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.
In case readers didn't take the time to read the WSJ opinion piece this week by prominent scientists, here it is:No Need to Panic About Global Warming -There's no compelling scientific argument for drastic action to 'decarbonize' the world's economy.
The brief video interview with the Princeton Physics prof there is interesting too. He says they would have had many signatures if they had taken the time.
These fellows are saying what we have been saying here for years, but they have more street cred than we have. Indeed, the story of the AGW hysteria is a fascinating story of the politicization of scientific inquiry coupled with governmental and academic greed for money and power. It is a cautionary tale.
Furthermore, I think many of us would welcome a little global warming. I think it would improve the planet, overall. It certainly did so in the past. Watch, over the next year, more scientific organizations and agencies find the courage to publicize these politically-incorrect views.
At Maggie's Farm, most or all of us are Environmentalists and Conservationists. We want land and water and air to be protected. We do not even approve of urban sprawl because we may need all of our farmlands someday and, as pleasant as urban hiking can be, we need the woods too. But at the same time, we like to live in reality.
"My idea was to bribe the working classes, or shall I say, to win them over, to regard the state as a social institution existing for their sake and interested in their welfare.”
That god forbid, that made me first your slave, I should in thought control your times of pleasure, Or at your hand th' account of hours to crave, Being your vassal bound to stay your leisure. O let me suffer (being at your beck) Th' imprisoned absence of your liberty, And patience tame to sufferance bide each check, Without accusing you of injury. Be where you list, your charter is so strong, That you your self may privilage your time To what you will, to you it doth belong, Your self to pardon of self-doing crime. I am to wait, though waiting so be hell, Not blame your pleasure be it ill or well.
A friend of mine recently joined a 3-day prison ministry in which our church participates. He returned home shaken by the entire experience.
6 million Americans sit in prisons today. I am certain that many of them are dangerous sociopaths who we would not want living next door, but many are non-violent (eg drug crimes, white collar crimes, etc) for which better penalties (eg fines) could be concocted. After all, it costs the taxpayer more per year than a year at Harvard to incarerate somebody.
America does have high rates of emprisonment. China doesn't, because they use the death penalty so liberally that they have medical vans on routes to stop by and harvest your fresh organs. In places like Saudi, they just cut your hand off if you steal. I suppose my feeling is that prison is ok for violent offenders, but not for the non-violent.
There are a few Italian pasta dishes that I am very fond of. One is the old reliable spaghetti - best made with spaghettini, I feel - with garlic and oil, with parsley on top. But the best is Pappardelle al Funghi.
The fungus, of course, has to be Porcini, either fresh if you can get it (and afford it), or dried. Dried is almost better, because you use the soaking water in the mix, and the flavor of the dried is more intense. I cannot find the exact recipe that I make on the internet, but it's something like this.
However, I don' know why it needs all that wine and chicken broth. Too soupy. Also, no Parmesan - no reason to add another flavor to distract from the earthy richness of the Porcini.
As you know, you never serve a sauce on top of pasta - you toss the pasta in the hot pan with the sauce. Photo below looks like it's made with fresh porcinis not cut quite into 2" pieces, and somebody forgot to garnish it with chopped parsley and some pepper. Otherwise...
Apple's executives believe the vast scale of overseas factories as well as the flexibility, diligence and industrial skills of foreign workers have so outpaced their U.S. counterparts that "Made in the USA" is no longer a viable option for most Apple products.
The elites who denounce poverty despise the poor. Their every high-minded, right-thinking “poverty program” proves this detestation—from the bulldozing of vibrant tenement communities to the drug law policing policies that send poor kids to prison and rich kids to rehab to the humiliation of food stamps and free school lunches to the loathsome inner-city public schools where those free lunches are slopped onto cafeteria trays.
That's the good olde Beachcomber at Cahoon's Hollow, Wellfleet, last summer. Sippican told me he used to play bass there. It's an entirely pleasant joint with pretty good seafood and generous bartenders.
Building is an old rescue station, right on the ocean beach.
When we were kids, we played Army Man. In the evenings, we watched Vic Morrow keep his head in Combat, and Christopher George go dunebuggying in Rat Patrol. Entertainment like that was everywhere, and every retaining wall in every driveway had imaginary Guns of Navarone atop it the day after we saw the movie. We'd gather up all our military-ish toy swag, pick sides, and wander the neighborhood sneaking up on each other and arguing over who shot whom. Nothing we had shot any sort of projectile, so there was nothing to do but argue; but we all wanted to die and fall to the ground in histrionic ways and writhe around a bit, so the arguments were mostly about who was "throwing" the war too easily to suit the other side. There was a dirty little secret of all such suburban war games of the sixties. We all wanted to be the Germans.
The Germans were cool. Exotic. The Americans were just our dads in olive drab. German uniforms were like a circus outfit compared to a reform school tie. Germans had those nifty beer bottle hand grenades, tanks named after panthers and tigers instead of anonymous generals, and those awesome grease guns that went BBBRRRRRPPPP when you let them off the chain. And besides, if you were the Germans, you were expected to lose and die and writhe on the ground in your death throes over and over and have all the fun.
The actual American military seems to have understood that the Germans had all the sexy stuff, and worked hard to remind the American troops that outre weapons, gaudy uniforms with lots of lightning bolts and skulls, and Roman salutes don't win wars. The American army was boring compared to the German army. Boring like Joe Louis fighting Joel Grey would be, that is. Workmanlike. Here's an interesting example of the mundane but necessary propaganda that reminded American GIs that the boring stuff works just fine.
He is right that weight is a class and/or cultural thing to some degree. There is a sort of logic to it in an era of plentiful or unlimited cheap carbohydrates in the Western world. Being heavy no longer displays prosperity, while being trim and fit shows that you have the ability to delay gratification for more important goals, such as being more vigorous and sexy, and less of a couch potato.
However, unlike Lefties, I don't care what other people chose to be or what they eat. From Knish,
Social medicine politicizes food consumption and a globalized economy politicizes food production. And the politicized American plate has less on it and at a higher price. While the left obsessively pursues its mission of destroying fast food in the name of lowering social medicine costs and being fairer to farmers, what they are truly accomplishing is to take affordable and filling food off the shelves, as they have done with countless other products that they have targeted.
As lefty pols go, in the last photo I saw, Al Gore looked like a fattie, living off the fat of the land. Last photo I saw, Obama looked semi-anorectic for a middle-aged man-boy. Clinton got fat, had a heart attack, and then got scrawny and ill-looking living on arugula salad.
Here is a brief history: The Real Skinny: Expert Traces America's Thin Obsession. What that brief post misses is that, today, in our culture, trim and fit is sexy and appealing to both men and women. In a way, it seems to say that you have not given up on life, or at least that you have not given up on caring about your body. In fact, "studies show" that being trim and fit helps you get a job, or keep one.
I love a Big Mac once in a while. Who doesn't? A Big Mac and Fries is around 1000 calories. To walk that off takes 4-5 hours of vigorous walking, at least. About 3 hours on the elliptical.
More on Charles Murray on Fishtown and Belmont, from Kay Hymowitz:
Most disastrous for Fishtown residents has been the collapse of the family, which Murray believes is now “approaching a point of no return.” For a while after the 1960s, the working class hung on to its traditional ways. That changed dramatically by the 1990s. Today, under 50 percent of Fishtown 30- to 49-year-olds are married; in Belmont, the number is 84 percent. About a third of Fishtowners of that age are divorced, compared with 10 percent of Belmonters. Murray estimates that 45 percent of Fishtown babies are born to unmarried mothers, versus 6 to 8 percent of those in Belmont.
And so it follows: Fishtown kids are far less likely to be living with their two biological parents. One survey of mothers who turned 40 in the late nineties and early 2000s suggests the number to be only about 30 percent in Fishtown. In Belmont? Ninety percent—yes, ninety—were living with both mother and father. Many experts would define the cause as a dearth of “marriageable” men (see above). The causation goes the other way as well. Men who don’t marry don’t work—or at least, they work less hard. Severed from family life, they don’t attach themselves to community organizations, including churches, and in greatly disproportionate numbers they engage in antisocial, even criminal, behavior.
For all their degrees, the upper class in Belmont is pretty ignorant about what’s happening in places like Fishtown.
I respect Murray a great deal, but I think he juxtaposes two extremes. America is filled with middle-class towns and middle-class neighborhoods which are neither Fishtowns nor Belmonts but which are having a tough time in the current economy. While the welfare state has enabled much of the deterioration of civilized culture in Fishtown, the lack of unskilled jobs (largely taken by new immigrants who are grateful for any work at any pay) and semi-skilled jobs (overseas) probably plays a role in that too. It takes a lot of initiative to take charge of one's life nowadays, regardless of one's advantages or lack thereof.
Where are the jobs for a guy who is happy to run a lathe or machine tool all day at a steady job, then go home to his cozy family? Those jobs no longer exist in Pittsfield or Bridgeport, and nothing will bring them back. It is a tragedy, I think, of the changes.
The "post" road meant a mail road. It now has different names as it travels through different towns, but locals call it "the Boston Post Road" or "the Post Road" still. Its original name was The King's Highway. That old road, based on an Indian trail. has been part of my life, on and off, forever. In fact, when I was a kid, the old trolley tracks still stuck through the asphalt creating a bike challenge.
Image of the Boston Post Rd in the late 1600s in Pelham, NY, from this site.
A friend of mine told me he is taking this trip this winter, with his two brothers through the Strait of Magellan and then up north along the coast of Chile.
He said they decided that they wanted to bond and reconnect before they get old. Sounds like a very cool trip, and cheap. He said he was going to take photos of Albatrosses. I warned him not to shoot one because nothing good comes of it.
The core institutions, ideas and expectations that shaped American life for the sixty years after the New Deal don’t work anymore. The gaps between the social system we inhabit and the one we now need are becoming so wide that we can no longer paper over them. But even as the failures of the old system become more inescapable and more damaging, our national discourse remains stuck in a bygone age. The end is here, but we can’t quite take it in.
and
The blue model is breaking down so fast and so far that not even its supporters can ignore the disintegration and disaster it now presages. Liberal Democrats in states like Rhode Island and cities like Chicago are cutting pensions and benefits and laying off workers out of financial necessity rather than ideological zeal. The blue model can no longer pay its bills, and not even its friends can keep it alive.
Many would claim that Sicily is not really part of Italy (they even speak Sicilian, not Roman Italian). However, the tiny country of Italy contains many regions with separate cultures, genetics (northern Italy is full of lovely blondes), foods, languages - parts of northern Italy speak German or French or Veneto - and accents, etc. that it seems like an artificial nation. Well, it is.
Languages of Italy. Many Italians speak a regional language or dialect, maybe plus the official Roman Italian, especially if they are urban.
The nation turned 150 years old in 2011, so it is still young and culturally divided.
Anyway, this post was meant to offer a sample of classic Sicilian cooking. We had something very much like this Swordfish outside Agrigento two years ago. However, the filet of swordfish, sliced horizonally, was neither pounded nor rolled - just stuffed with the herbs and pignolis, with the other slice laid on top before baking.
It was topped with a wine and white raisin sauce and served on a bed of - you guessed it - Italian-style mashed potatoes (ie with oil not butter, plus garlic). That's Sicilian cooking.
Sicily is on our list of places to spend more time in the future. Due to its relative poverty and its corruption (from what I have read, it's still basically run by the Cosa Nostra, and what we would term "sociopathy"in the USA is normal there), it hasn't changed much in the past century.
If you go, don't forget the Cannolis (they are a Sicilian dessert).
Photo on the right is a couple of charming Sicilian gals
Shooting a gun is like smoking a cigarette or drinking espresso in a café in Paris or having sex on a Caribbean beach: You’ve watched it so many times on-screen that you experience your own actions as an echo. It’s impossible not to feel like a cliché.
State officials have become addicted to federal subsidies because they allow them to spend money taken from taxpayers across the country instead of having to ask their voters to pony up the funds,
“An opposition that would earn its way back to leadership must offer not just criticism of failures that anyone can see, but a positive and credible plan to make life better, particularly for those aspiring to make a better life for themselves. Republicans accept this duty, gratefully.
“The routes back to an America of promise, and to a solvent America that can pay its bills and protect its vulnerable, start in the same place. The only way up for those suffering tonight, and the only way out of the dead end of debt into which we have driven, is a private economy that begins to grow and create jobs, real jobs, at a much faster rate than today.
“Contrary to the President's constant disparagement of people in business, it's one of the noblest of human pursuits. The late Steve Jobs - what a fitting name he had - created more of them than all those stimulus dollars the President borrowed and blew. Out here in Indiana, when a businessperson asks me what he can do for our state, I say ‘First, make money. Be successful. If you make a profit, you'll have something left to hire someone else, and some to donate to the good causes we love.’
The killings at Haditha in November 2005 were blown up by opponents of the US in Iraq into an indictment of the US and its troops. This onslaught sapped the will of many Americans. The following rules of engagement and the drawn out prosecution of the Marines involved have undermined the morale and endangered the lives of our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan.
Take the premise that at Haditha both the Marines and those who were killed in houses 1 and 2 were correct in their own view. The long term losers are both US troops and noncombatants.
Both Marines and US troops generally are at increased risk due to perhaps understandable rules of engagement that in practice are often excessive and dangerous. Noncombatants are at increased risk of oppression, or more impersonal death from US technology, in countries where thuggish foes seek domination and can serve as refuges for further attacks on the West.
Haditha was a decidedly treacherous town overrun with Al Quaeda led foes who blew up Marines in the convoy and fired on the survivors from the nearby houses. What else could the Marines do but attack and eliminate the threat from the houses? Walking in, exposing themself to harm, would have been suicidal. Those inside lived in fear of the insurgents, who had already executed the local police force, and were aware that an IED was to be exploded. What else could they do but huddle inside? Warning the Marines beforehand would have exposed themselves to extermination. Walking outside, hands up, after the attack on the Marines, may have been a good move, but they knew gunmen were nearby and they didn’t want to be in the middle of a shootout.
Tried a good Italian restaurant the other day, and I decided to see what they could do with a simple Braciola - Braciole - (made with flank steak in this case) with a Barolo sauce.
Readers know that I am an obnoxious Italian food snob, but it's not my fault. I never ate Italian growing up, so I never heard of spaghetti and meatballs. Between Mrs. BD's cooking, and many trips to Italia, the two things often thought of as Italian in the US that I can do without are tomato sauce (this good place had no tomato sauces on the menu), and pasta (mostly, with rare exceptions for clam or porcini, or near-starvation with nothing else in the pantry). Another tip: never order a pizza in Italy. Terrible stuff. Only Americans know how to make good pizzas. Furthermore, you can get a better bruschetta in America than the lame, stingy ones you get in Italy.
Italian red wine sauces for meat are simple: briefly sautee a glass of good wine, a hunk of butter, salt, and a little flour to thicken. In Sicily, they add some raisins to it and a little sugar. That is pleasant.
They served the Braciola on a bed of soft, creamy polenta with a splash of oil on it. I think there was a touch of parmesan in the polenta. These are the simplest of foods. For me, that's Italian cooking. You cook that Braciola until it almost falls apart.
At our house, we make polenta as a primi, firm and knife-cuttable with a sauce on top - black truffle or Porcini - but this saucy polenta was a good choice by the chef. Soft polenta. My chef friend disparages firm polenta, but I think it's fine for the right purpose and it's real Italian - thanks to the American Indians who genetically-engineered corn (maize, to you in Yorba Linda Europe).
Like Italian potatoes, tomatoes, squash, polenta (corn meal) were all recent imported products from the New World, and their risotto from Asia. Pasta? It's a topic of debate.
Feel free to tell me how much you like spaghetti and meatballs, and soggy penne with red sauce!
I would highly recommend it for students before they take any neuoscience-related courses in school. Our learning theory here is that it's best to learn all you can about a topic before you take a course in it. That way, you will at least be oriented. Sometimes, the whole expensive course might end up being redundant.
I have been asked by readers why I can sound so harsh about education and our current educational systems. The answer is that I care about learning so much. For me, learning new things is relaxing, recreational, and a gift (and does not need to be expensive), but I accept that not all feel the same way. I am a teacher at heart, even though I do not teach although I do help train our young associates. If I were as tough on students as I am on our associates, I'd be fired in a New York Minute.
Schools of education represent the academic slums of most any college. American education can benefit from slum removal.
Sounds true, although those pathetic standards certainly do not apply to my town in CT where, unions aside, the public school teachers are well-educated, enthusiastic, demanding, and dedicated. However, our local school system avoids hiring teaching school graduates.
No questions on Iran in the CNN, ABC and NBC debates? No questions about the president's treatment of Netanyahu? No questions about the veto of Keystone XL pipeline?
No questions about Solyndra, Operation Fast and Furious," Joe Biden's serial inanities, the unconstitutional recess appointments? Gibson Guitar, Boeing, the Environmental Protection Agency's generation and cement rules?
Nothing about cutting 20,000 Marines and up to 100,000 soldiers?
Newt's ex-wife is tracked down, but we never got an interview with Bill Ayers or saw the Rashid Khalidi tape? Romney's tax returns are demanded again and again, but we never saw the president's college or law school transcripts?
Newt's display of anger -- even the over-the-top characterization of John King as despicable -- got cheering from everyone who had wanted the GOP candidates to run straight at the MSM and their deeply corrupt insularity and embedded biases.
I honestly do not know the answer, but it seems basic to me. If you can't master Algebra and Trig, and use them to hone the brain, it's tough for me to figure out how you graduate from high school.
Sorry, governor, but colleges don’t graduate students. Students graduate themselves if their efforts are sufficient, and the sad fact is that many who enroll are so academically weak and unmotivated that they don’t amass enough course credits to get their degrees within six years. That isn’t the fault of the institutions.
Maintaining standards is an endless and possibly a losing battle with today's credentialism. Someday, we'll have to admit that most people are not scholars (even to the level of Algebra ll), and that learning how to do something useful and practical might be more important. That view, however, runs right up against the Big Education lobbies.
There is no market for Sociology Majors, but there is a big market for Master Plumbers and Gunsmiths. They make more money, too. But they need to know some math to do their work.
And I just got done with all of the water well problems as well as having the chest freezer fail and losing over 300 pounds of organic pork and grass-fed beef. Throw in the divorce and 2011 has been a hell of a year.
Since the 1960s, the thrust of economic policy-making has been to smooth business cycles. Democracies crave prolonged prosperity, and economists have posed as technocrats with the tools to cure the boom-and-bust cycles of pre-World War II capitalism. It turns out that they exaggerated what they knew and could do.
Frank Wuterich agreed this morning to accept a prosecution offer of pleading guilty to one count of dereliction of duty, with relatively minor penalty. “Dereliction of duty” is such a broad count that it can cover most anything, and in possible multiple counts possible in the court martial, could have resulted in Wuterich facing much heavier penalties.
This ends his 7-year ordeal at the hand of zealot prosecutors and rush to judgment media. The prosecution in this case, as in all its others, saw its own witnesses either basically testify for the defense or be demonstrated as liars or otherwise unreliable.
Still, Frank Wuterich, as any defendant, faced the possibility of a worse outcome, what is commonly referred to as “litigation risk.” With not just himself but three young daughters to care about, weighed against the honor of the Marine Corps (although including some who may have acted less than completely honorably in this case), Wuterich’s decision is completely understandable.
As usual, Mark Walker’s report, intimate with all the Haditha cases, covers the salient points:
[The rationalists] have got rid of the Christian God, and now feel obliged to cling all the more firmly to Christian morality ... When one gives up Christian belief, one thereby deprives oneself of the right to Christian morality. Whoever tries to peel off this fundamental idea—belief in God—from Christian morality will only be taking a hammer to the whole thing, shattering it to pieces.
Frederick Nietzsche (h/t Dr. Bob, who seems to be on blog sabbatical or retirement)
As far as I can determine, the Department of Education has no track record of positive accomplishment—nothing in the national numbers on educational achievement, nothing in the improvement of educational outcomes for the disadvantaged, nothing in the advancement of educational practice. It just spends a lot of money. This brings us to the practical question: If the Department of Education disappeared from next year’s budget, would anyone notice? The only reason that anyone would notice is the money. The nation’s public schools have developed a dependence on the federal infusion of funds. As a practical matter, actually doing away with the Department of Education would involve creating block grants so that school district budgets throughout the nation wouldn’t crater.
We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.
1. "Clustering." We have all heard about cancer clusters - Why does my town have triple the breast cancer of towns two miles away? There must be someone I can sue about this. Such claims have an emotional appeal, but they are nonsense. Random distribution is not even - it is uneven. Just try flipping a quarter, and you will get little runs of tails. Clustering is a natural effect of randomness, but trial lawyers are always busy trying to track them down: they can get rich before anyone figures out the game.
2. "Cherry-picking." Cherry-picking is a frankly dishonest form of data presentation, often used by newspapers to create alarmist stories about the economy, the environment, food safety, etc. It fools people without some decent science education. What it entails is combing through, say, 60 pieces of data, and then using the three points that support your argument, and ignoring the rest. Presenting random changes as meaningful facts is a lie. Environmentalists use this all of the time, as do other agenda-driven fact-handlers. A casual use of this fallacy is characteristic of The New York Times typical headline: Despite Good Economic Statistics, Some Are Left Behind - and then they scour NYC to find some single black mom in the Bronx who cannot support her kids - and she becomes the "story".
3. "Anectdotal evidence." The above example could also be termed "anectdotal evidence." If you look around, you can always find an exception, a story, and example - of ANYTHING. But anectdotes are compelling, and Reagan used them to the best effect. And how about those swimming Polar Bears! (I always thought they liked to swim.)
4. "Omitted evidence". You tell me how common this is! A first cousin of Cherry-picking, Omitted Evidence is also a lie. All you do is ignore the evidence and data that disagrees with your bias or your position. Simple.
5. "Confirmation bias". People tend to remember evidence which supports their opinion, belief, or bias, and to dismiss or forget evidence which does not. It's a human frailty. Humans have to struggle to be rational.
6. "Biased Data". "A poll at a local pre-school playground in Boston at 2 pm today indicated that 87% of likely voters will vote for Obama." Picking your data sources, like picking the questions you ask, can determine your results with great accuracy. As pollsters always say, "Tell me the answer you want, and I will design the question."
7. "Data mining." Data-mining is used by unscrupulous academics who need to publish. Because it is a retroactive search for non-hypothesized correlations, it does not meet criteria for the scientific method. Let's say you have 10,000 data points from a study which found no correlation for your hypothesis. Negative correlation studies are rarely published, but you spend a lot of time collecting it - so you ask your computer if it can find any other positive correlations in the data. Then you publish those, as if that was what you had studied in the first place.
Image: two good varieties of cherries for picking; Stella on the left, Lapins on the right, from Miller Nurseries
This production of Richard lll is a stunner, according to my family including my theatrical pupette, and the reviews. It's traveled around the world, now finishing up at BAM in New York until March 4. (Trailer of the performance at the link). Worth a trip to Brooklyn.
It's a joint production of the Old Vic, BAM, and Neal Street, known as "The Bridge."
“Mr. Spacey gives fierce and flashy physical life to every twist of a power-mad man’s corkscrew mind.” —The New York Times
Since we're on the topic of Shakespeare, Never Yet Melted found this:
Murray: The New American Divide - The ideal of an 'American way of life' is fading as the working class falls further away from institutions like marriage and religion and the upper class becomes more isolated. Charles Murray on what's cleaving America, and why.
It is not that the average person is not concerned about the environment. Everyone weighs the balance of economic gain against a respect for nature. It is only the truly affluent, however, who can be concerned about the environment to the exclusion of everything else...
At one time, a college degree was a virtual guarantor of secure, well-paying employment. Now, most college grads leave school with large debts — more than $27,000 on average. A college degree also no longer signifies that the recipient is either well-educated in the traditional sense or that he has acquired specific skills suited to the labor market.
What race is Obama? Black or Caucasion or Middle-Eastern? What race am I? If the one-drop rule applies, I am Native American. And since when is "Hispanic" a race? Are people from Spain "Hispanic"? Are European Cubans Hispanic? Are Central American Indians Hispanic? Or Indians? Are black Cubans Hispanic? So confusing. And I haven't even gotten to the Irish: definitely a race - and a race with a history of cruel discrimination in the US for which generous compensation is due (my kids are 1/4 Irish and would welcome a check).
Do you ever play Mexican Train Dominoes? A good game, quite absorbing. We learned to play it in Mexico last year. More fun than watching TV. Uncle's Games sells Mexican Train Domino sets.
This game is said to be the most popular Domino game these days. Rules here (which sound more complicated than it is to play). It's a good alternative to Chess and Scrabble when you don't feel like over-taxing your brain, and 4 or 5 can play.
I like 'perspective' videos and pictorials; that is, displays that snap the whole subject into sharp relief. I found one on relative earthquake strengths the other day that's particularly good because it demonstrates how the Richter Scale is logarithmic, not linear. An 8.7 quake, for example, is far stronger than a mere 8.0. There's an 8.0 somewhere in the world every few years; an 8.7 only every forty or so years.
And here are two videos that demonstrate the perspective of size. From our place in the universe outward:
What's astounding about relative size is that as incredible as the above perspective is, we can go just as far in the other direction:
The average Californian, like the average Greek, forgot that civilization is fragile. Its continuance requires respect for the law, tough-minded education, collective thrift, private investment, individual self-reliance, and common codes of behavior and civility -- and exempts no one from those rules. Such knowledge and patterns of civilized behavior, slowly accrued over centuries, can be lost in a single generation.
Can We Spare Newt Gingrich? He Fights. (Video Added)
The Obamacare issues of Medicaid coercion and the individual mandate are twins. They confront the court with the same challenge, that of enunciating judicially enforceable limiting principles. If there is no outer limit on Congress’s power to regulate behavior in the name of regulating interstate commerce, then the Framers’ design of a limited federal government is nullified. And if there is no outer limit on the capacity of this government to coerce the states, then federalism, which is integral to the Framers’ design, becomes evanescent.
In trackless woods, it puzzled me to find Four great rock maples seemingly aligned, As if they had been set out in a row Before some house a century ago, To edge the property and to lend some shade. I looked to see if ancient wheels had made Old ruts to which these trees ran parallel, But there were none, so far as I could tell - There'd been no roadway. Nor could I find the square Depression of a cellar anywhere, And so I tramped on further, to survey Amazing patterns in a hornbeam spray Or spirals in a pinecone, under trees Not subject to our stiff geometries.
(A bio and some commentary here. Buy the Collected Poems of this modern master here)
Michelangelo Merisi da Caravaggio's The Calling of Matthew (1600)
The notoriously brawling artist brought a new look to European late Renaissance art, and is viewed as a bridge between Mannerism and Baroque. He was a rock star artist in his time.
Image on right via 
The Knishman nails the zeitgeist here: 
Surviving Girl Land: 
Many would claim that Sicily is not really part of Italy (they even speak
It was topped with a wine and white raisin sauce and served on a bed of - you guessed it - Italian-style mashed potatoes (ie with oil not butter, plus garlic). That's Sicilian cooking.
From 
The US has 55,000 miles of oil pipelines already. Who would object to a beer pipeline from Canada? 
Life in the country: 
We have rreported so many scientific frauds in the past couple of weeks, I thought I would highlight some commonly-used "data-management" tricks designed to dishonestly influence people.
America is drunk
In Trackless Woods