Monday, December 13. 2010
 Everybody's talking about Bedbug infestations these days. Somebody recently told me that they had their house checked for bedbugs, but the exterminator only found Carpet Bugs.
I thought Carpet Bugs were mythical.
Pic is Carpet Beetle and beetle larva.
At Pajamas, "A perfect reflection of America's character, Manhattan will be displaying many new skyscrapers in the coming years." The piece quotes The Fountainhead:
I would give the greatest sunset in the world for one sight of New York’s skyline. Particularly when one can’t see the details. Just the shapes. The shapes and the thought that made them. The sky over New York and the will of man made visible. What other religion do we need? And then people tell me about pilgrimages to some dank pesthole in a jungle where they go to do homage to a crumbling temple, to a leering stone monster with a pot belly, created by some leprous savage. Is it beauty and genius they want to see? Do they seek a sense of the sublime? Let them come to New York, stand on the shore of the Hudson, look and kneel. When I see the city from my window — no, I don’t feel how small I am — but I feel that if a war came to threaten this, I would throw myself into space, over the city, and protect these buildings with my body.
Sunday, December 12. 2010
Excellent summary of the topic at The American by Arthur Brooks and Peter Wehner.
Perhaps I like it because it confirms my line of thinking, but says it better than I can. They begin:
The model of human nature one embraces will guide and shape everything else, from the economic system one prefers to the political system one supports.
At the core of every social, political, and economic system is a picture of human nature (to paraphrase 20th-century columnist Walter Lippmann). The suppositions we begin with—the ways in which that picture is developed—determine the lives we lead, the institutions we build, and the civilizations we create. They are the foundation stone.
It's one of the biggest topics on earth. Good job, guys.
Saturday, December 11. 2010
For wristwatch hoarders and collectors, a 6-watch watch winder. I didn't know such things existed, but I did not need to know.
Friday, December 10. 2010
The 1920s Christmas pics on this site are great fun. Some can be embiggened, with wonderful detail. (I don't know how to enable embiggening on our site.)
I notice that Santa did not seem to use wrapping paper back then.
 A good pal and his charming and lovely missus recently moved to Austin, but stopped by up here this week for a hello and for a sentimental taste of our Yankee chill.
I advised a gun rack for his Porsche, and alligator boots (When in Rome, etc.).
The Lucchese customized gator boot pictured here is nice for formal wear. Better, of course, to get a pair made for your own feet like the stars do.
Put something like this on your list, old buddy. Might need something to put on that gun rack, too. We can offer advice on that.
Tuesday, December 7. 2010
 Bird Dog Bay. Looks like a nice haberdashery - even if a stylistic cousin of Vineyard Vines.
Nice cufflinks.
Monday, December 6. 2010
My sons and I were at the pancake breakfast last Saturday morning at Camp Pendleton paid for by Congressman Darrell Issa’s Family Foundation to gather toys and contributions for Homefront San Diego. Issa’s Family Foundation is matching all contributions. Homefront San Diego has no overhead and no payroll. Every cent of tax-deductible contributions directly benefits the lower enlisted active duty military families in the San Diego area. Just go to the Homefront site and make your contribution to those who serve.
As a former Marine Sergeant, of course I enjoyed who worked the line serving us Saturday morning, though they serve us every day.
Continue reading "Those Who Serve"
Sunday, December 5. 2010
A fairly serious essay by Prof. Bertonneau at Brussels titled A Lesson for Our Time in Three Late-Antique Narratives: Satyricon, The Golden Ass, and Confessions. One quote from this literary jeremiad:
Everyone has vices. Most people manage to overcome the worst of their viciousness. It therefore requires a mighty labor not to see the so-called explanations of vice as mere excuses – indeed, as lame excuses – for irredentism and indulgence. The claim of personal helplessness is the creed of people who like their vices and who will on no account reform themselves. These non-explanations nevertheless have wide currency, but so also do the indifferent notion that the self is a “logocentric” illusion and the relativistic opinion that to flout a stricture is morally equal to observing it. The political religions of the Twentieth Century all relied on – and indeed mandated – these views as part of the ‘correct” view of existence. Socialism generically predicates its own inevitability and it then necessarily also predicates the emptiness of individual determination or action. Radical restructuring of society comes upon us inevitably, the vanguard always argues; and restructuring is justified because there are whole classes of victims whose misery is supposedly not of their own making, but has impinged on them from an outside beyond the control of the afflicted. In its less acute form of the multicultural welfare state, socialism insists that victim-groups not only cannot help themselves but that they cannot actually be reformed and that it is the duty of everyone else, first, to refrain from any condemnation of counterproductive behaviors and, then, to subsidize the pathological consequences of those behaviors.
Read the whole thing. It's a good reminder about those three classic texts, too, which we all read before we had the age on us to really appreciate what the authors were talking about.
Non-technical education is wasted on the young, because they are too interested in questions about themselves than in the big questions. These books were not written for adolescents.
Friday, December 3. 2010
12 years is the average difference in age between men and women, in second marriages.
I wonder why...
Tuesday, November 30. 2010
Remember when you carried around one of these, every where you went? Remember what liberation it was not to be tied to an electric cord and you could tuck it in your shirt pocket? It even had small earphones. The transistor radio only played AM, but AM was all music then. I still have mine (I take care of my treasures), and Jason and I use it to listen to ball games while were out and about.
Remember the music, also liberating, at the 50s start of RnR and pre-Beatles. Remember when you'd stay up late harmonizing with your friends or the song or all night listening. Remember when love was romantic and not another four-letter word.
My friend Charlotte sent me this one. Maybe you'll still like it, and you don't have to stay up late to listen. Or, you can find many of the greats on Youtube, and rock and remember all night long. Got something better to do?
Monday, November 29. 2010
Re that Looking for Racism piece we (and many others) linked a while ago:
I spent most of the summers of my youth working side-by-side with black guys, doing manual labor. Mostly landscaping and in lumber yards, back before all the Mexicans arrived. My folks required us to labor during the summers. They did not wish to produce spoiled, snotty brats.
I loved those dudes, and they liked me. We were a bit culturally alien, but we all liked good music and thought about Jesus. They all grew up in the South. The differences made us more interesting to eachother. They'd invite me back to their places after work to listen to Kenny Burrell, smoke some weed (to which they introduced me), and drink cheap wine and smoke Pall Malls (the red packages - delicious unfiltered smokes) until it was time for me to wobble my parents' station wagon away from downtown back to Whitelandia. I miss them.
In my view, modern racism is an invention of the race-pimps and pols who make a good living off of inventing it and then exploiting it. Even Al and Jesse have trouble finding problems nowadays and, believe me, they do look for signs of them everywhere.
Listening to cool Kenny takes me back to those good old days.
 Some report claims that 20% of the population, and 30% of youth, had a mental illness last year.
I think this must be a gross over-diagnosing of people who are going through tough times in their lives.
Feeling depressed, fearful, and even having suicidal ideas, however, can be quite normal for people in jams. If you apply a DSM checklist to 100 random people, you could come up with at least one diagnosis for every one of them.
Sometimes I feel that modern Psychiatry and pharmacology imagines that anybody who doesn't feel perfect all the time must be assigned a diagnosis (and maybe given a pill or two). Here at Maggie's, we term that Psycho-utopianism - and we have the trademark on that term.
Life is tough. Being a person can be tough. Most people's problems stem from dealing with themselves. I cannot assign a diagnosis to many of the patients I see (but I make them up when need be, for their insurances). If you have trouble with your feelings or your behavior, there is some help out there. Few cures, but plenty of help despite what the article implies.
I did get a kick out of this part:
The survey also found that 23.8 percent of women had some form of mental illness, compared with 15.6 percent of men.
We all know why the gender inequality there: hormones, and having to deal with kids and men.
Sunday, November 28. 2010
 At some point, we become inured to the shrill Chicken Littles who make a crisis out of everything they wish to control. It all makes The Englishman want to blow smoke in their faces.
Last I read, there is really no harm at all to second-hand smoke.
George Will, in today's Our puritanical progressives, says it this way:
Progressivism is a faith-based program. The progressives' agenda for improving everyone else varies but invariably involves the cult of expertise - an unflagging faith in the application of science to social reform. Progressivism's itch to perfect people by perfecting the social environment can produce an interesting phenomenon - the Pecksniffian progressive.
I have no desire to be improved, unless they can make me taller, smarter, richer, and better-looking - and a few years younger. I would pay money for those things. She Who Must Be Obeyed would pay money to get those things for me, too.
Friday, November 26. 2010
Want something meaty to chew on tonight? Raymond Tallis' How Can I Possibly Be Free?
He begins:
This essay is an attempt to persuade you of something that in practice you cannot really doubt: your belief that you have free will. It will try to reassure you that it is not naïve to feel that you are responsible, and indeed morally responsible, for your actions. And it will provide you with arguments that will help you answer those increasing numbers of people who say that our free will is an illusion, or that belief in it is an adaptive delusion implanted by evolution.
I am re-posting this because, as I slowly get through it (slowly because there is so much in it - I am reading it every night), I appreciate it more and more. Some of you cultural history types might put it on a Christmas list.
Another book I am reading, with far more pleasure than the gruesome After the Reich, is Peter Watson's The German Genius: Europe's Third Renaissance, the Second Scientific Revolution, and the Twentieth Century.
Since there was no real idea of "Germany" as a nation until 1817 (The Deutscher Bund), and no modern nation of Germany until 1871, the book is mostly about German culture (which preceded any German nation and which continues to exist beyond the boundaries of modern Germany - Austria, northeast Italy, Switzerland, the entire diaspora of German Jews, etc).
From the review in The Guardian:
So, is there a German genius? Of course there is. Even Borges never suggested that Goethe's Die Leiden des jungen Werthers could have been written in Spanish, or Einstein's "Zur Elektrodynamik bewegter K�rper" in English. Of all the answers assembled by Watson, the clearest comes from the American philosopher John Dewey in 1915, who summed up German civilisation as a "self-conscious idealism with unsurpassed technical efficiency and organisation". By idealism, he meant a belief that behind appearances or phenomena is some super-reality, sometimes called Geist, sometimes called Wille, sometimes even Musik. Whatever it is called, it speaks accurate German.
His chapter on German Idealism is especially good. Hegel and his brethren inform our thinking today far more than I realized.
 LP-CD turntables?
Seems to me it would be a good motivation to listen to one's dusty LP collection while putting them on CD where they belong.
Pic is this one.
Lots of reviews of these things say that they do not work well. I'd be concerned about the coordination of the endings of the LP and the CD.
Thursday, November 25. 2010
A quiet day at Maggies.
Here's a Wellfleet MA shore, looking the same way the Pilgrims saw it when they sailed down from P'town to Eastham. John Winthrop famously did not say, "My short-term goal is religious freedom, but my long-term goal is real estate" :
The Wellfleet, MA Congo Church, which still rings ship's bells instead of landlubber hours:
My sous chef, today:
Nice fireplace at a place we love:
Cape Cod sunrise:
I was told there would be football.
A thanks from Robin of Berkeley. A quote:
...this Thanksgiving, I feel not only grateful, but blessed. I read something evocative in the illuminating book Back to Virtue. The author writes that before a person believes in God, he feels either happy or unhappy. The person will cling to fleeting pleasures, no matter how harmful they may be.
When a person wakes up to the Divine, he's still sometimes happy and other times unhappy. But through all the trials and tribulations of this human realm, he continually feels blessed.
And a re-post, from legal immigrant Mark Steyn:
Three hundred and 14 years ago, the Pilgrims thanked God because there was a place for them in this land, and it was indeed grand. The land is grander today, and that, too, is remarkable: France has lurched from Second Empires to Fifth Republics struggling to devise a lasting constitutional settlement for the same smallish chunk of real estate, but the principles that united a baker's dozen of East Coast colonies were resilient enough to expand across a continent and halfway around the globe to Hawaii.
Americans should, as always, be thankful this Thanksgiving, but they should also understand just how rare in human history their blessings are.
Ditto, Mark.
Wednesday, November 24. 2010
 Every Thanksgiving, we kids sang this merry song on the way to our Granny and Grampy's Connecticut house: five of us, bouncing in the back seat of the Chevy station wagon. Dad driving with a cigarette in his mouth and humming opera tunes.
Kents, as I recall.
Their house was a mansion to us, filled with mysteries. My Gramps was a doctor. They had owl andirons with eyes, bathtubs with claw feet, a real ice box in the basement, a big family Bible from the 1700s, a jar of formaldehyde with a dissected human heart, old medical texts about Syphilis and Malaria which used to be common in CT, Tiffany lamps, a Chickering grand piano, Persian rugs, the first EKG machine in Connecticut (German made, in a mahogany cabinet, which still worked and which works to this day), the rooms my Dad and Aunt grew up in with all of their books - and my Granny's Mom, sitting and knitting. She died at age 103. An old Yankee, raised on a hardscrabble farm and who worked as a nurse, she never said very much. She was half Iroquois (her Mom), and looked like an ancient squaw with her hair tied back.
They had a cranky, humorless Polish widowed cook called Mrs. Wos (which was an abbreviation of her last name which I never knew) who helped them in the kitchen and who would smack your hand hard with a spoon if you tried to grab something. Granny was not much of a cook, to put it mildly, but she would help Mrs. Wos when asked. Mrs. Wos kept a filled bird-feeder outside the kitchen window for entertainment, and banged on the glass when a squirrel got into it. Come to think of it, she banged all sorts of things: hands, windows, pots and pans, cabinet doors, all the time.
And they had an old widower black guy moved up from Mississippi who did chores and yard jobs, and helped with the garden - the sweetest and most dignified Christian guy you could ever know. "Uncle Ed," who my Granny called Mr. Evans, sang hymns while he worked, and read the Bible and philosophy (and W.E.B. DuBois and Albert Schweitzer) when he was off duty in his cozy apartment above the garage - with a wood stove (in addition to real heat) - and walls of bookshelves. He believed that fiction was the work of the Devil but he never refused whiskey.
 Being alone in life, both family helpers joined us at the family tables for Thanksgiving dinner. Ed was always given the honor of offering the prayer which came from the depths of his heart. He went on for quite a while, as the soup got cold. Deep and yet simple, which are the things I still aspire to. He prayed for his country, for the enrichment of his and our spirits, for the soul of his dead wife, for his two boys in the service, and for the glory of creation.
I miss him because he was a dear buddy to me. He was the first black guy I knew. He had worked as a railroad Porter, and he said the railroad was the true friend of the black man. He knew the blues, and he knew the hymns. He taught me to fish, with great laughter and jollity. Bait-fishing from a rowboat, for food, with a bamboo pole. No fancy stuff. Long gone, now, but never forgotten.
Happy Thanksgiving, readers. Thanks to God, and God bless us, every one, living and gone - and our free country.
Photos: Station wagons were the SUVs of their time: if you had kids, you had one. '55 Chevy, of course. The '50 Buick? My grandparents drove theirs until the mid-1960s. Old people used to drive old cars. I recall theirs as having been brown, not black, but I couldn't swear to that. My Gramps, who was a doctor, totalled it into a tree while making a house call late at night in a snowstorm at age 84. He was OK, but the car wasn't. Bought a white Oldsmobile with power windows and began to cut back on work and grumble about socialism and socialized medicine. Johnson was President, with Medicare on the table - and he accepted vegetables, flowers, firewood, and labor as payment from those without money. He felt his poorer patients would feel demeaned by charity, so he expected something. I remember a bushel basket of fresh-dug potatoes on his back porch, with a note scrawled "from Sam." Another time I recall a bushel basket of sweet corn.
Tuesday, November 23. 2010
The United States is often referred to as a melting pot, where immigrants become Americans – proud of accomplishments and sacrifices here, and willing to contribute to that -- while holding on to traditions from whence they came. Many fear this melting has diminished, as more immigrants hold on to more of their native traditions and assimilate less.
That may be so. But, I’ve found that the reduction in those American traits is more pronounced among those born here, and they are to fault for the reduced emphasis on assimilation.
Thanksgiving is the uniquely American holiday, to give thanks for the bounty and freedoms found here. Over the years, I’ve seen the most sincere thanks given to America for that among immigrants.
Assimilation isn’t always easy, but they try. I’ve seen some buy Banquet TV dinners of turkey. I’ve seen some with widely different eating tastes force the turkey into their mouths and be at a loss for what to do with the leftovers. I’ve seen some introduce their native spices for the turkey and serve native side dishes. I asked a Mexican immigrant what his family does. The answer, “eat too much, just like everyone else.”
Want to enlarge the melting pot? Invite an immigrant to your Thanksgiving table. The first Thanksgiving was about sharing. Share stories about why you give thanks, including your family’s immigrant experience.
My family will host a family who recently immigrated from Japan. Beats too much football, and more American.
Monday, November 22. 2010
Marriage is a tough thing, with or without passion and eternal romantic love. Everybody knows that.
4 in 10 say marriage is becoming obsolete:
As families gather for Thanksgiving this year, nearly one in three American children is living with a parent who is divorced, separated or never-married. More people are accepting the view that wedding bells aren't needed to have a family.
I have no idea how anybody can run a family or a household, or build a good life, without a loyal and dependable partner. I couldn't do it.
Sunday, November 21. 2010
I think I could direct Carmen myself, every tuneful note is so familiar to me. Bizet is the Elton John of opera.
The story is just a vehicle for the tunes. Naive soldier falls in love with hot gypsy babe, deserts the army and joins the gypsy criminal band. Fickle, promiscuous gypsy babe changes her mind and runs off with studly matador. Naive guy is distraught and kills gypsy lady. Too bad - he has now destroyed his life. A cautionary tale about hot gypsy babes.
It's in French but set in Spain for the fun of it, and so Bizet could use that cool Toreador song he had in his drawer.
The opera is too long to tell such a simple tale, but Bizet was full of tunes.
I thought Galanca was excellent, but Cabell as Micaela stole the show. The sets were an amazing blend of neo and traditional, with lighting that Robert Wilson would envy. Dinner in the Grand Tier was excellent, of course. We had the Gateau Opera at intermission. What else would you have?
A fine birthday for our friend.
Saturday, November 20. 2010
I have a pal who is in the hospital, being treated for a serious case of Babesiosis. I visited him at the hospital yesterday, and determined that he would survive because I was able to elicit a few laughs - but it can be a very nasty and life-threatening disease (or a mild and insignificant one). He was on two or three IV antibiotics, and a morphine pump for the headache.
It's a bug like Malaria, and its vector is the tiny Deer Tick, same bugger as Lyme Disease. Dog ticks are annoying, but we woodsy and doggy people get those on us all the time. No big deal. Those Deer Ticks (actually, they are mouse ticks more than deer ticks) are the real problem for people who spend time outdoors.
Not to make light of a serious topic, but I can't resist re-posting "I'd Like to Check You For Ticks." It's a guy song, but the gals seem eager for Brad to check them. It must be lots of fun to be a country star:
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