Maggie's Farm

Remarkable - don't miss this: A German scientist did a comparison test to see how many people could tell the difference between the first and second picture.  3 things were different.  Only 49 out of 8,000 were able to solve it.  Can you?  Click below:

COMPARISON TEST

As usual, when Dust My Broom posts a blues mix, it's pretty darn decent. Last night he included a recording by Roy Buchanan, the guitar legend. (He also has Marcia Ball, the New Orleans piano player and blues belter who I saw in CT a year ago. She is a firecracker.)

Roy's bio here. Amazon has some Buchanan recordings.

From Sailing Anarchy:

"Hydroptère, the radical 60' hydrofoil trimaran hauling ass. For those who haven't seen it, it is a pretty fascinating thing. Take a look at the "shock absorber" foils."

The department store is the ancestor of the mall, and of WalMart. From a piece in Washington Monthly:

Department stores emerged as the Wal-Marts of their time, known for low prices, convenience, and controversy. When the first stores opened in the 1870s and ’80s, they were cavernous, no-frills storerooms that stocked a hodgepodge of items once available only from specialty merchants. The different merchandise lines were known as “departments.” At these one-stop Victorian shopping destinations, the sales staff might not have known silk from twill, or how to trim a jacquard vest, but the prices were low, and one could pay in cash—an innovation at a time when most retailers required annual credit lines that were extended only to wealthy regular patrons.

Not everyone was a happy customer. Established venders feared being driven out of business, and indeed many Main Street tea merchants, booksellers, crockery stores, and glassware dealers did lose patrons and close shop. Other early critiques were less about cents than sensibility. In 1897, Scribner’s lamented the big stores’ tawdry sales events; banal and homogenous goods; and appeals to customers as crowds, rather than as selective individuals. Mark Twain found maddening the stores’ practice of heaping goods of no practical relation on adjacent tables for customers to simply rummage through. Of particular offense was the sight of an autobiography of President Ulysses  S. Grant strewn alongside the rugs and teapots at John Wanamaker’s store in Philadelphia. Clemens, who had co-published the book, blasted Wanamaker as “that unco-pious butter-mouthed Sunday school-slobbering sneak-thief.”

The worst digital cameras, here. (h/t Protein)

The new camera gift guide - it's all 10 megapixels now, even for point-and-shoot.

Isn't capitalism amazing?

And, speaking of capitalism, what is the best way to protect an industry? To permit competition - of course. Look at the City of London: The Economist . (h/t, BusinessPundit)

These three dudes are the modern masters of farce, absurdist and semi-black humor. They all have no trouble making fun of earnest silliness, and all of their humor is dead serious.

A friend turned me on to the Brit Tom Sharpe, who has never been afraid of political correctness. But I never knew about his Wilt series, which is on the way to me from Amazon at this moment. I had only read his two which were set in South Africa. The mental hospital staging a Zulu War as a therapeutic theater piece with the patients taking sides with real weapons is just unbelievable. But so are the people with the rubber suit fetishes.

Peter de Vries, a long-time editor at The New Yorker and Editor of Poetry magazine, and long-time resident of Westport, CT now, alas, dead, wrote a number of droll, warmly satirical novels, most of them about life in Fairfield County. He is the most religious atheist writer I can think of. Adultery, social climbing, book clubs, alcohol abuse, horny adolescents, existential crises, wonderful misfits, nouveau riches, do-gooders, old-time eccentric grouchy Yankees, wacky preachers, and hearty golfers are the grist for his mill. Favorite De Vries quotes: "Nostalgia isn't what it used to be," and "It is the final proof of God's omnipotence that he need not exist in order to save us." One more: "I was baptised, but it didn't take." Can you label this genre "comic seriousness"?

Carl Hiaasen - bio here - prize-winning Florida journalist and co-songwriter with the late lamented Warren Zevon, has a feel for the dark side of South Florida culture (is there a bright side?) which he illuminates with such characters as Skink, the one-eyed ex-Florida governor who lives in the swamp, eats only road kill, and trusts only vets for medical help. My favorites are Skin Tight, Double Whammy, and Tourist Season.

What a delight to know that he is still alive and kickin'.

Here's the Chuck Berry website.

You know that you can left-click anything on our blogroll, but for links in text, you should right-click. But you all know that.

Membership on our blogroll on the left side of the column means that these are among the sites we find interesting - not that we agree with them! We are belatedly adding to our blogroll left-click list the following worthy sites this week:

Inside Higher Ed

BusinessPundit

Opinion Journal

The Corner

Gay and Right

What a story behind this treasure trove of Roman silver.

Story at Blue Crab. (He should write the book, or someone else will.)

First gear (Honda Honda) it's alright (faster faster)
Second gear (little Honda Honda) I lean right (faster faster)
Third gear (Honda Honda) hang on tight (faster faster)
Faster it's alright.

As Bob would doubtless point out on his radio show, this song was a Beach Boys cover of the 1964 orginal Little Honda by the Hondells. Lyrics here.

My next vee-hicle. My friends say a real man wouldn't buy a Jap truck, but I tell them that they are just insecure about their manhood. They say "Buy American." I say "How many American-made parts are in your Ford?"  And so it goes.  Honda Ridgeline.

Have you tried Under Armour? I have both the warm weather and the Cold Gear, and I find that it all makes me feel cold and uncomfortable, even indoors.

I know many people swear by it: hunters, campers, hikers, athletes, etc. I think the line was designed for pro football players. It has strong wicking properties. It fits tight and it's light. It's expensive stuff, but I just do not like it.

Since I own it, I guess I will stubbornly keep trying it, and will keep not liking it. Like anchovy pizza.

Much as I am fond of many of my up-to-the-minute blog brethren, after 1 1/2 years of this blogging project I find that we at Maggie's Farm are still too wedded, or maybe addicted, to the news cycle.

While the news cycle itself is an interesting thing that I may feel moved to write more about some day, at the moment I just want to remind our team that we do not need to be chained to it, or controlled by it. We know, up front, that the Mark Foley (it's Mark, right?) story had about 7 days in it, and the airplane in NYC had about 36 hours in it, that the Lancet story has about four days, and that the Harry Reid paperwork thing has about 3-5 days.

Truth is, these stories come and go, as Solomon in Ecclesiastes reminds us constantly. We would not be bloggers if we didn't want to add our two cents to the universe - or to our modest number of devoted readers.

It's kind of funny the way we bloggers receive each "news" event - delivered to us by the professional press 99% of the time - as if it were a slow ball over the center of the plate. Or an assignment to say something interesting. Like hysteric valley girls, or newspaper people trying to sell soap, it's "omigod, omigod..." and, after a few days, it's off the front page and gone forever.

And then, two weeks later, the story is gone - evaporated like a summer rain on pavement - just as the Harry Reid thing will be forgotten in a couple of weeks. Ho hum, just another US representative with deals on the side, and sloppy paperwork.

The world needs a blog devoted to follow-up stories, a few months out. The MSM would never bother, because it doesn't sell. Headlines sell, especially with sex and/or crime.

At Maggie's Farm, we not only try to put the brakes on our personal lives which move too fast and seem to pass too quickly - we try to put the brakes on our experience of the news cycle. We do this by interspersing the blog with things that are not transient; which are not opportunties to spout off or to get the scoop.

News is fun, and everyone has an opinion or a talking point or a spin or an angle or an insight on everything. As the crude expression goes, "Opinions are like a-holes: everyone has one." But what survives from the Bridgeport Post-Telegram from 1968? I know, and can tell you. Walt Kelly. Not much else.

Therefore, it is the cows and the dogs and the girls and the recipes that we offer which have the endurance and solidity: the newsy stuff and our opinions about it are the entertainment, such as it is. Yes, politics are important, but most of what we address so earnestly is, in the end, ephemera. It matters because liberty matters, and liberty is the food for the human soul. But we need to bear the transience of the daily issues in mind. Our reminder, to ourselves, about the things that endure and really matter are our posts on things like cows and dogs and plants and God, etc.

However, our dear News Junkie, keep up the good work. I deleted your instantaneous post about the airplane in NY Wednesday afternoon because I knew it was a non-story (until the Yankee angle came out - sad) , and you were trying to keep up. Not to worry. Not necessary. As noted on our header, we all have ADD. Hey! We are VICTIMS! But SURVIVORS! And, thankfully, we all have day jobs. If anything, we produce TOO MUCH "content", and should cut back - if we can.

Image: With those thoughts, we must provide another breed of cattle. This one is the semi-obscure but ancient Limousin, a breed of beef cattle from France, of course, which makes a fine rib-eye steak for the grill. Avec pommes frites, of course, and an expensive cabernet. Read All About It! - here.

And thanks much to all for being a Maggie's reader. You are good folks, and the price is right, ain't it? As long as we can last, we'll be curious about the things that endure.

Ye olde blogge has been interested in cattle, lately.
We have recently featured the most popular American diary breeds - the Holstein, the Jersey, the Guernsey, etc - for our city-folk readers who cannot tell a Jersey cow from a Jersey girl, and who have never milked a cow. (A post-test will eventually follow.)

While there are many wild species of cattle - American Bison, European Bison, Gaur, Water Buffalo, Cape Buffalo, Yaks, etc, the domestic dairy and beef cattle breeds are all derived from the Auroch, a Eurasian species which has been extinct since the last one was killed in Poland in the 1600s.

The word "cattle" is the antique French word chattel - same word as "possession". The word "steak" derives from the Saxon word for "stick" - that is, beef on a stick over the fire. Those Saxons ate well sometimes, I suppose, even without Weber grills.

A brief history of domestic cattle here. They were a great choice for domestication: relatively placid (not the bulls) grazing beasts which could provide milk, meat, labor, and leather. Since at least 6500 BC they were domesticated in Turkey, following pigs, dogs, goats, and sheep, but before horses.

Images: Aurochs from my time machine above, and an auroch from Lascaux to left.