Santa Claws

Rickrolled

The New Yorker ~ Joe Dator

Red Army Hockey

As a New York Rangers fan since the late 1960s, I saw them play the Soviet Union's Central Red Army team at Madison Square Garden on December 27, 1979.

The Red Army outplayed and outscored the Rangers 5-2.  The bigger news that day was off the ice. The Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan, and Afghan president, Hafizullah Amin, was overthrown and murdered.

Less than two months later, the Central Red Army team were miraculously defeated by an amateur team of U.S. college players at the 1980 Winter Olympics in Lake Placid, New York, after which ABC Sports broadcaster Al Michaels famously cried "Do you believe in miracles?" The U.S. team's Gold Medal finish came to be known as the Miracle on Ice. 

Ronald Reagan was elected President the following November and within 10 years the Berlin Wall came down and the Soviet Union collapsed.

F' Yeah

National Gallery

Frederick Wiseman's latest documentary brings you inside the National Gallery, as well as behind the scenes with the institution's leaders and craftsmen. It runs three hours, has no voice-over narration, and is simply remarkable. It's playing now at the MVFC.

Ho, ho, woof!

Another in a series of great Christmas-time New Yorker covers by cartoonist George Booth.

The New Yorker ~ December 22, 2014 ~ George Booth

The New Yorker ~ December 13, 2010 ~ George Booth

The New Yorker ~ December 13, 2004 ~ George Booth

The New Yorker ~ December 15, 2003 ~ George Booth

I Can't Breathe

Michael Ramirez ~ Investor's Business Daily

Eric Garner's death was a needless tragedy. NYC levies the highest excise taxes on cigarettes in the country, $5.85 on each pack, and then uses its police force to enforce the unlawful sale of tobacco.

Furthermore, the same week NYC's mayor said Garner's death was due to excessive force, the city's tax authorities filed suit against a Virginia-based tobacco shop for supplying untaxed cigarettes on Staten Island.

According to a recent report, 57 percent of the cigarettes smoked in New York are smuggled across state lines to avoid state and city taxes, which total $58.50 per carton.

According to cancer.org:

"Higher prices reduce cigarette consumption and save lives."

Put another way, higher cigarette prices and taxes criminalized behavior like Eric Garner's and the tragic implications of the city's laws and police enforcement.

50 years over 518 pages for $5,000

That's Taschen's "definitive, authorized illustrated history of the world's greatest rock 'n' roll band," titled The Rolling Stones . . . signed by Mick, Keith, Charlie and Ronnie, and featuring a forward by Bill Clinton.

Star Wars - The Force Awakens

In theaters, a year from now.

Gobble Gobble

Visited Stonewood Farm in Orwell, Vermont on Tuesday.  Run by the Stone family for the last 25 years, they'll put more than 15,000 turkeys on Thanksgiving dinner tables this Thursday.

The 1,500 or so in this barn got a one-month reprieve.

Stonewood Farm ~ Orwell, Vermont

The New Yorker ~ Mike Twohy

Excessive drinking, alcoholism and taxes

The Centers for Disease Control, a federal government agency and arm of the Department of Health and Human Services, just released a new study which reports that excessive "binge" drinkers aren't alcoholics or alcohol dependent.

"This study shows that, contrary to popular opinion, most people who drink too much are not alcohol dependent or alcoholics," said Robert Brewer, M.D., M.S.P.H., Alcohol Program lead at CDC and one of the report's authors. "It also emphasizes the importance of taking a comprehensive approach to reducing excessive drinking that includes evidence-based community strategies, screening and counseling in healthcare settings, and high-quality substance abuse treatment for those who need it."

Why is the CDC splitting hairs between excessive drinking and alcoholism? Excise taxes.

The wonks in Washington, DC would be hard-pressed to raise taxes higher on alcoholics, who are considered to have a disease defined as "alcohol use disorder" by the American Psychiatric Associations' Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, or DSM-5. But if they can classify the much larger population of heavy drinkers as "excessive," they create a big taxable target.

With beer, wine and liquor spending in the United States estimated at $100 billion annually, excise taxes on alcohol, as well as tobacco and firearms, are charged to raise federal, state and local revenue, under the guise of making us virtuous.

The current administration is not only looking out for us, but for themselves as well. Before the much ballyhooed government shutdown when kids' White House tours and National Park visits were roped off and cancelled, the State Department wasted no time stocking up on booze for its embassy staff and entertainment before sequestration took effect.

11:11 AM on November 11

Anthem Veterans Memorial

Great Seal of the United States

The Anthem Veterans Memorial in Anthem, Arizona, consists of five pillars, representing the five branches of the U.S. military. At precisely 11:11 AM on November 11, Veterans Day, the sun streams through ellipses in the pillars, illuminating the Great Seal of the United States.

Henry Graves Supercomplication

The Henry Graves Supercomplication. 

Patek Philippe's greatest watch of all time. A one-of-a-kind supercomplication, commissioned in 1925 for Henry Graves, Jr. and eight years in the making, it features 24 complications, including a map of the stars over Manhattan's Central Park along with Westminster chimes.

Expected to sell tomorrow for $15 million at Sotheby's in Geneva.

Postscript: An anonymous buyer paid $24 million at auction.

I've got a pen and I've got a phone

The Wave ~ Michael Ramirez

The Elephant in the Room ~ Liniers

Good Grief, Happy Halloween

The Thinker

Auguste Rodin's The Thinker. In shadow at San Francisco's Legion of Honor museum.

Disappoint Mints

A week before potentially seismic mid-term election results for the Obama administration's grandiose plans to "transform America" if not the universe, the "greatness" obituaries are popping up in more than just the usual places.

From Charles Krauthammer in the National Review - "Barack Obama, Bewildered Bystander":

"His principal job, after all, is to administer the government and to get the right people to do it. (That’s why we typically send governors rather than senators to the White House.) That’s called management. Obama had never managed anything before running for the biggest management job on earth. It shows."

More surprising is Jeff Shesol's article "Obama and the End of Greatness" in The New Yorker:

"So, for all our disappointment over the fact that Obama’s Presidency has been—in the parlance of the political scientists—more transactional than transformational, we should probably stop knocking him for not being Lincoln (even if it was Obama himself who encouraged the comparison)."

The Phone Call

The Phone Call.

What can I say?

I Feel Good

Tea for the Tillerman

Plus ça change, plus c'est la même chose.

O Canada, thud!

Ok, you'd be a little rusty after a long summer too.

What happened to Saturday morning cartoons?

I say, I say, can it really be so?

What happened to Saturday morning cartoons?

Butterflies!

Butterflies of North America.

Menemsha Bight

Menemsha Bight ~ Ray Ellis

Jeter's Final Homestand

He did it his way.

Laniakea - Immeasurable Heaven

Superclusters. Sometimes science blows my mind.

Excerpted from the latest issue of Nature:

"The supercluster of galaxies that includes the Milky Way is 100 times bigger in volume and mass than previously thought, a team of astronomers says. They have mapped the enormous region and given it the name Laniakea — Hawaiian for 'immeasurable heaven'.

Galaxies tend to huddle in groups called clusters; regions where these clusters are densely packed are known as superclusters. But the definition of these massive cosmic structures is vague.

The new study, published in Nature1, describes a novel way to define where one supercluster ends and another begins. A team led by Brent Tully, an astronomer at the University of Hawaii in Honolulu, charted the motions of galaxies to infer the gravitational landscape of the local Universe, and redraw its map."

Who's Your Daddy?

While driving into Manhattan yesterday on approach to the Willis Avenue Bridge, we spied this Who's Your Daddy? truck.

I understand the purpose and merits of DNA testing. What caught my attention was the truck's concrete block, prison-like paint job and illicit graffiti-style branding. Not sure this look is going to attract or entrap daddies who have otherwise escaped paternal responsibilities.

See related story: With genetic testing, I gave my parents the gift of divorce. 

Martha's Vineyard Development since 1660

Ice Bucket Challenge

Word is she nominated Mona Lisa, Whistler's Mother and the Girl with Pearl Earring.

Winding Down

The New Yorker ~ Mark Ulrikson

"Jeter has just about wound up his Mariano Tour—the all-points ceremonies around home plate in every away park on the Yankees’ schedule, where he accepts gifts, and perhaps a farewell check for his Turn 2 charity, and lifts his cap to the cheering, phone-flashing multitudes. He does this with style and grace—no one is better at it—and without the weepiness of some predecessors. His ease, his daily joy in his work, has lightened the sadness of this farewell, and the cheering everywhere has been sustained and genuine."

~ Roger Angell

In Remembrance

JLR
 10.31.30 - 08.17.13

To sleep, perchance to dream

"To be, or not to be? That is the question—

Whether ’tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles,

And, by opposing, end them? To die, to sleep—

No more—and by a sleep to say we end

The heartache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to—’tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wished! To die, to sleep.

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there’s the rub,

For in that sleep of death what dreams may come

When we have shuffled off this mortal coil,

Must give us pause. There’s the respect

That makes calamity of so long life."

~ William Shakespeare, Hamlet, Act 3 - Scene 1

Sun rays

Summer Days

Photo ~ Bill Brine

A Hard Day's Night

We watched A Hard Day's Night at the Martha's Vineyard Film Center tonight. Digitally remastered and remixed, seeing and hearing it again on the big screen after 50 years was pure joy.

RE2PECT

Just watched this commercial about Derek Jeter before he led off the bottom of the first inning of tonight's All-Star Game in Minneapolis. Before I could post it, he hit a double and then scored a run.

One of a kind.

Cape and Islands Map

Water colorist (and rug maker) Preston McAdoo paints maps of the Cape and Islands featuring traditional map details surrounded by fantastic creatures from the deep. After several years of admiring his work, I'm now a happy customer.

Preston McAdoo

Makonikey Head

Another great painting of Martha's Vineyard's north shore by local artist Ken Vincent.

North Shore, September ~ Ken Vincent

Embellishment

The National Hockey League's Rule 61.1 on Diving/Embellishment states:

"Any player who blatantly dives, embellishes a fall or a reaction, or who feigns an injury shall be penalized with a minor penalty under this rule." 

A handful of hockey players are notorious for this kind of nonsense, but they have nothing over soccer players.

38th Voyage of the Charles W Morgan

A 173-year-old whaleship, the Charles W Morgan, arrived under full sail into Vineyard Haven harbor on Martha's Vineyard last week. The trip was the ship's first in nearly a century, after 37 voyages that set the Morgan's crew after sperm whales around the world.

When boarding, you smell the pine tar still used to seal the seams of the ship's original oak deck. Today's crew sleeps in the original crew quarters. The captain's cabin features a gimbal bed to keep it level in rough seas.

Alas, I couldn't find a good place to stow away.

And, if you're worried that whales no longer capture our imagination, here's this week's New Yorker magazine cover. Yes, it says "Cap'n Ahab's - A "whale" of a burger!"

Bruce McCall ~ The New Yorker

Woulda coulda shoulda

Helluva season and finals.

Trading Private Bergdahl

The usual gang of idiots at MAD Magazine nailed it.

Once again, Susan Rice "breaks faith with the American public."

White House Rose Garden photo opp