sisu

"Keep up the excellent program!"

One-of-a-kind original hand-colored marker drawings by Sissy, exquisitely framed by Michael's for our beloved nephew Kyrian and his new bride Nicole.

We just got a most awesome email from the doc. It's been two weeks and a day since they took a sample of tissue from our stomach -- after all these years of doctorial harassment, we finally succumbed to his demands for a colonoscopy and upper GI endoscopy -- and now we are rewarded with a most encouraging report:

Biopsy [Path results tissue antrum] ok. BP looks great. Keep up the excellent program! [That would be our Cold Turkey regime]

From a personal point of view, commentary during today's imail with the woman who -- like Cosmo in "Moonstruck" -- knows everything:

We: I thought I had an ulcer.

She: How wonderful to feel well again. You must be totally thrilled.

We: Wicked.

She: Nothing succeeds like success!! I'm really pleased about your BP, too.

We: As you said, it's all about portions.

The only way to go is cold turkey.

"Your photographs paint a picture of freedom in America"

Gazing out over his domain on Father's Day last Sunday, with Camelot-by-the-Sea behind and the pool and the river's mouth before him, Goomp enjoys the freedom to pursue happiness made possible by The Age of Abundance.

"Your photographs [of an all-American backyard barbeque] paint a picture of freedom in America as pointed out by Brink Lindsey in his The Age of Abundance," writes Goomp in the comments to our previous post, referring to the argument of one of the books we gave him for Father's Day:

When the 20th century began such gatherings to enjoy were limited to the wealthy. Most people had neither the time away from work nor the financial means to enjoy such pleasures.

"In addition, Sissy is the Norman Rockwell of our time, capturing the magic moments of American freedom," says our sis with a straight face, declaring "I can never say enough about your 'eye.'" That would be the thing we often humorously refer to as a "good eye" for beauty in unexpected places. Then there's Rockwell's "good eye." As we wrote awhile back re the artist's "The Four Freedoms" series inspired by FDR's rousing wartime State of the Union address in 1941:

We remember having reproductions of the illustrations hanging on the walls of our grade-school classrooms in the fifties and thinking even then they seemed quaintly old-fashioned. In today's world, again at war with those who would stomp on our freedoms, we see them with fresh eyes.  Because Rockwell's subject matter was usually on the corny side, serious art critics tended to look down upon the artist's accomplishment, but beyond the anecdotal component -- much loved by the average American -- his compositional and painterly skills were quite remarkable.

Speaking of fresh eyes, "Do you remember 9/11? How you felt? The moral clarity of that day and the days thereafter?" asked Charles Krauthammer rhetorically a couple of years back, reflecting on the willful, all-too-human forgetfulness on the part of some of our fellow Americans regarding what they saw that day:

Just days after 9/11, on this very page, Lance Morrow wrote a brilliant, searing affirmation of right against wrong, good against evil.

A few years of that near papal certainty is more than any self-respecting intelligentsia can take. The overwhelmingly secular intellectuals are embarrassed that they once nodded in assent to Morrow-like certainty, an affront to their self-flattering pose as skeptics.

Good vs evil is too corny, too quaintly old-fashioned to satisfy some people's blindly self-destructive narcissism.

A barbeque in suburbia

Everybody into the pool!

Host and hostess caught in a remembrance-of-cookouts-past haze of savory smoke from the grill.

And the band played on . . .

. . . while partygoers ate, drank . . .

. . . and were merry. Good food, mahvelous setting, superb company.

Update: "I felt as though I could be in the midst of that party. Beautifully done," writes our imail correspondent:

The picture with the people talking, but with the flowers taking center stage. Some boring photographer (most of us) would have taken it ass-backwards and had the people in the front. The flowers would be a pale backdrop. You have captured Summer.

"I like the corniness of a backyard barbeque. It's so totally all-American," we continued. Her reply:

I don't think it's corny. I think it's magic.

And indeed it was.

"Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp"

"Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp, from political institutions right down to relationships between fathers and sons," a WSJ reporter notes re the I-was-there message of Peruvian dissident Mario Vargas Llosa. Above, Goomp's keeping-room table in the early-morning light on Father's Day.

"The woman is almost always the first victim of a dictatorship," novelist Mario Vargas Llosa told WSJ's Emily Parker when she visited his home in Lima recently [subscription only]:

Mr. Vargas Llosa discovered that this phenomenon was hardly limited to Latin America. "I went to Iraq after the invasion," he tells me. "When I heard stories about the sons of Saddam Hussein, it seemed like I was in the Dominican Republic, hearing stories about the sons of Trujillo! That women would be taken from the street, put in automobiles and simply presented like objects . . . The phenomenon was very similar, even with such different cultures and religions." He concludes: "Brutality takes the same form in dictatorial regimes."

"Did this mean that Mr. Vargas Llosa supported the invasion of Iraq?" Parker wondered:

"I was against it at the beginning," he says. But then he went to Iraq and heard accounts of life under Saddam Hussein. "Because there has been so much opposition to the war, already one forgets that this was one of the most monstrous dictatorships that humanity has ever seen, comparable to that of Hitler, or Stalin." He changed his mind about the invasion: "Iraq is better without Saddam Hussein than with Saddam Hussein. Without a doubt."

There's nothing like having lived under the jackboot to keep things in perspective:

"This is a story that often repeated itself," Mario Vargas Llosa says. "If a father was a businessman, he was a man who had to be complicit with the dictatorship. It was the only way to prosper, right? And what happens is that the son discovers it, the son is young, restless, idealistic, believes in justice and liberty, and he finds out that his vile father is serving a dictatorship that assassinates, incarcerates, censors and is corrupted to the bone."

Mr. Vargas Llosa could have plucked this scenario from his personal recollections of living under dictatorial rule in Peru. But he tells this story to make a more universal point: Dictatorships poison everything in their grasp, from political institutions right down to relationships between fathers and sons.

Father's Day sunrise looking out over the mouth of the river down Goomp's last weekend.

Vargas Llosa himself believes "that literature has the important effect of creating free, independent, critical citizens who cannot be manipulated":

If you live in a country where there is nothing comparable to free information, often literature becomes the only way to be more or less informed about what's going on.

Unfortunately, it doesn't always work so well in jackboot-free nations like our own, where the careless assumption of freedom as a given leaves a comfortable, intellectually lazy citizenry all too ripe for manipulation.

"An absolutely glorious day"

"It's an absolutely glorious day here," says one of the on-site Fox News reporters at Edwards Airforce Base in California as the elegant, swellegant -- albeit froggy-faced (above photo) -- Shuttle Atlantis makes a "picture perfect" landing this afternoon.

"We put people in space and bring them down so often that we just sort of take it for granted. It's truly astounding," says Shepard Smith, "how quiet, how almost not an event it is." Above photo shows view from the cockpit with runway at center, top of image.

"Everyone in the space center is smiling," says Trace Gallagher, Adam Housley or Tom Jones -- who can keep track? -- the reporters and experts on hand to keep Shepard up to speed this afta.

The wheels drop and Shuttle Atlantis touches down at Edwards Air Force Base. Neil Cavuto follows the live coverage with talking heads pro and con the policy of continuing the Space Station program. Had we a dog in that fight, we would no doubt be passionately for or against, but as an everyday citizen totally in awe of the scientific miracles of western civ, we are -- what else? -- totally in awe. Try to picture a jihadist accomplishing anything close.

Unimpressed with the scientific miracles of western civ, Tiny goes for the jugular of her "Pure Catnip" kitty toy.

Update: Pajamas Media links.

Everybody into the pool house!

Nephew Chris dropped by Goomp's this morning to clean the pool house, a favorite haunt of members of the local Northern Ribbon Snake community. One of them had shed its skin (above, x 5), which Chris presented to us for study and photodocumentation.

Baby (above) and Tiny took a scientific interest in Chris's find, performing a battery of olfactory measurements and paw tests.

The pool house cleaned, the strikingly handsome and well tanned Chris opened the season by diving into the pool but shooed off the paparazzi with cries of "No peectures, no peectures!"

Smiles of a summer day

Baby the Magnificent, official portrait in front of Goomp's Down East seaside cottage Camelot.

Baby and his sister slipped their traces, hopped out of the car and hit the ground running yesterday morning the minute we arrived at Goomp's. After a satisfying roll on the sunny pavement of the drive, they both bounded off to field and forest, and each came back in short order with a chipmunk in the jaws. Later Tiny was seen running across the lawn with a tiny vole hanging out of the corner of her mouth.

Tiny studies the movements of a local member of the Leporid community early morning.

The Chelsea Grays followed their instincts, and we followed ours, seeking a stay of execution for each prisoner. Our techniques varied according to the situation but usually amounted to distracting the cat long enough to grab either the feline or its intended victim and separate them to allow time for the prey to escape. If it's around mealtime, an enthusiastic "Want your supper?" will do usually the trick.

Can you say photogenic? Oh, you Baby face.

Neo stopped by for a visit last evening, and the talk soon turned to -- what else? -- blogging. A vague sense we both have that enthusiasm in the blogosphere has crested and is now on the wane. Visitor stats are sagging. Are we projecting, and/or are we onto something? As she talked, we felt as if she were channeling our thoughts. She nodded in recognition when we confessed that lately we had been prone to skip a day -- or even two -- of blogging from time to time without losing any sleep over it. Contrast this slacker attitude with the wild-eyed commitment expressed in this imail exchange a little under a year ago:

She: You are in the tiny percentile of those who blog daily.

We: Yes. Although I do miss a day from time to time. But in my MIND I blog daily. And when I don't I am wracked with fear and loathing.

Tuck refuels the totally awesome -- "weeds and brush have no chance" -- DR field and brush mower as he fulfills estate-grooming responsibilities yesterday.

Wither the blogosphere? Watch this space.

"Fortune does, in the end, favour the brave"

"Fortune does, in the end, favour the brave," said Margaret Thatcher yesterday in a speech marking the 25th anniversary of victory in the Falklands War. Baby the Brave -- above attempting to liberate a piece of chicken from Tuck's plate -- would agree.

"The totalitarian world produces backwardness because it does such violence to the spirit, thwarting the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship," Terence Jeffrey quotes President Reagan in a lesser known passage from the Great Communicator's "Tear down this wall" speech -- delivered 20 years ago last Tuesday -- that resonates. The totalitarian instinct runs dark and deep in our species, as we are forever blogging, but "something there is that doesn't love a wall":

Pondering what sustained Berliners, surrounded as they were by the Soviet menace, Reagan concluded: "Perhaps this gets to the root of the matter, to the most fundamental distinction of all between East and West . . ."

Even as Reagan spoke that day in Berlin, the forces of faith and reason were laying siege to Gdansk, Poland. On one side were Polish police, on the other, a Polish priest. The former came to intimidate the masses; the latter to say a Mass . . .

The Protestant president and Catholic pope won the Cold War in Eastern Europe without ever firing a shot there because Christianity had a more powerful and enduring grip on the soul of that region than communism could ever have.

We're reminded of Oriana Fallaci's spiritual kinship with John Paul's successor, blogged here early and often. As we wrote last year:

It's not faith vs. rationality [as some fundamentalist atheists like Sam Harris would have it], but intolerance vs. tolerance. Render unto Caesar, as we've blogged before. It doesn't require religious faith to believe in something worth fighting for. The shining city upon a hill shimmers in our mind's eye. As Oriana Fallaci wrote -- and we are forever quoting -- "I am an atheist, and if an atheist and a pope think the same things, there must be something true."

Moral codes -- whether religious, non-religious or anti-religious, red in tooth and claw or metaphorical -- are our species' default mode, the glue that bonds persons related by DNA or by ideology for mutual physical and/or psychological survival. As anthropologist-turned-psychologist Pascal Boyer's brain-scan studies suggest:

When the evidence is pieced together, it seems that evolution prepared what society later moulded: a brain to believe.

As well as providing succour for those troubled by the existential dilemma, religion, or at least a primitive spirituality, would have played another important role as human societies developed. By providing contexts for a moral code, religious beliefs encouraged bonding within groups, which in turn bolstered the group's chances of survival, says Boyer . . .

"What I find more plausible is that rather than religion itself offering any advantage in evolutionary terms, it's a byproduct of other cognitive capacities we evolved, which did have advantages," says Boyer.

Tiny in foreground watches as Baby achieves a victory in the latest suppertime skirmish.

The predisposition to believe is there. The standard model -- you're either a member of our group or we'll marginalize you or kill you -- is alive and well all over the world in what we have called "fear societies heavy and lite," wherever totalitarianism -- in President Reagan's words -- thwarts " the human impulse to create, to enjoy, to worship." Moral relativism notwithstanding, some cultures ARE better than others because they bring out the best in us, while the worst, unable to face life's dark side in themselves, encourage their citizens to stew in their own juices and project their all-too-human faults onto "the other."

Serendipitous double-exposure screen shot from live EWTN coverage of President Bush's historic audience with Pope Benedict XVI Saturday.

Let's give Margaret Thatcher the last word, in a speech yesterday "praising Britain's armed forces to mark the 25th anniversary of victory in the Falklands War":

There are in a sense no final victories, for the struggle against evil in the world is never ending. Tyranny and violence wear many masks. Yet from victory in the Falklands we can all today draw hope and strength.

Fortune does, in the end, favour the brave.

Fortunately, ours is not only the land of the free, but the home the brave.

Update: Modulator's Friday Ark #143, now boarding, is the home of all things bright and beautiful.

Update II: The News Junkie at Maggie's Farm has our number: "Maggie Thatcher, Reagan, fear, and cats."

Update III: For more Manichean musings, be sure to visit Dr. Sanity's Carnival of the Insanities, where "the insane, the bizarre, the ridiculous, and the completely absurd are highlighted for all to see!"

Tea: The new gin

"Theaceous: adj. pertaining to or like the tea-plant; belonging to the tea family of plants." You can get the definition free online at Tiscali's Dictionary of Difficult Words or by subscription at the Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary. For the full monty we looked it up the old-fashioned way in our snail Webster's Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged. Image of p. 2369 above lists "theaceous" just about a third of the way between "the" and "their" and includes etymological roots: [NL Theaceae + E -ous].

"Tea leaves struck a cord with quite a few of your readers," observed Goomp this morning during imail chats, referring to the deluge of personal testimonials and theaceous pointers flooding into the comments in our previous post, "Something to drink if you can't drink liquor." Excerpts:

We: Tea: The new gin. Or, on a more trendy note, Tea: The new black.

He: The "new black" is too esoteric for me. I prefer "Tea: The new gin."

We'll drink a mug -- "Cups are too small and frankly poncy," counsels our British correspondent Peter McGrath --  to that and to our wonderful commenters. A few nuggets:

Laura Lee: Everyday after school when I was in high school I would come home to a cup of tea and vanilla wafers, a very simple pleasure, but my friends found out and gave me a new nickname, Lauratealeaf.

Goomp: I have a hunch tea may also have an economic advantage over alcohol.

Teresa: I find that tea is a wonderful thing to soothe nerves (which seems silly, but appears to be true) and I have also noticed that it aids digestion.

Pam: Growing up in the south, tea was considered the 'house wine', so you struck a chord.

Rowena: I've been teetotaling for over two years, and now I've finally got the tea!

Meanwhile we've just passed the two-week mark -- and counting -- on our  Cold Turkey Diet. Time for a tea break. 

"Something to drink if you can't drink liquor"

Tiny keeps her eye on the lower forty this morning from her vantage point atop the woodpile.

Tea has never been our cup of tea, so to speak. Coffee was the salt in our stew. But we started drinking tea about a week ago after our British blogfriend, inveterate tea drinker Peter McGrath of The Beagle Project, intrigued us with a brief email message and link to a BBC article touting the health benefits of the liquid refreshment derived from the leaves of Camelia sinensis:

Tea: better for you than water:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/health/5281046.stm

Not that we were unaware that tea was supposed to be good for you, but until our cold-turkey epiphany two weeks back, we hadn't given it much thought.

"Camellia sinensis is the tea plant, the plant species whose leaves and leaf buds are used to produce tea," says Wikipedia. "White tea, green tea, oolong and black tea are all harvested from this species but are processed differently to attain different levels of oxidation." Black -- the one we're currently drinking because we happened to have some Twinings Earl Grey on hand -- "comes from leaves that have been fermented before being heated and dried." Botanical drawing from Köhler's Medizinal-Pflanzen in naturgetreuen Abbildungen mit kurz erläuterndem Texte (1887)

"Tea is the most important non-alcoholic beverage in the world," according to the Plant Cultures website, which also seems to be carrying water for government interference in markets via something called "fairtrade." But back to non-alcoholic beverages. A snippet of an imail conversation this afternoon about the drinking of tea:

We:  As I said earlier to Tuck, who happened to be puffing on a pipe at the time, "Tea drinking is sort of like smoking a pipe. It gives you something to do."

She: That's the secret of tea. Something to drink if you can't drink liquor.

We: I never knew until I went cold turkey.

In the spirit of her brother's earlier portrayal,Tiny gives her interpretation of the "Greatest Lion," Aslan.

As soon as we finish that Earl Gray, we're going to try Beagleman Peter McGrath's favorite brew, Yorkshire Tea. As Yorkshire fan Melissa McMinn of North Yorkshire says in comments at the site, "Yes - it’s the best! No other tea rivals Yorkshire Tea!!! I honestly don’t think I could live without it." Available online here.

Update: Pajamas Media links with "Something for the cold turkey community."

Update II: If animals of every stripe are your cuppa, head on over to Friday Ark #142 at Modulator and the 168th Carnival of the Cats  at The Scratching Post, where KT,  the Feline Theocracy's Maximum Leader, has "an important public service message" for the staff:

Have you ever had to do the laundry and change the sheets, but found the cat lying on the bed? Today we will show you how to remove the sheets without disturbing the cat.

Don't miss it!