By the fire one should drink ale, one should slide over the ice.
By his own hand, he wrote that he had 11 brothers and sisters, "and much kindred...was put an apprentice to a ship carpenter of Thoresby 3 miles from Alford in Lincolnshire where I served 7 years...and after that I bound myself to Frances East for 4 pounds a year for 4 yeares who...after I had served him for about a year and a half sold me to Robert Jafra then living in Boston...and boston church members persacuting som to the ofending of others my master came to Rhod Island with the said parsacuted people and I with him and his wife being sickly and they could not git their maid to Rhode Island with them because Boston members cried out against Rhod Island people whom the said members had expelled from them therefore my master was forced to se.. me to Randal Houlding of portsmouth on Rhode Island and I served a while and after bought out the rest of time of him and after a whil I married a wife hose madon name was mary paine I being about thirty or twenty eight years old or there abouts and the Lord hath given us Eleven Children of which one is ded the eldest is 29 yeares old and upward this 17th the Second month 1670 prased be the our Rock who hath been help and unto us at all times given what thou please it is marcy from thee to receive anything for the Earth."
office address plaque at the Vondelkerk and bulletin for the opera to be performed in its hall; it still hosts weddings, too
A friend of ours recently had the fortune to be in the right place and time to pick out this sweet blonde from a local breeder, who couldn't register her because of her off color. Our friend doesn't care that she's the wrong color, and she IS from good dogs. She's a German shorthair pointer he named Heidi. Close in age to our own darling brunette, below, they will be learning the ropes together.
We took Tuesday to drive down to Tulsa and pick out our girl from the litter. She's a German wire-haired pointer we named Gracie. She howled all through the night, but I didn't sleep where I could hear her, because I know this puppy game from way back.
These two photos were taken at a rest stop not far from the big Ark and Tulsa. She didn't even have a name yet.
The Arkansas River as it runs by Tulsa, Oklahoma.
We'll drive to Tulsa next week and pick out our girl from the litter. 
Bikes and the electric tram in Amsterdam.
Bikes, bikes and more bikes in Amsterdam. Everyone owns a bike.
THOMAS FRIEDMAN: DANES ARE ENERGY SMART
I was riding in a car back to my hotel in Copenhagen, Denmark, at the 6 p.m. rush hour. And, boy, you knew it was rush hour because 50 percent of the traffic in every intersection was bicycles. That is roughly the percentage of Danes who use two-wheelers to go to and from work or school every day.
What was most impressive about this day, though, was that it was raining. No matter. The Danes simply donned rain jackets and pants for biking. If only we could be as energy smart as Denmark.
Unlike America, Denmark, which was so badly hammered by the 1973 Arab oil embargo that it banned all Sunday driving for a while, responded to that crisis in such a sustained, focused and systematic way that today it is energy independent. (And it didn't happen by Danish politicians making their people stupid by telling them the solution was simply more offshore drilling.)
What was the trick? To be sure, Denmark is much smaller than the United States and was lucky to discover some oil in the North Sea. But despite that, Danes imposed on themselves a set of gasoline taxes, carbon-dioxide taxes and building-and-appliance efficiency standards that allowed them to grow their economy -- while barely growing their energy consumption -- and gave birth to a Danish clean-power industry that is one of the most competitive in the world today.
Denmark today gets nearly 20 percent of its electricity from wind. America? About 1 percent.
And did Danes suffer from their government shaping the market with energy taxes to stimulate innovations in clean power? In one word, said Connie Hedegaard, Denmark's minister of climate and energy, "no." It just forced them to innovate more -- like the way Danes recycle waste heat from their coal-fired power plants and use it for home heating and hot water, or the way they incinerate their trash in central stations to provide home heating. (There are virtually no landfills in Denmark.)
There is little whining about Denmark having $10-a-gallon gasoline because of high energy taxes. The shaping of the market with high energy standards and taxes on fossil fuels by the Danish government has actually had "a positive impact on job creation," added Hedegaard. "For example, the wind industry -- it was nothing in the 1970s. Today, one-third of all terrestrial wind turbines in the world come from Denmark." In the past 10 years, Denmark's exports of energy efficiency products have tripled. Energy technology exports rose 8 percent in 2007 to more than $10.5 billion in 2006, compared with a 2 percent rise in 2007 for Danish exports as a whole.
"It is one of our fastest-growing export areas," said Hedegaard. It is one reason that unemployment in Denmark today is 1.6 percent. In 1973, said Hedegaard, "we got 99 percent of our energy from the Middle East. Today it is zero."
Frankly, when you compare how America has responded to the 1973 oil shock with how Denmark has responded, we look pathetic.
Because smart taxes and incentives spurred Danish energy companies to innovate, Ditlev Engel, the president of Vestas -- Denmark's and the world's biggest wind turbine company -- told me that he simply can't understand how the U.S. Congress could have just failed to extend the production tax credits for wind development in America.
Why should you care?
"We've had 35 new competitors coming out of China in the last 18 months," Engel said, "and not one out of the U.S."
Thomas Friedman is a columnist with the New York Times News Service and author of the best-seller "The World Is Flat."
When we were in Edinburgh, we first drank Old Speckled Hen. We found it on the pub menu in Amsterdam as well and had a bottle or two. But in Amsterdam, Heineken is the undisputed King of Beer, so I drank more of that. I can report that Heineken tastes better in the Netherlands than it does here. Below is a link to a bit of history on Old Speckled Hen, actually an English beer. 
http://www.oldspeckledhen.co.uk/
When I was in Amsterdam, I visited the Van Gogh Museum. (Say Gogh as though clearing phlegm twice from your throat for each of the g's, then you'll be pronouncing it like the Dutch!) The museum houses the largest collection of Van Gogh's work, and I saw them all. They were, to say the very least about them, pure genius.
If you have not visited art in the original, you are missing out on an intensely satisfying and inspirational experience. Trust me--art on the internet, or even in fine picture books, does not compare to the originals in color, brilliance, size, textures, emotion. When you look at a great original, you virtually FEEL the artist touching you with his hand, his eye, his soul!
So it was with Millais' Ophelia. I knew about this painting, Ophelia, and was lucky enough to be in Amsterdam while Millais' exhibit was on display. Pretty much near starving and exhausted from hours of the Van Gogh, I went to look at it. Now I have to digress to explain that Shakespeare's Hamlet is my favorite of his plays. Usually just thinking about Ophelia can get me teary-eyed, so you can imagine how I felt in front of this huge canvas, the colors so vibrant, the details of the flowers and background absolutely sublime. It doesn't come across in digital reproductions, but the background is painted with such precision that it is almost photographic, yet not so photographically perfect that you can't also tell that the hand of the artist was involved.
Then there's Ophelia herself. Millais used a model suspended in water to perfect her pose. The story is that the model caught a cold from lying in a tub so long. Millais has painted her just as I imagine Shakespeare wrote her. In the play, great tragedy has fallen on Ophelia. Her lover has scorned her and has also murdered her father whom she loved. It is more than the gentle maiden, Ophelia, can bear, and she is driven mad. In this state, she wanders into the countryside, innocently picking flowers. Shakespeare tells us she fell, but the suggestion is also there that she floated away from life which is tragic. Millais paints her with her hands poised as though she has not accidentally fallen, but has relinquished life. Her face seems vivid with life, so you imagine she is not dead, but has surrendered to the flowing water, the day. In fact, he paints her almost as a Christ figure, innocent and sacrificial. Hamlet's sacrifice.
Needless to say, I did tear up while looking at this painting, but I was not the only one!
