Greenness:
Pineapple shorts:
Perfection!
Pineapple shorts:
Perfection!
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Showing posts with label photography. Show all posts
Monday 8 October 2018
Saturday 6 October 2018
We went down to the University of Wisconsin Library Mall because we saw the announcement from our local socialists: "We must show the ruling class we are not going anywhere."
"If Kavanaugh is approved tomorrow it will only be the beginning of sustained mass movement that will come for more than the rapists and misogynists they put and hold in power. Down with Trump, down with Kavanaugh, down with the GOP, down with the patriarchy and down with capitalism!"
There are a lot of people milling around downtown Madison. It's a Farmers' Market day on the square. It's a big football Saturday, and the game's not until this evening. And there was the big annual Marijuana Harvest Festival right on Library Mall.
And this is what the Socialist flooding of the street looked like.
It's not as if anyone was gravitating toward the Democratic Party. People cut a wide swath around this table:
That's the Socialist crowd in the background. A few feet away the mall was teeming:
The Libertarians were there, hoping to divert the marijuana-oriented passers-by:
It wasn't hard to see what they had to offer:
There are a lot of people milling around downtown Madison. It's a Farmers' Market day on the square. It's a big football Saturday, and the game's not until this evening. And there was the big annual Marijuana Harvest Festival right on Library Mall.
And this is what the Socialist flooding of the street looked like.
It's not as if anyone was gravitating toward the Democratic Party. People cut a wide swath around this table:
That's the Socialist crowd in the background. A few feet away the mall was teeming:
The Libertarians were there, hoping to divert the marijuana-oriented passers-by:
It wasn't hard to see what they had to offer:
Friday 5 October 2018
Thursday 4 October 2018
"There's so little honesty in law and politics. I sometimes feel like retreating from all of it and..."
"... reading poetry, listening to music, and painting flowers. But something holds me into this strange practice of observing and talking about it. If I'm just an observer and a writer, why don't I go find something beautiful to observe and write about?"
I wrote in the comments to "The intemperance of the law professors' 'judicial temperament' letter."
David Begley answered my question: "Go watch the Badgers destroy the Cornhuskers on Saturday. A beautiful WI win. I’m serious."
I answered: "I plan to watch the Brewers dissolve the Rockies tonight. Plus, I am eating grits this morning."
There's been much talk of beer this past week. It's easy to redirect the beer stream to baseball and the team with the beer-based name: The Brewers. In the rock-paper-scissors visualization, beer pours over rock. Beer wins! Brewers and grits. That's something beautiful in this lying, cheating world.
And by "rock," I don't mean ice. Don't put ice in your beer, and don't throw ice at anybody, unless you've got the right fun-loving, ice-throwing relationship with them.
UPDATE: The Brewers won in the bottom of the 10th inning, which is all we saw on TV. The rest of the game we heard on the car radio, as we drove home from Indianapolis, which is where I ate those grits, at a restaurant I recommend, Milktooth.
I wrote in the comments to "The intemperance of the law professors' 'judicial temperament' letter."
David Begley answered my question: "Go watch the Badgers destroy the Cornhuskers on Saturday. A beautiful WI win. I’m serious."
I answered: "I plan to watch the Brewers dissolve the Rockies tonight. Plus, I am eating grits this morning."
There's been much talk of beer this past week. It's easy to redirect the beer stream to baseball and the team with the beer-based name: The Brewers. In the rock-paper-scissors visualization, beer pours over rock. Beer wins! Brewers and grits. That's something beautiful in this lying, cheating world.
And by "rock," I don't mean ice. Don't put ice in your beer, and don't throw ice at anybody, unless you've got the right fun-loving, ice-throwing relationship with them.
UPDATE: The Brewers won in the bottom of the 10th inning, which is all we saw on TV. The rest of the game we heard on the car radio, as we drove home from Indianapolis, which is where I ate those grits, at a restaurant I recommend, Milktooth.
Monday 1 October 2018
Sunday 30 September 2018
"But how can you love a liar?"/"I don't know. But you can, fortunately. Otherwise there wouldn't be much love in the world."
Those are lines spoken in the play "Heartbreak House," by George Bernard Shaw, which we saw at The American Players Theater yesterday.
The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.
Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says: "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."
Hector explains his behavior:
Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.
AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?
"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.
Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?
Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:
The 1920 play is set just before World War I. The line "But how can you love a liar?" is spoken by the rich bohemian woman Mrs. Hushabye, and the line that follows it is spoken by Ellie, a poor young woman who is in love with Mrs. Hushabye's lying husband, Hector. Ellie intends to marry a rich capitalist, Boss Mangan.
Mangan, trying to extricate himself from the planned marriage, reveals what a liar and a cheater he is, but Ellie still wants to marry him. She says: "If we women were particular about men's characters, we should never get married at all, Mr Mangan."
Hector explains his behavior:
HECTOR. What am I to do? I can't fall in love; and I can't hurt a woman's feelings by telling her so when she falls in love with me. And as women are always falling in love with my moustache I get landed in all sorts of tedious and terrifying flirtations in which I'm not a bit in earnest....Mangan reaches a breaking point and declares he's getting the hell out of the house, "Heartbreak House," where all the action takes place. Hector makes a move to go too and to turn it into a ridiculous romantic escapade:
HECTOR: Let us all go out into the night and leave everything behind us.I thought you might enjoy those lines. There's much more, of course. Shaw was writing a play deliberately in the manner of Anton Chekhov. Note the seagull on the set in my photograph (at the middle of the right edge).
MANGAN. You stay where you are, the lot of you. I want no company, especially female company.
ELLIE. Let him go. He is unhappy here. He is angry with us.
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Go, Boss Mangan; and when you have found the land where there is happiness and where there are no women, send me its latitude and longitude; and I will join you there.
Chekhov famously said "If in the first act you have hung a pistol on the wall, then in the following one it should be fired. Otherwise don't put it there" (and "The Seagull" is the Chekhov play with the last-act gunshot). So when Captain Shotover brought out a box of dynamite to tinker with in Act One, I figured Shaw meant us to see the Chekhov joke and to expect an explosion in the next act. We're expected to anticipate the whole lot of them blowing up and to contemplate, throughout, whether that isn't what they all deserve.
AFTERTHOUGHT: What is the difference between "escape" and "escapade"?
"Escape" + "ade" suggests a drink that produces escape.
Yes, I know that's not right! Do you expect me to look it up in a dictionary?
Speaking of drink, Captain Shotover (a very old man) speaks often of "the seventh degree of concentration," which seems to be some mystical state that he learned about in his seafaring journeys, some 1920s New Age-iness. Late in the play, Ellie declares:
ELLIE. There seems to be nothing real in the world except my father and Shakespeare. [Hector]'s tigers are false; Mr Mangan's millions are false; there is nothing really strong and true about [Mrs. Hushabye] but her beautiful black hair; and Lady Utterword's is too pretty to be real. The one thing that was left to me was the Captain's seventh degree of concentration; and that turns out to be—
CAPTAIN SHOTOVER. Rum.
Saturday 29 September 2018
Friday 28 September 2018
Walking in the corn today...
At the Pope Farm Conservancy, where there are no sunflowers this year.
Talk about anything in the comments. This is intended as an open thread, even though I'm not saying "café." "Corn Café"... that would sound stupid.
Thursday 27 September 2018
Wednesday 26 September 2018
At the Twitter Prison Café...
... you're free to talk about whatever you like.
The photo shows a storefront on the east side of Madison.
Monday 24 September 2018
I've always been afraid to go for a walk alone in the woods...
... but I did it today. At Blue Mound:
I had the Indian Marker Tree Trail completely to myself. Beautiful!
Talk about anything you want in the comments.
The long view:
I had the Indian Marker Tree Trail completely to myself. Beautiful!
Talk about anything you want in the comments.
The long view:
Sunday 23 September 2018
Saturday 22 September 2018
At the Orange-and-Blue Café...
... you can talk all night.
And do think of using the Althouse Portal to Amazon. One thing I bought recently is "Educated: A Memoir" by Tara Westover. I recommend it. Here's an excerpt, something that I was listening to as I walked on Willy Street today:
I had grown up preparing for the Days of Abomination, watching for the sun to darken, for the moon to drip as if with blood. I spent my summers bottling peaches and my winters rotating supplies. When the World of Men failed, my family would continue on, unaffected. I had been educated in the rhythms of the mountain, rhythms in which change was never fundamental, only cyclical. The same sun appeared each morning, swept over the valley and dropped behind the peak. The snows that fell in winter always melted in the spring. Our lives were a cycle—the cycle of the day, the cycle of the seasons—circles of perpetual change that, when complete, meant nothing had changed at all. I believed my family was a part of this immortal pattern, that we were, in some sense, eternal. But eternity belonged only to the mountain.
There’s a story my father used to tell about the peak.... From a distance, you could see the impression of a woman’s body on the mountain face: her legs formed of huge ravines, her hair a spray of pines fanning over the northern ridge. Her stance was commanding, one leg thrust forward in a powerful movement, more stride than step. My father called her the Indian Princess. She emerged each year when the snows began to melt, facing south, watching the buffalo return to the valley....
