Tuesday, August 12. 2008
Boeing's long-awaited, state of the art 787 Dreamliner has delay after delay. 
An obit from Sipp, who knows whereof he speaks (unlike most of us). His piece led me to this oldie (Isn't that Steve Cropper playing? And how did they book Booker T and the MGs for that aerobics class?) which is not by Hayes but was from Stax records:
Monday, August 11. 2008
Here. I want to see how the Bird Dogette, back from England, does on this.
 I found an old piece suggesting that Scrubex may become a thing of the past. An ancient naval tradition - and navies are (partly) about tradition.
Photo is a Scrubex on the USS Theodore Roosevelt in 2005. That is a good work-out.
Sunday, August 10. 2008
Newcomb Hollow beach in Wellfleet, last week. 
Saturday, August 9. 2008
I am no big fan of the Olympics and no big fan of China, but I did see some of the opening in a pub last night. This is drummers from the Boston Globe's collection of remarkable photos from the opening (h/t, Flopping): 
That could almost be a well-regulated warehouse. Asia never had that individualistic ethos that we value so highly and which fuels our pathetic self-importance. However, I thought this photo of musicians could be a pic of competitive blogging - or maybe unison blogging, like the Vast Right Wing Echo Chamber: 
Bringing power to the people. This is Corb Lund (h/t, Reader, who thinks this should be a 2008 theme song):
 A review of John McWhorter's book of the above title begins thus:
For the past forty years and more, a fraud has been perpetrated on the Western world. Since at least the appearance of the first issue of Rolling Stone in 1967, it has been a common assumption that popular music, particularly rock and roll, is about social change. The story has become an Ur-text for any child growing up in America -- or England or the rest of the world for that matter. It is a pop culture creation myth: In the beginning the world was void, without sound, thought or feeling, when Elvis Presley descended, Prometheus-like, to bring eroticism, fun and rebellion to the dull gray world. And as the Church Fathers followed Jesus, others came to carry the message of social revolution forward: the Beatles, Rolling Stones, the Who, even the Grateful Dead.
Read the whole thing.
Listen here pretty papa
Please get out of my sight
I'm calling it quits now
Right from this very night You know, you've had your day
Don't stand around
You've been a good old wagon
Daddy but you done broke down You'd better go down to the blacksmith shop
Get yourself an overhaul
There ain't nothin about you
Make a good woman bawl When you were in your prime
You used to love to run around
You been a good old wagon
Daddy but you done broke down When the sun is shining
That's the time to make hay
Now it's rainin all the time
And you can't make your old wagon pay Nobody wants a baby
When a real man can be found
You been a good old wagon
Daddy but you done broke down Ain't no use in cryin
Or to make a big show
This man has taught me more about lovin
Than you will ever know Well he is the king of lovin
Just minus of a crown
He's a good old wagon
Daddy and he ain't broke down Here's the late, great Dave Van Ronk reminiscing, and playing the song:
Friday, August 8. 2008
With all of our posts about our beloved Cape Cod recently, our readers deserve a decent map to see what we are talking about. You can see that Wellfleet has ocean, harbor, and bay beaches - and plenty of wonderful ponds too. All with entirely different characters. Pop quiz on the map later. The green is JFK's Cape Cod National Seashore. Best thing (and one of the few things) he ever did. What would this Wellfleet road look like this if he hadn't protected it from development? It's not "barren" - it's lovely. 
Thursday, August 7. 2008
 The Grand Army of the Republic Highway, U.S. 6, runs from Provincetown on the tip of Cape Cod to Long Beach, California.
Its history is interesting in the ways it was patched together. Bit of trivia: Route 6 was "the road" Jack Kerouac meant to take, but he got caught in a rainstorm on the Bear Mountain Bridge north of NYC, so made other plans. Photo is the Sagamore Bridge built in 1935 over the Cape Cod Canal on US 6.
Maine's Seaway Boats are designed as much as work boats as recreational hulls which means, for one thing, that they are seaworthy in foul weather and seriously bumpy seas. I think there is the soul of a Maine lobster boat inside each one of their handsome designs even though they say they can all get up on a plane. 
And, by way of contrast, here's Al Gore's new boat. Looks like a ferry, or a royal barge. Designed for sunbathing, eating and drinking, and definitely not Yankee-style: 
Wednesday, August 6. 2008
Three videos by James May. Well done, and an excellent topic.
Excellent mini-marts. If you need your morning caffeine fix, and you're in New England but there's no Dunkin' Donuts nearby, there's always Cumby's. Trouble is, they usually don't open 'til 6 and that is way too late for us early-risers. This is the Wellfleet, MA shop on Route 6, next to the liquor store. This one doesn't sell gas. The teen-aged gals who work there are from Bulgaria, while the American teens sleep until noon, when they decide where to surf or windsurf that day. 
Tuesday, August 5. 2008
The Opinion Journal's piece on Solzhenitsyn begins like this: "The hammer banged reveille on the rail outside camp HQ at five o'clock as always. Time to get up. The ragged noise was muffled by ice two fingers thick on the windows and soon died away. Too cold for the warder to go on hammering." Thus did Alexander Solzhenitsyn begin "One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich," his reveille for the world about totalitarianism. Published in 1962, in the brief post-Stalinist thaw under Khrushchev, the novel about a prisoner in a Soviet prison camp made Solzhenitsyn at first a Russian sensation and later the country's most famous dissident after the Kremlin reverted to brutal form.
And as quoted by Vanderleun, "When all of the rest of the civilized world, as well as the Marxist world, was tossing God into the dustbin of history, Solzhenitsyn realized that only God really matters. He chided the West for embracing materialism and forgetting God, a lesson that is just as true today as thirty years ago." -
Monday, August 4. 2008
The Voyage of Life, Childhood, 1842. National Gallery of Art, Washington. 
Sunday, August 3. 2008
By Herb London at TCS. It begins: In order to fulfill the requirements for a major in history at Northwestern University, my daughter took a course called "The Cold War At Home." As one might imagine in the hothouse of the college system, left wing views predominate. The students read Ellen Shrecker, not Ronald Radosh. Joseph McCarthy has been transmogrified into Adolf Hitler. And victimology stands as the overarching theme of the course. Communists in the United States are merely benign civil rights advocates and union supporters. The word espionage never once crossed the lips of the instructor. An extraordinary amount of time and energy has been devoted to the "lavender persecution" - harm imposed on gay Americans. Presumably, this group was more adversely affected by McCarthy's allegations than others. Despite the recent scholarship on the period such as Alan Weinstein's well researched book on Alger Hiss or Stanton Evans' biography of Senator McCarthy, views that do not fit the prevailing orthodoxy aren't entertained. Pounded into students is the view that America engaged in "totalitarian practices" not unlike the Soviet enemy we decried.
What is marriage? Some provocative thoughts at Chronicle, concluding: In the meantime, Dolan and the marriage scholars she ably represents and cites — such thinkers and inspired researchers as Nancy F. Cott, David Cressy, Alison D. Wall, and Stone — offer a further message to conservative opponents of same-sex marriage. If they truly understood the institution's history, they might fall to their knees and thank God that gay people want anything to do with such a conceptual mess.
Is it really a mess? It's been a sacrament for a long time.
Friday, August 1. 2008
Nope. It's a bathtub. Good grief. More here. 
I was taught that glass is technically a liquid. However, now it seems that there is no consensus on what it is.
They define them as those who seek to disrupt civil online discourse: The World of Web Trolling. Just one more dumb hobby.
Our Editor forwarded me this 1992 paper by Tooby and Cosmides, The Psychological Foundations of Culture, (here in pdf, without the typos), which he found at Overcoming Bias. I wish I had known about this paper years ago. It's a dense and scholarly critique of what is known as "The Standard Social Sciences Model." The authors argued that this dominant model is obsolete and failing, resulting in a reactionary anti-scientific movement in the social sciences. I found it particularly interesting that the authors suggest that the clinging to an obsolete model has more to do with emotion than logic - a "fear of falling off the world." Similarly, they indicate that social scientists are emotionally attached to their blank-slate, meliorative views of human nature (there is no "human nature" - environment is everything, and thus people, culture, and society can be perfected - by them, natch). Their desire to hold on to that illusion causes them to resist many sorts of new information which conflict with their ideas. That is very human, but it ain't science. Indeed, what goes on in the social sciences would make for a fascinating sociological study.
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