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.
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.
Dr. Merc had a movie to post, but I think he wants it in tomorrow's edition. Woops, wrong about that. Anyway, it brought to mind a movie that Mrs. BD has watched three times in the past two weeks: A Woman in Berlin (2009).
The Russian invasion and occupation of Berlin in 1945. We didn't read the book. It's a serious movie, and a true story written by "Anonymous." War is hell.
Winter is made for outdoor fun of the strenuous type. I call the cold "God's air conditioning." Time to do things that make you sweat like a pig when it's cold as hell.
When the kids were young, we focused on family skating, skiing and sledding. Wonderful times, and all of my kids have mastered these things while accumulating the scars and broken bones that are an essential part of a vigorous childhood. My family does vigor, avoids "relaxation" - our theory is that you can lie around and relax when you're dead.
I used to like a ten mile road run in the morning in 10 degrees, but I don't do that anymore even though I should. (I prefer my wake-up cigar and a large Dunkin.) My relatives and friends like Paddle, cross-country skiing, Frostbiting, snow-shoeing, and skiing of course. My elderly Mom still likes to get her cross-country skis on and go out in the woods and hills and fields for a couple of hours in 10 degrees (F). Never was a wimp. She does appreciate a hot toddy on her return, a warm fire, and somebody to listen to her tell what she saw ("I saw a Goshawk on the ridges and flushed a grouse out of the briars by the river. Bear tracks on the mountain trail.").
I told her we might find her dead frozen body someday halfway up Tim's Mountain, and she said that was OK with her.
What do you like to do for outdoor cold-weather fun?
I'm sure readers have surmised that we are not big on fake things here at Maggie's Farm. We are sort of stuck on that 1960s authenticity thing.
However, we will make an exception for a few fake candles. Mrs. BD used them over the holidays for decorating tables and pine-strewn mantles, and I had to confess that they were quite pleasant and realistic with a waxy look and feel, and have the benefit of not burning down your house on Christmas Eve while you are busy carving the goose.
Real is better, but there's a role for these fake things. They seem to come in all shapes.
I think she got her collection of them at Bed Bath and Beyond the Budget, but they can be found all over the internet now.
I don't recall doing anything to change my camera settings, but I guess I did. Perhaps I can term this my brief Ohio Highlands Blue Period and try to make an artistic virtue out of a tech accident:
In the end, Gwynnie kindly managed to salvage some of my pics, and to restore the world to its proper tones:
God knows how many lawyers have built their retirements in West Palm Beach or "the Tampa area" on slip 'n fall cases in New York City. It's a major industry there, feeding mostly off the deep pockets of the city government. They settle promptly.
There is an entire category of inattentive person which seems to be slip and trip-prone. Perhaps their moms never told them "Watch what you're doing." They trip over curbstones. The overlap of that set of people with the set of greedy litigious persons are the key to the jackpot for both the lawyers and for the lucky jerk who didn't watch where he was going and has the personality type to cash in.
In the past, such people would win the Darwin Prize which eliminates their genes from the gene pool, but, in the new world, they win the big bucks.
Winter must be a windfall for these lawyers. Everybody slips on ice, and everybody knows that Gomers Go To Ground.
Admittedly the design is meant to be as much to invent an aesthetic rus in urba experience rather than a practical one, but how could anybody design anything in which some litigious person might not be able to find something to trip over? Aren't there rocks to trip over in Central Park? There are rocks and roots and ice all over my town paths where I like to take my dog - each one, I would suppose, with dollar signs all over it. I have slipped and tripped and fallen many times in my life, broke an arm, tore a shoulder to shreds, etc., and it never occurred to me to sue anybody.
I thought the litigation risk of the High Line would be drunks falling off the sides. Maybe I am out of sync with this new way of life. How do you design a litigation-proof anything other than a padded cell?
I snatched this clip of 'Family Feud' from Neal Boortz's site this morning. It's wonderfully entertaining on a number of levels, not least of which is the great job the host does with what could have been a rather awkward situation for a family show.
I love it when he actually leaves the podium to 'walk off the shock'.
Back last night from a quick visit to a snowy and frigid central Ohio. Naturally, we had breakfast at Bob Evans'. Stupid not to:
This was my "be fit" breakfast. Yum:
But look how the outdoor shot is washed out and blue, and the indoor shots were not. I think I fiddled with my settings, but I don't know what I did wrong. It's on full auto, I think.
Every outdoor shot I took, unless there were some lights in the photo, did the same thing.
For another example, this shot (while snow falling from a grey sky) should have been pretty nice, but it's blue:
This problem is new to me. Don't tell me to photoshop it. I don't do that.
It happens every Friday evening, almost without fail, when the sun resembles a giant orange and is starting to dip into the blue ocean. Old Ed comes strolling along the beach to his favorite pier. Clutched in his bony hand is a bucket of shrimp.
Ed walks out to the end of the pier, where it seems he almost has the world to himself. The glow of the sun is a golden bronze now. Everybody's gone, except for a few joggers on the beach. Standing out on the end of the pier, Ed is alone with his thoughts....and his bucket of shrimp.
Before long, however, he is no longer alone. Up in the sky a thousand white dots come screeching and squawking, winging their way toward that lanky frame standing there on the end of the pier. Soon, dozens of seagulls have enveloped him, their wings fluttering and flapping wildly. Ed stands there tossing shrimp to the hungry birds. As he does, if you listen closely, you can hear him say with a smile, "Thank you. Thank you."
In a few short minutes the bucket is empty. But Ed doesn't leave. He stands there lost in thought, as though transported to another time and place. Invariably, one of the gulls lands on his sea-bleached, weather-beaten hat - an old military hat he's been wearing for years.
When he finally turns around and begins to walk back toward the beach, a few of the birds hop along the pier with him until he gets to the stairs, and then they, too, fly away and old Ed quietly makes his way down to the end of the beach and on home.
If you were sitting there on the pier with your fishing line in the water, Ed might seem like "a funny old duck," as my dad used to say. Or, "a guy that's a sandwich shy of a picnic," as my kids might say. To onlookers, he's just another old codger, lost in his own weird world, feeding the seagulls with a bucket full of shrimp.
To the onlooker, rituals can look either very strange or very empty. They can seem altogether unimportant ....maybe even a lot of nonsense. Old folks often do strange things, at least in the eyes of Boomers and Busters. Most of them would probably write Old Ed off, down there in Florida.
That's too bad. They'd do well to know him better. His full name: Eddie Rickenbacker. He was a famous hero back in World War II. On one of his flying missions across the Pacific, he and his seven-member crew went down. Miraculously, all of the men survived, crawled out of their plane, and climbed into a life raft.
Captain Rickenbacker and his crew floated for days on the rough waters of the Pacific. They fought the sun. They fought sharks. Most of all, they fought hunger. By the eighth day their rations ran out. No food. No water. They were hundreds of miles from land and no one knew where they were. They needed a miracle. That afternoon they had a simple devotional service and prayed for a miracle. They tried to nap. Eddie leaned back and pulled his military cap over his nose. Time dragged. All he could hear was the slap of the waves against the raft.
Suddenly, Eddie felt something land on the top of his cap. It was a seagull!
Old Ed would later describe how he sat perfectly still, planning his next move. With a flash of his hand and a squawk from the gull, he managed to grab it and wring its neck. He tore the feathers off, and he and his starving crew made a meal - a very slight meal for eight men - of it. Then they used the intestines for bait. With it, they caught fish, which gave them food and more bait......and the cycle continued. With that simple survival technique, they were able to endure the rigors of the sea until they were found and rescued. (after 24 days at sea...)
Eddie Rickenbacker lived many years beyond that ordeal, but he never forgot the sacrifice of that first lifesaving seagull. And he never stopped saying, "Thank you." That's why almost every Friday night he would walk to the end of the pier with a bucket full of shrimp and a heart full of gratitude.
(Max Lucado, In The Eye of the Storm, pp.221, 225-226)
According to Rickenbacker, each person on the rafts converted to Christianity after the experience.
PS: By 1910, Rickenbacker was racing cars. Touted as the first man to drive a mile a minute, he received the sobriquet "Fast Eddie" (giving rise to a nickname borne by many men named Edward since his time). Eddie raced in the 1912, 1914, 1915 and 1916 Indianapolis 500. His only finish in the race was in 1914 when he finished 10th. In the other three races, he did not finish due to car failure. Notably, in the 1916 race, he started on the front row in 2nd place. Eddie was also an Ace in WW I with 22 enemy planes to his credit and started Eastern Airlines back in the 30's. Eddie left us back in 1973, but he was a pilot in two wars, an Ace, and received the Medal of Honor. He was also on the overseas air mail stamp some years ago. And he never forgot his debt.....
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 
I'm sure readers have surmised that we are not big on fake things here at Maggie's Farm. We are sort of stuck on that 1960s authenticity thing. 
A Great Story (1973)