We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
If all of your winter firewood has not been split yet, it is Splitting Maul Season.
Log splitting is a great joy, a great work-out, and useful. And it can be done as well by a 113-pound gal as by an 180-pound fellow because, when done properly, the maul does most of the work. Heck, it's a sort of lever. You lift it, then let gravity and leverage do the rest of the work, assuming you put the right English on the blow to your log. That is a matter of practice and experimentation, and a deep source of pleasure once this basic life skill is acquired.
Axes are terrible for wood-splitting. Wedges get stuck, cause huge frustration, and get lost in the field. There are all sorts of good mauls. This photo of mauls shows the spring-loaded maul, #5, which looks like a foolish gadget but which truly works well, and will really throw the wood around if you are wise and work on the edges and don't aim for the middle of a big one. Highly recommended by the Bird Dog Consumer Reports.
I approach a large log in the classic manner: I work around the edges, then I chop the corners off the remaining square, or pentagon, or whatever it might be. I like to end up with a square piece at the end. Knots? I never fight a knot just like I never argue with a Leftist/Statist. I burn them intact.
Very satisfying work and, as Thoreau said, it warms you twice: Once when you split it and again when you burn it. That is true Yankee economy.
Wimpy boys and wimpy girls. If safety is your biggest concern in life, you will never live. I thought it was all about fear of lawsuits, but I am beginning to think it reflects some form of psycho-ideology. We are raising a generation of wimps.
Thanks for the new vocab, Ted Dalrymple. Like him, I cannot stand being in a room or a car with closed windows unless it's the hottest day of the year. He applied the word in his piece Protecting Everyone From Themselves.
Here is a brief litany of obvious truths that have been resisted in the public discourse of black America over the last thirty years: a group is no stronger than its individuals; when individuals transform themselves they transform the group; the freer the individual, the stronger the group; social responsibility begins in individual responsibility. Add to this an indisputable fact that has also been unmentionable: that American greatness has a lot to do with a culturally ingrained individualism, with the respect and freedom historically granted individuals to pursue their happiness--this despite many egregious lapses and an outright commitment to the oppression of black individuals for centuries. And there is one last obvious but unassimilated fact: ethnic groups that have asked a lot from their individuals have done exceptionally well in America even while enduring discrimination.
The problem that I've identified—that I think is at the root of a lot of the spinning of our wheels and confusion of contemporary physics and cosmology—is that you can't just take this method of doing science and scale it up to the universe as a whole. When you do, you run into questions that you can't answer. You end up with fallacies; you end up saying silly things. One reason is that, on a cosmological scale, the questions that we want to understand are not just what are the laws, but why are these the laws rather than other laws? Where do the laws come from? What makes the laws what they are? And if the laws are input to the method, the method will never explain the laws because they're input.
Mitford may have been a nutjob, but I tend to believe that the way we deal with the dead (and the dying) in America is close to insane. Death is just a routine part of living, is it not? Loss is terrible, for sure, but we must adjust to it as we all grow older.The deaths of friends, family, and, finally, of ourselves.
What do you want to be done with your mortal remains, and at what expense? Do you even care?
Having lost faith in the discipline they are (over) paid to teach, literature instructors have enthusiastically embraced their roles as the guardians of progressive pieties about women and the Chinese.
This is not to suggest that Gilmour himself is any kind of resistance hero. He has long since apologized for his remarks and will almost certainly never make any such again.
Mau-mauing works. Even tough guys like male profs of literature are intimidated.
After we said some words over the grave, and after some shed some tears, we put Dad's ashes (surprisingly-heavy box of ashes) in a shallow hole next to Moms' and we all went to pick some apples and pears from Dad's trees at the farm last Sunday.
It was just wonderful that is the best year for apples, ever. My pic is just a small sample. The mini pears are as sweet as sugar and his apple varieties are spicey. Stood on chairs and used a butterfly net to harvest the high ones.
I claimed that our Dunkin Donuts coffees and the fruit were our family's Communion after the burial. We did not dare running it through a church. Everybody picked and ate some apples.
Thus did we sneak some Jesus into my cranky Yankee atheist, Bible-loving, distinguished Yale prof Dad's burial. I think it would have been marginally ok with him but he still would have been embarrassed by the attention and sentiment.
And likely, would have had some clever caustic quip about it all. Anyway, excellent apples. Everybody grabbed a box or bag and took a bunch home with them.
He always said that we could toss his cadaver in the river when he died. Well, the box of ashes is darn close to the trout stream.
...no one can be born a Christian in evangelical belief: everyone must come to Jesus individually of his own volition, making a profession of faith based on a genuine conviction of the truth of Jesus’ messiahship. This also explains why, more so than the members of almost any other branch of Christianity, evangelicals share a profound attachment to the textual world of the Bible. For the evangelical, the Bible is more than just a “good book”; it is the literal and inspired word of God, written by prophets who were moved by the holy spirit and preserved through the ages by the hand of divine providence. To evangelicals, the Bible is the blueprint of the cosmos, the framework of history, and the answer to all of life’s mysteries. Only the Bible—not a priesthood or a church hierarchy—can assert authority over the Christian.
Some might term me an Evangelical and some might not. Either way, I learned some things from the essay.
Great trick played on coffee shop patrons in the Village, which I saw on the news this morning. Sure, it's a viral ad (funny that an ad is preceded by advertising...such is the way of media today), but it's incredibly well set up, well designed. I doubt I'll see the movie they're promoting (the original was a classic in the genre), but credit to the marketing guys who did this.
We'll put his in the same hole as Mom's, not far from the church and the trout stream.
Ashes to ashes.
Dad forbade any ceremoniousness or anything religious and forbade any memorial events, so we kids will just dig a hole and have our own thoughts. Then we'll pick some of his apples and pears, and eat them as if a sort of family communion.
William Shakespeare pretty much stole his plots. That's fine with me. And I suppose he was commercially right to take on the then-old Romeo and Juliet tale, judging it to be one that would sell tickets. Passion, blood, melodramatic death, etc. He wanted to be wealthy, and he was. Little could he have imagined, though, that his version of R&J would be selling tickets in 2013, both on and off Broadway.
It's a silly story, and a silly play. No character development, no fine poetry, no tragedy. Two stupid hormone-crazed 14 year-olds off themselves because the mailman missed delivering a letter in an Italy in which mail delivery is spotty and the vendetta is the spice of life. Poor mail delivery is not the stuff of tragedy. In fact, the play is not a tragedy in Aristotelian terms - or any terms.
My drama expert kid says she thinks it was written as a spoof.
West Side Story beats the Shakespeare, in my view, by miles.
In Verona last month, Mrs. BD and I avoided the Juliet tourist trap baloney. I hate that kind of phony crap but, again, it sells tickets.
Instead of the B'way version with heart-throb Orlando Bloom, we went to see the opening night at our regular Classic Stage which we support to a humble degree, starring (heart-throb) Elizabeth Olsen.
Dumb play, and a lousy performance by all. Where did WS instruct the players to shout their lines? Or to do a ponderous delivery? "Look Mom - I'm reciting Shakespeare!" When people do Shakespeare, they forget how to act like people because it's SHAKESPEARE. Like it's holy.
The only plus was dinner with one of the NYC kids at the Blue Water Grill afterwards with a wonderful jazz singer under our balcony seating. I do love that joint with their music, the exceedingly pleasing surroundings and staff, and their lobster mashed taters. I'll do a whole post about Branzino when I get to it. A tasty fish, but any grilled fish (or anything) is good on a bed of lobster mashed potatoes.
My pic is the pleasant East Village, with the Classic Stage sign. Despite this screw-up, we still like them. They do good Ibsen and Chekhov if you like that sort of thing.
It's well-known that the Chinese rightly love Western music, and love our "serious" music more than our pop music (not that I believe that any music is really "serious"). It is no surprise that they love ours, because their traditional music is hideous.
China made 379,746 pianos last year, 77 per cent of global output, almost all of it for domestic sale. Multiply that by ten for second-hand sales and you are still nowhere near the popular estimate that 60 million Chinese children are currently playing the piano, equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom sitting down every evening and practising scales for two hours.
I wish that I had had a better piano teacher when I was a kid but that sounds like lame excuse-making. I have no musical talent at all, but I always have wanted to make just a little music for myself instead of pushing a button for it like a king with his court musicians. I wanted to understand what was behind the pieces I was learning to play, and she kept saying "that's for later." Then, eventually, there was no later. I should have been learning scales, and why scales exist. Or maybe not. I have a friend who is taking up piano in middle age, and is having a wonderful time with it. Great delight learning scales and jazz chords.
Every home needs at least one person practicing music, however well or poorly.
Maybe this is like our post about new math. You either have it, or you don't, but there is a gray zone.
These guys will play you for money. Many of them prefer speed chess - 5-minute or even one-minute games. It's a wonderful thing, excellent mental exercise. I hear that these guys are savvy players.
There are a few checkers guys too, but isn't checkers too much like tic-tac-toe? If you start, you win or draw unless you make an error.
A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.
"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand
"He loves nature, in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
"He has Van Gogh's ear for Music." - Billy Wilder
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
We will plant Dad's ashes next to Mom's at the Congo church cemetery in the Massachusetts Berkshires in a week or two. I have some ancestors buried there, but the older ones were buried on the farm's own adjacent cemetery because the church and its burial ground were not built until 1817. I have always appreciated the olde epitaph:
Behold my friends as you pass by As you are now, so once was I As I am now, soon you shall be Give thyself to God and follow me.
Cash registers were invented to prevent stealing by store clerks. James Ritty invented it in 1884. They were not mainly adding machines, but registers of sales so the owner could keep track of what was going on. In those days, any clerk could add quickly anyway. Paper receipts were a later improvement.
They were complex mechanical machines (still are, but not mechanical). The old National Cash Register Co. (NCR) is still in business. IBM's Tom Watson started out there.
I spent a few minutes trying to find out how they were designed, but gave up. The Wiki entry is quite lame. Disappointing.
The days of the ka-ching are long gone. The purpose of the ka-ching noise was to let the owner or manager know that a sale had taken place.
We learned an excellent lesson from from clearing out my parents' house.
Attic, basement, storage rooms. We have felt inspired in a strange way by it all, and have begun to work on clearing out our own spaces. Lots of our stuff we have not used in years seems quite desirable and useful to our Mexican immigrant helpers.
The rest of it goes to the dumpster. "Might want it someday" means "never."
After we said some words over the grave, and after some shed some tears, we put Dad's ashes (surprisingly-heavy box of ashes) in a shallow hole next to Moms' and we all went to pick some apples and pears from Dad's trees at the farm last Sunday.
We'll put his in the same hole as Mom's, not far from the church and the trout stream.
William Shakespeare pretty much stole his plots. That's fine with me. And I suppose he was commercially right to take on the then-old Romeo and Juliet tale, judging it to be one that would sell tickets. Passion, blood, melodramatic death, etc. He wanted to be wealthy, and he was. Little could he have imagined, though, that his version of R&J would be selling tickets in 2013, both on and off Broadway.
Cash registers were invented 
