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.
I grew up down the road from Bernstein's weekend house. My Mom was friends with Mrs. B. and I recall that they did garden designing together. A gay friend of mine who had met him at a party acknowledged that Lenny was "as gay as a Christmas Tree", but I guess he and Mrs. B. worked it out somehow and they had three kids.
Who cares about that? Bernstein was a rock star, and contributed a heck of a lot to American culture. As best I can recall, I only heard him conduct the New York once in youth, but I wouldn't know the difference anyway. Conductors do their interesting work in rehearsal, not on stage. If you want to learn about music performance, attend a rehearsal instead of the final performance.
He loved Mahler. When he grew older, Bernstein devoted himself to musical education. His Young People's Concerts on youtube are valuable to any adult. They were always sold out in NYC. Here's one of his Young People's Concerts at Carnegie Hall:
Bernstein claimed that Copland was his real teacher. West Side Story had to be one of his composing masterpieces, an opera, it is Romeo and Juliet:
Boys are more at risk than girls in the U.S. educational system. A MetLife study stated, "Girls appear to have an advantage over boys in terms of their future plans, teacher's expectations, everyday experiences at school and interactions in the classroom." Boys are less engaged in school, and less engagement means less success in the classroom; in fact, engagement with school is probably the single most important factor of academic success. Boys are more likely than girls to come to school without supplies and without doing their homework. Why aren't boys more engaged in school? According to Sommers, "schools today tend to be run by women for girls. Classrooms can be hostile environments for boys. They like action, competition and adventure stories. Those are not in favor. Games like tag and dodgeball are out; tug of war has become tug of peace, and male heroes have been replaced by Girl Power." Boys receive lower marks from female teachers, according to research done for the London School of Economics' Centre for Economic Performance.
American schools are designed for scholars, and gals. The average guy just does not like to do as he is told, especially by a female. Furthermore, many guys like manual work. It feels good.
Gather 'round, friends, and let me tell you of the most wonderful, relaxing three months I've ever spent in my life.
It was at beautiful Camp Elmwood.
It doesn't take much to set the scene (see accompanying photo). A few acres way on the outside of the S.F. Bay Area with a rolling terrain of paths and camp buildings with lush green lawn everywhere you looked, all safely fenced off to keep the vagabonds and ruffians at bay. The weather was splendid (I was there in the Spring) with crisp mornings and warm afternoons. The atmosphere of the camp was invigorating. It was fresh. It was alive.
And just why am I telling you about beautiful Camp Elmwood?
At dinner Friday night I was chatting with a lady about all of the farm stands that were here in Connecticut when I was growing up. Every truck farm had one: a rickety structure on the roadside with a little dusty space to pull up on, with baskets of eggs, tomatoes, corn, eggplant, red and green peppers, cut flowers, potatoes, apples. melon, raspberries, blackberries, turnips, bundles of fresh herbs, honey, dried strawflowers, giant Sunflowers, squash, pumpkins, corn stalks for fall decorations - whatever was ready that day.
Business, if steady, was never sufficient to justify manning these roadside booths. They usually had the prices written on pieces of cardboard, and one of those large mason jars to leave your money in.
The nice lady told me that Holbrook Farm in Redding, CT still uses the honor system, but not during the height of the season when things are too busy. Hearing that cheered me very much.
No spy cameras either - just good old-fashioned American country-style trust in one's neighbor. I do not think I would like to live in a place where a shop could't have an honor system, but I guess credit cards and sales tax collection complicate things these days.
Let's talk about how smart women are for a minute. There have been many very smart women throughout history. First there was Joan of Arc, who was burned alive at the stake, then there was Madame Curie, who irradiated herself to death, then there was Amelia Earhart, who died in a plane crash, then there was, um..., oh, Susan B. Anthony, who was so famous they named a $1 coin after her.
Smart women, all!
Pic: Artist's concept of what smart women think about
Well, under the same heading, I just love what this lady did. It goes to the very core of pragmatism.
To wit:
You're a cigarette smoker. You're seriously hooked. You've tried everything to stop, but you just keep failing.
Last Tuesday, 5-foot 1-inch Lopez went up to Sacramento County sheriff’s Deputy Matt Campoy outside the main jail and slapped him in the face, apparently for no reason. He grabbed the woman and took her inside the jail, where she again slapped his arm as soon as he turned her loose. Confused, Campos handcuffed her again, and that’s when the woman told him she had picked him because he was in uniform and she knew getting arrested was the only way for her to quit smoking, as tobacco is forbidden in prison.
When it comes to your health, you just gotta do what you just gotta do.
I was actually surprised how many commenters took the "Moron!" approach. I thought it was brilliant and daring. And the blotch on her 'permanent record' really won't make any big dif in the future, and any lawyer could get it expunged. But that week or two she spends in the hoosegow might make a very big difference when her grandchildren have a grandmother around to love and grow up with.
Well, now that we've got that 'smart' stuff out of the way, let's get down to the intrinsic, elemental, key role women play in the interwoven society of modern day life and what they bring to the table:
Boobies.
No, wait...
Other stuff and boobies. Right, that's it. I mean, I wouldn't want to shortchange the other body parts. That just wouldn't be manly.
And, speaking of boobies, what does a man really, really hunger for in life?
Good food.
Good food surrounded by pleasant women who, as we've already proven, can be quite smart. You combine your smarts with hers, your wallet with her good looks (to make up for the lack of yours), and we're talkin' an equal deal here with no 'objectification' in sight.
Our friend at the Q&O site is having problems with his semi-expensive watch, so I thought I'd repost this.
We posted a while ago about expensive watches, Vacheron Constantin, Patek Phillippe, and all that. I've had a couple of moderately-expensive ones over the years but over time the repair and maintenance seemed foolish and, sad to say, an Accutron cannot be effectively repaired anymore.
As cheap watches go, I don't like digital watches. I like to see the sweep of time.
When I last went for a dreaded and long-delayed medical check up on the insistence of Mrs. BD, I noticed that my fancy doc wore the same one I did - a Timex Expedition. They are good for about ten years or more, and when you need to replace the leather band it comes with with a nice leather band, the band costs 3X more than the watch.
Any watch I wear gets banged around quite a bit, but I feel naked without one. Are they male jewelry, social signals, or are they tools?
Amazon sells them, real cheap. $31. That is indeed a fashion statement: it declares that you are a sensible person.
Surely not by our bourgeois standards. Given the human brain and the human adaptability which is a gift from the most creative of us over the past 150,000 years, I think it's impossible to say what is "natural" for people other than to claim that it is natural for humans to make things and to live in cultures.
Are Savages Noble? The parts about war and sex (naturally) are especially interesting. So I guess war and sex are natural, too.
Admittedly, some words become meaningless over time.
Buggy whip industry.
Herewith, I am going to spell out my own little list, dismantling each word in turn. While I'm aware some harsh critic could come along at any minute and point out how this is nothing more than an academic exercise in sophistry, solipsism and semantics, I'd like to go on record as stating that that's exactly what it is.
In a generally ascending order of interest and/or importance:
You might have heard of that social anarchist who runs Coyote Blog. I wrote a scathing exposé on this scurrilous scofflaw here.
As for coyotes, he seems to think they're a cute, cuddly bunch, but a Google search proves otherwise:
Well, this menace to society is back in the news, again preaching his particular brand of anarchy, this time against the very foundation of our language, and thus society, itself:
By the way, if anyone read the fabulous book "Barbarians and the Gate," they** will remember RJR Nabisco's construction of a...
[...]
** I know this is grammatically incorrect, but I am exhausted with English's lack of a third person singular gender-neutral pronoun and hate saying "he or she." English is a language built bottom up from actual usage, so lacking any better idea, I support "they" as the solution.
I've been using "they" in this regard for over 20 years.
In fact, you could even say that the subject is a part of blog history. As I note in my bio, I was 'blogging' on a daily basis on my BBS a decade before the word was coined. In one of the first pages I wrote for the board, the 'Welcome' page, I told everyone that they'd see two variations from standard English in my articles; using 'they' for 'he or she' and putting punctuation outside of quote marks. (I'll cover the latter some other time.) So it could be said that one of the first blogs in history mentioned this very subject. Twenty-two years ago.
Here's the famed James Taranto quoting other people in his daily column. James is a stickler for following the rules.
"But there's something disappointing in giving your sparring partner exactly what they [sic] want."
"Of course what Ferraro said is that "nobody is going to say they [sic] don't ..."
"Where a person lives, their [sic] immigration status or who they [sic] love should not ..."
"... if a black person killed a white person they [sic] were more likely ..."
"If a 5-year-old can't sit still, it is unlikely that they [sic] can do well in a kindergarten class ..."
What this is really saying is, Broken is okay. I'm sure James and associated sticklers would like to fix every other broken thing on the planet, but for some reason they happily exclude this one obvious blow-it from their agenda. The question for James is, Are you planning on doing this for the rest of time eternal?
Here's the bottom line:
They does not necessarily equal plural. And I can semi-prove it.
My very first week in the South, I was alone in a diner. The waitress walked up and asked, "How y'all doin' today?" The exact same thing happened at a different diner a few days later.
That's when I realized that y'all doesn't necessarily equal 'plural', and 'they', in this context, is no different. To refine it even further, you could say that 'he or she' is the they, because more than one person is involved.
Coyote got it exactly right. Unlike any other language on the planet, English was built; constructed; formed from a collage of many languages, even varying forms of English, itself, and is thus designed to change with the times as the building process continues. While a total bitch for the outsider to learn, we who are fluent in it are offered an immense, descriptive vocabulary that no other language comes close to. In many, if not most languages, the exact meaning of a spoken word is based upon inflection. In English, we have a whole different word for every single variation, and then we still have inflection for the nuance.
Put another way, using 'they' for a singular person might feel a little awkward, but [sic]'ing every use of it for the rest of time eternal sounds a lot more awkward.
Forbes Magazine has hailed it as the most lovely campus in the US. Maybe so. That's a tough call. It's a tiny campus on a hill in the middle of a very pleasant and serene rural "nowhere." Feels more like a New England prep school than a college. One thing I can say is that the kids they admit are committed to the life of the mind, and the faculty is committed to each kid in a personal way. A good combination indeed.
Rigorously-demanding, too. While most famous for their literary and theatrical pursuits (The Kenyon Review, plus Paul Newman and Jonathan Winters at the same time), Kenyon has the highest graduate admit rates to medical school in the US.
My pupette's poetry prof, to my delight, knew Elizabeth Hardwick who was one of my poetry profs (along with the brilliant and inspiring...wait for it...Edward Said. He was not doing Palestinian politics then). Cool.
All elitisms run the risk of inbreeding and sterility. The real benefit of a perceived equality among citizens, as driven by the rough and tumble of economic competition, is not only that it expands the wealth pie but also continuously changes the diners at the table. That means that some at the head table may never have the proper politically correct manners, but that is the price of vitality. The problem with socialism and its near cousins is that it places the selection of winners and losers (even if called “industrial policy”) in the hands of the status quo, who quite naturally will put their friends and family first in line.
Commencement Weekend, and those darn Mennonites hog all the best parking spots in front of the pubs. People tell me they are Amish, others say these people are Mennonites. Same idea.
These people believe our ordinary lives are foolish, vain, Godless, and empty. I can't swear that they are wrong, but they are just ordinary people too.
Lovely flat farmland north of Columbus, this weekend. A little further north, the land becomes pleasantly rolling in a way which is reminiscent of New England. Corn ("maize" to you in Yorba Euroland) is just beginning to sprout. It is no wonder that ambitious New Englanders and upstate New Yorkers fled here in the early 1800s for the good farmland. 90% of Americans were in the agricultural industry at the time and they were not stupid about money. It was not about aesthetics: subsistence farming sucks. People desire profit. Farms are outdoor solar factories.
I'll post some more of my Ohio pics later. I took almost 50, which is a lot for me in 3 days.
Two weeks ago, I wrote a piece about Jason Collins and one comment made a comparison to the gay Jason Collins getting all the media attention, while Tim Tebow was being run out of the NFL for being a vocal Christian. I think the first part was true, while the second part was primarily a longshot opinion. There are too many Christians, and some very vocal ones, like Kurt Warner, who have played the game and not suffered.
I do believe Christians in the US suffer far more media abuse than gangster rappers, but that's another story. I'm writing this about Tebow, who I happen to like. He's a smart kid, a hard worker, and a good leader.
But sometimes even that just isn't enough. While his introduction to the NFL signaled an appreciable change in the nature of the QB position, unfortunately his skill set is not up to snuff.
That said, the guy still has more playoff wins in Denver than a certain Peyton Manning. Which perhaps says more about Tebow than it does Manning.
As our paleontological readers know, we are currently living in an Ice Age, right now in a minor somewhat warm (but not today) interglacial respite between the last and the next major glacial incursion.
History does matter, boys and girls. The most recent major interglacial (as opposed to the mini warm spells as in the past few thousand years) is known as the Eemian Interglacial. It lasted around 15,000 years, beginning about 130,000 years ago, and ended with our current ice age cycle.
At the peak of the Eemian, the northern hemisphere winters were generally warmer and wetter than now, though some areas were actually slightly cooler than today. The Hippopotamus was distributed as far north as the rivers Rhine and Thames…Trees grew as far north as southern Baffin Island in the Canadian Arctic Archipelago instead of only as far north as Kuujjuaq in northern Quebec, and the prairie-forest boundary in the Great Plains of the United States lay further west — near Lubbock, Texas, instead of near Dallas, Texas, where the boundary now exists. The period closed as temperatures steadily fell to conditions cooler and drier than the present, with 468-year long aridity pulse in central Europe…and by 114,000 years ago, a glacial period had returned.
The Eemian was the time when Homo sapiens began moving north out of Africa and the Middle East.
Sometimes it's a good idea to put things in perspective. Just for fun, here's the past 500 million years of climate change. We're still in an alarming and great 50-million year glacial, cold period, period with ups and downs within it. It's a fact that the earth, right now, is about as cold as it has ever been in the past half-billion years.
That's the big picture. Here's more detail, of just the past 65 million years but even on this scale the Eemian doesn't show:
I am sure that the energetic and ridiculously-productive (blog, books, newspaper opinion pieces - plus a day job teaching) Prof. Glenn Reynolds would enjoy having a law named after him.
A reader reminded us of Reynold's Law. Good comments there, too.
1. Dang compressor died in our icebox. Replacing it would be a few thousand $, half the cost of a new one. OK, get a new one. The KitchenAid lasted 20 years. Nice timing, it died 2 days before our Mother's Day party and cook-out. Ribeyes on the grill for 12. But why, I wonder, does the 55 year-old Frigidaire at the farm still work fine? The very pleasant, amusing, and smart refrigerator repairman (retired NYC cop on 75% salary) explained that it's because the old ones were low-tech. He said KitchenAids are the best, and Sub Zeros are just for show, not worth the $. He said modern refrigerators require surge protectors. Besides the cost, worst thing is that the failure defrosted my year's supply of frozen cranberries.
2. Gwynnie always tells me I need to get out more. Mrs. BD drags me out constantly for social events. Whenever I go, I meet charming ladies and guys who are far smarter and more accomplished than I am. That is life-enriching and humbling. At a cocktail party on Friday nite, besides touching base with old pals, I met a guy who builds nuke plants around the world and a physicist who loves modern dance and speaks intelligently about Thomas Nagel. He kept pressing me on whether I was a materialist (in the metaphysical sense), but his lovely wife said he had had too many gin and tonics. I kept saying "I don't know," which made him think I was smart.
3. Worked on the vegetable garden yesterday, with the lad. Deconstructing parts of it to make it smaller. It just got too big to keep up with. I realized that all I really care about growing are tomatoes, cucumbers, rhubarb, and herbs. Everything else is just as good from the store, and no weeding required. In the afternoon, I split logs from a tree we took down in the winter. I ache all over. The good kind of ache. Some days I feel like I'd like to bring back slavery, but it just wouldn't be right in today's political environment. I don't mean black slavery - any color would be fine.
4. This morning, we had a Mother's Day wren in the bedroom. The house painter had not put the screens back on the windows. I figured it was a good luck thing of some sort. At least it wasn't a rabid bat. It was indeed a House Wren. Kind-of funny, because I saw this morning that a pair of Chickadees are nesting in one of my wren houses. We love to house the homeless here at Maggie's HQ. Still hoping that a pair of owls will use my Screech Owl house. I've heard them around a couple of times in the early morning, but I am not sure that they like my placement of the thing. My experience is that they seem to like their houses in full sun.
What a character he was. He embodied all contradictions and futilities and was possibly the best pub or dinner companion of all time. Boswell's stuff is great fun to read (Boswell was quite a character himself), but nobody has run out of things to write about Dr. Johnson.
Should the youth "follow their passions" in career direction? And what if they have no career passion? And is "passion" necessarily a wise guide to major life decisions anyway? (It's definitely a good guide to hobbies and avocational pursuits, but not always a good guide to talent.)
... college grads should forget the dream of stable, long-term jobs in the education, health care, or public sector (what he refers to as the “rentier cartel-state economy”), and instead adapt themselves to the realities of the freelance economy.
Good advice. The rentier economy is going nowhere but downwards.
If you have the ambition to energetically create the life you want, clarify your goals, clarify your principles, learn all you can from your errors, be a helpful but tough manager of yourself and of others. It worked for him.
There seems to be something wonderful about something new.
We recently picked up a new car, an SUV of course to help prevent global cooling. (I wanted a Suburban but that is not what She fetched - thought it was too long for her to park.) An off-lease car, because we like the idea of letting the previous owner take the hit on the depreciation nowadays. Stupid not to, since they all come with 4-year warrantees anyway.
Happily, we are down to only three - or 2 1/2 - vehicles and, finally, no boats to worry about.
However, it got me to thinking about the charms of new things. New camera, new car, new house, new dog, new gun, new girlfriend or boyfriend, new painting for the wall, new horse, new piece of furniture, new iPhone, new place to visit, new landscaping plan and new plantings, new paint job, new chain saw, new tweed sport jacket, new TV. New sexual position.
The charm of the new never lasts, but it delights for a while before it lapses into the routine. Unless your new car is a Maserati, perhaps.
What is it about the new that so enchanting, when we know that new becomes old and familiar so quickly? I ask this as someone for whom old things are the most comfortable.
Gather 'round, friends, and let me tell you of the most wonderful, relaxing three months I've ever spent in my life.
Let's talk about how smart women are for a minute. There have been many very smart women throughout history. First there was Joan of Arc, who was burned alive at the stake, then there was Madame Curie, who irradiated herself to death, then there was Amelia Earhart, who died in a plane crash, then there was, um..., oh, Susan B. Anthony, who was so famous they named a $1 coin after her.
As our paleontological readers know, we are currently living in an Ice Age, right now in a minor somewhat warm (but not today) interglacial respite between the last and the next major glacial incursion.
The pleasures of Dr Johnson
There seems to be something wonderful about something new.