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Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up

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Every morning on The Daily Kos (warning:  this is a progressive blog post about politics), Barbara Morrill (aka BarbinMD) posts Your Abbreviated Pundit Round-Up.   I look at it almost every morning, because it is funny, short, and almost always includes at least one comment about a previously unknown writer that I want to read.

In today’s post, Morrill includes a link to New York Times’ pundit Gail Collins’ column of March 5th entitled The Rant List, with the comment that “Gail Collins is fast becoming one of my favorite columnists.”  Amen to that.  Collins makes me laugh out loud almost once a column, and she’s not as snarky or personality focused as Maureen Dowd.  In today’s column (and I recommend the entire read), she’s writing how we have to prioritize the things list of  “life is unfair” items hitting the news reports on an hourly basis.

The paragraph that hits home for me is:

Given the competition, I can’t get all that worked up about defaulting homeowners who are looking to the government for a rescue. True, a lot of them got in over their heads betting that housing prices would rise forever. But when it comes to stupid financial decisions to vent about, I’m sticking with Alan Greenspan.

CNBC and others want us to get mad at the people who (stupidly, I admit) thought the housing market would only go up and up and up.  But who was the biggest cheerleader for this housing market other than the former chairman of the Federal Reserve?   Collins, as usual, hits the nail on the head while making us laugh at the same time.

More to come…

DJB

Birthday Musings for a March 4th

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As the headline indicates, today is my birthday.  54 is a kind of nondescript age, as these things go.  Those bold enough to ask how old you are then respond with a rather weak “oh” when you say you’re 54.  Its not the big 5-0, so most people don’t expect life-changing reflections.  You’re also not 55, when you realize you are as close to 60 as to 50.   Those older than you say, “Ahh, to be 54 again.”  My colleagues in their 30s just give you that look that I use to give my parents and their friends.

All that said, birthdays can be a great connection with friends.  That’s especially true now with the Internet.  Facebook doesn’t give you any excuse not to send a “friend” a birthday wish, as the little reminder that David has a birthday” stares at you all day.  So you get multiple “Happy Birthday’s” (or Feliz Cumpleanos! from one Argentine-born friend).  It has been suggested I head to spring training to celebrate (not a bad idea) and that I enjoy more music this year (also not a bad idea). Toasts were raised (figuratively) to more “breathing, picking, and baseball.”  Amen.

Friends also pass along the “Today’s Birthday” column from the Washington Post.  where I learn…

You are philosophical and will lead people around you to higher thought. Couples experience a resurgence of passion and singles find chemistry and excitement with someone new this month. You will sharpen your skills and raise your profile in May. Marathon-scale projects come to a profitable end in June. Scorpio and Aries adore you.

Check back with me in May and June to see how I’ve done. And I’ll ask all adoring Scorpios and/or Aries to step forward and identify themselves.

Birthdays are also the one time you check out “This Date in History” if you ever do.  March 4th is the answer to a great trivia question if you love history, for Presidents were inaugurated on this day until the 1930s — something that’s often forgotten today unless your birthday happens to hit the same time.

Franklin Roosevelt was the last president inaugurated on March 4th as well as the first president inaugurated on January 20th.  Congress decided with the 20th ammendment that we didn’t have to wait so long for the president to come to Washington.  Can you image how fit to be tied the nation  would be now if we’d waited until today to welcome our new president?!

There aren’t many memorable inauguration speeches, but you can point to March 4th as the day Abraham Lincoln gave his brilliant Second Inaugural Address:

Neither party expected for the war the magnitude or the duration which it has already attained. Neither anticipated that the cause of the conflict might cease with or even before the conflict itself should cease. Each looked for an easier triumph and a result less fundamental and astounding. Both read the same Bible and pray to the same God and each invokes His aid against the other. It may seem strange that any men should dare to ask a just God’s assistance in wringing their bread from the sweat of other men’s faces but let us judge not that we be not judged. The prayers of both could not be answered — that of neither has been answered fully. The Almighty has His own purposes. “Woe unto the world because of offenses for it must needs be that offenses come but woe to that man by whom the offense cometh.” If we shall suppose that American slavery is one of those offenses which in the providence of God must needs come but which having continued through His appointed time He now wills to remove and that He gives to both North and South this terrible war as the woe due to those by whom the offense came shall we discern therein any departure from those divine attributes which the believers in a living God always ascribe to Him. Fondly do we hope — fervently do we pray — that this mighty scourge of war may speedily pass away. Yet, if God wills that it continue until all the wealth piled by the bondsman’s two hundred and fifty years of unrequited toil shall be sunk and until every drop of blood drawn with the lash shall be paid by another drawn with the sword as was said three thousand years ago so still it must be said ‘the judgments of the Lord are true and righteous altogether.’

With malice toward none with charity for all with firmness in the right as God gives us to see the right let us strive on to finish the work we are in to bind up the nation’s wounds, to care for him who shall have borne the battle and for his widow and his orphan — to do all which may achieve and cherish a just and lasting peace among ourselves and with all nations.

In fact, my birthday gift to you, dear reader, is to recommend that you read Ronald C. White, Jr.’s book Lincoln’s Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural.

As the book jacket reads, “When Lincoln finally stood before his fellow countrymen on March 4, 1865, and had only 703 words to share, the American public was stunned.”

The President had not offered the North a victory speech, nor did he excoriate the South for the sin of slavery. Instead he called the whole country guilty of the sin and pleaded for reconciliation and unity.

Lincoln’s speech is a timeless and brilliant example of his “moral and rhetorical genius.” Not a bad thing to recall on one’s birthday.

More to come . . .

DJB

 

Chicago: Great Main Streets, Great Architecture, and Great Food

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National Main Street Conference

I’ve been in Chicago since Sunday for the National Main Streets Conference, and it has been a great couple of days.  I love Chicago and I love Main Street.  The conference is sponsored by the National Trust Main Street Center and brings together 1,600 people from around the country who are rehabilitating their downtown commercial districts.  Having lived in three great Main Street communities – Murfreesboro, Tennessee; Americus, Georgia; and Staunton, Virginia – I have a real affinity for these towns.

Getting to Chicago was interesting.  The first of two snowstorms blew into Washington on Sunday morning.  I got a call from the airlines at 4:40 a.m. telling me my morning flight was delayed by an hour.  When I arrived at the airport it turns out that every other passenger on the flight had been moved to a different flight in order to make connections and I had a regional jet all to myself!  I joked that I flew up on the corporate jet…but it was a surreal experience.

The opening session at Main Street is energizing, with the feel of a political convention.  As you can see at the top, the attendees from the states sit together with their signs and it is easy as a speaker to get applause – just mention Michigan, Iowa, or Illinois (three especially large and noisy contingents) and there’s a roar from the crowd.   The meetings are held at the Palmer House, which has great historic rooms for the conference sessions.  FYI:  click on the link above and read stories about the five Great American Main Street Award winners.  These are impressive places to live and work. 

It wouldn’t be Chicago without seeing some Robie House Interiorworld-class architecture, and I was lucky enough this trip to visit the Robie House, which is a National Trust Historic Site.  This Frank Lloyd Wright masterpiece is owned by the University of Chicago and is operated for the National Trust by the Frank Lloyd Wright Preservation Trust.  We were at an event last evening to introduce supporters to the next phase of the interior restoration, and I’ve included a couple of shots.  The Preservation Trust is doing a great job in bringing this landmark back to life and they have a great vision for the future of the house.

Finally, any visit to Chicago should include some great food.  At the opening party for the conference on Sunday evening, they featured food from Chicago’s many neighborhoods, so you could wander around and have Chinese followed by Italian followed by…just about anything you wanted.  But the really good food I had was last evening, at a restaurant called The Gage Restaurant and Tavern.  The food was casual but very tasty.  It was located just across the street from the Millennium Park, and they have this cool light show set up in the park as well.

Chicago is just one of those special places on earth.  And even though it has been cold enough to bring frostbite to the toes, I’d be back in a heartbeat.Robie House Kitchen Under Restoration

More to come…

DJB

March Promises Some Wonderful Music

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As we head into March, the Institute of Musical Tradition has some terrific music lined up.   Those in the Washington area should check out one or more of the great musicians in town.

I been listening to bassist Missy Raines for years – first with Cloud Valley, then Eddie and Martha Adcock, and more recently with Claire Lynch and in a duo with flatpicker Jim Hurst.  She’s a seven-time winner of the International Bluegrass Music Association bassist of the year, and she’s just formed a new band named Missy Raines and the New Hip in honor of a new body part!  She’s at IMT on March 9th.

On March 23rd, flatpicker extraordinaire Steve Kaufman plays at IMT.  I haven’t seen Kaufman live, but I’ve heard and admired his music for a long time.  Kaufman runs a series of well-respected guitar camps during the summer and is a great teacher.  He’s also known for his long list of banjo jokes on his flatpik website.

A little boy told his mother that when he grew up he wanted to be a banjo player. “Oh no son,” his mother replied, “you either have to be a banjo player, or you have to grow up.”

What do you call five banjos at the bottom of a lake?  A good start.

And at the end of the month,  for you gypsy guitar lovers, John Jorgenson is in town for what promises to be a terrific performance.   I saw Jorgenson at IMT about two years ago, and he is simply an amazing guitarist.  Bring your flatpick and come join us!

Check out this video of Jorgenson playing Ghost Dance.

More to come…

DJB

My New Favorite Off-Season Sport, Part II

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In late January, I wrote a post about the Washington Capitals and how their exciting brand of play was making hockey my new favorite off-season sport.   A play last night by Alex Ovechkin – the “Great 8” – just solidified that feeling.

First some background as to how I came to watch an entire hockey game uninterrupted at home.  Candice and Andrew were out while I was battling both a computer with a virus and a head cold, both of which came from my teenagers.  As for the computer, I normally have my laptop with me as I watch TV sports but Claire was using it last night. On Monday  Andrew had ventured off on the home computer into web sites where viruses lurk, and so we were down one computer waiting to get it debugged.  The head cold came, on the other hand, from Claire’s recent sickness.   I finally decided to just give in, curl up on the couch, and watch the entire Caps vs. Canadiens game.

And what a great decision that was!  After a wide open first period ended in a 2-2 tie, the Caps had to score in the final two minutes of the 3rd period to even the score.  Then after a scoreless overtime, the Caps won in a shootout.

The game was exciting enough, but as a bonus it included one of Alex Ovechkin’s classic goals.  In the first period, Ovechkin took the puck near center ice, banked it against the boards to his left, did a 180 degree turn to his right to avoid an onrushing player, and then picked up the puck again in the offensive zone.  A Canadiens player rushed him from the side and knocked him down, but as he was sliding on his butt across the front of the goal, Alex kept control of the puck and flipped it up over the goalie.  It was incredible…but of course this morning, Ovechkin was quoted as saying,

“No, normal goal, not sick.  Top 10 probably.  You have to try something new.”

But the Caps coach disagreed.  Quoted in the Washington Post, Bruce Boudreau said,

“I’ve seen that goal about a 1,000 times,” Coach Bruce Boudreau said of “the Goal” scored by Ovechkin from his back in 2006. “But [this one] was as amazing a goal as I’ve ever seen.”

As I expected, someone had it on You Tube by this morning.  Enjoy it for yourself.

More to come…

DJB

Willie and the Wheel

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Fresh off their performance at the National Preservation Conference in Tulsa last fall, Western Swing band Asleep at the Wheel has joined with country music legend Willie Nelson for a new CD of Western Swing classics entitled Willie and the Wheel.  The Washington Post’s J. Freedom du Lac wrote a strong review of the album in which he said,

For several years, the iconoclastic singer-songwriter Willie Nelson has been surrounding himself with unlikely musical collaborators, from pop ditz Jessica Simpson and jazzman Wynton Marsalis to the rapper Snoop Dogg, with whom Nelson shares an abiding love of lighting up — and seemingly little else.

The pairings have produced more misses than hits as Nelson’s musical proffer has become wildly uneven. (Witness Nelson’s dreadful 2005 reggae experiment, “Countryman,” which should be filed in record bins under Jamaica Mistake.)

But for Nelson’s new album, “Willie and the Wheel,” he found the perfect partners: Western swing preservationists Asleep at the Wheel, who helped the aging country outlaw get in touch with his inner Bob Wills, to marvelously vibrant effect.

Bright, playful and exploding with verve, “Willie and the Wheel” is one of the first great albums of 2009.

Willie and the Wheel were on David Letterman on Monday evening.  Here’s the video, with a great turn by Paul Shaffer playing Western Swing piano.  Enjoy!

More to come…

DJB

The Chattering Class and President’s Day

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Regular readers know I don’t delve too often into politics.  There’s just so many more interesting things to write about (such as the Nats finally landing a good free-agent in Adam Dunn – more to come on that in the near future).

But today’s Daily Kos had a posting by Markos that hits on an issue that I think deserves widespread reading:  the cluelessness of the Chattering Class.  Or perhaps that’s too charitable.  The issue may be that they are working to protect their own interests instead of seeking the truth.

This was all too clear during the campaign debates.  The instant polls were terrific because they showed – in real time and all too clearly – how out of touch the cable TV political commentators were with what the rest of the country was thinking.  As Kos says today,

In 2008, those snap polls made fools of the talking heads until the last debate, when they finally shut their traps and let the snap polls determine the winners. Because according to them in the previous three debates, McCain, Palin and McCain had won. The people, on the other hand, had drastically different thoughts on the matter. The gap between the chattering class and the populace couldn’t have been starker.

I watched those polls during the debates and saw this great divide first hand.  The DC Chattering Class really did blow it in calling those debates (and in so many other ways as well).

So why should we listen to them this week?  Again, from Kos…

The people who live in DC, who pretend to speak for the rest of the country, have no direct experience with what is happening there — and their attempts to handicap DC politics have more to do with the inside baseball games that seek to protect their own interests above all else. The fact that three and a half million Americans will have jobs as a result of the passage of this bill, or that people who are unemployed or living on food stamps will continue to be able to eat, doesn’t seem to graze their analyses.

As is usual, Frank Rich also got this right in yesterday’s column, noting how Obama had outwitted the punditocracy and the opposition.

I asked David Axelrod for his take on this Groundhog Day relationship between Obama and the political culture.

“It’s why our campaign was not based in Washington but in Chicago,” he said. “We were somewhat insulated from the echo chamber. In the summer of ’07, the conventional wisdom was that Obama was a shooting star; his campaign was irretrievably lost; it was a ludicrous strategy to focus on Iowa; and we were falling further and further behind in the national polls.” But even after the Iowa victory, this same syndrome kept repeating itself. When Obama came out against the gas-tax holiday supported by both McCain and Clinton last spring, Axelrod recalled, “everyone in D.C. thought we were committing suicide.”

The stimulus battle was more of the same. “This town talks to itself and whips itself into a frenzy with its own theories that are completely at odds with what the rest of America is thinking,” he says. Once the frenzy got going, it didn’t matter that most polls showed support for Obama and his economic package: “If you watched cable TV, you’d see our support was plummeting, we were in trouble. It was almost like living in a parallel universe.”

For Axelrod, the moral is “not just that Washington is too insular but that the American people are a lot smarter than people in Washington think.”

Here’s a third moral: Overdosing on this culture can be fatal.

This is not a Republican or Democratic issue, as both sides have their spinners who conveniently forget the truth.  It is more about the all-knowing culture that feeds on itself here in our hometown.  During this weekend, when we celebrate the accomplishments of two Presidents who would never have survived if you would listen to today’s political class, that’s a good lesson to remember.

More to come…

DJB

Two Modest Milestones

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This week I passed two modest Internet milestones:  More to Come… welcomed the 4,000th visitor and I reached 100 “friends” on my Facebook page.

Stop laughing…

I take the blog milestone as the more satisfying.  My children won’t even let me friend them on Facebook, so I don’t put a great deal of effort into rounding up friends or in keeping my status updated.  (My most recent status update is from last Tuesday when I said I was ready for more news about the game of baseball and less (or no) news about A-Rod.  I still feel that way, so why change.)

More to Come… is much more like writing letters to friends.  The blog now averages almost 25 readers a day, which is fine with me.  And occasionally someone picks something up I’ve written and spreads it around, which is nice recognition as well.  That actually happened today, although the link was to a slightly altered version of my recent Readyville Mill post that was also posted on the blog at PreservationNation, the National Trust web site.  Mike West, writing in the Murfreesboro Post, picked it up and hopefully sent a few readers to my place of employment as well.

Wherever you read it, thanks for visiting, thanks for reading, and thanks for the wonderful comments.

More to come…

DJB

Lilly is Our Best in Show Every Day

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Lilly at the River HouseWe all jumped for joy this morning when we opened the Washington Post and saw that Stump, a 10-year-old Sussex Spaniel, won Best in Show at the Westminster Kennel Club show at Madison Square Garden last evening.  That’s because we have a 12-year-old Sussex Spaniel, Lilly, who we consider our Best in Show every day of the year.

Lilly came to us after life as a show dog, having won all the competitions her breeder thought possible.  The weekend before Thanksgiving in 2000 we went to a dog show to begin to get an idea of what type of breed we may want.  Like President Obama, I had been promising Andrew and Claire that we’d get a dog once we found a permanent home in Washington.  As seven-year-olds, they were searching the Internet nightly for information, and Claire would often bring printouts with pictures and information about a certain breed’s “kid friendly virtues” to the dinner table.

Sussex Spaniels were not on our radar screen, but as we stepped into the main building at the show we saw a group of dogs we didn’t recognize getting ready for their moment in the sun.  After asking, we found out they were Sussex Spaniels, and all four of us were hooked from the beginning.  Candice, David, and Lilly On our way to our car, we saw a woman putting two dogs into the back of her Volvo wagon and we walked over to talk.  It turns out she raised Sussex Spaniels, and one of the dogs she was loading up was Lilly, who had just competed in her last show.  To cut to the chase, we exchanged phone numbers, did our homework, and returned the next day and brought Lilly home with us.  It has been a wonderful eight years with Lilly at the heart of everything we do.

Lilly is friendly with us all, but she is devoted to Candice, which is a trait for these dogs.  They latch onto one family member and never leave their side.  Since Candice was the one around all the time when she first arrived, Candice was the chosen one.  Lilly will play nice with me because she knows I take her out in the morning, and Andrew and Claire both have their dog responsibilities that Lilly relies on.  But when Candice is out of the house, Lilly can usually be found by the back door (or more likely asleep on the couch near the back door), waiting for Candice’s return.

LillyStump is a repeat winner at Westminster, so we know what will happen next.  I’ll be walking Lilly the next few weeks, and we’ll get stopped almost every day by someone asking, “Is that a Sussex Spaniel?”  We’ll say yes, Lilly will lick their hand (if offered nicely), and we’ll have made a new friend.  It is a good thing we had Lilly scheduled for a trip to the Groomery today – she’ll need to look good for her turn on the green carpet.

Congratulations Stump, from Sussex Spaniel owners everywhere.  You’re best in show at MSG, but in our house you’d lose to Lilly.

More to come…

DJB

Restoring the Readyville Mill

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The Readyville Mill sits on the Rutherford/Cannon County line near the town of Murfreesboro, Tennessee, where I spent my childhood years.  At that time it was one of two mills remaining in the vicinity and was still in operation as a working mill for area farmers.  Some time in the early 1970s I played some bluegrass at the mill as part of a heritage days festival.  It was always a community center in this still-rural area of Middle Tennessee.

However, in the 1980s the mill was abandoned, a four lane highway opened up Cannon County to rapid development, and the mill seemed destined to either fall into the river from neglect or to be torn down for someone’s vision of a better community.  Luckily Tom Brady (not the Patriots quarterback) stepped into the breech.

A local website describes the mill’s background:

The Readyville Mill is the sole vestige of what was once a flourishing industry on the Stones River in Middle Tennessee.  Dating from the 1870s, the current Readyville Mill is a three-story building with an open fourth-story attic.  In the early 1900s, the mill supplied the area with electricity, making Readyville one of the first rural villages in Tennessee to possess electric lights.  Other products included ice, corn meal, refined flour, whole wheat flour, buckwheat flour, and lumber.  The mill was in continuous operation until the early 1980s. 

When I was in Tennessee a year or so ago, my brother Joe (the ornamental blacksmith and a great craftsman) took the children and me out to meet Tom and see the progress he was making in restoring the mill.   It was a great treat to see this place coming back to life.  And just today, Joe sent me links to two You Tube videos that show Tom’s progress.  I’ve posted both below and I think you’ll enjoy them.

More to come…

DJB