Cole Albert Porter, born June 9, 1891, died October 15, 1964. He and I lived in the same room in Welch Hall on the Old Campus.

St. Clement Cave Monastery, Inkerman, Crimea, Ukraine (click on picture for larger image)

I usually consider myself terribly well-informed, but every now and then along comes some glimpse of new oceans, new continents, entire new worlds of history and detailed information.

A Facebook acquaintance from the Czech Republic posted this picture of the Cave Monastery of St. Clement at Inkerman in the Crimea, which allegedly held the relics of the martyred 4th Pope until they were transferred elsewhere by Sts. Cyril & Methodius.

What a location for the next Indiana Jones movie!

Romanian Orthodox sites website.

NOAH TODAY

“THE GOVERNMENT BEAT ME TO IT.”

Hat tip to John C. Meyer.

The Scotsman, 28 December 2010, reported one very impressive result from Holt’s Auctioneers London Sale of December 16 instant.

A unique triple-barrelled shotgun made for a Scots aristocrat has been sold at auction for £43,000 [$66,000 at the time of the sale].

The shotgun – dubbed the “Holy Grail” – was made in April 1891 for John Adrian Louis Hope, 1st Marquess of Linlithgow and the seventh Earl of Hopetoun.

The three-barrelled ejector, 16-bore gun, with three triggers, was designed by renowned Edinburgh gun makers John Dickson & Son and is the only one of its kind. …

Holt’s founder, Nicholas Holt, said: “This is completely unique – the holy grail for any shotgun collector.

“The gun maker, which still exists in Edinburgh, looked back in their records and found this was the only single 16-bore, round action side by side by side ejector ever made. The mechanism was too complex to make more, but it still works fantastically well today and is capable of shooting three gamebirds with its three barrels.”

That is certainly an interesting gun, but it went, in my view, for a terrible amount of money all things considered. The auction catalogue description mentions a “slight crack at the hand” in the stock. It is nice to have three shots, but in return you get a gun weighing 7 lbs. when you could have a 16 gauge weighing 5 3/4 lb. (like my Greener). The gun is also chambered for old-fashioned 2 1/2″ 16 gauge shells, which until pretty recently had been neither loaded nor sold for decades in the United States.

The side-by-side configuration on this gun must surely be less handy than the alternative ways that the German gunmakers would arrange a drilling: either two barrels side-by-side atop one or two barrels over-and-under with the third to one side.

Why exactly three shots were wanted is unknown. It seems to me that a chap shooting driven grouse would be much better off with a better-balanced, better-handling pair of, or even one, 12 gauge gun. He’d have a better sight picture and a larger pattern.

Three shots are not essential in walking up shooting. If you can’t knock down the bird you just put up with two shots, you probably are not going to do it with three either.

The original owner was Governor-General of Australia, so perhaps there are particular circumstances hunting cockatoos or kangaroos, or in the event of convict rebellions, when a fellow simply has to have three quick shots.

Of course, in that event, he could purchase an American pump gun or semi-auto a lot cheaper.

On one strange and unique occasion, I actually personally scored a triple on ruffed grouse. I was just entering the end of patch of woods in Brush Valley, near Ringtown, Pennsylvania, which consisted of the remnant of an old orchard decayed and overgrown by surrounding forest, when I accidentally blundered into a ruffed grouse convention.

A grouse exploded from under my feet with my first step, and I fired and dropped him. I took another step, and a pair of grouse took flight on either side of me. I only had an open field of fire on the left hand bird, and I was again dead on target. When I moved forward to pick up the dead birds, more grouse exploded in all directions, and I managed to drop number three. Three was the daily bag limit, and I’d never taken the limit without reloading before. Grouse continued to launch from all around me as I recovered my birds. In those days, I was using a beat-up and downright elderly Remington Model 10 pump gun with a Full choke. I could not have done any better if I’d had that nice Dickson.

Hat tip to Vanderleun.

Poles refer to an ultra-conservative Lithuanian as an old żubr, “a bison.” This European bison would be pretty close to my idea of an ideal Romney appointee to the court.

Paul Waldman, at the (left-wing) American Prospect, says it’s time to start panicking, libs.

if there’s anything that ought to make you afraid of a Mitt Romney presidency, it’s this. First of all, if Romney wins he will be under enormous pressure to make sure that anyone he appoints will be not just conservative, but extremely conservative. Remember what happened when George W. Bush tried to appoint Harriet Miers: the right wing had a category 5 freak-out, not because they thought Miers was going to be a liberal, but because they couldn’t be absolutely, positively sure that she wouldn’t be a down-the-line Republican ideologue forever more. Unlike Romney, Bush had no particular need to prove to them that he was a real conservative, but the pressure was great enough that he eventually withdrew her nomination and nominated Samuel Alito, who was exactly what they wanted.

And that will be a shadow of the pressure exerted on a President Romney. So when he gets his chance to make an appointment, there is just no way he will do anything other than select someone pre-approved by the Republican base.

Read the whole thing, and smile.

Jonathan Haidt, in the Guardian, addresses the question of why people less well off are commonly Republican and conservative.

Why on Earth would a working-class person ever vote for a conservative candidate? This question has obsessed the American left since Ronald Reagan first captured the votes of so many union members, farmers, urban Catholics and other relatively powerless people – the so-called “Reagan Democrats”. Isn’t the Republican party the party of big business? Don’t the Democrats stand up for the little guy, and try to redistribute the wealth downwards?

Many commentators on the left have embraced some version of the duping hypothesis: the Republican party dupes people into voting against their economic interests by triggering outrage on cultural issues. “Vote for us and we’ll protect the American flag!” say the Republicans. “We’ll make English the official language of the United States! And most importantly, we’ll prevent gay people from threatening your marriage when they … marry! Along the way we’ll cut taxes on the rich, cut benefits for the poor, and allow industries to dump their waste into your drinking water, but never mind that. Only we can protect you from gay, Spanish-speaking flag-burners!”

One of the most robust findings in social psychology is that people find ways to believe whatever they want to believe. And the left really want to believe the duping hypothesis. It absolves them from blame and protects them from the need to look in the mirror or figure out what they stand for in the 21st century.

Here’s a more painful but ultimately constructive diagnosis, from the point of view of moral psychology: politics at the national level is more like religion than it is like shopping. It’s more about a moral vision that unifies a nation and calls it to greatness than it is about self-interest or specific policies. In most countries, the right tends to see that more clearly than the left. In America the Republicans did the hard work of drafting their moral vision in the 1970s, and Ronald Reagan was their eloquent spokesman. Patriotism, social order, strong families, personal responsibility (not government safety nets) and free enterprise. Those are values, not government programmes.

The Democrats, in contrast, have tried to win voters’ hearts by promising to protect or expand programmes for elderly people, young people, students, poor people and the middle class. Vote for us and we’ll use government to take care of everyone! But most Americans don’t want to live in a nation based primarily on caring. That’s what families are for.

The Daily Caller reports Fox News’ Greg Gutfeld’s mocking reaction to Sarah Jessica Parker’s plea during Sunday’s MTV Music Awards for viewers to support Obama.

Well, I tried to watch the MTV Movie Awards last night but something stopped me — oh yeah, I threw up,” Gutfeld said. “If MTV were a person, it would be the divorced dad getting an earring trying to hit on his teenage daughter’s friends. It’s the old fool trying to be cool. I admire, however, how the aging in-crowd sticks together even as they fall apart. Take the ad that aired during the awards with that annoying lady with three names. In it, she raffles off a dinner with herself, the president and his wife.”

“‘We need him and he needs us.’ Who is ‘we?’” Gutfeld asked. “I call it a co-dependence of cool where both sides cling to each other while everyone else jumps ship. Celebs, desperate to be seen as smart and not shallow, cling to Obama as the p.c. life raft during auditions, Frappuccino runs and coke parties. Saying ‘vote Obama’ beats thinking. It’s the best thing to happen to no-talents since breast implants, which is why Hollywood is now Obama’s volunteer PR army and personal ATM machine. But while the prez and this cult are the best star-pairing since ‘Thelma and Louise,’ — you know how that ended. And also, if Anna Wintour is the face of the campaign … your campaign may need a facelift.”

James Lileks loses his temper about Mayor Bloomberg’s latest exercise in Nanny Governance.

A culture that redefines food choices as moral issues will demonize the people who don’t share the tastes of the priest class. A culture that elevates eating to some holistic act of ethical self-definition – localvore, low-carbon-impact food, fair trade, artisanal cheese – will find the casual carefree choices of the less-enlightened as an affront to their belief system. Leave it to Americans to invent a Puritan strain of Epicurianism.

It’s worth looking at the whole thing.

There is some sort of paradox about the fact that you cannot have significant cultural resources without the critical mass of humanity provided by a great urban metropolis, but to live in a city with access to concerts, opera, and theater, you have to submit to living under the rule of crooks and nincompoops.