At the Sunset Café...

... you can speak with subtlety.... ... or intensity.... (2 stages of the same sunset, viewed from a jetty on the Mississippi River, in Pepi...

"Now 9 influential American Muslim scholars have come together in a YouTube video to repudiate the militants’ message."

"The 9 represent a diversity of theological schools within Islam, and several of them have large followings among American Muslim youth...

"I prefer the more martial view that death is the ultimate enemy—and I find nothing reproachable in those who rage mightily against the dying of the light."

Wrote Stephen Jay Gould in “The Median Isn’t the Message." Diagnosed with abdominal mesothelioma, for which the median survival was 8 m...

The locally owned BP gas station pleads for your love...

... via the door of the ladies' john:

Bowl.

Just an old sign I liked. In New Richmond, Wisconsin.

"The treatment of workers by American corporations has been worse — far more treacherous — than most of the population realizes."

"... Many of those workers were cashiered for no reason other than outright greed by corporate managers. And that cruel, irresponsible,...

If you're traveling in the north country...

... where Highway 63 meets Route 2 ... there is a café... Casablanca Traders ... ... where the nice lady kept the place open for an extra 15...

Instead of divorce, an amicable permanent separation.

"Why bring in a bunch of lawyers? Why create rancor when there’s nowhere to go but down?" Plus, there are all sorts of financial r...

"The interior door handles are red straps..."

"famously used in... 1973."

"I wanted to express something in the outer world that I feel inside... We seem to have lost that understanding of the whole of nature and the universe as a living entity."

Prince Charles feels a sense of purpose. Is that really so terrible ?

What Hillary wore.

I don't care about the big wedding. I just want an explanation for that crazy thing enveloping Hillary Clinton .

Althouse's needs are met!

We're happy to find a place that might be okay, open for lunch in New Richmond, Wisconsin. Bellarietta . I misread it as Bellateria and ...

"Senate Votes to Double Fines, Jail Time for Pot Brownies."

Protecting the children by grabbing one more sweet morsel out of their grubby little hands.

At the Bubbler Café...

... you can put things in your own words.

The Nazis and KKK of Galesville, Wisconsin.

Details from a kiosk displaying snippets of the history of the town: ( Enlarge .) ( Enlarge .) ... faded away into the night, and have never...

"American Idol" will never find a true replacement for Paula.

Ellen is out. She was nice, but she didn't know much about music and preserving her reputation for niceness (and comedy) trumped any de...

"She doesn't have to carry this on her conscience any more, and that's a kind of relief."

It wears on you over the years, this use of infanticide as your method of contraception .

It's easy retaining your status as the oldest man in Tokyo...

... when you're already dead. [W]hen officials went to congratulate Sogen Kato on his 111th birthday....  discovered a mummified body, b...

"Unmarried women, 70% of unmarried women, voted for Obama..."

"... and this is because when you kick your husband out, you've got to have big brother government to be your provider." Said ...

"What explains Mr. Obama’s consistent snubbing of those who made him what he is?"

"Does he fear that his enemies would use any support for progressive people or ideas as an excuse to denounce him as a left-wing extrem...

Architectural details in the Garden of Eden.

In Galesville , Wisconsin.

What will Mickey Kaus do now?

"I'm going to blog and then do something else on top of that and I don't know what the something else is going to be and I don...

"[T]he ceaseless obsession with and exultation over Chelsea's upcoming nuptials is emblematic of how our culture rewards women who marry...."

Hyperventilates Rebecca Traister about the way other people are hyperventilating. I don't mean to be the Matrimony Grinch. Weddings are ...

At the Mississippi Sunset...

Last night, somewhere south of La Crosse.

At the Overlook Café...

... you don't have to pay attention to anything you don't want. (Pictures taken yesterday in Wyalusing State Park, in Wisconsin, fro...

"The baguette scene could not have been simpler, but Carla wanted to make it a big one."

French First Lady Carla Bruni, doing a Woody Allen movie.

I'm nostalgic for Muzak.

You could ignore it. It was designed to fade into the background , and we used to scoff at it for precisely that reason. Now, I have to list...

"By the time this thing would reach the Supreme Court Obama's going to have amnesty. He's s going to have all these brand-new Democrat voters."

Rush Limbaugh rails against the federal court decision preliminarily enjoining the Arizona immigration law: The judge is a Clinton appointee...

"With his bloodless, sallow face, his lank hair drained of all color..."

"... his languorous, very un-Australian limbs, and his aura of blinding pallor that appears to admit no nuance, Assange looks every inc...

At the Special Touch Café...

... you can get tattoos, fireworks, and more. We didn't get any fireworks or tattoos. Not today, anyway. We did get some dinner at Culve...

Life on the Mississippi.

At Wyalusing State Park today, we rented a canoe... ... and paddled 5 miles of Mississippi River. Part of it was out on the open river like ...

A few more faces from the counter-demonstration.

(Background and photography here and here .)

How beautiful do you need to be to be "most beautiful" on Capitol Hill?

This beautiful.

"If It Causes Stress, Is It Really a Vacation Home?"

Let me react to another NYT headline. The easy answer is yes — because vacations are stressful.

"The Case for $320,000 Kindergarten Teachers."

Great headline. Justified by the text? The crucial problem the study had to solve was the old causation-correlation problem. Are children ...

An idiomatic expression gone wrong... and Rush Limbaugh is mystified and amused.

On Monday, Rush was riffing on that Maureen Dowd column about The Sherrod Incident, which had this quote from Congressman John Lewis about...

"I have never quite got over the fact that I thought, and I'm afraid I still do think, that 'acting' for a man — a really proper man — is sissified and faintly ridiculous."

"The French have a word for what I am and it's called 'manqué,' meaning a failure of desire.… I am everything 'manqué....

"Marriage is under attack in Wisconsin... Standing for marriage as God designed marriage is not easy.”

So said Julaine Appling, CEO of the Wisconsin Family Council at the National Organization for Marriage rally in Wisconsin today. Appling ap...

Created for the hoped-for Chicago Olympics: "a 167-mile road course that looped through Madison three times before taking racers west and into the hills near Blue Mound State Park."

A NYT article about our fabulous bike trails. “The steepness of the climbs are really what made this course significantly harder than other ...

"The oil slick in the Gulf of Mexico appears to be dissolving far more rapidly than anyone expected..."

Oh, no! The immense patches of surface oil that covered thousands of square miles of the gulf after the April 20 oil rig explosion are large...

"If it’s an Althouse link, everybody drinks."

Heh. (Via Instapundit .)

The 9th Circuit held Chipotle violated the Americans with Disabilities Act by not giving persons in wheelchairs the same view of the food prep that other people have.

"The court said the accommodation the company offered - bringing spoonfuls of each dish to wheelchair users for inspection before order...

Journolist "took a process that could have been public, democratic and transparent and gratuitously made it private, stratified and opaque."

"This was an odd move for 'progressives' to make when confronted with the revolutionary openness of the Web." Says Mickey ...

At the National Organization for Marriage rally on the Capitol steps in Madison, Wisconsin today...

... the counter-protest was much more visible: But the speakers plugged away nonetheless: The National Organization for Marriage attracted a...

Will Wilkinson and I talk about Shirley Sherrod, Journolist, Top Secret America, Wikileaks, and road trips...

... on the new Bloggingheads.

Putting the last 2 posts together makes me think about a Beatles song.

It's one of my least favorite Beatles songs, but Ringo's a good guy , and it's one that he managed to write. He says: I wrote Oc...

Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is right about this.

On the one hand, it is absurd for a world leader to be attacking an octopus , but superstition is a sign of a deficient culture: "Those...

"The Flower Show may come back someday, but it’s not where people are these days... Food is an easier sell."

Botanical gardens are turning away from flowers!  Botanical gardens are experiencing an identity crisis, with chrysanthemum contests, hortic...

"Rush is the man," said Jeffrey Toobin on Journolist.

After Sarah Spitz said she'd immensely enjoy watching Rush Limbaugh die: Rush cannot be replaced. What people miss about Rush is that he...

Obama, speaking of his family's financial situation: "We’re not that far removed from what most Americans are going through."

From an inane interview with ABC with consumer reporter Elizabeth Leamy, who makes a lame effort to convey the impression that she's go...

On the Capital City Bike Path...

... you can roll along at your own speed.  

"Any delusions that Journo-List was not, in part, a collusory venture..."

"... to shape the media narrative in ways to benefit Obama, above and beyond ferreting out the truth about any and all candidates, must...

A question about the Shirley Sherrod incident and taking things out of context.

Don't we constantly extract quotes and clips from larger contexts? I do blog posts by that method all the time. I find the juiciest line...

Oliver Willis, at Media Matters, writes a shamefully dishonest post about me.

Just posted today: To listen to the conservative media, the Daily Caller has exposed the discussion listserv Journolist as some sort of hotb...

"On Sept. 8, 2008, five days after Palin’s national debut, some members of the group discussed producing coordinated propaganda designed to wound Palin and boost Obama."

Writes Jonathan Strong in The Daily Caller: Ryan Avent, then a freelance blogger for the Economist, now an editor there, complained that Oba...

An empty wheelchair... "Don't Worry, He Won't Get Far On Foot."

John Callahan leaves the wheelchair forever.

Oh, no! Ron Johnson wants to move the BP oil spill to Lake Michigan!

The graphic in this new Russ Feingold ad had us guffawing.

At the Sunset Café...

... you can cling to the last shreds of the real... ... or become complete abstracted....

Gayfeather.

The flower that made me stop... ... as I pedaled the Capital City Trail today.

Is it important to sleep through the night in the same bed with your mate?

A lot of people don't. There's snoring. Inconsistent habits having to do with TV/computers/iPhones. Keeping different hours. Let...

"Americans fighting the war in Afghanistan have long harbored strong suspicions that Pakistan’s military spy service has guided the Afghan insurgency with a hidden hand..."

"... even as Pakistan receives more than $1 billion a year from Washington for its help combating the militants, according to a trove o...

"He leads by being there."

"The important thing is fear."

At the Mellow Madison Café...

... this was the vibe last evening. We're off to soak up the new vibe. It's a lovely day. You can do what you want, but if you want...

"The Obama White House is too white"... so it keeps "tripping over race rather than inspiring on race."

Says Maureen Dowd: The West Wing white guys who pushed to ditch Shirley Sherrod before Glenn Beck could pounce not only didn’t bother to Goo...

"No one in recent pop memory has been a greater enemy to the authentic than Lady Gaga."

No one? What about Madonna? From the start of her career Madonna was a savvy pop trickster, using outrageous imagery as a distraction whil...

"I know it's about a lesbian couple, but give me a break."

Ha.

"Almost all judicial decisions... can be assigned an ideological value."

"Those favoring, say, prosecutors and employers are said to be conservative, while those favoring criminal defendants and people claimi...

1 sunset... in 3 parts.

1: 2: 3. (On Lake Mendota, this evening.)