*Upper Apple.

6 eagles.
1 river.*
2 colors -- gold and brown.

New record for latest date paddling: 11/10.

(Not six sightings, but six at once taking off from the trees on a stretch.)



G'd night.

To Joy.

Tom Blackburn reminds us to take a minute today to celebrate Schiller's 250th birthday ("If you do the math, you notice that Schiller was a contemporary of Jefferson and Madison. Something was in the air in those days.")

Or don't, and suffer the consequence of a life not knowing ... your choice.

By Tom Blackburn
Palm Beach Post Columnist
Monday, November 09, 2009

The choral movement of Beethoven's Ninth Symphony is being performed somewhere in Europe today, on the 20th anniversary of the end of the Berlin Wall. It is a rule in Europe that no major ceremonious occasion can be held without it.

The Ode to Joy, or, as Friedrich Schiller called it, To Joy, is not only a poem that inspired the great romantic composer but also a Rorschach test for the young and idealistic. Schiller was thinking of joy when he wrote the poem at 26, but he also was thinking of freedom. The play William Tell, another work appropriate on civic occasions lasting a week or longer, came later. Schiller is known as the poet of freedom.

Schiller was thinking, too, of brotherhood. "Alle Menschen werden Brüder (All men become brothers)" is a bit of editing by Beethoven, but the original line was "Beggars become princes' brothers."

The poem preaches that joy, or freedom, brings all of humankind into one huge embrace with Nature's Creator. When Leonard Bernstein conducted the Ninth in a celebratory concert televised live all over Europe on Christmas of the Wall-ending year, he had the singers substitute "freedom" for "joy," which is easy in German, where the words, Freiheit and Freude, sound similar and scan alike.

The Wall fell in 1989 on the eve of Schiller's 230th birthday. Tuesday would be his 250th. Germany isn't going all-out this year because of the Wall commemorations and because it had a Schiller tribute just four years ago on the 200th anniversary of his death. If you do the math, you notice that Schiller was a contemporary of Jefferson and Madison. Something was in the air in those days.

Marbach, a picturesque town on the Neckar River downstream from Stuttgart, reopens its renovated Schiller museum Tuesday in the house in which the poet was born. He didn't spend much time there. His family moved when he was 4, and he got out of the duchy Württemberg as quickly as he could after his first play, The Robbers, about a Bavarian Robin Hood, was produced and promptly banned. It's now a classic. German schoolchildren have to read it.

It must have been exciting to live at a time when poets and playwrights were known - and banned - for their ideas rather than for whom they were sleeping with. Back in those days, politicians wrote long articles - and people read them - instead of mouthing other people's sound bites.

Not long ago, a young person, on first encountering Schiller, would glow with exciting dreams and inspiring thoughts. Now, we don't pester students with dead Europeans. We test them. A student might get close to the Ode to Joy through John Lennon's Imagine, but his best chance of encountering that now would be on a Florida license plate.

Songs, as Alec Wilder wrote, are made to sing while we're young. As Winston Churchill did not say (but some clever person did), "If you are not liberal when you are 25 you have no heart; if you are still liberal when you are 40 you have no brain." Even Schiller eventually felt embarrassed by some of the exuberance in his famous poem.

But everybody needs to be young and open to thrilling hopes at some point in life. If you miss that, how will you know what's going on in Beethoven's Ninth when you finally can afford a concert ticket?

We seem to be trying to achieve a generation of young fogies who will confuse accomplishment with celebrity, whose definition of freedom is low taxes and waving the sign they were given, whose highest aspiration would be a better car and whose goal is a shot on American Idol.

Judging by some grown-ups, that project is succeeding. Oh, well. "Seid umschlungen, Millionen..." In honor of the birthday, "I embrace you millions. This kiss is for the whole world."

It's even for the growing number who can't feel the joy of the Ninth.

It'll soon be here...

Suffice it to say, it was a beautiful weekend outdoors. Sunny Saturday, cloud cover yesterday, still in the 60s, with just enough sun peeking through...

I'm not much to photograph my weekend pursuits, preferring to enjoy that which cannot be captured and frozen in time: the sound of oak leaves gurgling at the edge of the water; the scents of decaying leaves mingling on the air with burning wood from a bonfire; the laughs in the distance of children and others taking advantage of getting out, when our high this time of year is typically 45.

The Minnesota gun-deer opener was this weekend too. While a bit of snow might have helped the trackers, and lower temps with the meat preservation, not too many complaints registered.

It's not the sun -- the extra bit of warmth she provides late in the year. It's the opportunity to get out and see what she's shedding light on here today, the changing scenes and the necessary measuring of where you're at, going into the darkness of winter.

I'm starting to eat the blueberries and cherries I put away for the winter; the defenses seem strong, God willing. Not being in the vulnerable group, I'm skipping that flu vaccine to free it up for somebody else, plus I had a fevery bug that laid me low a few days last spring, right before they announced this H1N1 was going around. Hopefully I've built enough immunity to see me through this season, with that and visiting the children in the family and being exposed to the little things, playing close to them.

Wednesday, of course, is the 11th and surely this year, we'll hold Veterans' Day a bit more somber. Wars should be wearying, don't you think? To see through the glorifying hype of the machos on the sidelines. Wars of necessity, foreign excursions, hunting, knowing your backyard turf ...

I've no pictures to offer up today, but I trust you too have your eyes open and live in the present creating your own. For the record, my Saturday morning was spent at our swim opener -- a scrimmage meet, with family members joining in on the relays, and offering us a good mechanical run through for our December and January invitationals.

Yesterday, I spent the afternoon outside, at -- true to her name -- Clear Lake. (There's a reason this area inspired Gaylord Nelson, father of Earth Day.) Should have left the park a bit earlier, so as not to drive at dusk with November being the highest deer-vehicle collision month. But I made it home safely and was asleep in the chair by 7:30pm, with a warm meal inside and the weekend chores all completed earlier in the week.

Can we start the Thanksgiving blessing-counting* a bit early this year?

--------------------------------

*Sure beats the blame game, and the neverending aspiring to ever bigger things, so much that you forget the simple blessings you already possess. "When you're counting up all the things you want and don't have, make sure you also factor in all the things that you don't want and luckily don't have."

Tis a gift to be simple, tis a gift to be free and all that.

Make it a great week -- yes you can! -- worthy of the freedom sacrifices we'll honor this Wednesday. And don't stop thinking about Thanksgiving...

Saturday morning...

and the day awaits!

Is there anything more promising after a long week mired in old grievances than a Saturday outside with beautiful temperatures and no constrictions?

Ah, to be young and alive ... and free on a fall Saturday. Make it a great one, whatever dust you kick up or waters you churn.

----------

UPDATE: How 'bout those NU Wildcats? Only the Big 10, and one game at that, but at that school, you learn early to savor every football victory. And against a ranked Iowa? Hawkeyes, Buckeyes hold the future in their own hands now ...

Now that, my friends...

is a Moon.

Mac Davis: keepin' it humble...

Everybody!


(and the album standard, recorded live.
"C'mon, where's all the kickers in here?")


And rounding out tonight's threesome, here's a Tom Jones classic. Why? because it's good ... to touch ...

Stretch of away games...

I'd say our Secretary of State rather disappointed in that recent swing. Pakistan, Palestine, Israel ... nobody's happy, nobody's buying in to what we're selling. (or giving away even.)

Can't blame any of them; hope we have a back up foreign policy plan, because it looks like Hamas is still fighting, Israel building, Pakistan harboring, and Karzai fully entrenched in Afghanistan. Not a winning record.

And like a Yankees team that underperforms*, we're not exactly playing on the cheap either. Disappointing.








*no such luck this year...

Monday morning sobriety.

Tom Blackburn talks turkey:

At the start of the 20th century, President Theodore Roosevelt saved the public from big business. A century later President Barack Obama has to wade back into the swamp T.R. drained a century ago. It refilled while no one was watching.

Mr. Obama's first step was to ask for a consumer financial protection agency. That bill is meandering through the House. It promises more small print for conscientious borrowers and investors.

Step Two was to cut or ban some over-the-top compensation for geniuses who run financial institutions. They are trading with money the government borrowed from China for them. Their bonuses were coming from the same stash. Inconveniencing whiny multimillionaires plays well in the tabloids. But nothing changed for the long haul. Their bad attitudes and empty threats of quitting only got worse. So there is no salvation in sight on the salary front.

Last week, the administration announced the third step, which consists of dealing with the problem of institutions "too big to fail." This is the big one. It was time to bring out T.R.'s big stick. The plan they announced, however, had the heft of a No. 2 pencil.

"Too big to fail" is shorthand for banks - and, as it turned out, other things - that were so big or so interconnected that everything would crash down around them if they failed. An example is American International Group, which brilliantly maneuvered into a position in which banks worldwide depended on AIG money for their survival. Then AIG didn't have the money when it was needed.

One could write the story of the 2008 collapse in terms of the falling of dominoes that were too big to fail. Still, even as the government stood them back up, JPMorganChase acquired Bear Stearns, Bank of America got Merrill Lynch and Countrywide, and Wells Fargo absorbed Wachovia. Those banks were too big to fail last fall and are bigger this fall. That's going in the wrong direction.

Mr. Obama appears ready to live with bigness, though, and try to manage it. His plan would make it easier for the government to step in and wind down the affairs of a monster the way it does with any little county bank that fails. The monster could indeed fail, the thinking goes, but it would do so neatly and slowly, and with less fuss than a bailout.

Money for the unwinding, in this plan, will come from payments into a fund for failure. The payments will be made by the institutions that are designated too big to fail. First problem of many: If they all go at the same time, as they did last fall, the fund itself will need a bailout.

Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner is whispering in President Obama's ear that banks that aren't too big can't put together the private-sector financing to fulfill Mr. Obama's green energy hopes.

Alan Greenspan, the former Federal Reserve chairman, has been stripped of his infallibility merit badge, but that doesn't mean that he is always wrong. Sounding more like one of T.R.'s trust-busters than his mentor Ayn Rand, he said last month, "If they are too big to fail, they are too big." He even mentioned that getting broken up by the government in 1911 was the best thing that ever happened to the original Standard Oil. The pieces were more efficient and profitable than the monster they came from.

Cutting monsters down to human size is not as easy as it sounds. But the alternative is to live under institutions that may get in the habit of doing what a bunch of them just did. Too-big-to-fail failures brought the world's economies to the rim of another Great Depression and left them behind the eight-ball for probably years to come. The failures are not only in denial; they take offense at any interruption in the resumption of the follies that almost laid us low.

The swamp must be drained. Mr. Obama's plan, however, looks more like marking a path through the swamp for Treasury Department airboats.

November.

Cloudy and cold, but dry.

7 trick-or-treaters tonight.

Twice-baked buttercup squash -- I'm trying to decide if it's better with a bit of maple syrup or honey...