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.
This being a fairly dead weekend in the blog world, I thought I'd just re-post this old gem. I don't do many you-are-there pieces, but they're lots of fun to write. Another fave of the genre is Treasure Hunting With A Metal Detector.
As a small side note, some of the bloggers here don't know that blog protocol dictates that the word 'repost' be included somewhere (title or text) in reposts, so check the dates before responding to a comment. There are two like that below.
(an email to friends, September '00)
Howdy, all —
I've just returned from Colorado Springs and I thought I'd share some of my experiences with you.
First off, sorry, no photos. It's a nice place, but I really didn't want to haul my $800 'photographically-compliant computer' (AKA "digital camera") all over the place. Just picture amazing rock formations and incredible vistas and you've got it.
There are few places on the globe where you can actually see the curve of the planet. You can't see it from sea level. You and I would see it, out on the ocean, because we know the Earth is round, but it would just be an illusion. Hold a straightedge up and it's flat as flat can be. You need two somewhat unique things lined up next to each other, a fairly rare occurrence.
You (1) need an extremely wide, vast plain, flat as a pancake, and (2) a fairly high (10,000 feet-plus) mountain perched right on the edge of aforementioned pancake.
I give you Kansas and Pike's Peak.
Most high mountains are in the middle of mountain ranges. I know that sounds crazy, but it's true. As such, the horizon is very irregular. But Pike's Peak is right on the edge of the Colorado Plateau, looking out across flat, flat, flat, Kansas.
You see The Curve.
Your first thought is,
They were right! It is round.
Maybe you already knew it, but it's always nice to have it confirmed.
He wrote treatises on chess, math, and other things too. Imagine what sort of website he could have had, had he only invented the intertunnels too. Everybody knows that Sippican invented the intertunnels.
Double entry sounds like tax cheating, but it is not. It is about credits and debits. (It does not refer to the private, personal books for cash receipts that many unscupulous Lefties use to dodge Uncle Sam and rip off their neighbors.)
Our historical knowledge is really a history which praises, ends up praising, ourselves—how much wiser [voice drips with sarcasm] we are, how we have seen through the errors of the past…Hegel already knew this danger of history, of the historical human being, when he said that every German gymnasium professor teaches that Alexander the Great conquered the world because he had a pathological love of power. And the proof that the teacher does not have a pathological love of power is that he has not conquered the world. [laughter] We have set up standards of normalcy while speaking of cultural relativism, but there is no question that we think we understand what cultures are, and what kind of mistakes they make.
That Richwine article generated plenty of heat. Truth is, everybody talks about or at least thinks about IQ all the time. At the least, every time we see somebody do something stupid, or express something without basis or thought. We also think about it when somebody says something that opens our eyes.
IQ is just one of the many personal traits across which individuals vary. It happens to be a valuable trait, but it is never determinative in life outcome. However, there is no measure for life outcome anyway. Life's outcome is death.
A couple of years ago, Mrs. BD and I vowed to never replace a rotten piece of wood on the outside of our home - or of the Farm, for that matter - with real wood. Purists like Sipp might object, but we've had enough. Too expensive in the long run.
My father-in-law taught me this lesson, and recently re-did most of his home's exterior these ways. He is no longer thrilled with the DIY approach as he grows a little older.
Blame design, or Nature, or Entropy, or whatever. Dead wood and water do not mix. Not in Yankeeland, anyway.
In the past week, we had Anderson's custom replacement service replace 8 old custom-sized windows with their new fake, never-paint, never-chip, last-forever composite frames and good thermopane glass. Not anywhere as expensive as one might have thought, but still costly enough with all of the custom sizing. Including three casement windows. Their guys work fast, too. Did it all in one day, and put insulation in the edges of the new frames.
Any wood that rots - sills, etc. - all we will use is Azeks. If it rotted out once, it will do so again. We're gradually replacing all the dang wood columns for the pergola and the porches with custom fiberglass columns with 6X6" pressure-treated wood posts hidden inside.
These new "woods" never rot, never peel, never warp, and never need painting. Woodpeckers never peck holes in them, and wood-boring wasps leave it alone. Best thing of all: it looks like real wood.
You might say that we have been converted by maintenance cost.
When it comes to writing, I have a rule I made up a long time ago that's worked to perfection over the years, so I thought I'd pass it along.
It's very simple, and you wordsmiths out there might already employ it subconsciously.
I had a perfect example just the other day, which prompted me to write this piece. I had written in a post:
Try telling it to the F.C.C.
I pondered whether it was a common enough acronym to leave out the periods, like 'NASA' and 'NBC', but I knew it was one of those things the 3-Notice Rule would catch, so I left them in. This was the first 'notice'.
I finished up the post and hit the 'Save' button, then the 'Preview' button to proofread it. I got to the above line and hesitated, thinking it might look better without the periods, then read on. This was the second 'notice'. I knew what was coming, but rules are rules.
Then I posted the article and gave it one more proofread (the actual Web page is wider than the editor, so things look a tad different) and noticed it again — that is, the sentence just didn't flow like it should have — and that was it.
I popped open the editor and changed it to:
Try telling it to the FCC.
Then I read it through again and this time I flew right through the line without hesitation.
I guess you could say I'm quantifying a bit of common sense here. By making it a 'rule', though, you're forced to stop at that third 'notice' and change the damn thing, no matter how trivial it is. In other words, yes, it's a pain to open the editor just to change one tiny little thing, but this is about readability — which overrides everything else — including our own inherent laziness. So, if the 3-Notice Rule catches it, you're obligated to fix it right then and there — or throw the damn rule out.
We don't have room for every single old sentimental object, Mrs. BD informs me. Furthermore, she does not want our home to "become a museum" for my family of origin. I agree with that.
So the question at hand is this: To throw out my Dad's rocking horse - or not? There is no place for it. The horse looks like it has had chemotherapy, but really it's just the result of 3 generations clinging to its mane to hold on. The ears, too.
Reminds me of Rosebud, from my Dad's favorite film.
Prohibition doesn't work, and most people see that. All it does is to drive up the price of illegal drugs, fill prisons, and support a booming illegal drug industry.
It is no wonder than none of our readers were able to identify this stuff from my parents' basement, which came via my Grandpa via his Mom, I think.
It turns out that it is so rare that the china and jewelry appraiser said she knew these existed, but had never seen them. It's gold-plated Lenox china. They did not make very much of it.
She suggested letting Sotheby's take a look at it all. I'd keep a couple of pieces for sentiment's sake, but would never use fully gold-plated dinner plated, coffee cups and saucers, and soup bowls. Now I'm greedily curious about market value. That little one in the middle is one of the 12 soup bowls, which looks more suited for an offering to a Greek god than for consomme.
As of this afternoon, my parents' house is empty of everything. Even the dumpster has departed. The Steinway Baby Grand was happily delivered to our parlor today and sounds pretty good there. My Mom's Victorian cast iron bird bath with four herons is in the driveway, waiting for me to show it some love with a power-wash and some Rustoleum. My Dad's Danish-style double bureau is in my bedroom. I've needed one forever, never saw one I liked. The drawers are cedar, so it smells good. Plus it was my Dad's for many years. He liked Danish design.
Funny thing about my parents. They never owned many clothes, but they always looked perfectly appropriate, and modestly-elegantly-attired, whether for weddings, beach club parties, dinner parties, fancy cruises, country clubs, hiking in Europe, opera, funerals, yard work, etc. I don't know how they did that. Mrs. BD opined that they did it by owning a very few perfect and very fine things, and were careful to never over-dress. They were not shoppers but seemed to have excellent Yankee taste. They had very little clothing for Good Will to take away.
Their dining room table is now against a wall in our living room, for the moment, where the piano mover guys were kind enough to lug away our old upright that my kids learned on. We might want to keep that Danish slate-topped table and use it as our kitchen dining table, as the wonderful one we use is quite large. Huge. Or save it for a kid. Mom's jewels - the few which I obtained thus far - are stashed in my safe.
After I do some clean-up, I'll post some pictures of it all. Life in Yankeeland goes on. An empty family house is eery, and left me feeling troubled and disoriented. I was already away at boarding school when they built it, but it became home even though I never really lived there. Somebody prosperous will love it, paint it, and raise some fine batch of kids there (it has 6 bedrooms). It's a lovely dwelling. Or maybe they will decide to do a demolition and start fresh. We are gone now.
Clean and wax the floors, wash the walls, then an open house asap. It's a short walk to the Congo church on the hill. It's only worth around a million, for the land. The lovely, large, but 1960s-era home itself does not seem to factor in its value at all. Small bathrooms, lots of big windows with no thermopane. People expect more comforts, nowadays, even though it is entirely sufficient and functional, modestly elegant and comfortable.
My parents were not interested in modern conveniences. Instead of a/c, they just planted trees to shade the house. No sound systems. Radio with WQXR.
Dad, I believe, was proud to have designed and built it for his big family of five kids. A place to read and talk, entertain, eat, and sleep. Never a TV until all the kids left, and always dogs until they got too old to take good care of them. Springers.
Call it Psychopathy or Sociopathy or just "bad people," people with an excess of predatorial instincts are all around us. Overwhelmingly most are non-violent, but what Dr X points out is that psychopathy is a matter of degree.
Most people who worry about being bad or evil, are not especially so. Sociopathic people rarely recognize their inner bad, and often think highly of themselves. Significant degrees of sociopathy can be found in people in all walks of life, not just in penitentiaries (in which few penitents are to be found). I knew a brilliant, charismatic Psychologist with abundant psychopathic traits who probably helped more people than I ever will with his charm, warmth, and wisdom. He had enough self-awareness to keep himself out of serious trouble but he had some close calls.
Dr X pointed out this piece at Smithsonian: The Pros to Being a Psychopath - In a new book, Oxford research psychologist Kevin Dutton argues that psychopaths are poised to perform well under pressure. Not sure I agree, but an interesting topic.
A "Cape" is short for a Cape Cod - style house. This was a common architectural style in the Colonial period, especially on Cape Cod but in New England generally. Common also in the Colonial Revival period (1930s-1950s). More about Capes in Wiki.
but it still reminded me of the song. In five months, both parents dead and final child moved out to NYC this week. That's a big life change for me and the Mrs., but we still have the dog. All 3 kids living and/or working in NYC now. It's a good thing for the youth to do: If you can make it there, you can make it anywhere. They don't have to stay there forever.
What makes it even better is that they get together there sometimes, and sort of network socially. They all have lots of friends and associates from prep school, college, and work. Interesting, attractive, proper, and ambitious kids, and they all want to be in NY where the action is. Meet people, make friends, build a life. Fun, plus social capital. They all have nothing at all to complain about except income, and when you're young in Manhattan, you don't really care. When I lived there, I had no clue that I was a pauper. Life was fun and fascinating, I could afford a beer, and I even met the future Mrs. BD there. Man, that was a random meet but it clicked.
While the Anthropogenic Global Warming and Natural Global Warming camps have been filling the airwaves with their usual bickering lately, and certainly the Anthropogenic Chlorofluorocarbonic Warming contingent is trying to stay in the news, the Natural Global Cooling people have been left out — if you'll pardon the expression — in the cold.
In case you're new to the global climate debate and haven't heard of the dangers of NGC, you'd better sit your butt right down and get caught up to date.
And what those scoffing 'deniers' out there are missing is that we're already fighting the battle on the northern front as the ice sheet moves slowly and inexorably southward. This was in Flagville, North Dakota, just last week:
"It sounds like a train!"
What she's hearing is the low-frequency crackling vibrations as the top 6" of soil turns to permafrost for the next 10,000 years.
This was also fairly telling at the 5:16 mark:
"It's piling up, because the house is stopping it from moving."
(10 seconds later)
"Oh, my God, their door's in! It just busted through a door over here, all the way through — the door's caving! Look at that, it's going right through their goddamned house!"
Such is the raw, destructive power of Natural Global Cooling.
Well, as if we needed any further proof after that video, here's the latest on the NGC front:
Normally the high Arctic has about 90 days above freezing. This year there was less than half that.
The numbers don't lie, folks. Disregard the facts at your peril.
This also might be why I'm living in the Florida Keys; Florida being projected to be the last state to have unfrozen summers by 2160. It has something to do with the geography but southern California and southern Texas are scheduled to go decades before that. The water barrier between the Keys and the mainland is also supposed to slow it down, so we've got a number of factors going for us down here.
While helping my brother clean out my parents' garage, going through shelves of tools, boxes of drill bits, old hinges, misc loose nails and screws, washers, screw-drivers, hand-drills, boxes of what-nots, etc, along with more garden tools than you can imagine even existed, I came across this old cedar cigar box full of mixed nails.
I know where that box of nails came from. That came from my grandfather's garage. My Mom's Dad. He kept all categories of little things in cigar boxes. He smoked in his office in town of course, but outdoors too, even while scything hay or on horseback, but stuck with cigarettes indoors so as not to offend the womenfolk. Pall Malls. Still delicious cigarettes.
So what about L. Osterweis? Well, he made cigars in New Haven, CT, with "South American" (Cuban probably) filler and Connecticut wrappers. Cigar people know that Connecticut still grows the best wrapper tobacco in the world.
The Osterweis company sold off their assets in 1954. From this Yale snippet, it seems that the Osterweis family did pretty well in the tobacco biz for a couple of generations. Even sent a kid or two to Yale.
I'll open with a statement which is derived from the post I recently made regarding Libertarian thought. I believe if athletes want to use drugs or steroids, the choice is theirs to decide if using them will help them improve.
I know this is a controversial position, but if someone wants to use a product which may well cause cancer, shrink genitalia, or otherwise harm them, why should we stop them?
However, I don't support breaking rules. Rules in sports help focus players on developing talent rather than using technology to short-circuit the system. Golf is well known for its use of guidelines to introduce new products, and recently made a rule change limiting putters. I have used products in golf that can help me reduce my slice, and hit balls which fly further than those allowed on the tour. But the USGA limits what technology can be used by professionals because technology can trump talent.
I don't know how to play the violin, so the technology which makes a Stradivarius a great violin won't make me a better violinist. But if Stradivarius provided a tool which moved my fingers to their proper positions and moved my bow across the strings in proper fashion, I could suddenly compete with Itzhak Perlman and barely take a class!
In my post honoring Gwyneth Paltrow, World's Most Beautiful Woman, I included pictures of some other famous women for comparison.
A commenter called the following a "hag":
He also called this a "hag":
Well, in the latest exciting news from the Hag Front, I'm pleased to announce we have a new entry in this most select of fields:
What's beyond scrumptious?
Her name is Camilla Belle. Or, as I prefer to call her, "The future Mrs. Dr. Mercury". She's appeared in about twenty films, although the only one I recognized on the list was Steven Seagal's 'The Patriot'.
That's about as adorable as it gets without actually being illegal. Even back then,she had that elusive it.
Her Wikipedia page is here, her IMDb page is here. I'd never heard of her until she popped up in some slideshow I was watching.
Rare photos of Ernest Hemingway from his recently released family scrapbooks
(an email to friends, September '00)
Accountants know who he was. He was a pal of Leonardo, and 
People always talk about the places they'd like to see or to visit. It's a big world. Most everybody has a bucket list.
When it comes to writing, I have a rule I made up a long time ago that's worked to perfection over the years, so I thought I'd pass it along.
