Tuesday, May 19. 2009
From Stanley Fish's God Talk, Part 2, in the NYT, a quote:
Pking gets it right. “To torpedo faith is to destroy the roots of . . . any system of knowledge . . . I challenge anyone to construct an argument proving reason’s legitimacy without presupposing it . . . Faith is the base, completely unavoidable. Get used to it. It’s the human condition.” (All of us, not just believers, see through a glass darkly.) Religious thought may be vulnerable on any number of fronts, but it is not vulnerable to the criticism that in contrast to scientific or empirical thought, it rests on mere faith.
 There’s a new gang in town. They’re not trying to act tough. They don’t have to. They’ve already proven they are. They’re not trying to look tough. They look like your neighbors. They’re not teenagers. They have become worthy adults by passing difficult hurdles.
But, they do have colors. They’re red, white and blue.
The new gang is called the Warrior Legacy Foundation. The warriors are not just military veterans but anyone who reveres the contributions and sacrifices of veterans, and wants to see their commitment honored and passed on to coming generations, whether serving in the military or not.
The binding commitment is to the military code of conduct: “I will never forget that I am an American, fighting for freedom, responsible for my actions, and dedicated to the principles which made my country free.”
As one of the founders remarks, “Veterans make the community in which they live a better place.” That community ranges from their block to the world. Think for a moment about how your community would be lacking if not for veterans.
To me, what makes a warrior, in any walk of life, is the willingness to give 110%, more than they themselves thought they were capable of, donating comforts not for glory but for being the best and furthering the betterment of others. Those are the traits that distinguish a worthy life and neighbor and citizen.
The Warrior Legacy Foundation is not out to make claims for government benefits. It is focused on raising the profile of the warrior class as a guide to what we all need to be and raise our children to be. Go to the above link and sign up to be part of this important mission. Be a neighbor and not just a bystander.
Some more info here.
The words for the Mauldin toon are "...forever, Amen. Hit the dirt."
The man likes to sail:
You have nowhere to go, and nowhere to be, and after the second time you take them your sailing companions must lose the urge to talk about the process of sailing in an enthusiastic fashion and simply enjoy it, and the company. And with the sky arrayed overhead, and the sea below, you are content to examine the world dispassionately. And the beauty and simplicity of the clouds that drift, the terns that swoop, the wavelets that tap their gentle knuckles on the windward side, the feeling of motion snatched without struggle from the endless breezes that massage your cheek and sail alike allow you to enjoy the world and all its wonders, and everybody in it, if just for a moment.
Monday, May 18. 2009
A nice email from a friend who came from Russia with his family to work in the US:
Special thanks for the introduction of the Maggie’s Farm. I don’t go to bed unless I read something there. I hope that you are going to survive the Bolsheviks intervention in this country.
Saturday, May 16. 2009
Negro Barber Shop, 1936, Atlanta, GA. Walker Evans. (h/t Dr X, who likes the kind of photos I like.) In 60 years, a photo of your barber shop will be just as interesting.
Friday, May 15. 2009
Here's how (h/t, Rug Rag):
Thursday, May 14. 2009
I hate studies of happiness because 1) I think happiness is fleeting 2) Everybody's happiness is different 3) I think good cheer and happiness come from within and from a clean conscience - not from without and, 4) I don't think life is or should be all about happiness anyway: I think it is meant to be made of sterner stuff than that...but that's me.
Therefore, I believe that "the good life" is not a one-size-fits-all shoe. For some, it's about being half in the bag on a mountaintop. For some, it's struggling with impossible math problems; for some, it's exerting minimal effort. For some, it's about having good relationships, but many folks don't give a darn about that. "Happiness" is a useless concept and, to me, a "good life" means nothing more than an honorable, responsible Christian life, with minimal jail time, and some golf and tennis and a good man in it but, again, that's just me.
Joshua Shenk has a piece in The Atlantic on the now-72 year-old Harvard longitudinal study. He begins:
Last fall, I spent about a month in the file room of the Harvard Study of Adult Development, hoping to learn the secrets of the good life. The project is one of the longest-running—and probably the most exhaustive—longitudinal studies of mental and physical well-being in history. Begun in 1937 as a study of healthy, well-adjusted Harvard sophomores (all male), it has followed its subjects for more than 70 years.
Read Shenk's piece, and tell me what you think. David Brooks wrote a commentary on the Shenks piece, in which he says:
The study had produced a stream of suggestive correlations. The men were able to cope with problems better as they aged. The ones who suffered from depression by 50 were much more likely to die by 63. The men with close relationships with their siblings were much healthier in old age than those without them.
But it's the baffling variety of their lives that strikes one the most. It is as if we all contain a multitude of characters and patterns of behavior, and these characters and patterns are bidden by cues we don't even hear. They take center stage in consciousness and decision-making in ways we can't even fathom. The man who is careful and meticulous in one stage of life is unrecognizable in another context.
Shenk's treatment is superb because he weaves in the life of George Vaillant, the man who for 42 years has overseen this work. Vaillant's overall conclusion is familiar and profound. Relationships are the key to happiness. "Happiness is love. Full Stop," he says in a video.
In his professional life, he has lived out that creed. He has been an admired and beloved colleague and mentor. But the story is more problematic at home. When he was 10, his father, an apparently happy and accomplished man, went out by the pool of their Main Line home and shot himself. His mother shrouded the episode. They never attended a memorial service nor saw the house again.
He has been through three marriages and returned to his second wife. His children tell Shenk of a "civil war" at home and describe long periods when they wouldn't speak to him. His oldest friend says he has a problem with intimacy.
Even when we know something, it is hard to make it so. Reading this essay, I had the same sense I had while reading Christopher Buckley's description of his parents in the New York Times Magazine not long ago. There is a complexity to human affairs before which science and analysis simply stands mute.
Ed: Related, see some of our previous posts on the topic:
Are we happy yet?
The Aristocracy of the Human Spirit: Freedom vs Happiness
Money and Happiness
Huxley's Brave New World at 75
Do Americans expect too much of marriage?
Happiness for Sale! No brain, no pain.
Grumpy. Are Americans hard to please, or do we just love to bitch?
NEVER get out of your car or off your tractor without putting the parking brake on. Never, ever, no matter where you are.
Make it a habit.
Somebody had to spruce up the ole driveway. Gwynnie put a much improved head on my body, but I think it makes me look a bit transexual or metrosexual or mixed frozen vegetable or whatever - sort of like that Boston trolley guy/gal. Which I am not, to the best of my knowledge.
These machines are fun to drive, and it makes the gravel look great until somebody drives on it.
Wednesday, May 13. 2009
h/t, Theo
From Captain Capitalism: Why I got a vasectomy
Monday, May 11. 2009
One of us quoted Dylan recently, who said something like "You got to take your inspiration wherever you can get it."
And we recently posted the lines which begin "Sing, Goddess...." Thus acknowledging that the Goddess is the author, not the man. The man is the messenger.
It reminds me of what my pastor once said to me when I asked where the preaching came from: "I stand up there, and the Holy Spirit uses me. It just flows out. I have nothing to do with it."
The definition of "inspiration" is "the immediate effect of God or gods." How wonderful is it that the word doubles as the medical term for inhaling, and that "expiration" doubles for exhaling and for death?
Whitestone Bridge to LaGuardia, Manhattan in the distance:
Nice early morning Tennessee thunderstorm with cheerful tornadoes buzzing around:
Nashville skyline, 6 AM:
Biscuits and sausage gravy: one of the reasons to fly south for brekkie. Nectar of the Gods:
Wish we had this kind of delivery up here:
More Tennessee breakfast:
This is a smoking establishment. Smoke and drink and enjoy life and raise hell with live music in freedom from the nannies:
The Dylanologist has commented here that Nashville lost any hope of being a charming city when it bought into the urban renewal craze in the 60s and erased its history, replacing it with parking garages, car dealerships, strip malls, and other forms of true urban blight. When civil rights leaders in the 70s referred to urban renewal as "urban removal," they were correct: it eliminated residential neighborhoods from the downtowns (see Bridgeport, CT too and, by stark contrast, Savannah, GA and Manhattan - where gentrified old "slums" are some of the most desirable places to live in, eg Chelsea, aka Hell's Kitchen), leaving those renewed downtowns as dangerous ghost towns at night and forcing people into the suburbs and into their cars. (The replacement of streetcars with busses is a whole, interesting story in itself. Maybe the Dyl will take it on if he has some time.)
I think it's fun to find some of the few remaining reminders of how pleasant Nashville once was before genius government planners with their theories, bulldozers and wrecking balls got to work:
A close-up:
Sunday, May 10. 2009
I know that Mother's Day was invented by Hallmark to sell greeting cards but, now that it exists, the child or husband who neglects it is in deep trouble. My wife (and my own Mom too, self excepted - believe myself to be the Black Sheep) produced some fairly OK kiddies.
Here's the new garden path you always wanted, wifey. Looped around my prize peach tree. Perhaps I did lead you down the garden path, but if you don't want my peaches, baby, don't shake my tree.
Yes, left front is a Harry Lauder's Walking Stick. Cool plant. A dwarfed, sterile, and contorted Hazel or Filbert, which looks most interesting in winter when you can see its strange shape.
Reposted -
The Jonathan Fairbanks house in Dedham, MA. 1636. Those are the bones of the basic center-hall Colonial. The slope of that roof is great for either snow or rain.
Multiculturally-sensitive though he may be, Sippican Cottage is omitting pueblos and phony old houses in St. Augustine from his thorough research on the topic. He means real wood-framed houses.
It's easy to detect the core of the farmhouse, before all of the additions and extensions.
What a young nation we are.
Saturday, May 9. 2009
 Thinking about smells and tastes today (they are essentially the same thing). My big old barn/garage did it to me this morning, with the warm air filled with scent and memories.
For me, that warm stew of the scents of gasoline, oil, grease, hay in the hay-loft, grain, tools and machines, dust, tractors, sawdust, kerosene, piles of saved lumber, old paint cans, leather tack and the saddle soap for it, the sweetness of fresh horse manure - mixed with the smell of the new grass and clover and wildflowers springing up in the fields wafting around - is an emotional thread that runs all the way back to my earliest childhood in Connecticut.
What it reminded me of today was being a lad of 8 or 10 helping my Dad build a new mounting block for my Mom and for us kids to get up on the horses. My Mom had a couple of big hunters, and appreciated a help to get up on them. She was almost always either pregnant or getting over being pregnant, but she loved the Hunt. These mounting block things had steps and a platform, with a railing on one side. My Dad would only use a hand-saw, believing that bench saws and the like were for the pros. He had one, but never used it. He could cut a straight line.
I was instructed to paint it barn red to match the horse barn, and the railings and cross-pieces white.
They make them out of plastic nowadays, but this guy built a simple wooden one.
Photo is one of those nasty modern plastic mounting blocks. Looks like made by Fisher-Price. Advantage: you can move them around easily.
Friday, May 8. 2009
Another reminiscence from our shrink friend Nathan about his days in the Indian Health Service -
 A limp and a death among the Lakota Sioux marked my first day at Eagle Butte, devoid of eagles and buttes. Two days’ drive from Chicago, I am greeted from afar by John Running Horse, he dipping and rising like a Venetian gondolier, waving aloft what from afar seemed to be the plaster sculpture of a leg. Up close, it is.
Before I could stop completely, John Running Horse lay one hand on the open window of my red Fiat 128, bowed in head and cast, asked, “You the new doc?” I was. “Put this thing on again”; hands me the cast, then points to his gondoliering leg. I park and head in.
The Indian Health Service had told me that there were two docs; arrive Sunday.
But, by Sunday, Dr. K. had been flown out with her atrial flutter to be cardioverted eighty miles up the road to Mobridge; Dr. L. was riding shotgun with a mother in active labor also to Mobridge. No docs in Eagle Butte.
I wrapped a new cast on John Running Horse’s right leg and asked as I did so -- dipping plaster rolls in warm water, smoothing them first around, then smoothing downward along the fracture to make it seamless -- how his old cast got cut off. Itched, he said; cut it off himself, as he unsheathe his James Black/Musso pattern S-guard bowie knife. White plaster still dusted its curved Stainless steel back tip and brass quillion; hadn’t even wiped it clean.
I told John Running Horse that his skin would itch again after a few days; dried skin flakes. I found a metal coat hanger, bent it straight and showed him how he could insert it within the cast to scratch itches. He found this marvelous; made a special leather sheath for it to hang from his belt. Later, he returned; brought a water color gift; painted himself on his horse; he wearing Sioux gear. In his right hand, born aloft like some victorious banner is not a leg cast, but his Winchester Model 1894 lever-repeating rifle -- the gun that won the West, the weapon of choice for the Rifleman of TV.
Continue reading "A Limp and a Death"
You used to just plain peter out at 68 or 79 or 93 but, after 1951, the law changed and some Doc had to make up a cause to put on the death certificate. A proximate cause, plus additional lines to fill in for contributing causes/underlying causes of death. (Imagine what that change did to disease stats!) More many more little-known facts about death.
Old time Docs knew that people died when they got old and rickety or had a bum ticker or some nasty growths. You plumb wear out eventually, and it is just a matter of which internal doohickey crapped out first. It was considered sort-of natural, and not a medical issue.
And, when folks died, they either said "They died" or "They ascended to their Maker" or "Went to their eternal reward." They did not say "They passed" (what a strange expression - passed what? New Agey-sounding, isn't it? Took a pass on more life, or what? Passed into the Spirit World?) or "passed away," as the relentlessly euphemistic funeral home people used to say. Like they aren't dead: they just sort of floated away past the 7-11 and the Pontiac dealership and the Pizza Hut to somewhere else.
Maybe to the lovely Mall in the Sky.
Kingston Farm, Concord, MA (h/t, And Rightly So). One heck of a fine barn/garage deal.
Thursday, May 7. 2009
"I was the shadow of the waxwing slain
By the falls azure in the windowpane;
I was the smudge of ashen fluff -
and I lived on..."
 I read Nabokov's Pale Fire when it came out. I've read all of Nabokov, or almost all. None of his butterfly texts.
From Mary McCarthy's 1962 review:
Pale Fire is a Jack-in-the-box, a Faberge gem, a clockwork toy, a chess problem, an infernal machine, a trap to catch reviewers, a cat-and-mouse game, a do-it-yourself novel. It consists of a 999-line poem of four cantos in heroic couplets together with an editor's preface, notes, index, and proof-corrections. When the separate parts are assembled, according to the manufacturer's directions, and fitted together with the help of clues and cross-references, which must be hunted down as in a paper-chase, a novel on several levels is revealed, and these "levels" are not the customary "levels of meaning" of modernist criticism but planes in a fictive space, rather like those houses of memory in medieval mnemonic science, where words, facts, and numbers were stored till wanted in various rooms and attics, or like the Houses of astrology into which the heavens are divided.
Hear about the mechanic who was addicted to brake fluid?
Says he can stop any time he wants.
 It's part of wisdom to know the limits of one's knowledge (and the limits of one's wisdom, if that is possible).
When I post a photo of a rug I like, aka a floor mat, my taste and lack of expertise are invariably corrected by one or another rug pro who likes Maggie's. And rightly so. I am the kind of person who welcomes correction and education even as it injures my fragile self-esteem and self-worth.
But this time I am determined to show something to wow the experts: this highly-collectible museum quality semi-antique 3X5 Barbie rug.
Now that is a special rug. It's the Barbie 50th Anniversary Rug! The sensitive rendering of Barbie permits the depth of her wonderful personality to shine through. The vibrant, sensual pink is very special, as are the beautifully stylized background flowers.
Any person of discriminating taste would be proud to have this carpet in their parlor.
Wednesday, May 6. 2009
Ignoring acquittals in sentencing? We agree with Dr. X that this is wrong. Judges aren't gods.
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