Thursday, September 24. 2009
Huge treasure trove of 1400 year-old Anglo-Saxon gold found in Staffordshire. Looks like things a king would have owned.
h/t, Synthstuff
Tuesday, September 22. 2009
Prehistoric sat-nav in England.
Gwynnie tells me that our western Indians did the same with petroglyphs, but I do not have the links.
Amost everybody likes to go places without getting lost. I got lost in Barcelona, but it's not like really being lost when there's a cafe and tapas joint nearby.
Monday, September 14. 2009
Managed to find my way to the delightful town of Lucca two weeks ago, the home of the beloved Jack Puccini and his illustrious musical ancestors. More than a tunesmith - but what a tunesmith. Here's his family church in which he first performed:
and here's the house he grew up in (second one in from the right corner):
More Lucca photos later...plus lunch, of course.
Saturday, September 12. 2009
Why did we schlepp all the way down to Agrigento last week? To see the Valley of the Temples (and to get a good lunch).
Why they call it "valley" I do not know, because this assembly of Doric Greek temples were built along a ridge - an acropolis, as always - within view of the busy harbor. It must have been quite a sight.
These were built before the Parthenon, around 460 BC - by Carthaginian slaves. The Temple of Zeus was five times the size of the Parthenon. The old Greek-era town was large (200,000 in 500 BC) and prosperous. Empedocles (the four elements, etc) lived there.
Most of the temples are in ruins either from earthquakes or use of the stones for other building purposes. The so-called Temple of Concord is in good shape, and was in use as a Christian church until the 1700s:
That's limestone. No marble around. You cannot really make good sculptures with limestone. To make the temples white, they were covered with a layer of plaster - some of which remains. The proscenia were painted bright colors, as the Greeks always did.
More about Agrigento, and lunch, below:
Continue reading "My summer trip: Agrigento, with almond groves and a fine lunch at Baglio della Luna"
Friday, September 11. 2009
Somewhere around 450 AD (according to the Venerable Bede), the Celtic warlord Vortigern, embattled by the northern Picts, made a decision that would change the world: He invited the Frisian brothers Horsa and Hengest to bring their warriors across the sea as mercenaries and help him defeat the Picts. After the fierce northern Germanic warriors ensured Vortigern’s victory, he tried to cheat them out of their payment, and they responded by founding a kingdom in southern England. Thus began the Anglo-Saxon migration, and soon, conquest.
The world went crazy after the fall of Rome. Read the rest. It's about the Olde.Anglosphere. As far as I know, basic English is still Frisian (except for the added Viking, Frenchy, Greek and Latinate stuff).
The historic Battle of Teutoberg Forest.
It stopped the Romans in the same way that Lepanto stopped the Moslems.
Wednesday, September 9. 2009
Most of Roman Carthage (which was the third largest Roman metropolis in the 200-400 era, after Rome and Alexandria - the population was around 300,000) is buried beneath the modern town of Carthage, but some that is accessible has been excavated.
After the Third Punic War in 146 BC, very little remained of the old Phoenician Carthage - except things like these boxes. The Phoenicians worshipped Baal, who required that everybody's first-born be sacrificed. The ashes of these kids were buried in these sad little stone boxes.
More of my photos of cool Roman Carthage ruins below -
Continue reading "My summer vacation: Carthage"
Wednesday, September 2. 2009
A re-post -
 In a comment on our piece about clear-cutting, a reader let us know about this book: 1491: New Revelations about the Americas Before Columbus, by Charles Mann.
Human fantasies about the Garden of Eden, like human utopian fantasies, just never give up. You might almost think we all wish we were back in the womb.
I ordered the book, but here's a quote from Charles Mann's 2002 essay in The Atlantic on the subject:
Before it became the New World, the Western Hemisphere was vastly more populous and sophisticated than has been thought—an altogether more salubrious place to live at the time than, say, Europe. New evidence of both the extent of the population and its agricultural advancement leads to a remarkable conjecture: the Amazon rain forest may be largely a human artifact.
It's a fascinating subject to me. Here's the whole essay.
Image: An early version of Edward Hicks' Peaceable Kingdom
 Via View from 1776:
Confined recently to nights in a hotel room in a foreign city I had the luck to find the most exhilarating piece of popular history I had read in a long time. The book is How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe’s Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It—a title which doubles as a summary. It is the latest by Arthur Herman, an American who is establishing a niche for himself as a gutsy revisionist and prime mover of the Western Heritage Programme within the Smithsonian in Washington DC. His book is “Scotch” as we would say in Canada by which we mean solid and not kidding. (Well a little droll but so is single malt.) ??The book unfolds the Scottish Enlightenment of the 18th century for the intelligent general reader—which for all its significance to the world we now inhabit is little studied or appreciated. It is almost the opposite of intellectually sexy, all achievement and no tragic pause. For the truth is wherever you look into “modernity” you find Scottish antecedents. From 1745 on they were Scots who altered our whole view of education and law who invented our modern economics and social studies; our medicine and engineering too; who shook down conceited practices in everything from history to theology—in each turning an inherited essentially mediaeval amalgam of prejudice and guesswork into a systematic study whose new focus would be the welfare of mankind.
The paradox is that this achievement was made in a thinly-populated country that had lost its political independence in the Act of Union of 1707 and which was a squalid backwater removed from the elegant royal courts of Europe.
Read the whole post. We have always been interested in the Scottish Enlightenment. See this old post,
The older folks are still talking about New England's '38 hurricane. No, I do not remember it myself.
Sunday, August 16. 2009
A snap of the Billings Farm in Woodstock. Yes, it's a museum farm, but they do a good job with their Jersey cows. Are mixed farms museums now?
My pal and I stole a couple of apples off their trees from over the fence during a morning hike last weekend: very good Macintosh apples - cold and crisp and spicey at 7 am. (This free ad is our in-kind payment.)
That's their cornfield in the background, and some hayfields behind that.
I thought to myself that no real farmer and orchard-keeper would have such meticulous lawns around their apple trees:
Saturday, August 15. 2009
I’ve nothing against the Woodstock get-together nor its good music. For those there who enjoyed the rain and mud, and those who addled their brains with drugs – most temporarily and some permanently, you’re welcome to it. What many object to is that Woodstock has been raised to an almost holy event to be honored as symbolic of our generation. Meanwhile, the far many more young people who wouldn’t have thought of attending, and the many more young people who weren’t there because they were serving in the armed forces, the hollow hallowedness attached by the media to Woodstock is seen as, as usual, blatantly one-sided and ignores the real sacrifices faced by others.
The VFW Magazine tells the tale of the 109 Americans killed in Vietnam during those four days in August 1969.
Time gushed with admiration for the tribal gathering, declaring: “It may well rank as one of the significant political and sociological events of the age.” It deplored the three deaths there—“one from an overdose of drugs [heroin], and hundreds of youths freaked out on bad trips caused by low-grade LSD.” Yet attendees exhibited a “mystical feeling for themselves as a special group,” according to the magazine’s glowing essay….
Meanwhile, 8,429 miles around the other side of the world, 514,000 mostly young Americans were authentically serving the country that had raised them to place society over self. The casualties they sustained over those four days were genuine, yet none of the elite media outlets were praising their selflessness….
So when you hear talk of the glories of Woodstock—the so-called “defining event of a generation”—keep in mind those 109 GIs who served nobly yet are never lauded by the illustrious spokesmen for the “Sixties Generation.”
Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Rennselaer, NY
A college professor friend who is authoring a book about those from NYC who did serve in Vietnam asked me to send him this, below, which I’ve kept in a scrapbook buried in my garage. The photo is me, in the center, leading a June 1968 Flag Day parade around my college campus, just before graduation. Soon after, I enlisted in the Marine Corps. During Woodstock, I was training to go on to Vietnam. The sentiments in the poem are those of another Marine, in Leatherneck Magazine, which mirrored my own.
Thursday, August 13. 2009
If you missed Part 1, it's here (with a little bit of Vermont history).
In the early 1800s, few towns had architects. They did have builders. And they had Pattern Books.
Pattern books were like blueprints, produced by well-known or entrepreneurial archtects in the big cities, just the same as builders' development houses of today are built from patterns.
I like this one. People up there tend to their front gardens with loving care for their own pleasure and for the delight of passers-by:
More fun photos below the fold - take a minute to feast yer eyeballs.
Continue reading "Woodstock, VT architecture, Part 2"
Tuesday, August 11. 2009
Vermont was settled later than most of New England, in the late 1700s by people from Connecticut, Massachusetts, and Rhode Island. Pioneers, attracted by cheap land. You could cut down all the trees and raise sheep, and the rivers provided endless power for mills. Woolen mills, stone-cutting marble and granite mills, lumber mills, etc. You could transport stuff down the rivers to the big Connecticut River.
They did cut down all the trees: by 1850 most of Vermont was denuded of forest, whether for lumber, grazing, charcoal, or firewood.
(In the 1700s, Vermont was considered part of the New York colony, but New Hampshire had claims on it. For a few decades, Vermont was the independent Republic of Vermont until they joined the union in 1792.)
After producing the woolen garments for World War 1, Vermont's mills slowly closed down, the Vermont wool biz (Big Wool moved west) dried up and was replaced by dairy for the distant cities when the trains came through. Now, with factory dairy, there isn't even much of that any more, and the trees have grown back (and so have the Moose, Black Bear, and White-Tailed Deer). The milk cows today spend all day in sheds until their productivity drops and they are turned into Mcdonalds burgers.
The wealth evident in the fine houses built in Woodstock from roughly 1800-1840 (replacing shacks, log cabins, and other humble dwellings) was a combination of its being a Shire town - a county seat with court and jail and lawyers - and the woolen mills. Those businesses attracted tradesmen and farmers, roads spread out, and the town thrived for a while. In 1830, this town of 3000 souls (then, and 3000 now!) had five newspapers.
Today, Woodstock is all about tourism, with endless interesting summer and winter events, and skiing, of course, in the winter. The village is preserved in amber by a fierce architectural review board and its designation as a National Historic District. Laurence Rockefeller had a lot to do with that (his Woodstock home is among the photos below the fold).
And, today, Vermont has the distinction of having the lowest per capita income in the US, having surpassed Mississippi a few years ago. The poorer they get, the further to the Left they move. It is not rational and it is utterly self-created (taxes and regs) and self-defeating, but it's a free country and, here at Maggie's Farm, we value the freedom of people to do stupid things if they want to. (I just hate it when people make obviously predictable mistakes on my nickel.)
The Wiki on Woodstock, VT here. Worth a visit. Bring camera.
I took the photos below early on Saturday morning. The temp was 48 degrees F at 5:30 when I typically go out to begin my exploring of a place (hence no people around in some of my photos). By mid-day, the temp got up to a balmy global warming crisis of 73 degrees.
I offer no architectural comments on the details of these structures. I don't have the time, and I lack the eye for detail that Mrs. BD has. My brain tends towards weight, balance, harmony, and emotional comfort - and only notices detail when it intrudes. However, I do know and believe that God is in the details. More on that later (maybe).
Many fun photos below the fold. All of these buildings are in town -
Continue reading "Woodstock, Vermont info and architecture, with some thoughts about old-time New England, Part 1"
Saturday, August 1. 2009
Is the era of the small town over in America? Bookslut thinks so.
I'm not sure how "small" is defined. As readers know, I work in a city (Hartford), sleep in exurbia. Everybody needs places to be a bit anonymous - but not too anonymous.
At the least, you want your regular shopkeepers, bartenders, and maitre d's to know your name - but you can do that in both city and country when you find the places you like.
Photo: A small town in NH, c. 1890. Note the large scale elimination of trees from the hillsides, typical of the 1800s in New England. Firewood, charcoal, and lumbering, thus creating hillside pastures and driving the bear and moose up to Maine. Also note the fine streetside Elm trees, now all gone due to the Elm Tree Blight.
No CVS or Dunkin Donuts in evidence: how did people survive?
Wednesday, July 29. 2009
 Teddy Roosevelt rightly fascinates biographers.
I am not ready for a new one after having read Edmund Morris' multi-volume bio, but Douglas Brinkley's new one looks to be a big seller: The Wilderness Warrior: Theodore Roosevelt and the Crusade for America.
Our pet theory is that Americans snap up history books because they get no serious history in school.
Monday, July 27. 2009
My friend and fellow Vietnam veteran, Bob Caldwell, served for decades as a journalist in major newspapers, retiring recently as member of its editorial board and editor of the San Diego Union-Tribune’s Sunday opinion section. Today, Bob returns to print, in the Washington Examiner, to remind us that’s the way it wasn’t despite Walter Cronkite’s media-pack-panic after Tet ’68.
Nationally syndicated columnist Diana West, also, examines Cronkite’s “offensive history.” West says, admittedly harshly, “No, the Cronkite post-mortem that's needed is for the zombies who conjured up the hollow rapture and the living dead who fell for it.”
If you really don't remember, and before you start arguing from ignorance, you might refresh your knowledge of the facts with reading the comprehensive The Big Story by the Washington Post's Chief of the Saigon bureau during Tet '68, Peter Braestrup. Braestrup doesn't ignore media bias but emphasizes structural, staffing and experiential limitations of the mainstream media of that time, and that these problems "persist to this day." No kidding!
P.S.: Another old friend, Cliff Kincaid of Accuracy In Media delves deeper into the wider range of Cronkite illusions, such as the Soviet threat being exaggerated and that President Carter was the brightest president Cronkite knew.
Dino's reminder of the Newsweek comment that the O "is sort of a god" reminded us of this post from one year ago:
 I love hope and change, don't you? That's why I buy Powerball tickets on occasion -and why I work out. Nevertheless, my life is pretty darn good, even if I have to work long hours.
Obama's got the Big Con going. Beran at City Journal gets it. One quote:
The danger of Obama’s charismatic healer-redeemer fable lies in the hubris it encourages, the belief that gifted politicians can engender a selfless communitarian solidarity. Such a renovation of our national life would require not only a change in constitutional structure—the current system having been geared to conflict by the Founders, who believed that the clash of private interests helps preserve liberty—but also a change in human nature. Obama’s conviction that it is possible to create a beautiful politics, one in which Americans will selflessly pursue a shared vision of the common good, recalls the belief that Dostoyevsky attributed to the nineteenth-century Russian revolutionists: that, come the revolution, “all men will become righteous in one instant.” The perfection would begin.
In rejecting the Anglo-American politics of limits, Obama revives a political tradition that derives ultimately from Niccolò Machiavelli. In the Discourses on Livy and The Art of War, Machiavelli argued that it is possible to create a communitarian republic like the one whose outlines he glimpsed in Livy’s (highly romanticized) version of Roman history—a polity in which citizens, forsaking their own swinish pursuits, would become happy in the pursuit of a common good. Wise laws, he maintained, would “make citizens love one another.” The virtuous res publica of the Romans could be conjured anew.
Monday, July 13. 2009
 The Englishman reminds us that yesterday was the anniversary of the Glorious Revolution.
We Americans do not think much about that 1688 event, but his link explains why we should. It was a precursor, of sorts, to the American Revolution.
The Columbia Encyclopedia says:
The Declaration of Rights and the Bill of Rights (1689) redefined the relationship between monarch and subjects and barred any future Catholic succession to the throne. The royal power to suspend and dispense with law was abolished, and the crown was forbidden to levy taxation or maintain a standing army in peacetime without parliamentary consent. The provisions of the Bill of Rights were, in effect, the conditions upon which the throne was offered to and accepted by William and Mary. These events were a milestone in the gradual process by which practical power shifted from the monarch to Parliament. The theoretical ascendancy of Parliament was never thereafter successfully challenged.
Image: William of Orange (William lll)
Sunday, July 12. 2009
Above: Lower East Side of Manhattan, 1937, where many waves of immigrants found their first foothold in America. Those 1860s-1890s tenements are still standing, in what is now one of the hippest young neighborhoods of NYC.
Below: Mulberry St., NYC, c. 1900, packed with southern Italian and Sicilian immigrants. The misguided Progressives wanted to tear down these neighborhoods, from the time of Teddy Roosevelt to Lyndon Johnson.
What's a "slum"?
The Dylanologist and I have always been interested in the tragedies of urban planning, and fans of the organic, natural growth of urban areas designed by market forces and human desires, not by hubris-infected government experts.
One of his great-grandmothers, 1st generation Irish, raised 5 kids (with great success) in a NYC tenement, using bureau drawers as cribs. The Dyl said to me the other day:
"I lived in tenements for eight years. No elevators: two to three-story walk-ups, no a/c, shared bathrooms down the hall, unreliable heat, no cable, no phone, no wireless, with one tiny room with a dirty window and an old single bed with one thin, lumpy mattress. For the first four years, my parents paid around $30,000 per year for the privilege, and for the second four years, closer to $40,000."
Here's Jane Jacobs:
Friday, July 10. 2009
 It's John Calvin's 500th Birthday today (1509-1564). He was indeed one of the shapers of the Western world.
Marvin Olasky offers Three Cheers for John Calvin.
Here's a Calvin quote via Marginal Rev:
Whatever be the kind of tribulation with which we are afflicted, we should always consider the end of it to be, that we may be trained to despise the present, and thereby stimulated to aspire to the future life. For since God well knows how strongly we are inclined by nature to a slavish love of this world, in order to prevent us from clinging too strongly to it, he employs the fittest reason for calling us back, and shaking off our lethargy.
Tuesday, June 30. 2009
"Orwell was right. It was Wells who made it respectable, even before World War I, for liberals in England and America to demean their own native democratic culture in the name of an imagined antidemocratic World State. And it was Wells, with his stature as the prophet of the future, who taught upper-middle-class liberals that they were entitled to govern in the name of social evolution."
 Fred Siegel, writing on HG Wells, via Samiz.
Readers know that we proud gun-and-Bible-clinging redneck Northeast Yankees hate it when Chardonnay-sippers who see themselves as our betters try to tell us how to live. We ain't stupid neither - cuz we been government-eddicated! At great expense!
BTW, we do love chevre - to the point that our editor wants to keep some goats. The meat is quite tasty, too. What's the PC term for a she-goat? A goatess? Goatette? Help me out.
Friday, June 26. 2009
Blogger and frequent Maggie's commenter AVI mentioned historian David Hacket Fisher a while ago in a comment here. It reminded me of Fisher's fine book, which I once meant to read but never did: Historian's Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought.
From a post on that book from this site:
Fischer, David Hackett, Historians’ Fallacies: Toward a Logic of Historical Thought (New York: Harper Collins, 1970). In only approximately 300 pages, Fischer surveys an immense amount of background historical literature to point out a comprehensive variety of analytical errors that many, if not most, historians commit. Fischer points out specific examples of faulty or sloppy reasoning in the work of even the most prominent historians, making it a useful book for beginning students of history. While this book presumably did not make Fischer popular with many of his peers, it should be noted that his contributions as a historian have not been limited simply to criticizing the work of others; since 1976, he has published a number of well-received books on other historical topics.
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