Welcome to the last Monday in April: Monday, the 27th of April, 2025, and National Blueberry Pie Day. As always, I recommend that to get the best blueberry pie in the world, you must visit Helen’s Restaurant in Machias, Main, which uses a mixture of fresh and cooked lowbush blueberries–not the big, bland commercial kind but berries picked by hand, and all topped with a thick layer of whipped cream. Here’s a piece along with a glass of blueberry sangria (skip the sangria):
It’s also Great Poetry Reading Day. Here’s the Society of Classical Poets’ list of the Ten Greatest Poems Ever Written (note that they all rhyme, confirming my theory) and I’ll put below #1, which surely is at the top of the list of anyone with literary chops. You will recognize the author. Read it to your boo:
Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?
Thou art more lovely and more temperate:
Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,
And summer’s lease hath all too short a date:
Sometime too hot the eye of heaven shines,
And often is his gold complexion dimm’d;
And every fair from fair sometime declines,
By chance, or nature’s changing course, untrimm’d;
But thy eternal summer shall not fade
Nor lose possession of that fair thou ow’st;
Nor shall Death brag thou wander’st in his shade,
When in eternal lines to time thou grow’st;
So long as men can breathe or eyes can see,
So long lives this, and this gives life to thee.
Readers are welcome to mark notable events, births, or deaths on this day by consulting the April 28 Wikipedia page.
Da Nooz:
*The NYT says that is now understands what caused January’s collision between an Army helicopter and a local flight that killed 67 people. It wasn’t one thing, but several.
As they flew south along the Potomac River on the gusty night of Jan. 29, the crew aboard an Army Black Hawk helicopter attempted to execute a common aviation practice. It would play a role in ending their lives.
Shortly after the Black Hawk passed over Washington’s most famous array of cherry trees, an air traffic controller at nearby Ronald Reagan National Airport alerted the crew to a regional passenger jet in its vicinity. The crew acknowledged seeing traffic nearby.
One of the pilots then asked for permission to employ a practice called “visual separation.” That allows a pilot to take control of navigating around other aircraft, rather than relying on the controller for guidance.
“Visual separation approved,” the controller replied.
The request to fly under those rules is granted routinely in airspace overseen by controllers. Most of the time, visual separation is executed without note. But when mishandled, it can also create a deadly risk — one that aviation experts have warned about for years.
On Jan. 29, the Black Hawk crew did not execute visual separation effectively. The pilots either did not detect the specific passenger jet the controller had flagged, or could not pivot to a safer position. Instead, one second before 8:48 p.m., the helicopter slammed into American Airlines Flight 5342, which was carrying 64 people to Washington from Wichita, Kan., killing everyone aboard both aircraft in a fiery explosion that lit the night sky over the river.
One error did not cause the worst domestic crash in the United States in nearly a quarter-century. Modern aviation is designed to have redundancies and safeguards that prevent a misstep, or even several missteps, from being catastrophic. On Jan. 29, that system collapsed.
“Multiple layers of safety precautions failed that night,” said Katie Thomson, the Federal Aviation Administration’s deputy administrator under President Joseph R. Biden Jr.
Some of the other screw-ups:
The helicopter crew appeared to have made more than one mistake. Not only was the Black Hawk flying too high, but in the final seconds before the crash, its pilot failed to heed a directive from her co-pilot, an Army flight instructor, to change course.
Radio communications, the tried-and-true means of interaction between controllers and pilots, also broke down. Some of the controller’s instructions were “stepped on” — meaning that they cut out when the helicopter crew pressed a microphone to speak — and important information likely went unheard.
Technology on the Black Hawk that would have allowed controllers to better track the helicopter was turned off.
It’s amazing that the NYT was able to figure all this out (given that it’s true) before the FAA did. But of course the FAA is doing a much more detailed investigation. You can bet that a lot of changes will be made, and some have already, in the operation of military helicopters around Reagan.
*In a NYT op-ed, writer David French argues that “Harvard may not be the hero we want, but it’s the hero we need.” (The article’s archived here.) He starts this way: “Like many of its conservative alumni, I have a complicated relationship with Harvard.” I’ll give an excerpt:
For the second year in a row, the Foundation for Individual Rights in Expression (where I served as president a number of years ago) has ranked Harvard last in the country in its annual free speech rankings. The environment, FIRE determined, was “abysmal.”
In 2023 the Supreme Court held that Harvard had engaged in unlawful racial discrimination in admissions. There was overwhelming evidence that Harvard discriminated against Asian American applicants.
Sign up for the Opinion Today newsletter Get expert analysis of the news and a guide to the big ideas shaping the world every weekday morning.In addition, Harvard also responded horribly to the unrest that swept campus after the Hamas terrorist attacks on Oct. 7, 2023. Last summer, a federal judge appointed by Bill Clinton described the university’s response to antisemitic incidents said to have taken place on campus as “at best, indecisive, vacillating and at times internally contradictory.”
You might think that this record of censorship and discrimination would mean that I’d stand up and cheer at the Trump administration’s decision to withhold billions of dollars in federal funding from Harvard unless it made radical changes in policy and governance.
But I’m not pleased at all. The Trump administration has gone too far.
. . .At the core of the complaint [Harvard’s lawsuit] is a simple idea: No matter what you think of Harvard’s conduct, it still enjoys constitutional rights, and the Constitution does not permit the president to unilaterally wield the power of the purse to punish his political enemies.
To understand why even critics of Harvard should support Harvard’s lawsuit, perhaps an analogy is helpful. Imagine that there is strong evidence that a person committed a crime. Perhaps he shoplifted from a liquor store.
Months later, you see a police officer beating that person in the street. When you ask why, the officer responds that the man stole from a store and is getting exactly what he deserves.
Even a nonlawyer could immediately identify two problems. First, why are you punishing this person without a trial? Second, the punishment for shoplifting is a fine or short jail time; it’s not a public beating. Demanding that the officer stop his unilateral punishment doesn’t excuse the man’s theft, but it does restore respect for the law.
If Harvard failed to protect Jewish students from harassment, for example, Title VI of the Civil Rights Act would permit the federal government to take action against Harvard (and in fact, the Biden administration opened a civil rights investigation of Harvard in late 2023), but as Harvard’s complaint notes, Congress “set forth detailed procedures that the government ‘shall’ satisfy before revoking federal funding based on discrimination concerns.”
The Trump administration flouted all those procedures.
In addition, as much as any person might reasonably object to the overwhelming leftward tilt of Harvard’s faculty and student body, Harvard’s ideological composition is a choice for Harvard to make, not the federal government.
. . . . While we can applaud Harvard’s decision to confront Trump, the university still needs reform, given its recent history. Harvard’s stand might not make it the constitutional hero that we want, but it is the constitutional hero we need.
I think French is right. I hope Harvard wins the lawsuit against the government for precisely the reasons he gives, but I also hope Harvard does enact the needed reforms.
*A BBC reporter has been outed as a pretty horrific antisemite from his social-media posts. Did the BBC get rid of him? Guess!
BBC Arabic journalist Samer Elzaenen has called for Jews to be burned “as Hitler did,” The Telegraph quoted him as saying in a Saturday report.
Elzaenen, 33, who has been reporting from Gaza, has been posting a series of statements on social media that condemns Jewish people, and has also called for violence against them, the Telegraph added, noting that his social media activity in the past 10 years has endorsed and celebrated more than 30 attacks on Israeli Jewish civilians.
He has appeared on the Arabic-language branch of the UK public broadcaster more than a dozen times since Hamas’s terrorist attacks on October 7, 2023. He called the Hamas terrorists who entered Israel that day “resistance fighters.”
Elzaenen had also made similar statements in May 2011 on Facebook, the report added, quoting him saying: “My message to the Zionist Jews: We are going to take our land back, we love death for Allah’s sake the same way you love life. We shall burn you as Hitler did, but this time we won’t have a single one of you left.” 11 years later, he wrote on the social media source, “When things go awry for us, shoot the Jews, it fixes everything.”
The Telegraph noted a post the BBC contributor made over two years ago on a car ramming in Jerusalem that claimed the lives of two boys aged eight and six and a 20-year-old man, saying that the victims “will soon go to hell.”
Elzaenen is working as a freelance reporter for the BBC, or so I see, but a reporter sending news from Gaza shouldn’t be hired (actually, should be fired) if he’s compromised his integrity that way. But hey–it’s the BBC, Jake!
*The WSJ reports that, of all people, Republican lawmakers may scupper Trump’s big tax bill, which is coming up for passage.
Republicans pushed President Trump’s “big, beautiful” tax and spending package closer to the finish line with votes earlier this month approving a budget framework. But as lawmakers return to work this week, hard intraparty fights remain in writing and ironing out the multitrillion-dollar package.
Most GOP lawmakers are on board with the broader plan to extend expiring pieces of the 2017 tax law, introduce new tax breaks such as “no tax on tips,” boost border spending and cut other government outlays. Speaker Mike Johnson (R., La.) wants to get the bill finished by Memorial Day. Still, fights are smoldering over the details, and several small groups of lawmakers have painted certain issues as nonnegotiable.
Republicans are using a process called budget reconciliation that requires a simple majority in both chambers, which allows them to pass the package without Democratic votes. With the Senate split 53-47 and a House divided 220 to 213, any small group of Republican dissidents can block the broader GOP agenda.
These include the following groups (names are given in the article for each one):
A group of so-called budget hawks have hinged their support of the president’s reconciliation bill on the idea that the tax cuts must be paired with significant spending cuts. These Republicans are willing to allow some deficit increases because they assume that economic growth will cover some of the costs. But they’ve indicated that—even though they’ve moved the process along so far—they aren’t automatic yes votes.
. . . One area likely to be targeted in the pursuit of steep spending cuts is Medicaid, a health insurance program that covers more than 70 million people who are low-income and is a big part of state budgets and the healthcare economy. There is a bloc of Republicans warning that deep reductions in coverage will hurt constituents and make GOP efforts to keep the House majority more difficult in 2026.
. . . A group of Republican lawmakers are vowing that their support for the Trump tax bill depends on raising the cap on state and local tax deductions, which was limited to $10,000 in 2017 as part of Trump’s tax law.
Republicans whose states and districts received billions in funding that went towards clean energy projects through the Biden administration’s Inflation Reduction Act are also warning party leaders against clawing back this funding and limiting tax credits that provide incentives. Such a clawback could be used to help offset the cost of other tax cuts, and Trump has repeatedly vowed to repeal the law.
All it would take to block the tax package would be three Republican senators or four Republican congresspeople defecting. Threats from Trump may not work on Republicans who think that they may not be re-elected unless they stand up for what their constituents want. I predict the budget will pass, but what do I know?
*I am pretty sure that this kind of arrest and detaining before deportation was NOT what the American people had in mind when they weighed in against an excess of illegal immigration:
The [foreign-born immigrant] wife of an active-duty Coast Guardsman was arrested earlier this week by federal immigration authorities inside the family residential section of the U.S. Naval Air Station at Key West, Florida, after she was flagged in a routine security check, officials said Saturday.
“The spouse is not a member of the Coast Guard and was detained by Homeland Security Investigations pursuant to a lawful removal order,” said Coast Guard spokesperson Lt. Cmdr. Steve Roth in a statement confirming Thursday’s on-base arrest. “The Coast Guard works closely with HSI and others to enforce federal laws, including on immigration.”
According to a U.S. official, the woman’s work visa expired around 2017, and she was marked for removal from the United States a few years later. She and the Coast Guardsman were married early this year, said the official, who spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss an enforcement incident.
The official said that when the woman and her Coast Guard husband were preparing to move into their on-base housing on Wednesday, they went to the visitor control center to get a pass so she could access the Key West installation. During the routine security screening required for base access, the woman’s name was flagged as a problem.
Base personnel contacted the Naval Criminal Investigative Service, which looked into the matter, said the official. NCIS and Coast Guard security personnel got permission from the base commander to enter the installation and then went to the Coast Guardsman’s home on Thursday, the official said. They were joined by personnel from Homeland Security Investigations, a unit within Immigration and Customs Enforcement.
HSI eventually took the spouse into custody, and the official said they believe she is still being detained. Officials did not provide the name of the country she is from.
There needs to be a hearing before trying to deport someone—,always. Even if this case involves a “fake” marriage designed to keep the woman in the U.S. despite being here illegally, there still needs to be a hearing. Instead, the Navy and Homeland Security are keeping the woman in detention, probably without a lawyer. This refusal to provide lawyers is one of the most offensive thing about these arrests.
Meanwhile in Dobrzyn, Hili is deeply concerned with truth.
Hili: Where is the truth?A: I have a feeling that it’s under the apple tree but I may be wrong.
Hili: Gdzie jest prawda?Ja: Mam wrażenie, że pod jabłonką, ale mogę się mylić.
x
*******************
Here’s a photo I took in the freight elevator yesterday as I went down to do laundry. I think it looks like Abe Lincoln carrying a lantern. Right?
From Duck Lovers:
From Meow. I have no cat so I’m home free:
Masih is still quiet and so we have JKR:
I hate to point this out*, but accusing me of hating men because I don’t think trans women should be given access to all women-only spaces does rather suggest that (in spite of your feverish assertions to the contrary) you’re well aware that these are, in fact, men.
*I don’t.
— J.K. Rowling (@jk_rowling) April 27, 2025
From Luana. While the correlation (0.06) may still be significant with this much data, it’s a lot lower than many of us think. Just throwing money at schools is not a soution:
There is almost no correlation between the amount a school district spends per student and test scores. pic.twitter.com/vsrF48vfl4
— Stat Shepherd (@stat_sherpa) April 26, 2025
From Simon, who says, “No comment needed.” Indeed! Bravo for Macron.
Macron shook one hand.
— Ron Filipkowski (@ronfilipkowski.bsky.social) 2025-04-26T13:45:10.390Z
From Malcolm: Inappropriate napping:
bro always find the worst possible place to sleep 😂😂 pic.twitter.com/QsWVoTlSXG
— Posts Of Cats (@PostsOfCats) April 18, 2025
From my feed. I trust they extracted the toy!
A mischievous puppy accidentally swallowed a toy, and the scene was absolutely hilarious 😂 pic.twitter.com/kj5PZKE9oA
— contents that ll heal your depression 🌻 (@catshealdeprsn) April 27, 2025
From the Auschwitz Memorial, one I reposted:
A French Jewish girl gassed upon arrival at Auschwitz. She was just eight months old.
— Jerry Coyne (@evolutionistrue.bsky.social) 2025-04-28T09:48:03.443Z
Two posts from Dr. Cobb. He gives this one the comment “!!!” Mine is: “It’s impossible, but if it were it might have feathers.”
Well now we've found the biggest grift yet in the de-extinction sphere
— Henry Thomas 🦤🏳️🌈 (@zhejiang0pterus.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T18:08:05.279Z
A new take on an old meme:
— Brian Williams (@briw74.bsky.social) 2025-04-27T15:03:47.302Z
Sure it was.
Comparing this to the UK: There are about 12,000 foreign nationals currently in UK jails for serious crimes, and another 12,000 who served sentences but are now free. “In principle” they could and should be deported on release.
In practice this is close to impossible because they appeal to the courts under human-rights legislation, and the judges (many of whom are openly open-borders advocates) then find some reason to rule that they can stay.
An insistence on one-by-one court cases for each deportee amounts — in practical terms — to saying that no-one should be deported. It’s just not viable for the numbers involved, either in the UK or US (and recall that about 5 million were deported under Obama’s presidency).
The position that no migrant should be deported (illegal or not, criminal or not) is, of course, a position that many support. But others are indeed ok with a due process that extends only to ascertaining that the migrant is indeed illegal or a criminal.
Right. “Due process” is often bit of a motte and bailey trick.
Obviously there should be enough process to be absolutely sure they don’t have a different person. Obviously there should be good records of who is held where and deported on what flight to where.
But advocating for a process as long & careful as death penalty appeals is just another way of saying never deport anyone.
Further, mixing these two up harms the public case for the first kind of due process. It seems that every single news article outraged about the first (very real) problem, cannot resist a segue into stating that, even if the basic facts (e.g. illegally present since 2017) were true, the author would still be opposed, would support indefinite delay for some minor reasons. It never ceases to amaze me that authors cannot stop where their case is strongest — cannot imagine that half the country disagrees with them on the rest.
Coel & Pawel: spot on.
The motte & bailey technique is rather obvious in this case and the only explanation I can think of as to why so many miss it is because the media orgs have focused on “due process” as a means to push a #Resist agenda.
And to circle back to DrB: yes, it was what they were voting for. I don’t recall any of Trump’s speeches saying, “We’re going to send the illegals back to where they came from, but of course we’ll give them a full hearing and a chance to appeal”.
In the case of illegal immigration, campus antisemitism, and government wasteful spending, much of the population agree that these have gotten out of hand in recent years and needed to be corrected or reversed. The left-leaning media focus thus has been on the problems arising from the corrective actions rather than the fact that these are being worked on with real effort.
Thank you!
The most interesting data in the last 5 years has been Euro “Crime by nationality” numbers. And other metrics of assimilation/contribution. Wide variance according to nationality.
Interestingly – in the USA we rarely record nationality in arrest records here: just race and immigration status. We do know that in the US immigrants commit fewer crimes than locals overall.
We see wide variance in Islamic immigrants/tion. Here in the US it tends to be neutral to positive, broadly. In Europe Islamic immigration has been an unmitigated disaster. Selection effects plus culture I guess.
D.A.
NYC
In the US, immigrants (mostly Hispanic) commit crime at a lower rate than the US average because (let’s be blunt) the US average is boosted by the fact that the black crime rate is so high (13% of the population, 50% of the murders).
In Europe, the immigrants (Syrians, Afghanistanis, Somalians, etc) do have a much higher crime rate than the (white) host population. In addition, they bring with them the highly damaging ideology of Islam (which, in the US, Hispanics do not).
“Sure it was.”
Maybe for you, but Trump’s poll numbers on immigration say otherwise. Poll-wise, his 1st hundred days has been an unmitigated disaster. Not that it’s any surprise; he is and always has been a moron, and he’s getting worse since this time he surrounded himself with like-minded morons.
Please. In general, morons are no more sociopathic than the rest of the population. In the case of iDiJT and his capos, “moron” is effectively a compliment
OK then, moronic sociopath…
Fine with me.
Immigration cases such as this must be handled with greater compassion. Each month, it appears that a number of cases like this occur. I would like to see the press publish a tally of such cases at the end of each month. However, to provide context, the press should also publish alongside that number the number of immigrants who entered the US a year ago that month by uttering the word, “asylum.”
Yes. It is the BBC, and the BBC has been vague at best in its coverage of the war in Gaza. Day after day its headlines—which are all that most people read—have been anti-Israel, even if the content of the articles themselves are more accurate but still portray Israel as the aggressor. So, I’m not surprised that the BBC employed an Israel- and Jew-hater as a freelance correspondent.
And at Harvard, I completely agree that Harvard needs to clean up its antisemitism and get rid of its DEI programs, but that the government’s demands go much farther than what the law allows. So, Harvard needs to reform itself and Harvard needs to either win its lawsuit or cause the government to settle and back down.
To be fair to the Beeb and other international news/infotainment organisations that hire on-the-spot action-news reporters, the diversity of the candidate pool is very slim indeed. The Beeb could of course put a higher value on truth v clicks and shut down the circus, but that ship has sunk.
Mick West did a preliminary analysis of the Potomac crash on January 29. I think it is accurate. He is just looking at the path of the aircraft, nothing about communications:
On Harvard, I am always surprised that people cannot stick to the principal. It is like free speech. It is easy to support when you agree, but the crucial thing is if you can support it for speech you disagree with.
+1
Also Juan Brown (blancolirio).
Apparently we don’t need no steenking principles. RIP.
A THOUGHT FOR TODAY:
The trouble with having an open mind, of course, is that people will insist on coming along and trying to put things in it. -Terry Pratchett, novelist (Apr 28 1948-2015)
Pratchett also said:
There is a rumor going around that I have found God. I think this is unlikely because I have enough difficulty finding my keys, and there is empirical evidence that they exist.
The nyt has not really figured out anything. As far as I can tell from this snippet, everything that they report was already known and public. The multiple redundancies is known colloquially as the “swiss cheese model” wherein a random layering of slices of swiss cheese leads to no holes all the way through the stack, but sometimes, the holes do line up which is the equivalent of ignoring safety requirements and/or mechanical failures lining up to give a hole all the way through the package.
Damn it. Real engineering takes time, skill, resources, and sometimes just a bit of luck that the needed data are available. Wait for the full ntsb investigation and report…i have not seen anything recently, maybe the nyt has an early leak of one. As I said in this space just after the accident, in the midst of speculation, it is not easy to even reconcile sensor or instrument readings where in the real world everything is measured within tolerances rather than exactly and timestamps which are critical for knowing or estimating where each aircraft was, when need to be corrected to best values themselves.
+1
… the following supposedly has “Swiss cheese model” but I cannot verify as the publication is not free :
The Contribution of Latent Human Failures to the Breakdown of Complex Systems
James T Reason
Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society of London. Series B, Biological Sciences
327 (1241): 475–84, 1990
https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/1970893/
Not free, I guess.
The Wikipedia article shows with a clear diagram how Swiss cheese factors into the model… imagine slicing a block of Swiss cheese, and think how the bubbles would line up…
Time, skill, resources, luck, and care.
Juan Brown had the crash assessed accurately and so the layperson can understand back in January or February using all info available at the time including his own insights and insight gathered from others. The NYT piece is a joke (“cherry trees” .. “gusty night”?!) compared to Juan Brown (aka channel blancolirio on YouTube).
E.g. The Blackhawk tips down a bit. Juan shows how this cuts down visibility through the window at the top. He covers way more and is very clear on this accident – that’s his brand.
There are some other good YouTube channels for this as well. This is important because I think everyone wants confidence when they fly.
That pie reminds me – I just got a big bag of Wyman’s blueberries on sale – looking to get those into my breakfast program.
Yes, Bryan, excellent reference. juan browne t/a “blancolario” on the you tube is a very good source on aviation incidents and accidents as is “mover” of mover and gonky. Mover has a retired helicopter cw3 pilot from the same group as the crashed helicopter on in one of his shows hopefully at url https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lJmvyEEIkEM
Altogether these guys all have strong mix of military, civil transport, fixed wing and rotary wing, and general aviation experience several still fly for the airlines. They bring in special skills such as an air traffic controller from time to time. They do not speculate in general or clearly mark speculation as such.
Here is yet another reason that I dropped my nyt subscription: they screw up things that I know about; so why should I believe what they say about things I don’t know about?
+1
Or… I’ll have a scoop of Wyman’s for you, how ’bout that? 😁🫐
If Gell-Mann Amnesia is when one is able to spot stories that are false based on one’s own knowledge but then blindly believes other stories in the same paper without skepticism, what is it called when someone like Jim takes the position that if we can spot the story within one’s knowledge as false that it then creates an aura of skepticism for all of the other stories? Batterson Awareness? 🙂
Your mention of blueberries brings to mind a great recipe I just made last weekend for the first time in about 15 years. The recipe is poached pears. Last weekend I was asked to bring a fruit dish to a dinner party and decided on this recipe.
The real star of this is the poaching liquid. After poaching the pears you reduce the poaching liquid down to a syrup. You could put some on your old gym shoes and they would taste good. I remembered how the last time I made it, a big holiday dinner party 15 or so years ago, people were picking their bowls up and licking them.
The connection to blueberries, I added blueberries and strawberries (fresh not poached) to a platter with the sliced poached pears, with a bowl of syrup and a bowl of whipped cream.
The poaching liquid / syrup is very simple, but quite expensive these days because vanilla beans have become crazy expensive. You could of course simply use vanilla extract or vanilla paste, but it’s hard to beat whole vanilla bean.
One bottle of a good Riesling, on the sweeter side (I like to use an Auslese), one whole vanilla bean split, scraped, everything into the pot, one cup of water and 3/4 cup sugar. Bring to a boil and poach the pears (peeled and cored), covered, until a fork goes in soft, or skip the pears and go right to making the syrup. But I think the pears impart a nice additional subtle flavor to the syrup. After poaching simmer until the liquid is reduced to about one cup of liquid, then refrigerate. Serve chilled. A bowel of blueberries with this syrup and some whipped cream is a wonderful thing.
This is an Alton Brown recipe.
Found it – great idea!
How would peaches or any other type of fruit do in this?
For poaching? I think peaches might be too soft. At least ripe ones.
Apples should poach well.
A quick search turned up the following, from Fine Gardening. They say peaches are poachable.
Thanks!
Juan Brown’s preliminary analysis, as always, is excellent. The Swiss cheese model for that flight path has had numerous holes for a long time. In this particular case, the last unclosed hole was the pilot’s disregard for her co-pilot’s instructions.
Agree it looks like Lincoln with a lantern.
I’ll try to find my old pic of JFK apparent in the chipped paint of a concrete floor and send it in. It could be the beginning of a new series :
U.S. Presidents Revealed In …. Weathered Surfaces…
…or something…
As with ‘best songs ever,’ this poetry list is futile. In the first place, so far as I know (and I’ve long paid attention) there is no successful aesthetic theory on artistic value. To make such a list as this one, especially to make it by committee, is an act of hubris on the part of the Society of Classical poets, reflecting the institution’s constraining of ‘greatness in poetry’ to a small walled garden somewhere back in Eden. Why 50 lines or fewer? Why rhyming? Why metrical? To rule out free verse is to banish thousands of 20th century poems in English.
Two instances:
Wallace Stevens might well be a ‘great poet’ by critical consensus. ‘Sunday Morning’ likewise a ‘great poem.’ But it is written in blank verse and is 120 lines long. So nope: not eligible, no matter that its matter and manner make it eminently readable and delicious for contemplation.
No Emily Dickinson–though she meets all the Society’s criteria. Let the committee find and read poem 598, whose opening line serves as a title: ‘The Brain – is wider than the Sky -‘
Enough.
Agreed. Some choices in the 10 “best” list I think are worthy (Shelley, Keats), some I tolerate, but “Daffodils” and “The New Colossus”? This looks like a list of poems for a junior high school English class.
My own humble contribution to Poetry Reading Day:
I dreamed about a distant land
Of azure skies and crimson sand,
And twisted trees with purple leaves
That wither in the sun.
This desolate beauty mutely spoke
About a long forgotten folk
Who lived and perished in this place
Of ruins wrought by time’s embrace.
And of their works remain alone
Crumbling walls of sand and stone,
Broken walls of rough-hewn stone
That bake in the searing sun.
A mournful wind wailed o’er this land
Of azure sky and crimson sand,
As though it grieved for ages past
And the souls who built the cities vast,
That lie in crumbled ruins now,
Baking in the sun.
Very nice. It makes me think of both “Ozymandias” and Coleridge’s “Kubla Khan.”
As with modern art, I’m afraid there are not really (any longer) any agreed upon criteria according to which one could judge better or worse(r) poetry.
What no comments on the cat (kitten?) sleeping in odd places. Even having a nap in the tree is an achievement!
Poetry:
One of my own top-ten is a magnificent (NON-RHYMING) poem by Adrienne Rich:
Fantasia for Elvira Shatayev
(Leader of a woman’s climbing team, all of whom died in a storm on Lenin Peak, August 1974. Later, Shatayev’s husband found and buried the bodies.)
I’ll just quote the first and last verses:
The cold felt cold until our blood
grew colder then the wind
died down and we slept
In the diary torn from my fingers I had written:
What does love mean
what does it mean “to survive”
A cable of blue fire ropes our bodies
burning together in the snow We will not live
to settle for less We have dreamed of this
all of our lives
https://www.tumblr.com/missedstations/25775724338/phantasia-for-elvira-shatayev-adrienne-rich
Another personal favorite, this one by Emily Dickinson:
As imperceptibly as grief
The summer lapsed away, —
Too imperceptible, at last,
To seem like perfidy.
A quietness distilled,
As twilight long begun,
Or Nature, spending with herself
Sequestered afternoon.
The dusk drew earlier in,
The morning foreign shone, —
A courteous, yet harrowing grace,
As guest that would be gone.
And thus, without a wing,
Or service of a keel,
Our summer made her light escape
Into the beautiful.
Thank you very much for the Fantasia for Elvira Shatayev link. 😭
A BBC reporter / pro-Palestine activist literally says, “We’ll burn Jews like Hitler did”. This is the same spirit that led to Yale students throwing water bottles at Israeli minister Itamar Ben-Gvir following his speech on Holocaust Remembrance Day and the antisemitic displays and encampments on college campuses.
When will the press and opinion writers start comparing these Jew-hating terrorist supporters to nazis and Hitler? It’s not like there hasn’t been violence against people for just being Jewish, so even that doesn’t seem to matter.
They might as well be handing out and wearing brown shirts instead of keffiyehs.
Re just throwing money at schools not being a solution, it would be nice if more folks who want to throw less money would actually suggest some non-ideological plausible solutions. Clearly, just throwing money has negligible effect on cultural, developmental, and other chronic disadvantages. Solutions to the interacting ecology of these complex aspects are intrinsically difficult if not unreachable. But either we as a society care enough to try, or we don’t. So far, it’s pretty clear that we don’t.
Fair evaluations of teacher performance would be a start, with increased merit pay for higher achievement among students and elimination of poor performers.
I’d extend that to administrators too. Pay for performance.
School boards need to be driven to push for the achievement objectives, but that’s a voter-driven solution.
Introduce competition via school choice.
I’m on the fence with reducing homework.
But a fundamental problem is parenting. At parent teacher conferences we’d see the same parents that we saw at all of our kids’ baseball and soccer games, band concerts, field trips, etc., and all of our kids were high performers in school. The parents of kids who were low performers in school didn’t show up at the P-T conferences and didn’t show up at other events (but usually those kids didn’t do many extracurriculars either). Correlation between parental involvement and student achievement was very strong, much higher than the money vs. test score chart shown.
If the parents are reinforcing a negative view toward school and learning, there is little the school can do to reverse it. That’s why they make inspirational movies when a child from a bad home environment succeeds – it’s extremely rare. It it was common it wouldn’t be a very interesting story!