Maggie's Farm

Poetry

Maggie's Farm is determined to do its part in bringing poetry back into style. We have always been intellectual fashion leaders..really! Cutting edge, or as J.S. says, "bleeding edge."  Poetry is just the words - without the music. Our souls have to add the music, mainly by reading it out loud. My beef with Shakespeare education is that they make the dopey kids READ it. Wrong!  as Jim Cramer would say.  It has to be seen and heard - it was never meant to be read in study hall (and - dont forget, Teacher - it is called entertainment). It's the difference between looking at a blueprint and walking through a building. Anyway, I am so pleased that the good old liberal Camille Paglia has done this book. At Maggie's, we have had the belief that good poetry crystallizes chunks of life in a magical way. How you narrow it down to 43 is beyond me (cannot be done), but she did a book-thing. Snappy title: Click here: Amazon.com: Books: Break, Blow, Burn : Camille Paglia Reads Forty-three of the World's Best Poems

The Pope

The world owes a debt of gratitude to Pope JP II for his moral challenge to people, and to himself. A true Rock. And a heck of a skier, I've heard, in his younger days. A humble bearer of The Word who you could easily imagine having a Sam Adams with on the slopes, maybe at Mad River Glen, but surely not Deer Valley. What a fine send-off he is receiving from around the world.

"News is what somebody somewhere wants to suppress; all the rest is advertising."

Lord Northcliffe

The male Wood Duck is the most flamboyant and exotic looking bird in North America. They have just returned here, where I live - saw a few on Sunday afternoon. It's getting late to put out nest boxes, but not too late quite yet. Assuming you have water - streams or ponds or marshy lakes. Their growing population relies on human intervention, because dopey humans cut down the dead trees they like to nest in.

Build duck nest boxes: Click here: Wood Duck . Buy them: Click here: Duck Houses at BestNest.com!  and learn about "Woodies":  Click here: All About Birds

Something is burning, baby, hear what I say.
Even the bloodhounds of London couldn't find you today.
I see the shadow of a man, baby, makin' you blue.
Who is he baby, and what's he to you?

We've reached the edge of the road, baby, where the pasture begins,
Where charity is supposed to cover up a multitude of sins.
But where do you live, baby, and where is the light?
Why are your eyes just staring off in the night?

Dylan, from Something's Burning, Baby

Internet and the UN

How would you like the UN to regulate and control the internet?

"....The ITU, a United Nations agency, would like to change that. "The whole world is looking for a better solution for Internet governance, unwilling to maintain the current situation,..."

What is wrong with "the current situation"? That it isn't "regulated" by an international body? It seems to be fairly wonderful now, and I would hate to see the great UN "improve" things. Thanks, Instapundit. Read piece:  Click here: The U.N. thinks about tomorrow's cyberspace | Newsmakers | CNET News.com

Welcome, Dr. Bliss

A long-time friend, Joy Bliss MD, has generously agreed to be our resident shrink - thank God - we need one here on the Farm. She is "The Analyst." She introduced herself, at my request, on the blog a day or two ago ("A New Member of the Farm"), and I've already gotten a couple of email requests for her phone number. For dates, not for shrink help. Plus the obnoxious but relevant question "Can she cook?" Please!...and no, she cannot cook worth a damn, in my experience, anyway. But she knows her way around Scotch whiskey. (Sorry Joy - can you handle the truth?) And - minor detail - she is married and unavailable, so quit it with those emails, please. Everyone wants a woman who can handle firearms.

I just reviewed her post for tomorrow on the subject of evil, and it is good. Too long, but good. She will be a great addition to the Farm - I promise.

UN Update

Art

Deception and Self-Deception

Robert Samuelson: "We are a nation of closet welfare junkies, which helps explain why we can't have an honest debate about Social Security. Social Security and Medicare are our biggest welfare programs, but because Americans regard "welfare" as shameful, we've found other labels for them. We call them "social insurance" or "entitlements." Anything but welfare. Democrats and Republicans alike embrace the deception. No one wants to upset older voters. Well, if you can't call something by its real name, you can't discuss it honestly."  Read entire: Click here: Welfare Junkies (washingtonpost.com)

"The greatest virtue is humility, and the shortest route to humility is through humiliation."

Edwin Lahey

We believe nuclear energy is a no-brainer: safe, and a freebie from nature. It's just a matter of time before it becomes our major source. I'm not askeered of it - got a mini-reactor in the basement. The family glows in the dark, but that saves $ on flashlights, and it's great for Halloween.

"But think of this: Between 1996 and 1999, more children under 5 drowned in 5-gallon buckets (58) than have died in nuclear power accidents in the West since the advent of atomic energy (zero)." 

Read entire:  Investor's Business Daily stock analysis and business news

Balanchine

Toni Bentley reviews two new books on Balanchine:
"George Balanchine, the greatest dance innovator of the twentieth century, and possibly the most important in all 350 years of classical dance history since the language was codified in the court of Louis XIV, has just been subjected to a global celebration lasting an entire year in honor of the centennial of his birth, in tsarist Russia, in 1904. Now it is perhaps a good time, as he enters his second century of influence, to assess the many acts of heroism performed in his honor—and the attendant damage."   Read entire:  Click here: The New York Review of Books: The Master

"As men, we are all equal in the presence of death."

Publius Syrus

The End of Democracy?

Fr. Neuhaus assembled the book on this famous 1996 debate on judicial activism, which included most of the wise conservatives in the US. From the description: "American conservatism's most ferocious internecine controversy in years erupted when the journal First Things published a symposium on "the judicial usurpation of politics," exploring the daring question "whether we have reached or are reaching the point where conscientious citizens can no longer give moral assent to the existing regime." A far-flung debate ensued, engaging scores of contestants in countless journals and newspapers."  Click here: Amazon.com: Books: The End of Democracy...

Travel with Brains

Travel around the Med with VDH. Does that sound good enough?

I'm already packing, even tho I've been there before.

Powell's new book reveals shocking steroid use in White House:

"Top Cabinet officials are up in arms about the allegations of widespread steroid use made by former Secretary of State Colin Powell in his new political tell-all Pumped." Read entire:Click here: The Onion

Microjets

Microjets for the middle class - I need one or two of these: "Travel in "very small jets" operating outside traditional commercial airline rules is expected to explode in coming years and is already causing congestion at some small airports."  Click here: MSNBC - Affordable personal jets closer than you think

Euthanasia, more

Lucette Lugano re her mother's stroke:

"That is when I realized that the stroke had not robbed Edith of her charm. Or her fundamental humanity. I glimpse the same charm and the same humanity in Terri Schiavo--though the advocates of the culture of death have sought to rob her of both."  Read entire: Click here: OpinionJournal - Taste

Euthanasia

Pat Caddell said on TV Saturday that we should not believe the ABC poll about the Schivao case, and he was quite angry about the probably deliberate distortions in the polling method. The euthanasia issue is morally and spiritually complex and treacherous in many ways, of course. (Courts and politics are trivial aspects of the discussion - it is about religion, or at least about spiritual beliefs.) And we are dealing with euthanasia at this point, not Terri.

Andrew Sullivan believes, for example, that it's all about insane Christians and that courts are the bottom line, if they are not God. He's very smart, but who believes that courts are that smart? Terri is the dying martyr .Then there's Frank Rich, the arch-materialist ranter - odd for an ex-theater critic - for whom all of this is a religous scam:The God Racket, From DeMille to DeLay

Peggy Noonan does a great job of explaining the pro-life view on euthanasia: Peggy Noonan and Steyn does too, drawing on a Canadian case: "Like other statist politicians, Mr. Trudeau . . . either didn't see, or resented, that right and wrong are only reflected by the laws, not determined by them. That's how I feel about the Terri Schiavo case. I'm neither a Floridian nor a lawyer, and, for all I know, it may be legal under Florida law for the state to order her to be starved to death. But it is still wrong." No compelling reason to kill Terri Schiavo

There is a debate here which is too deep, and too real, to be left to politicians and courts. I hesitate to compare it to the national debate on slavery, but it could be one of those defining debates that symbolically reflect our national view of existence. And, don't forget, the mainly religious opposition to slavery was based on the idea that Africans have souls. Last week, there was a well-reported case in the Netherlands or Denmark about a later-term abortion of a baby because he had a cleft lip, and the parents wanted a "perfect" kid. Let's have a national debate on euthanasia, which that case clearly was, and its limits, if any. Because this is about values and emotion and belief, not law. And I ask you - Why does this pan out to a left and right issue? Put your replies in "comments," OK?

Addendum: got a few emails noting that the links do not work on this bit - will try to fix.

"When everyone says you're drunk, you'd better sit down."

Old Irish saying

I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand --
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep -- while I weep!
O God! can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

from A Dream within a Dream by Edgar Allen Poe. Read entire: Click here: E. A. Poe Society of Baltimore

Matthew 27:45

Now from the sixth hour there was darkness over all the land until the ninth hour. And about the ninth hour Jesus cried out with a loud voice "Eli, Eli, la'ma sabach-tha'ni?" that is, "My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me?" And some of the bystanders hearing it said "That man is calling Elijah." And one of them at once ran and brought a sponge, filled it with vinegar, and put it on a reed, and gave it to him to drink. But the others said "Wait, let us see whether Elijah will come to save him." And Jesus cried again with a loud voice and gave up his spirit.

"We spend all our lives killin time, but, in the end, time kills us."

Bob Dylan as "Jack Fate", in the 2003 movie Masked and Anonymous (wonderful sound track)   Click here: Amazon.com: DVD: Masked and Anonymous (2003)