Palladian's Gadsden flag redesign.

Here's my original challenge to redesign the Gadsden flag. Click here to collect all the responses.

Christmas greetings!

A card from Palladian. Check out his cool sketchbook here.

Tablescape with pizza.

ADDED: The red thing is a Ball of Whacks.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian has his tablescape, which contains an image of this page:



And Roger von Oech, the designer of the Ball of Whacks stops in.

These would be lovable if they were moles...

... but they are mice. "Inadvertently raked up" — Meade IM's from the garden.

ME: Ouch

MEADE: I didn't hurt them

I even ushered the mother to where I moved them

And then I boiled and ate

All three of them

At first, Meade thought he'd raked up baby moles, but when he found the panic'd mother searching for her lost children, he knew they were mice. But let the topic now be moles. Because, yesterday, we were talking about squirrels, and NotYourTypicalNewYorker said:

Squirrels aren't bothering me.

It's the moles, I can't abide the cursed moles.

I put the trap here, they go over there...

It's the moles I tell ya.

And Meade offered some gardenly wisdom:

The moles are your friends. They aerate the soil and eat pest larvae. It's a misconception that they eat bulbs and other desirable garden plants - they're completely carnivorous.

Set your mower blades higher and/or walk down their feeding runs before firing up the mower. Also, where the female mole pushes up a mound of soil, spread it with a rake or with your boot heel so the mower doesn't hit it. It's the mower that does the damage, not the mole.

Adding tags to this post, I knew I already had the tags "mice" and "rodents." I thought it would be excessive to make a tag "moles." Too narrow! But are moles rodents? No, they are Insectivora. And that underlines Meade's point. Moles don't eat plants. Don't worry about moles. Worry about Meade... eating boiled mice. And me, out there in Meade's grass with the squirrels...



... levitating.

(Thanks to Palladian for the TrANNscendentalism.)

"Boy, that's an overwhelmingly white crowd."

Says Instapundit, looking at my pictures from the Obama rally.

That's also a popular observation in the comments. Seven Machos started it:

I see white people...

Palladian said:

Do you think they'll photoshop a little diversity in that crowd, the way they used to at the University of Wisconsin-Madison?

Revenant said:

Heh! Yeah, it IS whiter than a typical tea party rally, isn't it?

Yes, that's the thing. If these were pictures of a tea party rally...

What's in Bob Woodward's "Obama’s Wars"?

The NYT reports in advance of the publication date:

The president concluded from the start that “I have two years with the public on [Afghanistan]” and pressed advisers for ways to avoid a big escalation, the book says. “I want an exit strategy,” he implored at one meeting. Privately, he told Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. to push his alternative strategy opposing a big troop buildup in meetings, and while Mr. Obama ultimately rejected it, he set a withdrawal timetable because, “I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party.”...

[T]he book describes a professorial president who assigned “homework” to advisers but bristled at what he saw as military commanders’ attempts to force him into a decision. Even after he agreed to send another 30,000 troops last winter, the Pentagon asked for another 4,500 “enablers” to support them.

The president lost his poise... “I’m done doing this!” he erupted....

And President Hamid Karzai suffers from manic depression.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian writes:

"I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party."

He doesn't mind losing the war or the country, however.

ADDED: My response to that quote — "I can’t lose the whole Democratic Party" — is: The President is saying — can it be true? — that there isn't even a small fragment of the party that would support fighting the war with a serious commitment to victory. How damning!

"Living in her gilded cage all these years, Madonna, once a frequenter of dirty Manhattan bars, clubs, and pizza joints, has lost touch with the Real New York...."

And then she encountered our Palladian!

If only he had stuck around. He might have heard a whispered "Thank you."

Ha ha ha ha.

"I yelled at Madonna today, and I didn't even realize it until later!"

So Madonna is filming this movie in Brooklyn... and our longtime commenter Palladian has an encounter:

I yelled at Madonna today, and I didn't even realize it until later!

She's apparently directing a film (!) and was shooting right in front of my house in Brooklyn on Wednesday. I came outside to do my morning walk and there were crowds of people all over the place: screaming black girls, curious Chassidim, hipsters in Ray-Bans feigning disinterest, irritated cops... I saw a bunch of Arri equipment boxes and realized it was a film shoot of some sort. I walked a few feet down my block and a chick with a headset held up her arm and said "You have to cross the street, sir!" I replied: "I don't have to do anything. This is my neighborhood, and a public sidewalk, and I'll go where I please!"

I walked a few more feet and another drone with a headset came rushing up to me and said "The sidewalk's closed. Please cross the street!" I replied: "This is a public sidewalk. I will continue to walk where I please."

I pushed past him and a I came upon a haggard woman in sunglasses, a baseball cap and a scarf printed with a stylized skull pattern holding a clipboard and looking into a hand-held monitor along with a couple of other people. Being a veteran of the terrible world of film production, I recognized that this woman was probably the director. I paused as I passed and said to her: "You need to inform your brain-dead P.A.s that they need to treat us residents a little better, honey." She looked at me, expressionless behind her sunglasses for a moment before one of the men with her said "Move along, sir." I replied "a hearty fuck you to both of you" and I walked onward.

Later, when I was on my way home, I stopped in the local market and the Korean guy who runs the place said to me: "what do you think of that mess out there?" I told him of my encounter with the production assistants and the director. He laughed and said: "do you know who that director is? Madonna!"

I smiled and said "No, I didn't recognize her.. but she looks like hell and sure runs a shitty location shoot."

Everyone's talking about Obama not wearing his wedding band at the big press conference today.

"A White House spokesman tells POLITICO that Obama's ring is being repaired, though it's unclear what needed to be fixed."

Aw. Come on. What could need fixing on a wedding band?

ADDED: You know, if they were just staying together for the sake of appearances, he'd be sure to wear the ring. In the comments, XWL thinks the repair might be a size change:

Maybe he's losing a lot of weight... He was skinny to begin with, trending towards bone thin for a man in his late 40s can't be a sign of improving health. Don't remember any shirt off pictures from his recent spate of vacations, might be that he's looking sickly. He certainly looks more haggard facially, of late.

Meanwhile Palladian says:

Maybe it was dropped in the fires of Mount Doom...

Hey!

I think I got the blog working again.

Did you notice it was out of service?

IN THE COMMENTS: Jason (the commenter) said:

Yes, it was taken over by some weird person who pretended to be you and marry one of the commenters. It's been a weird trip. Glad to have you back. (What have you been doing the last year or so?)

Palladian said:

Yeah, all the frequent posts concerning 893-mile bicycle rides through the Andes, 627-mile cross-country skiing trips through the Alpines, recipes for squirrel and morel mushroom en croûte cooked in the wild, 2800-mile drives to the middle of nowhere to collect pigment samples for house-painting projects, cutting turf with plow oxen to plant beds of sorghum... very, very distressing to those of us allergic to the unnatural lifestyles of healthy, happy outdoors-people.

Thank goodness we're back to withering, subtle mockery delivered while sipping coffee in cafes, the sort of thing that brought the better of us here to begin with.

Liberal fascism.

Last night, I posted a picture of Union Terminal in Cincinnati that made Dead Julius say:

Nice American flag drapped just like a big Nazi flag...

In a train station too... You know who liked trains? Nazis! Therefore...

Althouse is a FASCIST! Q.E.D.  (Meade has too much connection to the earth to be called a fascist... he's just a FASCIST-LOVER!)

That station is amazing. So were the fountain sculptures. I wanna visit the city now. One thing on my to-see-in-Cincinnati list is the sculpture of the great Cincinnatus returning the fasces and returning to the plow... the fasces resembles an Uzi.

The link goes to a photo that I didn't take.

Palladian comes in with:

Cincinnati has a replica of the Capitoline She-wolf in Eden Park, presented to the city by none other than Benito Mussolini himself!

And that link does go to an old blog post of mine — with a photo by... well, that's not by me either. By Meade:



Hey! Look at those teats, Tits! This vindicates Alan Simpson. And Jonah Goldberg.

At the Helengoyle Café...

... take a good look at what you've done.

(Thanks to Palladian for the image.)

CNN is clinging to women readers.

It's so pathetic and obvious. Here's a screen grab of the center of the home page at CNN:



What makes people happy? Engagement... unhappy? Baby sloths enjoy the sweet life... aw... A big fish is in trouble! Miss USA! The lighter side of Elena Kagan! The style of the First Lady! A sitcom! Dancing With the Stars!

Reading CNN to find out the latest about happiness... that's not going to make this woman happy.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian switches the captions around:

"Add a couple in Banlon pantsuits and the dry look and you'd have a KTEL or Sessions album cover..."

Palladian critiques my photograph and does the artwork to drive home what cheeseball hicks he thinks we are to like sunsets:

Old images.

I have so much more time and subject matter for artistic projects in the summer, and with classes ending on Wednesday, I was looking for inspiration in the earliest examples of photography on this blog.

1. The blog post with the first digital photograph I ever took.

2. An early model of a post using photographs I happened to take that day and creating — concisely — a narrative arc.

3. Riffing on a movie with photographs taken — unabashedly — from the TV screen.

4. Photos of signs and displays accompanied by text that looks at them from a skewed perspective.

5. Attending and interpreting a genuinely interesting artistic event: Here and here.

6. I could use my drawings in a bloggy style. That reminds me: Palladian has done a magnificent job of presenting his drawings on line. Check it out. I used to travel with a pen and a sketchbook instead of a camera. I was highly influenced by this book. You have no idea how much time I spent, traipsing about, alone, looking and drawing. I don't know if I could go back to that, now that I've found digital photography. But I think there are alternative things that you can do, combining drawing and photography. I wonder if I'll ever get back to something like that....

7. Another idea is to get a new lens for the SLR camera and see what happens. 

Anyway... just casting about....

"RESURRECTION: NYT runs Obama 'cross' photo..."

Says Drudge, pointing to this "Illustration by Nola Lopez, photograph by Damon Winter." I'm not sure where the photograph ends and the illustration begins, but, either way it's quite a bizarre accompaniment to an article called "As Health Vote Awaits, Future of a Presidency Waits, Too." I don't think there's anything in the article even touching on religion... except to the extent that Obama is some kind of religion.

IN THE COMMENTS: Some of you think that the cross in this context should be understood as representing health care and not Christianity at all. (Sea Urchin said: "Well, it is a square cross, which I associate first with the picture on my first aid kit.") I hope that if you think that, you also agree — and many don't — with what Justice Scalia said at oral argument in Salazar v. Buono, the case about the cross that the Veterans of Foreign Wars built in the Mojave National Preserve, which is supposed to honor the soldiers who died in WWI:

"It's erected as a war memorial. I assume it is erected in honor of all of the war dead... What would you have them erect?...Some conglomerate of a cross, a Star of David, and you know, a Muslim half moon and star?"

Peter Eliasberg, the American Civil Liberties Union lawyer arguing the case, explained that the cross is the predominant symbol of Christianity and commonly used at Christian grave sites, not that the devoutly Catholic Scalia needed to be told that.

"I have been in Jewish cemeteries," Eliasberg continued. "There is never a cross on a tombstone of a Jew."

There was mild laughter in the packed courtroom, but not from Scalia.

"I don't think you can leap from that to the conclusion that the only war dead that that cross honors are the Christian war dead. I think that's an outrageous conclusion," Scalia said, clearly irritated by the exchange.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian said:

There's a theory that the symbol of the red cross was painted on the baseboards of corridors in the great palaces and castles of England during the middle ages and Renaissance to deter people from urinating in those places, a common problem in those times. It was supposed that a person would not want to micturate upon the symbols of Albion and of his saviour Christ. These effluence-protected spots thereby became associated with cleanness, which led to the later use of the cross to connote sanitation and hygiene. This association eventually led to the use of the red cross as a symbol for medical practitioners, once the connection between hygiene and disease prevention was made, that is.

Sarah Palin has had us in the palm of her hand all day.

Isn't it funny how she caught our attention with her scrawled-on hand? I picture her — hanging out with Todd today — laughing at how absurdly fascinated everyone is with her.

Hey, Palin fans! Here's an idea: Ink a list of 4 items on your left hand with the second one crossed out. Take a photo of it and link to it here.

Variation: Make up a list of 4 items with the second one crossed out for some other person's hand, for example for Barack Obama or Harry Reid or Andrew Sullivan or ... anybody. This too can be done as a photograph.

Come on. It'll be fun.

IN THE COMMENTS: Palladian delves into my Flickr-stream and finds this:

Closeup:

AND: Palladian also says "Obama doesn't solely rely on his teleprompter friends..."

"... as you can see in this digitally-enhanced enlargement":

"I thought I saw him walkin' up over the hill, with..."

I'm listening to the old Dion song this morning:



No, it's not because I'm trying to come up with a verse about Teddy Kennedy... or that I picture him — accompanied by angel-harp music — walking into Heaven with various beloved dead political heroes. (Get a grip, people, Teddy lived to a ripe old age and died in the normal course of things, which is the best any of us can hope for. He was not cut down in his prime like Abraham, Martin, John, and Bobby.)

It's because I need to pull this comment just buried under the "Third Man" post and elevate it to the heaven of today's front page. It's a comment about lost commenters — a song parody. And please, write new verses for that song. The collection of beloved old commenters who have wandered off is longer than Trooper, Titus, and Palladian. And they haven't died. I'm picturing them not in Heaven, but drinking and talking late into the night in some bar over on Atlantic Avenue.

Another room in the Obama Museum.

We've been playing off a photograph of Obama looking at paintings in a museum. Henry the commenter, combined the original photo with Chip Ahoy's photoshopped Obama as Van Gogh, so the idea is Obama looking at paintings of himself.

Palladian was inspired by Andy Warhol's "Mao" paintings, which were hung on his "Mao" wallpaper at a 1974 exhibition in Paris, like this:



Here's the new concept:

Obamalisa and Obama Van Gogh.

"Mona Lisa. Please, someone do it! The sly smile would be so perfect," said Kentuckyliz, in that post yesterday where I'd asked for Photoshoppings of Obama in French impressionist/post-impressionists paintings.

Palladian gave us this:



Chip Ahoy was all:

Ha ha ha ha ha

I can't stand it. But Palladian, Post- Impressionist? Allow me recommend filter/pixelate/pointillize for Seurat-like dotage to conform Obamalisa, ha ha ha ha ha, that kills me all over again, with our Hostess' bleg.

Nothing like a hilarious anachronism. Let's celebrate with a reprise Chip's delightful Obama Van Gogh:



ADDED: MPH does the Modigliani variation: