Thursday, May 18. 2006
Canada is de-registering long guns and shotguns. Good for them. Isn't sanity a fine thing? Those of us who like to hunt in Canada will appreciate that, but I bet Canadian shooters will appreciate it even more. I have no doubt that their billion-dollar attempted gun registration system was designed to lead to total disarmament eventually, because it wouldn't help much with the bad guys - what bad guy would commit a crime with a legal gun? Cap'n Ed has more on the subject. And more at Canada's Small Dead Animals. Image: A favorite Maggie's Farm hunting location, in central Manitoba, last O ctober.
Time to plan your August cruise. Medium or small ships are the best places, because you can never forget that you are at sea. We are very fond of the Holland-America Line, and have been for fifty years. For all of their trips I have taken, my favorite remains the old NY to Southampton route. Chilly, foggy, and old-fashioned. No need for a fancy suite: being on the ship is the thing. Make that historic crossing before you grow too old to enjoy it. Forget the food: you can see whales, petrels, shearwaters, giant ocean swells, the rare passing ship, mist rolling in and, if you're lucky, a good North Atlantic storm that will stir the soul and spirit (and stomach). Walking a few miles around the Promenade Deck at 6 AM in the cool North Atlantic mist, on a jerkin' boat, is a very fine thing to do. Image below: MS Statendam 
Tuesday, May 16. 2006
 If your dogs need work - hunt-training, obedience, etc., and you are in the CT area, Rick emailed us to recommend Quinebaug Kennels:
Jennifer is doing a great job with Parker and Sammy, my two hunting labs. Maggies should put her site up. A lady who can train dogs AND shoot guns. Nice. http://www.quinebaugkennels.com/
Oh - she has a new litter of black labs - only hunters need inquire.
Monday, May 15. 2006
Sometimes you come across people you don't understand very well. Your mind doesn't work like theirs does. The muse that whispers in their ear is different than any other. Many see work like his, and wonder why anyone would ever make something like that. Others might wonder why it had never occurred to somebody before. Maybe it did, and they thought: That's nuts. I can't do that. It's not the Sistine Chapel Ceiling. It's not Art, or Science, or Boatbuilding, or Engineering, or any thing else in particular. It's just captivating, all by itself. The world is often a harsh and violent place. We argue and tussle over things great and small; but every once in a while someone like Livio de Marchi shows up, and injects a little whimsy in the proceedings, just for the love of it, just for fun. Visit his virtual museum, and see all the cures for the world's ills he sculpts from wood in Venice, Italy. He didn't cure cancer, but he sure cured Monday.
Saturday, May 13. 2006
 If you are a Tom Wolfe fan, you will enjoy the speech he gave as the Jefferson Lecture at the National Endowment for the Humanities on Wednesday, printed in the New York Sun. In this wide-ranging and a bit random essay, he discusses speech, status, Freud, neo-Darwinism, immigration, Max Weber, rednecks, politics, college kids, drugs, and a host of other matters. One quote:
Evolution came to an end when the human beast developed speech! As soon as he became not Homo sapiens, "man reasoning," but Homo loquax, "man talking"! Speech gave the human beast far more than an ingenious tool. Speech was a veritable nuclear weapon! It gave the human beast the powers of reason, complex memory, and long-term planning, eventually in the form of print and engineering plans. Speech gave him the power to enlarge his food supply at will through an artifice called farming. Speech ended not only the evolution of man, by making it no longer necessary, but also the evolution of animals! Our animal friends—we're very sentimental about predators these days, aren't we—the lions, the tigers, the wolves, the rhinoceroses, the great apes, kangaroos, leopards, cheetahs, grizzly bears, polar bears, cougars—they're "endangered," meaning hanging on for dear life. Today the so-called animal kingdom exists only at the human beast's sufferance. The beast has dealt crippling blows even to the unseen empire of the microbes. Stunted adults from Third World countries with abysmal sanitation come to the United States and their offspring grow six or more inches taller, thanks to the wonders of hygiene. Cattle, sheep, pigs, chickens, turkeys would be extinct by now had not the human beasts hit upon the idea of animal husbandry. So far the human beast enjoys the luxury of crying sentimental tears over the deer because she's so pretty. But the day the human beast discovers deer in his cellar, fawns in his bedroom closet, bucks tangling horns in the attic at night above his very bedroom . . . those filthy oversized vermin, the deer, will be added to that big long list above. We're sentimental about the dolphins, because they're so smart. What about the tuna? It's okay to kill tunas by the ton because they're dimwits? It would take an evolutionary mystic (and there are such) to believe these animals will ever evolve their way out of the hole they're in thanks to man's power of speech.
Friday, May 12. 2006
Why can't "older" women find husbands? Joe explains it: For a woman of any age, finding a good man is a daunting task. By the age of forty, women find that all men are either (a) already married, (b) gay, or (c) idiots. Since the good ones are already taken, women have a choice of either stealing someone else’s man or stealing someone else’s man - and then converting them. Over the age of forty, women have a similar difficulty since all men are (a) still married, (b) still gay, or (c) dead.
 A quote from Curtis Sittenfeld's Prep, after Lee's semi- boyfriend Cross loses a basketball game:
When the buzzer sounded, I looked at Cross and was astonished to see that he was crying. I looked away reflexively, then looked back; his face was scrunched-up and red, and he was roughly wiping his eyes and shaking his head, but he wasn't trying to hide it... Sports contained the truth, I decided, the unspoken truth (how quickly we damn ourselves when we start to talk, how small and inglorious we always sound), and it seemed hard to believe that I had never understood this before. They rewarded effortlessness and unself-consciousness; they confirmed that yes, there are rankings of skill and value and that everyone knows what they are (seeing those guys who were subbed with two seconds left before the end of a quarter, I'd think how girl's coaches would never be that heartless); they showed that the best things in the world were to be young and strong and fast.
Thursday, May 11. 2006
I will be seeing an early pre-screening of the movie, and will share my impressions when I do. But I think I already know what they will be: Another solidly-made, tasteful, and very entertaining Ron Howard film, representing no danger either to God or man.
A Nukak tribe from the Colombian bush has arrived in town, and seems to enjoy the free food and shelter. NYT If it were the US, these folks would already be registered to vote.
 Quoted from the French feminist author Phyllis Chesler's new book, in a very entertaining mini-review at No Pasaran:
The kind of closed-minded "political correctness" which I have just described above is typical of groupthink and totalitarian thinking. If someone thinks for herself in an independent and creative way and dares to come up with non-party-line conclusions, she or he is then, in classic Orwellian style, deemed the enemy, a traitor, a non-person. Their work will not be read or discussed. They will not be invited to debate or to debate in a civilized and honorable way. They will be called a "racist" and a "neoconservative." If a feminist dares raise the specter of Jew-hatred and the demonization of the Jewish state among leftists and feminists, she will quickly discover that she has become unwelcome in the mainstream media and among leftists (who actually think of themselves as liberals), and among feminists.
Wednesday, May 10. 2006
From a fishin' song by Woody Guthrie: Well I went down to the fishing hole,
And I set down with my fishing pole;
Somethin' grabb'd my hook and it got my bait
And Jerked me out in the middle of the lake.
Huh it was some jump boy,
I got sunk, kinda baptized on credit. Jumped in the river and went down deep,
There was a hundred pound cat-fish lying there asleep,
Well I jumped on his back and rode him all aroun'
Saddled him up and I came into town.
People came runnin', lookin', dogs a-barkin'
(Kids a-squallin').
Proof that fishing is a fair sport. Fisherman killed by large catfish.
Opie likes to tell me about the thriving Cuban art scene. Not even Fidel and his cops and thought police can destroy the human soul. This from a young Cuban artist: 
 Kay Hymowitz reviews a new book by Flanagan: To Hell with all that: Loving and Loathing our Inner Housewife. The radical feminists hate her, but they should not: it's the radical feminists who "reinforce stereotypes." Who would want to be the kid of a radical feminist? Not me.
Quote from the excellent review: What Flanagan might have better underscored is that her real subject is not The Question: To Work Or Not To Work. It is love. Flanagan had a fierce devotion to her own mother, whose presence haunts the book. She experienced in her mother’s pot roasts and freshly ironed laundry the embodiment of comfort, safety, and love. Despite Flanagan’s deficiencies in the domestic arts, it’s a feeling she badly wants to bring to her own family. What this talented writer reminds us of are two simple truths that are apostasy to the fundamentalists and, sadly, lost to many young women who never saw them in action: that when working properly, satisfying domestic life can embody a mother’s love for her children, the most powerful love there is; and that no matter how women choose to live, this love will forever be entangled with self-sacrifice. Should this really be the stuff of war without end?
Whole thing at City Journal here - it's good, and funny. Image: A young woman gazing at the ocean at Cahoon's Hollow, wondering about her identity, feminist stereotyping, male oppression, and the meaning of life - and hoping she'll meet the tall, dark and handsome man of her dreams at the bar later on.
Truth is, I know a fair bit about algebra, and trig too, including many cheerful facts about the square of the hypotenuse. I even remember key bits of calc. I have no idea how anyone can consider themselves educated if they do not. And it isn't all that difficult - it's simple logic. I can teach anyone, with an intact brain, the basics of algebra in an hour. After the basics, it's all fun and creative problem-solving. Good for the mind. Is it useful, or necessary? I would say so. There is not much that can be understood in depth without math. Silber at TCS takes on the reporters who "don't get it", (and thus surely cannot understand economics either, or statistics, science, or ...). It is difficult for me to believe that reporters would brag about not knowing basic math, but I guess it explains a lot. But how did the guy Silber mentions graduate from college, not to mention high school, without learning it? Good piece. He also touches on the long history of algebra.
Tuesday, May 9. 2006
Raphael was a contemporary of Michelangelo and DaVinci - the High Renaissance. The early Renaissance art intrigues me more, but Raphael's Madonnas, and his work at the Vatican, had a major impact, despite his short life. He definitely liked to paint cute cherubs. This is Isaiah - definitely a dude to listen to. 
Monday, May 8. 2006
...so it may as well be me. As someone who works in NYC every day, I am g  rowing weary of the 9-11 "families." They are not sacred. There were a lot of folks who were successfully attacked by Jihadists, but that gives their families no special moral status. They are regular people, and it could have been me or you. Their endless, entitled demands on the city have become ridiculous, and it has become some wierd mission or morbid obsession, it appears, on their part. They are wrong to use their loss to control and manipulate the rest of us: that is an abuse of grief. Personally, I think a bronze plaque on a wall of the new building would be perfectly appropriate: "On this site, on September 11, 2001, America was attacked by Islamic Jihadists resulting in the deaths of 2752." We do not need a multi-billion dollar hystrionic thing to remember what was done to us, as a city and as a nation. A self-selected group of "Families" have become professional mourners and wailers, and that is unbecoming - and annoying. Bury your dead, remember them in your hearts, set your spirit against the enemy, and move forward. And quit it with the victim family schtick (sp?). All of us around here had friends and neighbors and family members die in 9-11, but don't make that grief a life-long career. We have also had plenty of death in Afghanistan and Iraq. We are in a war which we did not seek, or want. Not one of us forgets what was done to you and your loved ones, and to us as a nation. We saw it. We are dealing with the enemy. That is what matters, and that will be history's memorial. Mayor Bloomberg seems to be fed up, too.
 The ending, last night, was the height of TV. Paulie, sitting silently with his Mom on an authentic Italian New Jersey sofa, stunned, emasculated, and disoriented, watching Lawrence Welk.
Am I alone in thinking that this season's Sopranos is the best that it has ever been? Finally, this bunch of vulgar and ignorant sociopaths and low-lifes are actually being affected by life and reality. I discussed this with the hubby last week; we decided that only Chris and Paulie would be immune to change. Woops. Wrong! The moving part of this is the idea that these ruthless creeps might really have hearts and souls, buried deep inside - however immature, self-centered, paranoid, and undeveloped they are. And the bits about Vito in New Hampshire - wonderful. Live Free or Die! It makes you sympathetic to every lost gay fellow, searching for a real life. It almost brought tears to these eyes when Vito and the diner cook went riding off on their motorcycles through the New Hampshire hills. I heard a semi-well-informed rumor that they might come back next season...we'll see. I hope so, because it is finally becoming more interesting than it was - and it was always brilliantly-made, with perfect detail. And with perfect music.
Sunday, May 7. 2006
Home from the splendid 1909 Fort Washington Avenue Armory (right amongst Columbia-Presbyterian Medical Center) and the USFA Super-Regional Junior Tournament, with the granddaughter. There is a lot I don't know about fencing, but I do know that it demands far more athleticism than I had imagined, and that it is a sport based on tactics and trickery. Very mental, like all mano a mano games. But strength matters plenty, or they would not have boys separate from the girls. She has her share of bruises, but she failed to draw any blood from her opponents, as I suggested. She was handily defeated by the powerful US #1 in 14-and-under foils, but otherwise did OK. I have no doubt that it is more fun to do than to watch, since everything happens so fast that it is barely visible. If you haven't seen this, the scoring is partly electronic. Their vests and weapons are wired. Fights are quick and devilishly intense. T-shirt on sale: Fencing: Invented by Men, Pefected by Women. Here's half of the top floor of the Armory, filled with young fencers, coaches, and volunteer expert referees. I never ceased to be amazed by all of the little worlds of dedication that America consists of - with no government "help". 
We will try not to rely 
on Gagdad Bob too
much, but the guy is
good. He opens with a quote: Nothing happened in the sixties except that we all dressed up. --John Lennon He goes on to discuss what the freedoms of the 60s really mean, and why he rebelled against the fashionable dogma. One parapraph: Obviously, freedom itself cannot be the goal of freedom, for that is a nonsensical tautology. But for the left, it is. This is why most leftist “liberation” movements quickly devolve into the liberation of one’s own inner slave master to further enslave them. Thus, the feminist movement has nothing to do with truly valuing femininity or allowing a woman to truly become herself in the deepest sense. In order to do that, you must specifically rebel against feminist dogma. Likewise, “sexual liberation” hardly leads to anything beyond self-indulgence. The civil rights movement which began with such noble ideals quickly became nothing more than an entrenched establishment platform for venal ethnic lobbying and special consideration. This reached another new low last week, with the massive criminal marches all over the U.S. Why does the left relate to these entitled narcissists? Oh, that’s why.
Yes, read it all.
Saturday, May 6. 2006
If anyone gives you the idea that Dylan has lost it - forget it. He just gets more real and true. Less word-intoxicated, for sure, but this 2005 song is one of his very best, and not on any CD. Simple and perfect. Tell Ol' Bill is available on i-Tunes, so we cannot offer the download. Listen. Lyrics here - on Maggie's.
Thursday, May 4. 2006
So says Scott, of Bing Crosby.
Wednesday, May 3. 2006
A guy was sitting quietly reading his paper when his wife walked up behind him and whacked him on the head with a magazine. "What was that for?" he asked. "That was for the piece of paper in your pants pocket with the name Laura Lou written on it," she replied.
"Two weeks ago when I went to the races, Laura Lou was the name of
one of the horses I bet on," he explained.
"Oh honey, I'm sorry," she said. "I should have known there was a good explanation."
Three days later he was watching a ball game on TV when she walked up and hit him in the head again, this time with the iron skillet, which knocked him out cold. When he came to, he asked, "What the hell was that for?"
She replied, "Your horse called."
Tuesday, May 2. 2006
An old Alden
Sunday, April 30. 2006
Our Boy Genius Webmeister Chris is getting a new sail this spring. It's a 145% Genoa, a Tape-Drive cruising sail, here being completed at UK Sails' sail loft on still-salty City Island, NYC. Sails are one of the few things which are not mass-produced these days, but instead must be hand-made by master craftsmen - hence their extreme cost. A sail is a wind engine - a wing - an airfoil. The high-tech material adds to the cost, too: the only thing nicer than a see-through jib is a see-through blouse. 
Scott at Powerline points out that you can listen to a few of Paul Simon's new songs, including Wartime Prayer, at Simon's Site.
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