Mr. Kurtz's Neighborhood

The Kids Are Alright

See me, heed me,
Touch me, feed me.*

Adorable? Sure.
On the other hand...

An Op-Ed piece.

* Sorry, Pete.

In the Spring...

A young man's fancy may turn, but this summer it's

Naked Ladies

Belladonna Lily (Amaryllis belladonna)

Amaryllis is a monotypic (only one species) genus of plant containing the Belladonna Lily , a native of South Africa. The Belladonna Lily is a bulbous plant, with each bulb being 5-10 cm in diameter. It has several strap-shaped, dull green leaves, 30-50 cm long and 2-3 cm broad, arranged in two rows. The leaves are produced in the autumn and eventually die down by late spring. The bulb is then dormant until late summer.

The Belladonna Lily was introduced into cultivation at the beginning of the 18th century. However, most of the so-called Amaryllis bulbs sold as 'ready to bloom for the holidays' belong to the allied genus Hippeastrum, (below, left) despite being labeled as 'Amaryllis' by sellers and nurseries. Adding to the name confusion, some bulbs of other species with a similar growth and flowering pattern are also sometimes called "naked ladies", even though those species have their own more widely used and accepted common names, such as the Resurrection Lily (Lycoris squamigera).

The scientific name Amaryllis is taken from a shepherdess in one of the Eclogues of Virgil , and means any young rustic maiden

Another meaning of Belladonna, "beautiful lady" in Italian, is from the use of Atropine from the Deadly Nightshade or belladonna (Atropa belladonna) ,right, below, to dilate the pupils. It was thought that this increased a woman's beauty. Optometrists and opthalmologists still use atropine for this purpose and the drug is also used to treat cardiac arrest and poisoning by organophosphate fertilizers and nerve gases.

Detente

Don't you believe it. Appearances are deceiving and this is not a safe configuration. To quote the Mythbusters : We are what you call "experts" Do not try this at home.

And remember to support our troops. Wear red on Fridays

Savannah Smiles

And sleeps, unaware of the experiences of an early cat and my then fondness for the 1812 Festival Overture - with a carillion and real cannons. - Antal Dorati and the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra c. 1956

An Idea Whose Time is Come - 4 of a Series

Not properly a part of this series, but I had to find an excuse for posting it. I drove this car for 60,000 miles in four years and sold it for what I paid for it. Now why do I still believe I was the loser?
Note on the plate: OdToJoy was taken, so I went with Wagner.
If wishes were fishes, we'd all cast nets. - Gurney Halleck

Work, work, work

While I continue the sorting, tossing, packing and hauling, Savannah tidies up.

Remember to support our troops. Wear red on Fridays.

Writer's block? I ain't got to show you no stinking writer's block.

As he sat, wearily disdainful, slouched like a grimy bag of gym socks found behind a locker in South Philly's crumbling, leprous, superannuated pug's palace, he stirred hopelessly through the seething remnants of the maelstrom of his mind-that same mind, once so keen, that had earned him the youthful sobriquet "The Ginzu Dick". The moniter, that hell-spawned witness to failure iluminated his sallow, stubbled cheeks, leering at his impotence like one of the two-dollar whores who sat, wearily disdainful and mocked him from the end of the bar. He had no opening paragraph.

But I do.

We have a winner!

Yes, folks, Mr. Dan McKay of Fargo, North Dakota, is the 2005 winner of the Bulwer-Lyton Fiction Contest. A 43-year-old quantitative analyst for Microsoft Great Plains, McKay is the winner of the 23rd running of the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. Mr. McKay is currently visiting China, perhaps to escape notoriety for his dubious literary achievement.

Read the winning entry and submissions in all categories here and let's have no more snivelling about "Ebonics" or why Teddy can't read.

A Modest Proposal

Image: Controlled Demolition Inc.

From NY1 News:

Donald Trump says current estimates of how much it would cost to rebuild the United Nations headquarters are way too high – and he wants to do the job himself.

Trump appealed to members of a Senate subcommittee Thursday to let him manage the project. And he even offered to waive his fee.

United Nations officials say it will cost $1.2 billion to rebuild the 39-story building, but without good management Trump says that number could go much higher.

The real estate mogul also says U.N. officials "don't know what they're doing."

"This project at $1.2 billion will cost, in my opinion, $3 billion," Trump told the subcommittee. "But in my real opinion, it should cost approximately $700 million."

Trump said rebuilding the U.N. headquarters, located on Manhattan's East Side, would be no more challenging for him than the remodeling project he oversaw at the Wollman Skating Rink in Central Park.

The renovations - set to begin in 2007 and expected to take five years - would be financed by America in the form of a $1.2 billion, 30-year loan at 5.54% interest offered last fall by the Bush administration.

Donald, you've had your successes, but in this you're an amateur. You want to save money? Here's the way to do it.

Hire The Loizeau Family

$ 10 - $20 Million tops. High performance by an old-fashioned American family concern. A nice, clean, well-regulated job from one of the world's top teams, with many demolition World Records in their resume.

Then, the Ginzburg Doctrine notwithstanding, the Turtle Bay property could actually be transformed into a vibrant revenue producing and tax generating machine to act in the cause of human benefit.

Disclaimer This opinion piece is not to be taken as a suggestion to anyone for any ad hoc efforts, even in the noble cause of aiding the American taxpayer or saving thousands of young women and children around the world from the attentions of the blue-helmeted despoilers. This job, if implemented, should be carried out with all consideration to normal bidding, contract and permit procedures extant in New York County, and with every concern for the public safety. At any event, given New York's permit process, the sun will die first.

That was nuts!

Happy, Happy, Joy, Joy

Prise de la Bastille, by Jean-Pierre-Louis-Laurent Houel

Not a history or political post, this is simply my favorite day. Spending my first Bastille day in Paris in 1955 might well have had something to do with it, but every one was special. No fireworks today, but some sweaty gardening and a little MJQ: Blues on Bach, the lovely Jesu, Joy of Man's Desiring and some fine Sarah Chang doing the Paganini Violin Concerto No. 1 and Saint-Saens' Havanaise. Some think her Paganini to be technically brilliant but bloodless, contra Midori. Not so.

On a related thread, France, etc., I think I will have something to say soon on the facile and careless assignment of collective guilt. It has become a really nasty habit for a lot of folks who should certainly know better. Maybe they do.

Lest We Forget

I think there is one crime worse than murder, and that is selling suicide as an act of virtue. - Ayn Rand

This morning's lead editorial in the Whines takes aim at a small, selfish group attempting to limit freedom of expression at Ground Zero.

For nearly four years now, the 9/11 families - those who lost immediate family members in that tragedy - have provided an inestimable service to this nation. They helped drive forward the inquiries of the Sept. 11 commission. They helped formulate any number of the projects being developed at ground zero. They have reminded us conscientiously of what was lost on that day.

Ahh, a spoonful of sugar before the cyanide.

But in the past few weeks, we've watched a handful of vocal family members, who may not represent a majority of 9/11 families, change the dynamic at the World Trade Center site for the worse. They have begun a movement to "take back the memorial," which means, in essence, eventually purging ground zero of its cultural partners, including the International Freedom Center.

And just who represents these "cultural partners"?

This protest resulted in a shocking response in late June from Gov. George Pataki. He openly joined the criticism of one of those institutions - the Drawing Center - for an exhibition that it sponsored, in another part of town, that contains controversial images of 9/11 and America's role in the world. And he has called on all the cultural partners at ground zero for reassurances that their programs will harmonize with the concerns of this small group of family members.

This, from the Daily News, on June 23, 2005:

We have nothing against silly, self-important, half-baked pieces of "political art" per se. If someone of the "political artist" persuasion chooses to believe that a drawing of a jetliner dive-bombing a naked, spread-legged woman constitutes a sagacious 9/11 statement - "Homeland Security," this specimen is titled - then fine, draw away, and let the product freely hang in whatever private gallery chooses to display the thing, and let all who would admire it come around and do so all they please.

But not at Ground Zero.

Works such as "Homeland Security" belong nowhere near the sobering pit where the twin towers stood, but the prospect of such a sacrilege arises because Gov. Pataki and his lower Manhattan minions have given space there to a SoHo art gallery called The Drawing Center. What were they thinking? Did they even take two minutes to glance through The Drawing Center's catalogue, which, besides "Homeland Security," also features such artistic creations as:

# The infamous hooded Abu Ghraib figure, the wires falling from his wrists to arrange themselves into the word "Liberty."

# A connect-the-dots organizational chart fancifully linking George W. Bush to Osama Bin Laden and former Texas Gov. John Connally and some oilman here and some financier there.

The Slimes continues:

The World Trade Center site is of enormous importance to all New Yorkers, to all Americans and to people around the planet who have united to fight the insidious forces that led to 9/11. Mr. Pataki's job is to represent all those deeply interested parties. By attempting to appease one small, vocal group of protesters who are unlikely to be appeased anyway, he is abrogating the rights of everyone else. And he runs the risk of turning ground zero into a place where we bury the freedoms that define this nation.

Let's see now; "one small, vocal group of protesters (and the Governor) are apparently not part of 'all New Yorkers or all Americans united to fight the insidious forces' that this "newspaper" has, in it's hysterical hatred of the administration, supported and aided.

Further:

There must be no mistake about this. If the Drawing Center is forced to withdraw from ground zero rather than accept the censorship of exhibitions that are yet to be imagined, no other respectable arts institution will take its place.

What was offered as an open invitation to restore the artistic life of Lower Manhattan will have turned into an invitation to provide only the kind of cultural offerings that please a vocal group of people whose genuine grief has already taken on a sharply political edge. Those are unacceptable conditions that would undermine the very purpose of the arts. If the International Freedom Center must continually bend over backward to placate a handful of angry family members, then all of its commitment to the conscience of that site, to what it can teach us about the character of freedom in the world, will have been compromised.

Respectable? See above, in the Daily News article. As for 'restoring the artistic life of lower Manhatten', that doesn't have a God damned thing to do with Ground Zero and the slaughter of thousands of innocent, productive individuals. It's a matter of free enterprise, something this rag should look up when they can take time out from their masturbatory self-regard.

After all, it's certainly a relief that the Grimes has no 'political edge'.

'Unacceptable' to whom? The paper that got it's "reputation" from the Stalinist toady Walter Duranty, and made a lot of folks very rich while gnawing at the ankles of Capitalism and individual liberty?

This is about power, people, and by any means available. These consumate second-raters will use every conceivable route they believe to be undetectable to that end. What else are they good for?

And if I had to rely on the New York Times to teach my children about the character of freedom in the world, I would strangle them at birth.