Maggie's Farm

Nice weather equipment - WeatherPeddler

Slainte! - Check out Malts.com.

Wonderful. You can read Smithsonian Magazine online

Cabela's sells floor mats for most cars and trucks.

Travel -See America.org

Cost-effective travel - Club ABC

Vacation Home Rentals by Owner - VRBO. For example, this nice weekly rental on Nantucket:

or this one in Bellaggio on Lake Como:

And, of course, there are always good pin-ups at Theo

Readers know that I have a special attachment to Wellfleet on Cape Cod. I was a little kid in Hyannis when it was a sleepy village without malls, car dealerships, and retirement complexes, but my family soon fled up to Wellfleet for the summers.

By no means do we wish to encourage anyone to buy there, but most of the town is Cape Cod National Seashore so construction opportunities are limited. And the water, especially on the ocean side, is too darn cold for almost anybody except native New Englanders and kids.

Besides, as the old joke goes: "Cape Cod Real Estate - going fast." That's because Cape Cod erodes at the average rate of about 3'/year on the ocean side. Thoreau was impressed by that fact. Over the years, we have seen many nice oceanfront cottages disappear over the winter.

Wellfleet is not a fancy town (it's a glitz-free zone) and its waters produce the best oysters in the world. Wiki tells us: "Wellfleet was encountered by Europeans as early as 1606, when the French explorer Samuel de Champlain explored and named it "Port Aux Huitres" (Oyster Port) for the bountiful oyster population resident to the area."

I thought our readers might be amused by this piece of Wellfleet real estate, for sale now.

They are asking $1.8 million for that waterfront villa. It's probably the location on the harbor shore, not the structure - if you can call it that a structure.

For something with a little more charm, but no waterfront, this is my idea of a real Cape Cod house:

They are asking $3.625 million for this place. If you do the math, though (lot size 435600 at rule-of-thumb 44,000 sq ft/acre, that's a ten acre place. A solid foothold on the Cape. Worth every darn penny).

This is a summer weekend re-post from our dusty archives:

"Progress," like environmentalism, is a secular religion.

I have always been suspicious of the concept of progress. For Chambers of Commerces, it has always seemed to mean more asphalt. For Leftists it has meant movement towards international socialism. In the world of morals, it has seemed to mean less morality and self-discipline. In art and design, it often seems vain and meaningless. In the world of religion, it has seemed to mean watering it down. In the Sciences though - medicine, technology, etc - advances have of course added much to quality and ease of life - but nothing to the meaning and purpose of our lives unless we are scientists.

Wilfred McClay in Touchstone points out how the word has shaped our experience. Our words shape the way we think about things, sometimes in insidious ways and without our awareness, even as we use them: sometimes our words lead our thoughts instead of vice-versa.

History has become for our secular age what “fate” was for the Greco-Roman ancients, and what “providence” was (and remains) for many Christians. This is the sense of History that Hegel and Marx promoted, and the sense that Supreme Court justice Anthony Kennedy recently appealed to in justifying an opinion by “evolving standards of decency.” It is the sense that moral innovators are appealing to in promoting homosexual and polyamorous “marriage,” artificial wombs, bioengineered enhancements, and all the other delights of “posthumanity.”

The postmodernists who claim that we are beyond the sway of such metanarratives as History are speaking utter rubbish. (As usual.) “Progress” is the one article of faith that remains strong among us, the one torch in modernism’s darkening hall that still burns bright. To oppose it, even in the slightest, is to render oneself an “enemy of the future.”

Which is why the possibility that such innovations might ultimately fail is, literally, inconceivable to so many true believers, as inconceivable to them as a sudden revocation of the laws of physics. You see, there are certain prevailing winds in this thing called History, and the Path of True Virtue can only be found in discerning those winds, and aligning one’s skiff with them. Or so the partisans of conventional wisdom would have it. And their confidence is oddly mirrored in the dejection of the orthodox, who feel themselves on the losing side of History.

Yet both are wrong.

You can read the whole brief piece. It's a Christian view of time and of history.

Update: AVI did a piece about cultural views of time last week.

Johnny Otis, Willie and the Hand Jive (with Lionel Hampton)

Hand Art, from here:

More hand art photos on continuation page below -

Westport, Massachusetts is a lovely summertime seaside town on Buzzard's Bay. Lots of Boston people summer there. It has a Cape Coddy feel to it. Plenty of marshes and beaches, and a nice harbor (pictured above).

This cute little Victorian farmouse on two acres is for sale. It has a boathouse and a cottage. Asking only $995,000. It looks cozy and perfect, to me. Home. (No, we are not in the real estate biz and no, we don't get a finder's fee!):

That's the name of a blog. Interesting stuff. (h/t, No Pasaran). Here's their thoughtful essay on The Green Mark-up: Who pays for environmentally-friendly design? That blog does not post frequently enough.

There is no doubt that, these days, "Green" is really all about the green.

Speaking of architecture, Sipp has a couple of posts on buildings in Providence, RI - and Maggie's Real Estate has a nice place in Westport, MA in the pipeline.

Aphrodite, a 77' "commuter yacht," was built in 1937 for Wall Streeter (and later Ambassador to Britain) Jock Whitney.

Aphrodite has been restored. Here's the story, from the Brooklin (Maine) Boat Yard.

Our blogmeister and noted water rat Chris recently took some photos of Aphrodite, on continuation page below.

Getting there is half the fun. We decided to go to see the famous 20th century botanical gardens of Villa Taranto the hard way, hiking overland and up over the hill on the peninsula from the Pallanza ferry dock. As it turned out, our map wasn't as clear as it could have been, and it took us about two hours but, in the process, we stumbled onto some neat stuff. Thus there is a strong case to be made for leaving the beaten path when travelling, and letting yourself get a bit lost. Maybe that applies to life in general.

For example, we found this 1000 year-old church on a dead-end, on top of the hill overlooking Pallanza. I wrote the name down, but cannot find that scrap of paper.

 More photos of this hike on continuation page:

On Friday morning, the Fourth of July, we hustled the baby of the Bird Dog litter, age 16, down to JFK for her flight to Heathrow. This young world traveller is going on her third solo European trip, this time to study in an advanced Shakearean acting course at Oxford. Acting in, and digging into the classics is her passion.

She's a lucky gal to be blessed with a passion like that.

Her video auditions for the program impressed even me - as did her admission essays. There are those moments when you look wonderingly at a kid of yours and you think "How the heck did I produce that?!?!" Of course, you didn't. God did it. I have had many such head-scratching moments with my kids.

As typically happens in the four days before such trips, we had to deal with a suddenly-made-aware-of lost passport (it evaporated during the recent driver's license ID process) - and then with her emergency root canal on Thursday morning. Terrifying visions of Brit dentistry!

Her first and almost immediate email after her arrival at Balliol College was to inform us that she had neglected to bring her precious, required, and essential Riverside Shakespeare with her. It was the only item she absolutely had to have. She needed it immediately. Actor-types are like that...

I considered driving to the shore and trying to toss it across the pond to her, but that Riverside Shakespeare is a weighty tome.

So she will have to solve that emergency herself.

From Dubai, the fastest-growing city in the world. Some of this architecture is not for me: I do not like heights, or buildings that move:

Our Barrister must have a prosperous pal because the lines of that boat in his photo are pure Hinckley. (It's a good post, too.) In the Northeast, on salt water, few small power boats are more admired than the modestly-named and understatedly-designed Hinckley Picnic Boat. These peppy, preppy boats have a jet water drive, can be maneuvered with an un-nautical joystick instead of a wheel, draw only 18" because there is no prop, can get up to 29 knots and cruise at 25, can turn on a dime, and can stop in two boat lengths by reversing the jets. There is plenty of power and hi-tech engineering in that streamlined lobster boat:

Here's the Popular Mechanics piece on the Picnic Boat. Here's a used one, for sale. 

Wonderful toys. I admire them, but don't really want one because I wouldn't find the time to use it her enough to justify the substantial price tag. If you want something a bit larger but with the same jet drive, there's the stunning Hinckley 44' Talaria, reviewed here:

That photo I took ain't too bad. It does capture the feel of this charming place. On June 20th we rented a little two-door Lancia and drove west over the mountains from Lake Maggiore to the smaller Lake Orta, mainly to visit the antique and highly photogenic village of San Giulio (Saint Julius, in English), and to take a water taxi out to look at Isola San Giulio with its ancient church and active Benedictine monastery. (We will post separately on the church, because its artwork is so interesting. And the saint himself lies in there, under glass, visible in gilded splendor. I would not take a photo of that.)

Most of the streets of San Giulio are too narrow for cars, and they don't allow cars in anyway (except for deliveries). However, there is actually a parking garage up the hill for visitors.

The village has at least a handful of medieval buildings - the only definitely medieval buildings we saw on our trip (other than churches and towers). Major urban renewal took place in Europe during the 15th to 17th centuries.

This village also has the best trattorias we encountered.

We saw one guy taking modeling photos. She was an edgy-looking girl, from the front:

 More photos of this side trip on continuation page below:

More errors on continuation page below -

Dunes near Cahoon's Hollow beach on the ocean side of Wellfleet, MA (Cape Cod). I hope to get there in August, but those dunes and marshes are calling me right now.

Well, largely irrelevant I think, but not completely.

For one thing, relatively few people read blogs. Even the "big" blogs we read, like Michelle and Insty and Powerline, are miniscule in the larger scheme of things. But every once in a while a blog will have a major impact on events, on the news - or on just one random reader who gets a new thought or a new perspective.

However, blogs with any strong political bent are usually preaching to the choir. We are fortunate in being eclectic and pleasant and useful enough that people of all stripes seem to read us, and we attempt to be friendly enough so as not to drive people away just because we think Barry Goldwater was a political prophet.

We are not a political blog. We obviously do discuss politics with a strong point of view: Freedom First. An individual freedom bequeathed by God, with justice and mercy, is the bottom line of our politics and our world view. There is no reason for the USA to exist otherwise. If anybody has a stronger foundation, let us know. We'll listen.

Reader Buddy once said something like "Consider Maggie's to be just one more small brick in the wall of Western Civilization." Very small, but a brick. I like that very much, and I try to bear his comment in mind as a source of inspiration.

A Happy 4th to all of our freedom-loving readers. We will keep stuff coming over this weekend. Maybe we'll do some fun re-posts from our archives, along with a little oddball new stuff.

Avon, CT (pop. 17,000) in the Farmington River Valley (up towards The Barrister's neck of the woods), was a quaint, semi-rural semi-distant Hartford suburb until the highways came and the prosperous moved further from downtown Hartford. 

Avon's schools rank #1 in CT, largely because of its homogeneous middle-upper and upper-middle class population (a town's school "performance" correlates exactly with parental education and income, rendering school comparisons meaningless). Wiki notes that Avon was listed as one of the preppiest places in the United States in the 1980s best-seller The Official Preppy Handbook. A guy can still wear plaid pants or Nantucket Red in Avon without getting stared at, or shot.

With growing prosperity and suburban sprawl, towns like Avon have lost their cornfields and woodlands and chicken farms and dairy pastures. At the risk of sounding like an obnoxious snob, those cornfields have been replaced by graceless architectural abominations - with no relationship or sensitivity to place, proportion, local history, or taste - like these below (many more here and here), currently priced in the $800,000-4,000,000 range, and usually on about 1-acre lots:

In my post on The Centovalli Train, I asked "Where are all the people?" Many of these towns in Italy look neat, clean - but deserted, which adds to the stage-set feeling.

Maybe it's the time of day, but part of the answer is No babies in Euroland.

The Wild Swan is a 39' Sparkman & Stephens-designed sloop, built in 1947. Mahogany over white oak. She is for sale, here.

This is a perfect example of why boats are called "she."