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.
Shipping by ships, that is. I have a pal whose dad was a sea captain. Those guys certainly lead interesting, useful, and colorful lives. Long trips. Women or wives in every port.
A kid of a friend went to the US Merchant Marine Academy, which is in NYC. It is a demanding program and it is difficult to gain admission. An excellent goal for a kid who doesn't want to live in a cubicle and who is interested in mechanics, leadership, and can handle some math. Not unlike the Naval Academy, really, without the guns.
This post, From Breakbulk To The Container, will take some of your time because the amazing vintage videos will captivate. I had not realized that there were steel sailing ships at the NYC docks into the 1930s. Wonderful.
I'm not sure when the most dangerous time to live might be, or may have been. Apparently, some think it is now. My personal opinion is all eras are dangerous. Some may have, or had, increased risks. I can't think of any period of my life where I felt life was on a precipice. A few days or weeks with elevated fears and tensions? Sure, I can think of a few. April and May of 1972, 1979 at the peak of the Iran crisis, 1987 after the market crash, 1991 as Iraq was pushed out of Kuwait, September 2001. I was too young during the Cuban Missile Crisis, but I'm told that was a very shaky time. There may be one or two other moments I've forgotten, but 'dangerous time', to me, is almost every day. Which is to say, so common it's not really all that dangerous.
I focus on the fact, in general, our lives are improving. Today, most of us hold more computing, audio and video power in our pocket, at a reasonable cost, and this device can help us control our houses, cars, and money with a few swipes. We text or call someone and are sure they got a message. Our diets are vastly improved, our choice of diets extensive, and we have more options regarding the quality and types of foods. When I was in my teens, few people had flown in a plane. Today, most have. I was the first of my friends to visit Europe in 1976. Today, most of them have kids who have vacationed or studied abroad.
They had utopian Christian dreams which were rapidly shattered. A New Jerusalem. They really did feel that they were on a holy mission that had nothing to do with money (except insofar as they owed quite a bit to their sponsoring corporation - which they were never able to repay).
Meanwhile, at the same time and a short distance south, New Amsterdam was a prosperous and rapidly growing Dutch colony. They had a good port and a handy river, but also a spirit of freedom (and diversity!) which the Puritans lacked. I don't think the earlier Dutch settlers had a Thanksgiving in New York. They were too busy making money.
How did they celebrate their first year and their first harvest in the fall of 1621, when they sat down with their Cape Cod Wampanoag friends?
"Deer and wildfowl." What else? We don't know. I don't think they had the grain to brew their beloved beer until the next year. What we do know is that these folks had been through a nasty voyage in a rotten, leaky boat, landed at the wrong place - remember, they were headed to the Dutch New Amsterdam area - which was better idea. They managed to scrape out a living, thanks to the Indian's education (these folks weren't farmers, anyway) as they watched their family members die.
Only 53 of the original 104 immigrants survived until fall, 1621. Then they gave thanks to God. Thanks for what? Thanks, I think, to God for being there with them through thick and thin.
It's always been a wonder to me that they didn't all catch the next flight from Logan back to Leyden. Trust in God is strong stuff, and many of us are not strong enough to handle the powerful grip of God. Thanksgiving is about putting our faith in the Lord, or trying to - and nothing else. God Bless us, and America, please, and make us Pilgrims in our own time, in our own ways.
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..
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.
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.
By Alton Hall Blackington, New England’s Disastrous Weather, Yankee Books, 1990
As long as people work, live, and play in the vicinity of North End Park in Boston, no winter will pass without someone recalling the catastrophe that took place there on January 15, 1919. The scene of this tragic accident was that low-lying section of Commercial Street between Copps Hill and the playground of North End Park. Looking down from Copps Hill on that mild winter afternoon, you saw first the tracks of the Boston elevated railroad and the old houses nearby. Across the street were the freight sheds of the Boston and Worcester and Eastern Massachusetts railways, the paving division of the Public Works Department, the headquarters of Fireboat 31, and the wharves with patrol boats and minesweepers moored alongside. In the background to the left was the Charlestown Navy Yard. And towering above the freight sheds was the big tank of the Purity Distilling Company-bulging with more than two million gallons of crude molasses waiting to be made into rum. In the Public Works Department, a dozen or more horses munched their oats and hay, as flocks of pigeons fluttered around to catch the stray kernels of grain that fell from the feed bags. Stretched out on the running board of a heavily laden express truck, Peter, a pet tiger cat, slept in the unseasonably warm sunshine. This was the fourth day that the mercury of the thermometer on the sunny side of the freight shed had been climbing. On January 12 it was only 2 degrees above zero. But on the thirteenth the temperature rose rapidly from 16 degrees to 40; now, at 12:30 P.M. on Wednesday the fifteenth, it was 43 degrees above zero, and so warm in the sun that office workers stood around in their shirtsleeves talking about the weather. Even the freight handlers had doffed their overcoats, and sailors from the training ship Nantucket carried their heavy pea jackets on their arms. Mrs. Bridget Clougherty put her blankets out to air and smiled at little Maria Di Stasio gathering firewood under the freight cars. She waved to her neighbor, Mrs. O'Brien, who was dusting her geraniums on a dingy windowsill. At the pumping station attached to the big molasses tank, Bill White turned the key in the lock and started uptown to meet his wife for lunch. He bumped into Eric Blair, driver for Wheeler's Express, and said, "Hello, Scotty. What are you doing around here at noontime? Thought you and the old nag always went to Charlestown for grub." The young Scotsman grinned. "It's a funny thing, Bill," he said. "This is the first time in three years I've brought my lunch over here," and he climbed up on the bulkhead and leaned back against the warm side of the big molasses tank-for the first and last time. Inside the Boston and Worcester freight terminal, Percy Smerage, the foreman, was checking a pile of express to be shipped to Framingham and Worcester. Four freight cars were already loaded. The fifth stood half-empty on the spur track that ran past the molasses tank. Smerage had just told his assistant to finish loading the last car when a low, deep rumble shook the freight yard. The earth heaved under their feet, and they heard a sound of ripping and tearing-steel bolts snapping like machine-gun fire-followed by a booming roar as the bottom of the giant molasses tank split wide open and a geyser of yellowish brown fluid spurted into the sky, followed by a tidal wave of molasses. With a horrible, hissing, sucking sound, it splashed in a curving arc straight across the street, crushing everything and everybody in its path. In less time than it takes to tell it, molasses had filled the five-foot loading pit and was creeping over the threshold of the warehouse door. The four loaded freight cars were washed like chips down the track. The half-loaded car was caught on the foaming crest of the eight-foot wave and, with unbelievable force, hurled through the corrugated iron walls of the terminal. The freight house shook and shivered as the molasses outside, now five feet deep, pushed against the building. Then the doors and windows caved in, and a rushing, roaring river of molasses rolled like molten lava into the freight shed, knocking over the booths where freight clerks were checking their lists. Like madmen they fought the onrushing tide, trying to swim in the sticky stuff that sucked them down. Tons of freight-shoes, potatoes, barrels, and boxes tumbled and splashed on the frothy, foaming mass, now so heavy that the floors gave way, letting tons of the stuff into the cellar. Down there the workers died like rats in a trap. Some tried to dash up the stairs, but they slipped-and disappeared. As the 58-foot-high tank split wide open, more molasses poured out under a pressure of two tons per square foot. Men, women, children, and animals were caught, hurled into the air, or dashed against freight cars, only to fall back and sink from sight in the slowly moving mass. High above the scene of disaster, an elevated train crowded with passengers whizzed by the crumbling tank just as the molasses broke loose, tearing off the whole front of the Clougherty house and snapping off the steel supports of the "EI" structure. The trestle snapped, and the tracks sagged almost to street level, but the motorman of an approaching train, seeing the danger, managed to throw his train in reverse and prevent further catastrophe. The roaring wall of death moved on. ..
Not much has changed in Progressive populist appeals since then:
Now, my friends, if you were off on an island where there were 100 lunches, you could not let one man eat up the hundred lunches, or take the hundred lunches and not let anybody else eat any of them. If you did, there would not be anything else for the balance of the people to consume.
(Note to our non-American readers: today we celebrate Columbus Day in the USA. Had he sailed in the service of his homeland, the Republic of Genoa, the language of much of the New World would be Italian instead of Spanish. An interesting detail is that he never acknowledged that he had found a new continent.)
If Columbus had not carried some shoots of sugar cane from the Canary Islands to the West Indies on his second voyage, somebody else would have, eventually.
(Sugar cane, a grass, is native to some Pacific Islands, but it spread to India and then around the warm parts of the world. Sugar is good.)
The West Indies proved to be a good place to grow sugarcane. Once the natives were wiped out in hard labor on the Spanish and French cane plantations, importing slaves from Africa was economically sensible if morally indefensible. Thus began the slave trade to the New World and, eventually, the cane/molasses/rum/slave circuit.
We visited Columbus' nice house on Grand Canaria in Las Palmas last fall. By sailing ship, of all things. It is still a nice big handsome house.
Cane is still grown to some extent on the Canaries, and they are proud of their rum, Arehucas.
Eric Arthur Blair (1903-1950), better known by his pen name, George Orwell, remains an iconic figure in literature to this day. He's most famous for writing Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm, both books which warn against oppressive totalitarian authority and the nature in which power corrupts.
We were just there...so I was surprised to see this in my NY Historical Society feed today. Grant's Tomb dedicated on April 27, 1897. Our Urban Hike had some relatively good timing.
The current dust-up between Trump and Cruz regarding their wives is nothing new, though the press tries hard to make it seem that way. Political wives have always been an issue, in some form. Betty Ford is known for her eponymous rehab centers, while Jimmy Carter was famous for the lust in his heart (which surely hurt Rosalyn's feelings). Nancy Reagan held seances in the White House, and was known to consult astrologers. I don't really have to repeat any stories about Hillary - there are more than enough out there to keep me busy typing all day.
But political wives and their treatment have a much lengthier history, too. Edith Wilson is often recognized as the 'first woman president' for the role she played while Wilson convalesced after his stroke. Eleanor Roosevelt was a fiery personality in her own right. Dolley Madison, of course, is remembered for saving Washington's portrait in the War of 1812, but she was also the first to decorate the White House. Few know she lived in poverty after the death of her husband.
Even further back, we have Mary Todd Lincoln, whose story is often overlooked. It's a strong likelihood she was manic depressive. But even in the 1800's she was aware of the spotlight put upon the wife of a president. She lived an unfortunate and desperate life not long after Lincoln's assassination.
I'm not sure when the most dangerous time to live might be, or may have been. Apparently, some think 
Re-posted - 
