Maggie's Farm

Why is this day different from all other days? I'll go for the Colts +4, but I'd be just as happy to see Chicago win.

As Seinfeld said: "You are rooting for laundry." Watching TV is not sport...well, I guess getting to the bean dip after 14 Coors Lights is a bit of a sport.

Anyway, for real sport, try Tucks - Tuckerman Ravine on Mt. Washington. No lifts. You hike up the trail, and ski down the natural snow (or ice).

Image: Tuckerman Ravine skiiers in 1937. Same as today. Not for yuppies. For other old-timey skiing (but with lifts) we recommend Mad River Glen ("Ski it if you can"), and the Dartmouth Skiway. Yes, we love Stowe, - the home town of our webmeister Chris - but it's not really fully old-timey anymore.

Gian Carlo Menotti has died, at 95. (h/t, Villainous)

From stem-cell harvesting, to abortion on demand, to triage (as in the UK: "too expensive to bother treating"), to physician-assisted suicide for the terminally-ill, we see the steady march of a soul-less scientific rationalism.

I believe it is fear of that march which energizes the "crazy fundamentalists" who are not comfortable with treating human life as a disposable object.

Now we see the practical Swiss planning to add mental illness to the list of diseases which will have physician-assisted suicide available. "Suicidally depressed? Hey - we can help!" Who's next on their list? Diabetics? Drug addicts? The unemployed?

Sometimes a slippery slope is a slippery slope. How soon until Denmark and Holland have suicide teams roaming the hospitals (now often called "Death Services"), urging ill people to unburden society of their expensive and inconvenient problems? I can even see the ads: "Do it for the greater good", with some sort of happy, serene image of a smiling middle-aged lady floating on a fluffy cloud. Harp music, of course.

A Bristol, Rhode Island lawyer built Janet in 1903.

This 50' yawl was designed by Fred Lawley and built by George Lawley and Sons. She won the NYC Mayor's Cup in 2000.

Yes, she is for sale.

We post the photo to please Chris, who has worked overtime for Maggie's Farm this past week, and who finally subdued - or outlasted - the Botnet beast.

Chris loves sailboats and hates stinkpots - even old wooden ones.

This is a 26' triple cockpit runabout with a 425 hp Chevy V8. Mahogany, of course.

Pefect for Lake Champlain or Lake Winnepesaukee, if you don't mind being noticed. Or Long Island Sound, in nice weather.

You can buy it here.

Edwards' sleazily-earned wealth, and his 28,000 square-foot house for which he clear-cut many acres of woodland, convinced me that there truly are two Americas: He is in one, and I am in the other. But this house takes the cake. Wow.

Details

Roger won the Aussie Open. He is on a roll.

He is 25, and he likes Heineken.

Visions of Sampras.

An older lady gets pulled over for speeding...

Older Woman: Is there a problem, Officer?
Officer: Ma'am, you were speeding.  
Older Woman: Oh, I see.  
Officer: Can I see your license please?  
Older Woman: I'd give it to you but I don't have one.
Officer: Don't have one?
Older Woman: Lost it, 4 years ago for drunk driving.
Officer: I see...Can I see your vehicle registration papers please.  
Older Woman: I can't do that.  
Officer: Why not?  
Older Woman: I stole this car.  
Officer: Stole it?  
Older Woman: Yes, and I killed and hacked up the owner.  
Officer: You what?  
Older Woman: His body parts are in plastic bags in the trunk if you want to see...

The Officer looks at the woman and slowly backs away to his car and calls for back up. Within minutes 5 police cars circle the car. A senior officer slowly approaches the car, clasping his half drawn gun.  

Officer 2: Ma'am, could you step out of your vehicle please!

The woman steps out of her vehicle. 

Older woman: Is there a problem sir?
Officer 2: One of my officers told me that you have stolen this car and murdered the owner.
Older Woman: Murdered the owner?  
Officer 2: Yes, could you please open the trunk of your car, please.

The woman opens the trunk, revealing nothing but an empty trunk.

Officer 2: Is this your car, ma'am?
Older Woman: Yes, here are the registration papers. Officer 2: One of my officers claims that you do not have a driving license.  

The woman digs into her handbag and pulls out a clutch purse and hands it to the officer. The officer examines the license. He looks puzzled.

Officer 2: Thank you ma'am, one of my officers told me you didn't have a license, that you stole this car, and that you murdered and hacked up the owner.

Older Woman: Bet the lying SOB told you I was speeding, too. 

DeNiro clip, at YouTube

Great example of how the the press mis-reports science. Altruism in the Brain.

I can list ten reasons why this report is misleading.

There are two words in the English language that have all five vowels in order: "abstemious" and "facetious."

(h/t, reader)

Or is our notion of time a psychic construct? Physicists discuss time. 7 minute video. (h/t, Siggie)

Two things of importance are beyond ordinary time: God, and the unconscious.

HER DIARY:

Tonight, I thought my husband was acting weird. We had made plans to meet at a bar to have a drink. I was shopping with my friends all day long, so I thought he was upset at the fact that I was a bit late, but he made no comment on it.

Conversation wasn't flowing, so I suggested that we go somewhere quiet so we could talk. He agreed, but he didn't say much.

I asked him what was wrong; he said, "Nothing." I asked him if it was my fault that he was upset. He said he wasn't upset, that it had nothing to do with me, and not to worry about it.

On the way home, I told him that I loved him. He smiled slightly, and kept driving. I can't explain his behavior. I don't know why he didn't say, "I love you, too."

When we got home, I felt as if I had lost him completely, as if he wanted nothing to do with me anymore. He just sat there quietly, and watched TV. He continued to seem distant and absent.

Finally, with silence all around us, I decided to go to bed. About 15 minutes later, he came to bed. To my surprise, he responded to my caress, and we made love. But I still felt that he was distracted, and his thoughts were somewhere else.

He fell asleep - I cried. I don't know what to do. I'm almost sure that his thoughts are with someone else. My life is a disaster.

HIS DIARY:

Missed a big buck this morning. Bummer, but at least I got laid.

Some hae meat and canna eat,
And some wad eat that want it;
But we hae meat and we can eat,
And sae the Lord be thankit.

Shapin reviews a new book on the history of vegetarianism in The New Yorker. One quote:

With few exceptions, European proponents of vegetarianism emerged from those who had meat. You can define vegetarianism in any number of ways, but the simple absence of meat from the diet isn’t an interesting way to do it. To be culturally significant, you need some sort of principled justification, and there has been no shortage of that. The arguments that Stuart assembles are part of an immensely tangled and resonant debate. There’s no demonstration of the wrongness of eating flesh that hasn’t been countered by equally powerful arguments for its rightness, and different justifications have a way of both supporting and interfering with one another. Broadly speaking, though, for many centuries the debate centered on three questions, each of which was reflected in Newton’s dietary choices and the objections raised to them: there was the religious question, concerning the implications of Scripture for human alimentation; there were medical questions about the effect of eating meat on human health and character; and there was a philosophical debate about the proper relationship between man and other animals. There was no distinct category you could call moral, because all of them were, as they remain, intensely moral. Vegetarianism has always been less about why you should eat plants than about why you shouldn’t eat animals. And so arguments about vegetarianism, by drawing attention to rights that we claim for ourselves but deny to other animals, inevitably involve basic questions about what it is to be human.

I am not convinced that it's about morality, but it's an interesting piece. At Maggie's Farm, we are all dedicated, guilt-free carnivores. Whole piece here.

This wood-hulled replica of a 1790-era New England schooner was built in 2000. 32' and an 8' beam. "Caledonian." Besides being used for fishing, schooners like this one transported everything up and down the East coast. Yes, she is for sale, too.

 

A gentleman diner asked a waiter to take a bottle of Merlot to an attractive woman sitting alone at another table. 

The waiter took the Merlot to the woman and said, "This is from the gentleman seated over there," indicating the sender.

She regarded the wine coolly for a second, not looking at the man, and decided to send a reply note to the man. The waiter, who was lingering for a response, took the note from her and conveyed it to the gentleman.

The note read:

"For me to accept this bottle, you need to have a Mercedes in your garage, a million dollars in the bank, and 7 inches in your pants."

After reading the note, the man decided to compose one of his own in return. He folded the note, handed it to the waiter and instructed him to return this to the woman.

It read:

"For your information, I have a Ferrari 360 Spyder, an Aston Martin DB9, a Mercedes SL600 and a Porsche Turbo in my garages. I have over twenty million dollars in my bank account, but, not even for a woman as beautiful as you, would I cut two inches off.
Just send the bottle back."

Casual sex is a feminist con, says ex-groupie. I always found it amusing that the feminist con was so compatible with the time-honored male con. One quote:

Whatever Greer and her ilk might say I’ve tried their philosophy — that a woman can shag like a man — and it doesn’t work. We’re not built like that. Women are built for bonding. We are vessels and we seek to be filled. For that reason, however much we try and convince ourselves that it isn’t so, sex will always leave us feeling empty unless we are certain that we are loved, that the act is part of a bigger picture that we are loved for our whole selves not just our bodies.

It took me a long time to realise this. My earliest attitudes about sex were shaped from what I saw in the lives of my older sister and my mother — especially my mother, a free spirit who was desperately trying to make up missing out on the hippie era.

Whole pitiful story at Times Online

A basic summary piece on Jonathan Edwards' view of free will, with a comment about Pilgrims and sex, as quoted:

Puritans had a dim view of extramarital relations, but that was because they had a very high view of sexuality in marriage. Love, like the will, needs boundaries and channels; it needs a trusting and trustworthy context. The scholar Edmund Leites has studied hundreds of Puritan sermons about love and sex (there are many), and he has documented how much they preached about the duties to desire and how they saw the marriage bed as the "other altar of love." But they also knew that love, if it is to be sacred, needs a deep set of moral rudders. It needs to be modeled on the way God loves us. For nurturing awareness of the love of God, a vibrant community of faith is needed. For nurturing the love between persons, a faithful marriage is the context.

This fireplace grate comes highly recommended: Wall of Fire.

This 1927 22' Chris Craft Cadet, with its original 6 cylinder Chrysler engine, can be had for $52,000. Having beauty in life is one good reason to make money. What's not to like about this boat?

And hey, blog brother Right Wing Nation - you need to get over your water phobia. Shrinks sometimes think it's a fear of one's own unconscious: the strange and unknown depths, etc. Dr. Bliss could cure it in one day with her "total immersion" technique in blue water. What doesn't kill you makes you stronger.