At Home On Piety Hill

The Prince of Wales is getting to be a royal pain, flitting around the world, wagging his self-important finger, lecturing the commoners on everything from nutrition to the environment. If you will remember, he consumed thousands of pounds of precious aviation fuel to fly into New York, in order to receive an award for his decades of work promoting environmental sustainability and to raise awareness of global warming. As I remember it, the ceremony was postponed due to a blizzard.

Now, according the Telegraph UK, Charles is doing what he can to deny people the right to eat what they want by targeting certain eeeeeeevil foods and the capitalist pigs, who set up shop on the street corners and in the malls to deal the stuff to kids:

As nutritionist Nadine Tayara told him they discourage children from eating fast food, he retorted: “Have you got anywhere with McDonald’s, have you tried getting it banned? That’s the key.”

This guy is truly a useless appendage. I used to have a different opinion of the monarchy and, though it weathered the Diana debacle, this incident cinches it for me… these people need to hit the streets and earn their own bread. As it turns out in the article, his kids love burgers.

I suppose the real insult came with the graphic shown above from the article. It seems that the readers of the Telegraph like Cornish pasties almost as much as we do here in Nevada City and Grass Valley. In order to put MacDonald’s and the Big Mac into perspective, the journalist compared it to Prince Charles’ favorite country fare, the humble pastie, and sullied the reputation of our esteemed meat and potato pastrie. As you can see, the pastie is deadlier than the Mac. Does this mean Prince Chuck is going to begin calling for a boycott of pasties? Well, if he does, he’ll start a second American Revolution right here in Nevada County. They can have my pastie when they pry it from my cold, dead hand.

I think this is a first for me… I’m blogging while watching a film — Schindler’s List. I’ve already seen it once, but that was years ago. Anyway, I was thinking about getting iListen for dictation and transcription. I do most of my best thinking in the morning, while I’m commuting and doing production/deadline work. I’ve tried a cassette dictation machine ten years ago, but that just didn’t work. I started looking into iListen to use with my computer at home, comparing it to other dictation/transcription software and hardware solutions. Then, it occurred to me… I have a video iPod. I would want to get a microphone for it and use it away from home. Then I got a better idea… I’ll just get the Belkin TuneTalk and use my iPod for dictation. I will transcribe the file myself. I’m fairly proficient at typing and it’s mindless work — I can do it when I’m exhausted at the end of the day. If it doesn’t work out, then I’ll go ahead and spend the extra $130 for iListen. Any tips from you seasoned dictation/transcription-ists out there?

You never know what you will see on your way to Camptonville. I found this fellow moving to a new turnout each day and stoking up the woodstove to warm up each morning… a mobile commune of sorts. Forget about the Highway Patrol and vagrancy laws — wait until the ecoNazis catch him smokin’ up the South Fork!

While I retain bragging rights with my latest design coup, Denise did not waste any time in answering back with her own decor riposte! This crushed velvet, swiveling, 60’s variation on the “womb” design was found at a local thrift store and picked up for a song. The living room is coming together nicely and will be anchored by a beautiful new chair from Scandinavian Designs.

I suppose the United States will have to work hard to catch up to these nations, mostly socialist atheist materialist, leading the way in fouling our nest (some of the same nations that scold us for not signing on to the Kyoto Accords).

Here they are:
1. Chernobyl, Ukraine
2. Dzerzhinsk, Russia
3. Haina, Dominican Republic
4. Kabwe, Zambia
5. La Oroya, Peru
6. Linfen, China
7. Mailuu-Suu, Kyrgyzstan
8. Norilsk, Russia
9. Ranipet, India
10. Rudnaya Pristan, Russia

Jen Phillips at The Smithsonian slaps America-bashing, awareness raising, eco-prudes with a bit of common sense:

It’s great that there are no North American cities on the list, but it also poses a question: even if the United States does get its emissions under control, will it even matter in the light of pollution from rapidly industrializing nations like China?

But, she shows her true colors as the KoolAid drinking anti-free market, human rights blind, lemming she is:

The answer is yes, because China plans to abide by the Kyoto protocols, as their vice-chairman of development told the World Economic Forum this weekend. An Indian representative also vowed to cut emissions, although he said his country is turning more and more to nuclear power to do so.

As Wayne Campbell would say, “Shyeah, right! When monkeys fly…” Well, nevermind. You and I both know that’s never gonna happen. It also begs the question: ” Why is nuclear power the key to halting global warming in China, but not in Europe or the US?” I dare say the answer is more philosophical and ethical than environmental.

Meanwhile, over at Scrappleface Scott Ott is reporting record sales of Global Warming Shovels and other must-have items for the seasonal thaw.

I had another living room epiphany last week. But, before I go on and you get all excited and ask me to come work my interior design magic on your place, remember that I only do this for pleasure… no silver will cross the table.

We looked into putting an insert into our fireplace, but new regulations made it prohibtive, both in cost and efficiency. So, I sat gazing at the center of our living room, the locus of fellowship in our home and thought, “now what?” Should we put a large flower arrangement in front of it? Or, pile up a bunch of

candles inside the fireplace, like the hipsters in Rocklin do? Then, it hit me like a ton of bricks (get it?). I ran in and logged onto eBay… r-e-t-r-o c-r-a-c-k-l-i-n-g l-o-g and enter!

I found a few promising auctions, but they sold for way too much. That sent me onto the web, where I found a number of companies that manufacture some very nice fake burning logs. These were also too pricey, but then I happened onto a pile of faux embers I’d seen advertised for around $100 over at Penney’s Home for $49. It came in a couple of days and I got it right into the fireplace. Denise even had to admit I’ve got a real eye for design. So, what do you think?

Well, we quit Netflix. I found that I was watching more movies than I normally would, because I wanted to get my money’s worth. My discontent surfaced when I read about the class-action lawsuit filed against them for dragging their feet on fulfilling customers requests, who were signed up for “unlimited” rental accounts. I noticed that my service degraded around that time and their “cycling” became obvious and inconvenient for us.

Anyway, we are spending much less time in front of the tube, which is a real bonus and, now that I know what I’m looking for at the local video store, I can get in and out for about a buck. You can’t beat that.

Addressing the Suicide of Thought, G.K. Chesterton cites the French Revolution as an example of modern man’s inability to truly be revolutionary (in a good way), because of his self-imposed prison of “objectivity” and open-mindedness — euphemisms for an unhealthy and paralyzing skepticism. This degradation of thought, weaving its way through the 20th century and terminating in 2007, may explain why so many Americans (and cloistered, postmodern epicurean, hedonistic European socialists) will trouble themselves (and, the rest of us) over the genocide in, say, Darfur, while villainizing the liberation, in process, of vast numbers of victims of a large, totalitarian regime. I suppose if a genocide is taking place in relatively close proximity and you are not profiting economically from the status quo and the fighting could spill over and threaten your personal peace and affluence (say, in Bosnia), then that’s a genocide we (meaning a small contingent from our countries and a substantially large contribution from the United States) need to shed blood over. Now, if there’s another genocide in a distant land, which the UN, Germans and French are profiting from and has little chance of upsetting their domestic peace, well that is not a genocide, but a civil war and that nation’s domestic problem. And, if the dictator of that faraway place can keep a lid on things through torture, murder, biological agents and other brutal means, while the skeptics are enriched through their relationship with him, well, they won’t be troubled by that, as long as the press doesn’t publish any disturbing images. Here’s the quote that explains the history behind that sort of odd, self-serving, short-sighted logic:

…an historic example may illustrate it. The French Revolution was really an heroic and decisive thing… But since then the revolutionary or speculative mind of Europe has been weakened by shrinking from any proposal because of the limits of that proposal. Liberalism has been degraded into liberality. Men have tried to turn “revolutionise” from a transitive to an intransitive verb. The Jacobin could tell you not only the system he would rebel against, but (what was more important) the system he would not rebel against, the system he would trust. The new rebel is a skeptic and will not entirely trust anything. He has no loyalty; therefore, he can never be really a revolutionist. And the fact that he doubts everything really gets in his way when he wants to denounce anything. For all denunciation implies a moral doctrine of some kind and the modern revolutionist doubts not only the institution he denounces, but the doctrine by which he denounces it. Thus, he writes one book complaining that imperial oppression insults the purity of women, and then writes another book, a novel, in which he insults it himself. He curses the Sultan because Christian girls lose their virginity, and then curses Mrs. Grundy because they keep it. As a politician he will cry out that war is a waste of life, and then as a philosopher that all life is a waste of time. A Russian pessimist will denounce a policeman for killing a peasant, and then prove by the highest philosophical principles that the peasant ought to have killed himself. A man denounces marriage as a lie and then denounces aristocratic profligates for treating it as a lie. He calls a flag a bauble and then blames the oppressors of Poland or Ireland because they take away that bauble. The man of this school goes first to a political meeting, where he complains that savages are treated as if they were beasts. Then he takes his hat and umbrella and goes on to a scientific meeting where he proves that they practically are beasts. In short, the modern revolutionist, being an infinite skeptic, is always engaged in undermining his own mines. In his book on politics he attacks men for trampling on morality, and in his book on ethics he attacks morality for trampling on men. Therefore the modern man in revolt has become practically useless for all purposes of revolt. By rebelling against everything he has lost his right to rebel against anything.

G.K. Chesterton, Orthodoxy

Denise and I were down in Roseville, so we dropped by Sean and Camille’s new home. It looks a little plain. I think it could use something… I can’t quite put my finger on it.