@ekentgolding mentioned that the Henry Ford Museum has a Stradivarius violin on display, so I was curious to see about Ford’s violins. Here’s a synopsis of what I found online.

Henry Ford loved what he called “fiddle music,” early American folk music, and folk dancing. When he was a young man, he bought a violin and taught himself to play, although he was only an amateur violinist. In 1926, when he was in his 60s and wealthy, he bought seven Italian violins for an estimated $100,000, including two Stradivari and a Guarneri. (Today that would be about $1.8 million.) He kept them in his laboratory and played them in his dancing room at the lab, where he hosted dances. He also took them to his mansion. He hosted square dances there, too.

From Krakenimages.com, asset ID: 1680432307

I’ve long been fascinated by the changes that occur in a medical practice when that practice is bought by a third party.  I’ve had several friends who ran their own practice for years and were outstanding docs.  Then the regulatory environment gets increasingly complex, Medicare gets increasingly complex, revenue goes down, overhead goes up, and he gets concerned.  Then the local hospital or some other large organization comes in, offering to buy his practice – pay him some money upfront, then put him on salary as an employee.  He knows that he can’t keep up with governmental complexity anymore, and that the hospital has a legal department, a management department, and Lord knows what else.  So he signs up.

I’ve been around here since the beginning, but have only posted seven times. Six have been promoted to the main feed, which is a pretty good batting average.  I’m here to tell you about a new venture I’ve undertaken, telling the history of America through the medium of newspapers. The plan is to post one monthly show, commencing in January 1925 and continuing thereafter. Additionally, there will be three shows a month on specific topics of interest from any time prior to 1925.

To date, I’ve got twelve shows in the can and have posted the three below. These are the monthly shows from February and March 1925, along with a fun episode on the life of America’s premier confidence man, Charles Gondorf. I can’t tell you how much fun it is preparing and recording these little YouTube adventures with my daughter Olivia, my editor.

I enjoyed a lecture many years ago by a Jesuit history professor who opined that the real injury to Ireland from the Norman invasion was that the Normans did not finish the job—instead, the people got a long-term, partial, hostile occupation without the nation-building transformation the Normans had wrought in England.

Around that time, I read a semi-serious paper by two African academics (I am unable to locate a copy) who called for a re-colonization of Africa by the United Nations.  They argued that the legacy of European colonization left national boundaries unrelated to ethnic or historical groupings, weak governments that were pale imitations of colonial bureaucracies crippled by corruption and political instability. Their proposal was to replace virtually all of Africa’s governments with the rule of law, administered by non-corrupt technocrats empowered by powerful nations that would establish patterns, habits and expectations required for a functioning modern democratic economic order and then let new, modernized nations emerge with viable foundations.

On May 1st, Ross Douthat published a conversation with Jonathan Keeperman, titled “The New Culture of the Right: Vital, Masculine and Intentionally Offensive.” Keeperman, known for years on Twitter as “L0m3z” (pronounced “Lomez”), is the publisher at Passage Press, a confidently right-wing publishing company that has reprinted original Hardy Boys stories, HP Lovecraft science fiction, and Robert E. Howard pulp, founded a periodical called “Man’s World,” and put the words of prominent X-lectuals like Curtis Yarvin and Nick Land in print. His ascent from Twitter anonymity to recognition by one of prestige media’s preeminent thinkers — points of reference bookending his doxxing last year, which transmogrified an internet troll into a handsome young man with respectable academic credentials — denotes the suitability of Douthat’s choice of title for his interview series. “Interesting times,” no doubt.

The duo meander a bit into relevant territory, covering conservative hipsters (news to me), “The Longhouse,” and their shifting disagreements over the president, but the explicit purpose of the sit-down was to discuss a future for right-wing art. Kepperman seeks to present order to his seemingly contradictory mission, while Douthat hopes to discern whether Passage is constructing an institution capable of containing the entropic forces unleashed by the New Right it represents. The unstated point of contention between these representatives of two generations competing to replace the retiring Baby Boomers hinges not so much on the tired debate about “what time it is,” but rather on the appropriate action given the late hour. (You can imagine which party is up for pulling an all-nighter and which prefers to turn in for a fresh start tomorrow.)

Weekend talks in Geneva between U.S. and Chinese officials yielded a 90-day pause on the triple-digit tariffs between the world’s two largest economies. In the meantime, American tariffs on Chinese imports were reduced to 10%, down from 145%, along with a separate 20% levy due to Beijing’s role in the fentanyl trade. American tariffs will remain on steel, aluminum, and automobiles, meaning tariffs on China will remain above the current 30%. Chinese retaliatory duties were reduced to 10%.

American trade markets rallied in response to the news, combined with a surge in the dollar and treasury yields and a drop in gold. The relief came as a great surprise to many, as the president said only days ago that an 80% tariff on China “seems right.”

There has likely never been a more tendentious transfer of power in presidential history than the Biden-Harris team’s final act. They salted the ground by allocating billions of unspent Covid funds to George Soros and other radical left-wing groups.

Out of spite, they sold the border wall at giveaway prices. They tied down policy preventing offshore oil drilling, granted Social Security benefits to previously ineligible government employees, defied the Supreme Court to forgive student loans and were uncooperative in relinquishing the VP residence.

My impression is that daffodils don’t get a lot of respect. They bloom early, briefly, and are long gone by the end of spring. However, they are tenacious. They don’t require coddling and they come back year after year.

I used to have a lot of them. They came with the house. My mother didn’t care for them and I suppose it is because they die off early. Daffodils are gone long before the weather is warm enough to sit outside and admire them.

In high school, I wasn’t a sports guy. Sure, I was on the wrestling team, but I never did well. In any case, the prestigious sports at my school were football and basketball. But I was in drama, with lead roles in musicals and comedies. In the high school caste system of the time, this was a mid-position. I was placed below the jocks and cheerleaders but above the stoners and AV geeks. 

I did enjoy doing those shows, but there were challenges to putting on a show at the time that no longer exist. We put on the Woody Allen comedy, Don’t Drink the Water. In the play, a character absentmindedly sings the Gershwin song, “A Foggy Day.” The actor didn’t know the tune; none of us really knew the tune. So how could we find it? In 1978. 

We went to the library and a record store to see if we could find a record with the song. I think we eventually found a music store that sold us the sheet music so someone could plunk it out on the piano.  

Well, The Telegraph is outdoing itself today.

Not content with breathless commentary from the Deputy Royal Editor announcing that Meghan Markle, “as she prepares to relaunch her career” has hired an assistant who used to work for Bill Gates as her first “Chief of Staff” (the jokes almost write themselves**), the lead story tells the tale of 71-year old Julian Foulkes. A retired special constable (this means he was a volunteer in this role) from the Kent police force, Foulkes was visited in November 2023 by six of his former squad mates carrying batons and pepper spray, handcuffed at home. He then had to wait while every inch of his house was combed through, as he was required to answer questions about why he had books by Douglas Murray and copies of The Spectator on his bookshelves (items the female police officer who was pawing through them described on bodycam footage as “very Brexity things”).  The invading policemen also expressed concern over a shopping list in Mr. Foulkes’s kitchen, in his wife’s handwriting, on which she’d indicated a need to buy “bleach, tin foil, and gloves.”

Mr. Foulkes’s wife is a hairdresser.

The other night I did a routine burn of lawn branches in my burn barrel. Once started, it didn’t need any attention, but I found myself hanging around anyway, meditating in the flames. Like most people, I can watch fire for hours. Mankind is rare in this respect: the vast majority of animals instinctively flee from fire.

Actually, people are attracted to more than just fire: we find power and energy of all kinds draw us in, inviting us to share in the experience. And so you’ll see people on nature walks to get in touch with streams and rivers, to bask in the sight of waterfalls and mountains. And there is a thriving “storm-hunter” culture, too, of people who truly lust after the idea of experiencing a hurricane or a nearby tornado.

The forces of wokeness have struck another blow:

New York City’s Times Square installed a statue of a 12-foot-tall Black woman in casual clothing that its creator hopes will encourage people to reflect on “greater cultural diversity”….