How to make a Spanish Windlass

From Fine Homebuilding: how to make a Spanish windlass

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getting started

MVP

Giants 21
Patriots 17
Best super bowl ad: Chrysler

Renewable Energy in Iceland a Top Priority

Renewable Energy in Iceland a Top Priority: "Iceland is reckoned as a forerunner in the field of renewable energy. The country is generating around 81 percent of its primary energy needs from renewable sources. There are even plans to go fully green. Figures in 2007 said that geothermal energy accounts for 66 percent of primary energy, hydropower 15 percent and fossil fuels 19 percent."

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Tattered safety net: heating oil assistance cut

A New York Times reporter headed north to Dixfield, above Lewiston, Maine.  It's cold there.  A slideshow and article tell the story of two retired and disabled Mainers struggling to heat their houses, living on $1,200/month in Social Security benefits.  As the economy improves will Congress restore the funds cut from federal heating oil assistance to the poor?

Black bear Lugnut gives birth - video

The Wildlife Research Foundation in cooperation with the Maine Department of Fisheries and Wildlife has established a live streaming video in a bear den in northern Maine.  As you know bears do more than shit in the woods.  They give birth there! As did Lugnut, one of the bears they are following.  The link above will bring you to the video archive.  the home page ahs video live from the den where the bear sleeps, but doesn't shit, so except for lucky moments not much is going on.

One More Thing about Paterno - George Vecsey

George Vecsey - the recently retired Times sports columnist - and wise observer of men's lives, observes that by making Paterno king those who shouted "We Are Penn State" left him isolated and unguided. - GWC

One More Thing about Paterno - George Vecsey:

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At Brooklyn Prep, Paterno Learned Latin and Bravado - NYTimes.com

This building at 1150 Carroll Street in Crown Heights
- was Brooklyn Prep which closed in 1972

Mens sana in corpore sano was the maxim of the school. Neither was easy to achieve. Like everyone interviewed in this article I remember Brooklyn Prep as the most demanding school I attended. College at Holy Cross, grad school at BU, law school at Rutgers. None was as challenging as high school. None as rewarding. The study of the classics encouraged a Homeric self-image. If we were good enough to study Cicero and read the Odyssey in the original Greek we were good enough for anything. Just don't be late to class. - GWC

At Brooklyn Prep, Paterno Learned Latin and Bravado - NYTimes.com:

"At the Jesuit high school Joe Paterno attended in Brooklyn, students wore jackets and ties and were taught by priests or by lay teachers in academic robes. The curriculum was also rigorously Old World: students took several years of Latin and many added three years of Greek, with three hours of homework per night the rule.
If they were late or forgot a notebook, students might find themselves detained after school for what Jesuits called “jug,” spending an hour in the courtyard walking in circles.

Fr. Engel was Prefect of Discipline

The prefect of discipline was the Rev. Frederick W. Engel, a tall priest with the fists of a trained boxer who could instantly silence an auditorium filled with 300 shouting boys.
“It wasn’t hell you were afraid of, it was Father Engel,” said Gerry Uehlinger, class of ’67, now a trial lawyer in Maryland."

 The school is well remembered in Charlie's Prep the book sponsored by NYU President John Sexton.   Charlie Winans introduced us to James Joyce.


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Joe Paterno Leaves a Complicated Legacy - NYTimes.com

Joe Paterno was, by far the most famous graduate of my high school - Brooklyn Prep. A Jesuit high school in Crown Heights its motto was mens sana in corpore sano. Paterno took it to heart. We all took four years of Latin and most of us studied Greek. He loved Virgil - which I found insufferable. (I loved the Odyssey and Cicero.) Unique among football coaches he took academics seriously. Penn State had a high graduation rate and Paterno was an apostle of academic as well as athletic excellence. 

 But when an assistant coach reported that he saw a popular former coach sexually assaulting a boy in the football locker room Joe's moral vision failed him.  He did the minimum - reported it to university officials, not the police. And when nothing came of that Joe let it slide.  Now everyone knows and now Joe Pa is dead. The statue ofPaterno was removed from the front of the stadium;  the legend is sullied. It is a shame. - GWC Paterno Leaves a Complicated Legacy - NYTimes.com: "Joe Paterno loved the classics. He quoted Shakespeare to his team, devoured the epics of Virgil and donated his money to help save Penn State’s classics department, even endowing a scholarship in the name of his high school Latin teacher, the Rev. Thomas Bermingham. With Paterno’s death at 85 from lung cancer on Sunday morning, the final thread of his narrative is one fit for the literary tragedies he adored."

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Peter Ralston - premier photographer of the Wyeths' Maine

Peter Ralston - who co-founded the Island Institute with Philip Conkling - is the house photographer.  His pictures grace every issue of the annual Island Journal.  He grew up in Chadds Ford, Pennsylvania - the winter home of the Wyeths.  A life long friend of Andrew and his wife Betsy,  he is a peer and close friend of their son James -  himself a distinguished artist.  He spent a lot of time at Jamie and wife Phyllis's Kent House, on Monhegan Island.  It is so named because it was built by the great illustrator, landscape painter, expedition sailor, and rebel Rockwell Kent.  Among Ralston's projects was his commission to make photographic reproductions of Andrew's paintings.  If you click on Ralston's name, above, you'll find yourself at his website. 

We have a print from the original negative of the top photo - Clearing - which is his signature image.  I had the impression from faint recollection that Ralston didn't like it very much (that the sky is overexposed - actually that's just the image I found.) But Peter's comment corrects that error.  HERE is the image on his site.  As I observed there is great power in the image of  the sheep huddled under tow in that skiff.  The brightening sky and the sun through the mist convey mystery, hope and vulnerability.  The sheep were on their way to Allen Island.  Owned by Andrew and Betsy, the stone cross on the island's south eastern bluff was erected by the state of Maine to mark the 300th anniversary of the founding of Maine: Capt. George Weymouth's prolonged anchorage in 1605 from which he explored the St. George River and Georges Islands, and the Penobscot Bay and River. Known as George's Harbor, it is the Wyeths (and my) favorite spot. 

Misty Blue - Etta James