Thursday, March 13. 2008
 Rumor has it that the 200 year-old Silvermine Tavern, in the very pleasant Silvermine area of Norwalk, CT, is for sale.
I lunched there many times, as a lad. You can watch ducks in the old millpond from the window. The style is "country elegant." As I recall, gents must wear a jacket and tie for dinner in the dining room. They have won the prize for "Best Brunch in Fairfield County" for over 20 years. I'm sure they mean their Sunday after-church brunch. My family referred to such cozy old inns as "sticky-bun" restaurants, or as "stuff-and waddles" because one tended to stuff oneself and waddle out. I wonder if they still have sweetbreads on the menu. Yum. (No, we are not in the real estate biz. It is just amusing for us to see what's for sale, occasionally.)
Wednesday, March 12. 2008
Probably sold out already. Ewa, who we talked about earlier this week, will finally be back at the Met in October: "Why did it take so long? You'll have to ask them. I can understand if someone doesn't like my voice, my art, my interpretation, my way of singing, my behavior. I don't like Picasso, but that doesn't mean he is a bad painter." She shrugged off the importance of her Met return. "I am so busy — too busy. I've been onstage 30 years, really 50, since I played Madame Butterfly's baby when I was three years old."
via Tigerhawk. If you ask me, there's only one of those that has no accent at all.
Like raising one eyebrow, licking your elbow, and other important manuevers.
Tuesday, March 11. 2008
 Two bored casino dealers are waiting at the crap table. A very attractive blonde woman from South Carolina arrived and bet twenty thousand dollars on a single roll of the dice.
She said, 'I hope you don't mind, but I feel much luckier when I play topless.'
With that, she stripped to the waist; rolled the dice; and yelled, 'Come on, Southern Girl needs new clothes!'
As the dice bounced and came to a stop, she jumped up-and-down and squealed 'YES! YES! I WON! I WON!'
She hugged each of the dealers...and then picked up her winnings, and her clothes, and quickly departed.
The dealers stared at each other dumfounded. Finally, one of them asked, 'What did she roll?'
The other answered, 'I don't know... I thought you were watching.'
(Artwork courtesy of Theo)
Monday, March 10. 2008
I have been on an Ewa Podles kick lately. Unfortunately she was never a regular at the Met, for reasons of which I have only heard rumors (nothing to do with this contralto's voice). This is Una voce poco fa (Barber of Seville), 1998:
Sunday, March 9. 2008
The adagio from Piano Concerto No. 2 in 1929, with the Philadelphia Symphony Orchestra directed by Leopold Stokowski.
The photographs and diaries of Sophia Tolstoy have been published. Here's one of her photos of herself with her cheerful and fun-loving husband Leo (she would set up the shots and ask passing strangers to expose the image): 
Still Life with Crab Apples and Grapes, 1888, oil on canvas, John Wilmerding Collection 
Saturday, March 8. 2008
Over the past month or so we have seen Maria in various settings, from Greenwich Village basket houses to the present. Here's a snippet of Maria singing One Hour Mama from her 2007 album Naughty, Bawdy and Blue:
The democratization of fashion and high-end fancy stuff. Fascinating.
This piece by Major Shul came in over the transom: In April 1986, following an attack on American soldiers in a Berlin disco, President Reagan ordered the bombing of Muammar Qaddafi's terrorist camps in Libya. My duty was to fly over Libya and take photos recording the damage our F-111's had inflicted. Qaddafi had established a 'line of death,' a territorial marking across the Gulf of Sidra, swearing to shoot down any intruder that crossed the boundary. On the morning of April 15, I rocketed past the line at 2,125 mph. I was piloting the SR-71 spy plane, the world's fastest jet, accompanied by Maj Walter Watson, the aircraft's reconnaissance systems officer (RSO). We had crossed into Libya and were approaching our final turn over the bleak desert landscape when Walter informed me that he was receiving missile launch signals. I quickly increased our speed, calculating the time it would take for the weapons-most likely SA-2 and SA-4 surface-to-air missiles capable of Mach 5 - to reach our altitude. I estimated that we could beat the rocket-powered missiles to the turn and stayed our course, betting our lives on the plane's performance. 
After several agonizingly long seconds, we made the turn and blasted toward the Mediterranean. 'You might want to pull it back,' Walter suggested. It was then that I noticed I still had the throttles full forward. The plane was flying a mile every 1.6 seconds, well above our Mach 3.2 limit. It was the fastest we would ever fly. I pulled the throttles to idle just south of Sicily, but we still overran the refueling tanker awaiting us over Gibraltar. Scores of significant aircraft have been produced in the 100 years of flight, following the achievements of the Wright brothers, which we celebrate in December. Aircraft such as the Boeing 707, the F-86 Sabre Jet, and the P-51 Mustang are among the important machines that have flown our skies. But the SR-71, also known as the Blackbird, stands alone as a significant contributor to Cold War victory and as the fastest plane ever-and only 93 Air Force pilots ever steered the 'sled,' as we called our aircraft.
Continue reading "Major Brian Shul: "I loved that jet""
Friday, March 7. 2008
Wilco's Jeff Tweedy on his migraines, in the NYT Migraine blog, via Frontal Cortex. You can listen to Wilco here at Wilcoworld. The NYT gives me migraines, but Wilco doesn't.
Tuesday, March 4. 2008
 In San Francisco, of course. Ye oldest profession, is it not?
Is this is where the Libertarian rubber meets the moral, umm, road? Sometimes I wonder whether sexual intimacy has become the moral equivalent of defecation, in this pomo world. But maybe it always was: we are just apes, right?
h/t, Theo. Photoshop is fun. 
Monday, March 3. 2008
 Our friend Norm found this image of Bach. It's a good, solid face. I'd like to also see the image with a wig of the era.
Article here.
Reposted from 2005 Everything is so scary. You can drown in the bathtub, you can cut yourself with a chain saw, you can choke on a steak, you can spill hot coffee in your lap, you can slice your finger with a paring knife, you can get fat from eating bread, you can get hit by an SUV, you can get heart disease from french fries, you can get blinded by a tennis ball, you can get brain-death from watching TV, you can catch mono from kissing a girl, you can fall down the stairs, you can get hit by lightning playing golf, you can lose your sense of reality by studying astronomy, you can get Lyme disease from weeding the garden, you can get a rusty hook in your scalp while fishing, you can get skin cancer from going outdoors, you can get a papercut from copy-paper. Given how treacherous ordinary life is, it should be no wonder that all medical treatments, including medicines, have side-effects too. The recent pulling of Viox and Celebrex from the market puzzle me, because ordinary aspirin seems far more dangerous due to its frequent ability to cause gastric bleeding. Still, every MD I know takes an aspirin a day, not to combat paperwork headaches but to prevent heart attack. My point is not to specifically discuss medical care - I think almost everyone assumes that physicians know how to balance risk, and, nowadays, how to discuss these with patients. When people exercise judgement in life, they not only balance the risks and rewards of choices of action, they also balance the risks and rewards of action vs. inaction. Inaction always has its own cost - opportunity cost. Every fellow who ever contemplated asking a girl out knows what I mean. Or vice versa. My point is to talk about the expectation that life should be safe, and that someone (the gummint?) could or should magically protect us from that reality. That, I think, is part of the infantile impulse behind the wish for the Nanny State. Or the Mommy and Daddy State. This is not to promote a radical libertarian viewpoint. I like the Pure Food Act, and I am glad kids can't buy guns and dynamite. And I don't want to have to caveat emptor in everything I use or buy...but you kinda sorta have to anyway, don't you? Still, the endless seeking to be made safe from risk is a psychological state - a wish that reality be a certain way - and, as such, it is not amenable to correction by adjusting reality. It can only be corrected by growing up ...and by hamstringing the tort lawyers who have fed off, promoted, and exploited, these childish wishes that sometimes lurk even in the most mature people, including me.
Sunday, March 2. 2008
How's this band? Perlman, Barenboim, Du Pre, and Zuckerman with a bit of Schubert's Trout.
I did not realize that No Country for Old Men was a McCarthy book. At one point, I read everything he wrote, but I guess I lost track. Will read it before seeing the movie. JC Phillips' wife loved it. The book was reportedly edited down from 600 pages.
One more borrowed from Dr. Merc's collection: 
Brace's Rock, Eastern Point, Gloucester, MA, c. 1864. Oil on canvas. John Wilmerding Collection 
Saturday, March 1. 2008
A blast from the past: Minglewood Blues, at the 1988 Philadelphia Folk Festival.
Our Dylanologist is in Mexico, in Cabo this week for a well-deserved break from reality. Cabo used to be a funky place, but it's turning into Miami West. He contemplated a quick trip to Guadalajara to catch the Dylan performance, but the air fare from Cabo was prohibitive. He promised to pre-post his weekly Dylan entry, since internet is iffy in Mexico.
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