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.
Is Die Hard a Christmas movie? My son says no. I say yes. My brother says yes, the director John McTiernan says yes, and a host of others say no.
Others play Solomon and split the baby. It's not a movie with a Christmas theme, but does include the element of Christmas. So, "no, but..."
Another way of looking at this is to ask if there was a message regarding "the system" in Die Hard. It was based on a book which was clearly anti-capitalist in nature, and McTiernan states it was supposed to be anti-capitalist. Frankly, I think he lost on that score. The proletarian nods don't really add up well. Capitalism had been so successful in providing more for all that by the time the movie was made some of the items he felt delineated 'wealth and privilege' from 'working class' were no longer meaningful. They are even less so today (assuming our economy had not been locked down, which has only exacerbated some of the divisions of wealth which were barely noticeable before).
That said, the most noticiable delineations of class today are not wealth-related, but power related as our "leaders" lock us down and lecture us on how to behave, only to go do the exact opposite things which they suggest we do. The real 'class warfare' today is power vs. the lack of it, not whether one has more money than someone else. Of course, that was always the nature of 'class warfare', but Leftists love to obscure that fact with a veneer of basic economic BS that only people with common sense can see through. McTiernan, therefore, fails miserably in his goal of making a legitimate anti-capitalist story. Mainly because there is no legitimate anti-capitalist story to be made. Unless you are a "trained Marxist" and know how to create one out of whole cloth. (For what it's worth, the term "trained Marxist" always made me laugh. I studied Economics at The New School, which tried very hard to push the Marxist agenda, and I read quite a bit of Marx, Hobsbawm, Gordon and a host of other Marxist garbage. So I'm a "trained Marxist" and one of the things every single Marxist professor said was "Marx left no blueprint, only an idea with no path forward and no clear goal except revolution." That's why Marxism and Leftist thought is such utter BS. Unlike Classical, Neo-Classical, Monetarist or even Austrian schools of thought, Marxism is just an idea and not a fully-formed one, but full of childish and misleading binary concepts. Though I will credit Marx with completely shifting the study of History in a very meaningful and useful fashion.)
At any rate, to me Die Hard is very much a Christmas movie and very much a pro-capitalist one. After all, Hans Gruber himself, like so many Marxists before him, only cared about the power he was managing (his gang) and the money he was trying to collect, and was utilizing a facade to perpetrate his crime...you know, like BLM and Antifa today. These movements are cargo cults, full of images that seem to 'make sense' but cannot ever effectively achieve the goals they have set for themselves because they are inclined only toward one thing. Perpetual Revolution.
Clement Moore was a real New Yorker. His lifetime of scholarship is long forgotten, but his doggerel is a gem. His family farm was named "Chelsea", and it is still Chelsea. Moore's family church still stands, St. Peter's. Been there, amazing old woodwork inside.
Moore is buried uptown. We almost got to that cemetary on our last urban hike.
The German Christmas tree — a rootless and lifeless corpse — was never worthy of the day, and no one can say how far the spirit of rationalism which begins with the denial of Santa Claus, the supernatural filler of stockings, and ends with the denial of all things supernatural, has been fostered by the German Christmas trees, which have been adopted so widely in this country. … The Christmas tree, dropping melted wax upon the carpet, filling all nervous people with a dread of fire; banishing the juvenile delight of opening the well-filled stocking in the dim morning light, and diffusing the poison of rationalism thinly disguised as the perfume of hemlock, should have no place in our beloved land.
I always need to spend some time in NYC at Christmastime regardless of weather or viruses. We feasted with family and took a nice slippery walk through Central Park. Lots of bundled-up people walking. Mostly cheerful, some masked-up and some not.
The Met set out to be “worthy of this great metropolis and of the wide empire of which New York is the commercial center,” the civic leader William Cullen Bryant declared at its inception. Through a history of dedicated leadership, dutiful scholarship, and astonishing private beneficence, such ambitions have been more than realized.
Our Christmas Tree is a museum of sentiment. Essentially no store-bought stuff except things we found on our travels that stick on a tree, and all of my small bird ornaments. We have our kids' rattles, things they made in kindergarten, things like that. It's all personal.
The BD genius was to store them all in a living room bureau. 4 steps to take 'em out, 4 steps to throw them back in. No boxes, no wrapping ornaments, no fuss, almost no hassle. Bureau is a lovely 1500s hunk of wood.
If some old things break, it's ok. Nothing material lasts but Christmas lasts. We're planning a few small get-togethers, and we are signed up for Christmas Eve service (outdoors, I think).
When grandkids, will ask them each to pick one ornament to take home for their own tree.
Our post on tipping the other day raised the issue. As Christmas season is quickly approaching, I reviewed in my mind all the people to whom I give gratuities (ie material Thank Yous) at Christmastime, and throughout the year.
- our two garbagemen - $50 each before Christmas - horrible job, hard work, - our mailman - $25 at Christmastime - our carpet-cleaners - $5-$10 to each guy when they come (I give it before the job, not after - it works well) - our doctors and dentists - we send them all a Harry&David or fancy cheesecake each holiday season - restaurants - 15%, or 20% if I mean to return - hotel room staff - leave a $20 for them on the table. It's a crappy and thankless job. - my accountant - a holiday bouquet - porters at airports and hotels - $5 - barber - $5 per haircut - family lawyer - a holiday bouquet - food delivery guys, $5 - parking garage guys - $3-5 each time - cabbies and limo drivers - 15%, unless limo tip is included in the bill - coffee shops - I always leave them a buck or 50 cents. Spread the wealth! - bartenders - around 10-20% of the total - club and golf club staff - if you don't know what to do, the club managers will make suggestions - yard helpers - once or twice a year I'll give them each a $20 - home repairmen - $10 per visit, or $20 for a big or difficult job
I believe that I am pretty much in the mainstream on this. I am missing a few on that list, can't remember them all.
We have natural gas heat, stoves, etc. Good stuff. Our only 35-year-old furnace system came to the end of its life in the past week or two (planned obsolescence?), and the water heater for the heat system leaked.
I don't know what our readers have, but we have 4 zones. It would be better to have 6, but whatever. We didn't get into that.
A new high-efficiency gas furnace is not cheap. And it is tiny. 48 hours with just fireplaces was a good reminder about how people lived in the past. A reminder of how good we have it.
The wonderful installers asked me whether I wanted a new programmable thermostat for my work space. Nope. The antique one is great. Just turn the dial up, down, or off. I can do that.
With the Superbowl of politics coming up, let's address real daily life. So many people seem hyper about the election. Relax. Life is good, except for House Mice.
Mus musculus was a native to northern India but is now worldwide, spread by shipping.
They are clever enough to realize that living in houses and barns are a good deal. They are annoying but cute pests for sure. Cats, in fact, were introduced to Europe from Egypt to control house mice on farms. Even today, you do not know how much House Mouse poop is in your flour.
Native wild mice of all varieties do not tend to invade homes or barns. Hardly ever, just the highest IQ ones.
What a life he led, from poverty to fame and fortune. He had the luck to be born handsome with an animal masculinity which, in some ways, limited his range. No matter what role he played, I always saw him through the role.
Sure, he defined James Bond, but if you never saw Hunt for Red October, watch it.
The lady reviewer found the book arousing. It's about sex, surrender (or sacrifice), and individuality or lack thereof in acts of surrender or sacrifice.
The author of the piece at Quillette says the book is not about sexual fantasies (male and female), but it is.
If one must always search out one’s own desires in order to correct them, then we are suddenly no longer in Aury’s tender world of flesh and fantasy, but rather in Orwell’s world of surveillance and paranoia. Once we moralize the inner landscapes of our own erotic imaginations, even our explicitly pornographic fantasies, what pleasures are left to us that aren’t merely ruthlessly self-serving? And what is left private? It was, after all, a moment of privacy and warmth within myself that I enjoyed while reading O on an airplane. It was a privacy that opened up my erotic imaginings, that deepened me and, ideally, planted the seeds of private fantasies to be shared and discovered with a lover. For sometimes even privacy is best shared with a co-conspirator in laughter, and imagination, and sensuality, and in secret touches and all things forbidden. Things wicked and sweet and brutal and tender. My own private Chateau.
The first thing is to bring clarity to those you work with. This is one of the foundational things leaders do every day, every minute. In order to bring clarity, you´ve got to synthesize the complex. Leaders take internal and external noise and synthesize a message from it, recognizing the true signal within a lot of noise. I don’t want to hear that someone is the smartest person in the room. I want to hear them take their intelligence and use it to develop deep shared understanding within teams and define a course of action.
Second leaders generate energy, not only on their own teams but across the company. It is insufficient to focus exclusively on your own unit. Leaders need to inspire optimism, creativity, shared commitment and growth through times good and bad. They create an environment where everyone can do his or her best work. And they build organizations and teams that are stronger tomorrow than today.
Third and finally, they find a way to deliver success, to make things happen.This means driving innovations that people love and are inspired to work on: finding balance between long-term success and short-term win; and being boundary-less and globally minded in seeking solutions.
There are three things you need to determine about a candidate: talent, judgement, and personality. Think of hiring an engineer as if you're buying a race car. The first thing you must look for in a race car is horsepower, because without horsepower the car is useless for racing. The horsepower of engineers is talent. Without talent, engineers are useless for building products, so it's the first thing you must look for in a candidate. It doesn't matter how nice the person is, or how hard-working. No horsepower, no race.
Talent alone is insufficient. The world is filled with talented people who never get anywhere for a myriad reasons. Laziness, anxiety, fragility, impulsivity, egotism, victimhood, just to list a few. So once you've identified talent, you have to determine the shape and quality of its vessel. Where will the person direct their talent? And are they well-adapted to the demands of the external world?
A New Look Inside the Most Extravagant Apartment Building in NYC. 
Our Christmas Tree is a museum of sentiment. Essentially no store-bought stuff except things we found on our travels that stick on a tree, and all of my small bird ornaments. We have our kids' rattles, things they made in kindergarten, things like that. It's all personal.
Our post on tipping the other day raised the issue. As Christmas season is quickly approaching, I reviewed in my mind all the people to whom I give gratuities (ie material Thank Yous) at Christmastime, and throughout the year.
With the Superbowl of politics coming up, let's address real daily life. So many people seem hyper about the election. Relax. Life is good, except for House Mice.