G as in Good H as in Happy

Clay Jars

February 11, 2006

BBC news reports the first intact ancient tomb opened in The Valley of the Kings since King Tut in 1922. Estimated between 1539BC and 1292BC.

Via mirabilis

Been There, Almost

January 26, 2006

Lileks, mellowing,

Some kinds of offense are fine, depending on who’s being offended. I don’t care if the lingerie ads offend the burqua demographic, or whether a picture of a mixed-race couple in the homes section makes bigots knit their brows and hum a few bars of the "Horst Wessel Song" until they reach a centered place again.

has a new page scheme featuring old newspaper photos, context and detail that promises poetry. This is Sunday on Fifth Avenue in 1943, city buses absent because of wartime fuel shortage.

Face From the Past

Lives "from history," such as the wives of Henry VIII, take on the feel of objects. The distance amplifies our pervasive us-them, I-it recovering-narcissism. It makes us ready to discount their ways and knowledge and assumptions. Yet they breathed, ate, longed, and feared like every other human being.

It is worth wondering, What sort of world, agreements, people, strategies, make it plausible this 17-year-old was beheaded for marrying a King?

Update, subtitled But There Were So Many of  Them..., correcting ignorant ruminations:

Waugh and Real Life

January 15, 2006

During WWII, when the fate of England was fearfully uncertain, the Princesses Elizabeth (13) and Margaret Rose (9) were slated to be hidden at Madresfield Court, home of the family modelled in Brideshead Revisited, an Evelyn Waugh novel much admired here in its beautifully-scored, John-Mortimer-scripted Granada television version.

It requires an adamant conscience indeed to view the death of the elder Brideshead (Sir Laurence Olivier), or hear Julia's (Diana Quick) recitative on the care and feeding of sin, without some glancing attention to the state of one's soul.

Now Elizabeth II has seen much, much more of life even than the perils of war. Scandals, lurid deaths, royalty and the CoE in free-fall. What does she think? That family don't seem to write memoirs, so we will probably never know.

Link via Kathy Shaidle-recommended Wheat and Weeds.

The question of the royal heirs' wartime safety was the occasion of the Queen Mother Elizabeth's famously-loyal statement of refusal to send them to Canada.

The children could not possibly go without me. I would not leave without the King and the King will not leave under any circumstances.

First, or Last, Scene of a Fairy Tale

July 11, 2005
Once upon a time in Croatia, a bear knocked on a villager's door...After several occurrences, the Locknar family expressed some reluctance to answer the door.

Via mirabilis

Vision, Imagination, Optimism, Perseverance, Self-Reliance

June 14, 2005

Coral Castle in Miami, the sole work of a penniless immigrant, demonstrates how it is possible to accomplish something worthwhile, beautiful, astonishing, and lasting.

Via the semi-hibernating Anchoress and more images from Michael Jones.

Part of the always-expanding enterprise is the synchrony or even miracle of eyes opening to idle means and rich resources. One of our mentors, standing at one or another bar in the Fort Worth stockyards, likes to tell the story of ragged veterans in the nineteenth century straggling home from the War Between the States. Old furrows in neglected fields were unplowed and thick with weeds, rural folk close to starving.  At the same time, Northern cities were growing, and those new urbanites needed and wanted meat. Do we even know exactly who, exactly when, noticed the wild longhorn cattle, like a ram in a thicket?

The rest is the history of the cowboy, and cattle drives, and the code of the West, and more.

From today's Wall Street Journal, excerpt from subscription:

Cowboy as a Career? It Ranks Low among Jobs, With Bad Pay, Few Benefits --   For Mr. Link, It's a Great Gig

  "I can't believe I get paid for this, actually," says the lanky 43-year-old, who sports a large handlebar mustache. "You see scenery you would never see behind a desk, you don't worry about your weight or your cholesterol, and you don't have time for petty stuff or to be involved in bad things, like drugs."

    Although Mr. Link disagrees, being a cowboy is considered one of the worst jobs, according to the review of jobs published today on CareerJournal.com. The report cited the hardships involved in being a cowboy, the low pay and poor career prospects, among other things. At best, Mr. Link says he earns about $12,000 a year.

    Mr. Link isn't just a cowboy. He's a buckaroo, a cowboy descended from the Spanish tradition who has expert horse skills and works the livestock gently. He and Ms. Arthur are in the saddle of their purebred quarter horses at 7 a.m. because cows move better in the morning. The four herd dogs also are on the job. On a good day, they're done at dark, which comes at about 10 p.m. during Idaho summers.

    Rick Link never met a cow he didn't like. Good thing, because Mr. Link is a cowboy in the purest sense of the word. He spends as much time as possible outdoors with the creatures in a job that he thinks is the best in America.

    In winter, he tends cows and does chores for ranch owners near his home in Sweet, Idaho, about 40 miles north of Boise. In summer, he grazes 750 head of cows in Idaho's high country for a local grazing association. The job is his work, his hobby and his entertainment. When he and his companion, Joyce Arthur, have any free time, they're at the weekly cow sale in nearby Emmett, Idaho, or at a local branding.

    The cows are moved from pasture to pasture, a process which is a bit like "pushing a rope," says Mr. Link. "We rest them along the way so they don't lose weight and the calves don't get tired. I like to make our employers some money."...

    Mr. Link and Ms. Arthur say their biggest sorrow is that their lifestyle appears to be ending because of environmental restrictions on grazing, loss of open land to development and the growth of large commercial operations.

    "It's a passing way of life," says Mr. Link. But he expects to remain a cowboy as long as he can ride a horse. "I figure that if I have two cows and I'm taking care of them, I will always be a cowboy, even if I have to run some of them on a golf course."

Wearing a fine hat and gleaming conchas, too, we'll bet.

Cars

We don't often stop to think about the freedom that automobiles have given people day-to-day, especially women. Their impact, ribbons of asphalt over the land, the pollution of half-combusted gasoline, and the dependence on the resource of petroleum, are discussed in other forums. But we feel keenly that plans to move people out of cars and into public transport or worse, would erode the ingenuity, spontaneity, and independence on which modern life thrives. It is an automobile in the garage that signifies to the typical American woman that she need not wait until someone -- a taxi, a busdriver, a [male] relative -- is free and willing to move her in space in service of her needs and ambitions.

Austin's Capital Metro -- the agency that runs huge, barely-patronized city buses, and paints over the windows so the paltry ridership cannot be detected -- evidently does not consign its administration to public transportation, nor should it.

There is room for improvement, in consumption, supply, and even our national character* as regards chasing diversion down an 8-lane highway.  As a solution emerges, we will be on board.  But in the meantime, our humming Lexus IS300, the Platonic Ideal of a rocket camouflaged as a Dowdy-Dinosaurmobile, remains our cherished, blessed acquisition, and the Wall Street Journal's report (subscription required) on certain adjustments Lexus must make in the vehicle line half-saddens us, while certifying our inventiveness in avoiding its well-advertised and showy competitors.

Next week, Lexus plans to show the successor to its compact IS 300 model at the New York Auto Show. The old IS 300, which Lexus positioned as a sporty sedan, has fared poorly against rivals such as the Infiniti G35, BMW 3-Series and Acura TSX and TL.

The immediate changes have to do with four-wheel drive.  Lexus is also offering a SUV hybrid engine, followed by a hybrid sedan in 2006.

*Tao Te Ching 80

If a land is small and the people few
And the rulers recognize what's needed
The simple ways of courtesy
Are happily and gladly heeded.

For people need so little
To live their lives aright
Are food and home and clothing
Not enough for pure delight?

Though nearby lands are close enough
To hear their roosters crow
The people will be so content
That not a one will want to go.

Headless Tao by Jim Clatfelter