Maggie's Farm

Dirda reviews Columbia Prof David Damrosch's new book on the discovery of the earliest classic of world literature.

Among other things, Damrosch raises the question of whether the tale is about what we have always been taught (death and immortality), or whether it is a tale about the consequences of being a king.

Image is an Assyrian bas-relief of Gilgamesh conquering lions.

Major French scientist changes tune on global warming, and decries politicization of research. Canada Post

As more scientists dare to come forward, the "consensus" will be shown to be a fraud.

Meanwhile, Al Gore and Soros plan the New World Order. And we learn how hybrids pollute.

A guy goes to the Dr. for a chest cold. The Dr. listens through his stethescope and prescribes something.  The bill: $100.  The guy says: $100 for five minutes!?!  The Dr. replies: No - for twenty years of education and experience to know what's wrong in five minutes.

We mentioned one of our favorite little hide-aways in NYC in our piece on cool NYC websites a long time ago. One thing we like about the Campbell Apartment is that it is in Grand Central Station, and thus very convenient when waiting on a train. Plus I do like it. They know how to make a Martini.

The story of their overnight conversion to posh is amusing. NYT

A book from our new pal, Hog on Ice (h/t, Comrade Right Wing Nation):

Solomonia  located and posted this photo, and I hope he does not mind our borrowing it.

U.S. Navy Capts. Craig Williams, front, and Richard Butler fly in F/A-18C Hornet aircraft over USS Ronald Reagan (CVN 76) Mar. 1, 2007, during an aerial change of command ceremony while under way in the Pacific Ocean. Williams was relieved by Butler as commander of Carrier Air Wing Fourteen during the ceremony. DoD photo by Lt. Cmdr. Tam Pham, U.S. Navy. (Released)
Photo by: LT. CMDR. TAM PHAM, USS RONALD REAGAN (CVN 76)

An Amish boy and his father were in a mall.  They were amazed by almost everything they saw, but especially by two shiny, silver walls that could move apart and then slide back together again.

The boy asked, "What is this, Father?"

The father (never having seen an elevator) responded, "Son, I have never seen anything like this in my life, I don't know what it is."

While the boy and his father were watching with amazement, a fat old lady in a wheel chair moved up to the moving walls and pressed a button.  The walls opened and the lady rolled between them into a small room. The walls closed and the boy and his father watched the small circular numbers above the walls light up sequentially.  They continued to watch until it reached the last number and then the numbers began to light in the reverse order.

Finally the walls opened up again and a gorgeous 24-year-old blonde stepped out.

The father said quietly to his son....."Go get your mother."

(Borrowed from a cartoon selection at Flopping Aces)

The guy who wrote The Soldier:

If I should die, think only this of me: 
That there's some corner of a foreign field 
That is forever England. There shall be 
In that rich earth a richer dust concealed; 
A dust whom England bore, shaped, made aware, 
Gave, once, her flowers to love, her ways to roam; 
A body of England's, breathing English air, 
Washed by the rivers, blest by suns of home. 
And think, this heart, all evil shed away, 
A pulse in the eternal mind, no less 
Gives somewhere back the thoughts by England given; 
Her sights and sounds; dreams happy as her day; 
And laughter, learnt of friends; and gentleness, 
In hearts at peace, under an English heaven.

also wrote this (excerpted from The Old Vicarage, Grantchester):

God! I will pack, and take a train,
And get me to England once again!
For England's the one land, I know,
Where men with Splendid Hearts may go;
And Cambridgeshire, of all England,
The shire for Men who Understand;
And of THAT district I prefer
The lovely hamlet Grantchester.
For Cambridge people rarely smile,
Being urban, squat, and packed with guile;
And Royston men in the far South
Are black and fierce and strange of mouth;
At Over they fling oaths at one,
And worse than oaths at Trumpington,
And Ditton girls are mean and dirty,
And there's none in Harston under thirty,
And folks in Shelford and those parts
Have twisted lips and twisted hearts,
And Barton men make Cockney rhymes,
And Coton's full of nameless crimes,
And things are done you'd not believe
At Madingley on Christmas Eve.
Strong men have run for miles and miles,
When one from Cherry Hinton smiles;
Strong men have blanched, and shot their wives,
Rather than send them to St. Ives;
Strong men have cried like babes, bydam,
To hear what happened at Babraham.
But Grantchester! ah, Grantchester!
There's peace and holy quiet there,
Great clouds along pacific skies,
And men and women with straight eyes,
Lithe children lovelier than a dream,
A bosky wood, a slumbrous stream,
And little kindly winds that creep
Round twilight corners, half asleep.
In Grantchester their skins are white;
They bathe by day, they bathe by night;
The women there do all they ought;
The men observe the Rules of Thought.
They love the Good; they worship Truth;
They laugh uproariously in youth;
(And when they get to feeling old,
They up and shoot themselves, I'm told) . . .

His grave, on the Greek island of Skyros, bears these words:

'Here lies the servant of God, sub-lieutenant in the English Navy,
who died for the deliverance of Constantinople from the Turks'

This Roy Lichtenstein lifted from our cousin Mr. Free Market:

Maggie's Farm is blocked - censored - in China. No wonder when I check the Sitemeter world map of visits to Maggie's, China is a big dark blotch, same as Africa.

I hate to think of all of those people being deprived of our handy-dandy farming advice.

Maybe they don't like our Farmalls and our International Harvesters.

Good ol' Right Wing Nation found the the site that tests whether your blog or website is blocked in China.

Who does this for them? Google?

“If someone came into your house and offered you a cocktail of butanol, iso amyl alcohol, hexanol, phenyl ethanol, tannin, benzyl alcohol, caffeine, geraniol, quercetin, 3-galloyl epicatechin, 3-galloyl epigallocatchin and inorganic salts, would you take it?”

Question was raised here, h/t Junk Science. Sure you would drink it. It's a cup of tea.

Iowahawk has a plan to save Gaia. It's about carbon credits, natch.

Good timing for Iowahawk's piece, as we learn today that the Rev. Al buys his carbon credits from himself! We told ya that he doesn't believe his own BS. Just another political con man, doing a "virtuous" schtick. As the NJ notes below, if he really believed it, and if he were truly worried, he would live differently.

The Free and Independent Republic of West Florida. Its complex history here.

“Drink deep…or taste not,” is a direction full as applicable to Religion, if we would find it a source of pleasure, as it is to knowledge. A little Religion is, it must be confessed, apt to make men gloomy, as a little knowledge to render them vain: hence the unjust imputation often brought upon Religion by those whose degree of Religion is just sufficeint, by condemning their course of conduct, to render them uneasy; enough merely to impair the sweetness of the pleasures of sin, and not enough to compensate for the relinquishment of them by its own peculiar comforts. Thus these men bring up, as it were, an ill report of the land of promise, which, in truth, abounds with whatever, in our journey through life, can best refresh and strengthen us.

William Wilberforce (h/t, Middlebrow)

A Russian drive-thru:

I would cut off Ronald McDonald's head!

Indeed this is beyond parody. 

Has everybody forgotten about "Live and let live."?

Also, I'd bet a fiver that the Prince of Wales has never enjoyed a Big Mac with a large fries - hold the pickles, and therefore knows nothing about the subject.

David Brooks determines that there is evil in the hearts of men.

(h/t, Jules C)

Propaganda does not deceive people; it merely helps them to deceive themselves.

Eric Hoffer

For PhDs in Car Control only. YouTube. The parallel parking is the best. Can't wait to try it downtown.