Maggie's Farm

Here are some good and bad ideas.

Of course, roses and nice diamonds are never wrong, but if the evil greedy bank is in process of repossessing your trailer or your houseboat, you should consider a Gift Subscription to Maggie's Farm Online Edition!

The price is right, and we offer year-long mental, spiritual, and physical stimulation rather than the ephemeral pleasure of a rose. And we are sexy, too.

The silly issue of whether the Indians had butter for their baked winter squash (and their corn on the cob) brought to mind one of the best scenes ever seen on the silver screen, from Mr. William Claude Fields, in the Yukon film parody The Fatal Glass of Beer:

More from that film here at YouTube

Dalrymple doesn't want to live in a world without Falstaffs, criminals, fatty foods, messiness, alcohol, smokers, and trailer trash - a too-sterile world of "rational tyranny" and perfect post-Puritan morality. I agree. One quote:

When I read the medical journals these days, I feel I am reading the medical equivalent of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. They speak only the best of good sense (one doesn’t argue with a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox). They tell us how we, or rather they, that is to say the general public, ought to live. Not too fat, a certain amount of exercise, no smoking, drinking in moderation of the right kind of wine taken purely as a medicine to ward of heart attacks and strokes, in short, every activity and comestible to be treated as a medicine to be taken in the correct dose.

It is not easy to argue against this rationalistic tyranny, just as it is not easy to answer a puritan without sounding as if you are positively in favour of sin, the more of it the better. No doubt properly conducted studies have shown precisely how much alcohol one should take to achieve the greatest possible longevity; or if they have not been conducted yet, they will be conducted in the very near future. Science will establish precisely how much butter one is allowed per week. Epidemiology will hunt down all the dangers lurking in our habits. From this, prohibitions and imperative duties will inevitably follow. It is only natural, after all, that doctors should advocate whatever saves and prolongs life.

Read the whole excellent thing.

Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf put this grimly humorous book together. My copy of the book is dated 1993, but it is more relevant today than it was back then as this self-parodying stuff has permeated the language - some as jokes, eg "vertically-challenged," and some seriously, eg "special child" and "partner."

I am sad to report that the book is out of print, but it still can be gotten via Amazon. Sample entries:

Vagrant.  Nonspecifically-destinationed individual; directionally-impoverished person.

Phallocentrism: The use, by white heterosexual males, of such discredited devices as reasoning and logic to maintain a position of sexual and political dominance.

First Baseperson.  The correct gender-inclusive term for first baseman, recommended by the Little League.

Prisoner. Client of the correctional system, guest in a correctional institution, incarcerated American.

Pro-abortion. Pro-choice.

Shoplifter. Nontraditional shopper.

Grammar. Defined by Lewis Lapham as "arbitrary rules of procedure subservient to a sexist political agenda."

Pet owner. The American Humane Society says the appropriate term is "human companion of a nonhuman companion."

Morally different. Dishonest, evil.

Jungle. Tropical Rainforest. The term "jungle" is ideologically unsuitable because of its use in such insensitive phrases as "It's a jungle out there."

Difficult-to-serve. Canadian educators' term for sociopathic. Example: "Professor McLaughlin was robbed at gunpoint by one of his difficult-to-serve students."

Smellism. Discrimination against, or stigmatization or oppression of a human or nonhuman being because his/her/its nondiscretionary body odor is deemed to be unpleasant.

Ableism.  The Smith College Office of Student Affairs defines this as "oppression of the differently abled by the temporarily able."

Every entry in the book has an academic citation.

Since it seems to be Mule Day at Maggie's, here's Dolly with Mule Skinner Blues. Merle after with the same song. (thanks, reader):

Howlin' Wolf in 1964, with one heck of a band:

New York City's swirling, tide- and current-tossed East River, which runs from New York Harbor to Long Island Sound (and is therefore not a river in the usual sense and more of a salt-water connection left over from the last Ice Age) separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens, and further east separates the Bronx from Queens.

It is spanned by eight bridges and has 13 tunnels, all but one of the tunnels (the Queens-Midtown Tunnel) for rail. A friend took this photo on Saturday, with the majestic Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground, the Manhattan Bridge behind, and the great city of Brooklyn itself on the right.

With 2.5 million people, Brooklyn would be one of the largest cities in the US had it not merged with NYC in 1898.

A Tom Brady Superbowl?

From Gagdad's Erotic Tales of Metaphysical Ignorance - one of his best posts. It begins thus:

Obviously Man is intelligent. That's the problem. In fact, almost all his troubles are caused by his intelligence, through which he believes so many amazing things that can't be so. More often than not, the greater the intelligence, the more catastrophic the error, which is why it has been remarked that philosophy is "error on a grandiose scale."

after a bit, he gets to the heart of the art vs. porn issue, which he uses as an example of how things can be "despiritualized":

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, discusses the criteria for great art. He says it is the task of the true artist to record "epiphanies," that is, the sudden ingression of spirit into matter, when something leaps through its outer appearance and reveals its true nature in a way that illuminates the soul.

Didactic art is the opposite of this -- in fact, it is not art at all. That is, it lowjacks the medium of an art form and tries to cram some merely worldly message into it. In other words, instead of transmitting radiance from another dimension -- from the higher -- it forces in a message or "lesson" from the lower, from this side of manifestation. This is why nazi or communist or leftist art is so tedious. It is also why so much contemporary art is so awful. It's not really art, but what Joyce called pornography.

Pornography has nothing to do with sex per se; from the Greek, it means "writing of whores," which pretty much summarizes my point. It occurs whenever we completely despiritualize anything and divest it of its otherworldly radiance and spiritual telos. Therefore, there is much that is pornographic that is not sexual at all. By this definition, most contemporary music is indeed pornographic, as is most TV, certainly MSM news. Most literature is pornographic. Even religion can easily be pornographic. And certainly most politics.)

Image: Raphael's Adam and Eve in the Vatican

How to get an egg into a small bottle. h/t, Grow a Brain

We do like the NY Sun, but for the news a fellow really needs at 4:30 am before milking the cows and feeding the chickens, The Daily Mash is it.

For example, they explain why the French rogue trader really did what he did, and where he hid his losses. And they have another helpful sociological piece on The 40-somethings are a bunch of whining sh-ts.

Welcome, Daily Mash, to our blogroll. (h/t, Conspiracy)

h/t, Theo, who continues to be a good finder of cool stuff.

Boris Berezovsky with 12 Transcendental Studies by Franz Liszt, Here are 1-3. The rest of them at Classical Virtuoso.