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.
...lowering import tariffs and immigration restrictions would help Africans at a far lower cost to us than most direct donations. Yet direct donation activities usually get far more attention in most discussions of what we here can do for them there. Why?
Psychiatry made a wrong turn when it tried to turn its back on the heart and soul, and appeared to decide that it was better, or easier, or most cost-effective, or more "medical"-sounding, to view humans as bags of chemicals and containers of symptoms.
In his "Reflections on Sacred Texts," the Boring Old Man sees it pretty much the way I see it (h/t to Dr. X). I have a similar aversion to the DSM. My "sacred text" is the individual with the problem. Most patients I see do not fit neatly into any box, and I do not try to squeeze them into one.
The good doctors of most patient-oriented specialities - Internal Medicine, Family Practice, Surgery, etc. - seem to take more personal interest in understanding their patients and their lives than many "Biological Psychiatrists" do these days.
Psychiatry spans a broad range of problems, from pure brain abnormalities to regular difficult life problems, with complicated mixtures being the most frequent.
Fortunately for our patients, some us are still interested in getting to know them and in figuring out what ails them beyond their symptom checklist.
I planned to post one of my dreary links about the modern state of uneducation, but on this cheerless, sleeting day I felt like tackling a more uplifting topic.
Horses, like many large running mammals, lock their leg joints to sleep standing. The reason they are able to do this makes plenty of horse sense.
I forget who this came from, but it this feels like today:
December 8 - 6:00 PM. It started to snow. The first snow of the season and the wife and I took our cocktails and sat for hours by the window watching the huge soft flakes drift down from heaven. It looked like a Grandma Moses print. So romantic we felt like newlyweds again. I love snow!
December 9 - We woke to a beautiful blanket of crystal white snow covering every inch of the landscape. What a fantastic sight! Can there be a more lovely place in the Whole World? Moving here was the best idea I've ever had. Shoveled for the first time in years and felt like a boy again. I did both our driveway and the sidewalks. This afternoon the snowplow came along and covered up the sidewalks and closed in the driveway, so I got to shovel again. What a perfect life.
December 12 - The sun has melted all our lovely snow. Such a disappointment. My neighbor tells me not to worry, we'll definitely have a white Christmas. No snow on Christmas would be awful! Bob says we'll have so much snow by the end of winter, that I'll never want to see snow again. l don't think that's possible. Bob is such a nice man, I'm glad he's our neighbor.
December 14 – Snow, lovely snow! 8 inches last night. The temperature dropped to -20. The cold makes everything sparkle so. The wind took my breath away, but I warmed up by shoveling the driveway and sidewalks. This is the life! The snowplow came back this afternoon and buried everything again. I didn't realize I would have to do quite this much shoveling, but I'll certainly get back in shape this way. I wish l wouldn't huff and puff so.
December 15 - 20 inches forecast. Sold my van and bought a 4x4 Blazer. Bought snow tires for the wife's car and 2 extra shovels. Stocked the freezer. The wife wants a wood stove in case the electricity goes out. I think that's silly. We aren't in Alaska, after all.
December 16 - Ice storm this morning. Fell on my ass on the ice in the driveway putting down salt. Hurt like hell. The wife laughed for an hour, which I think was very cruel.
Like most people in life who just don't get it, arrogance is at least half of the problem. If you think you're real smart it's hard to learn anything from anybody, much less from experience.
What that "dysfunction" seems to mean is that one is a lousy boss of oneself. A useful concept, I think. People who achieve their goals make rational, practical plans, follow their plans, and are good at taking orders from themselves. When they tell themelves they are going to do it, they do it.
If Plan A doesn't work, they already have Plan B waiting in the drawer.
I think people vary enormously in their executive functioning.
If the weather permits me to get to Ohio for a quick visit this weekend, I will of course try to stop by my favorite 24-hr WalMart in Mt. Vernon. Who knows, might run into Mr. Hardin in a leopard skin suit.
But what to wear? Does everybody at WalMart look unusual? Is this "fashion-forward"? I wonder what Janet Napolitano wears when she goes. Dressing subversively for WalMart is a challenging task for uninventive folks like me. (h/t, Moonbattery):
"I don't understand it. I don't like it. And I don't think anyone would think differently. There's nothing you're trying to say that hasn't been said before you. And everyone who's said it before you has said it better than you have."
That was part of the critique the pupette got on her recent college poetry writing course effort. I guess everything is supposed to be new, despite what Ecclesiastes teaches us. She has always been told in the past that she is a talented writer. She did say "I'd like to point out, however, that this professor is phenomenal."
I emailed back something like this:
"That's what we are paying them for - tough criticism, high demands, and a dose of humility. If you could meet their demands already, what would be the point of being there and paying them money? My best teachers ripped me to shreds. They want to stretch you to your max and beyond it to find your limits, and that is good. We can't all be TS Eliots, and few youths have enough life under their belts to write poems that are more than pretty strings of words anyway. Don't worry - you have your friends and family to love you regardless."
Last week I sent her a poem that my brain wrote during a dream. (I never sit down to write a poem, but sometimes they come to me so I try to put them on paper before they disappear. Generally, I only share them with my sis who is a published poet.) I thought this one might have been about my college pup, or maybe any one of my kids, and did not add the title until I guessed what it could be about. I would not want to show it to a Prof.
Child
First you jumped out of my hand, hid in the sand camouflaged by the sand. Then I caught you with two hands but with a laugh you jumped out again into the water where the sea had carved a deeper channel. The water was clear. You dissolved in the water. I dove in to search but I could not find you.
Later, you returned from a foreign shore tall, and painted blue, asking what we do next.
A big snow is a delight to every Yankee who has a camera. Big snow makes everything new. An ordinary snowfall is not as inspiring. Here's the road I live on:
Just kidding re the above. My friend Nathan sent this pic of Central Park yesterday. I'd guess that was his Leica, not his cell phone:
NYC is a wonderland in a good snow. Our buddy Kab sent these to me from NYC too:
A relative sent in this pic of his house in CT. That's a typical, in-town New England house. It provides shelter. Your heart and soul provide the charm and warmth:
It just keeps coming. Snow is up to my knees. Got myself plowed and shoveled out at 4 AM this morning, and headed right off into the snowy dark to Dunkin' for my morning fix, and took some snaps.
This would be a good morning to be in Vermont, with skis. It's beautiful.
It's a blizzard right now, strong gusty wind, sleet mixed with snow and gradually turning to all snow. A winter wonderland, and all the kids are excited about a snow day for sledding or skiing.
Not in New Jersey: Slopes behind ropes: fear of lawsuits closing great New Jersey sledding hills. There was an adult in CT who settled for $4 million with a CT town when he injured himself sledding with his kids on a town-owned hill. Is a hill covered with snow an "attractive nuisance"? I don't think I would invite that guy and his kids to a winter sledding party on my hill.
And this one, also from Drudge today, takes the cake - or the sandwich: Rep. Dennis Kucinich sues cafeteria over olive pit in sandwich. I once cracked a tooth in half on an over-done French Fry at McDonalds. Maybe I missed a big payday... but Barrister is an honorable man with still a shred of dignity and decency - I hope.
Remember the bumper sticker: "Please hit me. I need the money"?
Whatever happened to people taking their own chances in life? What happened to "It's my own fault"? Says Prof B, Litigators ruin pretty much everything.
There are an infinite number of ways to live life fully and energetically. I was thinking about that topic since I read the bio of a fellow I admire and have heard speak in the past, Sander Gilman. I am a fan.
Dr. Gilman spoke at a medical meeting I attended in NYC in December. He is a polymath. Here's his bio:
Sander L. Gilman is a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Sciences as well as Professor of Psychiatry at Emory University. A cultural and literary historian, he is the author or editor of over eighty books. His Obesity: The Biography appeared with Oxford University Press in 2010; his most recent edited volume, Wagner and Cinema (with Jeongwon Joe) was published in that same year. He is the author of the basic study of the visual stereotyping of the mentally ill, Seeing the Insane, published by John Wiley and Sons in 1982 (reprinted: 1996) as well as the standard study of Jewish Self-Hatred, the title of his Johns Hopkins University Press monograph of 1986. For twenty-five years he was a member of the humanities and medical faculties at Cornell University where he held the Goldwin Smith Professorship of Humane Studies. For six years he held the Henry R. Luce Distinguished Service Professorship of the Liberal Arts in Human Biology at the University of Chicago and for four years was a distinguished professor of the Liberal Arts and Medicine and creator of the Humanities Laboratory at the University of Illinois at Chicago. During 1990-1991 he served as the Visiting Historical Scholar at the National Library of Medicine, Bethesda, MD; 1996-1997 as a fellow of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences, Stanford, CA; 2000-2001 as a Berlin prize fellow at the American Academy in Berlin; 2004-5 as the Weidenfeld Visiting Professor of European Comparative Literature at Oxford University; 2007 to the present as Professor at the Institute in the Humanities, Birkbeck College; 2010 to 2013 as a Visiting Research Professor at The University of Hong Kong. He has been a visiting professor at numerous universities in North America, South Africa, The United Kingdom, Germany, Israel, China, and New Zealand. He was president of the Modern Language Association in 1995. He has been awarded a Doctor of Laws (honoris causa) at the University of Toronto in 1997, elected an honorary professor of the Free University in Berlin (2000), and an honorary member of the American Psychoanalytic Association (2007).
I work hard, make myself as useful as I can, and read quite a bit, but I am a slouch. I stand in awe of such productive people, who are blessed with abundant talents and use them to the full.
...“calm and collected” are not the words that come to mind to describe the feminist response to the governor from Alaska. The young feminist Jessica Grose, writing on the popular website Jezebel just after the Republican convention, was—well, we’ll let her describe it: “When Palin spoke on Wednesday night, my head almost exploded from the incandescent anger boiling in my skull. . . . What I feel for her privately could be described as violent, nay, murderous, rage.” Grose’s readers left more than 700 comments, according to the late New York Sun, including one from a reader who wanted to “vomit with rage.” Other haters damned Palin as a traitor to her sex or an “insult to women,” as Judith Warner spat in the New York Times. “Turncoat bitch!” the comedian Sandra Bernhard railed in a performance caught on YouTube. “You whore in your cheap fucking . . . cheap-ass plastic glasses and your hair up!”
The New Victory Theater, on 42nd St. in the heart of the theater district. We saw the new Cymbeline there on Sunday afternoon. The Fiasco Theater Company. Six recent Brown MFA grads played all the roles, and the entire stage set was as seen: three wooden boxes. They spoke the Bard's lines in pure American accent and tone, and every word was comprehensible. Each actor played a musical instrument too. Delightful comedy - and the audience got all the jokes. This play is a farce, a sit-com about love, evil, treachery and vengeance, with a happy ending. Entirely lacking in Shakespearian grandiloquence.
We got there a bit early, and I chatted with the lighting board gal about the theater. It's the oldest operating theater in NYC, built in 1900 by Oscar Hammerstein's grandfather for vaudeville. Holds around 500. It's a jewel-box theater.
Its history reflects the history of 42nd St in the 20th Century. Vaudeville, then Burlesque (Gypsy Rose Lee stripped there) under the Minskys, then legit theater (Belasco himself had the electric lights put in), then a porn movie house in the 70s, then shuttered for 20 years, then reopened in the 90s as what it is now: a venue for family-friendly productions.
Thank you, Rudy Giuliani, for civilizing 42nd St.
The Fiasco's Cymbeline is only there for two weeks and is, I think, thanks to a pile of good reviews, sold out. They let me take pics before they began, as people were arriving. The actors hung around on stage talking to people and stretching:
A couple more pics of this jewel of a theater below.
I forget where this fine recipe came from (maybe Mr. Free Market. No, it was The Englishman), but I'd think it would work fine for any game bird except duck, and certainly for chicken:
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Peel the potatoes first thing in the morning as the second cup of tea and Aspirin take effect. Put in a pan with lots of cold water and handful of salt, bring to the boil on the Aga as your bacon and eggs cook. Finish breakfast, ablute and then pour the boiling water out of the pan over your breakfast plate in the sink to clean the eggy stains off. Leave pan lid off for the potatoes to steam dry as you walk the dogs.
On your return, sniff the grouse hanging in the woodshed and pick a couple, or more, of the ripe ones. Do the dirty deeds and return indoors with your fresh plucked grouse.
Rummage in the larder and pull out all the root vegetables you can find. Cut off the grotty bits, put in the hen food bucket (it's legal as long as you don't take them into the kitchen first).
Open up the Sunday paper on the kitchen table and put the vegetables on it; read, cut, slice and swear all at the same time. When finished screw up the soiled paper and use in the bottom of the fire grate.
Open a bottle of red.
Heat a large knob of dripping [fat from roasted meat] in your largest roasting pan until it is smoking, drop in the potatoes, swirl about and sprinkle with lots of salt. A sprig of rosemary can be added on top. Bung in the oven. Pour a glass of wine.
Second roasting tray, butter and oil and put to heat. When you have finished the wine, take out of oven and put the veg in, shake and return.
Your frying pan that you cooked your bacon in this morning should be returned to the hot plate and all that lovely bacony grease heated up. Pour another glass of wine.
Take birds and roll around in hot pan until they are brown and your fingers hurt.
As Agas only fit two roasting trays you will probably now need to add them to the potato tray.
Drink the glass and check how laying the table in the dining room is going.
Your guests should now arrive, have a sherry with them; make your excuse as soon as he mentions his work at the bank, retreat to the kitchen, open another bottle of really meaty red, get all the stuff out of the oven, birds on the carving plate on the table to breathe, veggies in the bowls that were warming in the bottom oven. Splash some wine in a glass to check it and then into the meat roasting pan, pinch of this, spoon of that and your gravy is made.
Take through and carve and let the guests help themselves to vegetables.
If you have been away from Maggie's this weekend, catch up on our posts. Good fun, as always.
Readers who have not strolled down West 42nd St. in the past ten years would be amazed by it. Clean, no sense of menace, no porn, no creeps, tons of regular people on the streets day and night. I didn't even see any cops - there always used to be patrol cars everywhere there. Multi-million dollar luxury apartments going up between 10th Ave. and the West Side Highway.
Funky, funky Broadway is now a place you can take your kids.
I took a few pics before and after the matinee yesterday:
A fun walk to the parking garage, despite the 15 degree temps and strong wind. NYC is all about walking. New Yorkers walk more miles just in their daily lives than any country folk do. That's why the gals are all so svelte compared to country gals. Streets filled with people. Wonderful.
I really do need to plan a 15-mile NYC Official Maggie's Farm walking tour of Manhattan this spring or summer, with an architectural/cultural guide. I meant to do it last year, but life got busy. The Battery to Central Park, with a snakey route hitting some old joints and pubs. Maybe I will plan it. If I build it, will you come? (I refer to our bigcityphobes.)
Having things to look forward to, whether a good snow storm, or a trip someplace new, a new lamp, a new Teaching Company series, a possible new friend, or reservations for a good dinner out, is part of the charm of life.
Mrs. BD has just laid on me our trip adventures for 2011 which she has kindly planned and paid for. (It seems like the villa in Provence or Tuscany for the whole family, plus the Gwynnies and the Sipps and some other fun pals, will have to wait 'til 2012 - God willing - because the gal wants to get me back to Turkey, and to the Holy Land, first. Maybe she is wondering how long I will last...)
For one thing, I know she is planning supper at this joint:
Screw the Death Tax. The grim reaper is forever snapping at our heels while we run like hell to keep one step ahead of him. Die broke. They keep reminding me that it's a big, inviting world out there, full of interesting, confusing, and exciting things. Ruts are bad because they shorten life. Comfort zones are mainly valuable as places to return to. I have learned this, in life. Timidity fails, constricts life, creates regrets that just accumulate and grow mold.
It's just kinda odd, though, that Mrs. BD had none of my hunting trips to my old familiar places on her list: Maine, New Brunswick, Manitoba. What's up with that? She has lots of theater and opera tix done too, but never even bothered to check out Bob's tour this year. Guess that's my responsibility.
What adventures are y'all planning this year?
Pic on top is the club where some of us Maggie's Farmers like to go to hunt critters with wings in Manitoba in early October.
Aristotle's "Man is a political animal" means, as you know, that man is an animal who lives in a polis. Most normal folks prefer to live amongst others, to cluster, whether for convenience, socializing, or for security. I happen to enjoy both town and country, and find suburbia to be an imperfect if often necessary compromise.
Urbanism is about studying cities and towns. The topic has always been of interest to me, whether from the archeological view or from the present view.
Our blog colleague with his shiny new site The Old Urbanist (a word-play on The New Urbanism) blogrolls several sites which I have found quite absorbing and informative:
Sander L. Gilman
A Country Squire’s Own Recipe for Roast Red Grouse
Aristotle's "Man is a political animal" means, as you know, that man is an animal who lives in a polis. Most normal folks prefer to live amongst others, to cluster, whether for convenience, socializing, or for security. I happen to enjoy both town and country, and find suburbia to be an imperfect if often necessary compromise.