"Wisconsin isn't actually the center of the universe. A convergence of events has just made it seem that way."

Writes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

This week alone, President Barack Obama visited the state, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gave the Republican response to the State of the Union address, and the Green Bay Packers were on the fast track to becoming America's sweethearts.

Wednesday night's "American Idol," spotlighting auditions it conducted in Milwaukee in the summer and fall of 2010, was just icing on the cake....

Performers stood in front of a blue scrim with the "Idol" logo, judges sat at the prow-like front of the [Windhover Hall of the Milwaukee Art Museum] and interviews were conducted in the museum's whalebone white hallways.

A stormy Lake Michigan was a feature throughout and could be seen dramatically changing colors and textures behind the judges....

Jennifer Lopez referred to it as "the ocean."

Hey, we were already planning to go to the Milwaukee Art Museum this weekend. So don't think, when you see my photographs, that we only went there because of "American Idol." We're going there because we're excited about seeing Masterworks of North Carolina Earthenware:

The exhibition explores, among others, work... by Moravian immigrant potters who...  found a home in the North Carolina Moravian missionary settlement. Superior in quality to the pottery the early American colonists were creating, the slip-decorated earthenware, though utilitarian, represented the religious beliefs for which their makers had once been persecuted, and allowed the settlers to maintain a sense of cultural identity in the new world.

I'm a descendant of Moravian refugees from persecution, and maybe the mysterious Meade will tell you why he's interested in the show too.

At the Countertop Café...

... there's plenty to eat.

Clay acorn birdbath...

... with oak leaves.

A still life open thread.

At the Busted Puffball Café...

... you can talk about your broken dreams. I had a beautiful dream of a magic mushroom named Puff. Puff the puffball mushroom. I thought we were going to slice him up into a million little slivers and fry him in butter. But you saw fit to break up old rotten stumps and fling them away into the corner of the yard, without regard to the whereabouts of the puffball, whose magic proved limited to the power to attract hurled stump parts.



Ah, Puff! I wanted knife-sliced slivers, not cudgeled chunks. The puffball will therefore live out its days, uneaten, rotting and freezing in the salvaged iron birdbath, with the clay acorn, the iron bird, and — nearby — the unoccupied teapot birdhouse.

The teapot birdhouse.

At the Acorn Café...

... we've grown a lot over the years. We're oaks now, right?

"As we mix the clay, the clay mixes us."

Clay-stomping (and artist-philosophy) for schoolkids.

That Jugtown frogskin glazed goblet.

I wouldn't have picked that one out from the group.



But photographing in the afternoon sun...



... I like it ...



ADDED: The goblet was made by the same person about whom Meade said yesterday: "The potter who made the bowl which is bigger on the inside than the outside: Vernon Owens."