A perfect evening..............................

Road tripping..............................

The kids are doing just fine......................................

Unorganized Hancock.............................Lisztomania




Unorganized Hancock is the house band at Sippican Cottage.  They have been featured here many times before.  Read part of the back story here and be hopeful for the future.

An interesting idea..................................

.......on how to get rid of outdated, outmoded and otherwise silly governmental rules and regulations can be found at The Spirit of Enterprise blog.

It is fairly easy to bash Congress for their failure to act responsibly.  We've done that a time or two here.  And the notion that some independent BRAC-like entity is required to do the necessary pruning, would seem to add fuel to that particular fire.  Why can't they just do their job?

Congress doesn't really need me to defend them, but that's about what's going to happen next.

You may remember that a delegation from Licking County journeyed to the Capital back in the Spring.  Our purpose was to encourage the Central Ohio legislative contingent to continue their political support for the defense work being accomplished at the privatized-in-place former Newark Air Force Station.

One of the things that struck me at the time was the sheer volume of demands, often conflicting, being placed on Congress by We The People.  Until the American people begin to accept the responsibility for their own lives and stop seeking/demanding a governmental action to cure every ill,  real or perceived, we will be getting a Congress that is pulled, tugged, and hamstrung in every which way.  Considering some of the alternatives, I'm okay with that.

Opening paragraphs....................

The Mississinawa Valley High School class of 1997 voted me Best Dressed Guy.  This isn't something I usually share with people.  You should feel privledged I told you.  Don't be too impressed; there were 51 members of the class of 1997, only 29 were guys, and rural Ohio isn't exactly the fashion capital of anywhere.
-Kelsey Timmerman,  Where Am I Wearing?:  A Global Tour to the Countries, Factories, and People that Make Our Clothes

Fifty years ago......................................

Duane Eddy and the Rebelettes.....(Dance with the) Guitar Man

F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote....................................

" The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function."

Kevin Drum writes:

"You might not know this if you subsist on a diet of cable news shouting matches, but it really is possible to believe two things at once:

• Intelligence agencies are a necessary fact of life and governments have a legitimate interest in keeping their operations secret. Anyone who works in the intelligence community knows this, and knows that security breaches are a serious business that will lead to prosecution.
• Americans have recently learned a lot about how pervasive our surveillance operations are, and it's laughable to think we would have learned any of it if Snowden hadn't done what he did. In the end, even if he's made some mistakes along the way, he's done a public service.

I believe both these things."

Me too.

On why a mind is a terrible thing to waste.....

Markets, private property, and profits do not make a modern economy.  And they certainly do not add up to capitalism.  Virtually all precapitalist economies have these necessary, but not sufficient, characteristics.  What is distinctive about the capitalist economy is its original discovery that the primary cause of economic development is mind.  The cause of wealth is invention, discovery, enterprise.
-Michael Novak,  This Hemisphere of Liberty:  A Philosophy of the Americas

The wonders of the Intertunnel..................

Newark, Ohio is located about 30 miles due east of Columbus.  Last evening, Ray (the not-so-simple-village-undertaker) Visotski stopped by to say hi to some blogging friends.  He was on his way home from delivering his youngest daughter to Marquette University.  As the map tells the story, Newark is only about three or four hours out of his way.  What does three or four hours matter when good friends, good beer, and good cigars are involved.  Thanks for the mighty effort Ray.

Ray Visotski, Kurt Harden, and assistant managing editor of
Cultural Offering, David Morrison pose for the camera man.

Good song, painful video..................

Billy Joel...................................We Didn't Start the Fire

Ouch...................................

"Indeed, the US Presidential election is a sort of quadrennial Olympics for con men. The odds of of a randomly selected untrained amateur winning the Olympic 500m race are poor when hundreds or thousands of professionals train for years for the event. The probability of a decent human being winning the White House when competing against hordes of amoral grifters whose skills are honed to a razors edge by years of competition are even lower."
-Perry Metzger, as excerpted from this fun blog post

Opening paragraphs..................

On April 27, 1962, Muslims gathered for the Friday evening prayer service at Muhammad's Temple No. 27 in South-Central Los Angeles, east of Culver City and west of Watts.  Some two hundred followers of Elijah Muhammad sat in folding metal chairs, separated by sex - the women wearing head coverings and floor-length dresses, generally white, and the men in distinctive dark suits with suspenders and bow ties, their heads closely shaved.  Facing them from the podium, a blackboard posed in large letters the thematic question of the Nation of Islam:  "WHICH ONE WILL SURVIVE THE WAR OF ARMAGEDDON?"  To the left, framed by a cross, and American flag, and a silhouette of a hanging lynch victim, the blackboard offered a grim choice labeled "Christianity, Slavery, Suffering, Death," in pointed contrast to the alternative proclaimed on the right:  "Islam, Freedom, Justice, Equality."  Thus, explained the quick-witted Minister John X Morris, the Honorable Elijah Muhammad answered one of the central puzzles of all religion - how to reconcile unmerited suffering with the presence of a benevolent God.  Allah had permitted the Christian nations to bring Africans into slavery - "chewing on men's bones for three hundred years," as Muhammad put it - to test the will of the victims to reestablish their religious dignity.
-Taylor Branch,  Pillar of Fire:  America in the King Years  1963-1965

Truer than true..............................

"In politics an absurdity is not a handicap."
-Napoleon Bonaparte

Fifty years ago.................................

Susan Maughan.....................................Bobby's Girl

(lips and words get a bit out of sync, but..................)

Being a fan of "unintended consequences".....

Christopher Hitchens, a very quotable man, said, "Unintended consequences aren't always disastrous."   Surely, one thinks, this must be true.  Then, lo and behold, I stumbled over this blog post proving the point:

"The baguette as we know it dates to the 1920s and was a byproduct of a protective labor law that prevented French bakers from working between 10 p.m. and 4 a.m. That made it impossible to prepare traditional round loaves by breakfast time. Bakers had to turn to a new kind of bread, whose thin shape made it faster to prepare and bake. The baguette—French for "little stick"—quickly became a breakfast essential throughout France."

Growth anyone.......................?

Picture post card kind of look at Shanghai, circa 1990

About the same view of Shanghai, twenty years later

Randomness..........................................

all pictures above were saved on my computer from the following contributing blogs:  here, here, here, here, here, and here