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.
Yale is responsible for introducing collegiate sports in the US, at first with rowing teams in 1843. And Yale's Walter Camp, of course, essentially invented the game of football.
When Yale Bowl was completed in 1914, it was the largest stadium built since the Roman Colosseum.
I have had a few interesting experiences with my patients and bill paying over the past few weeks.The business aspect of my practice is usually routine and unremarkable, but these stood out:
1. Phone message from a wealthy law firm partner one hour before his initial consultation: "Dr. Bliss, I just found out that you are not on my insurance so I decided not to come in."
(I threw a fit.)
2. An email from a college student patient with no money who I have seen on a charity basis "Dr. Bliss, my Dad" (who is unemployed) "and I were talking, and decided that we need to pay you something for the phone time and emails to adjust my medicine while I'm away at school. Please calculate something and put it on my account."
(I explained that I do not charge for brief phone calls or emails.)
3. Patient in the office "Dr. Bliss, you made a mistake on last month's bill." "Oh I did. I'm sorry." "Yes, it's the second time in two years when you undercharged me. Please correct it."
(I was naturally pleased by her honesty.)
4. Patient in the office: "My husband nickels and dimes me about every expense for the kids, and last week he went out and paid cash for a new Escalade for himself." "Did he?" I replied, "That's funny, because he told me on the phone that you all had no cash and asked that I give you a discount for a while." "Oh yes," she said. "I'm not surprised. His rule is 'Only suckers pay retail.'"
(I told her that as of today, it will be the full original fee because I was not pleased being one of his suckers.)
5. Business guy: "Doctor, will you take a discount for cash?"
("No. I happen to be one of those people who reports all of my income.")
A teacher put a sample of her 6th Grade summary math exam online, here.
I had forgotten what sorts of things 6th Grade math entailed, but found that I did not forget any that basic stuff because one keeps using it in daily life. 6th Grade math is fun math, no abstractions at all.
A re-post from last December - it's not snowing here yet this year - except for last weekend -
Still snowing heavily up here. Lovely evening for a smoke or two and a Scotch or three, and, as usual in the winter, I am encountering the problem of maintaining humidification.
I generally like to keep them in the mid-high 60s, but mine keep dropping to nearer to 50% in the dry air. And yes, I do keep them well-packed with good and bad smokes of all sorts.
Here's one bit of advice on the topic but, unless you have an electronic system, I suspect you just use solid heavy wood boxes and try to do your best to smoke 'em all - and not try to save a large collection. You can always buy more.
Here's something even better:
A pal who read my piece about humidors in winter was thoughtful enough to deliver me an Opus X along with two 72% Boveda gel-packs. Those packs are news to me. He promised that putting two Boveda packs in there will get your humidor through three months in the winter up here, where our humidity can be quite low in winter. The packs don't activate until opened.
America does have social classes, to some extent, based on all sorts of familial tribal signaling and shared understanding, but the mystery to most pundits especially on the Left is income mobility among economic levels. Social class and income are not the same thing. See "genteel poverty." Via The poor don't stay poor, the rich don't stay rich:
The data showed that fully 56 percent of those who in 2001 were in the lowest 20 percent quintile of income earners had moved up to a higher income quintile by 2007. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 66 percent of those who in 2001 were in the highest quintile of income earners dropped at least one quintile by 2007. And, as Perry notes on his Carpe Diem blog, lest anybody think the period spanning those years might not be representative because of the housing boom that triggered the Great Recession of 2008, data cited by the Fed point to the same pattern of high income mobility from 1996 to 2005. Fully 57.5 percent of those in the top 1 percent of income earners dropped to a lower quintile by 2005, while 57.8 percent of those in the lowest quintile in 1996 moved to a higher one by 2005.
In America, economic "class" is just a moment in time for most people.
We all must adapt! With Global Cooling hastening our certain death and doom by freezing to death, we offer this info in our annual Winter in New England series. God willing and if we survive Climate Change, we will extend this series next fall with some new additions.
Let's face it: 4 WD is is for petite blond yuppie wives who do not know how to drive in snow and mud while chatting on their cell - and for hunters who like to take vehicles to gnarly places. There's a cheap solution.
Snow and mud tires are called "Winter tires" nowadays. They are made of a softer rubber (so as to provide better suppleness in cold temperatures), which is why they don't last as long as regular tires. That's the reason to put them on in November and to take them off in March or April (around here, anyway). At that rate, they will last 3-4 seasons at the minimum.
Important safety considerations with winter tires: Always put them on all 4 wheels and never replace just one: replace all 4 at the same time.
Decent snow tires will turn your old Chevette into the rough equivalent of a 4 WD. But how do you know whether you need them? In my opinion, if you need them, you will know it - but here's a piece on the subject.
With global cooling picking up its pace, everybody may need them soon. 4 WD is good but, where you need them, winter tires are as good or better.
The problem the New Class faces at this point is the psychological and social self-perceptions of a status group that is alienated (as we marxists say) from traditional labor by its semi-privileged upbringing. It is, for the moment, insistent not just on white-collar work as its birthright and unable to conceive of much else. It does not celebrate the dignity of labor; it conceived of itself as existing to regulate labor. So it has purified itself to the point that not just any white-collar work will do. It has to be, as Michelle Obama instructed people in what now has to be seen as another era, virtuous non-profit or government work. Those attitudes are changing, but only slowly; the university pipelines are still full of people who cannot imagine themselves in any other kind of work, unless it means working for Apple or Google.
When I was a kid, we had an old red woodshed out back. It had a little hinged door, down low, to toss logs out of. It was far from the two-holer outhouse.
Mice and squirrels lived in there, and the occasional Black Snake too.
Nowadays, a wood fire is more of a luxury, a comfort, than a necessity for survival. We have grown more wealthy and comfortable than we appreciate. And we always seem to want more.
Some people still have woodsheds (necessary to take your brat kid behind for the wholesome daily whuppin'), but these days I keep my wood mostly out in the weather. Dry wood burns too fast, and causes the dread global warming. Of that, I am certain.
A tree guy I know just dumped me off a cord or so of green wood, for free and freshly cut from one of his jobs. Some logs large enough for splitting, but much of easily-burnable size.
People who are not fireplace experts think you need kiln-dried split wood for heat or for fireplaces. You do not.
As readers know, I keep the fire going in the MF HQ from October to May. I keep a supply of split and outdoor-dried wood, but once a fire is happy with coals I like to burn either green or wet logs. More heat, less flame, slower burn. Green wood burns fine once you have some coals. Sometimes, I throw a couple of hunks of charcoal in there to keep it hot and happy.
Recently, my alma mater Syracuse University and the University of Pittsburgh applied to join the ACC. Both were accepted. I had very mixed feelings. I attended Syracuse during the halcyon days of Big East Basketball. We were one of the original 3 Big East schools. We pulled the first major upset, beating Villanova for the Big East Tournament Championship in 1982 with a very mediocre squad. The Big East placed 3 teams in the Final Four in 1985, then 2 in the Final Four in 1987. The 1987 NCAA Championship saw Syracuse lose by a point in the final seconds as Indiana' Keith Smart nailed a jumper in the final seconds. Over the years, the Georgetown/Syracuse and the University of Connecticut/Syracuse rivalries have been heated and seen many legendary games. Syracuse's 6 overtime Big East Tournament victory over UConn in 2009 was the kind of game you only hope to see, and wind up telling your children about.
Big East men's basketball has had 6 NCAA Champions in the last 27 years. Women's basketball has seen many more, as the University of Connecticut Huskies have set a new standard for the term 'Excellence' when it comes to sporting achievements. In 32 years, it has won 28 championships in 6 different sports.
On the other hand, Big East football has seen very few important moments, has never really developed a strong following, and has not helped its best teams rise. In some respects, Big East football is a bit of a joke even though programs like UConn and Rutgers have managed to revive themselves. Over the years, it has been football that drives conference alignments because of the revenues involved.
As other conferences grew and focused on their revenues, the Big East played it safe. They lost Boston College, Miami and Virginia Tech in 2005. Hardliners in the conference scoffed, and I count myself among them. There was no way the move would benefit those teams (it hasn't really, but they've done better than they would have in the Big East). The Big East was clumsy. It just couldn't get the job done for those schools, nor for the two which recently left.
Shh-hh. Are we alone? I'm going to do something here that I'm not sure any blogger has ever done before, and, in fact, might actually be some kind of digital misdemeanor. Or, at very least, break Blogger's Rule #1.
I thought I'd ask for your opinion on something before publishing the post.
Yes, yes, I know that sounds crazy, and perhaps it is. They've recently changed my psychotropic drugs here at the sanitarium (also affectionately known as "Maggie's Farm" by the regulars in honor of the sweet ol' gal who runs the place), and I've increased my caffeine intake of late, so perhaps I've lost that delicate chemicular balance required to write a modern blog post.
All I know is that I had such good luck when I suckered that first sap into proofreading it (I wouldn't want to mention any names, but his initials are B.U.L.L.D.O.G.), that I thought I'd open it up to the Maggie's Valued Readers™ for further input before hitting the 'Publish' button.
It's about one of everybody's favorite subjects:
Global warmening!
I mentioned a few weeks ago that I'd be posting my global warming opus soon, but I held off because I wanted to run it by a few people and make sure I was touching all the bases. I mean to cover everything in this baby.
For example, Bulldog reminded me of Mt. Kilimanjaro, which was one of the first jump-off points ("The glaciers are melting!") for the AGW movement. My article mentions the Thames freezing over in the early 1600's and he noted that the Hudson and Delaware rivers had also frozen over, and that reminded me of the Northwest Passage, another item on the AGW list that deserves to be shattered.
And, as many people will tell you, when it comes to shattering hopes and dreams, I'm just the guy for the job.
So, fellow (and fellowette) anti-AGW aficionados, what say ye? Corrections, updates and additions are welcome. Any pro-AGW dribble will be cited in a future post arguing for the return of 15th century insane asylums.
“The part of the universe we are part of will all collapse down into a giant super-galaxy and the stars in the super galaxy will slowly use up their nuclear fuel and turn into little stellar embers that just fade into oblivion. It will be a very cold, lonely universe in the future.”
Sheesh. Sounds like Maine. I blame climate change.
It's all about this "consumerism" rage in the past two decades.
Students are consumers of education, patients are consumers of medical care, citizens are consumers of government services, prisoners are consumers of rehabilitative services.
It's a strange point of view.
The notion that students evaluate profs as if school were American Idol seems perverted to me. School is not infotainment. I can be an entertaining speaker and did some litigation in my distant past, but I would never teach where my career, even in part, depended on student evaluations. When teaching, I like to be a demanding SOB, intolerant of anything short of excellence and keeping people on their toes. In the end, people are thankful for my demanding attitude.
Saw one yesterday, flitting slowly through some shrubs. You will occasionally see them in the winter everywhere in the eastern US, hunting for bug larvae.
Darker and maybe smaller than a House Wren (which cannot survive a northern winter), they tend to be quiet and secretive in the winter as they pick through brambles and wood piles in the snow. Tough little guys. Survivors.
The book remains a staple of children's literature. While the movie went through a remake in 2005, the original remains a classic. It has lines that are familiar to all who have seen it, and its songs still resonate.
An interesting side note about the author, Roald Dahl. He was a spy for Britain in the United States during World War II (along with several other well known personalities such as David Ogilvy). He spent quite a bit of time trolling the social circles of Washington and New York City, collecting information. During his time here, Dahl began writing and found his calling.
One hopes Charlie Bucket has managed his global empire properly and treats his Oompa-Loompas well. I haven't seen any in Zucotti Park.
It's the time of year when we re-link our world-famous Boots and Wellies opus as part of our series of All You Need to Know For Snow (and mud) season.
It's also a good time of year for another free advt for Sierra Trading Post. Good discount outdoor gear, plus sneakers, etc. Often, good deals on dress shoes and work shoes, too. Some folks collect knives, or guns, or knick-knacks. I collect boots because happy feet make for a happy man.
I also collect boots because, as many unhappy feet learned the hard way, your winter boot size is probably not your foot size. You will put your wool socks and maybe liner sox inside them if you plan to spend any real time in the cold.
You gotta size 'em for your socks and not for your feet, in the north.
The OWS movement embodies certain qualities which we don't seem to fully understand. It's neither a generational or an issue-driven movement. It lacks solutions. It has no direction or focus. There is a reason for this, defined many years ago by Eric Hoffer.
Hoffer was skeptical of mass movements, feeling they epitomized juvenile behaviors. He was able to determine why, pointing to a lack of self-esteem which the protesters exhibited. Hoffer felt self-esteem was critical in the development of adult behaviors. He outlined how widespread affluence and the rapid changes in modern society lead to a desire to attain adulthood more quickly, but with certain rites of puberty being shortchanged, particularly with regard to work and endeavor.
In his view an extended adolescence led many to seek outlets for their inability to define themselves. These people, lacking in self-identity, defined themselves as they saw themselves described by others. There was an intense self-loathing and guilt regarding position and place. This was a direct result of low self-esteem. Self-esteem was not being cultivated as many of those in protest movements didn't work, and were incapable of understanding their responsibilities. From this perspective, all mass movements were interchangeable, regardless of what they sought to promote.
Self-esteem and self-contempt have specific odors; they can be smelled. ~Eric Hoffer
In aBangkokTemple: IT IS FORBIDDEN TO ENTER A WOMAN, EVEN A FOREIGNER, IF DRESSED AS A MAN.
Cocktail lounge,Norway: LADIES ARE REQUESTED NOT TO HAVE CHILDREN IN THE BAR.
Doctor's office,Rome: SPECIALIST IN WOMEN AND OTHER DISEASES.
Dry cleaners,Bangkok: DROP YOUR TROUSERS HERE FOR THE BEST RESULTS.
In aNairobirestaurant: CUSTOMERS WHO FIND OUR WAITRESSES RUDE, OUGHT TO SEE THE MANAGER.
On the main road toMombasa, leavingNairobi: TAKE NOTICE: WHEN THIS SIGN IS UNDER WATER, THIS ROAD IS IMPASSABLE.
On a poster at Kencom: ARE YOU AN ADULT THAT CANNOT READ? IF SO WE CAN HELP.
In a City restaurant: OPEN SEVEN DAYS A WEEK AND WEEKENDS. In a Cemetery: PERSONS ARE PROHIBITED FROM PICKING FLOWERS, FROM ANY BUT THEIR OWNGRAVES.
Tokyo hotel's rules and regulations: GUESTS ARE REQUESTED NOT TO SMOKE, OR DO OTHER DISGUSTING BEHAVIOURS IN BED.
On the menu of a Swiss Restaurant: OUR WINES LEAVE YOU NOTHING TO HOPE FOR.
In a Tokyo Bar: SPECIAL COCKTAILS FOR THE LADIES WITH NUTS.
Hotel,Yugoslavia: THE FLATTENING OF UNDERWEAR WITH PLEASURE, IS THE JOB OF THE CHAMBERMAID.
Hotel,Japan: YOU ARE INVITED TO TAKE ADVANTAGE OF THE CHAMBERMAID.
In the lobby of a Moscow Hotel, across from a Russian Orthodox Monastery: YOU ARE WELCOME TO VISIT THE CEMETERY, WHERE FAMOUS RUSSIAN AND SOVIET COMPOSERS, ARTISTS AND WRITERS ARE BURIED DAILY, EXCEPT THURSDAY.
A sign posted inGermany'sBlack Forest: IT IS STRICTLY FORBIDDEN ON OURBLACKFORESTCAMPING SITE, THAT PEOPLE OF DIFFERENT SEX, FOR INSTANCE, MEN AND WOMEN, LIVE TOGETHER IN ONE TENT, UNLESS THEY ARE MARRIED WITH EACH OTHER FOR THIS PURPOSE.
Hotel,Zurich: BECAUSE OF THE IMPROPRIETY OF ENTERTAINING GUESTS OF THE OPPOSITE SEX IN THE BEDROOM, IT IS SUGGESTED THAT THE LOBBY BE USED FOR THIS PURPOSE.
Advertisement for donkey rides,Thailand: WOULD YOU LIKE TO RIDE ON YOUR OWN ASS?
Airline ticket office,Copenhagen: WE TAKE YOUR BAGS AND SEND THEM IN ALL DIRECTIONS.
A Laundry inRome: LADIES, LEAVE YOUR CLOTHES HERE AND THEN SPEND THE AFTERNOON HAVING A GOOD TIME.
And finally the all time classic: Seen in anAbu DhabiSouk shop window:
IF THE FRONT IS CLOSED PLEASE ENTER THROUGH MY BACKSIDE…
Still snowing heavily up here. Lovely evening for a smoke or two and a Scotch or three, and, as usual in the winter, I am encountering the problem of maintaining humidification. 
When I was a kid, we had an old red woodshed out back. It had a little hinged door, down low, to toss logs out of. It was far from the two-holer outhouse.
Shh-hh. Are we alone? I'm going to do something here that I'm not sure any blogger has ever done before, and, in fact, might actually be some kind of digital misdemeanor. Or, at very least, break Blogger's Rule #1.
Saw one yesterday, flitting slowly through some shrubs. You will occasionally see them in the winter everywhere in the eastern US, hunting for bug larvae. 
It's the time of year when we re-link our world-famous 