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.
Funeral today of a friend of 30 years, the mother of dear friends. She raised 6 kids in the tough, thrifty, Yankee way with a rigid moral code, perfect gracious manners, and perfect stickler for grammar ("It is I"). A woman of faith, calm, decorum, and selflessness - and who stayed fit and kept skiing into her mid-80s.
We sang this one at the closing, one which always brings tears for me.
Antic, zany, madcap, anarchic, the Marx Brothers were successful first in vaudeville, then on the Broadway stage, and finally, most emphatically, in the movies. Their act resembled nothing so much as a comic strip brought to life.
Readers know that I am a fan of all sorts of art, from cave paintings through Renaissance to Cezanne to Thomas Cole and including Picasso whose taste, touch, experimentation, and vitality impresses me more with each passing year.
Does excellent technique equal excellent art? Is there a difference between fine art, design, decoration, and illustration? Does "art" evolve? Does the camera matter?
I tire of those questions.
Is there such a thing as talent? You betcha. I know for certain, because I have none. I envy talent - to a sinful degree.
Is the Art World full of hype and hooey? Of course. There is $ in the art biz.
I hate going to museums. Problem is, you have to, to stare at the good stuff up close.
Is "new" better? Nope.
Image is a Collins self-portrait. I would let him do a picture of me anytime he wants to.
The most important finding in psychology in the last 50 to 100 years, I would say, is the finding that everything you can measure is heritable. The heritability coefficients vary between 0.3 and 0.6, or 30 to 60 percent of the variance, under some assumptions, can be explained by the genes. It’s the largest piece of variance we can explain.
The single family home was an artifact of the blue model world. Before World War II, it was common for many generations of a family to live together. Before social security, grandparents didn’t have the money for independent living; children and grandchildren were a safety net. Often, extended families would live together, sharing chores, cooperating with child care and other activities.
But postwar suburbia changed all that: each nuclear family was supposed to be an island unto itself, and zoning laws in many American cities and towns changed to make illegal the kind of multi-family living that had once been the norm.
Where I grew up as a young lad in suburbia, a little old lady ran a candy shop out of her parlor. A gunsmith had his shop in his garage. At the farm, of course, everybody ran their business out of their places: farms, farm stands, blacksmiths, tractor repairs, etc. Farms were often multi-generational. And yes, in town, families lived over the store. It worked.
In cities, mixed zoning is a wonderful thing. Commercial on the first and/or second floors and residential above.
Good advice I got (when young) about bar fights is to use elbow to the head or torso, not fist. Far more power, less injury to self. Generally speaking, avoiding bar fights is easier though.
Congrats to New York for finally allowing MMA. Here's Holly:
I receive emails each week making suggestions for weekend activities. Sometimes they are interesting, most times not. This week, a suggestion to visit certain dive bars before they become Pret-a-Mangers. Not a bad idea.
I love dive bars. I grew up in rural Pennsylvania and my stepfather spent time at Mick's Tavern, the local gas station, garage and tavern. Total dive. At Syracuse, we had the student bar, Jabberwocky, which hosted many big name bands before they were names. That was before my time. The Jab also had Oldies Night on Wednesday nights, and Happy Hour on Friday. It wasn't technically a dive bar, but it could qualify. The drinking age was raised to 21 the year I left, and it closed. The real dive bar we used to frequent was Doug's Place, somewhere down near Carrier Circle. Real blue-collar stuff. We'd meet some alumni who lived in the area from time to time. It's where I learned to love dive bars. Pool, dimly lit, cheap glasses of beer, the only 'mixed' drink available was a Boilermaker. Always a few local factory guys in there. Doug's Place is long gone, too. I did hear 'Doug', whoever he is, opened a fish fry somewhere nearby.
When I moved to Queens in the 80's, my roommate was a local who introduced me to My Lady's, a tavern for which I played softball and drank quarter glasses of beer on Thursday nights. I got to know the bartender, a giant of a man, but the classic example of a huge teddy bear. My girlfriend's family came one night to watch college hoops with me and dubbed it The Bucket of Blood because, well, that's pretty much what it reminded you of. The final night it was open was 1991, and early on it was a great party. I heard the rest was very good, too. I guess I had an early start on the evening...
When we lived in Hoboken, Louise & Jerry's was our end-of-the-evening final stop. Louise, a widow in a housecoat, was always behind the bar. When God Bless America played on the jukebox, you had to stop what you were doing and sing with Louise. If she didn't like your look, she stopped you as you walked in, and demanded you leave. She once gave my wife the stinkeye for ordering club soda. When I told her, quietly, that she was pregnant with our first child, Louise smiled and gave us all a round of drinks (but kept the secret). Louise & Jerry's is still open, but I heard it's upscale now.
Recently, I stopped in at the Canyon Club, in Williams, AZ. One of the finest dive bars I've ever experienced. A real honky-tonk. Loved every second, loved the people. Which is important. A good dive bar has friendlies, it doesn't attract surly or violent types. You can have a curmudgeon or two, but people have to want to have a good time.
Some dives are iconic, and unlikely to go away. McSorley's is one. Out where I live, there aren't many dive bars left unless you're willing to take a chance. We used to have the Blue Collar Bar, but that got bought by a high-end group and was transformed into a "dive" bar. It retained the dive nature, but served high end cuisine. Excellent food, but ruined the ambiance. It closed after four or five years. Dive bars, I believe, have short lives.
There is still one place near me, the Garwood Rest, which my buddies and I will gather in to play darts (American Darts - with the wooden shafts and we're playing baseball, not 301, 501 or Cricket) and watch football or baseball once very month. It qualifies as a dive, but it's higher end than any other one I've been in. Here are some more. I'm familiar with the Raccoon Lodge, The Smith, and Hogs and Heifers, though all from 20-30 years ago. When you find a good dive bar, it's a thing to revel in.
Oftentimes Wikipedia can provide a handy overview of a topic or an idea which helps me orient myself in my thinking about it. By contrast, ye olde Encyclopedia Britannica was verbose, rambling, and not well-organized for a clear overview. Just my opinion, of course.
The old one-volume Columbia Encyclopedia did that better. I relied on it when I was young.
Studies frequently arrive at erroneous results. These are sometimes reported breathlessly by the press. When the results are contradicted, there is rarely a mention. Furthermore, negative studies often have difficulty getting published because they are unexciting.
How many people still think fatty meat causes heart disease? Many people never got the correction memo.
Fascinating cultural fossils whose members are most likely not to thrive when introduced to modern civilization unless they have the savvy and brilliance of Squanto.
Leave them alone at a great distance as if they were endangered wild animals, film and study the heck out of them, or buy them a Big Mac and take them to the opera? The fate of these stone age tribes is entirely in civilization's hands. A strange situation:
To make his case, Harris must commit along the way what for many is intellectual heresy. It has long been the position of science that the descriptive and the prescriptive spring from entirely separate realms of human experience. The thinking is that science deals only with the descriptive—with facts. Science can tell us what the facts are, but it can never tell us what we ought to do in a moral sense. Rather, the latter is the exclusive domain of religious and philosophical discourse, a normative universe the morally indifferent instruments of science can never penetrate. This position is most associated with David Hume. Hume argued that statements of fact (“your mother gave birth to you”) can never lead to moral conclusions (“so you should be nice to your mother”). Yet against the cautions of Hume, Harris attempts to prove that it is in fact possible to derive an ‘ought’ from an ‘is.’.
Harris is very clear about his mission. To use his own words: he is not merely saying that “science can help us get what we want out of life.” (p. 28) Harris is arguing that science can “help us understand what we should do and should want—and, therefore, what other people should do and should want...” (p. 28) These are very different claims. The first is uncontroversial and rather obvious; the second is impossible. Harris is arguing for a “science of morality” (p. 27) that will provide humanity with the necessary toolkit to discover what is objectively right and wrong, and pinpoint a universal conception of human values. In advancing this science of morality, however, Harris takes enormous liberties in logic...
Science can tell me what I should want? What? Science is not my Mommy, and if my Mom had raised me scientifically I would probably be insane..
It could have been a worthy essay, but it turns out it's aimed at Donald Trump. Conservatives seem to hate him. Too much hate. I am no big Trump supporter, but don't blame him - blame his enthusiastic primary voters. As Trump says, "I am just the messenger."
Borders and boundaries are fundamental aspects of human societies. I have to check you out before I invite you into my home. Same with my nation.
I am absolutely opposed to illegal immigration. They are uninvited guests, crapping on our rules and laws. I know that most Dems and the Chamber of Commerce don't care - or want more, but I believe immigration law is a national decision. Laws already exist. They can be changed by Congress.
I have no dislike of Mexicans or Guatemalans. All I ask is that they apply for residency and/or citizenship like everybody else.
Instead of beginning at South Ferry, we're thinking about beginning somewhere in the Lower East Side, heading north thru Murray Hilll, cutting across to Central Park South and doing a hike through the entire length of Central Park to Harlem, and after that we're not sure. Might be fun to continue up Broadway, lunch in some Dominican joint in Washington Heights, all the way to the Cloisters, but that all might take too long.
These are fun outings. We had a nice turn out last time - filled 3 tables in Little Italy for lunch.
Need good shoes. We'll post details as soon as we settle them, and invite all interested hikers.
You can't really obtain a sturdy, zero-maintenance dwelling or storage building cheaper than a Quonset Hut. Indestructible steel prefab housing, around $35,000. You put it on a slab.
And if you hate plumbing as much as Sippican does, just build an outhouse out back, near the lilacs.
After WW2, military surplus Quonsets were commonly seen. A family down the road from the farm raised their family in one, but it's been removed for many years. It had a wood stove. After the war, they were widely used as temporary housing for vets. They are easily insulated.
They lack charm other than the rural ugly charm. Sometimes you can see ancient ones on rickety farms in New England used as spare mini-barns or garages.
The US military first had them mass produced on Quonset Point, R.I. Hundreds of thousands of them were built.
Unless they happen to be in the tourist trade or the mini-mart business, the Yankee native does not tend to welcome visitors to his corners of the woods. Maybe this applies to all of small-town USA.
You get the feeling that the old families don't welcome out-of-towners, much less furriners. And whenever they see a New York license plate in town, they worry and grumble. I'm sorry, but it's just the way the folks are: "Please respect our space and our ways and we will try to tolerate yours as long as you keep them somewhere else."
City people might term it parochial, but it's actually a strong sense of proprietorship and protectiveness towards something valuable - "Our town."
I guess we like things as they are, or, preferably, as they were. The old-timers still refer to my place as "Peck's farm," even though old Amos Peck, the fourth generation on that land and a member of a founding family of the town, ascended to his reward in 1932 and his kids sold the old chicken and dairy farm to a dairy farmer down the road who was looking to expand his herd. One wonders whether there is a covert message in it: "You don't really belong there - you are just a transient with a mortgage."
It takes two to three generations at minimum, I think, to get past being a newcomer. To be an old family, I'd guess five generations minimum. (That makes sense to me. It is an indication that your family might be committed to the town, and not just passing by the way people often do these days, viewing land as real estate rather than as a place to anchor for your future generations.)
Yes, it's about different views of land and of "place". Ideally, your ancestors would have helped build our simple 1742 Meeting House/Congregational Church, which remains the only place of worship for seven miles.
I have mentioned in the past that our modest place (which is one component of the abstraction which is Maggie's Farm) abuts the Farmington River in north-central CT, whose happy rippling and sighing I can hear from my pool and from my poolside hammock.
We have eagles, ospreys, Wood Duck, trout (mostly stocked but with some sea-run I think), herring, and maybe soon we will have a return of fishable numbers of migratory Atlantic Salmon, thanks to the fish people. We canoe the river all the time, counting the herons and the Kingfishers, and cleaning garbage from the banks when we find it.
But do not come here. We prefer it quiet and private.
Photo above: A classic Yankee front door-mat. It does NOT apply to Maggie's Farm: you are the visitors that we welcome.
Photo below: Fishing on the Farmington in early morning mist.
I like living in a town where I know all the shopkeepers and even the workers at Dunkin Donuts and my mini-mart gas station. At my 24-hr Dunkin, they make my regular when they see my car pull in. That's nice. My Dunkin franchise is owned by a (Dot not Feather) Indian couple, but mostly served by Pakistani male immigrants. One black American lady works mornings there, and a Mexican guy does the night shift. The one black dude who worked there for about 6 months was fired for stealing from the till.
My gas-mini mart place ("Eat Here and get Gas") is manned by a Haitian, 2 Mexicans, and a Dominican. 4 shifts but they often do double shifts. A nice Mexican gal worked a fill-in shift for a while, but quit because nights were too fatiguing for her with three kids at home. I am friendly with the Mexican guy and the ever-cheerful Haitian guy who is always trying to figure out how to get rich and move to Miami. He is a brother in Christ. I briefly trade life stories for a minute or two with those 2, and they save a left-over Sunday New York Times for me on Monday morning. Free, of course, on Monday.
That Mexican guy has finally gotten off Oxycontin after two years of multiple leg repairs from his job in construction when he was in a ditch when a gas line exploded. Kept working through it all, in pain. He finally feels "pretty good, thank God." He has a noticeable gimp. He is legal, is trying to bring his wife and 2 kids to the US but has trouble paying the immigration lawyer. Has not seen his family for three years, sends them money. He lives in a small apartment with a cousin and brother, and the three share a small rusty 15 year-old Toyota. He is a sweet guy but he knows absolutely nothing about America beyond the citizenship test he had to take. Other than this job, he lives Mexican.
The other day he asked me about the bruises on my jaw. "Dental surgery," I said. "Pain?" he asked. "For a while," I said, "but better now." He said he had a very bad tooth, broke it on a chicken bone. Told me that in Mexico the dentist would pull it for $25 or $50. In the US, $400. and if he needs a root canal, $1200., so he is waiting to deal with it. Dentistry is expensive.
I told him about the couple of dental schools which have free clinics. Also, I told him that most dentists will give you a payment plan if you ask. After all, most people cannot walk in and put $4000 on their credit card, or write a $4000 check from their checking.
A modern John Deere tractor with 850 horsepower plays tug of war with an 1800s era steam tractor that has about 18 horsepower. While both are capable of getting an honest day's work done, there is only one that proves its dominance through sheer power.
Sooner or later, most of us are faced with helping make plans for elderly relatives who can't quite manage life any more in their own dwelling, whether because of medical problems and risk, or because of non-severe disabilities.
Mrs. BD and I have been moving her parents into an "Independent Living Senior Community" over the past month. (Ros Chast calls these places The Place, but I call them Old Folk's Homes.) Their new place is a one-bedroom apartment in a Senior complex in a suburban area less than a half-hour from us. The apartment is small, but they get the run of the place with its dining rooms (with 2 fireplaces), library (with fireplace), theater, patios, gym, meeting rooms, outdoor walking paths, etc. Their apartment has a small kitchen, large fancy bath, and a terrace to outdoors. You get three good meals, weekly cleaning and laundry, 24-hr handiman and 24-hr RN on duty. There are music concerts, movies, and good lectures all the time, religious services, plus of course Bingo and Mah Jong and all that. You can keep your car there, or they will drive you anywhere within 15 miles - included. That's all - no personal help unless you hire it on your own (which some residents do). These places are costly, but not necessarily a lot more costly that the cost of running and maintaining one's own home.
The next step, if needed, is Assisted Living. Assisted Living places often have specialized Dementia sections.
And then there are nursing homes, aka Skilled Nursing Facilities. Nobody ever wants to need those except temporarily to recover from something.
The New Old Masters - 
Col. Sanders 
Instead of beginning at South Ferry, we're thinking about beginning somewhere in the Lower East Side, heading north thru Murray Hilll, cutting across to Central Park South and doing a hike through the entire length of Central Park to Harlem, and after that we're not sure. Might be fun to continue up Broadway, lunch in some Dominican joint in Washington Heights, all the way to the Cloisters, but that all might take too long. 
You can't really obtain a sturdy, zero-maintenance dwelling or storage building cheaper than a 
City people might term it parochial, but it's actually a strong sense of proprietorship and protectiveness towards something valuable - "Our town."
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