Maggie's Farm

Consider this to be a free advt for People's Cube:

All we want at Maggie's Farm are more links, more blogrolls, and more readers.

For readers, we have a fine cadre of congnoscenti, who are hip to our deal and down wid us. You all have a capacity for irony - which means a decent IQ.

But, for Christmas, we want a mass market, like Michelle and Glenn. No - we want to be bigger than them: we want to be Glenn and Michelle and Kos and Powerline combined, and invited to the White House for chats! But, sadly, we just aren't good enough for that dream. Delusions of grandeur!

We don't even want money...well, we do want money, but we expect none from Maggy. She is cheap: we work for free. Galley slaves! Rescue us!

Please, Santa! We will be a one year-old blog (or two, really, depending on whether you count it from when we signed up with Truth Laid Bear) in February. 

Blogroll us, and link us, for Christmas!

We are sorta, kinda unique. Email us to your million intelligent, skeptical, inquiring friends, who might be deprived of their Daily Maggie's - to their detriment.

Gift-wrapping included! And the price is right! What a fine gift!

Merrily T-rated, on Continuation page below. (Thanks for the Christmas cheer, Black Dog.) The two four two ladies on the left appear medically enhanced, but I am no expert.

(Out of consideration to our readers, many of whom seem to read Maggie's at work or school, we will no longer post T-rated material on the front page, however much fun we think it is to do so. Apparently it has lead to some uncomfortable moments. Sorry - just click below to see Santa's friends.)

Yet another sport I would rather play than watch. This was today, in Danbury, CT - the New England Division.

The game is a wonderful combination of muscle, physical endurance, tactics, skill, anticipation, brains, and attitude. And of course, as a mano a mano game, it's all up to you. No team-mates to blame, and No Excuses.

This must have been one heck of a dramatic game when real swords were used. Ouch!

I know you all have been waiting eagerly. We have promised this exam for many months, but today is a good day for it. All beasts have been featured on Maggie's Farm. Multiple choice!

Answers on continuation page, for you slackers. Here it is:

1. The animal below is a: Holstein, Texas Longhorn,  Auroch,  Swiss Angus

 2. The beast below is a: Shetland Shorthorn, Bison, Yak, Musk Ox

 3. The animal below is a: Jersey, Guernsey, Brown Swiss, Shorthorn

 4. The animals below are: Black Angus, Holstein, Jersey, Auroch

 5. The beast below is a: Holstein, Hereford, Shetland Pony, Gateway Logo

 6. The critter below is a: Big MF, Brown Swiss, Shorthorn, Polled Hereford

 7. The creature below is a: Holstein, Mottled Swiss, Guernsey, Holstein

8. The nasty creature below is a: Cow, Cat, Goat, Bird

 9. The giant beast below is a: Longhorn, Shorthorn, Spanish, Hereford Bull

 10. The milker below is a: Dark and Stormy, Brown Swiss, Shetland Shorthorn, Limousin

 11. The happy animals below are: Black Angus, Brown Swiss, Polled Herefords, Brown Swiss

 12. This gentle and friendly animal is a: Water Buffalo, European Bison, Cape Buffalo, Yak

 13. A hard one: This breed of beef cattle is: Hereford, Shorthorn. Limousin, Charolais

14.  An Ox is a(n): older bull, older steer, breed of cattle, word for a big cow

15. There are how many surviving species of wild bovines? 3, 7, 12, 17

16. "Polled" means: they grow large horns, they don't grow horns, they are born without testicles, their horns are cut off.

17. This is a:  Polled Hostein, Apache Ghost Cow, Limousin, Charolais

18. Wuzzat?

The Vikings are returning in their ships to Ireland, reports Blue Crab. Very cool, but it's not really a very difficult passage, in good weather.

The Norsemen terrorized the British Isles during the dark ages, raping, burning, killing and pillaging...all the fun stuff Vikings liked to do, but also settling and colonizing, to some extent, until the French-speaking Norsemen of Normandy finally took the whole place over in 1066, more or less.

Monks huddled on top of inaccessible places like Skellig Michael to elude them, and dedicated their lives to prayer and the copying of the ancient classical writings.

We first learned about Skellig Michael on the old PBS Civilization series by Lord Kenneth Clark (that was good TV - every kid should see it). And then more in Thomas Cahill's wonderful How the Irish Saved Civilization. I like all of Cahill's stuff, especially Desire of the Everlasting Hills: The World Before and After Jesus.

I have been to Skellig Michael. Took the little fishing boat out there and climbed those endless narrow stone-cut, railing-less, acrophobia-inducing steps almost to the top, where their stone huts still sit in the wind and clouds. Would not recommend going to Ireland without going down there.

Image: A view from Skellig Michael.

In those aspen groves. What's a "Woodcock"? Tasty little things.

We see, on average, 1.3 movies per year, so we are not experts. But this new one is good.

After 40 years of seeing every enjoyable Bond film, this one preserves most of the Bond atmosphere (beaches, pretty gals, tuxedos) but dispenses with most of the dated stuff, like car chases, boat chases, helo chases, shaken not stirred, and gizmos (and, alas, Q died). And this one makes Bond a bit less of a cartoon character (he falls in love, he is overly-trusting, he bleeds). Still, an excellent male role model.

5/5 barks from the Bird Dog -  a memorable thriller.

The most interesting book I've read this year - George Marsden's recent biography of Jonathan Edwards. I am about halfway through it, but find it difficult to put down. (It won the Bancroft Prize.)

Marsden weaves late colonial history, theology, Edward's complex life (his struggles with faith, struggles with temptation, struggles with character flaws, his depressions, his never-resting intelligence), and the daily life of the times into a darn good tale. And Marsden does know his theology.

Connecticut's Edwards (1703-1758) is one of the most compelling and important figures in American history - probably more important than the Founding Fathers: he helped lay the cultural foundation on which the national institutions were constructed. I see him as the evolutionary link between the Puritan Pilgrims and the world of the Founders. His view of the world was far better known in the colonies in 1776 than were the works of John Locke - or of anyone else: sermons were best-sellers in those days. Isolated: not really.

Did Edwards read Locke? You bet. Locke was his great inspiration (except for scripture), at Yale (then a divinity school). Newton and Rousseau too: these New Englanders were plugged into the latest European thinking.

His life and preaching remain a part of America's national DNA. As theologian, theological logician, preacher, and the preeminant evangelist of the Great Awakening, he has been and remains the dominant figure in the history of American religious life - and a major international figure, too, because of his role in the worldwide movement that puritan Reform (Calvinism) represented.

So he is well worth reading about.

From the Booklist review:

In the first full critical biography of Edwards in 60 years, a distinguished Notre Dame scholar humanizes America's greatest colonial clergyman, a man highly esteemed in his own time but since singled out for decades of abuse by Puritan-bashers. To be sure, Edwards' brimstone pulpit rhetoric (most famously deployed in his 1741 sermon "Sinners in the Hands of an Angry God") offends modern sensibilities. But Marsden--drawing heavily on recent scholarship--restores Edwards to an eighteenth-century New England where most shared his doctrines, though few could rival him in the power with which he preached them. Exceptional insight shines through a felicitous style as Marsden recounts how Edwards acquired that power, the intellectual rigor of his Yale studies gradually lending force to his intense spiritual vision. His rare gifts enabled Edwards to kindle the Great Awakening, emblazoning his name on the pages of American history.

A quote from Marsden's excellent Introduction:

Historians of the United States have been prone to give much more attention to Benjamin Franklin than to Edwards as a progenitor of modern America. That is understandable because Franklin seems so congenially to represent tendencies that triumph in mainstream American life and politics. Yet a good case can be made that stories of America are deficient if they do not at least temper emphasis on the Franklins of the heritage with a serious reckoning with its Edwardses. Most strikingly, the modern narratives fail to account for why levels of religious practice came to be so much higher in the United States than in other modernized nations. They also do little to explain why evangelical Christianity  flourished in America and why its revivalist style became one of America's leading exports.

So-called "nice weather" doesn't mean a thing to real Yankees.

We exult in challenging weather, and love to go out in it to do things. Indeed, we look down on the "soft,"  who want life to be easy, overly comfortable, over-heated, and overly safe.

We like hard stuff, and we like to teach ourselves discipline. We do not respect the soft, lazy, easy parts ourselves - and rightly so. But we do not disdain good sex or good wine or good company. Even mediocre wine. And neither did the Puritans, as they were disparagingly termed.

Furthermore, we are raised to expect life to bang us up, draw some blood, break our hearts, make us shiver in the wet cold sleet, rust our guns, damage our faith, strain our capacities, get us lost in the financial, spiritual, metaphysical, or literal woods, disappoint our fondest hopes and dreams, make us hurt by friends and injured by enemies, drag us towards sin and pride, face us with risk, hand us loneliness and doubt, confront us with danger, add sorrow to our basket of sorrows, and even to kill some of us.

But we must give thanks for the chance to engage all of it, for better or worse, as best we can, with such gifts and such weaknesses as we are given. Can we take delight in the moments of joy and pleasure? Of course. But those are the exceptions: the dessert, the country pies of life.

No God promised us a rose garden: only politicans do that. God gave us mainly a chance for salvation of our souls - and interesting weather, and an interesting, complex, difficult life, to contend with, without all of the tools we really need....except the ablility to connect with God's love, if we want to. It's about Grace.