Maggie's Farm

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.

Columbia College has the chance to stand up for diverse opinions, or to collapse ignominiously the way Grayson Kirk finally did so many years ago, when the lunatics ended up running the asylum.

Powerline wrote the story before we got to it, with the apt tagline "The whole world is watching."

In the meantime, someone should inform these kids that it isn't 1968 anymore. The college is highly competitive - so where are they finding these infantile idiots?

And will the college which prohibits a pussy reference for the hockey team recruiting (what a joke) stand up to these tantruming spoiled brat brownshirts-in-training?

It's time to find out what Columbia University stands for: the mature discourse of civil, educated adults, or delinquent mobs. I think a semester's suspension might be reasonable. A little time to grow up, just like a "time out" for 4 year-olds.  

Your move, Administration.

Update: More from Blue Crab here, and video from Michelle here.

Our contributor Gwynnie is up there this morning, on Lake Winnipegosis.

I wish for the gang far worse weather than in the photo (last October), when we had Bluebird weather five days straight, and the ducks were not flying.

For duck hunting, you want wind, fog, sleet, snow, rain. Things that make people uncomfortable make the ducks uncomfortable, and causes them to think about moving from place to place instead of staying put. My best hunts have been in snow. The expression "good weather for ducks" means good weather for duck hunting.

Otherwise, the ducks just sit in the sun and sleep in the middle of the lake. On such days, in time, the intrepid  hunter, who may or may not have had too much after-dinner port the night before, dozes off, too, leaving a silent lake, the pursuers and the pursued all peacefully dreaming in the October sunshine.

When a man comes home from a difficult day at work, nothing brightens his spirits and makes him feel more appreciated than being greeted at the door by the smiling face of the woman he loves with an ice-cold beer in her hand!

(T-rated image below - right-click on continuation page)

Maggie's readers know that we love Mark Helprin. A recent interview with him in Doublethink, via Small Dead Animals. A quote:

And by the way, when I was a freshman at Harvard, the first demonstration that I saw was one guy who was carrying a sign protesting. So I stopped and I talked to him, and he told me about how awful America was and everything like that. His case was that his father had been one of the members of the Hollywood Ten, and he had been forced to relocate to the south of France and write his screenplays under a pseudonym. And he says, “Well, it wasn’t right. He was completely innocent.” But the parents lied to their children. They didn’t tell their children. And I said “Well actually, he was a Communist. It was legal to be a Communist. But he should have said so. Or, even if he shouldn’t have said so, your telling me that he was not a Communist does not change the fact that was a Communist.” So he looked at me like he had found a lunatic Red-baiter. Right? “How do you know?” I said, “Because my mother was in his cell.”

The CD of his Carnegie Hall Concert of 2005 is released this week.

Chinin of the NYT visited Jarrett and interviewed him. It is worth reading for Jarrett fans. A quote:

Mr. Jarrett is one of the most renowned pianists in the world, a virtuoso equally at home performing Bach or bebop. And though he had been a child prodigy and a member of Miles Davis’s best jazz-rock bands, it was his Herculean solo improvisations — full concerts seemingly conjured out of thin air — that brought him worldwide renown. His 1975 album “The Köln Concert” (ECM) is the all-time best-selling solo piano recording in any genre, with more than three million copies sold.

In a recent conversation at his home in northwest New Jersey, Mr. Jarrett shed some light on the discipline behind his creative process, which his more perceptive audiences valorize as much as his facility at the piano. And he took a rare clinical walk-through, like a coach reviewing game film, of the spontaneous opus that ECM is releasing on Tuesday as “The Carnegie Hall Concert.”

The album documents in its entirety a performance that surpassed even the hopes of the crowd, which clamored for, and got, five encores. “There was so much comfort exuding from his body into the instrument, and out to us in the audience, that you felt like there were no boundaries at all,” said the pianist Jason Moran. “It was a real reminder of what the possibilities of the instrument are, and what the possibilities of a solo concert are.”

The whole piece is here. Image from the NYT article from this past Sunday.

John and some other Maggie's Farm buddies, standing in front of Class Action at Bud 'n Mary's Marina on Islamorada last Saturday. The fish are mainly King Mackerel, plus a couple of snapper. They released the sharks they caught.

Was in Nashville for the long weekend - found the big Home Depot, and of course the Outdoor World of Bass Pro Shops and Redhead. Saw Music Row twelve times, and passed by the Opry on I-40 about the same, but heard none of the music except from the speakers at the gas station and the hotel lobby. Do they have music in Nashville?

Something about the South: the wives go to Outdoor World with their hubbies. Overheard: "Honey, don't you think you want that same thing in the waterproof version? You could get wet and miserable out there, sweetie. It's only a little bit more. We can put it on the Mastercard." Will some feminazi shoot me if I say "The women are women and the men are men  boys  men whatever."

And we, at Maggie's Farm, love the Southern mentality, and the accents, too. And biscuits 'n gravy. We like to believe that the gravy provides a nice, smooth, healthy, slippery coating to those major arteries.

This photo of the Nashville Outdoor World was early in the morning, before they open. But, as with Cabelas, you always wonder why there are so many people INSIDE on a weekend when it's about being OUTDOORS. The parking lot fills up fast.

I know the answer: Guys love gear the way women love shoes.

Did they have anything I needed? No. Did I buy a few things? Yes. It's the American Way.

Time to return to the old duck camp in Manitoba, on Lake Winnepegosis - the lake with the name that sounds like a rare infectious disease.

Bird Dog, regrettably, will miss the trip this year, but Gwynnie will not. Boats gassed up and warmed up, and ready to go. No need to go out before daybreak - the ducks there like to sleep in. Weather is either Bluebird weather or sleeting in late September, but breakfast is coffee, scrambled eggs, home fries, bacon, toast, left-over steak from dinner, cereal, and fruit, and should suffice.

Plenty of ammo, apples, granola bars and water on board our duck boat. Let's go. Wait...I left my gun in the gun-room. Anybody got their camera? And hey, where's the dog at? And did we remember the radio? Where the heck are my gloves? I thought I threw them in my bag...

And my favorite, after you depart the dock: "Did anyone remember to grab the ammo?"

Were any other of our horsey readers there? I know one who was at the auction on Sept 16th. Sounds like it was good fun. Mostly weanlings, I guess, but others too. Some people in the East love Quarter Horses as trail horses but, these days, you have to go west to buy a good one. The Weavers are said to breed the best.

Originally bred for sprinting (quarter-mile) races in the Eastern US, their smaller size, maneuverability, lithe muscularity, delicate feet, and cow-sense made them the standard cowboy horse. They come in good colors, but the Grey and the Blue Roan are my favorites: