Monday, February 8. 2010
Mrs. BD preferred to watch The Sound of Music during the Superbowl. As is well-known, at least in New England, the Austrian Trapp family settled in Stowe, VT, where they opened the Trapp Family Lodge in 1950. The family still owns and operates the Lodge.
There was a recent cast reunion in Stowe.
Here's the Trapp Family Lodge website. My family enjoyed this place very much in the winter when I was young.
Form Rick Moran:
There are few human beings on planet earth more annoying than Deepak Chopra, the touchy-feely, New Age Guru whose fetid, gooey, and completely banal nostrums regarding health and healing have reached a new low in the history of civilized thought.
But, Rick, remember that he has gotten fabulously rich from his banal nostrums. So maybe he's not a complete idiot. Maybe he is our P.T. Barnum.
Sunday, February 7. 2010
I do not know how many of Lorenzo di Medici's country villas are extant, but he helped design a few of them, one of which was an architectural inspiration for Palladio.
This one, sitting on the hills overlooking Florence, was built by Cosimo for his second grandson Giovanni, and came into Lorenzo's hands after his brother was assassinated by a cabal which included the Pope. It became one of Lorenzo's favorite hangouts with his philosopher, artist, and poet pals (and girlfriends).
(By the way, we recommend staying in Fiesole when visiting Florence, and it's just a 15-minute bus ride down the hill. November and May are good months.)
A friend was enthusing about (Habanos) Romeo y Julietas the other day. He views them as the best brand. Photo is their medium strength 42 ring gauge Corona - a good "starter cigar." Now that cigar appreciation is no longer the yuppie fad that it had been for a while, it's OK to enjoy them again.
Saturday, February 6. 2010
In the (now, sadly, defunct) New York Sun:
Given the nearly total absence of fanfare, you could be excused for not knowing that this was the quincentenary of Andrea Palladio's birth. Generally it is a kind of condescension to treat the great cultural figures of the past as though, in some sense, they were, or needed to be, our contemporaries. And yet a respectable case could be made that, of all the architects who lived before the 20th century, few were as influential as Palladio (1508-80) or came closer, in the arc of their reputation, to being what we would now call a "starchitect."
Read the whole thing.
Here's Wiki on Palladio. Below is a photo of Villa Capra, aka Villa Rotunda, in Vicenza.
A quickie for dessert? Restaurant bathroom trysts.
I guess amore is sometimes just overwhelmingly urgent, like diarrhea. Been there, but never when fully sober. I remember in the 70s when the only thing going on in restaurant bathrooms was people doing lines of coke with rolled-up $100 bills.
It is performed standing up, I assume, like the coke.
Friday, February 5. 2010
 We have found her travel books - "Exceptional Places to Stay" - to be spot on, especially if you seek local color and prefer to avoid the international hotel chains.
From Phi Beta Cons:
My point is that the common notion that a college education is essential to doing most of the work in the economy is mistaken. The ability of individuals to do work seldom depends on anything they studied in college.
True indeed. Nothing wrong with a liberal arts education, though, as life-enrichment for those too lazy to figure out how to obtain it on their own. (It's called "reading.") A rigorous high school education ought to be enough for most practical purposes, and adequate preparation for any job training or apprenticeship which doesn't require advanced math or science.
I have never been disappointed in The Teaching Company, but I have never enjoyed a series as much as Prof. Sutherland's Classics of British Literature. It is college as it should be.
As with any excellent humanities prof, you learn as much about thinking about life as you do about the topic at hand. His soft brogue is pleasant too.
Today, I am listening to his Chaucer lectures. Time flies by on ye olde elliptical machine.
Thursday, February 4. 2010
I visited Venice for a few days many years ago, and do not feel driven to return - it's a giant tourist trap with a pickpocket team on every block - except that I wouldn't mind catching the Venice Regatta in August:
On further thought, I wouldn't mind getting a little more experience with Venetian cooking. All I know about it is Risi e Bisi, which doesn't look like much but which is killer delicious when Mrs. BD makes it.
Here's When I Paint My Masterpiece live with The Band in 1971:
Wednesday, February 3. 2010
From Front Page's Class War in the Classroom:
“We must encourage students to access the antagonist class positions of texts in order to demonstrate how the oppositional voices contained in them identify evidence of class struggle,” Christopher Craig writes in the December 2009 issue of Radical Teacher, “a socialist, feminist and anti-racist journal on the theory and practice of teaching.” “Through this critical process, we can show how the values and interests of the dominant class are not universal but repressive, intended to keep the power relations between the ruling and working class one-sided.”
“For most of us, learning to read texts this way helps us to see through the ruling class ideology that exists in everything from literature to the nightly news.” Craig teaches at Emmanuel College, a Catholic institution of higher learning.
Wow. That's so cool, so advanced, and so deep. And no doubt it's exactly the lesson every $145,000 UAW worker wants his kids to be taught in school...
Thank God for teacher's ed. They do it all for the kiddies.
Rohmer died on Jan. 11. From a summary of Rohmer's movies:
Claire's knee—and the consternation it arouses in the diplomat—is a painstakingly constructed symbol of rationalisation gone amok. It gives us something by which to measure the diplomat's drift from reason. It also underlines the odd humour of the "Moral Tales": in Rohmer's world, faces are symmetrical, bodies proportional, and words are perfectly measured. Everyone is beautiful, and everything is in its right place. Everything, that is, except the intentions of his heroes.
The trailer for Claire's Knee (1970) - in French - sorry, but you can get the gist of it:
It would apppear that it is from bone fire, a burning of human bones.
Tuesday, February 2. 2010
Considering a trip to the Dolomites and the Veneto this August, with visits to Venice (not again!), Padua, Verona, Castelrotto (Kastelruth), etc. Apparently the people in the Dolomites do not really think of themselves as Italian (they had been part of the Austro-Hungarian Empire until WW1, and Mussolini Italianized the names).
Found out there are many villages up there in the Dolomites where the people mostly speak Ladin (not to be confused with Ladino). Several million people in the Veneto speak Venetian, too. People in Castelrotto speak German.
Photos below of Castelrotto, which looks more alpine-German or Swiss than Italian. It's the south Tyrol:
The Complete Calvin and Hobbes.
I am sad to say that The Complete Pogo, Vol. 1, has not yet been released. It's a damn shame.
Monday, February 1. 2010
 During the 1700s and 1800s the Brits scoured the planet to find cool places to visit (or to make money). Amelia Edwards was one of them, and she wrote about it. It was the era when, if you saw a couple of ladies riding side-saddle in the desert or the mountains, the natives would think "They must be English."
From Amazon:
British writer and Egyptologist AMELIA EDWARDS (1831-1892) was a published writer by age seven. Among her books most beloved by readers past and present are the novels Barbara's History (1864) and Lord Brackenbury (1880), and the travelogue A Thousand Miles Up the Nile (1877).
She wrote mysteries too.
We have in hand her book about her trip to the Dolomites: Untrodden Peaks and Unfrequented Valleys.
Her other books here.
Sunday, January 31. 2010
Thanks for inventing the internet. You thought of everything. It never ceases to amaze me how much stuff you managed to put on there.
I just found out that I can buy opera tickets for the Arena di Verona (a vast Roman arena) for August online, now. Looks like a fun outing, but the arena seems to big for opera.
Good site for high quality farm toys: Carter and Gruenewald. What a great business to be in.
Saturday, January 30. 2010
 At NY Rev of Books. One quote:
The number of legal chess positions is 1040, the number of different possible games, 10120. Authors have attempted various ways to convey this immensity, usually based on one of the few fields to regularly employ such exponents, astronomy. In his book Chess Metaphors, Diego Rasskin-Gutman points out that a player looking eight moves ahead is already presented with as many possible games as there are stars in the galaxy. Another staple, a variation of which is also used by Rasskin-Gutman, is to say there are more possible chess games than the number of atoms in the universe. All of these comparisons impress upon the casual observer why brute-force computer calculation can't solve this ancient board game.
Friday, January 29. 2010
We would never, even for personal use, advise violating the incomprehensible American ban on Cuban tobacco by using Top Cubans.com. However, we do find their latest rankings interesting, if mundane:
 Dress shoes need to be shined regularly if you do not wish to look bedraggled, don't they?
A spit shine requires a little water (or spit). Here's the USMA method.
And from The Art of Manliness, here's How to Shine Shoes like a Soldier.
It takes a toothbrush to do it right and to get into the seams. People say 30-40 minutes per shoe for a definitive shine, less for a touch-up shine. Obsessionals like to top off a shine with a coat of clear polish.
I read that you are supposed to edge the sole too. News to me, but makes sense.
Photo is a good J. Press Oxford shoe - off the rack and not too fancy, but good enuf for government or academic work. Maybe when I win the lottery I'll have foot molds taken in London and Rome and have them make me custom shoes and loafers like my prosperous friends do.
Howard Zinn. America the Awful---Howard Zinn's History.
Old Stalinists never die, they just fade away.
How could anybody not love a guy who can write like this:
"The brambles and the thorns grew thick and thicker in a ticking thicket of bickering crickets. Farther along and stronger, bonged the gongs of a throng of frogs, green and vivid on their lily pads. From the sky came the crying of flies, and the pilgrims leaped over a bleating sheep creeping knee-deep in a sleepy stream, in which swift and slippery snakes slid and slithered silkily, whispering sinful secrets." From James Thurber, The 13 Clocks (New York, 1957)
Now for some Thurber dogs -
Thursday, January 28. 2010
Wednesday, January 27. 2010
After all I’ve counseled, my 9-year old son insists on doing it his way in tomorrow’s 4th grade elections to the student council.
His speech is about how he will tell the students what the council decides, rather than tell the council what the students want. Liberal.
And, he’s carrying in a bag of candy for the students, to get the students to elect him. Corrupt.
If he wins the election, will he bring home congrats letters from Pelosi and Obama?
Grrr!
I'll post the election results in the comments.
Meanwhile, this approach might have been better:
OK, OK, I've failed as a husband, too!
From Bowman at New Criterion's Ain't Gonna Study War No More:
In the media’s view, everything must be over-determined by circumstance — or the mistakes of the Bush administration — so that acts of terror become like acts of God, both in their causes and in the limited and ad hoc way they demand to be dealt with. Insofar as questions of war and peace arise, it is only by way of demonstrating that war must be thought of as a struggle to understand the other side — the unspoken assumption being that there is always a way to get the enemy to stop fighting by understanding and sympathizing with him and without having to defeat him in battle — as the old, unmentionable honor culture would once have insisted. Got that?
PC makes some hatreds privileged and deserving of "understanding," and others not so.
Tuesday, January 26. 2010
Snaps from my field trip to Costo Sunday. I'm sure it looks just like your Costco or Sam's, but American abundance - and its cheapness - must be a wonder to those from Cuba or Venezuela.
What I was thinking, though, was that I'd like to transport the whole store to Port au Prince today.
Readers know that we are great fans of Dubliner Cheese from Ireland:
More random Costo pics below the fold -
Continue reading "Abundance"
Monday, January 25. 2010
 Unlike grand luxe cruising, freighter cruising isn't for everybody. Still, I know people who would not voyage any other way. Photo is from a 'round the world 124-day trip from the site below, which offers many long and short trips.
Freighter Cuises.
Sunday, January 24. 2010
Photo of the new Metro-North Yankees-E. 153rd St. station from this site.
There has always been good subway service out to Yankee Stadium, but now there is a new railroad service and a new Yankees-E. 153rd St. train station to make things easier for the suburbanites (how often does one hear about a new train service and a new train station?):
From the Northern Suburbs:
Take Metro-North Railroad to its new Yankees-East 153rd Street Station; there's direct weekend-game service from the Hudson, Harlem, and New Haven Lines, as well as weekday service, and shuttle trains from Grand Central. Click here for details.
It's a great amenity for folks in Westchester and CT, because the traffic and the parking have often been discouraging for them.
How well does the baseball transportation work in Boston?
I recently heard a friend use the term "NOCD." It was a blast from the pre-PC past - from my parents' generation.
If you do not know what it means, it is a parental admonition regarding friends and dates: "Not our class, dear."
Saturday, January 23. 2010
 We're highlighting Agassi's autobiography Open, 2009. Read the WaPo review at that Amazon site.
Pro tennis players have strange lives.
Friday, January 22. 2010
 If you live in a Royal Barry Wills (1895-1962) house in New England, you are lucky.
Wills was a Boston architect who specialized in accurate reproductions of Capes, Saltboxes, and Colonial houses - the sorts of homes which might be bungalows, ranches, split-levels or God-knows-what elsewhere in the country.
This site discusses his architecture.
I was interested to learn that the firm Royal Barry Wills Associates is still in business.
Thursday, January 21. 2010
A few midtown NYC snaps from last week, with brief comments.
First snap - the #1 reason to get a degree from Yale: it gives you a clean civilized place to pee in midtown with CNBC running in all the bathrooms if you join the Yale Club. Also, a very nice place to stay in the city for cheap, a cozy hang-out, pretty good dining, and top-notch meeting and reading rooms. The giant hall on the second floor is a good place to hold your memorial service when you croak.
More below the fold -
Continue reading "Midtown snapshots"
 It's Paul Mole on Lexington, in operation since 1912. There are still guys who get a straight razor shave there every morning on their way to work - hot towels etc. I am told many guys get a weekly trim. Not me.
And yes, they have a shoeshine guy there too.
She wonders what her kids should study in college, and considers what women used to learn in school. The daily Military Drill sounds good - like the IDF:
Wednesday, January 20. 2010
Tuesday, January 19. 2010
Monday, January 18. 2010
The blurb says this:
Last November, at the central market in Valencia, opera singers disguised as shopkeepers were selling produce at the various stalls there. Verdi's Il Travatore starts playing over the loudspeakers & they burst into song. None of the shoppers has a clue what's going on.
Too bad the recorded sound quality is poor, but what a kick.
Of all of the entertaining and/or interesting radio shows we enjoy (when we have time to hear them), there is one which I think comes closest to the Maggie's Farm sensibility - The John Batchelor Show.
Around here, it comes on late at night on WABC. It's more intelligent and informative than anything on the boob tube. If you don't know it, give him a try.
Very cool bumper music too.
Except when you need a specific course for a specific purpose or requirement (eg Physical Chemistry), I recommend choosing courses by the teacher, not by the topic.
At a medical meeting recently, I found myself making the same mistake I have often made: picking meetings by topic instead of by speaker. You can get more out of a brilliant person talking about Coke vs. Pepsi than you can from a mediocrity discussing your medical topic of interest.
Sunday, January 17. 2010
 Our dear pal Sippican is moving from the MA seashore to central Maine on the mighty Androscoggin River.
If there is good grouse country nearby, I will be a visitor.
Rumford, to be specific (pop 6000). Whether he has a reason or not I have no idea. Rumford is an interesting old lumber mill town, with turn of the century mill company housing developments which would be of interest to any student of the history of town planning.
Photo is the Sipp family's new house. I like it. It's not a house - it's a home.
But does it get broadband?
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