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.
Said Joshua Slocum about the Spray. Spray was an abandoned and partly rotten Chesapeake oysterman, abandoned on the beach in Fairhaven, MA.
Apparently she was an unusually well-balanced boat. You could lash her tiller and she would stay on course all night. He rarely needed to man the helm, which made solo sailing possible. Autopilot.
It is theorized that she (and he) were sunk by a collision with a steamer.
If perfect safety were somebody's goal, they should never ride in a car. Everything in life, including "quarantining," is a risk.
If this exacerbation of preexisting vaccine hesitancy persists, the costs will be irreversible. Contracting Covid-19 poses a much greater risk of death than the J&J vaccine. Moreover, people who don’t receive the J&J vaccine face a far greater risk of all blood clots, including CVST, by contracting Covid-19 than they do from taking the J&J vaccine. Since early in the pandemic, we’ve known that people with Covid-19, especially those who are severely ill, have an increased risk of blood clots, leading clinicians to administer prophylactic anticoagulation. University of Oxford researchers found that the likelihood of CVST in the two weeks after being diagnosed with Covid-19 was 100 times the risk in the general population without the disease and about eight times the incidence following the AstraZeneca Covid-19 vaccine, which, like the J&J vaccine, employs an adenovirus platform. There was also an increased incidence of other potentially fatal blood clots in the abdomen after Covid-19 diagnosis...
Stay for lunch. It'd just be a bite, she said. Scraps, mainly. The manservant with the striped jacket came and went. He brought meaty moist proscuitto crudo slices and a dark rucchetta salad. Rich Venetian oxtail stew with slices of fried polenta. I like it best like that, said Marta Marzotto, heaping our plates. Slices off a huge pink Mortadella. You must have some of this, said Marta. A present from Pavarotti. The mortadella looked not unlike its donor, minus beard and teeth. There was a subtle chicken and lemon casserole. The most beautiful gorgonzola I'd ever seen. Entire, hacked open and voluptuously spilling out its creamy blue guts. The countess offered wine from an unlabelled bottle. A fine fruity white wine that was drunk even less than the food was eaten. We ate with massive, weighty cutlery made for real hands, and drank from Marta's fantastical colored goblets of Murano glass. Then a gloriously substantial coffee semifreddo. Have some more, said the countess generously, shovelling semifreddo on to my plate. It's warming up.
That is an Italian luncheon. Until halfway through the book when I decided to google her, I had thought that Marta was fictional. Nope. She befriended the author. While married to Count Umberto Marzotto, she managed a long affair with Sicilian artist, movie-maker and famous Communist Renato Guttoso who figures prominently in the book. A close pal of Picasso. Colorful people, adding a lot of life to life. La dolce vita, so different from life in Yankeeland.
We had a memorial hike for my dear late brother-in-law Bob this weekend in the Shawangunks. Around 20 of us I think, relatives and pals who knew and loved Bob. Bob, of course, had been the fittest of us all if you don't include my other sister's wonderful kids, in their 20s.
Minimal bouldering, just up and down hills. I prefer bouldering and so does Bulldog, but not everybody does. I love uphill bouldering, but downhill is a bitch.
Funny thing about group hiking and bouldering is that the group speads out, whether by fitness level or by conversation or nature-looking. Every once is a while, you need to reassemble for mapping, water, and a granola bar.
Afterwards, a late (3 pm) group brunch at Mohonk. You deserve a couple of beers. It's a 4th generation Bird Dog family getaway place, and Bob always loved it there.
Typical boulder field up there. Scramble up! It's good fun.
Next time, one of our famous urban death march hikes in NYC
The wood is mostly rotten now, but our place in CT had a big old stone boat long-abandoned next to a stone dump in one of our outer meadows. The metal parts, chains, and bolts are still there.
These sleds were used to remove rocks and even boulders from crop fields or hayfields to build either stone fences or to throw in rock dumps. They were laboriously pulled by oxen, mules, or, later, tractors. Loaded and unloaded by hand, of course, with the aid of muscle and crowbars.
Tough life being a farmer in New England. No wonder those that could moved to Ohio. After the sheep frenzy, it was dairy. Now, dairy is in barns and not fields in New England, but still pleny of maize grown in the flood plains.
Recommended. You do not need to be a STEM student or an MD to understand this history. I had not known that this author had a serious family history of mental illness.
A dangling participle walks into a bar. Enjoying a cocktail and chatting with the bartender, the evening passes pleasantly.
A bar was walked into by the passive voice.
An oxymoron walked into a bar, and the silence was deafening.
Two quotation marks walk into a “bar.”
A malapropism walks into a bar, looking for all intensive purposes like a wolf in cheap clothing, muttering epitaphs and casting dispersions on his magnificent other, who takes him for granite.
Hyperbole totally rips into this insane bar and absolutely destroys everything.
A question mark walks into a bar?
A non sequitur walks into a bar. In a strong wind, even turkeys can fly.
Papyrus and Comic Sans walk into a bar. The bartender says, "Get out -- we don't serve your type."
A mixed metaphor walks into a bar, seeing the handwriting on the wall but hoping to nip it in the bud.
A comma splice walks into a bar, it has a drink and then leaves.
Three intransitive verbs walk into a bar. They sit. They converse. They depart.
A synonym strolls into a tavern.
At the end of the day, a cliché walks into a bar -- fresh as a daisy, cute as a button, and sharp as a tack.
A run-on sentence walks into a bar it starts flirting. With a cute little sentence fragment.
Falling slowly, softly falling, the chiasmus collapses to the bar floor.
A figure of speech literally walks into a bar and ends up getting figuratively hammered.
An allusion walks into a bar, despite the fact that alcohol is its Achilles heel.
The subjunctive would have walked into a bar, had it only known.
A misplaced modifier walks into a bar owned a man with a glass eye named Ralph.
The past, present, and future walked into a bar. It was tense.
A dyslexic walks into a bra.
A verb walks into a bar, sees a beautiful noun, and suggests they conjugate. The noun declines.
An Oxford comma walks into a bar, where it spends the evening watching the television getting drunk and smoking cigars.
A simile walks into a bar, as parched as a desert.
A gerund and an infinitive walk into a bar, drinking to forget.
A hyphenated word and a non-hyphenated word walk into a bar and the bartender nearly chokes on the irony.
These are strange, if not snobby, cultural descriptions. I thought that Kenneth Clark's Civilization series (still available online) was excellent anyway.
Mrs. BD and I signed up for a local co-ed Pickleball league. Seems like a fast game. They said you didn't have to have any experience with it. We don't.
Social justice activists have been arguing for some time that scientific societies and institutions need to address systemic sexism and racism in STEM disciplines. However, their rationale is often anything but scientific. For example, whenever percentages in faculty positions, test scores, or grant recipients in various disciplines do not match percentages of national average populations, racism or sexism is generally said to be the cause. This is in spite of the fact that no explicit examples of racism or sexism generally accompany the statistics. Correlation, after all, is not causation. Without some underlying mechanism or independent evidence to explain a correlation of observed outcomes with population statistics, inferring racism or sexism in academia as the cause is inappropriate...
One might have hoped for more rigor from the leadership of scientific societies and research institutions.
In June of 1994 a dangerous storm caught dozens of cruising sailors by surprise as they voyaged north from New Zealand. There are times when there is no rescue. "Mayday, Mayday, Mayday."
When you go boating, you make a lot of other people responsible for you. Amazing film.
Much like Padilla’s, my own early admiration for the classical world can attest to the powerful appeal of the tradition. Unlike Padilla, however, I haven’t grown disillusioned with the field. My engagement with classical antiquity continues to affirm, for me, its civilizing values, rather than the corrosive barbarism of identity politics. As an African American, I am not an immigrant. I can trace my lineage back to slaves (and a few indentured servants) who lived in the early 18th century. I am thus living proof that the classical tradition has just as much to offer the descendant of slaves as it does those who are to the manor born. I suspect that this is part of what attracted the younger Padilla to the field: Like me, he sensed that the ancient Greeks and Romans promised a degree of cultural competence and uplift, if one could master them. Unfortunately, Padilla has since racialized that promise.
I have spent a good part of my life talking with people about the role of faith in the face of imminent death. Since I became an ordained Presbyterian minister in 1975, I have sat at countless bedsides, and occasionally even watched someone take their final breath. I recently wrote a small book, On Death, relating a lot of what I say to people in such times. But when, a little more than a month after that book was published, I was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I was still caught unprepared...
Said 
He spoke truth to power and made heresy a virtue."