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.
After we said some words over the grave, and after some shed some tears, we put Dad's ashes (surprisingly-heavy box of ashes) in a shallow hole next to Moms' and we all went to pick some apples and pears from Dad's trees at the farm last Sunday.
It was just wonderful that is the best year for apples, ever. My pic is just a small sample. The mini pears are as sweet as sugar and his apple varieties are spicey. Stood on chairs and used a butterfly net to harvest the high ones.
I claimed that our Dunkin Donuts coffees and the fruit were our family's Communion after the burial. We did not dare running it through a church. Everybody picked and ate some apples.
Thus did we sneak some Jesus into my cranky Yankee atheist, Bible-loving, distinguished Yale prof Dad's burial. I think it would have been marginally ok with him but he still would have been embarrassed by the attention and sentiment.
And likely, would have had some clever caustic quip about it all. Anyway, excellent apples. Everybody grabbed a box or bag and took a bunch home with them.
He always said that we could toss his cadaver in the river when he died. Well, the box of ashes is darn close to the trout stream.
...no one can be born a Christian in evangelical belief: everyone must come to Jesus individually of his own volition, making a profession of faith based on a genuine conviction of the truth of Jesus’ messiahship. This also explains why, more so than the members of almost any other branch of Christianity, evangelicals share a profound attachment to the textual world of the Bible. For the evangelical, the Bible is more than just a “good book”; it is the literal and inspired word of God, written by prophets who were moved by the holy spirit and preserved through the ages by the hand of divine providence. To evangelicals, the Bible is the blueprint of the cosmos, the framework of history, and the answer to all of life’s mysteries. Only the Bible—not a priesthood or a church hierarchy—can assert authority over the Christian.
Some might term me an Evangelical and some might not. Either way, I learned some things from the essay.
I am reflexively skeptical about anything titled "common," and I do not know what the federal government is doing by getting involved in local education. What I do know is that many people would opt out of many government things if given free choice.
For one hot example, how many would like to opt out of Obamacare? Who wants all of that "insurance coverage"? It's not even really insurance anyway. It covers hangnails, the flu, birth control pills and even pregnancy (why should I pay for your pregnancy if I don't want to? It's elective, and none of my business). It's a pre-paid communal medical treatment plan, and I want nothing to do with it.
There is little that people eat that isn't raised on some sort of farm. As humans over-fish the seas, some fish that were once trash fish are now on restaurant menus. Often, new and more appealing names are used.
I had a perfectly-grilled filet of Branzino last weekend in NYC, on a bed of lobster mashed taters. Even the crispy Branzino skin was delicious. I had never had Branzino before. It's European Sea Bass. It tastes like a small Striped Bass, which means very good and a little sweet. Then I saw this: Why does every restaurant in the USA have Branzino in the menu?
It didn't take long to learn that Local Ocean is farming Branzino in the Northeast US. People are farming Striped Bass too. Count me as in favor of this trend.
Is government power benign, malevolent, or neither? I tend to think that concentrated power is dangerous, regardless of its intentions or of whether it is elected or not. Those who pursue power tend to want more. People like Colbert King see nothing but benevolence. He thinks I am a bad sort of rebel (maybe I am a rebel in opposition to either slavery or serfdom) and doesn't even consider the case for freedom or the dangers of power.
We confront the Great Solvers of the Human Problem who are determined to rearrange everyone to their liking. They began by controlling everything that people did. Now, they have moved on to controlling what people don't do. If you live, if you breathe, if you stir, move your muscles, track moving objects with your eyes, then there are obligations imposed on you.
ObamaCare is one of the final declarations that there is no opting out. Even if you don't drive, own a home, own a business, own a dog, or do one of the infinite things that bring you into mandatory contact with the apparatus of your government, you are committed to a task from maturity to death. Your mission is to obtain health insurance, and, in a system in which you become the ward of the government as soon as you taste air, it is the price that you pay for being alive.
In a free country, you are not obligated to do things simply for the privilege of breathing oxygen north of the Rio Grande and south of Niagara Falls.
Some people seem content with being subjects of a potent parental State which they trust will be filled with wisdom and care. Some (the aspiring adults, in my view) do not. There is a division there. It seems partly psychological. Old John Dean recently commented somewhere that he had become a Dem because Conservatives were the authoritarian party. I think he has it backwards, but he always did.
Nixon was a neo-Liberal. Goldwater was a good guy, as I read my recent history, a Don Quixote or a voice crying in the wilderness.
We'll put his in the same hole as Mom's, not far from the church and the trout stream.
Ashes to ashes.
Dad forbade any ceremoniousness or anything religious and forbade any memorial events, so we kids will just dig a hole and have our own thoughts. Then we'll pick some of his apples and pears, and eat them as if a sort of family communion.
A blissful marriage is the stuff of teenage fantasy. Real life gets in the way of romance, and our unappealing traits become more evident over time. It's amazing how people put up with us.
The age-old institution remains, for us, a sacramental covenant, a secular contract, and a practical arrangement for building a good, decent, wholesome family life. Especially so in an era in which we, and our kids, all quickly move from home, and the extended family in the neighborhood is a thing of the remote past.
IQ is part of it. If you and a spouse each have average IQs of 100, the marriage should have an IQ of 200. If your judgement is mediocre, you can find a spouse with better judgement. If your social skills are weak, a spouse can help compensate. If your taste in decor stinks, your spouse might do better.
And unless you are very wealthy and can afford plenty of help, four hands can get more done in a few hours than can two.
It all just makes good sense as a life foundation, as something to try to build whatever one wants in life on top of. As much as I may even hate and abuse my spouse at times, my life would be lousy without him. At this point, I could not do it without my companion to rely on 100%. It is a permanent bond, as we vowed in the beginning. We put up with eachother's flaws, and benefit from eachother's strengths. We are loyal to eachother and to our life together, above all else. We even confide in eachother, which can be a bit sexy. Fantasy is fun.
The political Left is ambivalent about marriage. They like the idea of marriage to the State instead of to people, but they like gay marriage. Go figure. Historically, however, marriage did not strictly require monogamy despite the spoken vows in church, and allowed room for adventure. We do not do that because that was not our deal.
Charles Murray has been on this topic for years. Marriage works well for society as a whole, but it probably works well for individuals too. Marriage is increasingly the big sociological divide in American life: Getting and staying married makes you part of a privileged elite.
William Shakespeare pretty much stole his plots. That's fine with me. And I suppose he was commercially right to take on the then-old Romeo and Juliet tale, judging it to be one that would sell tickets. Passion, blood, melodramatic death, etc. He wanted to be wealthy, and he was. Little could he have imagined, though, that his version of R&J would be selling tickets in 2013, both on and off Broadway.
It's a silly story, and a silly play. No character development, no fine poetry, no tragedy. Two stupid hormone-crazed 14 year-olds off themselves because the mailman missed delivering a letter in an Italy in which mail delivery is spotty and the vendetta is the spice of life. Poor mail delivery is not the stuff of tragedy. In fact, the play is not a tragedy in Aristotelian terms - or any terms.
My drama expert kid says she thinks it was written as a spoof.
West Side Story beats the Shakespeare, in my view, by miles.
In Verona last month, Mrs. BD and I avoided the Juliet tourist trap baloney. I hate that kind of phony crap but, again, it sells tickets.
Instead of the B'way version with heart-throb Orlando Bloom, we went to see the opening night at our regular Classic Stage which we support to a humble degree, starring (heart-throb) Elizabeth Olsen.
Dumb play, and a lousy performance by all. Where did WS instruct the players to shout their lines? Or to do a ponderous delivery? "Look Mom - I'm reciting Shakespeare!" When people do Shakespeare, they forget how to act like people because it's SHAKESPEARE. Like it's holy.
The only plus was dinner with one of the NYC kids at the Blue Water Grill afterwards with a wonderful jazz singer under our balcony seating. I do love that joint with their music, the exceedingly pleasing surroundings and staff, and their lobster mashed taters. I'll do a whole post about Branzino when I get to it. A tasty fish, but any grilled fish (or anything) is good on a bed of lobster mashed potatoes.
My pic is the pleasant East Village, with the Classic Stage sign. Despite this screw-up, we still like them. They do good Ibsen and Chekhov if you like that sort of thing.
It's well-known that the Chinese rightly love Western music, and love our "serious" music more than our pop music (not that I believe that any music is really "serious"). It is no surprise that they love ours, because their traditional music is hideous.
China made 379,746 pianos last year, 77 per cent of global output, almost all of it for domestic sale. Multiply that by ten for second-hand sales and you are still nowhere near the popular estimate that 60 million Chinese children are currently playing the piano, equivalent to the entire population of the United Kingdom sitting down every evening and practising scales for two hours.
I wish that I had had a better piano teacher when I was a kid but that sounds like lame excuse-making. I have no musical talent at all, but I always have wanted to make just a little music for myself instead of pushing a button for it like a king with his court musicians. I wanted to understand what was behind the pieces I was learning to play, and she kept saying "that's for later." Then, eventually, there was no later. I should have been learning scales, and why scales exist. Or maybe not. I have a friend who is taking up piano in middle age, and is having a wonderful time with it. Great delight learning scales and jazz chords.
Every home needs at least one person practicing music, however well or poorly.
Maybe this is like our post about new math. You either have it, or you don't, but there is a gray zone.
A while ago, I mentioned how my math education was almost destroyed by New Math. Even my math teachers didn't get the point of it even though they were required to teach it. Base Nine. Base 11? WTF? I am not an Einstein and do not need my math deconstructed. Base 10 is plenty enough to keep my brain challenged.
Once I recovered from the now-discarded New Math (it took me 3 years), I was fine. One regret I have with my career, among others, is that it does not require any sophisticated math. I still believe that the Calculus is a beautiful gift from God and the real shiny toy of education.
And statistics remain a perfect tool to fool juries with no math knowledge.
These guys will play you for money. Many of them prefer speed chess - 5-minute or even one-minute games. It's a wonderful thing, excellent mental exercise. I hear that these guys are savvy players.
There are a few checkers guys too, but isn't checkers too much like tic-tac-toe? If you start, you win or draw unless you make an error.
A member of Parliament to Disraeli: "Sir, you will either die on the gallows or of some unspeakable disease." "That depends, sir," said Disraeli, "whether I embrace your policies or your mistress."
"He had delusions of adequacy." - Walter Kerr
"He has all the virtues I dislike and none of the vices I admire." - Winston Churchill
"I have never killed a man, but I have read many obituaries with great pleasure." - Clarence Darrow
"He has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary." - William Faulkner (about Ernest Hemingway)
"Thank you for sending me a copy of your book; I'll waste no time reading it." - Moses Hadas
"I didn't attend the funeral, but I sent a nice letter saying I approved of it." - Mark Twain
"He has no enemies, but is intensely disliked by his friends." - Oscar Wilde
"I am enclosing two tickets to the first night of my new play; bring a friend, if you have one." - George Bernard Shaw to Winston Churchill, "Cannot possibly attend first night, will attend second... if there is one." - Winston Churchill, in response.
"I feel so miserable without you; it's almost like having you here." - Stephen Bishop
"He is a self-made man and worships his creator." - John Bright
"I've just learned about his illness. Let's hope it's nothing trivial." - Irvin S. Cobb
"He is not only dull himself; he is the cause of dullness in others." - Samuel Johnson
"He is simply a shiver looking for a spine to run up." - Paul Keating
"In order to avoid being called a flirt, she always yielded easily." - Charles, Count Talleyrand
"He loves nature, in spite of what it did to him." - Forrest Tucker
"Why do you sit there looking like an envelope without any address on it?" - Mark Twain
"His mother should have thrown him away and kept the stork." - Mae West
“Some cause happiness wherever they go; others, whenever they go." - Oscar Wilde
"He uses statistics as a drunken man uses lamp-posts... for support rather than illumination." - Andrew Lang (1844-1912)
"He has Van Gogh's ear for Music." - Billy Wilder
"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening. But this wasn't it." - Groucho Marx
Skunks are cute, adaptable little critters (weasel family), but their only real predator is the Great Horned Owl.My family never had a dog who didn't get skunked once, or a dog who never got slapped by a Porkie.The hard but non-fatal lessons of life.
I don't think she is blaming the booze business for this. Women have always had their secret Mothers' Little Helpers, of one sort or another, since the beginning of time. Laudanum, alcohol, coca leaf, tobacco, areca nut and betel leaf, you name it - long before TV advertising and Mad Men.
How about the "Elvis" from Mississippi? Peanut butter, fried banana, and bacon on toast, with a splash of hot sauce on top. Sounds ok with me. Gimme one, to check it out:
We will plant Dad's ashes next to Mom's at the Congo church cemetery in the Massachusetts Berkshires in a week or two. I have some ancestors buried there, but the older ones were buried on the farm's own adjacent cemetery because the church and its burial ground were not built until 1817. I have always appreciated the olde epitaph:
Behold my friends as you pass by As you are now, so once was I As I am now, soon you shall be Give thyself to God and follow me.
While visiting northern Italy, I jotted down some menu items we saw, and many of which we tried. These are typical antipasti, primis, or secondis:
Beef carpaccio Duck and horse carpaccio Ossa Bucco Antipasto misto Tagliatelle with truffle Tagliatelle with butter and sage Seared Tuna with pepper sauce Braised turkey breast with onion sauce Horse stew on polenta Salmon with zucchini blossoms with Prosecca sauce Gnocchi with porcini and truffle Chicken liver with balsamic sauce Triple fish carpaccio Grilled octopus with pesto sauce Rabbit stew on polenta Truffle risotto with smoked goose breast
That's Italian! As I said before, none of these treats taste as good as they should without wine.
If I want a dessert, my preference is a plate of mixed local cheeses with a couple of figs. Cafes change their menus daily, depending on what they have, and post them outside. Here's one, in Verona. Macceroncini in this context refers to thin tagliatelle:
Cash registers were invented to prevent stealing by store clerks. James Ritty invented it in 1884. They were not mainly adding machines, but registers of sales so the owner could keep track of what was going on. In those days, any clerk could add quickly anyway. Paper receipts were a later improvement.
They were complex mechanical machines (still are, but not mechanical). The old National Cash Register Co. (NCR) is still in business. IBM's Tom Watson started out there.
I spent a few minutes trying to find out how they were designed, but gave up. The Wiki entry is quite lame. Disappointing.
The days of the ka-ching are long gone. The purpose of the ka-ching noise was to let the owner or manager know that a sale had taken place.
Welcome, fellow and fellowess fans of NCIS. Tonight's the night we say goodbye to everybody's favorite ex-Mossad assassin and adorable NCIS agent, Ziva David. The goodbye story will continue into next week, and then this wonderful chapter will come to a close.
For those of you who missed the breaking story a few months ago, you can get caught up to date here. My full series of NCIS posts is here.
Street scene, early morning, Verona a week or two ago. Everybody loves Verona.What Verona lacks is a 24-hr Dunkin Donuts.
- GPS is very handy in Europe, but 10% of the time she will direct you to the most direct route instead of the most sensible route. I got some grey hairs from her direct route up in the Alps. No guardrails, cliffs, etc. Then a narrow tunnel. Exciting. Wakes you up. The locals zoom their beemers and Harleys along the edge of the cliffs.
- In addition to la bella figura, you can tell Italians from tourists because in town they ride bikes, Vespas, or motorcycles, have dogs, and are constantly smoking and drinking. Their dogs are always arguing in the street. And they kiss each other when they meet friends on the passagiatta.
- For Alpine hiking, you need Medium Weight hiking boots and a backpack with water.
- Nobody takes an AmEx card in Europe anymore
- Your cash evaporates while traveling. Bring more than you think you'll need, and inform your credit cards about your trip or they might freeze them when you use an ATM. Generally speaking, they want cash. Especially the restaurants. Many of the good ones, for locals, will not take any credit cards.
- In northern Italy, they only provide balsamic vinegar. Fine with me.
- In the Milan airport, we saw at least three women with burkhas and all that. One had a Ferragamo bag, the other two had Prada. Mrs. BD was impressed that they had found a way to show off. Their husbands looked like terrorists, and their kids acted bratty and out of control. They rushed off when the Emirates Air flight was announced.
- A reader asked why we "always" go to Italy. We don't only go there (our trips this year have included Georgia and Cape Cod), but there is no one Italy. There are a bunch of provinces and old city states with their own traditions and cultures that have only been politically united for 100 years, and are still far from socially united. As you saw in my travelogue, we spent 4 days in a purely German-speaking part of Italy (well, German and Ladin) where they make German food. Think Scotland vs. England, or Vermont vs. Texas.
- Food: In northern Italy (ie north of Siena and Emilia-Romagna) they cook mostly with butter, not olive oil. Their pastas are tagliatelle egg noodles (real good) and tortellini (which I hate). For carbs, they are big on risotto, polenta, and gnocchi (all good). Their very fine Lasagnas are soft, and have nutmeg. They like to cook with truffle and truffle oil, and they love their Porcinis. They like meat (steak, roast beef, rabbit, and horse) and seafood. Most menus have octopus in some form. I like any seafood. Italian foods are designed to be consumed with wine and I can attest that they are not as tasty without it.
- Weather: Generally, I'd try to avoid southern Europe in July and August. Too hot, and too many tourists.
We learned an excellent lesson from from clearing out my parents' house.
Attic, basement, storage rooms. We have felt inspired in a strange way by it all, and have begun to work on clearing out our own spaces. Lots of our stuff we have not used in years seems quite desirable and useful to our Mexican immigrant helpers.
The rest of it goes to the dumpster. "Might want it someday" means "never."
"We have reached a point of diminishing returns in our public life. Hardly anything actually needs doing. We may in fact be past that point; not only does nothing much need doing, but we’d benefit if much of what has been done were to be undone. What useful work can I do with Windows 8 that I couldn’t do with XP?
Politicians make a living—a very grand living indeed at the higher levels—by saying there are things wrong that need fixing. Are there, though?"
After we said some words over the grave, and after some shed some tears, we put Dad's ashes (surprisingly-heavy box of ashes) in a shallow hole next to Moms' and we all went to pick some apples and pears from Dad's trees at the farm last Sunday.
But then they had to backtrack: 
We'll put his in the same hole as Mom's, not far from the church and the trout stream.
William Shakespeare pretty much stole his plots. That's fine with me. And I suppose he was commercially right to take on the then-old Romeo and Juliet tale, judging it to be one that would sell tickets. Passion, blood, melodramatic death, etc. He wanted to be wealthy, and he was. Little could he have imagined, though, that his version of R&J would be selling tickets in 2013, both on and off Broadway.
Just back from an extra-long weekend around my old haunts in Oxford (UK). Same old, same old, and tourist-free in September.
Cash registers were invented 
