Malibu morning picture of the day - Tuesday, December 16, 2014

Dear Family, Friends, and Gentle Readers,

It's Tuesday again, and here is your picture.

A light rain is falling on Los Angeles and Malibu today, enough to make everybody an hour late for work...

Here's another look.

We can see offshore that it's breaking up. Remember that this view is to the south (Malibu's shore faces south).

Yesterday Monday, near quitting time; evenings look pretty good here too.

And before I leave the topic of seascapes, I had to walk over and check the sign over our bookstore close to quitting time and took this picture outside of that building which does face to the west (hence the setting sun).

Hey, cultural appropriation is just in our DNA; we should
just make peace with it and move on; we are
a nation of immigrants after all. Keep reinventing.

Since I'm so late, can't really chat, but I did notice that today is the 241st anniversary of the Boston Tea Party (December 16, 1773). If you are a modern-day Tea Party activist, Happy Birthday to You, as I am sure you are wont to claim this as your own (but it really belongs to all of us).

Did you know that jurist Oliver Wendell Homes also wrote poetry and that he wrote a poem about the Boston Tea Party? Look it up if you're curious what 19th century patriotic poetry looked and sounded like. It's pretty long, but let me take a minute here and give you his wrap-up at the end.




The lurid morning shall reveal

Justice Holmes: He would have been a quintessential
Chinese magistrate; learned scholars not only
enjoyed poetry, they composed it too

     A fire no king can smother;
Where British flint and Boston steel
     Have clashed against each other!
Old charters shrivel in its track
     His Worship's bench has crumbled;
It climbs and clasps the Union Jack,
     Its blazoned pomp is humbled,
The flags go down on land and sea
     Like corn before the reapers;
So burned the fire that brewed the tea
     That Boston served her keepers!
The waves that wrought a century's wreck
     Have rolled o'er Whig and Tory;
The Mohawks on the Dartmouth's deck
     Still live in song and story;
The waters in the rebel bay
     Have kept the tea-leaf savor;
Our old North-Enders in their spray
     Still taste a Hyson flavor;
And Freedom's teacup still o'erflows
     With ever fresh libations;
To cheat of slumber all her foes
     And cheer the wakening nations!

Love and Freedom to you all, now and ever,
Pops