Maggie's Farm

A friend's photo of her son windsurfing in Hawaii last week:

The ULHS has fast swing and Charleston. There is a Lindy Library. Politicians are scum: I'd vote for any of these dancers for President.

This is from their 2005 Charleston Finals:

The 2006 Fast Swing Finals:

A Charleston instructional film from the 1920s:

La Montagne Ste. Victoire (1900). Cezanne painted this mountain, near his home in Aix-en-Provence, over 60 times.

Got your Racks Calendar for 2008 yet? h/t, Holy Taco

This is an example of why, when we need a giggle or two to cheer ourselves up, we visit The Peoples' Cube, where you can find the whole story:

From a new review of the film:

Florian Henckel von Donnersmarck's The Lives of Others, now available on DVD, is the best feature film debut by a director since Orson Welles's Citizen Kane. Coming it seemed out of nowhere and defying all the conventional wisdom of the motion picture industry, Donnersmarck achieved a remarkable commercial and critical success with his first full-length film, culminating when it won the Oscar for Best Foreign Picture of 2006.

The Lives of Others fully deserves all the awards it garnered. Evidently a perfectionist, Donnersmarck created a film that is near perfect in every respect. It deals seriously and profoundly with an important but sadly neglected subject—communist tyranny in East Germany—and the screenplay Donnersmarck carefully crafted over several years does full justice to his central theme of injustice.

Dave Brubeck's group with Paul Desmond, 1959

From Freedom, Morality, and New Year Revolutions at One Cosmos:

You will notice that when you pick up most any "new age" type book -- in fact, unfortunately, many conventional religious books as well -- the language conveniently goes "wobbly" just at that critical juncture when you most need it. These frauds use language in such a way that they make you feel as if the fault is within you, not them. Philosophers and academics pull the same thing all the time. But if you truly understand something, then it shouldn't be difficult to find the words to convey that understanding to another, at least assuming adequate communication skills, along with good will in the reader. (I might add that where the new agers use fuzzy language to conceal their ignorance, the conventionally religious often fall back on overly rigid and saturated formulas to cover over their lack of understanding.)

It's a good observation, and I have noticed that too. And mea culpa, Gagdad Bob: I have done the same sometimes.

Jan 2007

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My take-home message from these data is that we have become a solid and steadily-growing small-to-medium-sized "boutique" site - a bit obscure but but surprisingly more often-read than many of the wonderful sites we read, admire, look up to, and depend upon for good stuff and interesting thinking. With millions of sites out there, we are grateful for our readership and for its steady growth as folks find us.

If we did not have fun with this, learn things, and receive some appreciation from our readers, we would quit. For 99.99% of "blogs," it's a hobby and closer to vanity publishing than to anything else. (If we could take in $1 per visit, we'd be more than delighted! But we decided not to do ads, etc., because of the hassle, the messiness, and the reality of the de minimus after-tax income from it.) That is why we have not chosen to be a an official member of the excellent Pajamas Media site, despite being on their blogroll: we would have to take the ads.

Our recurrent question is whether we have any slight impact on "the world" at all. In some ways, we would like to: in others ways, we would not like to, because we suspect that people who want to save the world might be a bit insane. (Still, we would love to have 100,000,000 readers across the globe, of all political stripes and colors.)

So we forge onward into a new year with the hope of adding something fun, stimulating, informative and provocative to the life of each individual reader in 2008, and with full awareness that what matters most is our own integrity and intellectual integrity, clarity of thought, our bred-in-the-bone Yankee skepticism and distrust of politicians and experts, our various random interests, the joy we are able to take in life, and the firmness of our foundational ideas and beliefs about "man and God and law," as the Dylan line goes. Trust us to question these all the time: we do.

We have had many comments about the amount of totty on Maggie's - some positive and some negative. It's really never been all that much, but it has led to some awkward situations at work or school for some of our readers. We will deal with that issue, somehow. Perhaps we need to control our inner 13 year-old.

Also, we have had frequent suggestions that we create a place for comment threads, because they become diluted among all of our daily posts. Well, we have been determined to reduce the amount of daily "product," but it never seems to happen. I cannot think of a solution to that. Furthermore, is reducing productivity a worthy goal anyway?

Finally, another response to a repeated question: Why the anonymity of our writers? For a variety of personal and professional reasons, we want to keep it that way for now. We are sorry if you disapprove of our modestly hiding behind the cybercurtain, but it is our choice because, as RR would say: We paid for this microphone.

Happy New Year, and stick with us! And tell your friends about us, if you haven't yet. They might get a kick out of Maggie's Farm.

Image: Ingres' depiction of the Maggie's Farm newsroom. (We felt obliged to photoshop out all the the Coors Lite empties and the bottles of Wild Turkey from his artistic effort, to protect the children.)

Photo from Sippican, who has all the words to the song

Photo taken yesterday. Thanks, reader for the timely image.

Patsy Cline might own this song, but the Duprees made it a hit in 1962. It's one of the best pop songs ever written (yes, the pyramid photos reminded me of it):

For a while, when Maggie's Farm was in its childhood and before we kept stats, we tried to post a Tractor of the Week. This was from May, 2005.

1976 Farmall Model 1496

I like the eager-to-work, funky Jetson styling. Eager masculine power.

I could use one of these big boys, but how do I get a real red neck sitting in the shaded cabin?

The words and lyrics of the spiritual Go tell it on the Mountain were written by John W. Work, Jr. (1872-1925). John Work Jr. is best known for his collection, the Folk Songs of the American Negro. He graduated from Fisk University in 1898 and became a teacher. He died in 1925 in Nashville, where he was born. Here's Dolly: