Maggie's Farm

Photo from Mr. Free Market

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.