The Boys of Spring

An opening day win at Yankee Stadium.  Right as rain.

200 countries over 200 years

Orwell Lives

Dark Spring

Today's mail brought this poignant cover art by Christoph Niemann from this week's issue of The New Yorker.

Kukulkan Descends

Today's vernal equinox brings 12 hours of light and 12 hours of night.  And the first of two appearances this year by the feathered serpent Kukulkan on the steps of El Castillo at Chichen Itza.  Kukulkan will descend again on September 24.

Owsley Stanley, RIP

AKA Bear, Alice D. Millionaire and Kid Charlemagne. 

Great Wave off Kanagawa

Katsushika Hokusai's 1820s woodblock makes me weep.

Warning to the West

No, not Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, but Daniel Hannan, member of the European Parliament, in his op-ed in The Wall Street Journal, titled A European's Warning to America.

Excerpts:

"American conservatives have struggled to press the president's policies into a meaningful narrative. Is he a socialist? No, at least not in the sense of wanting the state to own key industries. Is he a straightforward New Deal big spender, in the model of FDR and LBJ? Not exactly.

"My guess is that, if anything, Obama would verbalize his ideology using the same vocabulary that Eurocrats do. He would say he wants a fairer America, a more tolerant America, a less arrogant America, a more engaged America. When you prize away the cliché, what these phrases amount to are higher taxes, less patriotism, a bigger role for state bureaucracies, and a transfer of sovereignty to global institutions.

"We can now see where that road leads: to burgeoning bureaucracy, more spending, higher taxes, slower growth and rising unemployment. But an entire political class has grown up believing not just in the economic superiority of euro- corporatism but in its moral superiority. After all, if the American system were better—if people could thrive without government supervision—there would be less need for politicians. As Upton Sinclair once observed, 'It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his job depends on not understanding it.'

"Nonetheless, the economic data are pitilessly clear. For the past 40 years, Europeans have fallen further and further behind Americans in their standard of living. Europe also has become accustomed to a high level of structural unemployment. Only now, as the U.S. applies a European-style economic strategy based on fiscal stimulus, nationalization, bailouts, quantitative easing and the regulation of private-sector remuneration, has the rate of unemployment in the U.S. leaped to European levels."

The High Line

A sunny March Saturday with temperatures in the 60s led to a day in the city for lunch at Spice Market, book buying at Three Lives & Co, and then some post-lunch perambulating on The High Line.

The High Line was an elevated freight railroad built in the 1930s along 10th Avenue, nearly a century after street level trains had led to so many accidents it was known as Death Avenue.

Today it's an ingenious mix of  urban renewal, park planning and ecological raised bed gardens running north and south from Gansevoort Street to West 20th Street. 

Construction is now underway to extend The High Line park all the way up to West 34th Street, with an expected opening this June.  Here's a video preview tour.

Rock Paper Scissors

There's been a lot of talk about man and computers lately.  In fact, this week Rush Holt, a former Jeopardy champion, rocket scientist (for real) and now a member of the House of Representatives from the 12th District of New Jersey, beat Watson in a competition staged with House members.

Watson was in the news again when he was called a "pussy" in this mock Charlie Sheen video with Jimmy Fallon.



Which takes us to this online Rock Paper Scissors game on nyt.com.  After 29 rounds I was ahead, but bored.  Must be my tiger's blood. Winning!

The President's Speech

Sans Teleprompter . . .

All the News that Fit the Agenda

Hope and change!  Yes we can!

First Keith Olbermann.  Now Frank Rich. 

Sober Valley Lodge