We are a commune of inquiring, skeptical, politically centrist, capitalist, anglophile, traditionalist New England Yankee humans, humanoids, and animals with many interests beyond and above politics. Each of us has had a high-school education (or GED), but all had ADD so didn't pay attention very well, especially the dogs. Each one of us does "try my best to be just like I am," and none of us enjoys working for others, including for Maggie, from whom we receive neither a nickel nor a dime. Freedom from nags, cranks, government, do-gooders, control-freaks and idiots is all that we ask for.
This is just one small example of why these intertunnels, as Sipp terms them, are so cool.
I posted a pic of a nice oil lamp I picked up at a junk shop in Ohio. An alert reader promptly identified it as a Rayo lamp made by Bradley and Hubbard in Meriden, CT., around or before the turn of the century.
When I was a kid we had a barrel of kerosene with a spigot on a stand in the garage. Kerosene was useful for all sorts of things, including burning the garbage and for taking paint off your hands. Also, to make torches to burn the tent caterpillar things out of the fruit trees. Funny, haven't seen many of those lately. Kerosene has a good garage smell.
Then I learned this at Ebay:
Bradley & Hubbard was one of the inspirational leaders of the Roycroft movement in New York, well known for their arts and crafts industry. Walter Hubbard and his brother-in-law Nathaniel Lyman Bradley, started making cast iron clocks,tables,frames,andirons,chandlers and lamps. The company became Bradley and Hubbard manufacturing co in 1875. They turned out some of the most outstanding leaded glass lamps you'll find.
So they manufactured all sorts of lamps back when CT was a manufacturing center. There are all sorts of old Bradley and Hubbard lamps for sale online.
For one thing, he did paint "an America that was." I lived it, it was my growing-up world. Not everybody's, but mine for sure in New England. Church, barber shop, the town drunk, the town meeting, teasing the girls, backyard baseball, the classrooms, all of it. Call it fine art, pop-art, illustration, whatever. Was Watteau a "fine artist" or an interior decorator? I'd say the latter. Picasso? No and yes.
Rockwell documented the small, mundane moments of ordinary life. His pictures are great fun to look at in the same way that Breughel's are. Paint can accomplish much more than a camera ever can, but it's all either for religious or secular entertainment.
The Rockwell Museum is in Stockbridge, MA, if you are ever passing through there. Same town as Alice's Restaurant.
It is true. Docs who use electronic records spend more time on the computer than with their patients. Even worse, the treatments are increasingly done by prescribed protocols instead of designed for the individual situation. Case in point: When treating a patient with dementia, electronic health records fall short.
Furthermore, those records are not private. This is what you get when government gets more involved with medical care - and anything else.
My patients know that they are not on an assembly line, and I'll keep it that way until they make it illegal. Doing things my way, however, requires that I take no government insurances. Just pay me for my time at around the same fee as a master electrician and below the rate of a fancy lawyer.
Almost everybody wants to stay strong, fit, attractive, and ready for life. Avoiding carbs can keep you shapely, but it won't keep you fit. Walking is fine for the elderly for whom a long walk can constitute "exertion," but, otherwise, keeping one's muscles alive doesn't need to take very much time if done right.
The government should provide all of us sedentary cubicle-monkeys and couch-sitters with trainers for a half-hour daily, just as North Korea does. Daily government monitoring of our life-styles via in-home NSA-supplied video systems would be a good start. We all need more free services and more help from our moral and intellectual superiors.
As someone who worked for a firm for many years, I have been self-employed for a while. The costs of self-employment are high:
- office space, maintenance, and insurances, including buying your own Disability - work insecurity, erratic income, and no unemployment - no paid vacations - no splitting Social Sec and Medicare taxes with an employer - I pay 100% of it - I find my own medical insurance and pay 100% of it - Nobody contributes to my IRA except me - no collegiality
With all that, it's understandable that most people prefer being employees. So what's the benefit?
Kipling, who turned thirty in 1895, would likely have stayed in Brattleboro had not a bitter quarrel with his drunken lout of a brother-in-law put an abrupt end to his New England idyll. The Kiplings had built a beautiful Indian-style bungalow high above the Connecticut River (it is still there), and had hired Carrie’s boorish brother, Beatty Balestier, to care for the meadows and build a tennis court (also still there). Their quarrel over money ended in physical threats and a histrionic court hearing attended by so many spectators and reporters that the proceedings were moved to the largest assembly room in the town hall.
The Late, Great American WASP - The old U.S. ruling class had plenty of problems. But are we really better off with a country run by the self-involved, over-schooled products of modern meritocracy?
... the WASP elite had dignity and an impressive sense of social responsibility. In a 1990 book called "The Way of the Wasp," Richard Brookhiser held that the chief WASP qualities were "success depending on industry; use giving industry its task; civic-mindedness placing obligations on success, and antisensuality setting limits to the enjoyment of it; conscience watching over everything."
Under WASP hegemony, corruption, scandal and incompetence in high places weren't, as now, regular features of public life. Under WASP rule, stability, solidity, gravity and a certain weight and aura of seriousness suffused public life. As a ruling class, today's new meritocracy has failed to provide the positive qualities that older generations of WASPs provided.
Only WASPS know what "NOCD" means - but we often marry outside our tribe nowadays, just as Jews do. I am a loyal tribalist, myself. I think it works out for the best, speaking the same language, having the same social, psychological, moral, and behavioral expectations, finding familial comfort after the cultural adventures of youth. Every tribe has its own snobbery, its own unspoken language, and its own zone of comfort. Birds of a feather...We recognize our own peeps in an instant.
My tribe, my cultural ways, may not be dominant in the US anymore but, like other American subcultures, we retain and protect our ways of living and of doing the things we do within our own domains. There are lots of those domains left, but mostly private - and churches.
I don't know why they bother to wonder whether he was gay or not. Sounds more shy and inhibited to me, but who cares? I didn't know that he was a New Yorker.
Craig's List has it all. I am told you can search "Diesel," "Dog Food," or "Pain Relief," and if you sort through the listings you can find whatever you want. Heroin, Meth, coke, crack, Ecstasy, pot, Oxycontin, etc.
I do not want this stuff, but lots of people do. Yes, they deliver to your door or workplace in manila envelopes, but they do not take credit cards.
Thus the successful government war on drugs, ongoing since the Nixon administration. Prohibition never works. This is an ordinary Black Market similar to the Black Market for booze during Prohibition (when Joe Kennedy got rich with his Boston mobster buddies).
I am opposed to drug prohibition, and I am opposed to substance abuse as a terrible life plan.
One of the many things missed by many so-called "cosmopolitan sophisticates" (actually self-absorbed reality avoiders) is that the deepest pleasures in life are in giving, not taking, and creating the appreciation for giving in our children.
We had a full day scheduled for today, as do most families on weekends. Each year for the past eight or so the boys and I have brought new toys to the breakfast at Camp Pendleton (about a half-hour north of us) paid for by Congressman Issa, whose foundation pays for many such charitable works throughout North County San Diego. We usually go at about 11AM but would need to go at 7:30AM in order to make it to Gavin's basketball game at 11AM. I asked Gavin if he wanted to skip the toy collection breakfast today, so he wouldn't be tired for the game due to the earlier wakeup. Gavin immediately replied, "But, then poor kids will not have as many toys for the Holidays." Out of the mouth of babes (actually a just a month short of 9-years old) comes the core wisdom we take pleasure is seeing in our children.
So, arriving early, Congressman Issa marveled at how both boys have grown over the years he has known them.
Then we joined another family with whom we've sat for the past 5-years, whose son Eugene also had a basketball game today, so they arrived early, and for the same reason -- to make sure that kids less fortunate had new toys for Christmas.
Off to basketball, Gavin arrived just as the game began, and his increasing skills were soon evident. (We practice together every chance we get, especially right now on strengthening his dribbling with his non-dominant hand.) (below) -
It's just a matter of degree. Shouldn't the government simply put Prozac and amphetamines into the water supplies? Historically, one of the selling points of Coke was the coke in the mix.
It's not a bad deal to be poor in America. Government benefits are almost endless, not to mention private charity. Everybody will try to give you money and stuff. American "poor" don't have to work, have big TVs, cars, and air-conditioning, EBT cards, food stamps, and subsidized housing. Good for them.
If feeling poor is appealing, there is a sure-fire way to accomplish that. Be single, have kids, and don't work. Don't get any religious sustenance, and don't learn how to do anything useful. Add a little substance abuse or jail tattoos to that or some body piercings, for maximum effect, and make sure you have no positive social network. In other words, don't build your life in a rational, civilized manner.
Well, there is another way. What's the "poorest" village in America? Kiryas Joel. They are all on welfare. Happy. I believe many of them work off the books, too.
What can be more fun during Thanksgiving break than shooting a gun with family and friends? It can be the best time of year to get some target practice. I will usually grab my father-in-law and my boys and head out to a local range. This year, we didn't go. However, we typically visit family on Fire Island the following weekend, and they provided a surprise. Skeet shooting off the deck into the Great South Bay. 12 gauge pump actions and a 12 gauge over/under were the tools available.
“The American market for straightforward guides to etiquette dwarfs the British one. Even though large numbers of the British and especially the English are sticklers for etiquette, they pretend that such matters are either unworthy of discussion or in no need of it. Much more popular are guides that give them cynical or supercilious treatment. These reflect, wittily and sometimes not so wittily, on when it is a good idea to lie, how to navigate the hell of a second family, and the art of deflecting people who threaten to be tedious. It is a defining feature of English manners that they can be treated, simultaneously, as vitally important yet also comical. But then one could apply the very same terms to Englishness itself.”
I do plenty of DIY stuff around the house, but wish I was this handy. Gotta compliment the guy, he did a helluva job restoring this cabin and making it livable.
Re-posted
The Late, Great American WASP
