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.
In the Western world, beach bathing is a late 18th-19th Century phenomenon.
Bathing became fashionable because, like taking spa water, it was thought to be healthful. A form of "taking the cure" for neurasthenia or whatever.
Furthermore, before then nobody went to the beach anyway, and having a tan was for peasants only. It was a sign that you labored outdoors. Nobody knew how to swim, either (as in Italy today).
Native peoples, especially in warm climates, knew how to swim. The Front Crawl, aka Australian Crawl (now universally used for Freestyle racing), was adopted by Western Civ around the turn of the century, via Solomon Islanders who used this speedy stroke.
Here's a history of women's bathing attire. They definitely did not swim in these things. You would rapidly drown. Maybe they just got a little wet up to their knees, and splashed some water on their faces.
Even today, most people do not go to the beach to swim. They go to read, to watch their kids play in the sand and waves, to obtain some beneficial rays of the sun, to enjoy a sea breeze blowing over their near-naked body, to take a cooling dip, or to surf or body surf where there are good waves.
And how many places can one go out in public and exhibit one's gorgeous, erotic self in what is basically underwear?
My seven men must yearn to see some fine, strapping, young body-in-its-prime with some specific ailment to which they can apply something quickly sovereign, doctor and patient both ending up refreshed. But no, they face daily the procession of an ever older, more decrepit, more grotesque, unsavory parade of bodies-- of those who have lived too long.
It felt like it had been the longest week of my life. I was filling in at some big apartment complex while the building's handyman was on vacation, and I ran my tail off all week long fixing things. I came home that Friday and did something I'd never done before, and have never done since:
I flopped into my easy chair.
Normally, I plunk myself down in front of the computer and get caught up. But I was so beat that I just wanted to hit the La-Z-Boy and relax.
Out of boredom, I turned on the TV.
It was kind of a bizarre sight. On a completely empty highway, a white SUV was cruising down the fast lane going about 45 miles per hour, trailed by a zillion police cars. It eventually turned off and as it drove through the neighborhoods, people stood on the side of the street with signs reading "Go, OJ!", "We Believe In You!", "Run, OJ, Run!"
As I said, it was pretty bizarre.
And thus started a nine-month journey as I watched every word of testimony and every cable talk show that evening, VCR at the ready for overlapping shows. And yes, I was there, a few weeks after the trial ended, watching the final talk show on the trial's aftermath, and when they signed off, that was the last of the 'OJ Special' shows.
So I obviously consider myself something of an expert on the subject.
The other day there was an article on Hot Air claiming that OJ was going to 'fess up and admit to Oprah that he did, indeed, kill Nicole Simpson and Ron Goldman. It's probably a hoax, but we'll see.
You might agree with some of the comments:
The verdict had NOTHING to do with the murders. It was a racial vindication that a black man could kill two white people and get away with it if the jury was black. It’s called jury nullification and it’s happened many times throughout history. It doesn’t make it any less disgusting but it is a fact.
They didn’t believe he was innocent, they just refused to process the facts of the case. They went into this jury duty with a pre-determined outcome.
Stupid judge. Stupid, stupid, stupid jurors.
Wasn’t the composition of the jury all black females? Not that it would make any difference in their decision-making of course.
The jury was not all black. It was, however, all dumb. In fact, it was what they call a “downtown jury” meaning they are stupid and prosecutors are less likely to get convictions.
Actually, these people are as wrong as wrong can be.
In 1932 Yale accepted seventy-two per cent of its applicants. In 1940 Harvard accepted eighty-five per cent. Of the four hundred and five boys from Groton who applied to Harvard between the years 1906 and 1932 only three were turned down.
He concludes:
When my kids get “literature” in the mail from a college claiming that it will help them enter into the fullness of their humanity and teach them to insure in perpetuity the life and health of the world, I will stop using the word “racket” to describe “higher” education. But until that time I’m afraid I will be an accomplice to something I cannot wholly admire—if also, I hope, an enemy within it, a kind of Trojan horse.
Only the prosperous could afford fancy private higher education before WW 2. It is getting so that few can afford it now. At $50,000+ per year, they are back to looking for the rich kids again whose parents can pay full freight.
Actually, no blood relation to Andrew Breitbart, today’s investigative PR Superman at leaping tall piles of Leftist BS. Zisha (stagename Siegmund) Breitbart was a poor Polish Jew who in the early 1900s was heralded by schtetl dwellers, and by gentile audiences in Europe and America, as “Superman of the Ages” and “Iron King” for his feats (and tricks) of strength.
But of all the speculative theories surrounding the creation of Superman, one exceedingly likely influence has been virtually ignored—a real-life Jewish strongman from Poland who 1. was billed as the “Superman of the Ages”; 2. advertised, on circus posters, as a man able to stop speeding locomotives; 3. wore a cape; 4. looked—with his chiseled movie-star face, wavy hair, and massive upper torso—like the future comic book idol; and 5. performed his death-defying feats in 1923 and 1924 in Cleveland and Toronto, Siegel and Shuster’s [the conceivers of Action Comics Superman] respective hometowns, when they were impressionable nine year olds.
Master German filmmaker Werner Herzog made a biopic of Zisha Breitbart's life in 2000, Invincible. Herzog takes some film liberties, but “Herzog did accurately portray Breitbart as a sensational popular variety artist and a proud Jew who inspired hero-seeking Jewish children—likely among them Jerry Siegel and Joe Schuster.”
Here’s the trailer for Invincible.
Zisha Breitbart died in 1925 from the after-effects of a rusty nail in one of his acts.
Breitbart’s funeral, an Orthodox ceremony, was attended by thousands of Yiddish and German-speaking Jews as well as gentiles from the circus and variety stage world. One moving obituary quoted a passage from Zechariah: “Wail, O Cypress, for the Cedar has fallen.”
Interestingly, NYC's Broadway was an old Lenape Indian trail into the Bronx and Westchester, later extended by the Dutch to run up to the Dutch settlement of Albany (the current Rte. 9).
We now call the North River the Hudson River. The road along the wall is Wall St. That canal, now filled in, is Broad St. Another Dutch canal further uptown, long filled in, is now Canal St.
Father's Day dinner last night with the in-laws at the Red Hat restaurant in the charming riverfront village of Irvington, NY (pop 6000). Was the town named after Washington Irving? Yes. Re-named after its distinguished resident. In fact, the hamlet of Sleepy Hollow is just north of there.
Now mainly a bedroom town, it once housed the Lord and Burnham Co. which built greenhouses and conservatories, including those of the NY Botanical Gardens. In fact, Red Hat is housed in the back of one of the old Lord and Burnham buildings. (Mrs. BD knows Irvington as the location of the home office and shop of Eileen Fisher.)
If you look south from the water's edge, you can see Manhattan 20 miles in the distance. My pic, looking north up the Hudson, has the Tappan Zee bridge. Gal in the foreground looks like Botticelli's niece - angelic, but with a sadness.
Mrs. BD cannot stop talking about this week's WAFA show in Boston. The exhibits blew her mind - and she knows about these things.
For flower art, the WAFA is the World Soccer competition. Competitive sculpture, really, but ephemeral. Four days, then it's all in dumpsters.
She said New Zealand, Pakistan, Japan, Russia, and South Africa were well-represented by designers. Even a highly-talented mother-daughter team from Zimbabwe.
Mrs. BD and her pals had nice chats with an exhibitor from Wales and one from Pakistan. They also chatted with a priest from Northern Ireland who is a famous designer, and a guy from Russia who won his division, who was there with his blond bombshell girlfriend.
I would post pics but Mrs. BD lost her iPhone right before she went. Some pics are here.
Today is the last day of the show, and it probably won't be scheduled back in the US for a decade or more. People come to the WAFA events from all over the world, and filled up Boston's hotels.
This world is full of so many interesting things to see and do that it is a wonder that anybody finds time to look at the internet.
"If you have a Dad who didn’t beat or molest you, didn’t embezzle money from you or your family, and kept his whoring enough on the down-low that he has never had to address it in a press conference, you better be getting that man a present.
Dads who manage to avoid all of the things mentioned in the previous paragraph are hard to find, and deserving of praise."
It's a sad and difficult thing to grow up without a father.
I believe that, if you haven't gotten what you need to become an effective and self-motivated learner in high school, you never will. School is spoon-feeding, but real education is picking up the spoon yourself.
The test of whether someone has deserved a higher education is afterwards: Do they continue with scholarly or self-educational pursuits, or do they rest on their paper laurels? Most people could learn to do their jobs through apprenticeships if a job is what they are after, and save the college cost. Most jobs are not rocket science, but most jobs expect ongoing learning of some sort, on one's own.
I also believe that all education is self-education, and that a degree is an expensive piece of paper. See "I got my education at the New York Public Library," (which wonderful library, a source of learning for immigrants and scholars alike, had its 100th Aniversary last month).
We easily forget that almost none of the remarkable achievers and contributors in human history ever had higher education, or more than elementary formal education, and that that continues to be true up through the present.
America's "education system" is SNAFU, and "college education" is a racket designed to support Big Beer.
Math is fun, endlessly challenging, relentlessly logical, brain-exercising, and intriguing. Two years of Calc and Stats should be required for a Thinking Permit.
The various academic fields of –ists and –ologists try to decipher why and how individuals and groups do things, and the effective ways to get them to do them better or differently or to do other things.
I’d suggest that the further they get from coercion, material or otherwise, the weaker their prescriptions.
With one exception, that is, persuasion. The field of persuasion is what I focused upon in my doctoral studies of organization and decision making, as offering the most direct and directly measurable avenue to offering improvements that are accepted and acted upon.
Reducing a complex subject, full of tautologies, persuasion is getting someone to do what they want to do. One does that by listening, observing and understanding the person’s wants and offering information with comfort that they find useful which will lead them to rearrange their priorities.
A corollary to that is understanding why individuals choose attitudes and behaviors that are less constructive to their own wants. This article by a leading social psychologist says that we form narratives of ourselves and the world that are often misleading.
Personally, I believe that we all are exposed to roughly equal proportions of good and bad things in our lives, although of differing dimensions, and we each choose which to focus upon. The happier among us tend to focus on the good things more than the bad.
None of this is to contradict deep psychoanalysis, discursive or medicinal, for very serious problems. However, for most of us, the functionally dysfunctional common to humanity, the more direct path is through understanding our and others’ narratives.
The academic –ists and –ologists tend to go well beyond that -- often based on controlled experiments with college students from which they overgeneralize -- into how to influence or control groups of people, adding such magnitudes of mathematical and knowable uncertainties that they blunder about in faith-healing based on catering to whatever their powers that be desire.
Once one gets too far away from eternal verities, from moral lessons that have been, in effect, empirically tested across hundreds and thousands of years by all people and peoples and found to point in the right direction, one enters into the experimentalists that have no more respect for us than rats and no more object than controlling the rats.
They haven’t been too successful, so they increasingly turn to coercion. The resistance of individual constructive independence and relationships eventually wins out, although after great costs along the way.
If one chooses to be conscious and resist ill temptations, to be in control of one’s own narrative, however, the “I” rules and saves oneself and the world from great pain.
Like everyone else in the audience, if I had been watching 'Britain's Got Talent' when Susan Boyle walked onto the stage, I would have figured this was going to be a total disaster. A more frumpy, frowzy, middle-aged Scottish woman would be hard to imagine. Then she starts cackling away and going through some goofy gyrations and you're starting to think that maybe it's going to be some kind of musical comedy skit. Either way, you know it's going to be just awful.
But then.
Hopefully, we all learned a little lesson about stereotypes and preconceived notions that day.
In the Western world, 
I remember it well.
It's summertime, and I like to post a few light-hearted summertime items on occasion.
Mrs. BD cannot stop talking about this week's
At 