Friday, April 4. 2008
With photos, here. For one example: 
Thursday, April 3. 2008
Our morning links today reported the growing ogling crisis in the UK. Men are pigs: the government must do something. We hope this sign will contribute something useful to the discussion of the crisis, if not offer a simple solution. Why ogle, after all, if you can just stare? 
We like the healthy, wholesome NSFW barmaid on the continuation page.
Continue reading "Re the pub ogling crisis in the UK"
Sargent's The Daughters of Edward Darley Boit (1882). MFA, Boston. 
Wednesday, April 2. 2008
The remarkable Sylvie Guillem with Laurent Hillaire in a short excerpt from Forsythe's In the Middle Somewhat Elevated:
 Sheffield, MA, in the southern Berkshires, is one of the loveliest villages in New England. It has well-kept horse farms, a few dairy farms, a bunch of quaint bed-and-breakfasts, wooded hills, a 250 year-old Congregational Church, and a population of around 3000.
It isn't too far from Maggie's Farm, and it isn't too far from where Alice's Restaurant used to be (in Stockbridge). The only problem with this fine 1880 carriage barn-home is that it comes with only 6 acres. I would need ten or twenty times that to do what I want to do. The only other downside is all of the Subarus with Obama stickers in the area. (Asking price $740,000). The workshop and office space on the ground level are an appealing feature. (No, we are not in the real estate business: we just like a break from politics.)
Monday, March 31. 2008
 Tis Issat is the Smoke of the Nile - the falls of the Blue Nile in Ethiopia (map). The Blue Nile, arising in Lake Tana, provides most of the water to the Nile proper.
Here's a better photo of the falls. You can learn a lot about 19th C. Ethiopia (Abyssinia) in Flashman on the March (he survives a tumble down the falls - and then a tumble with an obese Queen). The subject comes up today because, after church yesterday, friends were discussing their upcoming mission trip to Ethiopia and I regret that I cannot join their group. On the other hand, maybe Ethiopia ought to be sending some missions to the USA and Europe. The Ethiopian Orthodox Church (previously the Coptic Orthodox Church) has been around since about 300, and has taken its own path. Note the outfits of the Deacons. I would love to see that country.
This is the 28' Alerion Express day sailer, at Cape Yachts. Nice boat. 
Sunday, March 30. 2008
 The NYT did a piece on So You Want to be a Blogging Star?
I guess we would welcome fame and fortune, as long as we could maintain our anonymity. What we would prefer would be to deserve it. But, as Bird Dog often says, we are an "elite boutique blog for the cognoscenti - not mass market." I know he puts it in those transparently flattering terms to feed our vanity and to keep us working without pay, but I know we have some modest impact and some utility for those who have found us. Anyway, Glenn Reynolds is quoted in the piece: Fit blogging into the holes in your schedule. “Deal with the rest of your life first,” advises Glenn Reynolds, a law professor at the University of Tennessee who posts constantly throughout the day on his site, Instapundit.com. The volume and regularity has helped make his political opinion site one of the most popular on the Internet. “The blog is best handled by inserting it into the small bits of free time that rest among the bigger chunks of your work.” Mr. Reynolds slips in posts between classes, as a break from writing law review articles and during slow time at home.
We do that too, Glenn. But what is "slow time at home"? Oh, I get it: the wife has a blog too (our blog-friend Dr. Helen). Photo is the Farmington River, in CT, in autumn.
Here's Charlie Munger: ...almost everyone thinks he fully recognizes how important incentives and disincentives are in changing cognition and behavior. But this is not often so. For instance, I think I've been in the top five percent of my age cohort almost all my adult life in understanding the power of incentives, and yet I've always underestimated that power. Never a year passes but I get some surprise that pushes a little further my appreciation of incentive superpower. ...We [should] heed the general lesson implicit in the injunction of Ben Franklin in Poor Richard's Almanack: "If you would persuade, appeal to interest and not to reason." This maxim is a wise guide to a great and simple precaution in life: Never, ever, think about something else when you should be thinking about the power of incentives...
Read all about it at Marginal Rev.
I guess I am a bit of a Gilbert Munger (1830-1904) fan, although I cannot say that he had an entirely coherent body of work - but who does? Others of the Hudson River School achieved much more prominence, and one of Munger's claims to fame was spending a day sketching with Bierstadt, the master of the School. But Connecticut-born Munger did get around a bit, from Yosemite to Venice, his work evolved, and did not have the over-dramatic Victorian quality that Bierstat is sometimes accused of. But man, would I like to have a Munger over my office fireplace. The image is is Cazenovia Cornfield, but look at his pictures on the link - good stuff. This is his Lake Marian, Humboldt Range, Nevada, 1871: 
Saturday, March 29. 2008
 It says 1997, not 1998, on these fine cigars our friend Nathan sent me. Many interesting tart, sweet, funky, sexual, and multi-layered aged flavors in them. I like the 43 ring size, but my humidor is a bit too high on the humidity right now - I think. Stepped on the meter like a complete klutz and broke it a while ago, and I think it is like the Everglades in there right now, judging from the draw.
I did spill some water in there, too - don't ask. I think I will leave the thing open for a few hours to dry out a bit, and order another crappy $5 hygromificateristicalmeter. Got some fine tobaccy in there: I want it in perfect condition when Nathan visits from Jerusalem next month.
Jim Kweskin's Jug Band with Geoff Muldaur, 1963. Good stuff, but unfortunately without a video:
From The Art of Literature and the Science of Literature by Brian Boyd in The American Scholar (an excellent magazine, BTW). A quote: For the last few decades, indeed, scholars have been reluctant to deal with literature as an art—with the imaginative accomplishment of a work or the imaginative feast of responding to it—as if to do so meant privileging elite capacities and pandering to indulgent inclinations. Many critics have sought to keep literary criticism well away from the literary and instead to arraign literature as largely a product of social oppression, complicit in it or at best offering a resistance already contained.
Literary academics have also been reluctant to deal with science, except to fantasize that they have engulfed and disarmed it by reducing it to “just another narrative,” or to dismiss it with a knowing sneer as presupposing a risibly naďve epistemological realism. They have not only denied the pleasure of art and the power of science, but like others in the humanities and social sciences, they have also denied that human nature exists, insisting against the evidence that culture and convention make us infinitely malleable.
Read the whole thing.
Friday, March 28. 2008
 Canada's #1 Dating Site: Adult Moose Finder
Roger de H. advises: Make sure you plug in "man" seeking "interracial elk" from the drop down list. And check out the dropdown list for "Country"
The artist Samuel F. B. Morse (Phillips Academy and Yale) is better known as an inventor - and for Morse Code. This is his Niagara Falls from Table Rock (1813), owned by the MFA, Boston. 
Wednesday, March 26. 2008
Eleanor Powell and Fred Astaire, 1940. The film is a bit washed out, but it's worth it.
Tuesday, March 25. 2008
Looks like my bedside table: Take Your Choice, 1885, oil on canvas, John Wilmerding Collection
Sunday, March 23. 2008
 Oh man, do I love getting my investment advice in the comments section of Maggie's Farm. It's Bretton Woods crossed with the Algonquin Roundtable around here.
If you huddle around our investment topic entries, a virtual hobo campfire, burning hyperinflated banknotes, appears in the comments. Everybody's nervously fingering their Mauser triggers and wondering what will happen if they're the first guy to fall asleep with a pocket full of Spanish Main money in their raggedy (but thank god, not leveraged or made in China) clothing. It's great fun. There are, as they say in the garden, a few hardy perennials. Let's have it one more time, for old time's sake: -There's going to be a run on banks! They'll run out of currency and you'll have to settle for deposit slips and lollipops! Um yeah, sure. There's $150,000 on your average mall ATM. But we're all going to be at the window at Mr.Potter's bank trying to get our doubloons before our neighbor does. Then we'll bury it in the yard! It'll be grand. -Buy gold! Gold I say! Yeah sure; of course it lost ten percent of its value last week, but hey, it recently passed the value it had - in 1980. Fantastic investment, that. You would have done better to hoard Member's Only jackets since then and sold them at flea markets near colleges now. You are laboring under the illusion that you're hoarding a superior sort of money, and all you've done is gone from being an equities investor, or a plain saver, to a commodity futures investor. And with all your money in one material. Profoundly dumb -- unless you're Hillary Clinton posting on the Internet under an assumed name. And the Internet doesn't work that way. Everybody is really a guy pretending to be a hot seventeen year old girl. -I bought loose diamonds! This is my favorite. I remember this one fondly since the first time I heard it on a low-rent golf course in the eighties. A guy wearing hand-me-down clothes telling you he's got all his money in "investment grade diamonds" that he knows how to sell in all the international hot-spots he read about in CondeNast in the dentist's office once. "You know," he says sotto voce while shanking a putt, "for when the really heavy sh*t comes down." Let's do an experiment in "investment grade" diamonds, (snerk) shall we? Buy one. Walk right back into the same place you bought it and talk to another clerk. Offer to sell it to him. He'll offer you 30% below wholesale. You paid retail. Of course, if the world turns to the Road Warrior (snerk) every fat housewife has a diamond, superior in every way to yours, (the skinny wives with big boobs have ten) and holds it simply for sentimental reasons. So in a real pinch, everybody sells theirs and your diamonds are less than worthless. And of course, you're assuming that even with running gun battles in the streets over the last Twinkie in the world, the diamond merchants will still be open. Maybe not. At any rate, it won't be a total loss -- you could make metal cut-off saw blades with your diamonds if you've got enough glue, I guess, and go into plumbing, which is an honest profession. I tell you what: let's test our hypothesis. Go into the same diamond store with a $100 fiat currency bill (oh noes! the debbil's money!). Ask as a favor if they'd break it into small bills so you can get money for the meter. Now go back in and give them all the small bills back and ask for your hundred. I doubt they'll offer you $30. But the doomsayers are probably right. You will save a lot of money on your water bill if you drink your own urine to wash down the Kruggerands you're eating in your bunker. I think we can all agree on that. I'm going to break with a long tradition of never offering anybody any advice. Here's mine: Happy Easter everybody! Use your worthless fiat currency to buy a great big ham and a bottle of wine! Enjoy! And God bless you, every one!
 From The Art Revolution in Cuba, in the WSJ, which begins:
John Crago, an agricultural exporter from Colorado, took a business trip to Cuba last spring. He came back with 60 paintings, from island landscapes to abstract works, rolled up in his carry-on luggage. With art from Asia and Russia in demand, some in the art world are betting on Cuba to be the next hot corner of the market. Prices for Cuban art are climbing at galleries and auction houses, and major museums are adding to their Cuban collections. In May, Sotheby's broke the auction record for a Cuban work when it sold Mario Carreńo's modernist painting "Danza Afro-Cubana" for $2.6 million, triple its high estimate.
Photo of decaying Havana by Carlos Garaicoa, from the WSJ article Also interesting: The Curiosity Cabinet of Vik Muniz. He creates things with everything from Bosco to shovels. Much of his stuff defies definition.
Wednesday, March 19. 2008
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