Maggie's Farm

Thorncrown Chapel in Eureka Springs, Arkansas (h/t, reader).

Is the Hillary Clinton campaign the Black Knight? It's not over yet, because she can bite.

Put the youngest Bird Dog pup on the plane to Charlotte very early this morning for the Junior Olympics Tournament. (She does Foil - elegant, but millions of rules. It's like physical Chess.) Gave myself a little treat by taking the Queens-Midtown Tunnel from LaGuardia airport into Manhattan, and grabbed a bag of fresh hot bagels and some good coffee before heading back north to the serenity of Yankeeland. I do love NYC. Who doesn't? It is vitality, even at 6 AM.

On a Saturday morning at 6 AM you can drive up Manhattan to the 96th St. entrance to the FDR quite enjoyably, despite having to dodge wacko, reckless, seemingly insane or drunk guys in wheelchairs in the middle of 3rd Ave, disregarding the street signals. Had camera, but too dark.

Fencing demands a lot from your legs, your brain, and your spirit. The young 'uns all come back with some good purple bruises, so it's a wonder that the goo-goos haven't banned this "violent" game yet. In pitiful Euroland, at least.

Bruises = Life.

Well, this pup of mine is good at finding her way around new places - a handy life skill - having done Europe a couple of times more or less independently. When she goes to a Fencing tournament, I say "Return with your shield, or on it," or sometimes "Dulce et decorum est pro patria mori."

I want to see blood on her foil.

The Jimmy Bruno Quartet in April, 2007. "Loverman" (forgive his promotionals - it's good marketing):

Playing this instrument looks like sign language.

This gal can play the Theremin, at David Thompson.

We already posted a Valentine's Day piece, but one more won't hurt.

Fairy-tale romances in the WSJ

Want an office romance? Sign the contract first.

Marriage: It's only going to get worse. (h/t, Dr. Sanity)

Need testosterone? Go shooting.

Is settling for Mr. Good Enough really Good Enough? Dr. Helen

Marriage pros and cons. Kim

Proposed on Imus today, a new book: "What Did I Do Now? A Men's Guide to Menopause."

And, finally, Bird Dog's 5-cent marriage advice: Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.

I think this might be a fake website, alas:  Felonspy. I found some bad guys I did not know about, but none of my friends. If it were genuine, some of my pals would show up there, for sure. 

They do not guarantee accuracy - read the disclaimer.

This story of Sinatra begins like this:

Frank Sinatra, the greatest vocalist in the history of American music, elevated popular song to an art. He was a dominant power in the entertainment industries—radio, records, movies, gambling—and a symbol of the Mafia’s reach into American public life. More profoundly than any figure excepting perhaps Elvis Presley, Sinatra changed the style and popular culture of the American Century.

Read the whole thing at The Atlantic while listening to one of his masterpieces below (music, no video):

I refer to Ken Follett's Pillars of the Earth, which I have just finished. It ain't littercher, but it's an absorbing read. He is a master storyteller and permits no let-up of tension.

It's in the historical fiction genre, set during the Civil War of 1139-1153. That war of succession was prompted, you may recall, by the foundering of the White Ship with William, the only legitimate son of Henry l, on board.

The book does a good job of putting you in a time and place. The gravitational center of the book is the building of cathedrals during the time when pointed arches and ribbed ceilings were first used, and when it was realized that pillars could support the weight of the buildings without relying on thick walls, thus permitting large windows.

Has mankind ever built anything to match the grace and artistry and grandeur of a gothic cathedral?

As I was reading the book, I kept wishing I could find our copy of David Macaulay's Cathedral. It's here somewhere...

Stevie Wonder:

Stormy afternoon house cleaning yesterday after church and Lenten Group study, including putting away some Christmas stuff. Decided to pick up and re-order the CD mess - hundreds scattered everywhere and many loose, homeless orphans separated from their jewel cases.

I wondered whether anybody still buys, or uses, CDs very much. I still like them, because I have three quite high-end sound systems around the place (including my precious Legacy speakers) which I enjoy more than computer speaker sound.

Anyway, I collected every CD in the house and put them all back in their cases, and made stacks. To Keep it Simple, Stupid, I made five categories: Pop (incl. rock), Classical, Roots (eg folk, blues, country - including every Emmy Lou - , Jazz, Irish, etc) and Misc (religious, Christmas music, Broadway, Cole Porter, Shakespeare plays, random home-made mixes, etc) and, finally, a Dylan stack.

The Pop, Classical, Dylan, and Roots stacks (many stacks of each so they wouldn't topple) were about the same height. How did the Dylan stack get so high? Because the Dylanologist has given me so many CDs of live performances (on top of all of his production recordings), which are far more interesting than the commercial CDs despite the iffy sound quality.

Creating order out of chaos is both mindless and satisfying, like doing the wash. I did find a Highway 61 Revisited in a Schubert case. I did end up with about 20 loose CDs without cases, and about ten cases without their CDs, which ain't bad.

I have enough Creedence. I need more Schubert, though.

We dedicate this piece to all of those who are still seething about McCain. This will soothe the injured heart: Anderson and Roe piano duo with Saint-Saens' The Swan. (h/t, Classical Virtuoso)

Re-posted from our archives:

There seem to be Bellow fans and Nabokov fans. I'd have to place myself among the Nabokov, but only because I've read more of his. Lolita's fame - more the fame of shock value than the literary - is probably undeserved. Are older guys attracted to younger women sometimes? Indeed. Historically, it was not uncommon for girls/women to be married at Lolita's age. From the NYT:

Legal considerations aside, not everyone took to the book. Edmund Wilson was repulsed; like many, he had trouble untangling author and narrator. Evelyn Waugh thought the novel without merit, except as smut. (On which count it was "highly exciting." To E. M. Forster those same pages were "rather a bore.") Rebecca West found the novel labored and ugly, a diluted blend of Peter de Vries and S. J. Perelman. Worse, she found in "Lolita" a great deal of Dostoyevsky, whom Nabokov abhorred.

Hmmm. I'd tend to take the Rebecca West comment as a compliment. Anyway, read entire Lolita update in the NYT.

From Building a Shed (h/t, Theo). It begins:

This week I have been mostly engaged in helping my old mate Colin build a shed. I'm enjoying it immensely; it's honest, manly toil with cement mixer and saw in pursuit of erecting an honest, manly structure wherein honest and manly things may be done.

The tale brought to mind the interview with Arthur "Two Sheds" Jackson:

Francisco Barrera, 1643. I would like this painting hanging over my dining room mantle.

His new record, Dirt Farmer, is up for a Grammy. If you are in the neighborhood, his band (with Larry Campbell) will be performing in Woodstock, NY, tonight. This video from a recent performance on the Don Imus radio show.

Here are some good and bad ideas.

Of course, roses and nice diamonds are never wrong, but if the evil greedy bank is in process of repossessing your trailer or your houseboat, you should consider a Gift Subscription to Maggie's Farm Online Edition!

The price is right, and we offer year-long mental, spiritual, and physical stimulation rather than the ephemeral pleasure of a rose. And we are sexy, too.

The silly issue of whether the Indians had butter for their baked winter squash (and their corn on the cob) brought to mind one of the best scenes ever seen on the silver screen, from Mr. William Claude Fields, in the Yukon film parody The Fatal Glass of Beer:

More from that film here at YouTube

Dalrymple doesn't want to live in a world without Falstaffs, criminals, fatty foods, messiness, alcohol, smokers, and trailer trash - a too-sterile world of "rational tyranny" and perfect post-Puritan morality. I agree. One quote:

When I read the medical journals these days, I feel I am reading the medical equivalent of Ella Wheeler Wilcox. They speak only the best of good sense (one doesn’t argue with a poem by Ella Wheeler Wilcox). They tell us how we, or rather they, that is to say the general public, ought to live. Not too fat, a certain amount of exercise, no smoking, drinking in moderation of the right kind of wine taken purely as a medicine to ward of heart attacks and strokes, in short, every activity and comestible to be treated as a medicine to be taken in the correct dose.

It is not easy to argue against this rationalistic tyranny, just as it is not easy to answer a puritan without sounding as if you are positively in favour of sin, the more of it the better. No doubt properly conducted studies have shown precisely how much alcohol one should take to achieve the greatest possible longevity; or if they have not been conducted yet, they will be conducted in the very near future. Science will establish precisely how much butter one is allowed per week. Epidemiology will hunt down all the dangers lurking in our habits. From this, prohibitions and imperative duties will inevitably follow. It is only natural, after all, that doctors should advocate whatever saves and prolongs life.

Read the whole excellent thing.

Henry Beard and Christopher Cerf put this grimly humorous book together. My copy of the book is dated 1993, but it is more relevant today than it was back then as this self-parodying stuff has permeated the language - some as jokes, eg "vertically-challenged," and some seriously, eg "special child" and "partner."

I am sad to report that the book is out of print, but it still can be gotten via Amazon. Sample entries:

Vagrant.  Nonspecifically-destinationed individual; directionally-impoverished person.

Phallocentrism: The use, by white heterosexual males, of such discredited devices as reasoning and logic to maintain a position of sexual and political dominance.

First Baseperson.  The correct gender-inclusive term for first baseman, recommended by the Little League.

Prisoner. Client of the correctional system, guest in a correctional institution, incarcerated American.

Pro-abortion. Pro-choice.

Shoplifter. Nontraditional shopper.

Grammar. Defined by Lewis Lapham as "arbitrary rules of procedure subservient to a sexist political agenda."

Pet owner. The American Humane Society says the appropriate term is "human companion of a nonhuman companion."

Morally different. Dishonest, evil.

Jungle. Tropical Rainforest. The term "jungle" is ideologically unsuitable because of its use in such insensitive phrases as "It's a jungle out there."

Difficult-to-serve. Canadian educators' term for sociopathic. Example: "Professor McLaughlin was robbed at gunpoint by one of his difficult-to-serve students."

Smellism. Discrimination against, or stigmatization or oppression of a human or nonhuman being because his/her/its nondiscretionary body odor is deemed to be unpleasant.

Ableism.  The Smith College Office of Student Affairs defines this as "oppression of the differently abled by the temporarily able."

Every entry in the book has an academic citation.

Since it seems to be Mule Day at Maggie's, here's Dolly with Mule Skinner Blues. Merle after with the same song. (thanks, reader):

Howlin' Wolf in 1964, with one heck of a band:

New York City's swirling, tide- and current-tossed East River, which runs from New York Harbor to Long Island Sound (and is therefore not a river in the usual sense and more of a salt-water connection left over from the last Ice Age) separates Manhattan from Brooklyn and Queens, and further east separates the Bronx from Queens.

It is spanned by eight bridges and has 13 tunnels, all but one of the tunnels (the Queens-Midtown Tunnel) for rail. A friend took this photo on Saturday, with the majestic Brooklyn Bridge in the foreground, the Manhattan Bridge behind, and the great city of Brooklyn itself on the right.

With 2.5 million people, Brooklyn would be one of the largest cities in the US had it not merged with NYC in 1898.

A Tom Brady Superbowl?

From Gagdad's Erotic Tales of Metaphysical Ignorance - one of his best posts. It begins thus:

Obviously Man is intelligent. That's the problem. In fact, almost all his troubles are caused by his intelligence, through which he believes so many amazing things that can't be so. More often than not, the greater the intelligence, the more catastrophic the error, which is why it has been remarked that philosophy is "error on a grandiose scale."

after a bit, he gets to the heart of the art vs. porn issue, which he uses as an example of how things can be "despiritualized":

In Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Joyce's alter ego, Stephen Dedalus, discusses the criteria for great art. He says it is the task of the true artist to record "epiphanies," that is, the sudden ingression of spirit into matter, when something leaps through its outer appearance and reveals its true nature in a way that illuminates the soul.

Didactic art is the opposite of this -- in fact, it is not art at all. That is, it lowjacks the medium of an art form and tries to cram some merely worldly message into it. In other words, instead of transmitting radiance from another dimension -- from the higher -- it forces in a message or "lesson" from the lower, from this side of manifestation. This is why nazi or communist or leftist art is so tedious. It is also why so much contemporary art is so awful. It's not really art, but what Joyce called pornography.

Pornography has nothing to do with sex per se; from the Greek, it means "writing of whores," which pretty much summarizes my point. It occurs whenever we completely despiritualize anything and divest it of its otherworldly radiance and spiritual telos. Therefore, there is much that is pornographic that is not sexual at all. By this definition, most contemporary music is indeed pornographic, as is most TV, certainly MSM news. Most literature is pornographic. Even religion can easily be pornographic. And certainly most politics.)

Image: Raphael's Adam and Eve in the Vatican

How to get an egg into a small bottle. h/t, Grow a Brain

Thanks, Opie, for these photos with the data, which came in over the transom. I cannot source it, but kudos to whoever put this together. It is interesting not only to see the different sorts of families (extended, nuclear, large, small, desert, middle-class) but to see what they typically eat in a week.

Germany: The Melander family of Bargteheide. Food expenditure for one week: 375.39 Euros or $500.07. (I guess that included the wine and beer) 

We do like the NY Sun, but for the news a fellow really needs at 4:30 am before milking the cows and feeding the chickens, The Daily Mash is it.

For example, they explain why the French rogue trader really did what he did, and where he hid his losses. And they have another helpful sociological piece on The 40-somethings are a bunch of whining sh-ts.

Welcome, Daily Mash, to our blogroll. (h/t, Conspiracy)

h/t, Theo, who continues to be a good finder of cool stuff.

Boris Berezovsky with 12 Transcendental Studies by Franz Liszt, Here are 1-3. The rest of them at Classical Virtuoso.

Animator vs. Animation by *alanbecker on deviantART

Very cool. Theo found it:

From a piece at Gizmodo on the 2008 PMA Camera Show, via Insty: