Maggie's Farm

Memo to file: Do not drive to Manhattan on the day of the New York Marathon. You can't get there from north and, if you do get there, you cannot get out. Here's the Marathon map.

We had an urge to see the Lod Mosaic and the Miro show at the Met today. Just a quick visit, in and out - but it seemed like every highway entrance and exit was closed, with extensive, traffic-jammed detours all around the periphery of the running route.

45,000 mostly out-of-town runners, with family and supporters on the sidewalks, and all the relevant bridges and roads and cross-streets closed, it's a miracle we got home.

We managed to get to the museum by parking 15 blocks away. I think I could have gotten home faster running than driving. I need a Manhattan pied a terre badly, but the government hasn't given me one, yet.

For all the hassle sometimes, and corny as it sounds, I really do love New York. Vitality, variety - all that. It's stimulating to me, just walking around and looking at stuff. Woods and meadows rarely surprise me, because I seem to know them so well. Humans - their works and antics - always surprise me.

I am not blessed with superior brainpower, but I believe I was blessed with a capacity to be enchanted by the details of life.

The Roman mosaic was good to see in person - the teeth of the fish are cool - and the Miro show was fascinating. Miro is always fascinating to me. I don't think of his stuff as surrealism, but instead as just plain hallucinatory. Completely strange, like an acid trip. His work always goes "Ding," Boing," "Snap," "Whirrrrr," "Wheeee," "Pop!" to me. Auditory, synesthetic.

The small show was about his short series of paintings called Dutch Interiors, based on old Dutch images and paintings which he transformed through what he termed his "tragicomic" method.

The show moved from the Rijksmuseum to New York last month. Here's one of the pictures from the show:

I took some random pics, as usual.

I have been told that Grace's Marketplace on 3rd Ave. is the best place to buy cheese in NYC. They generally offer 220+ varieties. Some folks prefer Citarella's, which has a location a few blocks away from Grace's on Third Ave. Better prices, but I know that fancy chefs get their cheeses at Gracie's.

A few more of my lousy NYC pics from today, below:

Pic is from my first visit to a WalMart two weeks ago. It was a 24 hr/day Supercenter. Yes, I was impressed. It was stocked to the gills, clean as a whistle, and the old codger Greeter at 7 AM was just great.

Wal-Mart vs. The Morons

1. Americans spend $36,000,000 at Wal-Mart Every hour of every day.
           
2. This works out to $20,928 profit every minute!

3. Wal-Mart will sell more from January 1 to St. Patrick's Day (March 17th) than Target sells all year.

4. Wal-Mart is bigger than Home Depot + Kroger + Target +Sears + Costco + K-Mart combined.

5. Wal-Mart employs 1.6 million people, is the world's largest private employer, and most speak English.

6. Wal-Mart is the largest company in the history of the world.

7. Wal-Mart now sells more food than Kroger and Safeway combined, and keep in mind they did this in only fifteen years.

8. During this same period, 31 big supermarket chains sought bankruptcy.

9. Wal-Mart now sells more food than any other store in the world.

10. Wal-Mart has approx 3,900 stores in the USA of which 1,906 are Super Centers; this is 1,000 more than it had five years ago.

11. This year 7.2 billion different purchasing experiences will occur at Wal-Mart stores. (Earth's population is approximately 6.5 Billion.)

12. 90% of all Americans live within fifteen miles of a Wal-Mart.

You may think that I am complaining, but I am really laying the ground work for suggesting that MAYBE we should hire the guys who run Wal-Mart to fix the economy.

To President Obama and all 535 voting members of the Legislature,

It is now official you are ALL corrupt morons:

a. The U.S. Postal Service was established in 1775. You have had 234 years to get it right and it is broke.

b. Social Security was established in 1935. You have had 74 years to get it right and it is broke.

c. Fannie Mae was established in 1938. You have had 71 years to get it right and it is broke.
                               
d. War on Poverty started in 1964. You have had 45 years to get it right; $1 trillion of our money is confiscated each year and transferred to "the poor."  We still have the poor, and they only demand more. Still waiting for the "Thank you's."
                               
e. Medicare and Medicaid were established in 1965. You have had 44 years to get it right and they are broke.
                               
f. Freddie Mac was established in 1970. You have had 39 years to get it right and it is broke.
                               
g. The Department of Energy was created in 1977 to lessen our dependence on foreign oil. It has ballooned to 16,000 employees with a budget of $24 billion a year and we import more oil than ever before. You had 32 years to get it right and it is an abysmal failure.
                               
You have FAILED in every "government service" you have shoved down our throats while overspending our tax dollars.

AND YOU WANT AMERICANS TO BELIEVE YOU CAN BE TRUSTED WITH A GOVERNMENT-RUN HEALTH CARE SYSTEM?

A reader reminded me that David Horowitz really liked Kenyon College.

If David likes something, I like it.

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

 

And indeed there will be time

For the yellow smoke that slides along the street,

Rubbing its back upon the window-panes;

There will be time, there will be time

To prepare a face to meet the faces that you meet;

There will be time to murder and create,

And time for all the works and days of hands

That lift and drop a question on your plate;

Time for you and time for me,

And time yet for a hundred indecisions,

And for a hundred visions and revisions,

Before the taking of a toast and tea.

Toast and tea, we used to figger, was the final Communion - Brit-style.

When I was in high school, we all memorized Prufrock. Not because we had to, but because we liked to. As I always say, I define poetry as any writing which contains an inevitability of versification, with some coherence of imagery. Poetry is song-writing. I wish we had recordings of Kipling singing his poems. It would be a hoot, I am sure.

(We memorized things competitively when I was in high school. Shakespeare sonnets and soliloquies, lists of Chem equations and math theorems, Civil War dates and other historical dates. From all that I use 1569 today as one of my main ID codes (Shakespeare's birth year). Sophocles. Ozymandius. Kipling. Le Bateau Ivre. Paradise Lost. We had an official annual school tournament to see who could memorize the most lines of the opening of the Iliad, and another with the opening lines of Canterbury Tales in the original good Old English. Many folks would do 100-200 lines without faltering. The kids taking Latin, of course, had their famous and traditional speed declension contests. I even remember memorizing Babi Yar in Russian for kicks - and I spoke no Russian. It just sounded cool, imitating Yevtushenko's voice. Our hockey team specialized in the Iliad contest - somebody on the team always won. Our hockey coach also taught Ancient Greek. It was a point of honor for the team. A good high school, good fun. I hope high school kids still do amusing things like this. God knows what kids learn in college.) 

From an excellent piece on Eliot at Commentary, T.S. Eliot and the Demise of the Literary Culture:

Understatedly spectacular is the way Eliot�s career strikes one today, at time when, it is fair to say, poetry, even to bookish people, is of negligible interest and literary criticism chiefly a means to pursue academic tenure. Literary culture itself, if the sad truth be known, seems to be slowly but decisively shutting down.

The fame Eliot achieved in his lifetime is unfathomable for a poet, or indeed any American or English writer, in our day. In 1956, Eliot lectured on �The Function of Criticism� in a gymnasium at the University of Minnesota to a crowd estimated at 15,000 people.

Read the whole thing. Eliot was a bank teller, of course - and a rock star. Still is a rock star, in my book. His stuff sticks like Velcro. Christ was his rock.

I love this stuff, testing your boat-handling skills against serious seas. I always loved to take my 23' cuddy cabin Sea Ox out after storms and hurricanes, for practice. The big following seas are the ones that frighten me. (h/t, Theo):

More at Theo -

From the prior weekend. Big fields, especially compared with our small fields in New England. This is south of Gambier, near Homer.

Readers might doubt me, but last Saturday was my first visit to a WalMart. It was the "Supercenter" in Mt. Vernon, Ohio.

What a place! Open 24 hrs/day. Humongous.

I realized one thing about this place: Sam Walton did not really have a new idea. He just took the old country General Store, expanded the hell out of it, and got big enough to control the prices of his suppliers.

I may be the last person on earth to learn these things. Why didn't Woolworth's do what Sam did?

What sorts of petty vandalism did you engage in on Halloween?

I got in trouble for chalking somebody's driveway with vulgar words one time.

As an adult, I also got in trouble with my wife one year when a neighbor and I escorted our young kids, and we ourselves trick-or-treated our friends and neighbors for cocktails and beers. We got too many. Not our fault for being overserved.

The Amish breed Standardbreds, trotters and pacers, for transportation.  They are longer and heavier than Thoroughbreds.

It's a delight to see an Amish trotter weaving through the strip mall traffic in Mt. Vernon, Ohio, head held high, prancing along, and mostly keeping up with in-town traffic.

This one was tied to a lamppost while the couple shopped at GoodWill.

Another below the fold -

It's taken me many years to realize that I can really only take in one piece of art per day. One painting - not a gallery-full. One poem, not a collection of poetry. One dance, not a whole dance concert. One piece of classical music, not a whole concert. One Chippendale highboy, not a room full of Chippendale.

Maybe it's my limitation in what I am able to process. Maybe it's my ADD, or maybe I am slow, but to me a wonderful thing is like a found jewel, or like finding an ancient coin washed up on a beach.

I assume that the people who make these things put a lot into them, and they can demand the same of me.

Thus one very special thing per day is plenty for me. I do not like to linger in museums - I prefer to hit and run.

Correggio, Venus with Mercury and Cupid, c. 1520

The new Queen Elizabeth. h/t, Theo.

She has the hull of a liner, but the superstructure of a Miami Beach hotel. Everything is quite elegant inside, but on ships like this you can too easily forget that you are on a ship at sea.

I prefer smaller ships, like many of the Holland-American line, that feel like big boats instead of like giant hotel-resorts.

Call me a snob if you want to. I like the Ryndam, below. I was looking at her because we need somewhere new to go to in 2011 - and I love ships 'n boats.

The Instyman posts something which might almost be considered a blog post instead of an Instyism. Good stuff, with some Heinlein for dessert. One quote:

The main problem with the “new elite” is that they’re not an elite at all. That is, they aren’t particularly smart, or competent. They are credentialed, but those credentials aren’t so much markers for smartness or competence, or even basic education, as they are admission tickets to the Gentry Class, based on good standardized test scores. That’s fine — ETS was berry, berry good to me — but it doesn’t have much to do with ability to succeed, or lead, in the real world. Worse yet, it seems to have fostered a sense of entitlement.

"Read the whole thing."

Purists might object, but these things are made of "resin," not wood. They are heavy. They have been outdoors for over a year and had accumulated mildew and dirt, so I decided to give them a bleach spray bath last weekend. It worked like magic.

I asked Mrs. BD whether she wanted me to put them inside someplace for the winter and she told me not to bother. "They're resin." I said "You mean plastic." I never realized it. I am happy to know that a lifetime of scraping, painting, and replacing rotting Adirondack chairs is over.

Seaside Casual Furniture, from Rhode Island. Only somebody like Sipp would notice that they aren't the real thing.

On Cape Cod in September. Thought blogger colleague Retriever might enjoy this pic.

One of the good things about this handyman special on Route 6 in Wellfleet is that you can just walk up the dirveway to the Cumbie and the liquor store. What does anybody really need that cannot be got at one of those places?