Maggie's Farm

Photo from The Tennessean.com, which I hope will forgive the use of this photo. The story of 8 year-old Christian Golcynski accepting the flag from his father's casket is at The Tennessean, here.

We linked this piece at Flares titled Facing the Market last week, but I thought it so usefully clear and succinct that I'd re-post it with a quote. Every kid in high school or college should read this to inject some reality into the romantic psychobabble about self-actualization which is endemic in our pampered society.

Some people have a "calling," but most do not. Some people have ego-driven compulsions to achieve to compensate for feelings of inadequacy. Some lucky people find work plain fun. But while work offers many rewards including money, social contact, dignity, and a variety of challenges, most people would not do their jobs if they won the Powerball. Otherwise, why is everyone planning for retirement?

For most folks, work is not recreation. A quote from the piece at Flares about the labor market:

The sad fact of life in a market economy is that you have to do what somebody else wants in order to get paid. You don't generally get paid for what is fun for you or for what you want to do; you get paid for what somebody else wants you to do, and usually that's something they themselves don't want to do for some reason. Maybe the work is tedious, maybe it requires high levels of responsibility, maybe it is dirty or dangerous. One thing you can be guaranteed is that it's something somebody else doesn't want to do themselves.

Now this is contrary to what most of us learn in school and in our cultural role models. We learn that we should be "free". We learn that we should be self-actualizing. We learn that we should break the rules and make things better and in the end everyone will reward us for "doing the right thing". Don't bet on it.

Ask your kids to read the whole thing.

The Torpedo Factory Arts Center in Alexandria's Old Town was saved from the wrecker's ball as the dock area of Old Town was about to be destroyed by urban planners.

Now, the saving of the Torpedo Factory (the building was a WWl-era torpedo factory) is considered to have been one of the triggers for the preservation and rejuvenation of Alexandria.

I get a kick out of those old factories that were built in monumental style. Temples to manufacturing, industry, invention, and the American work ethic.

I had never banged around Alexandria, Virginia until this past weekend. Since we have been touching on one of our pet hates, urban renewal, in Old Town Alexandria we have a perfect example of how the absence of urban renewal has make it possible to have a downtown that everyone wants to go to to shop, to eat, to hear music, to see galleries, to maybe meet a new girl- or boy-friend, and to hang out on the street or on the piers with an ice cream cone.

People like to go to places which are crowded, have a human scale, have some history and a touch of shabbiness or at least randomness. In other words, real places. Tiny Greenwich Village in NYC is crowded every night, but it cannot hold a candle to Georgetown for quaintness or size (but it has way better music). Why so many people seem to enjoy totally phony, manufactured places like Disney World is another topic for another day.

Wikipedia has a nice little piece on the town's history, which of course includes its history as a major American port, its slave trade, and its role as a supply center for the Civil War. Washington considered it to be his home town.

My lame photo, as usual, does no justice to what a hoppin' and pleasant place the Old Town is.

The ten principles of economics, simplified, with more humor than enlightenment...I think. It's from standupeconomist.com, at YouTube. (h/t, Jules).

Best profound quote: "People are motivated by things which motivate them to action."

I challenge anyone to name a quainter, cozier town than Georgetown (which also has 15-minute access to a city) - or one in which it is more difficult to park a car. It might be worth it to be a politician just to live there for a while. Georgetown beats Cambridge Mass. hands down as a place to live.

Every city in America which destroyed their 19th century factories, train stations, town houses etc. during the 70s government-funded frenzy for "urban renewal" is crying today.

Case in point, as our Dylanologist keeps reminding us, is Nashville which would be packed with pubs, shops, tourists, and million-dollar townhouses today if they had not bulldozed the old downtown to "modernize" it, to sterilize it, and to erase its history along with every human-scale building. So people go to the disgusting malls, which are, happily, a dying fad.

Like Bridgeport and Hartford, CT, the urban renewalist Stalin-inspired and highly-educated planning geniuses removed every reason a person might want to go, or to live, downtown. Only the backwater cities escaped that assault. Lucky for them. The supremely elegant and lovely Savannah, Georgia is my prime example, but we will do Alexandria, VA in a couple of days - same story but without the aristocratic flavor of Savannah.

God bless Jane Jacobs. I was fortunate to hear her speak once in New York on the subject of Harlem.

This morning, in lovely Georgetown  with unseasonably cool and comfortable weather for that swamp  (figuratively and literally) of a city, Washington, DC.

The first Roman Catholic church in DC, built in 1789.

I did not intend to cut off the steeple in my photo. The building is now renovated as The Chapel of St. Ignatius Loyola as part of Holy Trinity Parish, which now has a new sanctuary on the corner of N St. built in 1851.

The parish was started by Archbishop Carroll, who was also the founder of Georgetown University. We cannot underestimate the role of the Jesuits in this nation's history.

My graduating child, who is Protestant, of a more-or-less evangelical flavor, told me that Georgetown holds an outdoor Mass in front of Healy any time something wonderful, or anything disturbing (including things like not winning in basketball) happens. As an approach to both the grim and the joyful vicissitudes of life, I find that wonderful and rational.

Go Hoyas! 

Harold Brodkey, from The State of Grace in a collection of short stories, First Love and Other Sorrows:

I had read too many books by Englishmen and New Englanders to want to know anything but graceful things and erudite things and the look of white frame houses on green lawns. I could always console myself by thinking my brains would make me famous (brains were good for something, weren't they?), but then my children would have good childhoods - not me. I was irrevocably deprived, and it was the irrevocableness that hurt, that finally drove me away from any sensible adjustment to life to the position that dreams had to come true or there was no sense in living at all. If dreams came true, then I would have my childhood in one form or another, someday.

...

I was fierce and solitary and acrid, marching off the little mile from school, past the post office, all yellow brick and chrome, and my two locust trees, and there was no one who loved me first. I could see a hundred cravennesses in the people I knew, a thousand flaws, a million weaknesses. If I had to love first, I would love only perfection. Of course, I could help heal the people I knew if I loved them. No, I said to myself, why should I give them everything when they give me nothing?

Image: Brodkey, drawn for The New Yorker in 1995.

It is now widely believed that essentially all 6000 world languages evolved, by geographical separation, from one proto-language. (This theory tends to undermine Chomsky's claim to fame for theorizing an internal hard-wired grammar - Chomsky's sole interesting idea, in my opinion.)

However, languages are dropping like flies, as the planet shrinks. McWhorter in the NYSun argues that this is a good thing, but he hopes hobbyists will keep the old ways alive.

Will the universal language be English? I hope so. It's a pretty good language, but Italian is far more musical, and I'd be happy to have an excuse to learn it. Would no longer need a translated libretto for the operas I love.

By Dorothy Fields / Jimmy McHugh, and famously sung by Billie Holiday

Grab your coat and get your hat
Leave your worry on the doorstep
Just direct your feet
To the sunny side of the street

Can't you hear a pitter-pat
And that happy tune is your step
Life can be so sweet
On the sunny side of the street

I used to walk in the shade
With those blues on parade
But now I'm not afraid
This rover crossed over
If I'd never have a cent
I'd be rich as Rockefeller
Going to set my feet
On the sunny side of the street

Excellent youtube of the song as sung by Marie Bryant  - good photography. Woops - youtube cancelled that one. Here's Cyndi Lauper.

There is a Harvard study of life success and health. A quote:

Early wealth and privilege did not predict life success and health of the study subjects nearly as well as the original investigators thought it would. What did separate successful subjects from failures was their level of maturity and their optimism.

The assertion that "Character is destiny" is attributed to Heraclitus, around 500 BC. Read the whole thing.

Lightning strikes the Empire State Building on May 15. Photo from The Daily Mail.

At dinner on Friday night I was talking with a friend about fusion as a power source. He told me that he had had a conversation about energy with physicist and Benedictine priest Stanley Jaki.

In that conversation, Jaki posed this question: If energy were endlessly abundant and free, what would life be like, what would people do, and what would matter to people?

I have told my kids that one optimistic yet realistic way to look at life is that it is like standing in front of a conveyor belt upon which a stream of opportunities are passing by, but each one will never pass by again in the same form.

I am referring to every sort of opportunity: opportunities to make friends, to be kind, to find love, to have fun, to stand up for your beliefs, to show mercy, to develop interests, to develop good habits of character, to make money, to be forgiving, to practice strength, to find God, to learn, etc, etc.

Alas, that conveyor belt offers just as many opportunities to make mistakes and poor choices.

It is a tough part of maturity to accept the reality limitation, however, that any opportunity grabbed will reduce the number of opportunities passing by on the conveyor belt, because time is an arrow.

A friend reminds me of the old story:

The levee broke and the water is rising in the town. One guy gets on his knees and prays "God, save me from this flood." There is a knock at the door and a firetruck offering to evacuate him. "No thanks, God will rescue me."  He waits as the water fills the first floor.  A guy in a rowboat shows up.  "No thanks, God will save me."  Water fills the second floor and he goes to the attic and punches a hole in the roof.  A helicopter comes by.  "No thanks, God will rescue me."  The water rises further, and he starts treading water, but finally tires and drowns. Up in Heaven he berates God.  "Hey, you said you would help me when I was in need. Where the heck were you?" 

God replies "I sent you a firetruck, a rowboat, and finally a helicopter. You rejected every one..."

You can locate anyone's cell phone with this GPS mobile phone tracking system.

But, if my ringer is turned off, can it help me find my cell phone in my house?

Why are we getting repeated Google searches for "removing pachysandra"? We have never posted on that subject, although I guess we have posted on pachysandra.

Since there appears to be interest out there, here's my method.

(But first, even though I have some pachysandra beds adjacent to the house, I do not really approve of it near houses or buildings. It belongs at a distance, in full shade - if you must have it at all.)

I am an expert at pachysandra removal. You take a good sharp spade - not a shovel - and with it cut deep parallel lines in the pachysandra bed, about 14" apart. Then you use the spade to cut those stretches into 2-3' lengths. Use the spade to begin to undercut those strips a couple of inches deep, and then you can peel the whole thing up like a slice of carpet.

If you want to replant it somewhere else, just lay those lengths of carpet down, and, with some watering, they will grow in.

There is a new magazine out there, Garden and Gun. It sounds like an ideal sort of Maggie's Farm magazine (h/t, Dr. Helen).

With a photo of Pat Conroy on the cover, how bad could it be? I'll give it a try, if only to find out whether it's more interesting than our Maggie's Farm blog. I am certain that it is better-written.

Re gun mags, I used to subscribe to Shooting Sportsman, but it has become too snooty for my taste. Informative, though, if you own $60,000 shotguns instead of Mossbergs and Brownings like regular folks.