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.
It's the end of hunting season, and I have not killed enough stuff this year to satisfy the hunter in me. I have a doe in the freezer, countless pheasants and chukars, a few Canada Geese and a bunch of ducks of several species. A couple of grouse, but we have eaten most of them and all of the woodcock. (Ask me how to make woodcock ravioli with jus de gibier and black truffle - I will tell you.)
There is a feeling of regret. How many hunting seasons does a man have in one lifetime? And work, family, and obligations intrude, as they should and must. Carpe diem, if you can. It's been a terrible winter for ducks - weather too pleasant.
The only consolation is that it is now time to really get cooking all of the good game in the freezer. For starters, we're doing a large-scale venison bourguignon for a get-together next weekend. The following week, will do the venison filets for some lucky guests. With the Canada geese, I will have a small party and sautee the breasts rare with some mushrooms and celery root puree, with gibier sauce, etc. For the ducks - oh, man. Very special recipes for those precious wild spirits, which I may write about sometime. For the Snow Geese, a nice cassoulet with some other mixed game. For all the bones, wings, carcasses, etc., including the carcass of the Thanksgiving turkey and the bone of the Christmas ham, we'll make a gallon or two of Uncle Bill's jus de gibier, to use with everything, saving some of it for a special, once a year consomme de gibier for Valentine's Day.
Despite all of these delights, I'd rather be in the woods and swamps with the dogs and a gun.
Long-time readers know that my experience teaches me that retirement is often a poor state of affairs for the average American male. Many deteriorate physically and mentally. I have one 92 year-old client who goes to the office every day after swimming a half-mile at the Y. Work keeps him young. He does indulge in 4 weeks of vacation travel each year, however, and has great-grandkids around the house all the time. Nice, balanced life. First wife died, now on his second but she is not doing too well now.
A beautiful life, really, although he is not wealthy. He still has a mortgage, which I think is a smart thing to have. Bought his current home for $37,000, now has a $200,000 mortgage on it and it is worth around $700,000. today.
I have been updating his will and trusts for over 25 years, when he first thought he was getting old.
It's a major issue. Everybody is a criminal. I am willing to guarantee it. Nobody has read the million pages of federal regs and codes, and no citizen can understand them. A defendant is anybody the feds or the DA want to be one. Nobody is innocent, no matter how hard they try to be.
Wodehouse's Bertie and Jeeves novels are surely the most delightful, amusing, innocent, and refreshing fiction ever written in graceful, wry English.
Christopher Buckley reviews Wodehouse's life and writing: Yours Ever, Plum: The Letters and Life of P.G. Wodehouse. For a man who sought little but serenity, the presence of his wife and his dogs, and books, he had an eventful life.
From one of his letters:
“I sometimes feel,” Wodehouse wrote Townend in 1933, “as if I were a case of infantilism. I seem mentally so exactly as I was then [at school]. All my ideas and ideals are the same. I still think the Bedford [cricket] match is the most important thing in the world.”
A few random quotes from the books:
As a rule, you see, I'm not lugged into Family Rows. On the occasions when Aunt is calling Aunt like mastodons bellowing across primeval swamps and Uncle James's letter about Cousin Mabel's peculiar behaviour is being shot round the family circle ('Please read this carefully and send it on Jane') the clan has a tendency to ignore me. It's one of the advantages I get from being a bachelor - and, according to my nearest and dearest, practically a half-witted bachelor at that.
It was my Uncle George who discovered that alcohol was a food well in advance of modern medical thought.
I turned to Aunt Agatha, whose demeanour was now rather like that of one who, picking daisies on the railway, has just caught the down express in the small of the back.
Jeeves lugged my purple socks out of the drawer as if he were a vegetarian fishing a caterpillar out of his salad.
I once got engaged to his daughter Honoria, a ghastly dynamic exhibit who read Nietzsche and had a laugh like waves breaking on a stern and rockbound coast.
Anybody can talk me round. If I were in a Trappist monastery, the first thing that would happen would be that some smooth performer would lure me into some frightful idiocy against my better judgment by means of the deaf-and-dumb language.
In 1997, at the age of 27, I washed up at my parents’ house, done with school, and out of money. All I had to my name was and three humanities degrees, (B.A. Rhetoric, M.A. Literature, M.F.A Creative Writing) and a dog.
It was a dark time, both figuratively and literally because my parents had downsized since I’d first gone away for college and the only room for me in the new house was the basement. When I snapped the lights off at night, the blackness was total, roughly reflective of both my spirit and my prospects. In bed, I would wave my hand in front of my face, unable to make out even the faintest image. If you want to take that as a metaphor for my employment prospects, so be it.
"One important implication of our analysis is that for many institutions, demand-side market pressure may not compel investment in academic quality, but rather in consumption amenities," write the authors, three University of Michigan scholars.
h/t Willisms. Large, interesting chart is below the fold -
Regardless of that info, I'll keep repeating my gun mantra: Government should focus on disarming the bad guys, not the good guys. Begin with Chicago. Disarming the good guys only creates more helpless victims: Milwaukee Sheriff goes national with message to arm yourself.
Police rarely prevent crime. They cannot be everywhere. Their main job is to find crims after the crime. Your own job is to prevent crime against you and your family.
We get paid for a thing, a service, or a thing plus a service. Most jobs entail some degree of customer service, whether the customer is a client, a buyer in a shop, or a boss. Yes, a boss is a customer, pays you for your service to him or her. This simple textbook might open your eyes to seemingly-obvious things you have been doing wrong to interfere with good business and good business relationships.
It's a lesson in humility. As I said last time, this course is about things many of us think we're too smart to need to learn.
Recap of prior postings in this course this semester:
I have gotten deep into The Leopard, and I can report that I think (for what it's worth) that it is a masterpiece of modern literature. No, of literature. I've read a lot of books. I have not seen the movie with Burt Lancaster and Claudia Cardinale, but I don't need to.
It is sensual in imagery, poetically-written. Guiseppe di Lampedusa finished it shortly before he died, but, sadly, could never get it published.
The story is set in Sicily in the 1860s, during the time when Garibaldi's forces were constructing the nation of Italy, including the invasion and annexation of Sicily. It's a vivid portrait of Sicily which, even today, seems Italian in name only.
Lampedusa warned readers to keep track of the Prince's dog, Bendico.
While getting a college degree dramatically improves a person's potential earnings over time, the sheepskin alone is not the sine qua non.
Certainly not, especially in a time when college degrees are so commonplace and when graduate degrees have lost their economic, social, and academic value through dilution.
Listed in the article are not things you learn in college, but things you can learn wherever you are: high school, college, armed forces, crappy job, or on the street. Basic life lessons which I began learning at 12. I have had paid jobs since then. That's where I learned about life even though my book-larnin' has been a blessing to me.
They could or should have said "should learn before leaving high school" because that is when adulthood is supposed to begin. Well before my time, college students wore suits to class. It was a serious adult endeavor. We don't know what it is now, except that they will give you As (or rarely Bs which used to be Ds and Fs) for paying the bill because the customer is always right except in math, physics or chem. Which is why employers like to see the tough courses and the demanding majors in college grads. They grade on curves, so the right stuff shows to potential employers.
Now that I am in a position to interview new hires at our place, it has been a very interesting experience. We are finally doing quite well after post-start-up challenges. I'll write up a post about our hiring process and our hiring filters when I have a chance.
We get 1000 applicants for each job posting at our little shop, but we do not delete the "overqualified" here if they are willing to take a chance with low wages to start.
Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay What Is It Like To Be a Bat? (1974) is a fairly deep reflection on mind and consciousness. Take an extra Adderal before studying it. One key quote:
At the present time the status of physicalism is similar to that which the hypothesis that matter is energy would have had if uttered by a pre-Socratic philosopher. We do not have the beginnings of a conception of how it might be true. In order to understand the hypothesis that a mental event is a physical event, we require more than an understanding of the word 'is'. The idea of how a mental and a physical term might refer to the same thing is lacking, and the usual analogies with theoretical identification in other fields fail to supply it. They fail because if we construe the reference of mental terms to physical events on the usual model, we either get a reappearance of separate subjective events as the effects through which mental reference to physical events is secured, or else we get a false account of how mental terms refer (for example, a causal behaviorist one).
He is certainly one of the most provocative and interesting philosophers around today.
In Mind and Cosmos, Nagel continues his attacks on reductionism. Though the book is brief its claims are big. Nagel insists that the mind-body problem “is not just a local problem” but “invades our understanding of the entire cosmos and its history.” If what he calls “materialist naturalism” or just “materialism” can’t explain consciousness, then it can’t fully account for life since consciousness is a feature of life. And if it can’t explain life, then it can’t fully account for the chemical and physical universe since life is a feature of that universe. Subjective experience is not, to Nagel, some detail that materialist science can hand-wave away. It’s a deal breaker. Nagel believes that any future science that grapples seriously with the mind-body problem will be one that is radically reconceived.
Epistomology becomes a whirl, or a whirlpool. "There are more things in heaven and earth, Horatio, than are dreamt of in your philosophy." I'll put Nagel's new book on my 2013 reading list, which continously expands. Too many books, too little time.
Unless you are some sort of immature free spirit like Elizabeth Wurtzel (with a guardian angel) who meanders through life aimlessly, you will have goals and will plot a course to attempt to reach them in the endless effort to feel content or satisfied, or at least to survive independently. Odds are that we will not reach the goals, but we give it our best shot. Always have a Plan B and a Plan C.
It remains a lighthouse on the sea of life: How to Win Friends and Influence People. It's the first book in my syllabus of my course Life 101, A Sunday Series this semester at Maggie's College. It's good to learn how to connect with people, but it is not automatic for most of us.
More of the syllabus later. It's a one-semester seminar course, one book per week is all - 15 books. It's not for credit because people are supposed to know these basics of life already, but many bright people never learned them because we got the mistaken impression that we were just wonderful without even trying. Including me. We aren't wonderful.
As Dr. Bliss often says, the life you desire must be constructed deliberately, thoughfully, while always being alert to opportunities that arise. Opportunities do arise if we just "Suit up and show up."
The fact that millions of college graduates are unemployed or wait tables is not a temporary aberration; it is an inexorable result of rational incentives.
and
Consider the essential qualifications of a good employee (and I offer this account as someone who once owned and ran a business). He or she must be punctual, honest, be able to complete tasks on time, first time around and as specified. Employees must politely pay attention when spoken to and are not excessively argumentative; they must dress appropriately for the job, have good hygiene (look “clean cut”), speak distinctly and, with few exceptions, possess adequate writing skills as well as being able to perform tasks without explicit detailed instructions.
Such workers get along with co-workers or customers. They show up even under adverse circumstances and if unable to work that day, take necessary steps to minimize their absence. They give a full hour’s work for an hour’s pay and willingly volunteer for extra work if necessary. They also know that work is also not the place to socialize on the firm’s nickel.
I had been under the impression that the reason to spend big bucks for an elite education in prep schools like Andover, Exeter, Choate, Deerfield, etc. was for a very rigorous classical education, traditional and strict moral standards, and, in general, a special culture set apart from ordinary society and its fads, from factory-style public education, and from ordinary mindless and immature teen pursuits.
If these sorts of schools no longer aspire to be different, what's the point?
So now Geoff Chaucer, the father of modern English, is voiceless and the whores have voices? Thus the culture progresses, forgetting the Wife of Bath - and the Whore of Babylon.
Winter is book season. What am I reading this week?
A classic: How To Run Any Organizationby Theodore Caplow. This splendid book is inexplicably out of print but used copies are readily available online for pennies. He covers everything from running a church choir to a medical practice to a corporate department.
The Signal and the Noise: Why So Many Predictions Fail — but Some Don't. Nate Silver's new book.
Alexandre Dumas (1802-1870), author of The Count of Monte Cristo and The Three Musketeers, was a black guy. His Dad was a famous French general, born in Haiti (then Saint Domingue - Santo Domingo).
Alexandre's novel was based, in part, on his Dad who also had a grueling imprisonment after being captured by the Neapolitans in Taranto after being shipwrecked.
Tom Reiss researched this book for almost ten years.
You haven't heard of Peter Buck, PhD, but it's a story. Buck was an nuclear engineer, I believe for GE in Bridgeport, CT, and teaching an engineering class at the University of Bridgeport when he loaned a bright and hard-studying local student in one of his classes named Fred DeLuca $1000 to open a submarine sandwich shop to help him pay his way through college after the kid's family ran short of cash. That was 1965.
(I remember that first shop. I think it said "Submarines" on the sign, and I wondered what that was. I had had "grinders," but never a submarine. Just a 12" deli sandwich with lots of good stuff in it, as it turns out.)
A couple of years later Buck lent DeLuca a little bit more to open a second shop in Bridgeport, even though the first was not too profitable.
The privately-owned Subway now has 30,000 franchised restaurants worldwide. I don't believe that Dr. Buck ever worked for Subway or made any substantial further investments in the business but, based on their original deal, DeLuca and Buck have shared the profits ever since, 50-50. No lawsuits.
If you ever wondered why the Subway bags say "Doctor's Associates Inc" on them, it refers to Dr. Buck and his young engineering student Fred DeLuca, who remains the President of the Subway chain's corporation, Doctor's Associates.
The Buck and DeLuca families both still live in Fairfield County, each in fairly modest and quiet ways despite their unexpected wealth. Yes, I do like those Subway sandwiches, especially the Italian combo with Swiss cheese and some jalapenos on it. Oil and vinegar on top.
Their bread is too mushy for my taste, though. As Dr. Merc suggests, experiment with their different bread varieties. Still, compared to the burger chains, Subways are a treat when on the road, and they really do use prime and fresh ingredients.
I cannot eat a whole one. Just a half at most, and save the rest for later. My skinny daughter eats the whole thing.
It's the end of hunting season, and I have not killed enough stuff this year to satisfy the hunter in me. I have a doe in the freezer, countless pheasants and chukars, a few Canada Geese and a bunch of ducks of several species. A couple of grouse, but we have eaten most of them and all of the woodcock. (Ask me how to make woodcock ravioli with jus de gibier and black truffle - I will tell you.)
Long-time readers know that my experience teaches me that retirement is often a poor state of affairs for the average American male. Many deteriorate physically and mentally. I have one 92 year-old client who goes to the office every day after swimming a half-mile at the Y. Work keeps him young. He does indulge in 4 weeks of vacation travel each year, however, and has great-grandkids around the house all the time. Nice, balanced life. First wife died, now on his second but she is not doing too well now.
Maybe we all need to learn the hard way, but there is so little time to fail. It's a truism that we can learn more from failures than from successes. 
Customer Service: A Practical Approach.
I have gotten deep into 
We have posted in the (ancient) past about what Greek temples and sculpture looked like when they were built. Vividly-painted.
Prof. of Philosophy and Law (NYU) Thomas Nagel's classic short essay 
. One graf from 
Alexandre Dumas
A freshened-up re-post: