Hey………..

……..wanna see what the two little ones are up to? OK.

Reading my mail!

Lara.

Took this one today of Lara in low light hence the slight movement [slow shutter speed] and the grain [high ISO] but things like that don’t necessarily matter, I kinda like it. It was mostly the light from the computer monitor actually. And that’s the full frame by the way, it hasn’t been cropped. Cropping is a useful tool but should be used with care. Henri Cartier Bresson, the dean of photojournalism, said he never cropped a photo. It does make you more aware of your framing while taking the pics.

A Happier Post.

The grandkids dancing, and yes the mess on the floor is just their natural habitat, part of life.

In Passing.

A few quick things.

Robert P Murphy at Ludwig von Mises Institute writes, “Do You Austrians Have a Better Idea?” It’s the question asked by supporters of the giant bailout in reply to their criticism of same. He has a marvelous analogy for the bailout:

Now, in truth, someone doesn’t have to have a better suggestion in order to point out that a recommended strategy will exacerbate the situation. If an allergic man has been stung by a bee, I don’t know what to do except rush him to the hospital and maybe scour the cupboards looking for Benadryl. But I’m pretty sure drawing blood from his leg, in order to inject it into his arm and thus “stimulate his immune system,” is a bad idea on numerous accounts — not least of which, is that I’m pretty sure an allergic reaction means your immune system needs to calm down. But the point is, if a bunch of guys hold the man down — he has to be forced to endure the procedure for his own good, don’t you know — I feel perfectly qualified in yelling, “Stop!”

If you grasped that analogy, you can understand my feelings about anything Paul Krugman writes.

(All joking aside, I am pretty proud of the above analogy. But to make it even more accurate, let’s stipulate that a blind heroin addict, who has been convicted of manslaughter on three separate occasions, is the one entrusted with making the transfusion. Naturally he will use one of his own needles for the procedure.)

…

We who were not blinded by the glare emanating from His Holiness O knew it wouldn’t take long for his Fall from O-mnipotence. It’s been two and a half weeks and our hopes that he would be exposed as the charlatan he is have already been realized. Charles Krauthammer lays it out succinctly here.

After Obama’s miraculous 2008 presidential campaign, it was clear that at some point the magical mystery tour would have to end. The nation would rub its eyes and begin to emerge from its reverie. The hallucinatory Obama would give way to the mere mortal. The great ethical transformations promised would be seen as a fairy tale that all presidents tell — and that this president told better than anyone.

I thought the awakening would take six months. It took two and a half weeks.

…

Something pleasant for you, Katherine Jenkins, a mezzo singing a Bryan Adams song in Italian. It’s from a demo DVD made by Panasonic for their HDTV’s. Somehow it works! She is from Wales, something about Welsh singers, has a beautiful voice and is herself beautiful, what more could you want? Can’t embed but here is the link.

…

An update on my grand daughters, Cerys and Lara.

Using the computer will be as natural as talking for them. Fascinating.

…

And check out this cool watch. [I have a thing about mechanical clocks and watches.]

It’s Been a While…….

….. since I posted, among the reasons of course is my non stop life, which I do enjoy, I’m not complaining except too many things I would like to do get left by the wayside. Another reason can be found in this postover at Schmaltz und Grieben.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY: In what PC-addled public school did Americans begin to be taught that when bad things happen, no one is ever to blame?

D’jever notice that we’re not supposed to blame anyone for the current Great Depression?

Or how about, “IT’S THE FAULT OF ALL OF US.”

…………………………………

We’re never going to fix the problem until those that created it are held to account.

I am so disgusted with all the crap going on, corrupt governors and senators, idiotic, ideological schemes such as Fannie and Freddie to get homes to people who can’t afford to pay for them while those who run it like Dodds, Raines and many others skim off millions for themselves, then when it threatens the economic system itself, use the taxes of the hardworking American people to pay for it all, without a by your leave or a pretty please with a cherry on top with the inferred choice to say no you may not, you got into it, you get out of it.

From a column by Colby Cosh in the National Post reporting on a speech by Bank of Canada Governor Mark Carney:

In the published version of his speech, he notes that “only a handful” of analysts and policymakers saw the disaster of 2008 coming. In a footnote to that sentence, he mentions a short list of honoured names: At its top is that of Bill White. You have probably never heard of William R. White, and almost certainly you don’t know that he is one of the most accomplished Canadians alive. A Kenora, Ont.-born, University of Windsor-educated economist, he worked for the Bank of Canada from 1972 to 1994, eventually serving as its deputy governor; he then switched to the Bank of International Settlements, the “central bank for central banks,” where he served as top in-house economist until his retirement in June.

As the brains of the BIS, White tried to warn central bankers of the mess we are in now, describing in frightening detail exactly how it would arrive. In the bank’s 2007 annual report, he noted that the world was living in a period in which the dragon of inflation appeared to have been slain — but underneath its corpse was a rapid underlying monetary expansion, an array of confusing and novel credit instruments, unprecedented household debt and dizzyingly high asset prices.

So you have this extremely smart guy who must be known to the ‘leaders’ and if not, why not, warning of the danger to the economy and no one listens? Incompetence doesn’t even begin to cover it. [To be fair, the Canadian government under Stephen Harper, who is himself an economist, what a change from the endless succession of lawyers we get, have been prudent.] As Alois at Schmaltz und Grieben says, it’s the same PC addled teaching in schools, where everyone must have a prize, no one must be a loser, hence these high flying politicians and over rewarded CEO’s of huge corporations like GM, who screw up totally and there are no consequences for them!!

We need change all right, a change back to the days before PC undermined the ethics and the backbones of the people.

Which brings us to Obama who seems to be lulling the people on the right with his not bad choices for cabinet and other offices so far. I’m afraid he’s picking his battles and that his main battle will be to change even more the education system that has brought us to this sorry state to bring it more in line with what Bill Ayers has been up to in Chicago.

We shall see, won’t we?

After all that unpleasantness, a reminder that life goes on and is another reason for my lack of blogging lately.

However, I have a number of items I want to bring to your attention, so for a while there will be a post a day! How about that.

Happy Christmas to everyone and specially to Zee and her extended family, we all have a lot to be thankful for.

Surfacing…..

Like Zee in her post below, I have been somewhat mortified that the good old US of A could elect a beginner for President in these complicated times, but there you go, what’s done is done, we have to wait and see how badly the neophyte screws up before being thrown out in 2012. [You'd think I'd be a little circumspect in my predictions, well in the words of the prophet, No Way!] He’s made a good start on the screwing up if reports of Hill as Sec of State and Eric Holder of Marc Rich pardon fame as Attorney General turn out to be true. Goes right along with Wright, Ayers, Rezko and co. The leopard’s spots remain the same.
The media has a lot to answer for in Obama’s victory, what a job they did on Sarah Palin that when given one of O’s or Bidens idiot statements to attribute, they automatically think it must have been her. I hope they get their just reward and I note that the NYT is trading today at $7.08, down from $18.66 one year ago. There is a God.

I have other reasons for not posting much, seven day work week, daughter and grandchildren and all the other everyday activities that take up time. I have played a trick on myself, kept my clocks on summer time, gets me up early in the morning and to bed earlier than would otherwise be the case at night. It’s cool too, I feel like I’m in my own little time/space one hour separated from the rest of the world. it’s restful and liberating at the same time. Am I making too much of it? Well so be it. I like it.

One more reason, it’s November and winter is coming on……

Update. From NRO, comment on the Eric Holder appointment.

He is convinced justice in America needs to be “established” rather than enforced; he’s excited about hate crimes and enthusiastic about the constitutionally dubious Violence Against Women Act; he’s a supporter of affirmative action and a practitioner of the statistical voodoo that makes it possible to burden police departments with accusations of racial profiling and the states with charges of racially skewed death-penalty enforcement; he’s more likely to be animated by a touchy-feely Reno-esque agenda than traditional enforcement against crimes; he’s in favor of ending the detentions of enemy combatants at Guantanamo Bay and favors income redistribution to address the supposed root causes of crime.

In any other time, Holder would simply be an uninspired choice. But these are not ordinary times — we face a serious, persistent threat from Islamist terrorists. At the same time, Democrats have expressed outrage over both the alleged politicization of the Justice Department and the reckless disregard of its storied traditions. For these times, it is difficult to imagine a worse choice for AG than Eric Holder.

Much has been made, and appropriately so, of Holder’s untoward performance in the final corrupt act of the Clinton administration: the pardons issued in the departing president’s final hours. Of these, most notorious is the case of Marc Rich, an unrepentant fugitive wanted on extensive fraud, racketeering, and trading-with-the-enemy charges — but granted a pardon nonetheless thanks to the intercession of his ex-wife, a generous donor to Clinton’s library and legal-defense fund.

I wonder how many who voted for Obama knew this is what they’d get.

This and That.

Well, first the good news. [Hmm, come to think of it I only have good news!]

The Zogby rolling poll shows Obama at 48% and McCain a 45%. So it could be better but the way the MSM are spinning the campaign and from the rhetoric coming from the the Obamacides you’d think he was home and dry and picking out the drapes for the White House.

Obama leads McCain by 48 to 45 percent among likely U.S. voters, down 1 percentage point from Saturday. The four-day tracking poll, which has a margin of error of 2.9 points.

Pollster John Zogby said the numbers were good news for McCain, and probably reflected a bump following his appearance in the third and final presidential debate on Wednesday.

“For the first time in the polling McCain is up above 45 percent. There is no question something has happened,” Zogby said.

He said the Arizona senator appeared to have solidified his support with the Republican base — where 9 out of 10 voters now back him — and was also gaining ground among the independents who may play a decisive role in the November 4 election.

Obama’s lead among independent voters dropped to 8 points on Sunday from 16 points a day earlier.

‘RED FLAGS’

“If that trend continues, it is something that has got to raise red flags for Obama,” Zogby said. “It suggests to me that his outward look of confidence may be as much strategy as it is real.”

Other national polls have given Obama a double-digit overall lead, fueled by perceptions he would do a better job managing the faltering economy and unhappiness with McCain’s attacks on him over the past week.

But he has cautioned his supporters against overconfidence and most polls now put his lead in single digits.

Just think, he is massively out spending McCain specially in the battleground States, the MSM are ridiculously and despicably rooting for him, he has the black and Hispanic vote in his pocket and with two and a bit weeks to go that’s the best he can do. Against that is the fact, to me at least, that an awful lot of Americans are going to arrive at the polling booths and say, ‘Nope, can’t take the chance here’ and vote for McCain, the tried and true candidate.

…………………….

I have long been a fan of Christopher Hitchens, his writings and talks on the Iraq war have been exemplary, I’ve been going off him a bit of late because of his strident, shallow diatribes against religion which are typical of the lefty he used to be and now it seems still is. Now he has endorsed Obama! What is it with these intellectual types, and how the hell can we just get rid of them all and let real people like Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber run things? Hot Air has a post which includes a video of Laura Ingraham on Fox news taking him to task and doing a great job. First time I’ve seen Hitch stumbling over his words and not quite knowing what to say, much like Obama actually.
Hey Hitch, just go back to the left where you belong and let the grown ups do what has to be done.

…………….

Last Friday was little Lara’s third birthday! She is talking up a storm now [well she is female!] and last January looking at the snow falling out of the window she could just manage ‘no’ for snow, it’s kind of like a miracle how fast they master the language.

………………..

If you want to beat any lefties over the head with the facts about global warming, read the ‘Open Letter on Global Warming’ by Viscount Brenchley. It’s long and detailed and should be compulsory reading for anyone who wants to pontificate on the subject.

H/T Alan Sullivan.

……………..

Well here’s something to warm the cockles of your heart:

Lig Pic.

Zee, re your comment on my last Lig Pic:

These young ladies will be the Sara Palins of our future. Able to wield hammers and wit with equal facility because of their granddaddy!!

Funny you should say that:

A little known fact on Sarah:

And from Standpoint Online, How Sarah Got Drafted.

When John McCain invited Sarah Palin to join his cause, he blindsided the press. But a campaign for her to be called to serve her country had been building its case for months.

The McCain camp was surely aware of Task Force Palin, the motley alliance of blogs and websites who spotted Palin’s potential and then devoted themselves to spreading the word. I certainly was: I joined the “Draft Sarah Palin” Facebook group weeks ago. If the political press didn’t notice, that may be because they no longer talk to anyone but themselves. An early complaint against Palin, a candidate they had refused to take seriously despite her acknowledged place on the Republican shortlist, was that she had never appeared on Meet the Press. Where else should they get their information from?

So here I am, an old ex-Brit, living in Toronto and I knew about Sarah Palin and the possibility of her selection as VP nominee, and yet the mighty NYT and others, with all their resources and self described professional ‘journalists’ were taken by surprise. And they can’t connect the dots either between their un-professional hack work in support of Obama and their dropping like a stone circulation figures and advertising revenue. Well this is why incest is illegal in most places, guess the Democrats and the MSM didn’t get the memo.

Lig Pic.

Just me scraping paint with my two little helpers.

This and That.

Subject: Headlights

There are fewer than five months until the election, an election that will
decide the next President of the United States . The person elected will be
The president of all Americans, not just the Democrats or the Republicans.
To show our solidarity as Americans, let’s all get together and show each
other our support for the candidate of our choice. It’s time that we all
came together, Democrats and Republicans alike. If you support the policies
and character of John McCain, please drive with your headlights on during
the day. If you support Obama, please drive with your headlights off at
night. Thank you and God Bless

…..

I don’t read books as much as I would like these days, [I don't do a lot of things!] but one novelist I can re-read any time is Penelope Fitzgerald. Julian Barnes [a writer I like almost as much as PF] has written an appreciation of her and her work.

Like her personal manner, her life and literary career seemed designed to wrong-foot, to turn attention away from the fact that she was, or would turn into, a great novelist. True, she came from a cultured background, having one father and three uncles among the multi-talented Knox brothers, whose communal biography she later wrote. Her father was editor of Punch; her mother, one of the first students at Somerville College, Oxford, also wrote. Penelope was in turn a brilliant student at Somerville: one of her finals examiners was so astounded by her papers that he asked his fellow dons if he could keep them, and later, apparently, had them bound in vellum. But after this public proof of distinction, throughout what might for anyone else have been the best writing years of her life, she became a wife and working mother (at Punch, the BBC, the Ministry of Food, then in journalism and teaching). She was 58 by the time she published her first book, a biography of Burne-Jones. She then wrote a comic thriller, The Golden Child, to amuse her dying husband. In the period 1975-84 she published two more biographies and four more novels. Those four novels are all short, and written close to her own experiences: of running a bookshop, living on a houseboat, working for the BBC in wartime, teaching at a stage school. They are adroit, odd, highly pleasurable, but modest in ambition. And with almost any other writer you might think that, having used up her own life, she would – being now in her late 60s – have called it a day. On the contrary: over the next decade, from 1986 to 1995, she published the four novels – Innocence, The Beginning of Spring, The Gate of Angels and The Blue Flower – by which she will be remembered. They are written far from her obvious life, being set, respectively, in 1950s Florence, pre-revolutionary Moscow, Cambridge in 1912, and late 18th-century Prussia. Many writers start by inventing away from their lives, and then, when their material runs out, turn back to more familiar sources. Fitzgerald did the opposite, and by writing away from her own life liberated herself into greatness.

I have recommended her to many people, some like her and some not which tells me something about both types, though I put it down somewhat to her ‘Englishness’ and how well that translates to people whose mother tongue is not English however proficient they be in its use. The best comment I got from someone who liked her was, ‘She says so much with so little’.
Another old friend, now ex due to differences over Bush, America etc. asked me once for a recommendation for her reading circle, so naturally I gave her PF. Neither she nor any of her circle liked her. They are all highly educated people so I can only assume that she [PF] didn’t fit their received ideas as to what makes a good novel. As Stephen Leacock said on someone receiving their PHD, he has now been pronounced full and has no need to learn anything else for the rest of his life. The friend, by the way, was Danish and female.

If I encourage anyone to give her a try or if anyone reading this has read her I’d be most interested to hear what you think about her novels.

The article ends thus:

Novels are like cities: some are organised and laid out with the colour-coded clarity of public transport maps, with each chapter marking a progress from one station to the next, until all the characters have been successfully carried to their thematic terminus. Others, the subtler, wiser ones, offer no such immediately readable route-maps. Instead of a journey through the city, they throw you into the city itself, and life itself: you are expected to find your own way. And their structure and purpose may not be immediately apparent, being based on the tacit network of “loans, debts, repayments and foreclosures” that makes up human relationships. Nor do such novels move mechanically; they stray, they pause, they lollop, as life does; except with a greater purpose and hidden structure. A priest in The Beginning of Spring, seeking to assert the legibility of God’s purpose in the world, says “There are no accidental meetings”. The same is true of the best fiction. Such novels are not difficult to read, since they are so filled with detail and incident and the movement of life, but they are sometimes difficult to work out. This is because the absentee author has the confidence to presume that the reader might be as subtle and intelligent as she is. Penelope Fitzgerald’s novels are pre-eminent examples of this kind.

…..

I missed July’s tree pic, here it is a little late.

I should take a rainy day pic for Aug since it was just announced that it’s been the wettest summer here in Toronto since records have been kept. Strange but nice, no too hot and humid to breathe days, no watering lawns, everything green and it reminds me of England!

…..

Oregon, one of the socialist paradise States, couldn’t afford the $4000 a month treatment for a woman suffering terminal cancer but they did offer to pay for assisting her suicide should she so wish.

…..

I can’t remember if I posted this before but I just love this 12 year old girl singer from the Britain’s Got Talent show.

Lig Pic.

Time for a Katy pic taken today, uncharacteristically serene! Had the white balance on the camera set to 3500K from the normal daylight 5000K, gives a nice effect I think, I’ll have to do a bit more work on it, take some of the pink out of the face. I have July’s tree pic when I can get around to posting it.

Lig Pics.

Just to show that now and then I do pretty pretty…..

….and now and then I do artsy fartsy.

Pretty pretty is easy.
Artsy fartsy not so much.

Pretty pretty I kinda like.
Artsy fartsy not so much.

Pretty pretty pleases even ginger tom cats.
Artsy fartsy not so much.

Pretty pretty will endure.
Artsy fartsy not so much.

Pretty pretty is unpretentious.
Artsy fartsy not so much.

Pretty pretty is suited to chocolate boxes.
Artsy fartsy is useless.

Lig Pic.

How to sleep like a baby. The ‘little one’, Lara.

Lig Pic.

It’s June, here is this month’s tree pic.

Cut Grass.

Cut grass lies frail:
Brief is the breath
Mown stalks exhale.
Long, long the death

Philip Larkin.

Lig Pic.

This is an old ravine pic taken on my first digital camera, a 3 megapixel Kodak point and shoot which I bought about seven years ago and is still in perfect working order.
Accidentally and it seems fortuitously, I had the camera on the tungsten light setting which gives the pic the moonlight look.

Obama, Loser.

Over at American Thinker there is an article on Obama’s woes in three States that have been crucial to electoral success in both of W Clinton’s election victories and both of GWB’s. Interestingly Hillary won all three by large margins in the current primaries. B’bye Obama.

Meanwhile, Back at Trinity……Obama’s assholes aren’t going away for this election, much as he and the left hope they will. The article is from the WSJ’s Best of the Web.

Check out this numbskull. It’s difficult to decide if these people are more stupid than nuts or vice versa. Anyway, read the article which has more links.

After that here’s something to calm you down.

Too bad dandelions aren’t a cash crop.

It’s time also for a pic of the other grand daughter, Lara, she is two and a half.

Something sublime for you to show there are better things in the world than the millions of idiots will ever know.

When I tell musical friends that on its release in March, Pierre-Laurent Aimard’s solo-piano version of J.S. Bach’s The Art of Fugue shot to the top of the Billboard and iTunes classical charts, they get this glazed look. It’s as if you told a physicist that Einstein’s General Theory of Relativity was topping the best-seller list. It’s not supposed to happen.

This is because the 14 fugues and four canons that make up The Art of Fugue constitute one of the most esoteric musical works ever written. Each fugue bears the severe title Contrapunctus followed by a number, and there is no indication of what instruments are supposed to play them. Every piece is in D minor; all are based on the same melodic theme. It’s as if Bach intended the AOF as a theoretical treatise, to be read and studied rather than performed, to demonstrate some of the more arcane things you can do with the idea of a fugue.

Isn’t that encouraging? Very interesting article which includes links to snippets of the work.

I’m Ba-aack!

I’m back on line, have been for a few days, over three weeks without the internet! Well maybe and hour or less each day to check e-mails and a few blogs, now I have to try to get back up to speed. I said in my update post that March was such a dull month that I didn’t have any ‘tree’ pics, looking through the file I found a couple interesting enough to post, it does at least show the progress from Feb and I have one for April when spring was at last winning the battle.

This one was taken on Mar 10.

And this one a week later.

And so to April.

I hope this isn’t boring, it’s a bit of a sorry post after so long away and with all that’s happening in the world. For instance, slowly it’s getting through that Obama isn’t as smart as he and all the other elites think he is as an ordinary guy like me without intellectual pretension and living in the real world could see from the start. I hope John McCain has the measure of his slippery lawyer’s tongue come the debates. Expect to see Obama slink away like a dog with its tail between his legs, except, like John ‘Do you know who I am?’ Kerry, he has such a huge over-estimation of his own worth that he won’t even be able to discern that he’s been steam rollered flat.

I should just mention Zee’s been doing a wonderful job, I feel honoured to be associated with such a real American. Great stuff.

Ligpic.

Kamouflage Katy

Taken yesterday in the ravine….

Ligpic.

The Headless Shadow!

Lig Pic.

This is a Lig’s Daughter Pic that she took a couple of days ago. Nice change to have a black and white pic, n’est ce pas? Katy on the left, Lara on the right.