Saturday, August 14. 2010
We posted this long ago, but Tiger reminded me of it. No man-made machine is like this:
Friday, August 13. 2010
"Are you a Ranger or a Hobbit?"
"I think I offended a group of very fine, upstanding law students." A tough talk, quite entertaining.
Of course, nobody expects you to take a job in which the demands do not meet your wishes. That's just called "a bad fit." When people complain about legal work hours, they should consider doctors' hours, Wall St. hours, the hours of an infantryman in Afghanistan, or the hours of an entrepreneur, by way of comparison. One quote from the piece:
Nothing world-changing has happened within the limited confines of the nine-to-five work week. Nobody can wake up in the morning and say, “I’m dedicating myself and my family to my fellow man, but only so long as I keep exactly the kind of balance that would make my therapist proud.” Eight hours per day can help make one happy (maybe), but is happiness the point? Do we even know in any given day, week, or month what will make us happy over the medium to long term? We think we do, but I know many, many people who get exactly what they want . . . and then find out it wasn’t as great as they thought it would be.
Vanderleun is right: these 1940s color pics are fascinating slices of American life. I have seen some of them at Dr X, in the past. Part of the message for me is how soft and luxurious our lives have become over the past 60-70 years. Women had muscles then, but not from working out at the health club.
Here's one of the pics:
Thursday, August 12. 2010
 ...I'd buy this W. 12th St. townhouse as a pied a terre. I'd let all my millions of best friends use it, too, when they visited NYC. There would be a maid and a cook who lived on the top floor, and three reserved parking spots at the garage down the street.
All day long I'd biddy biddy bum...
With the lousy economy, and the closing of so many Wall St. firms, prices are coming down a bit, but such places remain pricey from my humble standpoint. They are asking $29 million for this typical and rather ordinary one (see photos at link). I guess lots of people want to have places in Manhattan these days.
People who are not familiar with 19th century NY townhouses do not know that they all have pleasant little gardens in the back. Lots of landcaping businesses in NY specialize in townhouse mini-gardens. Little fountains, mini-patios, quiet lighting, pots, plants that like the city, etc. I once knew somebody whose Mom kept her pet tortoise in her NY garden for many years. Animal probably outlived her. It fed on bugs, worms, weeds and grass in the garden, and vegetables left-over from Chinese take-out. Crunched up those skinny dried hot peppers without batting an eye. It lived in the kitchen in the winter.
I think it was a Greek Tortoise (Testudo graeca) that she snuck home in her luggage from a trip to Corfu in the late 1950s. Gerald Durrell, brother of Lawrence Durrell, loved those tortoises when he summered in the Greek islands. Those animals can live well over 60 years. They become precious living heirlooms, like parrots.
Photo of T. graeca in its natural spartan habitat:
Wednesday, August 11. 2010
Wrote this post back in January, before we finalized our travel plans - not going to the Veneto this year...maybe next year. Or maybe Provence...or if the Dems entirely ruin the country, nowhere fun and just farm drudgery.
Considering a visit to Padua (just a few minutes outside Venice) to see the Arena Chapel with its Giotto interior while visiting the Veneto and Dolomites this summer (maybe). It's a famous chapel - more famous than the Matisse and Chagall Church in Westchester - but it looks very much like the Giotto stuff in the chapels in Santa Croce, which I have seen.
I read that, to visit the Capella, you need reservations, decontamination, etc. Plus a time limit and no photos, as is usual in Italian historic churches.
 I guess I should have known that the title of that email was going to be a Canadian pharmacy hawking Viagra, but for a second there my crazy brain thought it might be about how to want to bed geriatric women.
You know, a Zorba-type thing. What a great movie. The inspiration for Mr. Tambourine Man, I have heard.
 Our friend Sippican is having a major sale of his brand-new antiques. Serious markdowns.
His stuff is all solid wood, nothing fake, and generally consistent with Maggie's Farm style - all-American homespun with no Baroque or Rococo.
We have a couple of his pieces and they are handsome. Heirlooms (and if you happen to wonder about the etymology of "heirloom," it's just like it sounds).
Here's Sipp's furniture website.
Tuesday, August 10. 2010
I read that America's saving rate is rising, and that people are paying off their personal debt - and that retail business is terrible.
Are you buying stuff and spending money, or restraining yourself these days?
Let us know, in the comments.
Monday, August 9. 2010
 Re my Bias Against Beauty post, a case in point from yesterday's news.
Red-blooded American fellows are challenged by this sort of charming person, regardless of what the lesbian feminazis might say.
Sunday, August 8. 2010
 Instead of turning up my nose at Baroque design, I decided to try to get into the heads of those who promulgated this heavily-ornamented style from around 1600 to 1750 in Europe.
Aside from some Italian kitsch, nobody has done new baroque for a long time. This remarkable book, Baroque: Architecture, Sculpture, Painting, despite its abundance of photos, is not a coffee-table book. It is dense with text and scholarly detail, and 500 pages of small print which tests my eyes. There is no way I will complete this before I arrive in Vienna, but I will give it the old college try.
One idea which is coming through clearly is the notion of "the world as a stage." Baroque design is meant to be a stage set. It was meant to impress and/or intimidate and/or inspire - to convey power and wealth, but also to provide a grandiose setting for the highly formalized interactions and occasions of the high classes of the time. It does that, however fussy, overdone, and gratuitously gaudy it may look to a modern eye.
Another feature of Baroque design is that it moves. It has curves, details that jump out; interiors can be a "blooming, buzzing confusion" (the term William James used to describe his speculation about the experience of a human infant).
Versailles, St. Peter's Square (which is a circle), and the Hofberg Library are some classics of Baroque. Baroque is sensual, indulgent, extravagant, maybe grandiloquent. Like Bach. Bernini's 1650 Ecstasy of St. Theresa contains most of the elements of Baroque, especially the melding of sensual art with the grand architectural design:
Here's a short list of the main elements of Baroque design.
Wiki explains how Baroque design has its roots in Mannerism, and how it was replaced, as a design fashion, by the aesthetic of Neoclassicism, which embraced restraint and cool "reason" as a reaction to a Baroque which had been taken to its limits.
We do not need to be enslaved to the aesthetic of our own time - or of any time. Baroque, however interesting, just isn't a Maggie's Farm, Yankee style. It's not in the blood.
Here's a Baroque era table, which I find both hideous and wonderful at the same time. It certainly moves, with those squigglies wiggling all over the inlay, and those sea slugs creeping up the legs:
 A new report claims a bias against female beauty in a number of jobs. I am not surprised.
I always advise young associates to avoid regular work with sexy females, unless the associate is on the make. The distraction can be too much for a fellow to handle, the chemistry can be too exothermic, and familiarity can quickly turn to grievous consequences after a couple of cocktails.
For a serene and honorable life, I advise working with fat women with a wart on their nose - preferably with a hair growing out of the wart.
This strategy has always worked for me. I have a libidinous nature and a dirty mind, so it matters.
Saturday, August 7. 2010
 Mrs. BD reports today, after trying Gibbs' recommendation, that a paste of vinegar and baking soda is quite effective for poison ivy. (Remember McGeek's case of poison ivy?)
Mrs. BD is highly sensitive to poison ivy, but when she gets weeding she stops paying attention and just rips along like a weeding machine.
Gibbs is usually right about things. I made her take some Benadryl too. Partly to compete with Gibbs, I guess.
Friday, August 6. 2010
I was reminded of this after reading Powerline's What Missouri Showed Me. The states, and the people, are not pleased with Imperial Washington and its mandarins.
A friend and reader emails this, re the old Wellfleet place we posted a couple of weeks ago:
I've been in a bunch of really old shacks down that way. The people that built them were really amazingly flinty and resourceful. I've attached a picture of a threshold of a door from Truro. They couldn't manage to have a door sweep, so they made a sort of rain gutter with a drain hole in the nose. You know how the rain comes at a house down there. There was never any overhang in those old houses, so the rain sheeting down the door would probably flood the floor, and some poor bastige named Higgins or Crowell or Snow or Starbuck got it off the honeydew list as best he could. Marvelous.
Tuesday, August 3. 2010
Up on the roof garden of the Metropolitan Museum of Art is Big Bambu. You can take tours up through it. I guess you would call it an "installation." It is an endless work-in-progress. I wonder how it would stand up to a good Nor'easter.
The views from up there are magnificent, overlooking Central Park.
Monday, August 2. 2010
At 99, Mitch Miller has died but isn't forgotten, nor his singalongs in our living rooms.
The brief from Wikipedia:
Mitchell William "Mitch" Miller (July 4, 1911 – July 31, 2010)[1] was an American musician, singer, conductor, record producer, A&R man and record company executive. One of the most influential figures in American popular music during the 1950s and early 1960s, both as the head of Artists & Repertoire at Columbia Records and as a best-selling recording artist, he is sometimes thought of as the creator of what would become karaoke with his NBC-TV series, Sing Along with Mitch. A graduate of the Eastman School of Music of the University of Rochester in the early 1930s, Miller began his musical career as an accomplished player of the oboe and English horn, and recorded several highly regarded classical albums featuring his instrumental work. But he is best remembered as a conductor, choral director, television performer and recording executive.
Let's let Mitch Miller take us for a stroll.
If this is too schmaltzy for you, more the pity. Second part is vaudeville. (When Gavin was born, he wouldn't stop howling. I walked the hospital corridor singing "Toot, Toot, Tootsie, Goodbye" which quieted him. Not a single nurse nor visitor had ever heard of vaudeville!)
We need Mitch Miller in our living rooms today. His lasting impacts.
Students Who Don't Study - Evidence shows that college students put in less and less time on coursework but receive higher grades.
Allitt begins:
American discussions of education often veer over into utopian fantasy, and one of the commonest delusions is that nearly every young person wants to be educated. The reality is quite different.
Nearly every young person wants the qualifications that offer access to well paid work, and will do as much as it takes to get them. But most youngsters do not care deeply about education for its own sake, especially if getting it requires long hours of solitary, disciplined study. Learning is hard, often joyless, and for centuries was understood to be so alien to youngsters’ inclinations that it had to be reinforced with frequent beatings.
Now we indulge the idea that not just basic literacy but a high level of formal education is for everyone, and that they will appreciate it.
 If you blinked this morning you missed the link I posted to a gallery of the Playboy centerfolds, semi- and unclad, "Maggie's Farmcritters", from 1953-2008. It was taken down by order from she-who-must-be-obeyed, our in-farm censor. Banned from the Farm even as a link, not to mention in full display "below the fold" as a hidden page.
As a site posting great art, I wonder if painted nudes will be banned, or statues figleafed. Bird Dog, better skip the Belvedere Museum outside Vienna.
But, my wife is from Europe, and enjoys the female form. She posed nude and in lingerie when younger. Her mother has a nude drawing of my wife on her living room wall. We have several Klimpts hanging in our house, and it hasn't corrupted our sons, both former champion breast-feeders. My wife enjoyed and emailed around my review of the Hooters International Swimsuit Pageant.
The other day I replied to a Commenter that "As I age, I would find more delight in finding the perfect Italian Cheesecake, far rarer than the perfect 'cheesecake.' " Personally, I would never allow cream cheese cake to pass my lips, but I wouldn't ban others from enjoying it when tastefully done.
What are your tastes and limits in either cheesecake?
(Photo is an Italian Cheesecake. Ricotta cheese. Not too sweet.)
Sunday, August 1. 2010
 Why? Because he says it all, here.
Photo from the post.
That's a Picasso quote. For me, even his small etchings and line drawings have more soul and substance and solidity (and variety and visual surprise) than all the work of the other great artists I have seen. Every line shows strength, boldness, certainty, inevitability, regardless of whether it is etchings, lithos, oil, ink, watercolor, collage, sculpture - anything. It's called "talent."
If you're in the neighborhood, I'd advise not missing the Picasso show at the Metropolitan Museum. We got there yesterday. 300 works, all dusted off from their own mind-boggling collection. If I didn't suffer from "museum brain," I could have spent an hour just in the last room with the small etchings from the 1960s. As always, the audio guide is very good ($6, and two for one if you are a member.)
The show runs until Aug 15, and it's never crowded in August. I'd say the show is worth a special trip to NYC because it is a visual feast. For me, an overdose because just a handful of wonderful pictures fills my feeble brain to the brim.
This from his "Classical" period, 1920s.
More of my pics below the fold -
Continue reading ""Good artists borrow. Great artists steal." The Met's Picasso show"
Saturday, July 31. 2010
Thanks, Opie, for these photos with the data, which came in over the transom. I cannot source it, but kudos to whoever put this together. It is interesting not only to see the different sorts of families (extended, nuclear, large, small, desert, middle-class) but to see what they typically eat in a week.
Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide. Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07. (I guess that included the wine and beer)
Egypt: The Ahmed family of Cairo: Food expenditure for one week: 387.85 Egyptian Pounds or $68.53
Ecuador: The Ayme family of Tingo. Food expenditure for one week: $31.55
On continuation page below, USA, Bhutan, Mexico, Poland, Chad, and Italy:
Continue reading "Food and Families around the world"
Friday, July 30. 2010
I think that the religious faith of most average Christians waxes and wanes over time, sometimes even in the course of a day. I do know people whose faith seems to be 100% and rock solid. In the end, I don't find thinking about the topic of strength of faith particularly useful or productive. God is a mystery to me, as is existence itself (and most other things too), but I believe that in prayer and in practice one can come into relationship with God - or at least with Jesus.
Ron Rosenbaum speaks up for the Enlightenment agnostic in everyone: An Agnostic Manifesto - At least we know what we don't know. One quote:
Atheists have no evidence—and certainly no proof!—that science will ever solve the question of why there is something rather than nothing. Just because other difficult-seeming problems have been solved does not mean all difficult problems will always be solved. And so atheists really exist on the same superstitious plane as Thomas Aquinas, who tried to prove by logic the possibility of creation "ex nihilo" (from nothing). His eventual explanation entailed a Supreme Being standing outside of time and space somehow endowing it with existence (and interfering once in a while) without explaining what caused this source of "uncaused causation" to be created in the first place.
This is—or should be—grade-school stuff, but many of the New Atheists seemed to have stopped thinking since their early grade-school science-fair triumphs.
Right, sort-of (I don't think we even know what we don't know). Science is not a religion. It's just a formalized, rigorous mode of inquiry from which most of the data and facts and theories are inevitably replaced over time. It is incapable of handling the Big Questions and Big Truth, but it sure can be useful. For example, we currently believe that "gravity" doesn't exist as a "force," but it's a handy concept anyway. Someday, our talk of "forces" wil be viewed as little more than 18th century gods.
Chesterton: ""If there were no God, there would be no atheists."
Thursday, July 29. 2010
I want to go the the museum at the Belevedere Palace in Vienna more to see the Kokoshkas than to see the jazzy Klimts. Klimt is fine, but Kokoshka is one of the gnarly German Expressionists that I get a kick out of. Well, Austrian in this case.
I have a good Klimt quote though:
I have never painted a self-portrait. I am less interested in myself as a subject for a painting than I am in other people, above all women...There is nothing special about me. I am a painter who paints day after day from morning to night...Who ever wants to know something about me... ought to look carefully at my pictures.
Kokoshka's famous 1914 Bride of the Wind:
Wednesday, July 28. 2010
This article is from the British paper The Star.
This is one of those rare moments in life when you realize you've just read something such as you've never read before, nor may ever read again.
ON 21 July, we published an article claiming that the video games company Rockstar Games were planning to release a version of their popular Grand Theft Auto video games series titled “Grand Theft Auto Rothbury”.
We also published what we claimed would be the cover of this game, solicited comments from a family member impacted by the recent tragedy and criticised Rockstar Games for their alleged plans.
We made no attempt to check the accuracy of the story before publication and did not contact Rockstar Games prior to publishing the story. We also did not question why a best selling and critically acclaimed fictional games series would choose to base one of their most popular games on this horrifying real crime event.
It is now accepted that there were never any plans by Rockstar Games to publish such a game and that the story was false. We apologise for publishing the story using a mock-up of the game cover, our own comments on the matter and soliciting critical comments from a grieving family member.
We unreservedly apologise to Rockstar Games and we have undertaken not to repeat the claims again. We have also agreed to pay them a substantial amount in damages which they are donating to charity.
Rick Moran led us to the real meaning of Dog Days. Via Wiki:
For the ancient Egyptians, Sirius appeared just before the season of the Nile's flooding, so they used the star as a "watchdog" for that event. Since its rising also coincided with a time of extreme heat, the connection with hot, sultry weather was made for all time.
Sirius is the shiny dog collar tag in Canis Major:
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