Maggie's Farm

A tip for the gals: from 10 bizarre scientific studies, the useful fact that the length of a guy's index finger correlates with the length of his flaccid penis, when stretched ("stretched"?).

Now please stop staring at my fingers.

A study indicates that the primate brain's reward system for acquiring information seems to follow the same pathways as the reward systems for food and sex.

That is surely why readers read Maggie's Farm: we are stimulating!

Story at Frontal Cortex.

This series of photos came in over the transom, but I see that it was adapted from a NYT story:

"Clingstone, an unusual 103-year-old mansion in Rhode Island's Narragansett Bay, survives through the love and hard work of family and friends."

Sunshine doesn't cause the dangerous skin cancers (h/t, Englishman). People need that sunshine; what we used to term "bennies" - Beneficial Sun Rays. "Going out to catch some bennies and study chem."

Hold the sunblock, and go to the beach (h/t, Tangled):

Or to this one, in China:

Our post yesterday morning moved me to look up some Bedford real estate. Since Bedford pretty much abuts CT, and used to be part of it, one might consider it part of New England Yankeeland.

Here's a pleasant 33-acre horse property on Guard Hill Road, Shannon Stables. It comes with a 2-BR cottage built in 1850. Asking $14.5 million. More photos here.

Above: Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1937, where many waves of immigrants found their first foothold in America. Those 1860s-1890s tenements are still standing, in what is now one of the hippest young neighborhoods of NYC.

Below: Mulberry St., NYC, c. 1900, packed with southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants. The misguided Progressives wanted to tear down these neighborhoods, from the time of Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson.

What's a "slum"?

The Dylanologist and I have always been interested in the tragedies of urban planning, and fans of the organic, natural growth of urban areas designed by market forces and human desires, not by hubris-infected government experts.

One of his great-grandmothers, 1st generation Irish, raised 5 kids (with great success) in a NYC tenement, using bureau drawers as cribs. The Dyl said to me the other day:

"I lived in tenements for eight years. No elevators: two to three-story walk-ups, no a/c, shared bathrooms down the hall, unreliable heat, no cable, no phone, no wireless, with one tiny room with a dirty window and an old single bed with one thin, lumpy mattress. For the first four years, my parents paid around $30,000 per year for the privilege, and for the second four years, closer to $40,000."

Here's Jane Jacobs:

Painting of a brig off Heligoland by F T Albinus, for sale here.

It's a big travel weekend. In Yankeeland, you might very well find yourself driving through the Merritt Parkway's Hero's Tunnel under West Rock ridge in New Haven.

Amusingly, the Merritt, the earliest American parkway, had these criteria in its design:

To ease objections from county residents who feared an influx of New Yorkers on their roads, in their towns, on their beaches and through their forests, highway planners called on engineers, landscape architects and architects to create a safe and aesthetically pleasing limited access highway - one with exit and entrance ramps, but no intersections - that would not spoil the countryside.

With the lighting, the Hero's Tunnel looks like the gates of hell - but it really just takes you to Hamden:

Bogus or not, I like these ideas for guys to avoid accompanying their spouses on shopping trips. (It's like the age-old trick of breaking the vacuum cleaner every time one is asked to use it). This is from Mostly Safe for Work:

At Am Digest, Bungee dating in NYC. The guy is right. He is an idiot. A gentleman never, never takes a nice girl on a date to a Korean whorehouse.

I like to explore and learn a bit about the places I go to.

Birmingham, Alabama is a rather new city, by Eastern standards. Even the "old" stuff there isn't very old. There wasn't much of anything there until after the Civil War. Railroads (it has no navigable river), coal and iron ore were the key to that city's wealth, hence the borrowing of the name from the Brits. Amost all of that is now gone.

A new city in the New South.

With a metropolitan population of around 1 million, it's a good-sized city, but the city proper lacks downtown residences. It's a biz center now (most recently a banking center) - not a hopping urban scene. The Univ of Alabama Medical Center also is growing like crazy.

Still, there is no visible urban scene: life happens in the leafy, lovely, quiet suburbs. 

On a weekend, there is not a soul to be seen on the streets yet it looks clean, prosperous, and safe. No "mixed use" as you find in NYC. A Jane Jacobs case study, because I have seen photos of the downtown in the 1920s which were packed with people on weekends and holidays, with the streets lined with storefronts. 

In recent decades, the suburbs which had been part of the city spun themselves off so as to be independent of the constantly-alleged and often court-confirmed corruption of the Dem machine which runs it, and which seems determined to drive people out of town.

One cool thing about cities this size: you can get from Mountain Brook, Homewood, or downtown, to the airport in about 15 minutes. Everything seems easy to do. It's manageable and friendly. For the comfortable, golf seems to be king in Birmingham. Too darn hot for tennis, if you ask me.

Beautiful: the tee of the 4th (or 14th?) hole at Shoal Creek:

A free ad for the nifty mag Garden and Gun, with another golf course in the background:

Every city carries its burden of woeful history. The 16th St. Baptist Church, where the Civil Rights movement tragically obtained energy when some KKK killed four choir girls in church in 1963. The reputation of the fine people of the city was smeared for a generation by the behavior of a handful of murderous scumbags.

More below on continuation page -

Thanks, y'all, for putting us up in these fine lodgings in Birmingham (photos below), for the fine very Southern-style party (with excellent grits 'n shrimp), and for showing us around.

Can any reader name this good old club?

 View from our balcony:

More reminiscences from our friend, during his time in the Indian Health Service. He is probably referring to the Prairie Rattler:

From afar, it might have sounded like "Thunk, thunk, thunk, thunk"; at the base of my skull, it was more like "K'thunk, K'Thunk, K'thunk, K'Thunk."  What I didn't know was what how it sounded to a rattlesnake in the dusk of the Dakota scrubland.  My second day's doctoring done on Eagle Butte, the heat dissipating quickly at sunset, I hit the asphalt's edges to jog. 

In Chicago, I had snagged a pair of Nikes, the early waffle-sole design, discovered by Bill Bowerman when he poured urethane onto his wife's waffle iron. Then, Bowerman and Knight's company was still called Blue Ribbon Sports; word was that their victory shoe would protect knees and add speed. I came up in an era when leather was treasured for feet; once yearly, before Pesach, we visited the leather shoe store, where we played with this tall contraption, like a scale, into which you could insert your feet and see your skeleton; a time more innocent, before parents knew to protect their children from Xray exposure.  Good money, hard-saved dough, was spent on a pair of Oxfords. High-tops of flimsy cloth and thin sole were for basketball and any other weekend activity.  It was an era before I knew the difference between an Oxford and a Brogue, between open- and closed-lacing, nor would have cared; a time when I most admired my pediatrician's penny-loafers, shining coppers adorned.  Loafers I desired, but parents believed that laces protected growing feet.  Now, I had laid out precious bucks on some rapidly evolved descendant of polyester to protect my feet and knees.

Minimally dressed -- white T, running shorts (the days before wick-a-ways)  and my Nikes -- I ran with traffic, not yet knowing the treacherous combination of Sioux and cowboy drivers in pick-ups.  But, it was the K'Thunking in my head, the tatooing of my feet in the desert eve that should have hinted to me why the Indians came out to look, some pointing, some waving  -- not quite a greeting, not a hello, a different sort of wave; a mother stepped onto her veranda holding her child, pointing;  words were shouted, muddled in the evening breezes so I understood them not; I thought it was a welcome to the new doc.

Nurse Alpern greeted me in the lot between hospital and my apartment building.  Rattlers are out. Like this M.D., Crotalus Horridus also leave their rocks in the eve, but looking for meals. Rattlers also hear K'Thunking or Thunking, or some rattled version of this to find their meal: they too are served, who simply listen and wait.  Mrs. Alpern, the ever practical:  Don't do this again; can't afford to lose docs.  The Indians who came out to see the doc in shorts and Tee?  They thought I was dumb; wondered how far I would get.

It was a few weeks later that I saw my first snake bite. 

This is long, wonderful, nerdy, and informative. h/t, Language Log:

Via BSBFB's It's all downhill from here

I spent my young youth on Cape Cod, while my Dad was stationed at Camp Edwards. (1st. Lieut., US Army. Drafted out of Harvard College and never went back but, along with his fellow draftees, he was granted alumnus status and afterwards went on to grad school at the great University of Chicago, then, after a stint at the also great University of Rochester, to Yale to teach in a scientific field.)

Readers know that the salty air, the fog and the foghorns, the frigid water, the mud flats, and the clam broth seeped deep into my soul and, despite all of the development and the ticky-tacky that happened up there in the past 30 years, it's still my soul's home base. I can put up with some ticky-tacky, if it's American.

Sipp on Cape Cod (he still lives near there). Here's one of my recent Wellfleet photos. Always buy the Toro (Bluefin Tuna fatty belly meat, and grill flaming hot 3 minutes per side). As you can see in the photo, they cannot spell their own name; that's a Striper eating a lobster (as they love to do); and Cape Cod is not for the fancy set, the Country Club set, the Hamptons set, or even the Nantucket set (or, when it is, they would never let it show: that is the Yankee rules):

The Jewish-born Roman Catholic convert Czech composer Viktor Ullmann's Der Kaiser Von Atlantis was his last composition in the Terezin concentration camp outside Prague before he was shipped to Auschwitz in 1944 and gassed on arrival.

One of the remarkable stories of the era is about all of the music in the camps, and Terezin had more than its share of talent. The Nazis and even the SS loved music and thus encouraged camp musicianship. Mrs. BD recently heard a Terezin survivor speak about being in the choir there at age 11. (140,000 passed through Terezin: 20,000 were liberated at the end.)

In this short (50+ min.) modernist opera, the Emperor of Atlantis (a thinly-disguised Hitler-type) declares total war on the world. (As one would expect from a prison camp opera, the "Loudspeaker" has a major role and, instruments being limited, it's like a cabaret band.) Death goes on strike out of resentment at the competition from the Emperor, but love reappears on the battlefield and, in the end, Death is persuaded to resume his merciful task of erasing pain from the world when the emperor himself agrees to die.

Here's a snippet of the opera on YouTube, the Emperor's farewell aria: