Wednesday, November 14. 2007
Monday, November 12. 2007
 We posted on Theodore Dalrymple's new book today. As many know, Dalrymple, whose real name is Anthony Daniels, M.D., is a retired Brit prison psychiatrist.
Here is a list of his books. If anybody can find a photo of him, let me know. I can't. Thanks Opie - that was quick! A pleasant, benevolent-looking fellow with a pack of smokes in his shirt pocket. And thanks to Mr. Vanderleun for another photo, and a bio, here.
In The New Criterion, Steyn, Heather MacDonald, Roger Kimball and James Pierson reconsider The Closing of the American Mind.
 The Dancing Lady is a fine optical illusion: she moves both clockwise and counterclockwise, depending on how your brain views her.
Blink once or twice, and you can change her direction. However, most people have an innate tendency to see her moving in one or the other. People's Cube uses this image as the basis for a discussion about the subjectivity of perception. Unfiltered, unprocessed perception isn't truth, but we already know that.
Sunday, November 11. 2007
 Another one from the Belmont neighborhood of Nashville. Who wouldn't want to live in this charming little home? Look at that front porch - crammed with potted and hanging plants, and with a big white rocking chair just inviting you to sit down with a good book and a tall glass of sweet tea. And despite its small size, there is great attention to detail in every part of the house, from the windows to the decorative supports for the eaves. Another quote from the Standard Home Plans catalog from 1926:
"To the wife and children home means infinitely more than to the husband whose duties are elsewhere. To him it is a place for recreation and rest, but to them it is their kingdom. The hearts of many wives will go out to The Bristol, not with selfish designs, but with earnest maternal longings for better conditions for the culture and refinement of their children."
That is of course, a too-skinny Callas, with her weakened and beaten-up voice at the end of her career - but who wants to judge Callas? Having seen the rarely-performed 1917 comic opera Gianni Schicchi for the first time yesterday, I can finally put Mio babbino caro into full context. As the Bird Dog daughter said yesterday, "It's not even an aria. It's too short, and there is no refrain. It's just sung lines. Should be longer." In the plot, Gianni (we call him "Johnny"), the crafty lawyer, manages to create a fake will for a wealthy Florentine family friend giving everything to himself, thus providing his daughter with a sufficent dowry to marry the aristocratic boy she loves. Gianni, in Dante's Inferno, can be found in the 9th circle of hell - yet there was redemption in love: her little song was what persuaded her dad cross the line. What dad could not be similarly moved?
 From It Takes a Church last year:
God of the ages,
We thank You for all who have served in the armed forces of this country.
We thank You for the freedom their sacrifice has earned and guarded for us. Help us to prize this freedom and use it well.
We ask You to bless all living veterans in a special way today, as well as the families of all veterans.
Comfort those who grieve for those who gave the last full measure of devotion.
Strengthen those who bear physical, emotional, and spiritual wounds.
Stand with those who provide care to them.
Move us to reach out to sisters and brothers who are veterans, or relatives of veterans, or who currently serve in the military.
We pray for the day when no one needs to serve in the military. Help us to live now in anticipation of that day, as people who long for peace, who pray for peace, and who seek to be peacemakers in this world.
A snap of the interior of St. Peter's Church (1837), where we saw Pucchini's one-act Gianni Schicchi yesterday performed by the Chelsea Opera. 
Exterior: 
23rd St. in Chelsea, down from the church: 
Saturday, November 10. 2007
Ringo's hair salon bit is the best: "Would you like a cuppa tea, Madam?" More good Beatles links at Grow A Brain
Friday, November 9. 2007
 We hold contradictory views of dogs.
One is the old-fashioned view: to regard them as work animals, trained for service, from which high levels of obedience and performance are expected, and ideally kenneled outdoors. Guard dogs, hunting dogs, fox-hunting dogs, sled dogs, rescuer dogs, tracking dogs, police dogs, seeing-eye dogs, race dogs, Saint Bernards carrying cheap brandy, and so forth. Servants, not friends, who are to be put down if they cannot handle their task. But that view is more from our hard head than from the heart, because we love dogs and they love us, if they are allowed to, in mysterious ways which go far beyond the provision of kibbles: dear pals, providers of unconditional love, nightime foot-warmers, front-of-fireplace curlers, boisterous walking companions, food stealers, and cave-protectors. Passionate Conservative talk show host and Constitutional Law expert Mark Levin is whole-heartedly in the latter camp. He only owns dogs rescued from shelters. Of his latest book Rescuing Sprite, he comments: There’s a special connection or bond between humans and dogs. It’s as if dogs exist to bring people happiness. They teach us about life, loyalty, joy, trust, responsibility, and laughter. They help us clear out all the clutter that surrounds our busy lives and focus on what’s really important. They tell us it’s okay to take time to play sock-pull or have a catch, make silly noises, and enjoy yourself despite all the pressures we adult humans have deal with. Let me put it this way: Dogs are not pets. Dogs are family.
Well, he slips into the anthropomorphic, or pathetic, fallacy here, but I know what he means. Country folk are not so sentimental about dogs. I aim for a compromise, but all of us at Maggie's Farm are suckers for a puppy.
From One Laptop Per Child: beginning Nov. 12, for $399 you can give and get an XO laptop. One goes to a third-world kid.
Thursday, November 8. 2007
Heck, with this sort of insanity, all the Brits will have left is nun jokes. Unlike the whiners and babies, nuns can take a joke. Remind me. What year was it that Britain was successfully invaded by the alien transexual moonbat body-snatchers?
Still cannot find Abbott and Costello doing their immortal Susquehanna Hat Company routine on YouTube, but the Stooges originated the concept in the 1930s, called "Slowly I turned":
The apparent popularity of our recent philosophical post on Track Geometry Cars motivates us to post this photo of monitors from the rear window of a BNSF 80 car, from this fine foto Foamer site. Thanks, reader. If you like Track Geometry and Inspection cars, here are tons of them. 
Steyn takes a backward look at Allan Bloom's classic The Closing of the American Mind in a piece in New Criterion entitled Twenty Years Ago Today. He concludes: At my local school in New Hampshire, the music teacher eschews the classics and teaches boomer rock, much to the bemusement of her young charges for whom forty-year-old pop songs are as remote as 400-year-old sonatas. Children are asked to pick a favorite Beatle. Why would a six-year-old have such a thing? The Fab Four split up thirty years before he was born. It’s like my old music teacher asking me to pick my favorite member of Paul Whiteman’s Yacht Club Boys. But she never did. And that’s the biggest difference between 2007 and 1987. What Allan Bloom observed in his students can now be found in the teachers.
Winslow Homer, 1892 
Wednesday, November 7. 2007
 MIT suing Frank Gehry for design flaws, flooding, leaking, and dangerous icicle formation in the Stata Center in Cambridge.
As Althouse comments, Do you want a wild and crazy building dreamed up by an artist? Stop and think whether all the less strange buildings look the way they do for a reason.
It will not help the construction company, from whose site we borrow this photo, that they bragged about their teamwork with Gehry. The design itself? Looks just like any ordinary building, after one has eaten a few shrooms. And don't blame MIT - no engineers there.
Tuesday, November 6. 2007
 "How To" books and sites are great fun to read, even if you never actually do the thing. I have been perusing Home Depot's Home Improvement 1-2-3 with great enjoyment and edification. Since I do not ever plan to retire, I don't know when I will find the time to try most of these things, but it's fun to know how they are done.
And speaking of "How-To" books, one would have to place the Kama Sutra on top, as it were. It was written by the Hindu sage Vatsyayana between the 2nd and 4th centuries, for prosperous male urbanites, not for the masses. It was meant for spiritual connoisseurs, you might say. Here's a good Kama Sutra ("Writings on Love") site. Study it carefully, boys and girls - and practice, practice, practice. Pop quiz later this week. Image: Charunarikshita - "lovely lady in control."
Yet another "crisis." Ho hum. In my opinion, if people have the money, and want to overeat delicious carbs and get fat, then leave them alone. Your body is your own, and not on loan from the nanny. And it's a free country. Here's a cool obesity map of the US, 1984-present.
You know, if you're going to spend all that money and go to all that trouble, you really should enjoy yourself. Bust up the furniture, maybe. And if nothing else, after you settle in for all those decades of either eyeing the kitchen knives while he watches football, or smiling and nodding while your significant other picks out just the right candle at the second CandleBarnOutletAnnex you've been in today, you'll still have some amusing wedding pictures to look at.
Lots more, all hilarious, at DivineCaroline.com
Derbyshire reviews Charles Taylor's "remarkable new book," A Secular Age. One quote: Simply put, A Secular Age is a magisterial refutation of what Taylor calls the “subtraction story” of secularization. On this familiar narrative, secularization is simply an effect of the progress of science and rational inquiry. Taylor raises two related objections against it: first, that it misses the essentially moral dimension of the “exclusive humanism” that emerged in the 17th and 18th centuries, and which, in his view, is closely tied to an “ethic of freedom and beneficent order”; second, that the emergence of that humanism is too substantial an achievement to be explained by the subtraction story, which makes it seem as if human beings simply “fell into” conceiving of their moral capacities without reference to god. Taylor goes further: not only is the discovery of “intra human” sources of benevolence the “charter of modern unbelief”, but religion itself played a significant role in shaping that ethical vision.
Read the whole thing. We have made that point here several times: Western humanism is Christian in its cultural core, but not in its soul.
Monday, November 5. 2007
Don't believe all of the disparaging things that are said about hovering, overly-involved "helicopter parents." Apparently it helps kids get into college. Washington Post. Probably annoys them, too. Whether it really helps them do life is another matter.
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