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.
Some good explanations of some common cliches. How many of those explanations did you know? I saw some errors in there.
Friday, February 29. 2008
"Own a complete library of the most influential books of all time!"It's remarkable that things like this are produced today. Gutenberg would be pleased. Of course, there is Project Gutenberg too.
Pirate King: | | For some ridiculous reason, to which, however, I’ve no desire to be disloyal, | | Some person in authority, I don’t know who, very likely the Astronomer Royal, | | Has decided that, although for such a beastly month as February, | | | twenty-eight days as a rule are plenty, | | One year in every four his days shall be reckoned as nine and twenty. | | Through some singular coincidence – I shouldn’t be surprised if it were owing to the | | | agency of an ill-natured fairy – | | You are the victim of this clumsy arrangement, having been born in leap-year, | | | on the twenty-ninth of February; | | And so, by a simple arithmetical process, you’ll easily discover, | | That though you’ve lived twenty-one years, yet, if we go by birthdays, | | | you’re only five and a little bit over! |
That entire section of The Pirates of Penzance is here.
Thursday, February 28. 2008
Vote for your favorite English landscape (h/t, Theo). This is Dorset: 
Wednesday, February 27. 2008
Something for me to remember Bill Buckley with: the Contrapunctus 1 from Bach's The Art of the Fugue, with Glenn Gould.
From So What?, by Sippican: The stage is exactly three inches and a galaxy away from the dance floor. Dance? Please. Stumble around with a woman that ain't your wife, I think. I like the old dude that looks like Batman's butler or a fruity sort of baron or something that conducts or sways or whatever it is he's doing. He's possessed with it, same as me. He's usually possessed of plenty of cake, a desire to buy a man a drink, and an aversion to arithmetic, too. The waitresses adore that.
The curtain is dirty from wiping your hands on it. Me included. It's dirty like life is. Up high, it's dirty with cobwebs and dust and corruption because you can't reach up there. Down low it's dirty with the grubby hands of all of us trying to wipe off the sweat and grease of what you're doing.
I listen for the cornshucks of the brushes on the snare. He hits it, but I don't care about that. In between -- the faint circular sketching he does without thinking -- that's what I'm after. He's lathering the dry face of the song so I can shave it with the sharp edge of the brass. The bass rumbles like thunder in the distance.
I can taste metal and blood and booze in my mouth. Tastes like life.
 William F. Buckley Jr, who we have quoted often at Maggies (including, by strange coincidence, multiple times yesterday), died today at his home in Connecticut.
Over many years, the man has been an inspiration through his fiction-writing, his non-fiction, his sailing, his piano-playing, his passion for Bach, his passion for God, his love of life and of freedom and and of his fellow man. And his love for his remarkable wife Pat, who died last year. Yes, also for his cheerful political energy and pioneering efforts on behalf of Conservative views (he, seemingly single-handedly, made these views respectable), but these efforts were always lower on his list than devotion to God and living - and enjoying - life to the max. A superb human and a superb life. I am most grateful for the things this brainy, witty, refined and joyful Scotch-loving Connecticut Yankee added to my life, but what I will remember most vividly is his description, in one of his sailing books, of his successful effort to install a piano in the parlor of his sailboat. Many comments at Memeorandum.
Monday, February 25. 2008
 These folks make remarkable toys.
The roller coasters and ferris wheels are remarkable, but the main thing with k'nex is putting them together. It's a challenge, a 3-D puzzle, and that's the fun of it. Like Legos.
It ain't Baryshnikov - it is square-dancing tractors and a real Maggie's Farm sort of simple, county fair entertainment (h/t, Theo):
Game with hunting equipment, by Willem van Aelst, 1660 
Sunday, February 24. 2008
Another shot of Cannon Mtn. Ski Area, where cannonistas appreciate the lack of upscale amenities: 
and a shot of the Franconia Inn, not far from Cannon Mtn. and Rte. 93: 
Friday, February 22. 2008
 A friend laid a box of the Ashton coronas on me last week to try, and I burned a few today while bumbling around. Very mild but a tasty flavor.
They are Dominican with a Connecticut shade wrapper. Funny how often those CT-grown wrappers return, eventually, back to New England. Not expensive for the quality. An excellent everyday smoke.
Do you want Google to store your medical records? I don't. Now I fully recognize that nobody in their right mind would want to find out anything about me and my utterly normal life which is remarkable only for its relative contentment, but there are privacy principles here: it's nobody's business. A security and intel analyst decided to find out what he could about himself. The piece begins: In 2006, David Holtzman decided to do an experiment. Holtzman, a security consultant and former intelligence analyst, was working on a book about privacy, and he wanted to see how much he could find out about himself from sources available to any tenacious stalker. So he did background checks. He pulled his credit file. He looked at Amazon.com transactions and his credit-card and telephone bills. He got his DNA analyzed and kept a log of all the people he called and e-mailed, along with the Web sites he visited. When he put the information together, he was able to discover so much about himself—from detailed financial information to the fact that he was circumcised—that his publisher, concerned about his privacy, didn’t let him include it all in the book.
Read the whole thing at Popular Science.
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