Maggie's Farm

Eastham, Wellfleet, and Truro aren't fancy. At least, they are not pretentious or social-climbing summer colonies. Nobody wears red pants or pants with whales on them, and even the rich folks inhabit very humble dwellings. Unlike the islands (Martha's Vineyard and Nantucket), you do not have to spend $10,000/week for summer rentals.

Nevertheless, tons of good fun family-friendly seafood restaurants, and lots of live music at night. It's altogether cheerful and jolly, full of happy, sunburned, and mostly attractive, fit, modest, and presentable folks (ie it ain't Snooki's Jersey Shore). Just right for me.

As much as I love the Farm in the Berkshire countryside, in the summer the sand and salt and piney woods and cheerful people and chilly water and seafood suit me best. Always will have a hold on my heart.

This old fishing and shipping village was in its heyday in the 1870s, when the train came through town. I believe this building began its life as a salt cod and shellfish warehouse - reader corrected me - a Lorenzo Dow Baker banana warehouse:

More pics below the fold -

How long is the average book? What sorts of books are written in first person and third person?

Cool book stats here.

Mrs. BD and I listen to Teaching Company cds in the car. Well, it's called "Great Courses" now.

Best college course I ever sat in on is Bob Greenberg's How to Listen to and Understand Great Music. It's on sale now. I cannot express how absorbing and wonderful he is to listen to. It's life-changing, even for somebody musically-disabled like me.

Handel wrote Messiah - 50 gem-like and unforgettable tunes - in 24 days.

Some delightful memories from Selma, California.

I had a chat with the owner of this Sakonnet 23, moored on the tidal flats in Wellfleet Harbor. In fact, I swam out to the mooring to see her up close and to chat with him one day last week when he was getting ready to go out for a sail. I was attracted to the classic, double-ender lines, and figured her to be a repro of an antique. Nope.

Not an old design. The Sakonnet 23 is a Joel White design, first built in 1997. Here's one for sale for around $30,000.

Here she is at low tide. That's a 1000 lb. half-keel. I think it's cool the way she stands on the keel when the tide goes out, holding the rudder out of danger.

Below the fold, pics of two of the most common Cape Cod boats -

She begins her post with this: "'The universe is made of stories, not atoms', poet Muriel Rukeyser famously remarked."

It's true enough to be a truism. We live by stories, in stories, telling stories.

Furthermore, atoms are stories too.

A simple ring supposedly owned by Jane Austen recently sold at auction for $236,000. Its value without the story? Probably a couple of hundred bucks. It's just as easy to think of stories which detract from value, eg the value of Jeffrey Dahmer's house.

Is it possible to quantify the story value, the sentimental value, of things? Sometimes, yes: Significant Objects: How Stories Confer Value Upon the Vacant

What I want is six legal laborers (easily to be gotten around here at 7 am on a Saturday) for 8 hours, armed with my chain saws, my mighty brush-wacker, wood-chipper, a soil tiller, trimmers, garden tools, root poisons, grass seed, and a truckload of mulch.

In one hard day, with me and the lad working hard and happily alongside, I think we could restore the immediate surrounds of the Maggie's HQ to pristine elegance. I do all I can on my own, but some jobs are more than I can handle in the time I have. Lots of rocks and evil vines.

It's a bitch of a job, but many hands make light work and labor is satisfying especially with many hands on board.

Will provide excellent and abundant take-out Mexican lunch for all. Beer with limes after the job is done. Payment in cash, of course, as is customary. The rate here is $100/day, and these guys work hard.

In the fall, I will also  have some heavy-duty transplanting to be done but it's not the size of job that this one is.

After recommending Gombrich's Meditations On a Hobby Horse and Other Essays On the Theory of Art a month or so ago, I have been re-reading it after 20 years.

It's the deepest and most thoughtful stuff I have ever read about image-making and our responses to them, so dense with ideas that I can really only digest a sentence or two at a time.

Over the transom:

More below the fold -

Inspirational and entertaining TED talk - with juggling (h/t Cheating the Impossible: Wire-Walker Philippe Petit on Education, Creativity, and Patience)

"Milton Friedman, who would have turned 100 on Tuesday, helped to make free markets popular again in the 20th century. His ideas are even more important today":

 Well over 200 million were liberated from poverty thanks to the rediscovery of the free market. And now as the world teeters close to another recession, leaders need to urgently rediscover Friedman's ideas.

I remember asking Milton, a year or so before his death, during one of our semiannual dinners in downtown San Francisco: What can we do to make America more prosperous? "Three things," he replied instantly. "Promote free trade, school choice for all children, and cut government spending."

How much should we cut? "As much as possible."

A Libertarian at heart. The man believed in American freedom from the state and had faith in human potential - when unleashed. Listening to him talk, for me, is like seeing the sun come out from behind a cloud.

And a 15-minute walk to the YMCA and the library. Plus a fairly dense neighborhood where kids can hop on their bike, or just walk down the street, and find tons of kids to hang out with and play ball with. How good is that?

The train would be the New Haven line (NYC to Boston). Fairfield is around an hour and 15 minutes by train to Grand Central Station. Not too bad, especially if you can get work done on the train. A little less time to New Haven. It's part of the "Gold Coast," but this neighborhood is more like Silver. Pricey for what little you get.

The lad and I took our annual journey to the great Pequot Library Book Sale in Southport, CT on Sunday afternoon, then spent a few minutes scouting out the Fairfield real estate (south of the Boston Post Road, near Long Island Sound), just for giggles - but thinking as investors.

With all of the amazing amenities, one might think these neighborhoods near the beaches would be charming as heck. They are not. They are mostly post-war, poorly-built and poorly-designed with lots of split-levels and other charmless ticky-tacky stuff, built on small lots on marsh fill and thus subject to flooding during big storms. But that's the price you pay to walk to the beach. Laws would not permit such wetlands construction today.

My lad says that post-war neighborhoods are rarely gentrified, or spruced-up, due to lack of charm and construction quality. Because of the local amenities and conveniences, the land here is worth about the same with house or without. It's mostly 1/4-acre lots, some less. That means the houses are what are termed "scrapers": the house adds no, or minimal, value to the lot. In fact, the cost of demolition detracts from the value. Those lots are valuable with or without a functional house - around $450-800,000, and well over a million post-scraping and rebuilding. As a result of the near-zero value of the building, many of them are not well-maintained or improved up to modern standards.

Only a few of them have been scraped and replaced by 3-story houses of indeterminate, ungainly style. (Due to setback requirements, you have to build up to 3 stories to get the square footage people want today.)

When people realize their houses are hopeless scrapers, they stop putting money into them and thus make the neighborhood - and themselves - look scruffy, dilapidated, or dysfunctional. Often, they are best off renting the darn thing. Here's an example of one below, a snout house I suppose, which has had nothing done since 1958 except paint. Landscaping, I think, by Home Depot. With a little effort in that department, it could look like a fairly good starter house or retirement shelter. An American flag over the entry, and some interesting landscaping, would add a lot to this basic dwelling without scraping it off.

(By the way, I hate those set-back zoning rules. Stupid. Houses could have friendly porches right off the street, and larger back yards for gardening, etc., without them. People making zoning rules are usually idiots. These are not exactly grand estates with gracious lawns full of grazing sheep.And, speaking of annoying zoning rules, these post-war neighborhoods are zoned as single-family residential, so there are no corner stores to walk to for coffee, a newspaper, an ice cream, or to chat with neighbors over a beer. You have to drive when anybody would prefer to push the stroller a few blocks for a coffee.)

For an example, this pleasant Cape in the same neighborhood is for sale for around $750,000. More Fairfield listings here.

Mrs. BD is a big iPhone fan. The other night, she was showing me an iTunes University lecture from a Yale prof on her phone. It was pretty good.

I asked her how that could be in her phone. She said "It's in the cloud, same as my Downton Abbey."

"I don't understand this Cloud," I said. "Is there a God app in that cloud, because if there is, I need it."

Candlewood Lake in western CT is an 11-mile long man-made lake, built in 1924 for hydroelectric.

Excess power is used to pump water up hill from the nearby Housatonic River into the lake, then allowed to flow back into the river through pipes and turbines when power is needed. An interesting engineering idea.

Turbines, of course, are not healthy for anadromous fish, but Candlewood Lake is good for bass fishing, water-skiing, and swimming.

Photo from New York's Lovely Abandoned Subway Station

75% of Manhattanites are renters. Some rents can get pretty high. It's a strong market for housing.

Carl Hiassen has a new book out, Chomp, for young readers. Other of his books offer hilarious south Florida black humor for grown-ups.

What did I just begin reading?  Mark Twain's 1867 Innocents Abroad. Since we're taking a pass on a Europe trip this summer, thought I'd read about what ship cruising was like right when the concept was invented - his trip was advertised as a "pleasure excursion." From the blurb:

Innocents Abroad began as a series of travel letters written by Mark Twain mainly for the Alta California, a San Francisco paper that sponsored his participation in the trip to Europe and the Holy Land in 1867 aboard the steamship Quaker City. On the excursion from New York to Palestine they traveled a distance of over 20,000 miles by land and sea through France, Spain, Italy, Greece, Morocco, Russia, Turkey and Egypt. Through his humorous and insightful writings, Twain describes countries, nations, incidents and his amazing adventures.

Apropos of (is it necessary to use "of" after "apropos"?) our post a while ago about scientific research, here is Dr. Ionnadis's famous essay: Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.

It's a classic, and a good antidote to "the experts say..." and "studies show."  Thanks for the reminder, reader.

Interesting to note that, the hotter the topic, the less reliable the findings. In the social sciences, it's far worse. Mostly garbage, I think.

I am science-trained, and it made me a skeptic about everything I read.