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.
Spain is a great place to look at Moorish architecture. Sometimes it is referred to as Islamic, but Moorish is more accurate. The horseshoe arch, for example, was borrowed from the Christianized Visigoths who ran the various Spanish kingdoms before the Moslem Moors successfully invaded Iberia in the 700s.
Even after Christian kings had their long reconquista, but while Granada was the last Muslim outpost (until 1492), Moorish architects and craftsmen were in demand throughout the Iberian peninsula because the style was so popular. That post-Reconquista style is referred to as Mudejar, which often combined Moorish with some Gothic and Renaissance styles.
My pic of a courtyard in the Alcazar in Seville is Mudejar. In Moorish architecture, it was usual to use scavenged old Roman columns for their new buildings.
h/t to Kevin Williamson's piece on government as the nation's cheesemonger. Crazy that those tons of cheddar will end of up dumpsters when so many would be happy to buy it at a cheap price..
By the time he began to publish in the 1890s, academic economics was in the throes of a counter-revolution sponsored by large landholders, bankers and monopolists denying that there was any such thing as unearned income. The new post-classical mainstream accepted existing property rights and privileges as a “given.” In contrast to Veblen’s argument that the economy was all about organizing predatory schemes, this approach culminated in Milton Friedman’s Chicago School defense the pro-rentier argument: “There is no such thing as a free lunch.”
This blunt denial rejected the preceding three centuries of classical value and price theory, along with its policy conclusions promoting taxation of land and other natural endowments, and financial reform. Dropped from view was rentier overhead in the form of predatory and unproductive forms of wealth seeking. The post-classical mainstream treats all income as “earned,” including that of rentiers. Lacking the classical concepts of unproductive labor, credit or investment, today’s textbooks describe income as a reward for one’s contribution to production, and wealth is being “saved up” as a result of someone’s productive investment effort, not as an unearned or predatory free lunch...
It was a convention of Moorish design to decorate the heck out of walls, with maybe 5-6' of colorful geometric ceramic tiles from the floor, then rising to the ceiling with intricate carved-looking walls which often have some Koranic verses in them.
This from the Alcazar in Seville:
I learned three things about Moorish upper-wall treatment:
- This is not stone. It is marble plaster. - This is not carved. It is made with molds while the plaster was soft. - These walls, now white, were generally painted originally so it must have been jewel-like. It reminds me that Greek statues and columns, and even the statues of saints etc. on the outside of Gothic cathedrals, were also painted.
This is my pic of a plaster wall in the palace in the Alhambra.
Like many young people, I was charmed by Buber's book as a late teen. As I mature, I learned that relationships are far from binary and that all exist on some spectrum of intimacy, from zero to the excessive. Really, how many people does anybody want to be emotionally intimate with?
David Brooks somehow tries to connect the Buber view with the politics of today and produces pure silliness. "Thous at every level"? Please, enough with the sanctimony. This is politics, which is war at every level.
I have not met Gerard but I feel like I sort-of know him. Naturally, I do not like him because he is more clever than I am, and a gifted writer. Reading that confession reminded me that this was perhaps just the first time he was saved from imminent death. The second time was when his heart (again) gave out on a sidewalk where he was rescued by passers by.
... going to your school’s Halloween party wearing pants embroidered with sailboats, carrying a gin-and-tonic, and wearing a name tag that says “Chip” or “Muffy” while spouting off-color jokes about Catholics, Jews, Negroes, Homosexuals and Communists trivializes the 400 years of toil it took our ancestors to build a life for us in suburban Connecticut.
He was a prolific and graceful author too. A quote from the article:
Olmsted was thirty-six when his plan for Central Park was accepted, and he had no formal training in landscape architecture. Nor had anyone else, for at that time, parks were laid out by architects, gardeners, or surveyors. Up to that point, he had led a highly erratic life, filled with false starts and brave experiments that make for fascinating biography. Fortunately, there are two very good ones, one by Laura Wood Roper (1973) and another by Witold Rybczynski (1999), and they demonstrate that one cannot make sense of the second half of Olmsted’s life without understanding the first.
They claim that patriarchy and toxic masculinity cause men to cut off their emotions, but the moment that men sincerely try to express any emotional pain, they are derided as tiny-dicked man-babies whose “male tears” are cause for endless sadistic joy.
Anybody with the Y chromosome can be male, but it's not easy to be a man. It is, in fact, a lofty goal depending on your definition. Like most guys, I measure myself against my father and my peers in terms of success, strength, integrity, religious progress, friendships, knowledge, good cheer, self-restraint, seeking responsibility and independence, courage, etc. Not saying these are distinctly male aspirations, just that it's hard to be an adult person and it is not easy to become a man.
Bad science is ubiquitous, and bad science writing even more so. I have no confidence in any science journalism, and I approach any scientific results with deepest skepticism. The more hyped the "Studies show..." articles are, the more my skepticism grows.
Took this pic of a grand pair of early 19th C. houses in downtown Nantucket. For some reason, I always expect to see a funeral home sign in front of Greek Revivals. Merchants or sea captains? I forget. Nantucket went through a brief period of prosperity then, not to see wealth again until its fashionable real estate boom since the 1970s: NYC money, mostly.
Interestingly, Greek Revival architecture was introduced to Greece by Greece's early 19th C. monarchs, King Otto from Bavaria and King George from Denmark.
- Ah, yes. Reader reminds me that these homes were built by the Starbuck family. Great name.
Jazz is meant to be heard live, in dark smokey places. A little marijuana definitely helps with any music appreciation, but especially jazz. Jazz and Folk were commercially destroyed by Rock and Pop in the late 50s. Niche music now, but still happily abundant in NYC.
A pretty good definition at Wiki: "It can be a special repetition, arrangement or omission of words with literal meaning, or a phrase with a specialized meaning not based on the literal meaning of the words."
In other words, figures of speech add poetry and color to language. When over-used, they lose their power and fade into ordinary and become, really, unheard.
If you had OCD you could have been a Renaissance scholar classifying the 184 types of figures of speech, but the five most of us learned in grade school are simile, metaphor, hyperbole, personification and synecdoche.
From what I hear, Craig's List is the best way to quickly unload your excess or unwanted stuff. Also, a good source for stuff you might need to furnish an empty room.
One thing to bear in mind is that your excess, old, or even antique furniture, however sentimentally-attached to it you might feel, is worth very little. Probably a tenth of what was paid for it. Brown-colored furniture (ie antiques or old stuff with dark-stained wood) is particularly undesirable. If you think it's worth $500, it might be saleable for $20-40 at best. Many people use Craig's just to get a few bucks to have somebody take it away because stuff has little value unless somebody wants/needs that exact thing at that exact moment.
The demolition of NYC's majestic old Pennsylvania Station in 1963 prompted movements for historic preservation across the US. Lucky we are that they did not tear down Grand Central (which they wanted to do to replace it with something modern). Still, Penn Station was grander by far.
I am grateful to live in a Belmont where most people aspire to be good upright contributing citizens, or at least to appear to be. A reminder of a modern sociological classic: Belmont & Fishtown - On diverging classes in the United States. (That is a link to his essay summary of the ideas in the book.)
There is also a good (video) talk by Murray at that link, about the book.
An airplane is just a crappy bus, and my Greyhound days are over. For long flights, I need an airplane with a gym on board. I've joked about wanting planes with swimming pools,but an upstairs gym would do me a lot of good on a plane. The only reason I hate long flights (ie over 4 hours) is my physical restlessness. I am not a good sitter, I do not enjoy movies except for ten minutes. I don't do video games. I have no real paperwork to do outside the office. I don't mind reading a book for 30 minutes but after that I need to do something for a while. Plus I am prone to a mild Restless Leg Syndrome on airplanes so I would rather stand up. And don't tell me I am supposed to sleep.
I am not asking for a weight room, just some cardio machines, some light weights, some floor mats, some hard and soft boxes, some bars for pull-ups, etc. Simple but with room to move. Charge me extra. Maybe a shower too.
On our upcoming flight, we are going First Class thanks to the gift of miles from my in-laws. Still I'd take a gym over the bigger seat and the legroom - because I am not a sitter. As for airplane food, regardless of class, no thanks. Grab a sandwich or a yoghurt in the airport. And they toss you this crap as if you were some starving dog in a dog shelter.
When I told my trainer about this desire for airplane gyms, he emailed me the below. I think that flight was wasted without a girlfriend or wife to spice it up. This dude is a jackass:
I recently stopped by a "Different Sexualities" seminar to see what people were talking about. One of the provocative topics was whether pedophilia was a sexual orientation. Some said yes, and some said it was a latent tendency in all males. Another topic addressed rape and sexual violence. Some felt it was a sexual preference, and some claimed it was latent in all males. Sex addiction? There was no agreement about whether it even exists but it was a consensus that the Western bourgeois nuclear family was an unnatural and possibly "unhealthy" artifact of culture, economics, and male power. Also discussed were fetishes (cross-dressing, item fetishes, S&M, exhibitionism). It was made clear at the outset that anything LGBT was normal and would not be discussed to keep the meeting "safe." Whatever. How they could be sure that there were no uncomfortable pedophiles in the room, I do not know.
I can not claim to be able to measure how much "polymorphous perversity" or ordinary perversity might be latent or only partially expressed in a given human, male or female, so I just listened. What struck me most, and discouraged me most, was how politicized it all became, and how quickly complex psychological issues became subsumed under feminist rubrics of "patriarchal hegemony" and "oppression." These do not enlighten, they are just cant.
Contrary to some popular impressions, sexuality is not the central topic in modern Psychology, Psychiatry, or Psychoanalysis. It is just one aspect of who a person is and, generally, we are interested in all aspects of a person.
