Three hundred years is a long time. Imagine how many people move from childhood to old age and beyond seeing, experiencing the same spiritual home, essentially unchanged from generation to generation to generation. Imagine that it is beautiful, elegant, simple, and perhaps imperishably pure. That was the First Congregational Church of Pomfret, Connecticut. Which died today.

A lovely church burned to the ground today. Don’t tell me it’s just a building, a materialist artifact. It’s a sacred place. Countless people were baptized, married, and memorialized upon their deaths there. They went there in hard times to renew hope, in good times to express thanks and humility. It was a place whose shape and legacy served to make them live up to the best in themselves. Its purpose was inspiration.

Its loss is not a brick and mortar accounting transaction. It’s a death in the family. A death for our own Lake, who has enlivened and informed this and the previous site for years. We are all in mourning tonight.

What music is appropriate? Later, I know, my wife will help me, but she is not here, so this is all I can think of:

I’m Personally, Elementally, Absolutely Certain He Meant: Go For it!

Apparently, we’re all supposed to tiptoe around this subject. Witness what I’ll call…

Exhibit I.

But I continue to think there’s a phase transition out there, one straw, one grain of sand, one stunningly shameless lie too many. For example, here’s a candidate I’ll call…

Exhibit II.

How brazen can it get? He’s just laughing at us now.

“Do I dare, and do I dare…?” — T.S. Eliot

*Oh, yeah. Look up the meaning of the name.

P.S. FAIR WARNING. Don’t get carried away.

If you follow the clues above, you could come to believe you’re on the trail of Serendicity. It’s more like insanity, or quantum pattern, which is indistinguishable from insanity. It’s a rabbit hole you should NOT dive into.

Beware the Rabbit Hole.

Most of you don’t know the difference between coincidence and conspiracy, destiny and determinism, or prophecy and paranoia. Don’t go there.

Don’t read anything into the first initial of this poem‘s title character. Or the content of the poem. Probably the kid book writer stole it from here for Freudian reasons of his own.

Don’t track down the etymology of the big fruit up top. Doesn’t matter that the noun is Persian and the verb means betrayal.

Don’t follow the Jacob root to Esau and Hussein. There is no link. If you read past the first full paragraph, you need professional help.

Consider instead that there’s something we could call Pseudo-Serendicity. I’m working on a definition of it. In the meantime, don’t move. Work on the London Times crossword instead.

Sydeffexin. We can make life better. We treat nothing, so you can enjoy all the side effects at no risk.

You’ve seen the ads for years. Hey, do your knees hurt? Wuddafuxxin can change your life. Ask your doctor. What are you taking for your Tunnel Vision Disease? Ask your physician about Seewhydexxicin. Is your skin getting worse even after all these years? Has your doctor told you about Pincperfexxscinitol? Are you still depressed after years of therapy? Maybe you should ask about Rilyrilychillinexxinacin? Do you suffer from Beady Eye Syndrome? Try the breakthrough medication Lizycine. [Picture of the good life to follow.]

Erik Satie music keeps playing. Cue butterflies and hummingbirds. “Yes, life can be great! (Quick sotte voce) Possible side effects include rashes, heartburn, acne, diarrhea, constipation, urinary incontinence, gynecomastia in men, hairy backs in women, instantaneous blindness, sudden heart explosions, total shutdown of the immune system, irresistible suicidal impulses, bleeding from every orifice, complete paralysis, gangrene, psychosis-inducing brain tumors, noxiously smelly feet, public tooth loss, and spontaneous human combustion. Do not suspend taking this medication without consulting your physician, which could lead to spree killing in your children's bedroom. Do not take if you’re a male who wants another erection or if you’re a woman of child-bearing years, post-child-bearing years, pregnant, or trans-gender pre-female. Otherwise, Sideffexxin is perfect for you. Unless you’re a smoker or have ever sprained your knee. Consult your physician for best results.”

Okay. As an annihilation of health care quality in the name of contractual health care coverage, ObamaCare is all side effects and no care. Joke. Not a very good one, I concede, unless you’re into gallows humor. Sorry.

But the rest of this is not. The drugs of modern medicine are all about unintended consequences. Here’s an article that has somewhat more authority than my goof on the subject.

Today I’m thinking about two things. How the rest of us survive in the age of ObamaCare and what possible unintended good consequences there might be.

As it happens, there are a couple of workarounds. One for families who have lost their individual or employer insurance. And one for businesses who are trying to resist the extortion of the federal death panel ObamaCare indubitably is without flinging employees into the abyss.

If you’re a person or a family, read this essay about the best way to opt out of ObamaCare.

It’s not insurance per se, but it’s insurance for real, the way close-knit communities like the Mennonites do it. The ObamaCare law allows it. Legal, cheaper, and beyond the reach of the IRS.

If you’re a business, read this, which is about self-insurance, also legal and exempt from ObamaCare, and also cheaper than the federal monstrosity.

Both of these are exemptions the heartless Republicans managed to sneak into the law. Ha.

But there’s a larger point than workarounds. One driven home to me by own experience and a new book called A Physician’s Apology.

The doctor author’s point is that we get too many drugs prescribed to us and we take too many of them without pushing back. He says there are 700,000 emergency room visits a year caused by side effects of prescription drugs. As many as 100,000 deaths might be prescription mistakes of one kind or another.

Which got me thinking, in my contrarian way, that higher premiums, deductibles, and co-pays might work counter to Obama’s purpose. Maybe, just possibly, people will — however improbably and counter-intuitively — discover that they don’t need all the supposed health care they have been receiving. Maybe they’ll stop calling the doctor for every ache and pain and blue mood. Maybe they’ll rediscover that people with abundant food and water are more inclined to be healthy than sick, regardless of all the sick-making propaganda that’s spewed through the media.

I know I was shocked to learn that if and when I’m forced into ObamaCare I’ll be penalized by up to triple premiums because I smoke. Okay. On the other hand, it’s hardly true that I have been a burden on the health care system up to now. In the last 30 years I have been to a medical doctor exactly twice. Once because I had a coldy-flu type thing when I had an important business trip to make by plane (he advised me, icily, not to smoke), and once when I put my hand through a window in a colonial house (c. 1757) with reluctant sashes. I’d bled for hours on an antique couch and needed stitches to clear my name. That’s it.

Things I don’t remember. Like lots of medical check ups as a kid. We only went when we got sick or fell out of a tree, or for occasional shots. We got our vaccinations from Dr. Ware’s sadistic wife. (He was nice; he stitched my head when I fell on the radiator after I jumped on the bed when I’d been told not to. He thought it was funny.) I don’t remember Boppa, who died at 82 with a 17 year old hole in his back, taking lots of pills, and I spent a lot of time with him. As I recall, we both in those days took our aspirin one at a time with a cracker afterwards. I don’t remember much pill-taking by my mother’s parents, who both lived past 90, although my mother did die at just 80 some years after a close call with a too powerful blood pressure pill that nearly exterminated her electrolytes over a decade or so. She seemed frailer after that.

Are you starting to catch my drift? My own approach has always been to stay as far away from doctors, their pills and their procedures, as I can. I’m always befuddled by the statistics relating how many times a year “healthy Americans” visit their doctor. On their side is the fact that I’ve probably had pneumonia twice in the last ten years without receiving antibiotics. There was a moment or two in there when I thought I might die. But I figured I wouldn’t, just like I never have yet. Once they get you into hospital, under medication, obeying their rules, fearing their check ups, you’re done anyway.

And I don’t believe their pronouncements, their certainties, their truths. I’ll close with one provocative example. How many women have been told that rising breast cancer rates are inexplicable, unless they’re the fault of chemicals, pollution, or some other act of man?

Take a look at this. Granted, it’s not definitive. But maybe longevity and immunity are more about trying to do the best you can rather than spending x-number of hours on treadmills and converting to the vegan faith?

I’m no fanatic on the subject of health. All I can boast for myself is that I’m not overweight. But I resent the idea that the government owns my body. It’s MY vehicle to do with as I see fit. If it expires, used up, tomorrow, it has still taken me far enough. It was never my dream to be a fossil in a Hoveround, revolving around a liege lord who calls himself president.

So, still, today, and perhaps for a few months to come, I can say defiantly to my totalitarian master, “This is a bag of bones you have not yet acquired. I have no prescriptions, no illusions about what a phony you are, and no reason to hide from your vain attempt to possess my body. You’ll never get there.”

Problem is, so many of you have so many years ahead of you to proclaim the same defiance. Can you do it?

The me I’m supposed to be at my age. Make sure you don’t wind up this way either. It’s the worst side effect of all. Shammadamma.

She talks about verbal abuse of women. Anyone recall her defending Palin last week?

I know how much trouble this is going to get me into. So I’m still thinking about it, weighing my words.

But the premise I’m toying with is that women will be the end of the United States and western civilization.

I’ll give you one big thing to think about. Many civilizations, dating back thousands of years, have established conditions that could keep women safe from rape and other kinds of violence caused by superior male strength, including serving in combat. (Sexist barbarians, I know.) But none of them put women in charge until the 20th century. Yes, I know Elizabeth I, Tzu Hsi, Golda Meir, and Margaret Thatcher were leaders of nations. They were the exceptions. There are always exceptions, or I wouldn’t be married at this point in my dotage.

Why didn’t they want women in charge?

Amazing to me that Dee Dee Myers, former press secretary to President Clinton, could write a book arguing that women should be in charge of everything now. Why? Because women ARE in charge of everything now and everything sucks. (Don’t even try to tell me Obama’s in charge because Michelle would set you right in a second.) Kathleen Sebelius is in charge of ObamaCare, and she can’t begin to figure out what her responsibility might be. Janet Napolitano is in charge of Homeland Security, and she has no idea what to say about the NSA rampaging through our private communications. Who was in charge at the IRS when persons and groups were targeted because of their allegiance to the Constitution? Her name was Lois Lerner. Who was Secretary of State when the U.S. consulate in Benghazi was attacked for nine hours and our foreign service personnel were slaughtered with no attempt to rescue them? Hillary Clinton. Who was the Speaker of the House when the ObamaCare nightmare got jammed through congress on purely technical manipulation of the rules? Nancy Pelosi. Who was the presidential adviser who undertook the secret negotiations that will now give Iran nuclear weapons? Valerie Jarrett. Or VaJ as her intimates call her.

And who, besides me, in the entire MSM/Internet universe has put this list before you in these terms? No one. Because men have become women too.

Why do they talk about a nanny state? Because women want to be in charge of everything, down to the shirts and underpants you wear. They know better because they know better and don’t stop talking long enough to learn different. The nonstop all-knowing mouth is what’s most important. Mayor Bloomberg doesn’t need boobs or a uterus to be everybody’s mommy. He has a virtual ‘knitting vagina,’ which spins the myth of fem superiority into nooses designed to hang everyone.

Women are somehow kinder, fairer, smarter, wiser, more cooperative, more competent? Give me a break. For the most part, they’re the same rigid, backbiting, dangerous, fanatically emotional time bombs they always were. Why nobody was ever dumb enough to put them in charge. Until we did.

But think…

Have women’s lives really improved since they got the vote in 1920? More importantly, have the lives of our citizenry as a whole improved since women got the vote? Maybe there’s more money because of all those working moms, but even the leftists don’t believe more money equals happiness. (Only power matters to them.) There are more abortions, more divorces, more broken homes, more struggling single mothers, more bastard, fatherless children who fall into lives of drugs, crime, and failure. And more middle class strippers, lap dancers, hookers, Craigslist escorts, and amateur webcam porn performers than our grandparents could ever have imagined. Wouldn’t the suffragettes be proud?

Okay. I’ll leave you to think about it on your own. I’ll also leave you to think about the moral cesspool we’ve plummeted into since the day almost a hundred years ago when women got the vote. The idea that women are somehow more moral is also a joke. Men commit the most violent crime? Imagine a million babies a year flushed down toilets… And on top of it, they want all of us to pay for it and admire them for their twerking.

Progressives call this progress. Don’t they?

Back at you later.

Raebert’s done in.

It was a fine day here but tiring. Great food, family members who actually get along with one another, and two kids who are smart, funny, and affectionate. Go figure.

Tougher for Raebert, who is frightened by children. A good moment for a grandson, though, who was unnerved by Raebert’s size and learned that petting the big guy soothed both of them.

Did I mention that Lady Laird put on a feast with all the trimmings? I helped. You should have seen me with my giant list in the supermarket. One guy who was stacking shelves helped me find things four times. Old ladies helped me find the rest. Only one was disapproving. She thought I should have known that chocolate chips were in the baking aisle, not the candy section.

So we were both tired come the weekend. Why I can justify the amount of football and streaming shows we watched from Turkey Day on.

Highlights. The Auburn Miracle. Instantly into legend, of course, as the greatest college football game ever played. Also, probably the greatest ending of an Ohio State-Michigan game ever. (My mother and both her parents were Ohio State alums. You don’t ever get over that affiliation.) Lady Laird’s Ravens beat the Steelers, and my Eagles survived another heart attack comeback by a team they dominated utterly for three quarters. She also had the last laugh over me with respect to Peyton Manning. I’ve been saying he’s done and should retire, which I got really final about when I witnessed his second interception, a wobbly mess of a pass at a particularly inopportune time. I won’t say she chortled when the Broncos subsequently scored 28 unanswered points. But she did.

What else? We watched Red2. Hilarious from beginning to end and better than the movie it was a sequel to, whatever critics say. Pure entertainment, witty and ferociously paced. We also stumbled on Wallander — no, not the weepy BBC Kenneth Branagh slop, but the Swedish version, which is now on Netflix and splendid. There are 13 episodes and three or so in, they’re neither repetitive nor unintelligent.

It was also her birthday yesterday. Which we celebrated very very quietly, with the promise of more to come. I’m taking steps. I guarantee it.

And Raebert will be better, by and by.

Do you have any? Until I married Lady Laird, I’m not sure I did. Other than watching the Detroit Lions lose a football game in the afternoon.

She came equipped with one decidedly odd one I should have known about but didn’t. Which is that you must listen to Arlo Guthrie’s Alice’s Restaurant on the day.

You see, there was once a radio station that was THE radio station. WMMR in Philadelphia. They billed themselves as “progressive rock” and pioneered the on-air personalities who didn’t yell like the AM stars of the time, you know, Wolfman Jack, Cousing Brucie, et al. MMR even had a nerdy little guy who just loved the music. His name was Michael Tearson, he adored rock and roll music, and he was a bookishly conversational radio host, so earnest that he felt like everybody’s smarter younger brother.

That was the WMMR experience. They talked to you. They were fans. They were crazy. They did Stones A to Z weekends, playing every single Rolling Stones song in alphabetical order. You could plan your weekend around your favorite letters of the alphabet.

And then there was Pierre Robert, who without my permission, started the Alice’s Restaurant tradition on Thanksgiving.

I learned about it from my wife about ten years ago, something she shared with her son, the both of them listening at the same time, and I found it, you know, moving somehow.

Frankly, I have no idea what the song has to do with Thanksgiving. But I don’t care. It’s a good thing and a reminder that there were happier days when not everything had a political meaning or penumbra or tag.

WMMR is not much anymore. Just another classic rock station stuck in the past. Pierre Robert is still there, a literal graybeard who also seems stuck in time. The good news is that Arlo’s song is available on Youtube, and the tradition can continue in perpetuity.

This morning I woke her because it was time to check the turkey which had been roasting overnight. Sleepily, she said “I thought it was me whose favorite holiday was Thanksgiving.” Not anymore, sweetie. I’ve caught the bug.

Do you have a weird Thanksgiving tradition of some sort. If so, please share.

Regardless, have a great day with your family. We sure will.

Our new home away from home. You gotta be tough in the New Normal.

Just a note to let you know there won’t be the usual Norman Rockwell Thanksgiving greeting this year. Lady Laird and I are camped out on the threshold of the Deptford Mall waiting for the Black Friday sales to begin.

She’s got the list. It’s so top secret even I haven’t been allowed to see it yet. I’m guessing there’s stuff on there about GPS, needle cams, and electronic jamming devices. But my job is to boil the water we’re siphoning from the nearby ladies room faucets. I’m also responsible for preparing the MREs, which is tricky because they’re frankly inedible without the right application of ketchup and French’s brand onion rings. And Raebert, obviously, insists on having his own tent, which he keeps knocking over. Guess whose job it is to put it up again.

So it’s not a holiday here. Hope things are better in your little corner of the world. Maybe you’re one of the ones who can afford a turkey. I really do. We have cranberry jelly. I’m saving it to put on the MREs come Thursday. That’s the day we here at the mall call T Minus One. Other people call it Thanksgiving.

Honey? Honey? Where’s the bag with the bungee cords? Honey?

Where’s she wandered off to now? Damn. Gotta go.

Have a good one.

Raebert’s tent. He’s wandered off too, dammit.

JUST FOR BARBARA. Not to worry. He ran back home. Apparently, tent life isn’t for him. Poor baby indeed.

Mommy promised to be back soon.

Real men aren’t this obnoxious and despicable.

Professor walks into a bar. Says “I’m looking for sociopaths.” Bartender says, “Mirror’s right behind my head, sport.”

One afternoon in October 2005, neuroscientist James Fallon was looking at brain scans of serial killers. As part of a research project at UC Irvine, he was sifting through thousands of PET scans to find anatomical patterns in the brain that correlated with psychopathic tendencies in the real world.

“I was looking at many scans, scans of murderers mixed in with schizophrenics, depressives and other, normal brains,” he says. “Out of serendipity, I was also doing a study on Alzheimer’s and as part of that, had brain scans from me and everyone in my family right on my desk.”

“I got to the bottom of the stack, and saw this scan that was obviously pathological,” he says, noting that it showed low activity in certain areas of the frontal and temporal lobes linked to empathy, morality and self-control. Knowing that it belonged to a member of his family, Fallon checked his lab’s PET machine for an error (it was working perfectly fine) and then decided he simply had to break the blinding that prevented him from knowing whose brain was pictured. When he looked up the code, he was greeted by an unsettling revelation: the psychopathic brain pictured in the scan was his own.

Interesting, huh? Maybe not really. I’ve been talking about the danger of secret sociopaths in our midst for at least a dozen years. Must not be that interesting.

Still. We keep hearing about Rahm Emmanuel and his brothers Ezekiel and Fuckface (the guy in Entourage I’ve never watched). I think, in NYT and WAPO terms, we’re supposed to admire them. I’ve always kind of taken it for granted that they were sociopaths from a family of same. Sorry. I come from a family equipped with moral conscience and empathy. My bad.

Here’s more about the confessed sociopath in the Smithsonian article:

It wasn’t entirely a shock to Fallon, as he’d always been aware that he was someone especially motivated by power and manipulating others, he says. Additionally, his family line included seven alleged murderers, including Lizzie Borden, infamously accused of killing her father and stepmother in 1892.

But the fact that a person with the genes and brain of a psychopath could end up a non-violent, stable and successful scientist made Fallon reconsider the ambiguity of the term. Psychopathy, after all, doesn’t appear as a formal diagnosis in the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders in part because it encompasses such a wide range of symptoms. Not all psychopaths kill; some, like Fallon, exhibit other sorts of psychopathic behavior.

“I’m obnoxiously competitive. I won’t let my grandchildren win games. I’m kind of an asshole, and I do jerky things that piss people off,” he says. “But while I’m aggressive, but my aggression is sublimated. I’d rather beat someone in an argument than beat them up…”

Of course, there’s also a third ingredient, in addition to genetics and environment: free will. “Since finding all this out and looking into it, I’ve made an effort to try to change my behavior,” Fallon says. “I’ve more consciously been doing things that are considered ‘the right thing to do,’ and thinking more about other people’s feelings.”

But he added, “At the same time, I’m not doing this because I’m suddenly nice, I’m doing it because of pride—because I want to show to everyone and myself that I can pull it off.”

You can’t pull it off. There’s always going to be something bent about you. Your first instinct will be to smash, obliterate, annihilate, and ridicule those who obstruct you. How dare they?

You give yourself away by your overreaction. See video above.

Ezekiel? We’re damned lucky you’re not a guy who tracks down human prey and leaves them in ponds with some missing trinket as trophy.

I’m not kidding. You can’t see what’s wrong with you. Obama can’t either. The rest of us, if we pause and reflect, know exactly what’s wrong. When Thanksgiving comes, you don’t give thanks. You want thanks. Pitiful you.

In our neck of the woods we like film noir. Lady Laird has all that Russian and German language literature in her past. She can even stand Strindberg (I’m joking. Nobody can stand Strindberg.) So I pick dark stuff for her to watch. How I found Annika Bengzton, which I hope some of you have watched. She’s hot, the subtitles aren’t that onerous, and she takes her top off from time to time.

But there’s a dark strand in American movies too. Most of you know the handful of archetypes: Double Indemnity, Sunset Boulevard, Touch of Evil, and Kiss Me Deadly. You know. Black and white. Not so happy endings. Or beginnings for that matter. All these titles are indexed at imdb.com if one or two aren’t known to you. Guess which one ends with a nuclear explosion.

Truth is, though, there are many such movies, starring everyone from Bogart to Mitchum to William Holden to Glenn Ford. Lots of sultry blondes no better than they should be. Including dolls like Jan Sterling, who made this appearance in a 1950 production called Mystery Street:

Not her best 10″ by 12″ glossy, to be sure.

It’s a startling little movie. The hero is a surprisingly diminutive Ricardo Montalban (the real life inspiration for “the most interesting man in the world” in Dos Equis ads), who is aided in his murder investigation by a Harvard professor (Bruce Bennett) who seems straight out of the modern TV series CSI.

All kinds of stuff is upside down. Patrician Elsa Lanchester plays a madam. The wife of a man who is implicated in the death of a prostitute trusts him enough, correctly it turns out, to stand by him even at the risk of her own life. And the villain is a Harvard snob who sneers at the Hispanic cop on the case. But everybody is wearing a suit and tie. Except the women, obviously, of whom one is a female marine, who knows exactly how to police a 1911 .45 caliber semi-automatic.

Life ain’t what we think it is. The past ain’t as dumb as we sometimes want it to be. Movies weren’t as naive as we pretend they were. Watch this one if you think you know better.

btw, collections are available.

Lots of collections

Well, I’ve only watched one this season, so it’s not what you’d call a comprehensive update. I was curious to see Rachel Maddow in the gay cop sitcom Brooklyn Nine-Nine.

Rachel isn’t always funny in his new gender-bending comedy.

I thought it was just me not appreciating all the subtleties, but here’s the scoop from an industry insider Q&A:

Question: Have you gone back and looked at Brooklyn Nine-Nine since your initial review? I watched the first few weeks with some hope, but it seems to me to have gotten into a rut way too quickly. Rachel Maddow’s shtick has gotten old real fast, and what seemed like interesting characters at first view have all been exposed as one-trick ponies. And for goodness sake, what is the great Andre Braugher doing here? Lord knows, I would love to see him have another successful series/ (I watched and enjoyed Thief, Last Resort and even Hack.) And the first episode gave him an intriguing backstory, which should have started developing by now and could add to the development of other characters in the squad room. But after the pilot, they dropped all that entirely, and his role seems to be reduced to playing the stern parent to Maddow’s child. What I thought might be another Barney Miller has become, way too fast, Leave It to Beaver with cops. Am I overreacting here, or has the show failed to capitalize on its initial promise? I’m willing to give it time, but I don’t see any growth here at all. – Rick

Matt Roush: Watch Tuesday’s mostly delightful Thanksgiving episode, and see if you feel more generously toward it. I’ve watched most episodes this season and still like the show – more than any other fall network sitcom (which isn’t saying much) – and while it has been uneven and I take your point that Maddow’s show-off character is often more annoying than funny, there’s strong ensemble work and great diversity on display here, including Braugher’s masterful deadpan as the sly, un-stereotypically gay boss. He’s absolutely worth exploring further, but there’s time…

Not really. If these ratings are any indication. The show has three more viewers than the zero who are watching Michael J. Fox’s uproarious comedy about unfunny people in an unfunny situation.

I don’t think that leads to Renewal Land. Rachel better hang on to his day job. In my humble opinion.