Maggie's Farm

Thanks to Hell In A Handbasket for alerting us to a worthy site, Women's Outdoor News.

And thanks to our buddy for this fine aviation site which we have seen before, Flight Level 390. I want that guy flying my airplane. With the machine on auto 99% of the time, what is there to do but sleep or blog?

Drowning is almost always a deceptively quiet event. The waving, splashing, and yelling that dramatic conditioning (television) prepares us to look for, is rarely seen in real life.

Thanks to Mario Vittone for this excellent post that everybody ought to read (h/t, reader).

Another good one from Mario: Going Fishing? No You’re Not.  Every time you leave shore, you leave safety and, however relaxing and fun it may be, you are entering a dangerous environment on a contraption which is floating at the moment, but wants to sink. If there were no bit of adventure to boating, nobody would do it without getting paid.

It's not that the water wants to kill you but, as a reader commented elsewhere, "Nature doesn't care."

Last I heard, commercial fishing is the most dangerous occupation in America, and unwatched swimming pools are death traps for little kids. I know a couple whose 3 year-old drowned during their poolside cocktail party. Fifty people there, and nobody noticed the little kid slip under.

Story at Neptunus:

When you go to places like Cape Cod or the Berkshires (as I do), you have to put up with this sort of stuff. I maintain my sense of humor, but these sorts of things bug Mrs. BD because she is intolerant of idiotic females who make her gender look retarded, and rightly assumes such vehicles belong to women.

If they really loved Gaia, would they be driving?

No. They would be walking to volunteer at the Turtle Abortion Clinic. "Every Turtle A Wanted Turtle." Sheesh. If you ask me, we cannot have too many turtles. Maggie's loves turtles of all varieties, races, species, and religions.

Truth is, I brake for turtles too:

Roman Coin Hoard Found in Somerset. What fun to find something like that.

I found a Massachusetts Pine Tree coin (1700s) on a Wellfleet Harbor beach a few years ago, with a hole through it (for stringing one's money, I suppose), and thought I had found something wonderful. I don't know where I put it.

Low tide, Cape Cod Bay, way out on the western shore of Great Island this weekend. Heaven. You can even bring your doggie. No people there, either, except me and the Mrs. and the rare beachcomber.

A dune knitted together by a clump of Bayberry overlooking Cape Cod Bay, near Duck Harbor:

I know many readers may tire of my New England travelogue photos, but I am the Editor so, if you don't like them, don't look at them. It will take a while to complete this photo dump. Meanwhile, catch up on our holiday weekend posts which were rich with stuff.

Your Editor and Mrs. Editor have been on lower Cape Cod ("lower" means upper on the Cape. You go "up" when you go down to Hyannis. Figure that out. Less confusing to call it the "outer" Cape, but that's too easy) for an extra-long soul-feeding  weekend, as we require an annual immersion in the smell of hot Pitch Pine, hot sand, salt air, chilly baptismal salt water, beach grass, and the endless clams and oysters and raw Atlantic Bluefin tuna on which we feed. Our goal is eternity as a Great Black-Backed Gull, sitting on sand bars, staring at the horizon, and feeding on whatever gets washed up by the sea.

However, these first pics are for our pal Sipp. Newcomb Hollow, sunrise this past weekend, and ye olde Beachcomber in the early morning light. The local Cumby opens at 5, and I am always there by 5 with the fishermen - and I mean the pros, not the amateurs. The rough gnarly guys in boots who ain't askeered of drowning and who shamelessly hit on the gals at the counter with promises like "We could have lotsa fun tonight when I get back if you would just give me a nice smile."

I like to make my early morning rounds to see what is going on.

If you squint and stare straight east, on a clear day you might see the coast of Portugal in the far distance, just over the horizon.

I'll wrap up my Newport photo dump with a few pics from the Flower Show, which is the main reason Mrs. BD dragged me to Rhode Island last weekend. The Newport Flower Show is what the gardening and arranging ladies term an "important" show. It attracts garden club competitors from as far as Texas, and it raises lots of money for the Preservation Society of Newport County.

Mrs. BD did not have an entry in the show this year, but she likes to keep a finger on the pulse of things.

Last weekend's show was held at Rosecliff, one of the loveliest Newport cottages. Guy who built it was a Comstock Lode heir. My photos do not capture how crowded the place was with flower people and their tolerant husbands, mostly, like me, feigning deep interest and appreciation while furtively glancing at one's watch.

More pics of the show below the fold -

Quote from an essay of the above title by Roger Scruton in City Journal:

Until recently, European architects have either connived at the evisceration of our cities or actively promoted it. Relying on the spurious rhetoric of Le Corbusier and Walter Gropius, they endorsed the totalitarian projects of the political elite, whose goal after the war was not to restore the cities but to clear away the “slums.” By “slums,” they meant the harmonious classical streets of affordable houses, seeded with local industries, corner shops, schools, and places of worship, that had made it possible for real communities to flourish in the center of our towns. High-rise blocks in open parkland, of the kind that Le Corbusier proposed in his plan for the demolition of Paris north of the Seine, would replace them. Meanwhile, all forms of employment and enjoyment would move elsewhere. Public buildings would be expressly modernist, with steel and concrete frames and curtain walls, but with no facades or intelligible apertures, and no perceivable relation to their neighbors. Important monuments from the past would remain, but often set in new and aesthetically annihilating contexts, such as that provided for Saint Paul’s in London.

Citizens protested, and conservation societies fought throughout Europe for the old idea of what a city should look like, but the modernists won the battle of ideas. They took over the architecture schools and set out to ensure that the classical discipline of architecture would never again be learned, since it would never again be taught. The vandalization of the curriculum was successful: European architecture schools no longer taught students the grammar of the classical Orders; they no longer taught how to understand moldings, or how to draw existing monuments, urban streets, the human figure, or such vital aesthetic phenomena as the fall of light on a Corinthian capital or the shadow of a campanile on a sloping roof; they no longer taught appreciation for facades, cornices, doorways, or anything else that one could glean from a study of Serlio or Palladio.

Read the whole thing. 

Photo below: The charming, friendly, safe, and human-scale Chelsea neighborhood of Manhattan, which was a crime-ridden "slum" one generation ago, part of Hell's Kitchen. Ripe for massive demolition and "urban planning" and "urban renewal." The social engineers are almost always wrong because they are oblivious to human nature. This one-time slum is a very pleasant place to live in, provided that your neighbors behave themselves.

Don't blame the old buildings.

Newport, RI has the largest number of pre-Revolutionary houses and buildings in the USA. This one is odd. A saltbox with a ? gambrel roof. WTH? Name the year it was built:

I'll take you for an architectural stroll from around Kay St down Bellevue, with structures of all eras, beginning with this Victorian:

More pics (from last weekend) below the fold -