Tuesday, January 19. 2010
Monday, January 18. 2010
The blurb says this:
Last November, at the central market in Valencia, opera singers disguised as shopkeepers were selling produce at the various stalls there. Verdi's Il Travatore starts playing over the loudspeakers & they burst into song. None of the shoppers has a clue what's going on.
Too bad the recorded sound quality is poor, but what a kick.
Of all of the entertaining and/or interesting radio shows we enjoy (when we have time to hear them), there is one which I think comes closest to the Maggie's Farm sensibility - The John Batchelor Show.
Around here, it comes on late at night on WABC. It's more intelligent and informative than anything on the boob tube. If you don't know it, give him a try.
Very cool bumper music too.
Except when you need a specific course for a specific purpose or requirement (eg Physical Chemistry), I recommend choosing courses by the teacher, not by the topic.
At a medical meeting recently, I found myself making the same mistake I have often made: picking meetings by topic instead of by speaker. You can get more out of a brilliant person talking about Coke vs. Pepsi than you can from a mediocrity discussing your medical topic of interest.
Sunday, January 17. 2010
 Our dear pal Sippican is moving from the MA seashore to central Maine on the mighty Androscoggin River.
If there is good grouse country nearby, I will be a visitor.
Rumford, to be specific (pop 6000). Whether he has a reason or not I have no idea. Rumford is an interesting old lumber mill town, with turn of the century mill company housing developments which would be of interest to any student of the history of town planning.
Photo is the Sipp family's new house. I like it. It's not a house - it's a home.
But does it get broadband?
Saturday, January 16. 2010
Something America needs more of: good shoeshine stands. This one is in Grand Central Station, NY - a train station which hosts several shoeshine stands of various styles. Those guys do a better job than you could ever do yourself, and a good, solid, comfortable pair of shoes is like a good old friend. Gotta care for them.
I am told that high quality leather shoes, well-cared for and never worn two days in a row (the 2 lbs. of foot sweat per day is a problem for leather's endurance), should last 40 years or more. I own about three pairs of 20+ year-old dress shoes which are just entering their prime years.
It takes a minimum of three legs to build a stool, and a minimum of three logs to build a good fire.
A BD daughter recently learned this basic Boy Scout fact after failing to start holiday fires. It requires a tent of wood to hold in enough heat to produce and ignite the heated gasses which create the rapid oxidation we call a flame. The flame is the burning gasses. The complex and mysterious chemistry of ignition is the key to flame.
The gasses, of course, are hydrocarbons. Wood is nothing but unripened oil or pre-coal. I explained to her (she does not seem to have a chemistry brain yet) that slow oxidation is called "rotting," slightly quicker oxygenation is called "smoldering," quick oxidation is called "fire," and extremely quick oxidation is called "explosion."
Medium controlled oxidation is called "life," and why we exhale CO2 (hydrocarbons + oxygen = mostly CO2 + H20 + heat/energy), and why we are above room temperature most of the time. It's an exothermic chemical reaction. We animals are masterfully designed to control and harness these chemistries in our bodies.
Friday, January 15. 2010
Part of an extraordinary long quote from A Woman in Berlin in a piece at Never Yet Melted:
...I long ago lost my childhood piety, so that God and the Beyond have become mere symbols and abstractions. Should I believe in progress? Yes, to biggger and better bombs. The happiness of the greater number? Yes, for Petka and his ilk. An idyll in a quiet corner? Sure, for people who comb the fringes of their rugs. Possessions, contentment?
I have to keep from laughing, homeless urban nomad that I am. Love? Lies trampled on the ground. And were it ever to rise again I would always be anxious, could never find true refuge, would never again dare hope for permanence.
Perhaps art, toiling away in the service of form? Yes, for those who have the calling, but I don’t. I’m just an ordinary laborer, I have to be satisfied with that. All I can do is touch my small circle and be a good friend. What’s left is just to wait for the end. Still the dark and amazing adventure of life is beckoning. I’ll stick around, out of curiosity and because I enjoy breathing and stretching my healthy limbs.
Thursday, January 14. 2010
 The history of cranes and tower cranes here.
h/t, Samizdata
Thompson's Remants of an Army. Story of the 1842 Afghanistan battle here.
Wednesday, January 13. 2010
Identify the perpetrators of atrocities upon children as sociopaths or whatever (see Dr. Joy Bliss' post below), and the words don't come near the horrors they commit, which are monstrous, whether during the Holocaust or today in many countries.
Here's a photo from a group of 41 children, ages 3-13, plus ten adult staff the Nazis tore from their refuge near Lyon, France on April 6, 1944. The children were sent to Auschwitz and murdered, as were the staff.
Up to 1.5-million children were murdered in the death camps, about 1.2-million of them Jews, the others Roma or handicapped.
Holocaust by Barbara Sonek
We played, we laughed
we were loved.
We were ripped from the arms of our parents
and thrown into the fire.
We were nothing more than children.
We had a future.
We were going to be lawyers, rabbis, wives, teachers, mothers.
We had dreams, then we had no hope.
We were taken away in the dead of night
like cattle in cars, no air to breathe
smothering, crying, starving, dying.
Separated from the world
to be no more.
From the ashes, hear our plea
This atrocity to mankind can not happen again.
Remember us, for we were the children
whose dreams and lives were stolen away.
Here's a photo of a few of the very few children who survived to liberation.
We see similar photos today of children elsewhere in the world who suffer. Remember and do more than repeat the mantra "Never Again."
More info about the once happy children in the first photo at this site.
HT: My good friend "Charlite", a righteous Gentile.
I have been thinking quite a bit about Sociopathy (aka Antisocial Personality, aka Psychopathy, aka in the young "Conduct Disorder") lately. People without a conscience who view others as objects of gratification or as tools to be used. I have missed the diagnosis several times over the past few years, to my regret. Many experts are known to miss it until something happens to wave the red flag in front of your face.
It's not just an important diagnosis for us shrinks to make: it's important for everybody out in the world. 2-3% of humans probably have enough sociopathic traits to be of concern in life. It's a strange partially genetic adaptation. Some end up as leaders and moguls, many end up addicts, dead, or in jail. Sociopathy knows no economic, cultural, or ethnic boundaries.
What is this "condition"?
It's a tricky thing, sociopathy. It has been well-described from many points of view. We analysts often think of it as being based in an absence of empathy - an inability to experience others as other than as objects to be exploited, used, predated upon, etc. An inner coldness and calculatingness towards others, but not to be confused with obsessional personalities who simply protect their emotions, and not be confused with those with immoral or amoral impulses - everybody has those.
However, successful sociopaths learn to create a warm, caring, engaged, and often charming presentation of themselves to the world. Very successful and smart sociopaths learn how to live honest lives and to channel their talents, guile and wiles into honest paths.
Full-blown sociopathy is generally considered an untreatable and incurable condition. I am not convinced that that is true - but I think it requires special methods which are outisde of regular Psychiatry. Sociopathic traits are far more common than the supposed 2% of the population that are said to be full sociopaths. I am not going to write an essay on this complicated topic, but will just offer some links for those who are interested:
Wiki has a simple introduction to the topic
A classic book by Cleckley: The Mask of Sanity: An Attempt to Clarify Some Issues About the So Called Psychopathic Personality
An interesting paper: THE SOCIOBIOLOGY OF SOCIOPATHY: AN INTEGRATED EVOLUTIONARY MODEL
I have more links on the topic, but no more time right now.
Tuesday, January 12. 2010
The Eclipse. A little too flashy, d'ya think?
Have you read The Shack yet?
Sunday, January 10. 2010
The piece at Intelligent Life begins:
When Wallace Stevens died, few of his Connecticut insurance colleagues even knew he was a poet. With the recent release of his "Selected Poems", Ryan Ruby revisits a man who proved that to be a great poet, no great experience is necessary ...
Whole thing here.
Most commentators bemoan the decline in readers of the dead-tree editions of major newspapers. Most explanations center on ideological bias of the local newspaper turning off readers or the availability of news on the Internet or the cutting of size of newspaper sections.
In my case, the local newspaper, the San Diego Union-Tribune, is politically centrist most of the time, so I’m not turned off or away. It has cut the size of its sections but mostly eliminated excess, so my time with the paper is better focused. And, yes, the Internet offers more depth and diversity, but one does have to specially search and scan many posts and sites to get the depth, diversity or local news, if one wants it, which takes up lots of time.
The local newspaper, by contrast, handily offers the highlights of national and international news, so I’m aware of them, and if interested can then decide whether to spend more time (than the too much time I already spend) on the Internet.
Most important, I can only find extensive coverage of California or of San Diego area news in the local newspaper.
And, I can do it all in 10-minutes of scanning the print newspaper. I’d have to spend several-fold longer clicking all the links in the U-T’s online edition and another several-fold longer scanning numerous websites.
Here’s an example of how it works, to quickly connect the dots via the print edition of the San Diego Union-Tribune:
- Page 4 of today’s newspaper has an AP report of a 6.5 earthquake offshore of Eureka, in northernmost California, that onshore broke some windows. The report is not online, because the U-T is economizing by not paying the wire services extra to put their pieces online at the newspaper’s web site. That saves funds that can be spent on enlarging local reporting.
- Page 1 headlines “Questionable firms getting stimulus cash” in San Diego (written for the newspaper by an independent investigative news service) with this telling quote:
To government watchdogs, such contracts raise concerns about the way the $787 billion stimulus program is being administered.
“It is very upsetting that the government doesn’t do more due diligence before it hands money out,” said Laura N. Chick, California’s inspector general for stimulus funds. “We’ve gotten very used to handing out taxpayer dollars and not so good at overseeing to whom are we giving them and how they are being spent.”
- Page 1 of the Regional section has a regular columnist’s headline, “Tsunami spending? Wave your money bye.”
Imperial Beach spent $47,000 in grant money. San Diego County, $30,000. San Diego City has received $1,500 and may seek another $150,000 to protect us from a terrible tsunami….
The federal government has been pushing tsunami awareness since 1995, when it formed the National Tsunami Hazard Mitigation Program, out of concern one could hit along the coasts of Oregon, Washington and Northern California because of seismic activity nearby…. [Note: not the San Diego area; nor did a severe offshore earthquake near northernmost California's Eureka cause a tsunami.]
But what are the odds? The National Safety Council puts the odds of dying in an earthquake in your lifetime at one in 153,597.Dying from a lightning strike is one in 81,701. Bee stings? That’s a mere one in 62,950.
A tsunami? It’s so rare, you can’t even put odds on it.
But we won’t need to worry. Once the feds pony up more of our money, we’ll all be TsunamiReady™.
In less than 10-minutes to scan the entire, shrunken, print edition I have an investigative report with a top insider’s indictment of wasteful and reckless stimulus spending and two additional specific related examples of how.
Try being aware of that connect the dots online.
In addition, my 9-year old son eagerly reads each morning’s sports section, taking it along to school to discuss with his classmates during lunch. The print edition helps to create a young person interested in knowing more than from the 5-minutes of TV sports news, and being aware of a wider range of sports topics. Those habits will carry over into a later interest in the news.
Postscript:
Across the country, in Baltimore, the PEW Research Center studied how state and local news happens by one-week’s local and state news reporting from all sources. Some key findings:
-- Among the six major news threads studied in depth—which included stories about budgets, crime, a plan involving transit busses, and the sale of a local theater—fully 83% of stories were essentially repetitive, conveying no new information. Of the 17% that did contain new information, nearly all came from traditional media either in their legacy platforms or in new digital ones.
-- General interest newspapers like the Baltimore Sun produced half of these stories—48%—and another print medium, specialty newspapers focused on business and law, produced another 13%.
-- Local television stations and their websites accounted for about a third (28%) of the enterprise reporting on the major stories of the week; radio accounted for 7%, all from material posted on radio station websites. The remaining nine new media outlets accounted for just 4% of the enterprise reporting we encountered.
But, here’s the “bad” news: the new media hasn’t filled the hole left by declining newspaper resources; instead, government and special interest groups have a freer hand than before to push their own viewpoints with less examination by the media for completeness or truth:
-- As the press scales back on original reporting and dissemination, reproducing other people’s work becomes a bigger part of the news media system. Government, at least in this study, initiates most of the news. In the detailed examination of six major storylines, 63% of the stories were initiated by government officials, led first of all by the police. Another 14% came from the press. Interest group figures made up most of the rest.
Our intertubes friend Right Wing Prof died on Thursday. He invited us to post this piece from him (which we did) in 2007 because he didn't think it fit the tone or purpose of his site -
Almost heaven, West Virginia
Blue Ridge Mountains
Shenandoah River -
Life is old there
Older than the trees
Younger than the mountains
Growin like a breeze
Country roads, take me home
To the place I belong
West Virginia, mountain momma
Take me home, country roads
Our friend Right Wing Prof at Right Wing Nation is a guest author today. His reminiscence is about West Virginia, clans, ancestors, his youth, and snake-handling preachers.
You've probably never heard of the Big Sandy River, the tributary of the Ohio River that separates eastern Kentucky from western West Virginia. It's even less likely that you've heard of the Twelvepole Creek, also a tributary (well, if you can call a creek a tributary) of the Ohio, in the mountains of West Virginia, or Wayne, the largest town in Wayne County.
So let me take you there.
I assume you've been through West Virginia on the interstate. If not, you're missing perhaps the most beautiful state in the United States. The license plates say Wild, Wonderful West Virginia, and a drive across the state on I-64 shows you how wild and how wonderful the state is. But to really see West Virginia, you have to get off the interstate and drive into the mountains.
If you take WV-152 from I-64 in Huntington, the state highway rapidly becomes a narrow, two-lane road that winds like a snake up and down the mountains and twists through the valleys, only a few miles, incidentally, from where the Hatfields and McCoys live. You are in Wayne County, and the beauty of the landscape contrasts sharply with the early twentieth-century shacks. Suddenly, you begin to climb the side of a mountain, and you realize you're driving into a town. The buildings are well-kept and much nicer and larger than the small shacks and rundown farms you were seeing along 152. The crest of the mountain is downtown Wayne, an attractive town with several large churches and local shops.
As the road takes you down the other side, though, you feel as if you are in a different community: The buildings on the back side of the mountain, deeper into Wayne County, are ramshackle, falling apart, very unlike the buildings on the front side and the top. Wayne feels almost like a movie set, presenting its best side to visitors from the city, and hiding its worst side behind the mountain.
Wayne is the county seat, with a little over 1,100 people. Our destination is East Lynn. Turn on 37, and the road gets even narrower as it takes you further into the mountains. You will suddenly see the steep, narrow valley widen in front of you as the road makes a sharp right turn, and before you is the Twelvepole. Just down the road is East Lynn, somewhat larger than Wayne, but noticeably poorer.
I have before gotten nasty cracks from people when they asked where my family was from and I told them. Let me say it now: I am not ashamed of these people. These are Scots-Irish, deeply religious, and fiercely proud, too proud to take government handouts, preferring instead to get along as best they can, people who work hard all their lives and live in poverty, yet give to their families and communities and do well by their families, not white trash sitting around on the front porch smoking corncob pipes and collecting welfare.
My great-grandfather, Laban, was born here in East Lynn, three days before Jefferson Davis was elected president of the CSA. Laban was from a poor branch of a prestigious family (my great-great-great-grandfather was Henry Clay's first cousin), and he married Nancy Ellen, from a land-wealthy local family (the wealthier branches of the Clay family live in Kentucky). My great-grandfather was a schoolteacher (mathematics), but had been afflicted all his life with some sort of stomach problem. Somehow, he managed to talk his wife into leaving not only the clan, but the state, and moved his family to southern Indiana, where he believed the sulfur water springs would help his health problems.
Continue reading "Clay Bond, aka Right Wing Prof, RIP: Country roads, take me home"
O.K.....the game is on!! Travel Scrabble. Keep it going. Change one letter of the bottom word posted in the comments and let's see where we get stuck and can't continue!
Rules: You cannot add letters. You can only use English. You can only change one letter - one letter only, please - and you cannot change the letter sequence.
Our starting word is TRIP - We will do the first one below, and all can add their words below (don't violate the rules, tho).
Friday, January 8. 2010
When my sibs were too young to ski, I would take ski buses with pals on weekends to ski at Mohawk Mountain and Butternut for the day.
When the other kids got older we would ski all around New England as a family (my Mom skied, but Dad read books by the fire and shepherded), but most regularly at Stowe, Stratton, Bromley and good old Magic Mountain where I got skewered with a ski pole by my cousin one time.
A widely accepted truism in marketing is that sex sells. A recent academic study of movies finds that sex doesn’t sell. The study’s co-author found those attached to the truism resistant to the facts:
"When I presented these results at European Science Days this summer, I was struck by how hard it is to overcome preconceptions about the box-office consequences of highly graphic sexual content," says co-author Dean Keith Simonton of the University of California, Davis. "But not all truisms are true."
It wasn’t until I noticed a small squib in this morning’s newspaper that I was aware of the research report, which CNN reported about December 29th. (I wasn’t distracted by watching porn or looking at the lovelies occasionally appearing here at Maggie’s Farm. Actually, I’ve been enjoying the unfolding of my Optimist’s Prediction For 2010, as the portents darken for liberal-left activism and brighten for center-right activism.)
According to the study of 914 films released between 2001-2005, the largest sample yet studied, CNN leads with: “A recent study concluded that nudity and explicit sex scenes don’t translate to success for major motion pictures,” at US or international box offices or at the Academy Awards. A researcher at the Culture and Media Institute finds similar results for 2009:
This research also holds true for the 10 highest grossing movies of 2009. None contained graphic sex scenes and only one, "The Hangover," a raunchy comedy about a bachelor party in Vegas, featured a lot of sexual content. Others on the list, such as "Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen" "Star Trek" and "Avatar" contained mild sexual content while the rest contained little or no sexual content.
CNN quotes an author of the study:
"Sex did not sell, whether in the domestic or international box office, and even after controlling for MPAA rating," said Simonton, who is a professor of psychology at the University of California, Davis. “In other words, even among R movies, less graphic sex is better."
What did sell? “The top-grossing films in the study included movies like "Shrek 2;" "Spider-Man;" "Star Wars Episode III: Revenge of the Sith" and "The Lord of the Rings: The Return of the King," all of which contained mostly minor to mild sex and/or nudity.”
What about horny young men?
Tom Jacobs, staff writer for the research-driven consumer magazine Miller-McCune, wrote about the study and said there has long been the belief that the many young males who make up movie audiences are enthralled by female nudity.
"These researchers really put that belief to the test and crunched the numbers," Jacobs said. "What I took from the study is that a hint of sex is perhaps more enticing than out-and-out nudity."
That isn’t a surprise to those of us who love the great movies from the 1930’s to the 1950’s, where romance flourished, scenes faded away after the kiss, and viewers projected their own emotions and desires on to the screen, rather than today having to sit through another repetitive graphic humping on the screen.
At Maggie’s Farm, a few of us contributors enjoy occasionally posting a salacious photo, but the success of Maggie’s Farm is mostly owed to its cultural observations and photos. Our chief Bird Dog keeps that at the forefront of focus.
Let’s take an informal poll: readers please comment on our blog’s mix.
Thursday, January 7. 2010
What are "intellectuals" anyway?
When I was young and vain I thought I was one. I read lots of books, got myself overly-eddicated, used to read the New York Times daily, and robotically held most of the socially-acceptable, arrogant, bien pensant views. Now I know I am a regular person who just tries to live in reality as best I can, fully aware that many non-tweedy, non-Ivy grads understand life far better than I do. Uncommon sense and sensibilities can replace common sense. From Tom Sowell's new book, with interview video, at SDA:
Thomas Sowell on Intellectuals and Society - intellectuals certainly can renounce war, “and that does not stop your neighbor from building up the biggest army in the world and coming in and killing you.”
We used to ski the places on Rte. 93 quite a bit when the pups were younger. Wildcat and Gunstock Mtns, too. Less crowded and, truth be told, more genteel folks on average than on the Vermont slopes. I am partial to Loon, but Cannon Mtn. gets the prize for NH's funkiest, old-style place. Here's a brochure from the 1970s (Mittersill has been closed since the 70s):
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