. We found it to be full of Brits and Italians (the Italian women dressed to the nines, of course and the American women dressed for a visit to WalMart) on holiday.

From our ferry, here's another Capri ferry passing in front of Vesuvius and Naples suburbs in the background. (We opted out of Herculaneum or Pompeii - been there, done that.)

Besides Capri pants and their ceramics, the island is famous for their hand-made women's sandals. Thus Mrs. BD spent a few hours sandal-shopping. Here's the workbench at a sandal shop, when the guy stepped away for a minute. His sandals cost around 160 Euros. He will make one for your feet, with your choice of design and decoration, in about an hour. I guess he makes close to $200/hour or more with his talent, skill, and fashion sense.

More Capri snaps and comments below -

Thanks to all Farmers for pitching in so energetically over the past couple of weeks to keep Maggie's fresh, entertaining, and informative.

Our frenetic writers can throttle back this week because everybody will be back on board.

I, for one, will begin a little series of snaps of my travels. The plan is to not make it dull. I know that other peoples' travel snaps can be. I aim for informative.

For some doggone reason, regardless of the camera used, my photo skills seem to have achieved a new low in quality while the places I have visited have been remarkable. So be it.

Photo is your Editor, perusing a hefty wine list last week. (As is too evident, I do not use fake bow ties when dressed properly for dinner.)

I loved The Avengers.

This episode is a classic, linked via SDA.

 Here they are. (h/t, Smart Christian) Examples:

Resolved, That I will do whatsoever I think to be most to God's glory, and my own good, profit and pleasure, in the whole of my duration.

Resolved to do whatever I think to be my duty, and most for the good and advantage of mankind in general.

Resolved to do this, whatever difficulties I meet with, how many and how great soever.

Resolved, Never to lose one moment of time, but improve it the most profitable way I possibly can.

Resolved, Never to do any thing, which I should be afraid to do, if it were the last hour of my life.

Resolved, To be endeavoring to find out fit objects of charity and liberality.

Resolved, To maintain the strictest temperance in eating and drinking.

Do we find Edwards' life fascinating? Yes, as we have noted previously. We view him as the link between the Pilgrims and the Founding Fathers.

Besides writing and thinking and preaching and raising ten kids, Edwards loved to take a boat down from MA to NYC for  lobsters, oysters, and good conversation with the Presbyterians. Probably also to get a break from all of the kids. 

Except for a brief stint in a Presbyterian church in NYC after graduating from college, Edwards spent most of his life in western MA, which in the 1730s and 40s was frontier. He was fired as Pastor of Northampton (actually, voted out by the town government, which hired and paid the pastors in those days) because they felt he was overly harsh about morality. So he moved west to become the pastor of the Indian mission town of Stockbridge.

He ended his career with a brief Presidency of The College of New Jersey (now Princeton), where he died after a smallpox inoculation at age 54. A Yale grad who had excelled in the sciences, Edwards followed fellow Yale grad Aaron Burr Sr, of Fairfield, CT, in that job.

J. S. Bach

A re-post from 2007 -

Paul Davis, author of Cosmic Jackpot: Why Our Universe is Just Right for Life, has an opinion piece in the NYT: Taking Science on Faith. It begins:

Science, we are repeatedly told, is the most reliable form of knowledge about the world because it is based on testable hypotheses. Religion, by contrast, is based on faith. The term “doubting Thomas” well illustrates the difference. In science, a healthy skepticism is a professional necessity, whereas in religion, having belief without evidence is regarded as a virtue.

The problem with this neat separation into “non-overlapping magisteria,” as Stephen Jay Gould described science and religion, is that science has its own faith-based belief system. All science proceeds on the assumption that nature is ordered in a rational and intelligible way. You couldn’t be a scientist if you thought the universe was a meaningless jumble of odds and ends haphazardly juxtaposed. When physicists probe to a deeper level of subatomic structure, or astronomers extend the reach of their instruments, they expect to encounter additional elegant mathematical order. And so far this faith has been justified.

The most refined expression of the rational intelligibility of the cosmos is found in the laws of physics, the fundamental rules on which nature runs. The laws of gravitation and electromagnetism, the laws that regulate the world within the atom, the laws of motion — all are expressed as tidy mathematical relationships. But where do these laws come from? And why do they have the form that they do?

Read the whole thing. Jonah Lehrer at The Frontal Cortex in a piece titled The Faith of Scientists expands on the topic, referring to the ideas of philosopher V.W.O. Quine. A quote:

When Quine came up with his holistic version of knowledge, he also demonstrated that our most necessary scientific principles are actually the least provable. For example, most scientists, when asked what constitutes the starting principles of reality, will probably say something about one of nature's fundamental laws, like gravity or the theory of natural selection. But these are precisely the same things that we will never see directly. (As Gertrude Stein once wrote, "The laws of science are paper laws, they make believe that they do something.")

Read this whole thing too. The notion that the laws of nature have no existence seems obvious, but it turned on a lightbulb for me. The point, as I see it, is not to discredit the scientific method or scientific theorizing, or to glibly equate science with religion: the point is that we must have humility about the depth of our knowledge.

Photo: Starburst Galaxy NCG 3310 "blazing with star formation", from the Hubble site.

A re-post from our archives -

The Bird Dog family enjoys providing coffee hour at church. It's a gratifying ministry because it promotes fellowship. The more goodies you provide, the more fellowship you nurture, and the longer folks stick around and get to know eachother.

If a church is a manifestation of the living body of Christ, you can't have loose body parts all over the place: a congregation needs to congregate, in small groups and in large. Other churches in the area have copied our tradition of providing more than coffee and a pitiful bowl of goldfish crackers. We do brunch, essentially. Here is what we brought today:

Bagels and cream cheese; red and white grapes; plain pound cake, sesame pound cake, walnut pound cake; Vermont cheddar, brie, and Roquefort cheese and crackers; blanched carrots, broccoli, sugar snap peas and string beans with blue cheese dip; strawberries with sugar to dip them into (no matter how many you bring, they will disappear fast - the kids go for them like piranhas); cheese "Danish" pastries, tortilla chips with that excellent Costco salsa and Costco guacamole; corn muffins, chocolate chip muffins and blueberry muffins; croissants. Coffee, cider, and orange juice. I forgot to bring the sliced red peppers for the vegetable dip, and forgot the strawberry jam for the corn muffins.

I was surprised by how the blue cheese disappeared first today, and I brought a huge hunk. We don't bring doughnuts anymore because the little kids stuff themselves with them and the fussy parents don't seem thrilled with that. Next time, I think we'll bring a spiral-cut ham with honey mustard, and slice up a mountain of baguettes. This would be good with a ton of sliced melons. (Too bad we don't do wine and beer too - people would never go home.)

Information designer Tom Wujec on how the brain makes connections, in 6 quick minutes:

h/t, Wilkinson

It's a heck of a line-up, but, still, Bob does it best alone. For you youngsters, this song was Bob's Goodbye to "causes," and his Hello to the heart and soul. McGuinn's guitar dominates.

When I was coming up, "Ask Andy" was the first thing I read in the afternoon papers after school, even before the funny pages.

Along with my Dad's interests, Andy was the one who got me interested in science. He even used one of my questions once. I think it was about animal camouflage, but I cannot swear to that. I eventually went on to love chemistry and biochem and geology and every miraculous thing in Creation - as a dilettante, of course.

I was delighted to find this piece on Ask Andy. Good memories from an innocent time.

Do any of our readers remember him?

Don't pick a fight with an old man. If he is too old to fight, he'll just kill you.

Anon. h/t, Old Misery Guts, whose site quote is:

"Life is mostly froth and bubble,
Two things stand like stone,
KINDNESS in another's trouble,
COURAGE in your own."

- Adam Lindsay Gordon

This 1947 22' wood Chris Craft Sportsman is for sale here.

Another reminiscence from our buddy Nathan (now a prominent Psychoanalyst living and working in Israel) from his years working for the Indian Health Service -

A crushed chest, bolo tie and porcupine quill earrings marked my exit from Eagle Butte, Lakota Sioux Reservation.  Only tie and earrings were planned; the crushed chest was almost preordained, however. Mrs. Alpren was the organizer, the mover of my goodbye bash. A sheet cake smeared heavily with white frosting, a Sioux warrior astride his horse dressed the top.  The regular docs were covering the floor and E.R. so that I and La femme de ma vie - of the moment (LFDMV) were feted.  The nurses filled the doctors’ lounge, as did former patients and their family members. I recognized some of the women who had snaked around my first clinic, waiting quietly, somberly, with some embarrassment for their first Birth Control Prescriptions, the plastic rings marking each day of the cycle. John Running Horse, still limping, but without a cast.  Before many words were spoken, before I had to face that awkwardness of how to say goodbye, mean sincerely how moved I was by these  people, yet leaving them, the call came.

Being flown in by Tim, the cropduster, was John Captured Alive (how these names endured, I never learned), who was found after being run over by a truck. He had fallen asleep beneath the truck after a heavy drunk.  John was known for the heavy drunks, but this was his first doze beneath a truck. He arrived with his chest flailing, both sides: he had a crushed chest. This flailing is a desperate movement, like the mad fluttering of a damaged moth, while the person strains to get air into his chest: it won’t expand.  For this, I recalled, one needs to “inflate” the chest, stabilize the fractured ribs, by negative pressure. Then, he could be evacuated to a bigger hospital, perhaps Mobridge. But, Mrs. Alpern said that there was no modern vacuum to reinflate. I knew he would not survive without this. I remembered my old professor of anesthesiology once taught us to care for the patient before worrying about the respirator. He also told us of the “old days” when they had to make do. When babies in Africa were dying of cholera and it was too difficult to place IV’s in their veins, he would sluice fluids subcutaneously under the skin of their backs; most revived within hours and many survived. And for crushed chests, old vacuum bottles. Big, gallon-sized, thick-walled vessels whose wavey glass revealed its faults and heftiness. Such bottles my mother had used to brew sweet wine in the kitchen, lined up along the wall, rags stuffed in their mouths, emitting a sweet, almost vinegary fragrance.

Mrs. Alpren remembered these; had used them years back; got two and hooked them together with heavy rubber tubes, one in, one out between the bottles. From the first bottle a tube went to the patient; from the second, to a vacuum in the O.R. wall. While she assembled, I quickly draped and prepped the chest with Betadine.  As I swiveled left to repeat, the hospital priest, truly named Father Casper, had tip-toed behind and to my right: while giving last rights, sprinkled water on my sterile site. I said, a bit too sharply, “He’s not yours yet,” and re-prepped.  A sharp incision between the ribs, a tube inserted, a few stitches to make a tight skin seal, the vacuum turned on, Captured Alive’s chest stopped flailing and rose, and filled.  The O2 into his nose now could flow into his lungs.

We called Mobridge; an ambulance arrived with a diminutive electric-powered pump to take over our bottle-array. Dr. L. agreed to ride shot-gun with Captured Alive and I returned to my goodbye party.  LFDMV was styling the porcupine quilled pierced earrings. Mrs. A. explained that the needles were flattened by the artist’s teeth.  LFDMV slipped the noose of the beaded bolo tie over my head. The knot itself was beaded and she slid that snugly to my throat. I felt a bit hybrid: cowboyish and Indianer.

I try to say something felt: how warmly I was received by the Sioux, how they trusted me with their children’s well-being, how appreciative they were. But, when I say that it would be hard to leave, Mrs. Alpern – reliably honest Mrs. Alpern – asks, “So, why are you leaving?”  To this, I am speechless.

This was the tribe Erik Erikson had studied in the 1930’s, this German-Jewish refuge to America, learning about childhoods. He described the quiet despair of the Sioux versus the robust resilience of the Yurok after the White man arrived. The despair I still saw. The people I left. The bolo? Gone with the earrings and the LFDMV.

But, not the memories. Not gone.

A re-post -

In a comment on our piece about clear-cutting, a reader let us know about this book: 1491: New Revelations about the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann.

Human fantasies about the Garden of Eden, like human utopian fantasies, just never give up. You might almost think we all wish we were back in the womb.

I ordered the book, but here's a quote from Charles Mann's 2002 essay in The Atlantic on the subject:

Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.

It's a fascinating subject to me. Here's the whole essay.

Image: An early version of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom

Via View from 1776:

Confined recently to nights in a hotel room in a foreign city I had the luck to find the most exhilarating piece of popular history I had read in a long time. The book is How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It—a title which doubles as a summary. It is the latest by Arthur Herman, an American who is establishing a niche for himself as a gutsy revisionist and prime mover of the Western Heritage Programme within the Smithsonian in Washington DC. His book is “Scotch” as we would say in Canada by which we mean solid and not kidding. (Well a little droll but so is single malt.) ??The book unfolds the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century for the intelligent general reader—which for all its significance to the world we now inhabit is little studied or appreciated. It is almost the opposite of intellectually sexy, all achievement and no tragic pause. For the truth is wherever you look into “modernity” you find Scottish antecedents. From 1745 on they were Scots who altered our whole view of education and law who invented our modern economics and social studies; our medicine and engineering too; who shook down conceited practices in everything from history to theology—in each turning an inherited essentially mediaeval amalgam of prejudice and guesswork into a systematic study whose new focus would be the welfare of mankind.

The paradox is that this achievement was made in a thinly-populated country that had lost its political independence in the Act of Union of 1707 and which was a squalid backwater removed from the elegant royal courts of Europe.

Read the whole post. We have always been interested in the Scottish Enlightenment. See this old post,

If my teeth were not half-rotten, I would still be a regular Lifesaver consumer.

Regarding the 5-flavor packs, I always appreciated the person who observed that "The orange ones don't taste like oranges -they taste like orange color." That guy understood the magic of Lifesavers.

Here's one fact you don't know about them: The candy was invented in 1912 by the poet Hart Crane's father, Clarence Crane of Garrettsville, Ohio. He was a chocolate manufacturer who, in the resourceful American way, was looking to invent a summertime candy - one which wouldn't get soft or melt in the heat.

Here's another factoid: Their first flavor was Pep-O-Mint. 

From 1920-1985, Lifesavers were manufactured in the handsome Lifesaver Building below on Main St. in Port Chester, NY. Now condos, it is still known as the Lifesaver Building. For a few generations, anyone riding the New Haven Line would see those giant, cheerful, colorful Lifesaver models on the grass in front of the copper-green trimmed building.