On the Glacial Drumlin Trail...

... east of Madison, beginning in Cottage Grove, we biked for about 18 miles today.



I like an overcast sky with photographable clouds.



But I don't want to hear thunder. This is how it looked just before a big downpour.



We sought shelter in the library in Deerfield. I read the Utne Reader (after Meade handed it to me) and Meade read the Mayo Clinic Newsletter until the librarian said she was closing in a minute. The worst of the rain was over, and we pedaled back over the trail, dodging chipmunks and frogs and one dark brown rabbit.

Was Art Nouveau "the clumsy process of trying to 'dress up' the inorganic forms of modern construction in the false clothing of the natural world"?

That's what Walter Benjamin thought.

If Benjamin was right about Art Nouveau in general, then Jean Carriès was a dissenter from the movement who refused to play along with the lie. Carriès did not carry the prettifying gene. He had an eye for the monstrous, for the contortions of nature and its abnormalities. If Carriès accepted the idea that the modern city is an extension of the natural world, he did so with the proviso that the extension was a malignant tumor.

The dissent from the lie looked like this:

At the Bunny-in-the-Love-Grass Café...

... you are cute and we are tolerant, but at some point the tolerance ends, and we are thinking slingshot and meat.

At the Cutest Bunny Café...

... aw, aren't you cute?

Enough discord! Here's the cutest little bunny rabbit of all time.

Of all time!



Look at that tiny white dash on his tiny forehead! Look how he destroyeth not the garden, but nibbleth on a fallen sprig!

MORE: You know you want more, or do you fear that your brimming heart will burst with love?

"On Good Friday, Dagwood makes the risen Christ weep with his horrifying rabbit fursuit."

"85 percent of the people in the 'furfans' and 'Blondie fans' Venn diagram overlap are now writing clarifying letters to King Features, emphasizing that Dagwood was not the character they wanted to see dressed in a sexy bunny outfit."

Bonus at the link: "Oh, your husband’s a terrible lout, is he? If you ever need a sympathetic ear, I’m here for you … listening … nodding thoughtfully … drinking your pain, your darkest emotional pain, like the sweet, sweet divine nectar that it is … oh, God, tell me, tell me, TELL ME…"

"Like two tragic Playboy bunnies who're going through some kind of tiresome art school phase where they lounge around the mansion reading Anais Nin...

"... and smoking cloves and talking about how their work as centerfolds is really just a post-modern reclamation of the male gaze and telling Hef not to be such a phallocentrist perv. But now that I'm old, I feel like, a) screw The Girls Next Door, THAT's the reality show I want to watch, and b) eh, the rabbit ears are kind of cute...."

Meade shoots a bunny.

(Enlarge.)