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.
Mark Edmundsen has written a piece at The Chronicle about one of my favorite bugabooos in Health Now: A Provocation. Here's a quote:
Francis Fukuyama glances at this matter in a passage from The End of History and the Last Man. "In America today, we feel entitled to criticize another person's smoking habits, but not his or her religious beliefs or moral behavior. For Americans, the health of their bodies—what they eat and drink, the exercise they get, the shape they are in—has become a far greater obsession than the moral questions that tormented their forebears."
I entirely believe in the value of remaining fit, strong, trim, sexy, and attractive but it is the fetishizing of health and the common delusions about food that annoy me the most. In the end, we are not in control of our fates. And I hate brown rice, don't know why anybody would eat it willingly. The Chinese won't eat it.
Mrs. BD thought that some of our readers, especially those remote from NYC, might like a sample of the retrospective, Savage Beauty, at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, which ends next week. She particularly singled out ex-New Yorker Marianne.
The show is a big deal. It has been sold out since the opening, and yesterday you had to wait in line 2-3 hrs to get in (unless a member of the Met, as we are, in which case you go right past the lines. It was crowded.).
I liked the show. We usually use those good headphone things, but, for some reason, we did not this time.
This Scotsman, who recently committed suicide, was quite an artist. All the husbands and boyfriends there seemed interested to look, as was I (up to a point). It would have been more fun with live models wearing the things.
They put on a remarkably dramatic presentation of McQueen's stuff with what I presume is edgy-artsy-fashionista music and spooky lighting. My photos are not very good because pics were not technically allowed so I had to be discreet. (I do it for you, our readers.)
And yes, I was rewarded with a good lunch afterwards.
They are supported by honor, but not enforceable in court. Hence the word "gentleman." One would like to think that gentlemen still keep their word:
Informal, oral understanding resting on the sense of personal honor of the involved parties. Generally, such agreements are not enforceable through courts.
Have you heard Trombone Shorty? I enjoyed hearing him and his band live, last summer. Had a quick chat with him, too, after the set. He is a sweetheart, and very humble despite being such a prodigy and, now, a star.
I know folks who will drive 40 minutes to the Red Rooster Drive-In on Route 22 in Brewster, NY, when they get a jones for their burgers, fries, and onion rings - all made to order, the old-fashioned way. Slow food. Good hot dogs too. Worth a trip from Great Falls, or Phoenix.
Is it over-rated? Maybe. I love it, though.
The place is unchanged since the 50s. There is really no seating, but lots of picnic benches outside. Or eat in the pick-up and drip juice and ketchup on your shirt in the manly American-style.
It's taken a few years for my hunting pal to get his hunting getaway in the wilds of upstate New York into usable shape. He has been doing most of the work himself.
I do not know why he did not throw a match onto the old thing and start fresh. Probably because he is the sort of guy to do things his way, the hard way, preserving the old as best he can.
"Studies show" that, once 10% of a population accepts a notion, it acquires a sturdy enough foothold to have a chance to widely penetrate the population. That's why cranky ideas and crazy notions - along with worthy notions - become part of popular culture.
Politicians know this, which is why they are so full of BS. Their tactic is to repeat a meme until it's accepted by a quorum, even if you Maggie's Farmers know better. You can get 10% of people to believe that the moon is made of Roquefort, that vaccinations cause autism, that JFK's assassination was a conspiracy, or that the planet is about to burn up due to cars.
Another: Lucian Freud: Art without the feel-good factor - No other artist portrays his subjects with such intense and relentless honesty. But can we love the uncomfortable art of Lucian Freud?
I have posted about codes of behavior here, several times. It is an important subject for me, and it seems to me that honor is a core concept in Western Civilization (I cannot speak for alien civilizations because I am still struggling to understand my own.). U VA seems to be dealing with this subject now. One quote:
Complaints that a strict Honor Code represent an antiquated, all male, aristocratic standard appropriate only to the slave-holding ante-bellum South in which it originated, that it needs to be replaced by a new standard more attuned to a diverse community with “nuanced perspectives on crime and punishment” sounds more than odd coming from the Grounds of UVa, where “Mr. Jefferson” is not so much a ghost as a virtually live presence. The Declaration of Independence, after all, another "old boy" product, can be described in exactly the same terms.
Perhaps the psychotics at the otherwise wonderful U VA are not aware thatjobs have honor codes, citizenship has an honor code, all relationships have honor codes, science has honor codes, the professions and business have honor codes, supposedly academia has honor codes, every organization and club has an honor code, even the Mafia has honor codes - everything in civilized life is based on honor codes, whether implicit or explicit. That's why it's called "civilized".
Violate them at your peril. At the least, ostracism and social avoidance are unpleasant consequences of violations of mannerly codes, appropriateness codes, and honor codes. In real daily life, just one screw up often is fatal because nobody forgets. The Law only covers the most extreme violations of the codes.
Seems to me that people are getting most of their music-listening through all sorts of devices other than their good old music systems.
As many have done, I went through a music system phase and bought some very fine audiophile speakers and amps along the way (not to this extent, and I never bought into the surround sound fad).
However, I seem to use them less and less often, and my sizeable and eclectic CD collection gathers dust. I'd rather spend money on going to live music anyway.
Pic is of Legacy Focus speakers, which I own but do not use hardly enough.
Gerard would be amused to know that I "met" Janis once, at good old Max's Kansas City in NYC just off Union Square. I was there with some college friends, late, when she came in with a couple of guys from her band. She pulls up a stool next to mine, said "Hey" to acknowledge me, and ordered a couple of shots of Wild Turkey and a beer. She looked like a mess. I think they were all stoned out of their minds.
Those were the days. I went to Woodstock too. It sucked. Trust me. The best thing about going turned out to be being able to say I went.
I think I will do some like totally random slide shows from my old pics this summer on weekends - if only for my own and for my family's amusement. "Show and Tell." It's tough to have ideas on summer weekends. I love to go places - both the old and familiar, and the new and astonishing. Anywhere is interesting to me. "Go Go Hi Ho!" as my friend says. That's the spirit.
Wellfleet MA has a good harbor and a fair variety of boats. None of the fancy stuff like Newport or Nantucket, though. The town is not social enough to attract that crowd, but it is social enough for everybody to get in line for a Harbor Freeze cone on the pier every night after supper. (It is Mac's now, but I still call it Harbor Freeze.) I have seen people on that line from NYC that I haven't seen in 20 years.
There is plenty of dock space, and a large anchorage. It still has a small commercial fleet, more engaged in lobstering or in dragging for quahogs and sea clams than in fishing. The big-time fishing boats berth in Provincetown, where they have quick access out of Cape Cod Bay to the ocean.
I can not imagine living too far from the sea, and I feel that swimming in fresh water or overly-warm water is sort of disgusting. Chilly salt water is what works to cleanse and re-baptize my soul.
"Everybody has won and all must have prizes." That's the Dodo Bird Verdict.
Colleges, expecially private colleges, now hand "A"s out like jellybeans, and everybody is an honor student. Here's A History of College Grade Inflation.
When I went to college, an A meant "extraordinary distinction" in my Liberal Arts studies, and they were delivered like precious jewels. Probably 0-3% achieved that. Of course, in math and science it meant simply that you mastered all of the material in depth, and made no foolish exam errors. The wisest graders would overlook careless computational errors if the rest was correct.
Do normal guys like to hang out with guys and act stupid? Of course. In some ways, we never mature past age 7. In Teddy Roosevelt's case, age 6. Young women, often, do not comprehend the developmentally-arrested aspects of the male psyche.
What's not to like? She is ready for a summer trans-Atlantic sail to Ireland on your vacation, or, better yet, a cruise to the Med via the Canary Islands, with a quick stop at Bermuda and the Windwards en route. (You can hire people to sail her back home to the US while you and your sweetie-pie First Mate - or second - wander around Portugal, Spain, and Morocco.)
Those heavy volumes have become as obsolete as buggy whips.
I brought my 10+ year-old set of the Brittannica over to the book exchange, and they told me they were "household waste." That set was expensive.
When I was a student, I always looked up every topic in the Brittannica before looking at a textbook, to get the overview. I am lost without a broad overview.
Wikipedia just doesn't do it, no matter how handy it is for our website. You can subscribe to Britannica online.
Sippican has published his first book, and it's about time. He calls it "flash fiction." As many of our readers know, the guy knows how to repair a chair and to spin a yarn.
You might have heard about the terrible tragedy to strike Los Angeles last night. Gigantic earthquake toppled it into the sea? Forest fire ran amok and consumed the entire place? Mexico finally said "¡No más!" and took its land back?
A 10-mile stretch of one of the nation's busiest freeways has turned into a virtual ghost road.
Interstate 405 closed for 53 hours for a major construction project beginning early Saturday that will test whether this car-dependent city can change its driving habits for a weekend.
For weeks, authorities have urged Los Angeles-area residents to avoid getting in their car, lest they trigger what's been hyped as "Carmageddon."
Such an event could back up vehicles from the 405 to surface streets and other freeways, causing a domino effect that could paralyze much of the city.
Yes, you read that right, everyone. 53 hours!
When people suffer so terrible a fate, you can bet that Maggie's Farm will be right there with comfort, aid, and moral support for those most devastated by their grievous loss.
And we note for the record this isn't the first time Highway 405 has been shut down. 405 was where OJ Simpson's infamous 'slow speed chase' took place, and I'm sure we all remember when that jetliner landed on it a few years ago, narrowly avoiding what could have been a horrific disaster.
Of all the astronomical discoveries over the years, which was the most profound? Which discovery, upon further examination, opened more new doors to philosophy, deep thought and science than any other?
Certainly the discovery that the Earth wasn't at the center of the solar system would be most people's pick, since it only relegated a couple thousand years of religious belief to the dust bin of history.
But when you think about it, that particular discovery didn't really alter our view of the cosmos; it was more just a matter of a small physical realignment in the immediate neighborhood. It certainly had religious repercussions, and certainly made calculating planetary orbits easier, but not much else. Switch the Sun and the Earth around and we still have no further idea what all those little twinkling lights up there are.
But in 1863, an Italian astronomer named Angelo Secchi invented the heliospectrograph, which breaks a star's light into its spectral bands. He eventually charted the light from almost 4,000 stars.
At one point, he turned it on the Sun and compared its chart to the others. And what a stunning moment.
Our Sun is a star.
To me, if there was one fulcrum point upon which our entire understanding of the cosmos turned, that was it.
Our Sun is a star.
I'm currently halfway through a terrific series on our solar system called Wonders of the Solar System. It's a 3-disc set; I got mine from Netflix. The following video is from the episode 'Empire of the Sun'. That's the only segue from above; the actual clip is specifically about the Earth. Very specifically, as you'll see.
Apart from the usual breathtaking photography and computer graphics, what makes it particularly enjoyable is the host, Dr. Brian Cox. Like the great science hosts of yore (Carl Sagan, James Burke, et al), Cox doesn't get bogged down in technical talk and he uses easy-to-understand examples of the physics he's describing. He also carries across that unabashed 'wonderment and awe' that Sagan used to wear on his sleeve. Nothin' wrong with that.
On the other hand, I'm no slouch with this cosmos stuff, m'self. Until I see otherwise, I believe my Life On Other Worlds: By The Numbers is the definitive work arguing against there being intelligent life on other worlds.
Which is why the following clip interested me. It's yet another link in the chain of events that are extremely unlikely to happen to the average planet.
Does the average planet have... a spinning molten iron core?
I never meant this to be a Hinckley week (the Offical Maggie's Farm Sailboats are the Alerion line, or maybe plain Cape Cod catboats), but this is an example of what Hinckley used to be best known for: classic, elegant cruising sailboats. In my experience, they can't point worth a darn but they are a good ride.
This 1986 Hinckley Bermuda 40 yawl is for sale for a reasonable $330,000.
I’d rather die. I respect the wishes of people who want to live as long as they can. But I would like the same respect for those of us who decide — rationally — not to. I’ve done my homework. I have a plan. If I get pneumonia, I’ll let it snuff me out. If not, there are those other ways. I just have to act while my hands still work: the gun, narcotics, sharp blades, a plastic bag, a fast car, over-the-counter drugs, oleander tea (the polite Southern way), carbon monoxide, even helium. That would give me a really funny voice at the end.
I have found the way. Not a gun. A way that’s quiet and calm.
Knowing that comforts me. I don’t worry about fatty foods anymore. I don’t worry about having enough money to grow old. I’m not going to grow old.
Why it's not a bad deal to be somebody's mistress. A quote from the review:
She gives great room to the idea of monogamy and to the lovely tedium of routine that comes with loving someone over the long term. That tedium unquestionably has its pleasures, but so too does allowing your partner and yourself to establish routines separately. The mistress in Drury’s book finds that a relationship kept removed from the “housework” — not just the washing-up but also the repetitive actions and the small moments of the daily life — can still be sustainable. It’s not simply sexual passion; it’s long-term love as adventure, creating a dynamic for each partner different from the inward-turning marriage. How you choose to fill that solitude brings out your character in a way that a crowded life cannot. “[The mistress] is thrown upon her own resources and must frequently entertain herself, and this gives her time to read and think and follow her own pursuits. She soon not only welcomes this but defends it with all the fierceness of the self-preserving instinct.” Drury’s mistress reveals herself to be the exact opposite of the public stereotype.
I read the whole review. It might be a good deal for some to be a mistress (or a gigolo), but I am certain that She Who Must Be Obeyed would be grouchy if I had another woman on the side.
Prediction: There will be many of Hollywood's sexier actresses attending Marine Corps Balls next November 10, thanks to Marine Corps balls.
Another reason today's Marines are the best yet, and deserve to have more strut in their stride:
In Vietnam, one of the guys sent a letter to the president of Hunts Foods asking him to send a case of Hunts Snack-Packs. The Hunts president wrote back that his son served in Vietnam and he was very pleased to send a case. Immediately, we were all writing to presidents of various food companies asking for a case of our favorite. My choice was for Ring Dings. Although squished and melted when a case arrived, I had a big chocolate smile all over my face.
But, none of us had the sense of one of today's Marines who sent a Youtube message to Hollywood actress Mila Kunis asking her out to the next Marine Corps Ball. She accepted the invite.
I bet more Youtubes are being sent now to other sexy Hollywood actresses. Beats Ring Dings. And, melts in your mouth, not in your hand.
Mark Edmundsen has written a piece at The Chronicle about one of my favorite bugabooos in 
Best Road Burger in the Northeast
Seems to me that people are getting most of their music-listening through all sorts of devices other than their good old music systems. 
Sippican has published his first book, and it's about time. He calls it "flash fiction." As many of our readers know, the guy knows how to repair a chair and to spin a yarn.
Now here's an interesting question:
Why it's not a bad deal to be somebody's mistress. A quote 