At the Live Free or Die Café...

... think of all the alternatives.

"The Kingdom of Dahomey became a major power in the Atlantic slave trade..."

"... with slaves supplied through raids of surrounding areas .  Oyo would sometimes put pressure on Dahomey to decrease their slave tra...

Real or political theater?

About that Bulgarian gun-pointing, gun-jamming incident ... I'm feeling truther-y. How about you?

"He went out of the room calling 'Ewing!' and returned in a few minutes accompanied by an embarrassed, slightly worn young man, with shell-rimmed glasses and scanty blond hair."

Imagine having a blond, bespectacled man somewhere in your house, going to fetch him, while yelling his name — his name being the implausibl...

Screw-up at The Atlantic leads to inane corporate memo.

Perhaps you noticed the screw-up : The Atlantic ran an article promoting Scientology — "David Miscavige Leads Scientology to Milestone ...

"Please take away my Second Amendment right."

"Do more to help us protect ourselves because what’s most likely to wake me in the early hours isn’t a man’s body slamming at my door b...

At the Ice Dog Café...

... do you know what you're doing?

"He then kissed his wife, whom he called 'Sweetie,' and told his daughters, 'I did it.'"

Oath sworn. Video at the link. First thing you see is Chief Justice Roberts walking into the room, and if you're like me, you said, ...

"Thriller, Beat it, and Bad all in one video!"

"When ever I get angry, this is what I feel like doing." Apt comments at a YouTube video I turned up in the process of trying to...

Are we people, persons, or individuals?

I got into a back-and-forth with kentuckyliz in this comments thread . She experienced "individuals" as dehumanizing, and I found ...

"More than 280,000 units — nearly half of Manhattan’s apartment stock — is rent-regulated in some fashion."

"These apartments are either godsends to those who occupy them, or daggers that twist in the hearts of everyone else, left to pay marke...

"Opt Out of State Standardized Tests" — Facebook page run by a high-ranking NYC Department of Education official.

According to the NY Post, Lisa Nielsen is promoting truancy on test days. On Thursday, she blogged that kids would learn more by cutting cla...

The Sandy Hook massacre should "force us to confront yet again the ways in which ever more of our lives are lived on a screen, in the cloud, via our computers and phones and tablets...."

Says Michael S. Rosenwald, noting that: Except for using the bathroom and eating his meals, getting a haircut was just about the only thing ...

Biden sez "I'm proud to be President of the United States."

Oops.

Bill Clinton says: Do not look down on the bitter clingers.

"Do not patronize the passionate supporters of your opponents by looking down your nose at them..." "A lot of these people li...

"As of today, Barack Obama’s presidency is half over. If that’s not enough to cheer you up..."

"... try heading over to the Insta-Wife’s new site, Helen’s Page, where you can commiserate or whatever with others who feel the same w...

"All Hostages Dead/Slaughtered in Sahara."

The Drudge headline hangs over from yesterday , even though Barack Obama will be sworn in to his second term in office later this morning. I...

"Stan Musial, one of baseball’s greatest hitters and a revered figure in the storied history of the St. Louis Cardinals..."

"... the player they called Stan the Man — died Saturday. He was 92."

At the Swan Lake Café...

... you were right. Those really were swans out there on icy Lake Mendota this afternoon.

"Sometimes a shadow moved against a dressing-room blind above, gave way to another shadow, an indefinite procession of shadows, that rouged and powdered in an invisible glass."

Earlier today, I made a "café" post out of a photograph of a tablescape that included my small toy robot, and betamax3000 used it...

Maybe it was named after the buccaneer Peter Wallace.

Belize — our "History of" country today. It's a legend, that the Spanish pronunciation of "Wallace" was Ballis an...

Video from the "Guns Across America" rally here in Madison, Wisconsin today.

Here's some edited video showing the crowd and the signs. In the middle there is a prayer, and at the end is the national anthem. Once y...

Meade drove me up to the Capitol Square to catch the "Guns Across America" rally.

I jumped out of the car almost before it stopped moving to catch up with this sign: "The Experts Agree/Gun Control Works": "R...

Purchases of the day.

The Queen of Spades and Other Stories (Dover Thrift Editions) [Kindle Edition] by Alexander Pushkin (Author) Disney Nemo Plush Mini Bean Ba...

At the Paperweight Café...

... step away from that desk.

"Men try harder, because they know that women want men who earn more."

"Women don’t because they know that men have different priorities, and because they want to quit the rat-race at some point and have ki...

Speaking of Presidents and nightmares...

I had a dream last night that I woke up, looked at my iPhone, and saw a terrible headline in Drudge. I tried really hard to yell it out to M...

"I don’t think we should talk about Lincoln’s underwear..."

"It’s not appropriate for someone so iconic. Even in the bedroom, Lincoln is never shown in his pajamas. He’s in his shirt and pants....

"We said, hey, let's do something ridiculous."

"Let's go shoot guns." ADDED: Via a Columbia Journalism Review "Pass the #popcorn" item, with a lot of intra-journal...

"The 100 richest people in the world earned enough last year to end extreme poverty suffered by the poorest on the planet four times over..."

"Extreme wealth was 'economically inefficient, politically corrosive, socially divisive,' the report said."

"Should you get divorced in order to make your children better people?"

"What a good parent you are for asking, but, no, of course not: There are easier ways to get the benefits of being non-religious to you...

Purchase(s) of the day.

Through the Althouse Amazon Associates portal : " Up in the Old Hotel " by Joseph Mitchell. " Glock: The Rise of America...

At the Winter Light Café...

... I can't tell you what we did.

"P.S. I know you're doing your best."

8-year-old Grant reaches out to President Obama:

"Her expression was curiously familiar — it was an expression I had often seen on women’s faces...

"... but on Myrtle Wilson’s face it seemed purposeless and inexplicable until I realized that her eyes, wide with jealous terror, were ...

"French control over Flanders steadily increased until 1302 when an attempt at total annexation by Philip IV met a stunning defeat.."

"... when Count Guy (who had the support of the guilds and craftsmen) rallied the townspeople and humiliated the French knights at the ...

"Being Married Helps Professors Get Ahead, but Only If They're Male."

Headline at The Atlantic. The writer, Alexis Coe, begins with something the Princeton professor James McPherson wrote in the acknowledgemen...

Please contribute to a 10-year old girl's science experiment.

Watch a 6-second video and answer 3 easy questions.

7th Circuit upholds Gov. Walker's much-protested collective bargaining legislation.

"The district court invalidated Act 10's recertification and payroll deduction provisions, but upheld the statute's limitation ...

"Obama unveils 'Organizing for Action.'"

I read the Politico headline out loud. Meade immediately improvises a song, and I have the wit and the skill to transcribe as he sings: Org...

"Who of a certain age could forget when a bookish black woman named Anita Hill addressed a Senate committee of 14 white men..."

"... and candidly spoke of graphic sexual harassment by then-Supreme Court nominee Clarence Thomas? The explosive, race-tinged hearings...

Photo taken, just now, without getting up from my desk.

ADDED: Dialogue: MEADE: Did you get video? ME: No, stills work better. MEADE: It was blinking. ME: It could have been winking. Birds in prof...

"Then David said to Abigail 'Blessed is your advice and blessed are you.'"

"Mrs. Phillips chose her pen name herself, taking Abigail after the prophetess in the Book of Samuel... and Van Buren for its old-famil...

"Moustaches, once associated with old men and bikers, have been experiencing a fashion renaissance of late."

"One of winter's hottest grooming trends was the fake moustache, which is available in a range of styles, including the tiny 'S...

"American Diversity" class insufficiently heartwarming for some Wisconsin parents.

Daily Mail brings news of a local high school where kids were taught that "minorities had historically been oppressed by white people....

"I always start with physicality when I’m writing as a woman. So I always have a vagina and think about having periods."

Said Will Self , who has a new novel, "Umbrella," the title of which is based on the Joyce quote "A brother is as easily for...

"What Hostages in Algeria? Manti Te'o Had a Composite Girlfriend!"

Where's your sense of proportion?

"Did the Framers have batteries, or did they have to plug everything in?"

A wisecrack question of mine, just now, in the middle of a long conversation about the theory of original intent. Meade — who is not a lawye...

If Sonia Sotomayor's autobiography has nothing at all about law or even politics...

... why would anyone read it? The book, which covers her life prior to becoming a judge, barely says a word about the Constitution and even...

"Armstrong did not delve into the details of his doping, and Winfrey never asked."

"He did not explain how it was done, who helped him do it or how, exactly, he perpetuated his myth for so long. He said he was not comf...

Purchase of the day.

Through the Althouse Amazon Associates portal: "A History of the Jews" by Paul Johnson. Associate earnings to the Althouse blog:...

Swartz "was deeply committed to civil disobedience and to the moral imperative of breaking unjust laws."

"On the other hand, he seems to have had his soul crushed by the prospect that he would spend time in jail. This is an unusual combinat...

"Maybe I'm naive, but I still don't think Lance doped."

Michael Ian Black.

At the Black Dog Café...

... I have just got to break free.

"Americans, while occasionally willing to be serfs, have always been obstinate about being peasantry."

Think hard. It doesn't really matter — does it? — that this is today's sentence from "The Great Gatsby," another dutiful p...

"Throughout their existence as a separate culture, Ruthenians formed in most cases rural population, with the power held by local szlachta and boyars..."

"... often of Lithuanian, Polish or Russian descent. As in the rest of Central and Eastern Europe, the trade and commerce was mostly mo...

"My Mom thought the cowl looked like a micro-mini skirt!"

It totally fits like that too. Perfect with leggings as an item of clothing I call an asswarmer .

Is this Mariah-Nicki thing going to work?

Is anyone watching? We watched the first hour last night (with the rest saved on DVR), and, well, it seems the problem is that Nicki Manaj c...

"In this bill we will nullify anything the president does that smacks of legislation."

"And there are several of the executive orders that appear as if he’s writing new law. That cannot happen.... I’m afraid that President...

"Though party officials typically dance around the unseemly issue of gerrymandering..."

"... this report is surprisingly candid and unabashed."

Get your hiking shoes on!

Quit posing! Get out here!

"I think there's a very fascistic thing under The Little Prince, you know.... I think there's a kind of SS totalitarian sentimentality in there somewhere."

"You know, there's something, you know, that... masculine love of a certain kind of oily muscle, you know what I mean? I mean, I ca...

"The toothbrush moustache (also called Hitler moustache, Charlie Chaplin moustache, 1/3 moustache, philtrum moustache, the postage stamp, or soul (mou)stache)..."

"... is a moustache, shaved at the edges, except for three to five centimeters above the centre of the lip. The sides of the moustache ...

The use of children in politics — if you find it persuasive, you'd better sharpen up.

Drudge is doing propaganda here: But it's very heavy-handed propaganda deployed to critique propaganda. You won't slip into falling...

"Democrats hailed Mr. Cuomo's aggressive gun-control push..."

"... citing it as an example of a muscular brand of politics that the governor has made his signature in two years in office. He has be...

"The Ugly Side of the Southern Belle."

An op-ed in the NYT on the occasion of ... can you even think what?

A "pedestrian who did not even own a car could be convicted of vehicular homicide in the death of her 4-year-old son..."

"After a long bus trip with her three young children in April 2010, Raquel Nelson did what other bus passengers did that day, and had d...

"Lance Armstrong will offer more than the sporting world’s most long-awaited confession..."

"He’s expected to counter the U.S. Anti-Doping Agency’s portrayal of him as the mastermind of what it called the most sophisticated, pr...

"A breeze blew through the room, blew curtains in at one end and out the other like pale flags..."

"... twisting them up toward the frosted wedding-cake of the ceiling, and then rippled over the wine-colored rug, making a shadow on it...

"An orange peanut? For me? I accept you."

At the Careful Composter Café...

... be green... and orange.

A cartoon from 1233.

I'm fascinated by the school lesson material at the U.K. National Archive site. That cartoon is from one titled "A Medieval Mystery...

"By 1666 at least 12,000 white smallholders had been bought out, died," or left Barbados.

"Many of the remaining whites were increasingly poor. By 1680 there were seventeen slaves for every indentured servant. By 1700, there ...

"Oxygen Media has pulled the plug on 'All My Babies' Mamas,' a reality special... about a musician who has fathered 11 children with 10 different mothers."

The conceived the show. They gave it life. Then they walked away. ADDED: Rush Limbaugh riffs on the O Media decision: It's not gonna air...

"I'm an atheist... Eric is in the ground, rotting."

"I know it sounds horrible to say that, but that is where he is. How is that a better place?" "I was searching frantically fo...

"15 Frugal Billionaires Who Live Like Regular People."

Fascinating and really cool. Got us going talking about why someone would do this (other than being nutty). Highlights: 1. Warren Buffet, w...

"There are three things in life that people like to stare at: a flowing stream, a crackling fire..."

".... and a Zamboni clearing the ice."

Obama resorts to the "if there’s even one life that can be saved" rhetoric.

"If there is even one thing we can do to reduce this violence, if there’s even one life that can be saved, we’ve got an obligation to t...

"I think the businesses that bring these men in should also be accountable for not providing opportunities that keep them busy outside of work."

"They should check their employees before hiring (if they don't already) and get rid of those who commit ANY kind of aggression tow...

A slice of Wisconsin politics.

I framed this screenshot from the lead article at the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel webpage: Meade sent me that link and highlighted the quote...