Monday, June 18. 2007
The purpose of this unsatisfactory and unsuccessful photo in the rain on Saturday was to try to capture the excellent and highly-varied Hosta beds in front of the little antique farmhouse. How many sturdy, self-reliant Connecticut Yankees have been raised in this humble 1720 home? 
Sunday, June 17. 2007
Is the universe a quantum computer? New theories may undo the reality of space and time...but everybody knows that: who has any time, and who has space for anything?
 As narrow-minded, knuckle-dragging traditionalists, we Maggie's Farmers honor fathers: fathers that stick around and do their best to do what grown men need to do for their families and for their communities.
Few of us can reach the Atticus Finch ideal. Here are a few Dad-related links from our archives: The Incredible Shrinking Father A few pretty sailboats M200 carbine Are boys just defective girls? Bring back dueling! Fine powerboats: This one and this one David Grossman's Ode to his son Uri What do men want?
Saturday, June 16. 2007
Banging around Yankeeland in the rain all day, and ended up driving through a hailstorm like I have never seen in New England. It looked as if it had snowed, or as if God had dumped his largest box of mothballs on us. There's a herd of Black Angus in the distance on this farm in beautiful Litchfield County. Taking photos in the rain is evidently not my thing. 
Photos of Tiger Woods' home in the islands. Ain't talent, discipline, and determination a wonderful combination for fulfilling one's dreams, whatever they may be? For Tiger, clearly, one part of the dream is comfortable shelter. This pad has nothing in common with Maggie's Farm except that both have indoor plumbing. 
 More photos on continuation page below.
Continue reading "The House that Golf Built"
Nice description of the near-impossibility of hitting a baseball. Right Wing Nut House. With a note on Barry Bonds.
Friday, June 15. 2007
The video here. h/t, Flares
Icarus, 1947 
Thursday, June 14. 2007
Humble Brit cell phone salesman takes the stage at the UK's version of American Idol. Story and video at Anchoress. (Wolf Flywheel of The Shelf notes in our comments that this fellow, Paul Potts, is not exactly a newbie. He studied with Pavarotti, has toured in Italy. Oh well, still a good story, and I suspect the guy can quit his day job now.) Comment from The Barrister: The moral of the story (or should I say "narrative"?) is that we listen to too much lousy pop music. When we hear the real thing it makes a big impression.
Tuesday, June 12. 2007
I'm rubber and you're glue. Whatever you say bounces off me and sticks to you.  There is some psychological wisdom in this schoolyard defence against scapegoating, projection, and name-calling.
Libel and slander lawsuits have a long history of bouncing off the target and damaging the plaintiff. One example is Oscar Wilde's slander suit which landed Wilde himself in jail for homosexual conduct. The Islamic Society of Boston's recent libel suit provides another example. (They are the folks who got the cheap land deal from Boston for a new mosque.) The process of discovery uncovered many facts which the Islamic Society would not have wanted publicized - but which were, before they finally dropped the case to prevent further damage to themselves. Attorney Floyd Abrams discusses the case in Opinion Journal. Photo: Oscar Wilde
 I happen to be one of the few people who dislike going to Whole Foods (except for their cheese department), but they will, no doubt, have an impact on Brit marketing of food. Samizdata. Brit marketing is like American marketing in the 1930s, from what I have seen.
America takes the art and science of Marketing very seriously. Americans can sell anything, from Snake Oil to Windows software to Ford automobiles to Global Warming Hysteria. America creates and invents like crazy, but our ace in the hole is our sales and marketing genius. What good is an idea if you can't sell it? Whole Foods, like the A&P's Food Emporium years ago, is all about Upscale Marketing: you take a little Balducci's, a little Food Emporium, plus a little Yuppie Health Food Store ethos to make the customers feel like they are eating wholesome stuff and therefore their precious selves will stay young and live forever - and stir. "Organic" is the "New! Improved!" of our era. The art of retail sales, I have been told by master salespeople, is all about appealing to people's narcissism - and never letting them admit that they have been "sold". "Let them feel good about themselves for choosing our stuff."
Friday, June 8. 2007
Photos taken at a pick-up at the U.S. Military Academy's Summer Leaders Seminar, today. It's a week-long picnic only for those who want to be pushed hard, and who hope to have the right stuff. If you are not familiar with West Point, that is the great Hudson River down below. The site was selected by Washington himself, and it is the longest-used military location in the US. At the time, it was a highly strategic site, commanding the water route to the inland northern colonies. 
An architect friend recently designed this molding, called Rolling Wave. I like it. I guess it can be made in whatever size you want. Amazing the way they can translate a design into a plaster molding, but it has been done for a long time. Useful skills. And such fine custom things cost less than one might think. 
Tuesday, June 5. 2007
 He's fine - he's just Astral Travelling. (h/t Right Wing Nation). Indeed he is.
Candidates for the Darwin Awards? As they say, There is no cure for stupid.
Like the Barrister in his fine piece on the subject of poverty, I am interested in understanding who the poor are in the US, and why. What lies behind the census data and stats? In medicine, we of course deal with many people who are poor due to various physical and mental dysfunctions and disabilities, and our charities and government programs offer them a great deal of help and support. In fact, the poor in general are beneficiaries of a huge safety net in the USA thanks to the generosity of our citizens. But what I found most interesting in The Barrister's piece was this notion of the "voluntarily poor." In America, we are too quick to assume that everybody wants to be rich. Indeed, I think no sane person would refuse a $160,000,000 check from Powerball, but the word "voluntary" refers to behavior, not to idle thoughts and dreams. If you aren't willing to move from Podunk, Maine to Charlotte, NC to get a good job, you are indeed voluntarily poor. And if you would rather drop out of high school and have four kids as a single Mom in St. Johnsbury, VT, you are also voluntarily poor. If you are an uneducated, illiterate immigrant, you are voluntarily poor - but presumably better-off than at home. I would like to be able to look behind the poverty stats to try to understand what choices in life the poor have made, with the understanding that these choices probably reflect a part of what they want in life. Not everyone is materially-driven, and most people are only partially materially-driven. Some people are driven to nothing at all, including basic self-respect. Some are, in fact, motivated by dependency. There are only two facts that I know for certain: Single moms are often poor, and people who do not work full-time are often poor. Gals who get knocked up without "a ring and a date" are deeply foolish. Government support (if it were included as income) would bring them out of the poverty stats, however - but that support from their neighbors rewards bad decisions made by folks who have not been taught better, or who simply haven't made any life plan. Life lived recklessly sometimes - but very rarely - works out. I'd like every kid to be taught, by example and by words, that they have something of value to add to their families, their country, and to other people, but that none of that will be be realized without making smart choices and without making a plan. Freedom demands a lot of maturity from people because it offers so many choices. LaShawn has a piece on the subject: Why Mothers Need to be Married. The recent, widely-quoted piece in The Economist makes it clear that getting and staying married correlates highly with good kids and correlates highly with a secure life. Apparently, if you graduate from high school, get married before having kids, and if at least one of the couple has a job, and if you have no more kids than you can afford, things tend to work out fairly peachy in the USA. However, the post hoc ergo propter hoc fallacy implied is not addressed. In the end, do the data say anything more circular than "People who run their lives well do well in life"?
Monday, June 4. 2007
 We mentioned the above notion in the post about Kimball's essay on art yesterday.
How is this quote, from a piece at Right Wing nation on Green sex toys, to illustrate the concept? Also, note: inflatable sheep can easily be repaired with a bicycle patch kit if popped.
Is it legal to marry an inflatable sheep in Denmark yet?
Saturday, June 2. 2007
 A number of folks have linked to Roger Kimball's piece, Why the Art World is a Disaster. Kimball's ideas have been said before by others, but he is one of our favorite essayists, and it's definitely worth reading.
His point is not a curmudgeonly critique that "modern" art products are ugly, or not really art. His point is that art designed to shock the middle class is predictable, boring, and old hat. Political art, conceptual art, art that attempts "the domestication of deviance" is a tired idea, and was already tired in the 1940s when Orwell wrote: (The artist) is to be exempt from the moral laws that are binding on ordinary people. Just pronounce the magic word “Art,” and everything is O.K. Rotting corpses with snails crawling over them are O.K.; kicking little girls in the head is O.K.; even a film like L’Age d’Or [which shows among other things detailed shots of a woman defecating] is O.K. .I learned a few things from Kimball's piece, including the tidbit that Duchamp made art of urinals to mock the avant garde, and found that they took it seriously. At that point, he quit art. Read the piece. Image: Kandinsky's House in Munich, 1908. Yes, I do love Kandinsky. Maybe my favorite, if I had to pick one artist.
Her choreography renounces gravity. Great fun to watch. Two videos of her stuff here. (Thanks, Nathan. Mrs. Bird Dog says she knows Elizabeth from NYC, and says her work reminds her of the Multigravitational Dance Company which shared a space with the Alwin Nikolai Dance Company in the good old days. "Nik" was Mrs. Bird Dog's role model, mentor, and friend - and a good guy who is missed.) Who is Elizabeth Streb? In 1997 Elizabeth Streb was awarded a John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation 'Genius' award. She is currently the 'Dean's Special Scholar' at New York University at the Draper Program working towards an M.A. in Time and Space studying Physics, Philosophy and Architecture.
Streb's choreography, (she calls it POPACTION) intertwines the disciplines of dance, athletics, extreme-sports, and Hollywood stunt work into a bristling muscle and motion vocabulary that combines daring and strict precision in the pursuit of attempting to display publicly the aggressive and deep effect of 'pure movement.'
An MA in Time and Space? Hmmm. Well, OK. Whatever. Looks like pure, wonderful physicality to me which blurs the arbitrary lines between dance, gymnastics, and sport.
Mukesh Ambani is building a 60-story house in Mumbai. It puts our American hedge fund guys to shame. It has room to house 600 servants. I could definitely use 600 servants around here, if only for a few days. Yard work, closet cleaning, straightening out the attic, weeding the garden, polishing the silver, sorting out the pantries, a bit of painting, spreading mulch, moving shrubs, carpet cleaning, gun cleaning, etc. I could keep 'em busy for a couple of days, and would want them back for a visit next June
Wednesday, May 30. 2007
 MIT prof Alex Byrne takes on the subject of meta-ethics in the Boston Review. Byrne is of the view that moral law is built into the structure of nature itself (which I would hear translated as "the Creator made it that way"). One quote:
Everything, in short, is a natural phenomenon, an aspect of the universe as revealed by the natural sciences. In particular, morality is a natural phenomenon. Moral facts or truths—that boiling babies is wrong, say—are not additions to the natural world, they are already there in the natural world, even if they are not explicitly mentioned in scientific theories. Fundamental sciences such as particle physics and molecular biology do not speak explicitly speak of sand dunes, or boiling water, or lobsters, but facts about sand dunes and the like are implicitly settled by more fundamental facts: arrange bits of matter a certain way and you have an eroding sand dune, or boiling water, or (here the arrangement needs to be very complicated indeed) a lively lobster. And, presumably, the same goes for the moral facts. But how can morality be a natural phenomenon? We ought not to boil babies, but the natural world seems not to contain any trace of an “ought,” or an “ought not.” A dropped stone is under no obligation to fall, it just does. Admittedly, I might say, before dropping a stone out of the window, “This stone ought to hit the ground in three seconds,” but here I just mean something like “It is likely that the stone will hit the ground in three seconds.” If the stone doesn’t do that, it has done nothing wrong, and is not to be blamed for anything. In the natural world, nothing ought to happen, or ought not to happen, in the relevant sense of “ought.” Keeping within the confines of nature, there is no space for the fact that we ought not to boil babies. Yet since nature is all there is, there is no place left to go.
Is pleading "nature" a cop-out, or profound? The piece is a heck of a good summary of the current and past basic thinking about meta-ethics, but you have to put your Thinking Cap on before reading.
Tuesday, May 29. 2007
Last evening: 
Monday, May 28. 2007
 Half the county was at Home Depot this morning. We aren't into buying Hostas at Home Depot, but their tomatoes are good, and mine are in the ground now. And I have 20 more bags of black mulch to carry around.
But getting back to Hostas, Mrs. BD found this site. Long-time readers know that we have rules about Hostas - never anywhere near the sun and never less than 5-20 plants of the same type en masse. Done right, they can be wonderful, but done wrong, they can be tacky. One of their downsides is that they take a few years to fully establish themselves. One of their upsides, besides their preference for dense shade, is the astonishing variety of sizes and colors of foliage available these days. Here's our previous piece on Hostas.
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