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Spring fancies

Babe tests the onshore breeze washing over the terrace, taking in the sights and sounds and smells of this glorious last day of May 2007. Tempered by many Chelsea winters harsh and mild, the perennials are lookin' good. From left, clockwise: Pinkish flowers and gray-green leaves of dianthus purchased years back from a seaside nursery in Stonington, Maine; spiked leaves of hybrid bearded iris taken long ago from Mummy's Down East garden; and leaves and first flowers of Rosa multiflora, a weedy but deliciously fragrant volunteer. Magenta accents middle right are petunias bought locally and planted by Tuck in the freshly restored circular parterre just the other week.

Ever seen one of these? The size and shape and fuzziness told us it was a sphinx or hummingbird moth, but which species? A quick Google search revealed we had a Great Ash Sphinx Moth (Sphinx chersis) on our hands (clinging to Tuck's pinky, above). At first Tuck thought it was a stray clump of Chelsea Gray fur stuck on the garlic chives in the center of the parterre garden, but as he plucked it up, the clump moved. Adrenaline rush. Fight or flight? In horror, he tossed it into the weeding bucket. Taking a closer look, he was delighted to find our new friend. Fun facts: The females lay their eggs on the leaves of ash, lilac, privet, cherry and quaking aspen -- all species abundant in Chelsea private gardens and the urban forest -- the preferred diet of their voracious offspring, who spend their caterpillarhood eating, eating, eating. They pupate underground and then emerge to "fly as a single brood in the north and as two broods in the south from May-June and from July-August."

 

 

Who's the most beautiful boy kitty in the world?

 

 

After he regained his composure, Tuck proudly displayed his find for the photographic record. Note honest gardener's dirt-embedded fingernails. Gloves are for sissies.

Update: For more proud faunal displays, check out Modulator's Friday Ark #141 and Carnival of the Cats #166 at Fire Phil Garner.

Napping it off

Snapshots from yesterday's midday Mem Eve cookout: Grilled rib eye for Susie, dogs, marinated strips and Kayem brats for all. Potato salad, Chelsea Baked Beans, steamed corn on the cob from Georgia and a mighty Caesar salad on the side. Susie's apple, blueberry and cranberry pie for dessert.

Tuck and Goomp joined us grillside, using their heads/ears to show their colors. Gorgeous late-spring weather. The cats were in their element, staying out all hours. Chris showed up late afternoon with vodkas and Sprite for poolside chats [we ourselves stuck with Beefeater martinis, of course]. Back to Chelsea this a.m. as skies turned damp and gloomy. Cats napping it off.

"All the sounds of the earth are like music"

Sunrise at Camelot-by-the-Sea Down East this morning.

We're trying to reconcile this year's image (above) with last year's Memorial-Day-Weekend sunrise shot of May 28, 2006 (below) from Goomp's front lawn, where the sun appears to be far more northerly (leftward in photos). We  thought we were standing in about the same spot when we clicked the shutter this morning. The silhouette of the 19th-century summer cottage in both shots supports that impression. Hmmm. Maybe the clouds were playing tricks on our photographic eye? Whatever the case, the summer solstice -- when the sun rises way to the left of the cottage -- is well on its way.

We second our caption of one year ago today when we wrote "Sunrise this morning over Eastern Point across the river from Goomp's, headquarters for the family's Memorial Day salute to the awesomely brave and good and true fellow Americans who give their all so we might enjoy such natural wonders. We think you know who you are, our beloved fellow bloggers and readers who serve and love those who serve. We cannot thank you enough. God bless."

Baby Cakes draws a bead on catbirds outside the window plucking up ants from the anthills on Goomp's seaside terrace early morning.

"All the sounds of the earth are like music" goes the opening song of Rogers and Hammerstein's "Oklahoma," the bracing "Oh, what a beautiful morning." It resonates this Memorial Day Eve with all the windows open and the birds singing and rustling up chow down here on the southern coast of Maine as we rise to meet the day. You can't get any better than Papa Ratzi's message from his historic Kracow mass a year ago today: "Keep the faith, keep the hope, keep the love." Googling back a little, we stumbled upon a keeper of our own, "Your loved ones' lives had what we all want: meaning."

"Another laughable scare tactic"

"He named a noxious weed after a German botanist he disliked [Siegesbeckia orientalis, Johann Siegesbeck, who had called his work "loathesome harlotry"] and the entire toad family after a French rival -- names we still use today," writes Robert Lee Hotz re Linnaeus, the 18th-century Swedish naturalist who gave the world modern taxonomy, the science of classifying organisms -- on the occasion of the 300th anniversary of the great man's birth. In celebration, "Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and his colleagues launched the new online Encyclopedia of Life with $12.5 million from the MacArthur Foundation and the Sloan Foundation." Were Tiny (lurking, above left)  a namer of species like Linnaeus, she would no doubt rename a certain noxious rodent after her brother, Baby (lounging, above right).  Babycakesia chelseana, anyone?

"In what was another laughable scare tactic, Gore noted global warming worsens various diseases" including Lyme Disease, wrote 15-year-old Portland, Maine high school student Kristen Byrnes, whose extra-credit project in her Honors Earth Science class is a masterful fisking -- with linked footnotes -- of Al Gore's manmade-global-warming scam, "An Inconvenient Truth." News Busters has been on the case touting the young Mainer's website "Ponder the Maunder" for a couple of weeks -- noting the MSMs apparent lack of interest in the youthful truth-seeker's off-template critique of the party line of the "debate-is-over" crowd and their media allies -- and now The Anchoress issues a must-read challenge: Will Gore debate Kristen Byrnes on Global Warming? [Sound of crickets chirping] If Mr. Gore trembled in his boots at the thought of debating "The Skeptical Environmentalist" author Bjorn Lomberg, Ms. Byrnes's scientifically sophisticated analysis of the good, the bad and the ugly in his chicken-little message must surely dissolve him into a puddle of primordial ooze.

"That is why the weather guy [New Zealand's favorite weatherman, Augie Auer] said that in 5 years global warming will be a joke," wrote Kristen, who runs rings around the UN climate panel's flawed, politically driven analysis of a recent period of drought in Australia. The big guys said it was caused by our species' CO2 emissions and would only get worse. Based upon her study and analysis of the El Niño/El Niña and solar cycles from NOAA and other online sources, Kristen accurately predicted Australia's drought was most likely on the wane. You right, mate?

Her straight-faced fisking of Al Gore's dishonest and tendentious list of illnesses allegedly made worse by human-induced global warming is a hoot. Here's what she had to say about Lyme Disease, in the news today because NY Sen. Chuck Schumer, his eyes on the prize -- destroying "what's left of the Bush presidency" -- forgot to spray with Deet and tuck his trouser bottoms into his socks when he went trudging through field and forest recently during a damned dam tour in the Hudson Valley region. The old boy came home to discover a deer tick embedded in his leg, with the tell-tale "bulls-eye" mark of Lyme Disease spreading out red and angry.  He should have read Kristen's common-sense "tips on prevention":

Lyme Disease.  Spread to humans by ticks. More people are becoming infected because more people are moving into the wooded areas where ticks live. Lyme Disease is also common among hikers and people who spend time in the outdoors, especially those people who do not take the proper precautions. If you live in a wooded area or spend a lot of time in the outdoors, take precautions and educate yourself about the symptoms of Lyme Disease.

We've found more than one deer tick embedded in our flesh through the years, usually brought in by the puddies. Lyme Disease untreated can lead to debilitating nerve damage. Note to self: Remember to apply Tiny and Baby's Frontline Plus for cats (Kills fleas, flea eggs, ticks & chewing lice) before we head Down East this afternoon to Goomp's for Mem Day festivities.

The journalistic question that dare not speak its name

Tuck cat whispers in Baby's ear this afternoon as the Babe vies for bits of sausage from Tuck's DIAB (Dinner in a bowl, an awesome gigantic salad of sliced iceberg lettuce and onions, chopped tomatoes and snow peas, shredded carrots and sliced baked sausage).

"Young troops are some of the best goodwill ambassadors we've ever produced," a retired Army officer told The American Spectator's Jeff Emanuael, whose Opinion Journal op ed today takes on the journalistic question that dare not speak its name:

While embedding may be decried by some for causing journalists, who claim the utopian titles of "objective" and "neutral" for their reportage, to lose their cold detachment and actually begin to see the soldiers they live alongside as humans, it is that very quality that makes the practice of embedding reporters with military units so beneficial to both parties.

Rather than observing events from a safely detached distance -- and thus being able to remove the human element from the equation -- embedded reporters are forced to face up to the humanity of their subjects, and to share common experiences -- often of the life-and-death variety -- with those they are covering.

Laura Lee excerpts a totally awesome example of the genre today, quoting Arkansas Democrat Gazette embed Amy Schlesing:

This is the living area of Camp Stryker, acres of white metal trailers in neat rows surrounded by thick gravel and interspersed with the occasional bathroom and shower facility. Bathrooms and showers are communal, modesty is something you just have to get over.

Many soldiers have small grills, which glow with charcoal at dusk. Soldiers gather around the grill and laugh, play cards and listen to music.

The smell wafts through camp carrying memories of home.

"You are the best boy ever was," Tuck whispers in the ear of the best boy ever was.

Go read the whole thing, and then come back to Jeff Emanuael's WSJ op ed:

Human nature being what it is, such close working conditions, and such common, life-threatening experiences, will have an effect on both parties involved -- and it is a testament both to the soldiers themselves, and to the journalists who volunteer to live and work alongside them, that that effect has, in so many cases, been so positive.

Good god. Where'd this journalistic moral-equivalency thing in a time of war come from, do you suppose? Is the Columbia School of Journalism to blame? It surely is consistent with the Gramscian project to undermine our shining-city-upon-a-hill institutions to make way for the soul-killing Marxist utopia, where our betters -- from Hillary on down/up -- tell us what's best for us, but why were our "best and brightest" so willing to buy into the big lie? Was it simple indoctrination in their tender college years? If so, our best hope amongst the journalist class may be the upcoming generation who by nature -- human nature -- are now rebelling against their elders.

"Decency in the face of barbarism and murder"

The Babe's thoughts turn inward this afternoon as he traverses the kitchen counter while visions of kitty treats dance in his head.

"Interest in the war is waning back home, I'm told, and that may also explain the thinning ranks of reporters over here," writes Michael Yon, one of the few remaining voices in the wilderness keeping the over-there fires burning on the frontline in Iraq:

But without reader support I can't continue indefinitely.

Reader support keeps my boots on the ground here, and my readers will determine how long I am able to continue this work. I have not taken a penny from Fox, any television or other outlets to fund this year-long trip.

Ironically, with fewer reporters here every day, it seems even more critical to insure that the news flows from those sources we do have on the ground. So, please continue to spread the word about my work and please consider supporting this site by clicking here.

Sir, yes sir. We're putting our money where our blogmouth is and invite our readers, if so inclined, to do the same. Michael is one of those seekers of wisdom and truth Bill Whittle calls in his latest uberpost "The Remnant":

Chances are you have no idea what the term The Remnant refers to . . . Not the actions of Delta Force operators or other First Responders -- the obvious assumption -- but rather of decent, ordinary people who showed extraordinary decency and courage when the moment called them.

And what did the passengers of United Flight 93 have in common? Men and women, gay and straight, liberal and conservative, Republicans and Democrats, rich and poor . . . who knows, and more importantly, who cares?

That is Remnant. That is the strength, the foundation, the core, the essence of civilization and decency in the face of barbarism and murder.

Bill Whittle is the oner who wrote deep and darkly a couple of years back of the "Tribes":

"Then there are sheepdogs," he went on, "and I'm a sheepdog. I live to protect the flock and confront the wolf." Or, as a sign in one California law enforcement agency put it, "We intimidate those who intimidate others."

What's the kitty meeping, you ask? It's a gift from Miss Kelly from last Saturday night's blogmeet to die for, a "Super Mammoth Elephant Ear" bulb. Set it into the soil, add sunlight and water, and it iwill go Jack-and-the-Beanstalk on you: "Elephant Ear (Colocasia esculenta) Need a quick-growing, dramatic, lush, tropical effect, elephant ears are your choice. They do well in sun or shade and love plenty of water, making dense clumps nearly 3' x 3'. Winter hardy (roots)."

Meanwhile, even as Bush-Derangement-Syndrome sufferers attempt to demoralize the sheepdogs on the front and members of The Remnant stateside, the home fires are burning brightly in this neck of the woods thanks to fearless freedom fighters like our own Sub Rosa blogpals Sol of Solomonia and MB of Miss Kelly. Sol was interviewed, with reference to his totally awesome "The Silencing," featured by Pajamas Media the other day -- an exhaustive report of Boston-area Islamist groups' use of lawsuits to silence their critics and the media -- by Boston's WRKO radio station's Pundit Review, which you can listen to here. As we told our friend in his comments:

You oughta have your own show, fergossake. You are a natural and so easy on the ears.

So much talent, so little time. Let's roll!

The evocative and timeless landscape

Republication from our "Crescent of Embrace" post "Reading the landscape" of September 2005: The Three Soldiers (right) by Frederick Hart caught us off guard two falls ago when we walked up the rise after taking in Maya Lyn's once controversial but now much loved polished marble Vietnam Veterans' Memorial Wall on the Mall in D.C., engraved with all the names of the war dead (left).  Overcome with emotion as we followed the three soldiers' gaze back to the wall, we recalled our elitist disdain from years before when we first heard that the pristine wall would be "contaminated" by a realistic grouping.  How wrong we were. The lifelike but universal soldiers breathe life into the cool, abstract wall with their humanity, and the wall, in turn, lends historical resonance to the immediacy and concreteness of the soldiers.  The whole, never anticipated by individual planners nor artists, was so much greater than the sum of its parts. Landscapes are like that. Their evocative power grows over time.

"Mark Steyn's commemorative block set on an acre or two of greensward surrounded by a cluster of iconic buildings does not translate well to an immense, windswept field of 2,200 acres surrounded at vast distances by forested hills. The large scale demands large landscape gestures," we blogged back in September of 2004, bucking the tide of an angry right blogospheric frenzy amongst our usual philosophical allies -- a Judeo-Christian version of the Mohammed-cartoons hysteria? -- over perceived Islamic iconography in the landscape architect's design for the Flight 93 crash site. We've flogged the topic here early and often. Now Mr. Steyn is at it again, determined that the naturalistic landscape of wetlands and surrounding woods proposed for the site is "the precise opposite of what Flight 93 embodies":

A true Flight 93 memorial would honor courage, action and improvisation, but reflection, healing and wetlands are the best we can manage. Go to any Civil War memorial on any New England common, and marvel at how they managed to honor their dead without wetlands and wind chimes.

We don't know about the wind chimes, but a rationally ordered, human-scaled New England common is totally the wrong model for the Shanksville field where Flight 93 went down as the forces of light and darkness wrestled in the aisles. As we wrote back during the initial controversy, think Gettysburg:

We've never visited Gettysburg National Military Park. According to the NPS website, it "incorporates nearly 6,000 acres, with 26 miles of park roads and over 1,400 monuments, markers, and memorials." But in our mind's eye it is not the touchingly sentimental, old-fashioned memorials so much as the evocative and timeless landscape itself -- the "passive beauty," in Lileks's words, of its vast, empty battlefields -- that moves us to contemplate the human condition. Again to borrow Lileks's words, these "muted things" do not seem "at odds with the events they describe."

Are Mark Steyn & Company blinded by an agenda they signed up for in the wake of Shanksville street evangelist Ron McRae's initial sighting of the virgin the Islamic crescent and star in the site plan for the Flight 93 memorial? Have they strayed so far from their roots that they have forgotten Thoreau's insight that "The most alive is the wildest. Not yet subdued to man, its presence refreshes him."

Update: Michelle Malkin, who led the charge last time, begs to differ for reasons of her own, of course:

A proper war memorial stirs to anger and action . . .

Memorial architect Paul Murdoch, whose firm emphasizes "environmental responsibility and sustainability," did not return calls and e-mails seeking comment, but he did emphasize to the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette that his creation was about "healing" and "contemplation." He is also proud of his idea to hang a bunch of wind chimes in a tall tower at the site as a "gesture of healing and bonding."

No Fred Thompson, the architect obviously has no idea what to make of this new-fangled blogosphere thing. You don't not return Michelle Malkin's calls. But as we emailed Michelle, forget about what the architect says -- gestures of "healing and bonding" are mainly for other architects' ears anyway -- and look at the work itself:

I continue to think you're reading all the wrong things into the Shanksville design. As a landscape architect myself, I tend to bypass the bloated prose of architects to look at the work itself and try to imagine myself in the space.

If a landscape architect blogs in the 'sphere and no one is around to hear, does it make a sound?

Update: A way-cool blog we discovered in our Site Meter stats, Archinect links.

Lobster and lilacs

Tiny goes for the jugular of lobster in the ruff at Sunday's clambake Down East.

Hey. Give me that.

Back home this afternoon she settles in before dinner on the dining room table with remnants of Goomp's lovely Mother's Day floral bouquet of pink roses and baby's breath, kicked up a notch by a few sprigs of our own homegrown lilacs, framing her loveliness.

Update:  Lots more faunal loveliness at Modulator's Friday Ark #139 and Carnival of the Cats #164 at TBIFOC.

"You are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it"

Tuck checks out the filter as Goomp looks on during Pool Opening Ceremonies Sunday. What do you suppose the "carbon footprint" of this domestic amenity that has brought so much pleasure to the extended family through the years might be?

"Why do reason, logic and truth seem to play a sharply diminished role in the way America now makes important decisions?" asks a psychologically projecting Al Gore without irony atop a Time Mag soapbox this morning. Dr. Sanity has some answers (see below), but first let us wallow along with the Gorester in his slough of despond over what His fellow Americans such as ourselves have wrought by electing GWB -- twice! -- instead of His Holiness:

The persistent and sustained reliance on falsehoods as the basis of policy, even in the face of massive and well-understood evidence to the contrary, seems to many Americans to have reached levels that were previously unimaginable.

A large and growing number of Americans are asking out loud: "What has happened to our country?" People are trying to figure out what has gone wrong in our democracy, and how we can fix it.

Previously unimaginable? Asking out loud? Aren't they terrified of being snatched from their homes in the dead of night and "disappeared" into the Gulag? Oh, never mind. Dr. Sanity, with reference to Sigmund, Carl and Alfred's "Wednesday Weekly Whacky Awards," notes that the promulgation of falsehoods has been the very essence of the leftist project from way back when:

. . . Read what some of our "finest" educators and psychiatrists have said over the last 50 years about education. If you can make it though to the last quote, then you will begin to realize why K-12 education has evolved into K-12 indoctrination -- indoctrination into the leftist mindset . . .

[Johann Gottlieb Fichte, the Prussian University head of philosophy & psychology who influenced Hegel and others] was instrumental in creating the "climate of collectivism" in philosophy (as Stephen Hicks has referred to it) that prevailed in Germany during the late 18th and throughout the 19th century. In this counter-enlightenment climate, the state was worshipped as the source of all reality and that which brought meaning to life. Hegel, building on Kant, Rousseau and Fichte, would go on to write, "It must be further understood that all the worth which the human being possesses -- all the spiritual reality, he possesses only through the State."

Hegel's heirs went on to divide into left- and right-wing camps. The charge of the left was led by leftists like Karl Marx, who transformed Hegel's "dialectic of Spirit" into an economic and social system that depended on a godless dialectic of "oppressors vs oppressed." The right-wing Hegelians tended to stress the omnipotence of the state and were less willing to abandon a deity. For more than a 100 years, the two camps have been battling it out, each trying to impose their utopian vision onto the human species.

Dr. S. offers three examples of the educational establishment's totalitarianist mindset. We'll quote just one, and you can head over there and to Siggy's for more, if you can stand it:

“This is the idea where we drop subject matter and we drop Carnegie Units (grading from A-F) and we just let students find their way, keeping them in school until they manifest the politically correct attitudes. You see, one of the effects of self-esteem (Values Clarification) programs is that you are no longer obliged to tell the truth if you don’t feel like it. You don’t have to tell the truth because if the truth you have to tell is about your own failure then your self-esteem will go down and that is unthinkable.” Dr. William Coulson, explaining Outcome Based Education (OBE)1964

No wonder home schooling has taken off. We recall our own sister's concern about the content-free, politically-correct, self-esteem-driven curriculum prevalent in the middle school of her Boston-bedroom-community town during her own children's school days. Fortunately for her, for her kids -- our totally awesome nephews! -- and for the American way, the indoctrination didn't take, and her sons are free and independent thinkers uncowed by politically correct imperatives. We can't help but wonder, though, just how effective the Gramscian infiltration of collectivist indoctrination has been with these last couple of American generations. The younger generations' distraction by the lowest-common-denominator culture of celebrity and self-absorption may ironically be their salvation.

Sometimes a cigar is NOT just a cigar

"Mental institution, Michael. It might be something you should think about," confides a Cuban-cigar-chomping Fred Thompson in the above-linked faux-fatherly-advice rapid response video to Michael Moore's whiney debate challenge to the unannounced presidential candidate, a Drudge exclusive this morning. With apologies to Siggy, sometimes a cigar is NOT just a cigar. In Senator Thompson's hand and mouth it becomes a WMD to atomize the portly crockumentary filmmaker's house of cards. Class will out.

Meanwhile, forget about Brit Hume and the "First-in-the-South Republican Primary Yawner Debate" on Fox News tonight. Too many candidates, too many words, too little beef. Drudge and Thompson leave Hume and the Ten Little Indians in the pixel dust.

Update: "Fred Thompson is the first politician anywhere to understand how the speed of the internet can change politics," writes Bob Krum [via Instapundit], who has a military term for what the Senator just did:

This is something that should alarm Fred’s opponents -- both Republican and Democrat.  In certain military circles there’s this concept known as the “OODA Loop.”  OODA stands for Observe, Orient, Decide, and Act.  The late Colonel John Boyd, a Korean War pilot, came up with the concept to try to explain why American pilots were so much better than their opponents in dogfights.  He determined that through a combination of training, aerodynamics, and cockpit design, American pilots and their aircraft could more quickly observe a stimulus and respond.  It allowed them to react and act again and again so quickly, that at some point, the American fliers were an entire decision cycle ahead of their opponents.  It’s called “getting inside your opponent’s OODA loop.”

Roger Abramson seems to be channeling our own thoughts:

By the way, Thompson’s response to Moore will have a much greater impact on the presidential campaign than anything said at this little shindig tonight. It’ll be seen by many more people too.

This is starting to get interesting.

Update II:  A backdoor Instalanchette. We left a linked message in the comments at VolunteerVoters.com, to whom the Lancherizer had linked. Hey. We get it where we can.

Update III: Michael Moore should have done a Google search before opening his big, fat mouth. On the other hand, why would he? He's never been one to allow himself to be confused by the facts. Goomp -- who traveled to Cuba as a young businessman in his salad days -- in the comments:

When I smoked cigars twenty years ago, I loved them, Cuban cigars had become illegal because of Castro's repressive liberal ideas. I checked with Google and find that we have relented and it is now legal to buy Cubans. They are the best.

I'll puff to that.