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.
He's right. Peterson is a (mostly secular) pastor with a dark message (Life is suffering, a hard thing to do) and a challenge to life adventure (Fight chaos, Be the best you can be, Don't make things worse, etc.). Like a good preacher, he brings truisms and even banalities back to life in a useful and, for many, inspirational way. He rights the ship in a crazy world.
Besides that, he's smarter and more articulate than any of us. God bless him.
Snarky about brunch. Truth is, brunch after church with friends is one of the most pleasant things in life. A delicious meal too, with smoked salmon and other neat things.
My best Sunday morning: Early one-hour workout, church, brunch with friends in an outdoor cafe with a Bloody Mary or Bloody Bull, until 1 or 2 pm. Then go do something interesting or go for a walk.
Life can be wonderful and beautiful if structured correctly and a Sunday brunch is part of that on a lovely Spring day.
Winter image is some village in Brooklyn by Francis Guy, c. 1819.
On its own, Brooklyn is perhaps the 3rd largest city in the US. However, it was incorporated into New York City in 1898 after much political squabbling.
It's basically a 70 square-mile peninsula of the western end of Long Island, jutting into New York harbor. Named after Breukelin in Holland as it was first settled by the Dutch (if you don't consider the Lenape Indians who were there then).
It is a boom town now with high-rise office buildings and luxury buildings sprouting up everywhere. Gentrifying rapidly. Still, much of it is a brownstone townhouse and wood-frame house city of developments built on farmland from the mid-1800s through the 1920s. Like much of the New York metropolitan area, it has an abundance of relatively distinct neighborhoods distinguished by class, ethnicity, affinity groups, etc. There are Hasidic and Orthodox areas, black areas, Italian neighborhoods, hipster neighborhoods, blue-collar neighborhoods, fully-mixed neighborhoods, quite down-at-the- heels areas like East New York, industrial and warehouse areas, upper class neighborhoods - almost everything but Asian neighborhoods which are mostly in Queens. And yes, Coney Island too.
While it is a city unto itself, there is no doubt that the economic engine for it is Manhattan even though many Brooklynites rarely venture into Manhattan. And vice-versa, except for the BAM and Peter Lugar's Steakhouse.
There's a good map of the Brooklyn neighborhoods below the fold. Our 12-mile hike last Sat. did not get much further than the westernmost neighborhoods. It would take a lot of time to explore the whole place on foot. I have a daughter in Crown Heights and a nephew in Williamsburg. One of our hiking pals was born in Brooklyn Heights. My grandma (from Norwalk, CT) taught school in Clinton Hill before she got married to a prosperous physician from Connecticut.
At Florida State University, a study was done on gender differences between men and women. Attractive, well-dressed students approached the opposite gender and asked one of the following three questions:
This was an-all NYC weekend for us. A splendid, uplifting weekend all-round. Glorious. Took a daughter and her boyfriend to see the Met's Thomas Cole show today after an early morning 4 mile mini-urban hike with my sis and her hubbie to loosen up stiff muscles from yesterday's hike (with evil Starbucks break this morning). Good informative show and ran into good family friends there serendipitously so the kids had to catch up and chat too-loudly in the museum. Saw his Oxbow painting of a sight which all drivers up and down Rte 91 near Northampton have seen.
At lunch, the good boyfriend told us that he, his dad, and his uncle will participate with 1400 people in this year's The Great Saunter on May 5th. It's a 32-mile all-day Manhattan hike. This event is new to me, but I love the idea. By comparison, our hikes are Little Saunters. 32 miles would be a challenge for me now but, dammit, I would finish it if I had to crawl. I have a friend who had to crawl a mile to finish the Hawaii Ironman triathlon a few years ago. His wife was proud of him.
There is nothing healthier than taking on things to dispel our self-esteem despite the ego-protective temptation to hide and avoid them. Into life, outside the comfort zone. Here are some of the things that work well:
- Socializing with high-achieving, highly life-competent witty people - Taking a calisthenics/fitness class at the gym - Taking the Great Courses Intro to Calculus or Intro to Immunology Class and discover your IQ limits - Joining a Bible, or classical music/opera study group and discover your ignorance and lack of insight - Accepting the duty of running a small volunteer organization - Inspecting your naked body carefully in a mirror - Reflecting on one's mortality and what good one will have left behind - Taking an advanced yoga class - Try to get your book published - Go to a new city or woods without a GPS and make yourself get lost - Reach out to befriend somebody you feel is smart, fun and interesting, and get the brush-off - Learn a new sport or skill from scratch - Go on a job search - Get into weight-lifting
I welcome your suggestions for deeper humility in the comments -
Good advice, but it's also always a good idea to sense when somebody is tired of taking to you. Sorry to say, they probably are. On both ends, short and sweet is best in most cases unless you are lucky enough to get a truly lively and jovial interaction going.
A friend recently extended his driveway to put in a Pickleball court. The game is like a cross between tennis, ping-pong, paddle tennis, etc. It looks like this:
Famous quote to Stalin from Lavrentry Beria, head of Stalin's secret police.
I continue to recommend the (depressing) Three Felonies a Day by Prof. Harvey Silverglate. You can count on it. You are a felon. There are 6000 federal crimes (including owning an owl or eagle feather), and nobody knows all of them until somebody looks one up to pin on somebody they decide to target. That's not counting the 40,000 pages of federal regulations.
Feel free to confess in the comments for your trivial crimes which might be past the statute of limitations.
Nack was a towering figure in the history of sports journalism, a literary wordsmith and tireless reporter whose distinctive and soaring prose is revered by his peers and generations of younger writers. He stands among the best sportswriters in the history of the genre, and in many ways, among the best writers of any kind. When he stopped typing, he was a giant personality, full of endless good charm, disarmingly well-read and all times, given to entertain...
And here's Nack's reminiscences of his favorite horse, Secretariat: Pure Heart
The college screechers disparage manliness, but the real world continues to value specific, ideal manly qualities because they are so useful in life and helpful to others. Young men, listen up.
Historically, the path from boy to man was hard-earned and marked by specific achievements. With the modern invention of adolescence and "extended adolescence", the lines are blurred. Like the song says, a "mannish boy" is not a man. Puberty does not make a man, nor does sexual activity.
Are the ideal "manly" qualities today very different from those of the past? I don't know. I can tell you what qualities my friends aspire to and work towards as a life-long project: providing for and protecting family and progeny, independence, courage and shame for weakness, the willingness to take risk, the willingness to be tough and forceful when needed, a seriousness about life while remaining cheerful, physical fitness and athletic development, mental fitness, spiritual development, skill development of all sorts, community involvement, responsibility and integrity, kindness and being a good friend, having constructive life goals, generosity of spirit, etc etc. We discuss these things in our men's Bible study group.
It's a tall order, and that is exactly the point. We all raise boys to aspire towards these qualities, knowing full well that it is a challenging and difficult path with many speed bumps and disappointments. (How different or difficult the path is for women is not something I feel qualified to discuss.)
When I went off to prep school at 13, on the first day the Headmaster said to us (paraphrased from memory): "Welcome, boys. You have said your goodbyes to your parents and have had a nice lunch. We are delighted to have you now officially join our school. I am sorry to tell you that we will make it very hard for you and you will suffer many disappointments but we expect that you boyswill become adult young men who are a credit to this school when you graduate. One more warning. Disappoint us too deeply and you will be sent home to your Mom. Please do not do that. Since we picked each of you carefully and personally, we expect that each one of you will have victories too in whatever areas you choose. If you have troubles with something, let us know. We are on your side but we will be tough in expecting and demanding your success, so get ready for the adventure. Give everything your best. You have one hour to settle into your rooms, and then report to the Field House for your health and physical fitness and sports assessments. Good luck, boys, and I will see you tomorrow morning in Chapel."
Good little speech about male privilege. Although the intellectual challenges were intense, overall it seemed secondary to their focus on personal development, to expand oneself to become the best, most developed person you could be. School, or parents, same message.
Call them self-employed, or gig workers, or outside contractors if you want. People who get no paychecks or job benefits.
For people who value independence and being their own boss, the price paid in uncertainty, lack of external structure, and anxiety, is worth it. There is nothing new about this. If you are a plumber with a truck you are a gig worker. So is a guy with a barbershop.
Last week I posted on Does Language Shape Our Thoughts? The subject provoked some discussion. It is true that the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis turns out to have little empirical support, but I'll stand by my experience that a new word or phrase, and the concept in them, certainly effect the ways I think and can even give me a new tool to think in a new way. Heck, that is called "education." (a quote on the topic below the fold)
I think one problem might be taking the implications of a theory too far, too globally. This brings me to the notion of "social construction," popularized by Berger and Luckmann's The Social Construction of Reality.After I read it, I asked my professor whether social constructionism might be a social construct.
Berger and Luckmann's claims were stimulating and I am certain that they have limited application despite being unreinforced by data. (I don't know how one gets data on such types of epistemologic theorizing.) However they were welcomed by radicals and deconstruction postmodernists who took them to extremes, sometimes to psychotic levels of subjectivity, because they appeared to support the ideas of the infinite malleability of the human mind and heart, and the impossibility of objectivity.
It seems self-evident that language and ideas shape our thoughts. Almost nobody ever has an original thought, but new words and new ideas we obtain from others and from the past are exciting (or disturbing) because of their shaping or re-shaping effects.
There is some Goethe quote that we can only see what we know. If you see a "fighter jet" and I see an F-16, our mental representations of the thing are entirely different. Similarly, if you see "woods" and I see an Oak-Beech climax forest. Knowledge embedded in language shapes our perceptions and thus our thought.
My favorite question is "Who was the genius who invented numbers?" Are numbers "real"? . Remarkably, not all cultures have/had numbers. Numbers make a huge difference in how we perceive the world. And colors are just handy bunching of slices of the humanly visible electromagnetic spectrum.
I suggest that we get our own act together instead of waiting for utopia. There is no utopia, and heaven, I am told, is like a boring vacation. A harp is a fine instrument, but all day long? Not to say that meeting God would not be an exciting moment.
"I drink beer whenever I can get my hands on any," Merton confessed. "I love beer, and by that very fact, the world." But even in the hermitage, Merton struggled with other people's infatuation with his hermit identity.
In an age where there is much talk about "being yourself" I reserve to myself the right to forget about being myself, since in any case there is very little chance of my being anybody else. Rather, it seems to me that when one is too intent on "being himself" he runs the risk of impersonating a shadow. . . I am accused of living in the woods like Thoreau instead of living in the desert like St. John the Baptist. All I can answer is that I am not living "like anybody." Or "unlike anybody." We all live somehow or other, and that's that. It is a compelling necessity for me to be free to embrace the necessity of my own nature.
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