Maggie's Farm

We have some number of readers who think NYC is Gomorrah. It's Gotham, not Gomorrah.  I'm a country boy, but I love it and find the neighborhoods endlessly fascinating.

I spent yesterday overseeing a relative who had a procedure at the Hospital for Special Surgery. It's ranked #1 in the world for Orthopedics. I have rarely seen any place run in such a friendly, cheerful, efficient, and well-organized manner. Even their security people are full of Good Morning and Welcome and How Can I Help You?, etc.

A chilly day in New York. As various things were going on, I got out to stroll around 1st and 2nd Avenues a bit, on the Upper East Side of Manhattan in the pleasant but not fancy part of the East Side, and I made a wonderful new 83 year-old friend in the Ambulatory Surgery waiting area too. A retired Econ. Prof from Chicago with a remarkable life story but I won't go into it. Everybody has a story, don't they? His wife was getting a shoulder repair.

Tourists never see the Upper East Side, way over near the East River. Lots of people live and/or work there, but it's a hike to the Lexington Ave. line (The Second Ave. El was torn down in 1942,  and has not been replaced yet).

Marianne used to enjoy these sort of pics - just a random street photo gallery -

More random street pics below the fold -

The famous rebel spy Nathan Hale taught in this one-room school in East Haddam, CT (then a part of Moodus, CT), for a short while after graduating from Yale. He felt too isolated there, apparently, so took another teaching job in the city down in New London.

Does that Lab hunt? You betcha.

So claims Psychiatrist Ted Dalrymple.

Rots the brain, promotes passivity. It's not called the Boob Tube for nothing.

Mine came out at 39 (which is just sort-of kinda slightly younger than I am). Fitness Age Calculator.

"Thomas Nagel's article "What is it Like to Be a Bat?" is undoubtedly one of the most important pieces of philosophical work completed in the last fifty years. "

That is from What is it like to be a man? A quote:

A conviction in physicalism, and the possibility of science fully explaining conscious experience in the future, is extraordinarily widespread among contemporary philosophers, almost to the point of constituting a professional creed (though there are some notable exceptions).  Implicit in this position is the deeper conviction that for conscious experience to be truly understood – for anything to be truly understood – it must be understood scientifically, that to understand a thing in an essential way is to understand it scientifically.  Such an attitude is bound up with that common belief among modern philosophers, traceable to the logical positivists, that their discipline is merely an auxiliary to the more fundamental work of the sciences, a belief adequately summarized by Jerry Fodor as “the world picture that the natural sciences have a sort of priority…to which other discourse is required to defer insofar as it purports to speak literal truth.”

Nagel's essay is a critique of reductionism. Here is Nagel's famous essay.

My baby Sis, on the right, sent me this pic she found of us messing around with boats many years ago. I was helping her tune her Laser's rigging. We both remain happy to mess with boats of any sort, anytime. Sail or power. We have a feel for water. In adolescence, this one particular sis of mine was a great sailboat racer (Lasers, as in photo) but always scowling. Tough competitor. Happily, she outgrew the scowl, hasn't really scowled for years, has three cool, scowling kids now, and a distinguished career.

Lightnings were my racing boat. Our threesome of young fellows even got into Sports Illustrated, with my cuz as skipper. We took strategic risks, often, to break from the pack and we studied the winds, currents, and tides. Wonderful boats for learning seamanship, and seaworthy in most weather including those nasty summer squalls which always added excitement and danger.

I consider basic seamanship to be a fundamental adult life skill, along with swimming, shooting, tennis, land navigation, quoting Shakespeare and the Bible, catching and cleaning a fish, how to start a fire, play an instrument, budgeting, fundamental principles of cooking, handling tractors on hills, riding a horse, public speaking, log splitting, using correct grammar when called for, handling tools, appropriate grooming, dressing, and manners including table manners; pleasing social conversation, making basic judgements about other people, making a Martini, and a few other things - most of which which I have not yet perfected but there is still time.

I suppose every person has his own idea about the Basic Life Skills needed to negotiate the world effectively. I know some who would even include Golf!

The youth need parents to teach these things - or to pay to have them taught. It's called parenting, and it can't be outsourced. It's a serious enterprise.

Re-posted -

If all of your winter firewood has not been split yet, it is Splitting Maul Season.

Log splitting is a great joy, a great work-out, and useful. And it can be done as well by a 113-pound gal as by an 180-pound fellow because, when done properly, the maul does most of the work. Heck, it's a sort of lever. You lift it, then let gravity and leverage do the rest of the work, assuming you put the right English on the blow to your log. That is a matter of practice and experimentation, and a deep source of pleasure once this basic life skill is acquired.

Axes are terrible for wood-splitting. Wedges get stuck, cause huge frustration, and get lost in the field. There are all sorts of good mauls. This photo of mauls shows the spring-loaded maul, #5, which looks like a foolish gadget but which truly works well, and will really throw the wood around if you are wise and work on the edges and don't aim for the middle of a big one. Highly recommended by the Bird Dog Consumer Reports.

I approach a large log in the classic manner: I work around the edges, then I chop the corners off the remaining square, or pentagon, or whatever it might be. I like to end up with a square piece at the end. Knots? I never fight a knot just like I never argue with a Leftist/Statist. I burn them intact.

Very satisfying work and, as Thoreau said, it warms you twice: Once when you split it and again when you burn it. That is true Yankee economy.

Teach your children well...

A self-propelled log loader, built by Clyde Iron Works, Duluth.

After we said some words over the grave, and after some shed some tears, we put Dad's ashes (surprisingly-heavy box of ashes) in a shallow hole next to Moms' and we all went to pick some apples and pears from Dad's trees at the farm last Sunday.

It was just wonderful that is the best year for apples, ever. My pic is just a small sample. The mini pears are as sweet as sugar and his apple varieties are spicey. Stood on chairs and used a butterfly net to harvest the high ones.

I claimed that our Dunkin Donuts coffees and the fruit were our family's Communion after the burial. We did not dare running it through a church. Everybody picked and ate some apples.

Thus did we sneak some Jesus into my cranky Yankee atheist, Bible-loving, distinguished Yale prof Dad's burial. I think it would have been marginally ok with him but he still would have been embarrassed by the attention and sentiment.

And likely, would have had some clever caustic quip about it all. Anyway, excellent apples. Everybody grabbed a box or bag and took a bunch home with them.

He always said that we could toss his cadaver in the river when he died. Well, the box of ashes is darn close to the trout stream.

From Evangelicals and Israel - What American Jews Don't Want to Know (but Need to). One quote from the important essay:

...no one can be born a Christian in evangelical belief: everyone must come to Jesus individually of his own volition, making a profession of faith based on a genuine conviction of the truth of Jesus’ messiahship. This also explains why, more so than the members of almost any other branch of Christianity, evangelicals share a profound attachment to the textual world of the Bible. For the evangelical, the Bible is more than just a “good book”; it is the literal and inspired word of God, written by prophets who were moved by the holy spirit and preserved through the ages by the hand of divine providence. To evangelicals, the Bible is the blueprint of the cosmos, the framework of history, and the answer to all of life’s mysteries. Only the Bible—not a priesthood or a church hierarchy—can assert authority over the Christian.

Some might term me an Evangelical and some might not. Either way, I learned some things from the essay.