At 16:30 02/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
Never give up on that book Keith. I saw Studs Terkel, the American writer, interviewed on TV last night. I just caught part of it, but I think he's written another book and he's only 91!
M'mm -- don't think I'll reach those years, but if the canaries don't peck me to death I might get a decent book out. I'm growing my beard to look like Darwin -- maybe that'll help.
And please don't bother Harry and I while we are rabbiting about you. You give us plenty to chew on!
I don't know whether you are serious, but you and Harry are a delight in my old age despite your (un)reasonableness in not falling over to be tickled on your tummies with my arguments.
The house and location sound lovely. Last time I was in Somerset I slept in an old barn, 17th Century I believe, converted into part of a B&B.
Well, I'm crossing my fingers. The chief candidate for buying my present house is a Daily Telegraph sports journalist (with a wife who write detective novels), so I'm letting the tone of this neighbourhood down somewhat. But Winsley (for that is the name of the village) is still, thanks goodness, a goodly mixture of yuppie arty-tarties and genuine old farm workers (though on the far side of the village there is a clump of about 250 executive homes with long cars and SUVs in their drives -- but I'm already learning not to talk about these arrivistes -- though, to be fair, they are at least keeping the village shop in good economic health. Many villages round here have lost their village shops, and even their pubs!)
Keith
Ed
- ----- Original Message -----
- From: Keith Hudson
- To: Ed Weick
- Cc: Harry Pollard ; [EMAIL PROTECTED]
- Sent: Tuesday, December 02, 2003 3:24 PM
- Subject: A cottage in the country (was Re: Thoughts on IQ scores (was Re: [Futurework] Talmud vs. Science (or Censorship thereof)
- Ed and Harry,
- M'mm .... I see. While the cat's away ......
- I've been looking at a house for most of the day and when I come back I find that the two old men of FW have been talking about me.
- But I think I've found the place. Two old farm workers' terraced cottages of the 1700s bolted together more recently (well, about a hundred years ago). Attached to another pair similarly joined in stoney matrimony. Front room of my choice extends across front garden boundary into neighbour's building. Her kitchen extends across rear boundary into my intended garden. All very higgledy-piggedly -- probably the result of territorial disputes. Walls are two feet thick, circular staircase, oak beams everywhere. No room for a study on the ground floor -- where I'll need to be in coming years as my breathing worsens -- so I'll have to build a garden office where the GREAT BOOK will be written. Also, I have a sudden fancy out of nowhere to breed canaries or suchlike, so I might build an aviary next to my office with a little doorway between me and them, and then they can fly around as I toil -- no doubt crapping over the keyboard as they do so. That's something that George Bernard Shaw never had in his garden office. But, then, I'm aiming for higher things than GBS....... Anyway, it's nice village -- has all the things that English country villages should have -- cricket club, bowls club (another incipient fancy of mine), Women's Institute meeting room where they teach young wives how to make sponge cakes and marmalade, nice Gothic church with a bent spire and, of course, the village pub. Also, so help me!, two manor houses (both, I'm glad to say, have public footpaths that run right across their graceful and spacious lawns along which the riff-raff can walk -- we're still protective of the common weal over here) and one of them, unbelievably, has a paddock with four llamas in it! What are they doing in the Somerset countryside, for God's sake! Delicate whispy things they are with dainty legs and all, nibbling away and eating fallen autumn leaves rather than choice green grass -- but I was told by a bent and ancient gent returning from the pub in painful gait on gnarled walking sticks and wearing a white beard even longer than mine, not to let my dog off the leash (she was anxious to give chase to these lovely creatures) because one of these dainty llamas would land a well-aimed kick on her skull and crack it open without a doubt. "Them there lamy things can look after 'emselves a'right", we were told. M'mm .... not so dainty after all!
- I return home to find an invitation to speak at an economics conference in Milan next year. So even though you two go on at me, someone out there likes me. Might go, might not. I haven't got my ideas together yet. Still a few more hundred postings to write before my great thoughts start to gell.
- And then I discover, from a wall of e-mails in my mailbox taller than the rooms I've just been to, that you two have been rabbiting on again.
- Ah well, back to the keyboard. Haven't made an offer for the country pad yet. (Oh, I forgot, a well in the garden, of course. Probably better quality than the stuff we get down pipes these days.) Might not get the house -- might not have enough of the ready. If so, it'll have to be another day of house-hunting. Meanwhile, does anybody want a Georgian town house in a most desirable city? And with a genuine ice room -- in which I now sit -- to which ice came from a freshwater lake near Boston in the early 1800s. Honest! Jane Austen visited next door, and David Ricardo lived a hundred yards away while he was dwelling on GREAT BOOK thoughts just like me. (Very sensibly he kept away from the gaming tables.) This place is stiff with history. Also, remembering a visitation (nay, delegation) last summer, I'm planning on putting a plaque on the wall outside:
- "Harry Pollard (and family) slept here"
- Or perhaps not.
- Keith
- At 07:46 02/12/2003 -0500, you wrote:
- From: Keith Hudson
Thanks, Harry. I enjoy my debates with Keith. Just to be fair, maybe one of these days I'll let him win one. As for potatoes, you know what happened to the Irish in the mid-19th Century. Like the sinister potato of Indiana or Idaho, they sat in the ground an lowered. But then their hour came! Ed ----- Original Message ----- From: Harry Pollard To: 'Ed Weick' ; 'Keith Hudson' Cc: 'Christoph Reuss' ; [EMAIL PROTECTED] Sent: Monday, December 01, 2003 5:24 PM Subject: RE: Thoughts on IQ scores (was Re: [Futurework] Talmud vs. Science (or Censorship thereof)
Ed and Keith, Whether your are miffed or unmiffed, your dialogues are delightful (even when you are both wrong). In your discussion of the lowly potato, you are both somewhat condescending and dismissive. Yet, Ed, the only way your next generation could be doctors, lawyer, and the rest, is because potato growing was doing well. Should Keith's forebodings about the oil crash come to fruition, who will be of greatest importance - potato growers or experts in human genetics? Even without the crash, who is more important - potato growers or those who can discuss the frontal lobes? First potatoes, then Madonna (oops! I've already been in trouble with Ray about that). First potatoes, then we'll be able to check out our unmyelinated neurons (whatever they are). I suppose dirty hands come before clean minds. Harry ******************************************** Henry George School of Social Science of Los Angeles Box 655 Tujunga CA 91042 Tel: 818 352-4141 -- Fax: 818 353-2242 http://haledward.home.comcast.net ******************************************** --- Outgoing mail is certified Virus Free. Checked by AVG anti-virus system (http://www.grisoft.com). Version: 6.0.541 / Virus Database: 335 - Release Date: 11/14/2003
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
Keith Hudson, Bath, England, <www.evolutionary-economics.org>
