Flag disrespect at the Wisconsin State Capitol protests:

I saw this today, at the State Street entrance:



Does the fish on the flag make it more disrespectful to have it on the ground or does it somehow cause this not to be a U.S. flag anymore and therefore okay to put the whole thing on the ground?

"The Fish Filet™ Commercial KFC Doesn’t Want You To See (Anymore)."

"'It is no longer airing and will not be re-aired,' said a flack for Yum! Brands, the perpetually thrilled conglomerate that owns KFC."

ADDED: That's an interesting YouTube portal into Chinese commercials. Check out this very weird Panda cheese thing, and this one made me feel like I needed to have a seizure.

The morning after the State of the Union.

I hope you're feeling okay. Hope you didn't smoke too much salmon last night. Here's the video of the whole thing, in case you missed it... or forgot it... or just want to relive every scintillating moment of it...

ADDED, THE EVENING AFTER... I embedded last year's SOTU. So... quite a morning after for me. LOL. Delete.

Man! Getting Nancy back. That's quite an aftereffect!

Stanley Fish finds "a unity" to Sarah Palin book "America by Heart," but "it is not one Palin proclaims or works out discursively."

NYT readers will have their Sarah Palin processed through the Mind of Fish:

Rather, the unity is conveyed by the quotations that carry the argument, long (sometimes two-page) quotations from an impressive variety of authors, quotations that are strong in isolation and even stronger when they are laid next to one another. The book is really an anthology. The author does not present herself as controlling or magisterial; she gives her authorities space and then she gets out of the way. Her performance mimes the book’s lesson: rather than acting as a central authority, she lets individual voices speak for themselves. Humility is not something Palin is usually credited with, but here she enacts it by yielding the stage as others proclaims the truths she wants us to carry away.

Sarah Palin is doing something that is, perhaps, pure genius, and it takes the brilliant professor to say what she is doing so that the ideas are apparent even to New York Times readers, who are well-defended against the notion that Palin is anything but stupid. Even slapped in the face by Fish...



... they resist. I'll be the professor translating the diverse items into a unity for your easy consumption: NOOOOOOOOO! Favorite way of saying "no": surely, the book was actually written by Bill Ayers some ghostwriter.

At the Frozen Lake Café...

... maybe you can catch something.

"The caribou that waited too pliantly in the cross hairs is doomed to become stew for Palin and an allegory for politics."

"The elegant animal standing above the fray, dithering rather than charging at his foes or outmaneuvering them, is Obambi. Even with a rifle aimed at him, he’s trying to be the most reasonable mammal in the scene, mammalian bipartisan, and rise above what he sees as empty distinctions between the species so that we can all unite at a higher level of being."

That's Maureen Dowd. She's going there. Into the realm of violent metaphor, visualizing shooting the President. It's an amusing riff, but it's an image I would self-censor.

In any event, I agree with a lot of her mockery of "Sarah Palin's Alaska":

Sarah checked her freezer at home before she flew 600 miles to the Arctic, trying to justify her contention that she needs to hunt to eat. Wasn’t it already stocked with those halibuts she clubbed and gutted in an earlier show?

“My dad has taught me that if you want to have wild, organic, healthy food,” she pontificated, “you’re gonna go out there and hunt yourself and fish yourself and you’re gonna fill up your freezer.”

For the price of all that plane-flying, couldn't you just mail-order a freezer-full of meat?

What Sarah Palin is doing to her children.

The ratings are up for "Sarah Palin's Alaska." Oh, that's so sad for the people who exulted last week when the ratings were down. I skipped last week myself, but I watched this week's show. It was pretty cool seeing the Palins hauling in fish nets, slicing salmon into strips, tying the strips with string, and hanging them up in a smokehouse, with Todd's Eskimo grandmother demonstrating how to set up the fire to get the smoke just right.

I was touched by Sarah's interaction with Trig and with another boy with Down Syndrome (a member of her extended family). It made me cry and it made me think about this post by Andrew Sullivan criticizing Sarah Palin for combining motherhood and a career in national politics:

Anyone one who genuinely cared about the privacy of her kids would have either said no [to the vice presidential nomination] or been extremely careful to release the information as soberly as possible....

[S]he parades a special needs infant in front of the press, dangles him half-naked in front of book tour crowds, uses him constantly as a rhetorical campaign prop, and cites him at almost every speech to appeal to pro-life voters....

What Palin has done with her young children is unprecedented. Think of how Obama strictly protects his daughters, and how George W. Bush did the same. 

Think of how the press — including you — regards those daughters as off-limits but goes after Palin's daughters.

What Palin has done is use her children, having failed to actually rear them. She is still doing it on her reality show. That she has gone so far as to use and thereby abuse a child with Down Syndrome whose interests are clearly in seclusion, careful nurturing and care, and constant parental attention, tells you a huge amount. 

Seclusion? Is that right, tucking those kids away from the rest of the society? Why not be out and proud?

Did you watch "Sarah Palin's Alaska"?

I watched for about 20 minutes. I might have been interested in a reality show — more like "The Osbournes" — where we see some semblance of everyday life in this unusual family, but — as the title warns us — it's more of a travelogue — with Sarah Palin talking almost constantly. They went fishing and saw some bears. Sarah said "wow" and "oh my gosh" a lot. They fished, Todd caught fish, and Sarah complained that Todd caught all the fish. Why shouldn't Todd catch the fish?

Here's the Television Without Pity forum for discussing the show. I love the stern moderator's rules:

What’s on topic in this thread?

• Things you saw on the show.

What’s not on topic here?

• Politics
• Bristol's appearance on DWTS
• Politics
• Your personal judgements about Palin's fame/family/career
• Politics
• Posting to tell us that you're not going to watch.
• Politics.

In other words, this isn’t a thread to snark on Palin at will. Please take extra care to follow the rules of the board and the special rules for this thread. If you don’t pay attention to the rules, and treat this as a general thread given to you to bash or praise Palin or your fellow posters, you will be warned. Thanks.

Good rules!

At the Koi-Ahoy Café...

... rouse yourself from last night's serenity and move.

(Last night's koi were activated by Chip Ahoy.)

At the Koi Café...

(Enlarge.)

... let go... serenity... sleep... there will be plenty of excitement tomorrow.

"Jean [Harlow] did not like to wear bras and was advised by her mother to ice her breasts to keep them firm."

"Similarly, she did not like to wear underwear because she disliked lines and she also preferred to sleep in the nude. Although these clothing practices were considered racy, especially due to her sex-symbol status, she actually approached them with a child-like freedom from confinement."

That all makes sense to me. Except the part about ice!

I ran across that by accident after searching — unsuccessfully — for the old Clairol ad with the tagline "If I have only one life, let me live it as a blonde." While it made being blonde seem awfully important, I always thought it was bizarre to remind us that we're all going to die. How much compensation for that calamity could we get out of blondeness?

Another commercial from the same era tried to encourage us to use the product (Schlitz) with: "You only go 'round once, and you've gotta grab for all the gusto you can."



Wow. They really rub it in with the sharks that ate the guys in the shipwreck. Must drink beer! I guess it takes a heavier hand to use death as leverage against guys.

Anyway, what's this post about? Freedom, commerce, death as an incentive to live, an icy brew and... for the adventurous: icy breasts!

"All programs on Discovery Health-TLC must stop encouraging the birth of any more parasitic human infants and the false heroics behind those actions."

"In those programs' places, programs encouraging human sterilization and infertility must be pushed. All former pro-birth programs must now push in the direction of stopping human birth, not encouraging it."

The hostage-takers manifesto.

ADDED: The guy seems pretty clearly crazy, and I hope no one dies and he gets the help he needs, because this manifesto — PDF —  is hilarious, but if anyone dies, it might be wrong to laugh.

Saving the environment and the remaning species diversity of the planet is now your mindset. Nothing is more important than saving them. The Lions, Tigers, Giraffes, Elephants, Froggies, Turtles, Apes, Raccoons, Beetles, Ants, Sharks, Bears, and, of course, the Squirrels.

Of course, the Squirrels. That's such a childish list of animals, and not just because of "Froggies." These are the animals in a children's picture book or Noah's Ark toy.

The humans? The planet does not need humans. You MUST KNOW the human population is behind all the pollution and problems in the world....

I disagree. Around my city, geese are crapping everything up. I notice that no birds got on Lee's list of favored creatures.

These are the demands and sayings of Lee.

How religion-y, and yet he hates religion:

Civilization must be exposed for the filth it is. That, and all its disgusting religious-cultural roots and greed. Broadcast this message until the pollution in the planet is reversed and the human population goes down! 

He hates everything that human beings have produced. It's all filth. Even the ideas. He gets his ideas from a gorilla:

The Discovery Channel and it's affiliate channels MUST have daily television programs at prime time slots based on Daniel Quinn's "My Ishmael" pages 207-212 where solutions to save the planet would be done in the same way as the Industrial Revolution was done, by people building on each other's inventive ideas.

Here's the book. A gorilla tells us what to do. Example from the pages cited:

We could pension off our teachers, close schools, and open up the city to our children. Let them learn anything they want. We could take that risk....

Quinn has been hyped by Oprah Winfrey: Here's an Oprah interview with  Quinn:

WINFREY: You say that y--hundreds of years from now, children will look back on our society and call us monsters. Why?

Mr. QUINN: I think so. Yeah, because we're g--we're--we continue to take and take and take and consume and consume and consume everything in sight. And in 100 years, if--if there are still people around to think about it, we're going to look back and say, `My God, these were terribly greedy people. What kind of people were they? They were hard to understand, who had no thought for us, for the future of--of the human race.'

WINFREY: How are we monsters? In what ways are we devouring the world?...

ADDED: The man was killed. The hostages all survived.

[T]he suspect had "metalic canisters" strapped to his chest and back. When Lee was struck by police bullets, one of the canisters "popped." Police have not confirmed if the canisters were a bomb, but Manger said the "device may have gone off" when he was shot.

"Andre Jones and Richard Wise have a 700-gallon trank suspended from the ceiling of their West Village town house apartment."

"The filled tank weighs more than 6,000 pounds and has cost the couple some $200,000 in equipment and service."

How much would it cost to get rid of it? Because that's the calculation I'd do if I were buying that place.

Oh, here's the next picture. Caption:

Mr. Jones, left, and Mr. Wise sitting next to their suspended fish tank. "At night, we sit in the living room and sort of get lost in it, instead of the television set," Mr. Jones said of the tank.

I love the tagged-on  phrase "of the tank." Like there was ambiguity before. You might have thought they got lost in their living room. And I love the implication that this home Sea World makes them superior to peons who watch actual television. Because... why would that be? You can get a big flat screen TV and play a DVD of fish swimming. It looks pretty much like that fish tank these guys have. And you'll have at least $180,000 left to buy 60+ years of cable service.

Then there's this couple, the Wilzigs, who have an aquarium with a lighting device that allows them to choose any of 64 colors to reflect off the colorless fish inside. Posing with his wife on a white settee, Mr. Wilzig said:

"The whole essence of the house was to be push-button color-changing. The apotheosis of that was to take the fish themselves and have them be swimming in whatever color you want."

I was going to say this article should be blogged over at Stuff White People Like, and then I thought about how the Wilzigs, when they had their white friends over, could use their push buttons to make them any color they want. Come on! That would be the apotheosis.

(By the way, Mr. Wilzig looks like a character in one of Eric Bogosian's performance pieces.)

ADDED: "Trank"?

IN THE COMMENTS: Sixty Grit said, "There was a line in BttF2 about 'tranks' and other drug users. Or maybe they spelled it 'tranqs.' Do not know. But I think it is a city thing." Found!

(The police car arrives. The signs outside say "Hilldale - The Address Of Success" but have been altered to say "The Address Of Suckers". The car lands outside a house and the officers open the door.)

Reese: Hilldale. Nothing but a breeding ground for tranqs, lobos and zipheads.

Foley: Yeah, they ought to tear this whole place down.

(The officers press Jennifer's thumb to a panel next to the front door, and it opens.)

Voice: (v.o) Welcome home Jennifer.

(Jennifer is beginning to wake up.)

Jennifer: What?

Reese: You got a little tranked, but I think you can walk.

Well, it makes sense. The fish are presented as tranquilizers. So get a fish tank and get tanked. But that's so lowly. In NYC now, you can get a fish trank and get tranked!

At the fish boil.

Traditional, Lake Superior style.


(Enlarge.)


(Enlarge.)


(Enlarge.)

Underneath it all...

... we are fish.

Proto-blogging in 1816.

From "The Last Novel," by David Markson:

Keats stayed up all night on the occasion when he actually did look into Chapman's Homer — and then composed his sonnet so swiftly that he was able to messenger it to a friend to read before breakfast.

You read something quickly. It inspires you to write something quickly and then to get it out instantly to be read. That is blogging, and Keats got as close to that as one could in 1816. But he was reading George Chapman's translation of Homer and writing a sonnet that people will read as long as there are people who can read. That's all very grand, compared to blogging. To counterbalance, the blogger gets the instant writing out to thousands, and Keats only got his poem out instantly to one person.

But would Keats have read Homer and written a timeless sonnet if he could have blogged?

***

I read the first 82 pages of Markson's book out loud as Meade drove the TT up to Fish Creek, Wisconsin and back — via Whitefish Dunes — Thursday and Friday. I stopped reading at page 82 last night at about 9 when the last of the daylight failed. The book is composed entirely of snippets like the one quoted above, and if I'd gotten to the next snippet, it would have been:

Fish feel pain.

Ah! The fish theme! How apt!

Actually, I'm lying. Lying out of love of aptness. For your sake, dear Reader. That fish snippet is at the very bottom of page 82. It was the second to the next one. The next one was really:

If it were up to me, I would have wiped my behind with his last decree.

Said Mozart — after a demand by the Archbishop of Salzburg for more brevity in his church compositions.

There's another Mozart one that led to some laughter and conversation. On page 21:

I wish you good night, but first shit in your bed.

Reads another Mozart letter to Anna Maria.

***

Let me get the jump on the comments and say yes, I know that Kurt Cobain sang "It's okay to eat fish/'Cause they don't have any feelings." And yes, these days, on hearing "Homer," one doesn't think of the Greek poet anymore, one thinks of "The Simpsons." That's what TV and blogging and everything modern has done to us. 

Remember, walking in the dunes?

This is Whitefish Dunes State Park, and that water — with a riptide just waiting to drag you to your death if you don't have the presence of mind to swim parallel to the shore — is Lake Michigan.



If you dawdle on the stairs, you might notice this orchid-like vine, and if you're married to a horticulturist, he might tell you it's sweet pea, which it is:



And if you're old like us, you might feel compelled to sing the old Tommy Roe song. The video at the link is nice. You see Roe performing and interacting with a girl in the audience. "Pause at exactly 1:43...the look on her face & eyes as he whispers in her ear..priceless!! :)" says a comment. Another comment comes from "Itsmewithroe," who says:

Actually, Tommy Roe was lip singing. 

I.e., lip synching.

We could hear the recording, and he was whispering. Even he was strumming his guitar, but it was a quiet strum. We were all told to sing the song along with him. If I had known the camera was on me all that time, I would have been so embarrassed. I thought the camera was on everyone.

No. That's not his daughter. the blond in the back, she had a blue & white sailor type 2 piece bathing suit. Tommy Roe had no children. I remember now. It was the summer of 67. I've been talking about that day all my life. I was in ecstasy. I never knew the camera was on me. The producer/director, who ever he was, stage the girls behind me in position. I wonder if I could upload my pictures when I was a kid on this site.

Ha. The producer knew what he was doing. The girl is adorable. And what a great bubblegum song of that era. Roe's best song, however, was "Sheila." It was a cool enough song that The Beatles saw fit to cover it, pretty much in the original form.

But back to Whitefish Dunes. I was going to do a spiffy segue. You know, something with...



... but... well, that counts, according to my rules of blogging.

We were lying on the beach, and a guy came over and asked me if I was Ann Althouse. I confessed and he introduced himself — we'll call him Dr. Steve — and said he loved reading the blog. So, then, hi, Dr. Steve. You know, you said something that invited an answer and I let silence be the answer, but then as Meade and I were walking back across the dune...



I experienced l'esprit de l'escalier — staircase wit — literally on the stairs.

This name for the phenomenon comes from French encyclopedist Denis Diderot’s description of such a situation in his Paradoxe sur le comédien. During a dinner at the home of statesman Jacques Necker, a remark was made to him which left him speechless at the time because, he explains, l’homme sensible, comme moi, tout entier à ce qu’on lui objecte, perd la tête et ne se retrouve qu’au bas de l’escalier: a sensitive man like me, overwhelmed by the argument levelled against him, becomes confused and can only think clearly again [when he gets to] the bottom of the stairs.

Blogging is great for people afflicted with l'esprit de l'escalier, because I can answer Dr. Steve here. He said: "I can never quite figure out your political persuasion."

The late riposte: "I am not persuaded."

Let's watch Obama's big speech.

7:06: He's laying out a "battle plan" to fight the leak at the bottom of the Gulf of Mexico. He's "deploying" the military.

7:08: What to do during the "siege." A decision has been made to speak in military terms. Of course, he's not the first President to ask us to think about a nonmilitary problem in military terms. The War on X... the moral equivalent of war....

7:12: To make sure this won't happen again, Obama is establishing a commission.

7:15: We need to "jump start" the "clean energy" future. There's "the potential" to create "millions of jobs" but "only" if we "act together." We need to do something big at the national level to make this happen. Some people say we can't afford this, but he's saying we can't afford not to do it. He's vague about what this will be. The only thing he won't accept is doing nothing. He won't accept the "paltry limits of conventional wisdom." So even though we don't "precisely know" what we need to do, we will do it. Like we did in WWII and in going to the moon. We'll do something. And it will have to be big, but we don't know what it is. Then he drops from that scarily high level of abstraction and the unknown to... shrimpers. Something about shrimp people. We must think BIG and... shrimpy.

7:20: And suddenly, it's getting religious. I think he's bringing this speech in for a landing, because... it's a bit prayer-like. There's a "hand" that will "guide us." And — yes — it is the end: "May God bless America."

7:26: Well, that was a terrible speech! When it wasn't grim and dreary, it was grandiose. But the grandiosity was so vague... and half-hearted. Oh! The malaise!

AND: Here's the text of the speech. This is the part that interested me most:

As we recover from this recession, the transition to clean energy has the potential to grow our economy and create millions of jobs -– but only if we accelerate that transition.  Only if we seize the moment. And only if we rally together and act as one nation –- workers and entrepreneurs; scientists and citizens; the public and private sectors.  

This is the anti-capitalist move. There is all this opportunity, but free enterprise and capitalism can't take advantage of it. We need a top-down, government-imposed scheme, he announces. He doesn't explain why. It's an article of faith.

Now, there are costs associated with this transition [towards energy independence].  And there are some who believe that we can’t afford those costs right now.  I say we can’t afford not to change how we produce and use energy....

This is such embarrassing cliché rhetoric: Some say we can't do it. I say we can't not do it.


He cites a bunch of modest ideas that have been suggested and says we should think about them, then says that we have to do something, even though you could take all those things together, impose them, and still not break what he calls our "addiction" to fossil fuel. He blathers about WWII and the moon landing -- as noted above --  and talks about "what has defined us as a nation": "the capacity to shape our destiny....  Even if we’re unsure exactly what that looks like.  Even if we don’t yet know precisely how we’re going to get there.  We know we’ll get there." That is so hopelessly grandiose and vague, and to keep us from looking at it too long and despairing, he's all: Look! Shrimp!

Each year, at the beginning of shrimping season, the region’s fishermen take part in a tradition that was brought to America long ago by fishing immigrants from Europe.  It’s called “The Blessing of the Fleet,” and today it’s a celebration where clergy from different religions gather to say a prayer for the safety and success of the men and women who will soon head out to sea....

It's the shrimp and religion combo platter. Yummy!

Lightning hit a 62-foot-high Jesus Christ at the Solid Rock Church in Ohio and burned it down.

Pics of "Touchdown Jesus" and video of the fire at the link."

As fire gorged the iconic statue, several motorists along I-75 pulled over to photograph the sight....

The sculpture stretches 40 feet wide at the base. It was made of plastic form and fiberglass over a steel frame.

Plastic foam and fiberglass... at the Solid Rock Church.

A pond surrounding the statue that used to be full of fish is now filled with remnants of the structure, made of fiber glass and foam. All the fish are either dead or dying....

No miracle for these fish. I was going to Google some relevant stuff about the miracle of the fish, but Google being what it is, a search for "miracle of the fish" turned up things like:

How Miracle Whip, Plenty of Fish Tap Lady Gaga's 'Telephone ...
Mar 13, 2010 ... At least nine different brands make appearances in Lady Gaga's nine-minute music video, "Telephone," from HP Envy to Miracle Whip and Wonder ...

adage.com/madisonandvine/article?article_id=142794 - Cached

Ah! The world is strange, but perhaps God is trying to tell us something.

BoingBoing embeds a shark versus octopus video...

... and the commenters would like to see the scriptwriter and the voiceover actor thrown into the tank for the next meal.