Maggie's Farm

If you compete, you lose. Ironman Rev. Tod at It takes a church

Bill Clinton: "I just want them to tell the truth." Good grief. Hewitt

Do Americans play top level college tennis? Not very many. VDARE

A gentleman is never unintentionally rude.

Anon.

Yup, there they go controlling and manipulating prices again.

How dare they lower gas prices?

The country was just beginning to move toward alternative, green fuels, and suddenly they cheapen oil again. They cruelly squeezed us for a while, got rich on our poor backs, and now they give us a break, just when we all sold our Suburbans and bought these lame Priussies, sold our furnaces and replaced them with wood-burning stoves, and quit eating corn so they could make ethanol out of it.

But did they really give us a break? Naw. Now they will get rich on volume, instead of high prices. Crafty SOBs, aren't they? Almost like capitalists.

Who gave them the right to control prices? The government should make sure we have cheap   expensive  no  lots of  oil...oh heck, I don't know what. But the government should do it. Surely they know what is best, but it had better be cheap gas for my F150 - I need something to show for the taxes I pay.

Al Gore and the Dems, and the Greenies, have been arguing for higher gas prices, and higher gas taxes, for twenty years. They do not like oil. I do not know what they do like, but it isn't oil - unless it is in their own SUVs and their own furnaces.

Lowering oil prices is a crime against the environment and a crime against humanity. Big Oil needs to be investigated for this senseless, evil, greedy act of lowering oil prices.

Image: Edward Hopper's "Gas."

Now Harry Reid has joined the Clinton forces to frighten ABC. Will they be frightened? If so, it will be to the country's shame. This is not Iran, Harry. Jee whiz, even the left-wing NYT calls the film "evenhanded."

To me, this smells of totalitarianism, and is extremely creepy.

Contact ABC and tell them to tell the truth without fear or favor. NBC proves here that the Clintons dropped the ball with Osama. How, besides declining opportunities to kill Bin Laden? Well, these things could have caused some concern.

Cranes and barges salvage boats in CT ripped from their moorings during last week's storm. (Thanks for photo, Chris)

The blogger-commentator David Warren caught a bit of flak for raising questions about the behavior, and the "conversions" to Islam, of the two newsmen last week. He has written a reply to those who criticized him, here.

I have to say that I had similar reactions to Warren's as I saw the events unfold. I suspect that I would have done exactly what the two men did, but I would not have been happy about it. Renouncing your beliefs and your traditions, even at gunpoint, is not something to feel good about, even if the gunpoint renders the "conversion" invalid.

This is a better topic for our Dr. Bliss, because this is not my brief on this blog, and maybe I can extract a comment from her before I post this, but the story reminded me of the impossibility of getting through life without accumulating a dump-truck load of things to feel shame and guilt about.

No matter how careful and mindful we are, if we have a working conscience, we will accumulate that load. The offer of forgiveness from God is a miraculous blessing, but many of us find it impossible to forgive ourselves of such things - and I don't think that is a bad thing.

Similar to survival guilt, if I were Steve Centani I would find what I had done to save my skin to be a source of embarassment for many years. But I hope I would have had the fear,  practicality, and appropriate contempt for my captors, to do the same thing, and get home to my family and my warm bed.

Is it possible to get out in the world and to do things without accumulating shame and guilt? I doubt it. I think it's part of the burden of being human.

We all need someone we can feed on
And if you want it, you can feed on me
Take my arm, take my leg
Oh, baby, don't you take my head

Rolling Stones, Let it Bleed 

I see Praying Mantises all the time, motionlessly stalking bees and bugs in my rose bushes and raspberries. Huge bugs, but very well-camouflaged. Lady Praying Mantises are known to take the concept of giving head a bit too forcefully. They begin with the guy's head, then, once well-fertilized, end up consuming the rest of him. Maybe they get too excited.  Or perhaps it's a feminist thing, and it makes the charming Lorraine Bobbit (Hey, lonely guys! She is still looking for a date!) seem tame by comparison. NYT Science News

Summer is done. The beaches begin to be deserted, and school, work - Real Life - takes over. The leaves will be turning soon, and another hunting season will soon be upon us.

Ye olde blogge has a minor change: We have added a Food and Drink category, and we tried to collect, in there, most of our past posts on those subjects.

One comment on the evolution of blogs: We are seeing more blog-and-news aggregators, sites that combine the professionals with the amateurs, and blur the distinctions. Places like Pajamas, Powerline News, Town Hall  - we like them very much, and visit them, and admire their ambition, but they aren't much fun. I realize that is a deeply silly criticism, and we are in favor of blurring the pros from the people.

Those sites seek visibility, eyeballs, importance, and maybe even income. That's well and good. Maybe 8 million Americans visit blogs regularly - not a huge number. World-wide, who knows? Still, a tiny number.

Thus far, we have declined to get on board with these organizations. We do want more readers, but we do not really want ads, and our eclecticism doesn't really fit. We occupy a niche.

If you enjoy us, please bookmark us, send our site around, and, if you have a site, blogroll us. We will just "do our own thing" for now.

Maggie's Farm: always surprising. Or we try to be.

Thanks for reading us. We appreciate it.

The thing about tennis is: no matter how much I play, I'll never be as good as a wall. I played a wall once. They're ... relentless.

Mitch Hedberg (h/t, Owner's Manual)

Editor's Note: Our Aliyah Diary author (see the Aliyah Diary category on the left to find out about it) has applied to the IDF, and should find out by today whether he has been accepted. He is in his fifties, but is in good shape.)

9/4/06 

For all the 535 km. biked from Jerusalem to Eilat, for all the landscape, for all the blazing desert, which felt as if at times heat blasted from earth's core, roasting us ventrally, for all this and more, but a few moments remain scorched into memory, and a few people, in fact, two, remain memorable.

By day three, we are cleared by the military to ride the Philadelphii road, the coarsely gravelled road parallel to the Egyptian border.  We are warned.  If you need to piss, face away from the Egyptians, as they may take a forward-facer as offensive and shoot in return.  But, facing northwards, the pisser contends with the prevailing southerly winds.

Warning.  We will climb 400 meters to Qadesh Barnea, where Abraham and Sarah paused on their route to Egypt, where Moshe paused with tens of thousands of ex-slave Jews on return from Egypt, waiting to hear from the dozen spies' (a prince from each tribe) report on the land of Canaan from which these Jews had been absent for four hundred years. Then, we will descend slightly to begin the one kilometer ascent to Mount Harif (Mount Spicy), highest point in the Negev.

I feel my heart would burst as I snake the last few meters to Qadesh Barnea. But I also know that if I dismount, I won't remount.  I do not look upwards, but keep nose to wheel, occasionally slaloming to make the upward ascent less steep. This ascent gives new meaning to aliyah.  Oddly, it is the terribly bad, unmusical tom-tomming, of the crew above that gives me impetus, if not hope, that I can arrive.

I stand on Qadesh Barnea, looking downward and north, into Israel, a
landscape not so different than what Moshe saw: shaley shoulders descending to the baked, barren desert, of multiple soft, pastel hues, dead to the eye.  No life.  To imagine a land flowing with milk and honey takes much imagination, much hope, or at least a belief in a certain G-d.  Perhaps, it also took Moshe's belief in this rag-tag passel of people that they could find or create such a land.  No, from here, after a heart-bursting climb, I see more a land that consumes its inhabitants.  I am no Moshe at this moment, certainly no Caleb nor Joshua.

My late great local Italian gunsmith, who died a couple of years ago, could machine a new part from a hunk of steel, or build a new walnut stock. He didn't just "fix" guns - he could build one from scratch.

Niccola was a grouch ("The customer is always wrong"), he always acted as if he were doing you a favor to do a job, and his English was imperfect for sure, but he became a pal to his customers, and to me. White-collar men have a natural respect for those who can DO REAL THINGS.

In time, it got so I would waste an hour of Saturday morning errand-time hanging out in his shop, watching him work, and talking nonsense. He probably wished I would just leave, but the work was very interesting. The very cool but primitive machine tools. The layers of oil and sanding on a fine Turkish Walnut stock.

Before he got sick, he told me that he had ads at the High School job bulletin board for years - "Learn Gunsmithing locally, as an apprentice. Expert gunsmiths earn up to 100+/hour".

He never received a single phone call - and this High School has white kids, hispanic kids, black kids, poor kids, rich kids, - the works. "College-bound"? Haha. Anyone can go to some college, but most of them are glorified high schools themselves, desperate for bill-paying warm bodies. Foolish kids, not to welcome such an offer. When Niccola died, all of his art and skill and wisdom and knowledge and irreverence died with him. "Another Purdy? Piece of homemade English sheet. I do what I can with thees, OK?, when I finds the time. You wait, maybe 6, 8 month, we feex. Pain in neck, kappisch? No want to work on, but we do."

Our schools, and maybe our dopey culture, make everyone feel like a loser if they don't push paper and stare at screens, in a cubicle. This is so wrong, and really so condescending and contemptuous, that it makes me sick.

Matthew Crawford of UVa makes a case for manual labor and the trades:

So what advice should one give to a young person? By all means, go to college. In fact, approach college in the spirit of craftsmanship, going deep into liberal arts and sciences. In the summers, learn a manual trade. You’re likely to be less damaged, and quite possibly better paid, as an independent tradesman than as a cubicle-dwelling tender of information systems. To heed such advice would require a certain contrarian streak, as it entails rejecting a life course mapped out by others as obligatory and inevitable.

Entirely agree. Whole thing here, Shopcraft as Soulcraft, in The New Atlantis

By coincidence, this week Betsy posted a piece on the same subject, in which CNN reports a resurgence in Vocational Education. It's about time that our kids, and we, remember to respect real honest skilled work. I have never seen a gunsmith who was laid off, or not in control of his destiny, or unhappy with his work.

Images: Top: Gunsmiths building Virginia rifles from scratch at Colonial Williamsburg.  Bottom: Carpentry crew of PBS' This Old House.

Ephesians 6: 10-20

Finally, be strong in the Lord and in the strength of his power. ¹¹Put on the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to stand against the wiles of the devil. ¹²For our struggle is not against enemies of blood and flesh, but against the rulers, against the authorities, against the cosmic powers of this present darkness, against the spiritual forces of evil in the heavenly places. ¹³Therefore take up the whole armor of God, so that you may be able to withstand on that evil day, and having done everything, to stand firm. ¹⁴Stand therefore, and fasten the belt of truth around your waist, and put on the breastplate of righteousness. ¹⁵As shoes for your feet put on whatever will make you ready to proclaim the gospel of peace. ¹⁶With all of these, take the shield of faith, with which you will be able to quench all the flaming arrows of the evil one. ¹⁷Take the helmet of salvation, and the sword of the Spirit, which is the word of God. ¹⁸Pray in the Spirit at all times in every prayer and supplication. To that end keep alert and always persevere in supplication for all the saints.

¹⁹Pray also for me, so that when I speak, a message may be given to me to make known with boldness the mystery of the gospel, ²⁰for which I am an ambassador in chains. Pray that I may declare it boldly, as I must speak.

Michelle has the numbers to phone
to complain about their pro-illegal program. It's the job of citizens
to speak their minds.

(We are partial to Ballantine Ale, if you can find it. The big glass bottles, which make excellent .22 targets for enjoyable recycling/re-use.)

Good wholesome fun for the kids, and you.

Ballantine Ale and guns: perfect together.

"I ain't nobody's houseboy.
I ain't nobody's well-trained maid."

From this month's Rolling Stone piece on Dylan:

"I don't really have a herd of astrologers telling me what's going to happen. I just make one move after the other, this leads to that." Is the voice familiar? I'm sitting in a Santa Monica seaside hotel suite, ignoring a tray of sliced pineapple and sugar-dusty cookies, while Bob Dylan sits across from my tape recorder, giving his best to my questions. The man before me is fitful in his chair, not impatient, but keenly alive to the moment, and ready on a dime to make me laugh and to laugh himself. The expressions on Dylan's face, in person, seem to compress and encompass versions of his persona across time, a sixty-five-year-old with a nineteen-year-old cavorting somewhere inside. Above all, though, it is the tones of his speaking voice that seem to kaleidoscope through time: here the yelp of the folk pup or the sarcastic rimshot timing of the hounded hipster-idol, there the beguilement of the Seventies sex symbol, then again -- and always -- the gravel of the elder statesman, that antediluvian bluesman's voice the young aspirant so legendarily invoked at the very outset of his work and then ever so gradually aged into.

It is daunting to interview a legend. Read the whole thing.

Will launch on Sept. 6. Amazing photo borrowed from Calif Yank

"You think I'm over the hill?
Think I'm past my prime?
Let me see what you got,
We could have a whompin' good time."

From the AP
From CNN/Entertainment Weekly
From Rolling Stone
From Prefix Mag.
From Reuters

And, of course, Expecting Rain links every review to date.

The Rolling Stone piece is interesting in explaining the provenance of some of the songs (Dylan is at least as much of a thief as any other songster or artist, and he steals plenty from himself too), but most of the reviews I looked at miss the point. Bob has nothing "to say," in the socio-political sense, and hasn't wanted to have anything "to say" since he wrote My Back Pages (and some of his preachy re-born songs in the 70s). His songs are more like dreams. Some people still want him to tell them about life. Heck, all of our lives are more normal than his is: we could teach him about normal life. He's been wealthy, and covered with girls, fame, and adulation since his early 20s.

No, it's about the song. If a song - or any music - is effective, and has any staying power, it carries us, or invites us, into its own world, which is the world of the imagination, and, if it contains truth, the world of the heart and the soul. For me, that is what gives a song, or a piece of music or art, its quality of inevitability - not predictability - but the feeling that it was more discovered than constructed. "We live, and we die, we know not why, but I'll be with ya when the deal goes down."

Thunder on the Mountain, and Spirit on the Water, have that. I am not saying that they are immortal art, but they sure are up there with Muddy Waters and Stephen Foster. Dylan's road band can play anything, and I like him on piano.

But a critique of the American economy?!?!?!  Gimme a break. Or a commentary on Katrina? Idiotic. Some reviewers seem to expect Bob to be a musical blogger. This is a guy who has been writing about floods and weather almost since the time of Noah, like all the old blues guys do and did, and this is a guy who liked Barry Goldwater, who loves Teddy Roosevelt; a guy who wrote "I become my own enemy in the instant that I preach," and who very much enjoys making money doing what he does.)

It is a delight and a fascination to hear the latest Bob has offered us, for a pittance.  But to hear him live, amongst the yuppies, college students, and the grey-haired pony-tails with their pot smoke, and the kids, and the regular folk, is to really see how much he wants to give for as long as he can. Me? I am partial to his mean and nasty blues.

He is a troubadour.

I doubt that even cat-lovers consider "pussification" to be a compliment.

Being "a man" isn't the same thing as being male. Manhood must be practiced and learned. Responsibility, courage, strength, honor, honesty, dignity, dependability, emotional restraint, physical competence, risk-taking, determination, independence, handling failures, self-discipline,  endurance, not complaining, pitching in, doing the hard thing, doing the right thing, sacrifice, the willingness to kill or die to protect things you treasure - none of these virtues is an automatic gift of the Y chromosome, even if the genetic foundation is there.

They are difficult skills to learn, and most guys have to learn them the hard way - through their failures and disappointments - even if they have good role models. They are at least as difficult to learn as it is to learn how to be a good mother, or how to be a good citizen. I do suspect that they are more difficult to master, but those skills, and others, are the foundations of male self-respect. Guys have to have a code to live by, and it isn't "their feelings." Animals can live by their "feelings." And it goes for women, too.

A "feminized" culture (I use quotes because it's the term people use, but I don't think that strong, pioneer-minded women need to be weak or childish at all) which values emotional gratification, and gratification in general, over sturdy, adult, and demanding virtues, is lame and decadent.  I do not even need to bring religion into the discussion to say that life is not about our gratification. That's for little kids, social workers, Californians, and many of our lost-in-the-wilderness European and Canadian cousins (who seem to still want Kings to take care of them while they lounge in cafes and complain about their "benefits," for which better men and women are paying ...but being taxed to death for your achievements doesn't exactly inspire effort and risk, or any other admirable qualities. It just inspires a pathetic, and profoundly un-American and infantile "gimme mine" attitude).

Who could imagine Atticus Finch protesting about his benefits? Or wanting to get paid for his aching back?

 Classical Values reminded us of an archival and classic Kim du Toit piece, "The Pussification of the Western Male."

We have become a nation of women.

It wasn’t always this way, of course. There was a time when men put their signatures to a document, knowing full well that this single act would result in their execution if captured, and in the forfeiture of their property to the State. Their wives and children would be turned out by the soldiers, and their farms and businesses most probably given to someone who didn’t sign the document.

There was a time when men went to their certain death, with expressions like “You all can go to hell. I’m going to Texas.” (Davy Crockett, to the House of Representatives, before going to the Alamo.)

There was a time when men went to war, sometimes against their own families, so that other men could be free. And there was a time when men went to war because we recognized evil when we saw it, and knew that it had to be stamped out.

There was even a time when a President of the United States threatened to punch a man in the face and kick him in the balls, because the man had the temerity to say bad things about the President’s daughter’s singing.

We’re not like that anymore.

Read it all, and enjoy it.

Sissy might know more about this type of sunflower, which is in bloom right now at Maggie's. I don't know whether they are a wildflower, or escapes.

More Bob stuff, including the video of When the Deal Goes Down.

I have heard the new record but I am not going to write a comment other than to say that it has an old-timey feel. 

On the week of the release of Dylan's new record, a review of his career, and a book on Bob's (largely uninformative) interviews, by Menand in the New Yorker. A quote:

Dylan’s words—he has said as much—are often placeholders, devices to fit the melody and fill out the line, which is why dutiful efforts to extract a message or a meaning are largely beside the point. If you want a message, buy a newspaper. “Songs are songs,” Dylan says in one of his early interviews. “I don’t believe in expecting too much out of any one thing.”

Sloppy or not, Dylan is astonishingly prolific; he has written more than five hundred songs. Most of them are lovely (or angry or joyous or wickedly sly or all of those things together). Many of them are unforgettable. (A new album, Dylan’s forty-fourth, called “Modern Times,” is being released this month. The songs are simple riffs, with laid-back arrangements, and all feature prominently Dylan’s gorgeous late-period croak. It sounds a little the way “Buena Vista Social Club” might have sounded if Cuba had been the birthplace of the blues.) The only comparable pop songbook from the era is Lennon-McCartney—and there were two of them. Dylan is also, despite the silly things people said about his voice when he started out, one of pop music’s greatest vocalists. His chief weakness is a tendency to shout, particularly in performance (and he is, let us say, an inconsistent performer); but, when he is in control of the instrument, no one’s voice, with that kind of music, is more textured or more beautiful.

Ninety per cent of musicianship is phrasing, and the easiest way to appreciate Dylan’s genius for phrasing is to listen to him, on bootlegs or on the late albums of traditional songs, perform songs that he didn’t write—“Folsom Prison Blues,” or “People Get Ready,” or “Froggie Went A-Courtin’.” He gets it all. When my children were little, we used to have a cassette around the house of songs for kids by pop stars, on which Dylan did “This Old Man” (“With a knick-knack paddywhack, give the dog a bone”). That performance had the weight of the whole world in it. I listened to it a hundred times and never got tired of it. You can refute Hegel, Yeats said, but not the Song of Sixpence.

Jeff Goldstein, commenting on a Steele piece - one quote:

Specifically, a medievalist, pre-modern mindset like the one animating the Islamofascist movement is, ironically, quite adept at using postmodern observations about the nature of truth to sustain a rhetorical advantage over the West.  And it does so by playing to the West’s arrogance—its idea that, because it has embraced the tenet of multiculturalism, it is somehow showing itself to be tolerant and nuanced in its dealings with the Other.

But recent history has shown us that all this Western “understanding” is a ruse.  Instead, it is a mindset that pretends to an understanding by deferring to the Other, a maneuver that serves only to undermine Enlightenment principles and ideas of universal rights while simultaneously giving control of the identity narrative to groups it purports to “understand”, who are then able to use that control to affect victim status, define and shame their enemies, and bracket out unfriendly criticisms. 

But this only works because the premises have been accepted by many in the western intelligensia, and have, from there, made their way into public and social policy....

I am not certain that those premises have been truly accepted. Some of that might be a ruse, and a pose, too. Good piece. Read entire.

Nathan sent us this piece from Israel:

A Father's Ode to His Lost Son

Sunday, August 27, 2006; B01
David Grossman, a leading Israeli novelist and peace activist, lost his soldier-son, Uri, earlier this month. Uri was serving on the front lines in Lebanon and was killed two days before the U.N.-brokered cease-fire. He died two weeks before his 21st birthday. His father delivered these remarks at his funeral on Aug. 16.

My Dearest Uri,
For the last three days, almost every thought has had a "won't" in it. He won't come home, we won't talk, we won't laugh. That boy with the ironic gaze and the awesome sense of humor won't be anymore. That young man with the wisdom so much more profound than his age won't be anymore. That warm smile and that healthy appetite won't be anymore, that uncommon combination of determination and tenderness won't be
anymore, his common sense and discernment won't be anymore. We won't have Uri's infinite gentleness, nor the calm that steadies every storm. We won't watch "The Simpsons" and "Seinfeld" together anymore, we won't listen to Johnny Cash with you, and we won't feel your strong, soothing embrace. We won't see you walking with your big brother, Yonatan, conversing with exuberant gestures, and we won't see you hug your little sister, Ruti, the love of your heart.

Uri, my beloved:
Throughout your brief life we all learned from you. From your strength and your determination to follow your own path. To follow it even if there is no chance at all of succeeding. We marveled at your battle to get accepted into tank commanders' course. You didn't give in to your officers because you knew that you could be a good commander, and you weren't prepared to make do with contributing less than you were able. And when you succeeded, I thought: Here's a man who knows his abilities in such a simple and sober way. Without conceit and without arrogance. Unaffected by what others say about him. Whose source of strength lies within.

You were like that from childhood. A boy who lives in harmony with himself and with those around him. A boy who knows his place, knows that he is loved, is aware of his limitations, and knows what's special about him. And, really, from the moment you bent the entire army to your will and became a commander, it was clear what kind of commander and human being you would be. Today, we hear from your comrades and soldiers about the sergeant and the friend, about the guy who gets up before everyone to organize everything, and who goes to sleep after everyone else has already dozed off.

And yesterday, at midnight, I looked around the house, which was a mess after the hundreds of people who had come to console us, and I said: Okay, now we need Uri, to help put things straight.

You were the left-winger in your battalion, and they respected you, because you held fast to your opinions without dodging a single one of
your military responsibilities. I remember you telling me about your roadblock policy -- you spent a lot of time manning roadblocks in the territories. You said that if there is a child in a car you pull over, you always begin by trying to calm the kid down, to make him laugh. That you always remind yourself that the kid is about Ruti's age. And you'd always remind yourself how frightened he is of you. And how much he hates you, and that he has reasons for that, and still, you will do all you can to make that terrifying moment easier for him, while doing your job, without fudging.

1. Do not hear
2. Do not open your mouth
3. Do not rebuke anyone
4. Make yourself foolish in this world

Cassian, from a piece at Middlebrow