Maggie's Farm

Today on the Farm, 5:30 AM. For the full effect, add the sound of an early-rising croaking raven to the photo.

A Bird Dog pup practicing lawn mowing on slopes. It's always exciting when the front wheels leave the ground. The photo doesn't capture the slope.

Thanks, reader.

Share Maggie's Farm - don't hoard us! Help keep us inspired and chugging along during these dog days of summer by sending us around to your million friends. That is all we will ever ask for.

But if our readers insist on continuing to mail cash to our Maggie's account, well, that is just great too. Nothing smaller than wrapped ten-packs of circulated 100s, please, or it isn't worth our trouble. Mail cash to: Mr. Churchie la Femme, c/o CYA Assets Associates, Ltd, George Town, Grand Cayman.

 Photo: A handsome 1925 Doble steamer. I remember my Granny explaining to me why her next-door neighbor had a funny low extension on the back of their garage. The prior owner needed the extension to fit their fancy new Stanley Steamer. That funny lean-to extension remains there today, and is surely useful for today's cars.

From La Nozze de Figaro, Bartoli and Fleming. Dang Spanish words in there are annoying.

Friedrich Gulda and Herbie Hancock. Some said Gulda couldn't do jazz...

Since the News Junkie plans to stop by Cuttyhunk this weekend, I thought I'd do a piece on this place which is mainly known to East Coast sailors for its large harbor.

Cuttyhunk is the outermost of the chain of Elizabeth Islands that stretch from Cape Cod southwest into Buzzard's Bay between the MA shore and Martha's Vineyard. Most of the Elizabeths are owned outright, but not Cuttyhunk, which has a year-round population of 52 (many more in July and August). Cuttyhunk is two miles long and about a mile wide. It is mostly wild.

The island is not convenient at all, but it ain't a cheap place to buy- example. If you don't have a boat, you get to Cuttyhunk from New Bedford on the M/V Cuttyhunk.

Here are some Cuttyhunk photos. Here's a history of the lighthouse. 

Today's weather report on Cuttyhunk: 54 degrees at noon, with drizzle.

Photo is the steeple of the 1881 United Methodist Church. (That is a Striped Bass, if I am not mistaken.)

1958. The guy was a damn good crooner. When I look back on how kids dressed for a night out, or for college, through the early 60s, I realize that they aspired to adulthood. Now, everybody aspires to youth. Youth is wasted on the young.

This one is 16' with a 4 cylinder engine.

This is from the mid-80s. Domino's "I'm Walking" was the first song Nelson recorded.

I have always heard about the Series 7 exam, but never bothered to look into exactly what it tested until the pup told me that she has to pass it this month, after two months on the job.

It covers a lot of territory. I believe that she is studying hard for it, in the few hours in the day they don't keep her at work.

Wall Street is an exciting place this month: interesting things happening. As Warren Buffet says, when the tide goes out, you find out who is swimming nude.

We should be grateful for the free heat, since we pay plenty for heat from October through May. Thought this photo from last winter might help us cool off.

Definitely Fred country, says Beth at My Vast Right Wing Conspiracy, who posted the above relevant Lynyrd. Much as we are open to Fred, we don't really know where he is coming from yet, or what sort of candidate he can really be.

For the fine arts to revive, they must recover their spiritual center. Profaning the iconography of other people's faiths is boring and adolescent.

Thus comments atheist Camille Paglia in her excellent essay. She makes the case, with which I agree, that art without a spiritual center quickly degenerates into narcissism, commercialism, propagandizing, or adolescent shock-art. Another quote:

A primary arena for the conservative-liberal wars has been the arts. While leading conservative voices defend the traditional Anglo-American literary canon, which has been under challenge and in flux for forty years, American conservatives on the whole, outside of the New Criterion magazine, have shown little interest in the arts, except to promulgate a didactic theory of art as moral improvement that was discarded with the Victorian era at the birth of modernism. Liberals, on the other hand, have been too content with the high visibility of the arts in metropolitan centers, which comprise only a fraction of America. Furthermore, liberals have been complacent about the viability of secular humanism as a sustaining creed for the young. And liberals have done little to reverse the scandalous decline in urban public education or to protest the crazed system of our grotesquely overpriced, cafeteria-style higher education, which for thirty years was infested by sterile and now fading poststructuralism and postmodernism. The state of the humanities in the US can be measured by present achievement: would anyone seriously argue that the fine arts or even popular culture is enjoying a period of high originality and creativity? American genius currently resides in technology and design. The younger generation, with its mastery of video games and its facility for ever-evolving gadgetry like video cell phones and iPods, has massively shifted to the Web for information and entertainment.

I would argue that the route to a renaissance of the American fine arts lies through religion.

Read the whole thing in Arion. h/t, reader.

Image: One of Andy Warhol's Tomato Soup images, to my mind just one example of "art" lacking in a center - unless his idea was to mock the very idea of artistry. He made himself fabulously wealthy with this sort of stuff, but his Hollywood-style celebrity was at the core of it all.

From Le nozze di Figaro (h/t, Reader). When Figaro was first produced in Vienna in 1786, the mockery of the aristocracy was shocking. Shortly thereafter, however, Emperor Joseph ll had to set a limit of 9 encores, because the 4-hour opera was running too late at night.

One of the most beautiful sights in the world: A reserved clay court at 8 AM on an August Saturday morning.

The Clancy Brothers with Tommy Makem, Brennan on the Moor. Only Liam remains of the original group. A piece by Rick Moran here.

The big sale is on until the end of August.

Long-time readers know how much we all love the Teaching Company. It's one of the ways we all try to continue to learn. But it's much more fun than school, because no single school could contain so many suberb and enthusiastic communicators - plus no tests or term papers. We use the CDs in the car and while working out.

I cannot praise these people enough. Look through their catalog to find the gaping holes in your education. In my family, we trade them around, but we only buy them during the sales.