Month: March 2026

09JUL2019 – Quote of the Day

photog Quote of the Day ,

I ran this one a year and a half ago but it’s well worth running every year.

The Man in the Arena as it is called,  is part of a speech called Citizenship in a Republic made by Theodore Roosevelt in Paris, France on April 23, 1910.  It’s well known but well worth requoting.

It is not the critic who counts; not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles, or where the doer of deeds could have done them better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood; who strives valiantly; who errs, who comes short again and again, because there is no effort without error and shortcoming; but who does actually strive to do the deeds; who knows great enthusiasms, the great devotions; who spends himself in a worthy cause; who at the best knows in the end the triumph of high achievement, and who at the worst, if he fails, at least fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who neither know victory nor defeat.

 

 

 

Ah, That Was a Proper 2026

photog Current Events, Life in Dunwich, photog's Corner , ,

So today it got up to 66οF and tonight it’s only going to get down to 38οF.  Tomorrow I’m off from work and it’s gonna be 67 οF and sunny all day, with no wind.  So, tomorrow is the official first day of un-winter.  Camera Girl and I will officially get up a half hour later, eat a leisurely breakfast, stroll around the devastated grounds and then go for a ride and walk around a lake, take a few photographs then go into town and have something special for lunch; maybe Chinese or Thai.  Life begins again.

Except for the north side of the garage roof, all the roof snow is practically gone.  And some areas of vegetation (mangled and brown) have reappeared behind the retreating snow.  Obviously, the absurdly high piles of snow I created over the course of the last few weeks will be there well into April (and in places into May) but those will just be there as a cautionary tale about the folly of living in New England.

The west field will be soggy for weeks while the snow retreats there last.  But within a week or two I intend to go there and cut down all of the raspberry canes and spread fertilizer on that bed.  Last year that program provided a bonanza of berries and I intend to duplicate that procedure this spring.  But the truly awful production we got out of the squash, eggplants and cucumbers over there has convinced me to move all of these beds to the south field.  I’m going to dig up a good chunk of lawn over there and plant vegetables and transplant some flowers that have languished too close to the forest shade.

So, there is a plan going forward and plenty of work to do.  But it’s just so good to finally be freed from sitting around in the house staring out at a world of snow.  They talk about cabin fever and I know exactly what they mean.  It’s a depressing, nervous state where you have to invent things to do to keep your mind off of your imprisonment.  It’s a time when you try to stick to exercise regimens just to avoid becoming a pile of mush over the inactivity of the winter.  And the short days just makes it worse because darkness makes you sleepy.

Okay, I’ll put all that behind me.  Winter 2025/2026 is officially dead and buried.  Even if we have that stupid April Fools’ Day nor’easter this year, it’s just there to provide “poor man’s fertilizer” for the vegetation.  I predict 2026 will be a very productive year with interesting scientific and technological news and improvements on the economic front.  But most important I predict that summer 2026 will provide the most memorable cookouts, barbecues and grilling that will be talked about for the next decade and will become a byword for successful outdoor parties.  Like some Shire gaffer, in the future you’ll see me eating a cheeseburger smothered in onions and relish and here me declare, “Ah, that was a proper 2026!”

Coming to a Theater Near You

photog Current Events, Movie Reviews, Reviews , ,

I was watching a movie from the 1980s (Moonstruck) with Camera Girl tonight.  I’ve been busy with book marketing for the last month and it’s been a grind.  So, I sat down after dinner and we just enjoyed the show.  It’s a ridiculous romantic comedy with Cher and Nicholas Cage as the couple and a veteran cast of character actors with New York City as the backdrop.  It’s an absurd movie but it’s genuinely funny and it means no harm.

And I found myself enjoying the movie immensely.  Afterwards I tried to figure out why.  First off it was about 1980s America; a place where normal life proceeded and people were generally happy.  And secondly, the movie was well made.  It wasn’t deathless prose.  It wasn’t profound.  It was silly.  But it was good-hearted and the script, the acting and the production were professional and enjoyable to watch.

But why should that be such a big deal?  And then it hit me.  Nothing that has come out of Hollywood in the last five or ten years has been any good.  Everything is poorly made and poorly written and poorly acted.  Nothing makes you laugh or cry or even think.  It’s all dreck.  And that’s crazy!

And it occurred to me that this won’t go on forever.  Someone is going to step forward and make something good.  And I think what they’ll do is break the rules.

Someone is going to refuse to only hire DEI writers and DEI actors and DEI directors and instead they’ll hire the old white guys who used to make stuff in Hollywood and used to make us laugh and cry and think.  It’s a cinch those guys haven’t all died in the last ten years and I’m sure they could use the work.  I’m sure they haven’t forgotten how to ply their trades.  All it will take is someone with enough money to put together a production crew (outside of Los Angeles) and has the nerve to make a movie about the America we used to make movies about.  And it doesn’t have to be a period piece about the 1950s when everyone was white.  There can even be some immigrants in the cast.  After all the problem isn’t having non-white people in a movie.  It’s about the writer and director hating white men so hard that they have to make believe they don’t exist.

It’s a funny thing.  The eastern and southern European immigrants who came to this country at the beginning of the twentieth century didn’t look like the English and northern European people who were already established here and from whom the movie characters were selected.  Blond haired, blue-eyed stars weren’t them.  But they could be stand-ins for the dreams that those immigrants had about being prosperous and happy in their adopted country.  They had enough imagination to realize that the American dream was transferrable to people who chased the American dream.  Work hard, follow the rules and dream big.  It was aspirational to watch Jimmy Stewart or John Wayne as a cowboy saving the day and winning the girl.  Hating on Anglo-Americans made no sense.

Well, that’s what needs to happen again.  Aspirational movies with Americans acting like Americans and not apologizing for being smart and successful is what we should be seeing on the screen.  And there shouldn’t be any DEI box checkers making sure there are the correct number of interracial couples or black lesbian brain surgeons in the story line.  Of course, 2026 is the year that Christopher Nolan is casting a black woman as Helen of Troy in his Odyssey.  Well at least it wasn’t a trans-woman.  But I guess I’ll have to wait a little longer.  I can wait because I know it’s coming to a theater near me soon.

Struggling Back from the Abyss

photog Current Events, Trump ,

Anyone over the age of fifty knows that things are devolving in the western world.  European societies (including places like the United States, Canada, Australia and New Zealand) are degenerating from the competent, affluent and intelligent places they were even twenty years ago into mediocre (at best) struggling third world backwaters.  The reasons are manifold but essentially the powers that be have intentionally worked to undermine the institutions and practices (merit-based career advancement, standards based educational advancement and preferential employment of American workers) that made an advanced civilization possible.

It seems that the damage is pretty severe.  In many areas of the country young people educated under the lax standards are functionally illiterate and without skills that would make them useful employees.  But at the present there are attempts to bring manufacturing back to the United States and efforts to deport illegal aliens and curtail legal immigration.  But it leaves us with the question as to whether this degeneration of society will be reversed and how?

The way I see this is that improvements will be a local phenomenon and will be tied into state policies to arrest and reverse these problems.  And in order for improvement to grow it will require a two-pronged effort.  State government will have to enforce educational reform that verifies progress through standardized testing and state and federal agencies must work to ensure that qualified Americans can find good jobs in their state.  Places like Florida, Texas and Tennessee are taking the first steps to attract jobs to their states.  Low tax rates are encouraging businesses to leave places like the West Coast and the northeast and provide job opportunities for Americans.  Florida has made a start at reining in the woke madness that has descended on public schools and colleges and restore them to their proper mission of providing learning for Americans who want to work in a modern nation.  And right now, the Trump administration is deporting illegals from red states without the battles that occur in places like Minnesota and California.  Put these conditions together and what I expect to see is normalcy begin to return to red states first.

I read somewhere recently that Mississippi has shown marked improvement in the test scores of public-school children and I wonder if the conservative nature of that state’s population in comparison with other parts of the country might be part of the reason.  But in general, I expect that what will eventually happen is states that encourage merit-based rewards and have an America first policy to job creation and cooperate with immigration control will eventually become noticeably better places to live than the woke areas that have already become hellholes like New York City, Los Angeles, San Francisco and Portland.

Of course, if the Democrats get back into power in Washington, they will do all they can to degrade these other locations by reopening the borders and preventing red states from targeting illegals.  But I still think we may already be witnessing a bifurcation in the kind of society that will be seen in America.