Maggie's Farm

Light Blogging Today

Your editor will be preoccupied today with an annual charity event tonight for a favorite conservation organization - Ducks Unlimited - which has over 700,000 members in the US and Canada, and over 11 million acres of wildlife habitat under protection and management.

We raise them a lot of money each year at a festive Christmas-themed guy's night out, but it's a fair amount of work getting things ready. Special thanks are due to Vineyard Vines, who has donated our table gifts this year, and to Windjammer Barefoot Cruises and Land Rover, who have been loyal supporters for many years.

Three Classics

For Christmas books for the youth, I highly recommend the two ancestors of self-help books, which together contain the ABCs of life, and one recent deserving addition. Corny, yes. Hip? No. Wise, yes. Still true? Absolutely. Indispensible when facing the big world.

In an era when we no longer live with grandpas and grandmas and aunts and uncles, we need books like these to fill us in on how the world works. Who else will teach us this stuff?

1. The Power of Positive Thinking by Norman Vincent Peale

2. How to Win Friends and Influence People, by Dale Carnegie

3. The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, by Stephen Covey

Dear Editor in Chief,

For a supposedly Christian-oriented blog, are you aware that you have two naked people on your front page right now, plus a frankly erotic, dare I say "post-coital" painting? This is not appropriate for a wholesome Christian family blog like Maggie's Farm, in my opinion, and I would respectfully request that you avoid such sorts of overly-stimulating and exciting postings in the future.

Sincerely,

Deeply Offended and Disappointed, in South Carolina

Dear Deeply,

As you have very perceptively noted, we have made a strategic editorial decision to become a sex-focused blog instead of the obscure, eclectic, thinking person's blog we have been in the past. We believe it will increase our readership if we limit ourselves to the subjects of guns, sex, violence, and rock 'n roll in the future. So, my dear Offended, just bear in mind that Markets Rule, Sex Sells, and humorlessness kills.

Sincerely,

Bird Dog, Editor Dog in Chief and Chief Financial Officer, Maggie's Farm, LLC

We are on a Botticelli (1445-1510) kick at the moment. If any college in New England needs someone to teach Europe: 1400-1565, we will do it with pleasure. Email us a generous contract, with benefits.
Venus and Mars (1483).

When giving treats to friends or children, give them what they like, emphatically not what is good for them.

G.K. Chesterton

Another book

I forget which blog recommended Istanbul: The Memory and the City, by Pamuk, but it looks excellent and goes on my Christmas list.

Did anyone miss this? Frank Rich's War, in the NY Sun. Or this on civilian deaths in Iraq: Logic Times?

In praise of Joe Lieberman. Ex-Donk

What is this? Click Aliyah Diary category to find out.

Ulpan: Progressive Judaism, and the Bankrupcy of Judaism in San Francisco. 11-9-05

    The Ulpan was so famous, I expect more physically imposing
structures, some international style of Mies, or perhaps Courboisier,
form following function, as our mental forms would follow the function
of our new language, new Semitic thoughts, biblical, spare, yet clear,
unwasted breath, nomadic laconicism.  Biblical brevity we learn, but
such knowledge is transmitted in tin sheds, concrete bunkers with
corrugated roofs, in the Mediterranean summer.  Our brains have Hebrew
baked into them.
    Situated at the Southern tip of Netanyah, the town itself is sun-worn
with streets named yearningly after the Riviera -- Nice, Aixe,
Provence -- by French-tongued North African Jewish transplants,
refugees who continue to long after La Patrie.
    The school, on grounds of a  half-star hotel, more a youth hostel,
often sans youth, is too far to walk on baking summer days; too long
to wait for the bus, a heat-beaten mini-van, still run by North
African schedule, in a time warped by Camus' sun, slowly, belatedly
(in American time).  The driver, should he be rushed, makes an upward
gesture with his hand, fingers pursed and tips pulsating at each other
as if to say, "I'm coming, I'm coming."
    From the town square, pass the beach and as the road ends, veer left
onto a rutted, gravel-embedded path that bounces you to the gate,  a
pseudo-security, a guard in the darkened shed, acting as if he has
smoked his nargilah at the last break. The gate is motorized,
electrified, slides open slowly, creakily and only partially, on
rusted rails.

Savonarola, Erasmus, and the pre-Reformation

I found a piece (actually, part of a lecture series by Kreis) which nicely and succinctly addresses what was going on in Italy, and in Europe, during the 1400s and early 1500s. Specifically, the differences in trends between northern and southern Europe; the power of Savonarola and his Bonfires of the Vanities; and the poor reputation of the Church at that time leading up to Luther.

To view Savonarola as a "bad guy" is to make the error of viewing history through our present point of view. He was a reformer, an evangelist, and a true believer with many intellectuals and artists as followers (including Lorenzo the Magnificent and Botticelli), and it was the Church's fear and distrust of him which led to his execution at the spot below, outside the Palazzo Vecchio, where I took this photo 12 days ago.

The greatest way to live with honor in this world is to be what we pretend to be.

Socrates (470 BC - 399 BC)

Ignorance is preferable to error. He is less remote from truth who believes nothing than he who believes what is wrong. 

Thomas Jefferson(Thanks, Paxety, who let us share his collection of favorite quotes.)

More book recommendations, and blog linking

I figure that Christmas is partly about getting, and giving, enough books to keep everyone out of trouble for a while. NRO has some book ideas (thanks, Charmaine), including Charmaine's recommendation of a Walker Percy, one of my favorites. But I think Love in the Ruins was his best - or maybe The Last Gentleman.

And, speaking of Charmaine, she has a very pointed cartoon which raises the question of why so many bloggers, like us, offer so many brief links to other bloggers and to news sources, instead of limiting ourselves to original writing.

We do it to share interesting things we find, and to be part of the conversation. Maybe it's a waste of energy and time: I don't know. As our contributor Opie famously said: "Those who can, do. Those who can't, link."

We provide a mixed bag, reflecting our many interests, and, as I like to say, we all just follow our doggy noses and see where they lead us.

Matthew 17:20

I tell you the truth, if you have faith as small as a mustard seed, you can say to this mountain, "Move from here to there" and it will move.

A Brooklynite, on Terrorism

Crude, straight-talking, humorous, X-rated video: Terrorists.wmv
Thanks, Steve, for this charming slice of real New York.

The discovery of a new dish does more for human happiness than the discovery of a new star.

Jean Anthelme Brillat-Savarin

A Promise

Thanksgiving is a wonderful holiday because it arrives during hunting season, and because it's not about giving and getting stuff - it's simply about gratitude and family bonds. But we hereby promise our readers to utter no party-pooper pieties about the commercialization of Christmas this year. However, we must also say that we

Remember Chrenkoff?

Is there life after blog? He was an excellent and productive blogger. I just found a piece of his I had saved for some reason. It's about Happiness. We hope Chrenkoff has found happiness in his new career.

Such as PenIsland.com. Here.

The Sporting Chef

Most of the guys I know do the game cooking in their houses. It's not only part of the ritual of hunting and fishing, but it's a way to treat the wild creatures with special respect.

Here's a site for the hunters: check the recipes.

The 50-50-90 rule: Anytime you have a 50-50 chance of getting

something right, there's a 90% probability you'll get it wrong.

Anon.

Tomb of Machiavelli

In Santa Croce, ten paces from Michelangelo's, and twenty paces from Galileo's. Lousy photo - they don't allow flash.

As Maggie's Farm readers know, Nick Machiavelli (1469-1527), the father of modern political science, was no dark, cynical, sinister thinker, just a hard-headed realist about human nature and the handling of political power. Practical, and a good writer, too.

A few of my favorite sound bites:

"Princes and governments are far more dangerous than other elements within society."

"The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him."

"The fact is that a man who wants to act virtuously in every way necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not virtuous." 

"The distinction between children and adults, while probably useful for some purposes, is at bottom a specious one, I feel. There are only individual egos, crazy for love." 

See Aliyah Diary category to learn what this is about.

Nov. 6, 2005

Rutie's Tears

    When Rutie, my teacher, finally broke into tears, it caught me in the
throat. I could barely sing.
    It started simply enough. Our ulpan classes gathered in Shulamit's
Tent for singing.  Opher, the moshav-dweller who plays piano -- and
flute, and accordion (which he prefers, as he feels he is one with the
instrument) and directs the choir, and gives us the tours, and is the
secular Torah/Mishnah/Gemarrah teacher --embraces me as I enter,
remembers me from two years ago. Embraces me with one of those bear
hugs that Mizrahi Jews are better at than us Ashkenazim.  (Patrick and
David know better of which I speak.)
    We are preparing for a Rabin memorial ceremony next week with the
visiting army troops.  The troops are to sing for us, and in
appreciation, Opher is preparing us to sing for them,.  An Israeli
gift. So, this gaggle of Argentine-accented, and French-accented, even
two Japanese-accented Hebrew students and a couple like me, are being
directed in Opher's spirited manner as he plays a tuneless piano, or
dons his accordian.  Before each song, Opher invites a teacher to read
and speak of the lyrics, we should know whereof we sing.  [Later, I
recall that Plato wanted to ban poetry (at that time, sung lyrics)
from the Republic, as music bypasses the rational and goes straight to
the heart. (So, right he is about that.  Leonard Bernstein gives five
characteristics by which to judge good music, then tacks on a sixth:
does it hit straight to the heart.)