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.
A friend reminded me the other day about breakfast at the Regency. That's where he meets with people for business breakfasts when in New York, as do many heavy hitters and financial types who seem to own their regular tables.
He told me that they make an excellent corned beef hash. I love corned beef hash for breakfast.
Pic of breakfast at The Regency from this site (good pics, obnoxious writing).
I'm a bit jealous. I don't own (or need) a suit expensive enough for a Regency breakfast. This is more my speed:
If there is any better mental training, or any better test of training and intellect than Chess, I don't know what it is.
(Other than real life, of course. Mastering the vicissitudes, raw deals, unfairnesses, subtleties, luck, and challenges of real life is the real test. Of course, dealing one's own personal limitations is a big part of that game.)
A friend of mine with three young kids recently banned all electronic and computer games from the house. "Enough stupid crap in this house." He announced that they would henceforth play Checkers, Chess, Backgammon, Poker, Mille Bournes, Euchre, or Hearts in the house - and that he would give each kid one game every night.
He's been working on Fritz though, to make sure he can stay ahead of them, and his eldest (9 years old) requested a Chess tutor. But even Fritz is banned for the kids. "I want them to play a real human, to learn to read them and their game."
Daubigny is considered part of The Barbizon School of realism and naturalism, but he is better known as a forerunner of Impressionism. As a friend said, Impressionism didn't come out of nowhere.
I have always been interested in the history of the idea of retirement. Not interested because it is something I want to do (I could financially do it today if I wanted to), but interested in why an intact, healthy person would not want to fully participate in society by being a productive member.
My Grandpa worked until he was felled by a stroke at 86, and my Dad worked until macular degeneration made him incapable of driving around age 76.
Private pensions (especially from the railroads) began in the late 1800s but it wasn't until the New Deal and Social Security that the option to be put to pasture became widely available. Roosevelt was, of course, highly motivated to remove workers from the labor force in an effort to reduce unemployment, and that was the main impetus for Social Security.
In 1900, 65% of men over 65 worked. By 2000, it was 17%. Of course, nowadays many jobs build in forced retirement. I saw some stats somewhere that about 40% of retired men return to some form of paid work within three years of retirement, but I don't recall the source.
Although some employees sitting in cubicles may long for the end to their work lives, sun-drenched days with tee-times, knitting and visiting the grandchildren, Howard Stone said retirees shouldn't retire, at least in the traditional sense of the word.
"Those who say 'I'll never work again' are making a major, major mistake. Because they're going to find themselves adrift, away from a community purpose and a sense," he said.
I found a good piece, with lots of numbers, on the economic history of retirement in the US. It begins:
One of the most striking changes in the American labor market over the twentieth century has been the virtual disappearance of older men from the labor force. Moen (1987) and Costa (1998) estimate that the labor force participation rate of men age 65 and older declined from 78 percent in 1880 to less than 20 percent in 1990 (see Table 1). In recent decades, the labor force participation rate of somewhat younger men (age 55-64) has been declining as well. When coupled with the increase in life expectancy over this period, it is clear that men today can expect to spend a much larger proportion of their lives in retirement, relative to men living a century ago.
Comment from Dr. Bliss: Excellent subject. A few random thoughts:
- I think many folks want to be able to retire. Many enjoy their jobs much more once they have the financial freedom to quit.
- People I have talked to who have retired young, such as cops with full pensions at age 45, and Wall Streeters who walk away with bags of money around the same age, almost always take on a second career of some sort.
- Psychologically, being retired can feel like being unemployed or sent out to pasture. When people retire in their 50s or early-mid 60s, a workplace loses their experienced wise ones who have "seen it all before", and the experienced wise ones feel useless.
- A comment about people who "hate their jobs." People love to bitch about their jobs. But without the job, they lose a lot of human contact, a structured place to use their brains or abilities, and a role in the world.
- Hedonistic retirement: The idea of the fun and sun and travel retirement has been sold hard to the middle class over the past 30 years. From what I have seen, it isn't all it's cracked up to be. A vacation can be a refreshing change of pace and change of senery, but an endless vacation can be like a meal made of all dessert courses: cloying and unnutritious.
- People who do not return to work after retirement, but who jump into unpaid labors of love, like community service projects, local politics, working for charities, churches, and non-profits, often seem to feel a good sense of satisfaction in "giving back."
- "Meaningful work." I hate that expression. All work is useful and contributes to society, whether it is raising one's kids, milking the cows, flipping burgers, or selling bonds. People who use that expression should think hard about what they mean by it. Furthermore, folks who want their work to provide them with meaning may be barking up the wrong tree.
1. Frayed cord on my cool Italian desk lamp was sparking. Brought it to my local lamp shop, since I am wary of electric repairs. Guy repaired the wire while I watched. Then he said it's a little wobbly, let's fix it. Took it apart, tightened all of the parts. Then he said that the frosted glass panels needed cleaning. He showed me how they can be removed, and cleaned them all up with their special chandelier-cleaning spray stuff. He replaced the four bulbs with the proper bulbs. They he wrapped it in bubble wrap for the ride home.
Total time: 30 minutes. Total charge: $6.25, which was for the new bulbs.
2. My Dell office computer was making terrible sounds. The IT guy I phone when I have a problem said it wasn't worth fixing, being 4 or 5 years old. My genius son replaced the fan for $10.99 and it's as good as new. Yes, I have a back-up hard drive.
I grew up in "nose bleed" at Ebbets Field, and Duke Snider was my hero and the hero of Brooklyn. I had his autograph, but my mother tossed it when she (finally) cleaned my room while I was in Vietnam. But I never lost my adoration. Last week I was at batting cages with Jason where Duke Snider's jersey, bat and photos are prominently displayed. The owner and I reminisced for an hour while Jason listened. After, Jason said to me, "He must have been some kind of hero for you to look up to him." At 84, the Duke of Flatbush left our field today, and remains in our hearts.
The New York Post quotes Snider: " 'If I live to be 100 years old,' he said in 2002, 'I'll always be able to remember what it felt to be young and a ballplayer in Brooklyn, N.Y., and I'll always remember what it meant to be a champion of the world there.' "
The Duke lived out his years in Fallbrook, about 20-miles from where I live now. When I was a kid in Brooklyn, after a game, Duke Snider would sometimes come out of the ballpark to play stickball in the street with us kids. The San Diego Union-Tribunerecalls:
Duke Snider played center in Ebbets Field and stickball on the streets of Brooklyn....Snider hit .295 with 407 career home runs, played in the World Series six times and won two championships. But the eight-time All-Star was defined by much more than his stats - he was, after all, part of the love affair between Brooklyn and "Dem Bums" who lived in the local neighborhoods....Snider is the Dodgers' franchise leader in home runs (389) and RBIs (1,271). He led all major leaguers in the 1950s with 326 homers and 1,031 RBIs....
Snider hit .309 with 42 homers and a career-high 136 RBIs in 1955. That October, he hit four homers, drove in seven runs and hit .320 as the Dodgers beat the Yankees in a seven-game Series.
For a team that kept preaching "Wait till next year" after World Series losses to the Yankees in 1953, '52, '49, '47 and '41, it was indeed next year. A generation later, long after they'd all grown old, those Dodgers were lauded as the "Boys of Summer" in Roger Kahn's book....
A durable slugger with a strong arm, good instincts on the bases and a regal style, Snider hit the last home run at Ebbets Field in 1957....
A native Californian, Snider became part of Brooklyn's fabric during his playing days. "I was born in Los Angeles," he once said. "Baseballwise, I was born in Brooklyn. We lived with Brooklyn. We died with Brooklyn."
The Duke of Flatbush will always live in the lore of Brooklyn.
The right to a leisurely retirement has been imprinted on at least five generations of Americans, which is why so few consider whether it is practical or even desirable to guarantee that everyone should meander through the last twenty years of life. Degradation intensifies when mental activity abates, and mental activity abates when there is nothing to strive toward and there are no problems to solve. Work for compensation is desirable because work for compensation is an expression of value creation, and value creation instills a sense of self worth. Work keeps the mind and body alive.
Work or play are personal choices; neither choice should be subsidized or deterred, nor should the choice be relegated to a disinterested third party. Whenever the individual abrogates responsibility, he surrenders his independence to another people's intentions, and another people's intentions are always driven by what is best for the other person.
Read the whole thing.
I need to re-post my old piece about retirement. My theory is that retirement is terrible for people and for society unless people find new ways to be constructive and to participate in real life. Mountains of wisdom and experience are tossed away when people in their 60s, at the prime level of mature adult functioning, go out to pasture like lame horses.
Sometimes it is forced, and that is a shame.
As I have said before, I believe that the key to financial peace of mind is to be able to quit working and still pay the bills. That's a tall order. Or, ideally, to work on one's own terms. That tends to help people enjoy working even more. My family is like Bird Dog's - the old-time Yankee ethic is that men are supposed to work 'til they drop. I guess we never got the newfangled memo from FDR, telling us to quit working and to go sit down somewhere to await the Grim Reaper. (Of course, he died in the saddle himself at a youthful 63.) We forget how new, and relatively untested, a societal idea this retirement is. Carpe diem, etc.
Oh well, to each his own. Some folks live for their retirements, and blossom in it. Sailing around the world (avoiding the Somalia coast), and volunteering at interesting or worthwhile sociable work. Many retreat into purposelessness and hedonism, and become old before their time. Some become the wonderful greeters at WalMart and the Meals on Wheels guys and gals, and some start up new enterprises like our own Capt. Tom.
That's freedom, but I do resent working to pay the pensions and green fees of fully competent people who are younger than I am. Makes no sense to me.
The “Battle Hymn of the Jewish Mother” is a reply to the Wall Street Journal article last month, “Why Chinese Mothers Are Superior,” that caused quite a stir.At root, the difference is between raising a mensch and raising a child to be a self-centered person with primary responsibility to self, above all striving for success, wealth and status, separated from and above society, and even the child’s ownnature.
In Yiddish, there’s no higher goal or compliment than being a mensch. In simple translation from the German, a mensch is simply a man. In Jewish culture, a mensch is the highest compliment, a person of the highest character who knows and acts with a strong sense of what is right and responsible toward others. It is believed that success in life is in being a mensch, and though material success is a possible outcome through the respect from others, success in being a worthwhile, contributing human being is a sure thing and most to be desired.
Our pal Gwynnie likes Coleman gas lanterns. They are good, but I don't have any of them.
I like lamps and lanterns. I do not care to use kerosene indoors. Lamp oil is fine with me. Whale oil is hard to come by, nowadays. (We have to remember that people like Mr. Rockefeller saved the whales with their oil from the dirt.)
Not feeling confident that the TSA would let me onboard with an oil lamp as a carry-on, I only bought one at the antique shop junk shop in Ohio to which the pupette dragged us a few weeks ago, looking for props for her next digital animation effort. Glad she did - the place was full of cool old junk. Disconcerting, of course, to see stuff for sale as "antique" that was quite ordinary when one was a youngster. Mrs. BD said I should have taken a photo of their supply of old salt and pepper shakers, and she was right. The Mickey and Minnie Mouse ones. Maybe next time.
The place must have had 100 old oil lamps, all sizes and all types. The Amish and Mennonites still use them, and who knows when all of the remote old farms were electrified. On my next trip, now confident that the TSA is cool with them, I think I will stock up on some more of them. We lose power regularly here, and if I cannot read I go insane.
Oil lamps produce a very pleasant light, and small ones are a good alternative to candles on a dining table. You can get repros for high cost, but you can find nice old ones in heartland junk shops for cheap. I am partial to the old green or red-glass ones that look like whorehouse illumination, or the cheesy milk glass ones with flowers painted on the glass that were probably bedroom or parlor lamps, but I bought the one in the picture instead. Large and handsome, I think. $40. I think it's silver plate because it is tarnished in places. It works fine. Most of them were considerably less.
In the past year, I realize I have heard my share of live music but have not bought a single piece of recorded music.
Part of that must be that I already own so much of what I want to listen to, including Barenboim's set of Beethoven's Piano Concertos, and all of Beethoven's string quartets including his astonishing and complicated masterpiece, Opus 133, the Grosse Fuge. The hook brings you back.
(It takes me many listenings to see what a composer is doing with an ambitious piece. Composers, like performers, tend not to realize that the average music listener cannot key into what they worked so hard on - at great length and fussing over every note for months or weeks - in one drowsy after-dinner session in a concert hall.)
Popular Science visited some toy fair the other day and ran an article on some of the snappier products. I thought I'd highlight a few here.
Let's start off with an easy one. This is one of those puzzles that's actually much easier to do than it sounds.
The object is to roll the ball through the obstacle course. Easy enough? The hitch is, you have to sit four feet away and you can't touch anything.
The answer?
Well, mind control, of course.
How else would you do it?
Mindflex was a great step forward in games, tracking your EEG waves through a headband to help you move a ball across the board. But who wants to play a game alone, right? Mattel's new MindFlex Duel is an upgraded two-player version in which you and a friend race to move the ball across the game board or through an obstacle course. It's a true battle of wits.
Sure, you'd like to hide a video camera in the girls' locker room. Who wouldn't? The problem is, the darn steam always fogs up the lens! Obviously, the answer is to secretly dash in, grab the vid, then dash back out before the lens gets fogged up.
As we say in the locker room biz, no sweat!
Get the car's-eye-view from a camera embedded in the hood of these three-inch racecars. Each 1:64 scale car can hold up to 12 minutes of VGA-quality video and has a one-inch LCD on its lower chassis for instant playback -- or you can load videos onto a computer to share online.
Most people like pets. I've raised tropical fish and exotic goldfish, dogs and cats, rats and rabbits. And many people would like to keep a small 'desk pet' at work, like a cute little hamster or guinea pig running around the desktop, keeping one company in the wee hours. Unfortunately, the cruel, merciless corporate plutocrats in their effort to keep us crushed beneath the imperialistic jackboot of authority have deemed this inappropriate.
Still, there's a simple answer. I present this more as a harbinger of things to come:
Set this palm-sized 'bot on its way on your desk without worrying that it will knock over the coffee cup in its path. When it's not being controlled by its accompanying iPhone app, the TankBot's autonomous mode relies on infrared sensors to see and avoid obstacles, so it won't make a mess of your workspace.
1 Boring Old Manhas a good post (one of a series) about current trends in Psychiatric diagnostics. One quote:
To my mind, the resulting evidence-based psychiatry seems like a tautology from my college logic class. A tautology is neither a proof nor fallacy. It’s the situation where the premise and the conclusion are just different ways of saying the same thing. Instead of experience informing, refining, or changing our new classification, practice was being designed to reaffirm and solidify it, since the only admissable evidence is group validation by clinical trial. No matter the outcome of the study, the validity of the group is affirmed. It depersonifies our patients - their diagnoses becomes bigger than their lives or experiences, and it locates the seat of knowledge outside the clinician/patient dyad, putting it in the hands of key opinion leaders who look at the studies and create the algorithms. The resulting relationship moved from doctor/patient to expert/diagnostic_group. I wish I were overstating this, but I don’t think I am by much.
Because human nature is so variable and strange and complicated, and because my field is still in recovery from an overdose of "Biological Psychiatry" (in which the "mind" plays no role), many of our Experts have seen fit to categorize people according to their symptoms.
Pursue sex too avidly? You got a sex addiction. Work too hard? You got OCD. Nervous about something? You got an Anxiety Disorder. Put stuff into your underpants at WalMart? You got Kleptomania.
To my mind, these things are not diagnoses - they are what we term in Medicine "Chief Complaints" - we scribble "cc -".
To my mind, surface emotional symptoms frequently say little about what is ailing or bothering a person, just as saying that a patient has a fever tells you little about what is wrong. It just tells you that something is wrong. I find it to be challenging, helpful, and always interesting to probe into what is really the matter rather than slapping a label on somebody.
A label is not a diagnosis. I had my training from the best, and they certainly agree. (We need to re-post my series on diagnosis one of these days.) I'd like to go on at length about the topic of depth Psychology and Psychiatry vs. cheap and superficial Psychiatry, but I can't do that right now.
Are manners all about social signaling? I don't think so. I find bad manners to be an aversive stimulus, and poor table manners cause me to lose my appetite. To term that a "signal" is to stretch the definition. Once a society agrees on manners, unmannerly behavior becomes offensive.
It's not rocket science. The basics, for kids:
Take your elbows off the table. Don’t talk with your mouth full. Don't pick up a fork until everyone is seated and the hostess picks up her fork. Eat slowly, and converse during meals. Look people in the eye when you speak to them. Avoid talking about yourself: Assume that only relatives and close friends care. Say "Please" and "Thank you," and say "How do you do?" when introduced to elders. Give a firm handshake. Write your thank-you notes in a timely fashion.
To support the ancient history course we are doing with the Teaching Company, we had to go to the City to see some Assyrian stuff close-up.
Interestingly, there were Christian groups going through the ancient rooms with guides making all the relevant references to the Old Testament. Wonderful to overhear them. Ur of the Chaldees. Abraham. Captivity in Babylon.
These pics are actually Neo-Assyrian carvings from the acropolis at Nimrud, palace of Ashurnasipal ll, 880 BC. Note that one of the guardian gods or genies has hooved feet, the other lion's paws. They also have 5 legs, so that from the side they are walking, but from the front, standing firm. Cool.
Readers know my personal Museum Rule: Just go to see one group of things, and leave before becoming a victim of Museum Brain. An hour and 20 minutes is my limit.
An interesting perspective on internet marketing from our respectable oriental rug consultant/expert friend at Rug Rag, who is clearly frustrated by the Google system in which, as I understand it, one can buy one's position on searches. Commerce is a tough game:
Sniper sites show up in the top 10 search results for "Oriental Rugs." A 100% commission-based single page facade website literally has every site link directing traffic straight to an affiliate Canada-based dealer which cannot sell most of their Persian rugs to the States unless they happen to be warehoused in NY.
Another is a hole-in-the-wall shows in top ten for "Oriental Rugs." So many unbelievably great rug companies in the States with fantastic websites and merchandise, and a black hat SEO site represents the top 10 searches for the term. They have over 20,000 pages from what we can see most are dedicated for each town and city in every state covering the US, in some cases, misleading to have a location selection in every one.
Picture of a spider-hole rug store below, courtesy Google maps. Front had the name on it, so that pic is from the side. Ranks 6-8 for "Oriental rugs" in Google. Problem is, there need to be more quality sites ranking for these keywords.
We want to keep the junk Persian rugs off peoples' floors, but we don't rank high enough to be seen before people make purchase decisions.
I wasn't able to join Mrs. BD and friends to hear the great Yale and NYU Prof Harold Bloom talk about Shakespeare Monday night at the Classic Stage Company (a theater company she loves and supports) just off Union Square.
She reported a few random things Bloom said, paraphrased:
"Lear is Shakespeare's greatest work. I don't know how a human could have written it."
"I am not a Shakespeare scholar. I give no credence to any Shakespeare scholar."
"Shakespeare used a 22,000 word vocabulary in his writing. No other writer has ever come close to that. And he probably invented 1000 words, many of them now part of ordinary English."
"He wrote Othello, Macbeth, and Lear within 14 months. How could that be done?"
"He may have died of Syphilis."
Mrs. and Co. had supper at the Blue Water Grill. With the Union Square Cafe, The Gotham Bar and Grill, the Blue Water Grill, and Toqueville(which my daughter loves), Union Square has come a long way since I sort-of lived on University Place. Back then, the cops would stop by to pull dead guys out of the bushes in the morning. ODs, mostly.
Now it has a dog park and an open air bar with live music, and I guess most of the old addicts and drunks are dead.
At Bard College I’m teaching a modified version of the Yale Grand Strategy curriculum developed by John Gaddis, Charles Hill and Paul Kennedy to a group of undergraduates this semester and the students have been generous enough to agree to share this experience with the online world.
I thought it appropriate to group these three movies together since they all have that same warm, fuzzy feel to them. Not to mention a hot chick! Or, at least in the case of True Grit, hot under the collar!
True Grit
Doc's List Of The Toughest-Talkin' Hombres In All Of Western Moviedom:
5. John Wayne in The Alamo
4. Clint Eastwood in Hang 'Em High
3. Kurt Russell in Tombstone
2. Gene Hackman in The Quick and the Dead
And #1 on Doc's List Of The Toughest-Talkin' Hombres In All Of Western Moviedom:
1. Little 14-year-old Hailee Steinfeld in True Grit
I mean, wow. Write some tough lines for any of the above heavyweight dudes, then stick a dainty 14-year-old girl wearing her daddy's big floppy hat in front of the camera speaking them, and watch the sparks fly. Poor old Rooster never knew what hit him.
Neither did this poor slob:
Nor did Jeff Bridges, who said in an interview that he was full of trepidation at the thought of giving the lead to an unproven 14-year-old, but the first scene they filmed was when she walked in while he was sleeping and proceeded to verbally kick his ass all over the room, at which point he never had another doubt.
What was particularly impressive about the movie was that it had a nice unhurried feel to it, as befitted the times, yet it never dragged. I had complained in my Jonah Hex post a few weeks ago how slow and boring Westerns had become, and while there wasn't a lot of gunplay in Grit, it sure never felt boring. Even the 'quiet' scenes, like around the campfire and saddling up the horses, had a sharp edge to them because of the ever-present tension between Marshall Cogburn and Texas Ranger LaBoeuf, played to perfection by Matt Damon.
Another nicety is the way they stick to the language of the day and don't use contractions — a purely modern convention. I'm sure it felt a little awkward and unnatural for the actors at times, and it's a little jarring to hear, but its authenticity made up for any disjointedness. They also use 'full' sentences, unlike the clipped way we speak today.
Old way:
"I do not know of that which you speak!"
Modern way:
"Huh??"
A truly enjoyable movie. Notes on Toy Story 3 and Shrek 4 are below the fold.
It's the cat's meow: 
1. Frayed cord on my cool Italian desk lamp was sparking. Brought it to my local lamp shop, since I am wary of electric repairs. Guy repaired the wire while I watched. Then he said it's a little wobbly, let's fix it. Took it apart, tightened all of the parts. Then he said that the frosted glass panels needed cleaning. He showed me how they can be removed, and cleaned them all up with their special chandelier-cleaning spray stuff. He replaced the four bulbs with the proper bulbs. They he wrapped it in bubble wrap for the ride home. 
From Mauzy's 
Candles and flashlights are never sufficient for when your power goes out for a day or three. We have discussed the topic on our annual post, 
It's always been said that snow on the roof is an indication of good home insulation. It is 
I wasn't able to join Mrs. BD and friends to hear the great Yale and NYU 
