1 sunset... in 3 parts.

1:



2:



3.



(On Lake Mendota, this evening.)

"I like to ask my kids interesting, but age appropriate, ethical and epistemological questions while we sit around the dinner table. Help me think of some more."

A great Ask Metafilter question. 

(I give an answer, using my Metafilter screen name, Alizaria.)

Do you/did you do things like this with your children?

Sailboats on Lake Monona, very free and easy...

Easy, like biking the Capital City bike trail...
Silver Madison skyline let me be...




We are leaving — you don't need us...

Let's judge old people in their bathing suits.

1. Giorgio Armani, 76, in a Speedo.

2. Jerry Hall, 54, in a tankini.

Judge!
	Old people can go swimming, but the question of how they look is a nonissue. They. Are. Old.
	Both of them look pretty decent for their age. Let's be charitable and encouraging.
	Giorgio looks great at 76 and wears a Speedo with elan. Jerry... blech.
	Jerry is fine, but an old guy in a Speedo? Horrible!
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IN THE COMMENTS: ironrailsironweights said:

It's amusing that two people who are a generation apart in age are being lumped together as "old."

Oh, yeah. Why did Althouse do that?
	Because "old" for women starts early.
	Because the Giorgio looks relatively good for his age and Jerry relatively bad.
	Because these are 2 photos that happened to pop up in the news today.
pollcode.com free polls

"JOURNOLIST: A Vast White-Wing Conspiracy?"

Instapundit links to I Own The World's collection of the names and faces of Journolist. Glenn stresses whiteness, but I Own says "IT LOOKS MORE LIKE THE UPPER WEST SIDE OF MANHATTAN" and the commenters eventually — scroll halfway down — pick up that cue.

"A self-styled dork from Wisconsin is on a mission to become a real New York ladies' man...

"... by dating 30 women in 30 days, and sharing his exploits with the world."

Why did The Daily News cover this story?
	You can call him a dork and he looks like a dork, ha ha, check out the photo.
	He's from Wisconsin! He came to New York! Hilarity ensues.
	30 women in 30 days. A stunt. A stunt that gets us hot!
	They need stuff about the internet and this is popular on the internet so they saw it. Voila!
	The guy's website really is pretty cool.
pollcode.com free polls

The website, Dating Brian, actually is pretty cool.

At the Cicada Café...

... the cicada's on her last legs, but I know you can keep things going around here.

Note the Japanese fishing net floats in the window box. A longer view, through the pennisetum...

"Treat Me Like Your Mother Or I'll Eat the Sun."

The title of a drawing in an art show by Frances Bean Cobain, who will turn 18 next month and by so doing get her hands on a tremendous amount of money.

I crack down on Newsbusters for saying "CNN Host Calls for Crackdown on 'Bloggers' in Wake of Sherrod Incident."

Newsbusters is getting a lot of attention for an article with that flashy headline, but the headline is completely unjustified by the video it purports to analyze. Let me walk you through the text and show you what I mean:

Anchors Kyra Phillips and John Roberts discussed the "mixed blessing of the internet," and agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others on the internet.

Phillips and Roberts agreed that there should be a crackdown on anonymous bloggers who disparage others. Take note. You'll see that they don't. And what does that have to do with the "Sherrod Incident" referenced in the headline? Andrew Breitbart is the polar opposite of anonymous. He seems to love getting his name out there and all over everything. And the disparaging of Shirley Sherrod was done through her own image and words in a video clip.

Newsbusters quotes Roberts telling us what we know:  the short clip of Sherrod's speech made her seem a lot worse than the whole clip. But, as Roberts notes, we did go further and get the whole context.

Phillips brings in the the problem of anonymous bloggers:

"There's going to have be a point in time where these people have to be held accountable," Phillips said. "How about all these bloggers that blog anonymously? They say rotten things about people and they're actually given credibility, which is crazy. They're a bunch of cowards, they're just people seeking attention."

Roberts cites a conversation with Andrew Keen, author of "The Cult of the Amateur: How Today's Internet is Killing Our Culture":

"Well what Andrew talked about with me was this idea of a gatekeeper but there are huge first amendment rights that come into play here - freedom of speech and all that. And he said the people who need to be the gatekeepers are the media to check into these stories," said Roberts.

So, Roberts isn't saying there should be a government crackdown. He recognizes the First Amendment, and says Keen said he wanted the media to be the gatekeepers. Newsbusters says:

Phillips wanted to go even further, asking if "there's going to come a point where something's going to have to be done legally" about anonymous bloggers.

So... legally... does that imply a government crackdown or is Phillips only suggesting that there can be defamation lawsuits brought by individuals in which the identity of "anonymous" — really, the word should be pseudonymous — bloggers can be discovered?

"There has to be some point where there's some accountability. And companies, especially in the media have to stop giving these anonymous bloggers credit," she said.

So, Phillips ends up back at the idea that the media need to shift and winnow the material that comes up through the internet. Where's the crackdown?

"If you're in a place like Iran or North Korea or something like that, anonymous blogging is the only way you could ever get your point of view out without being searched down and thrown in jail or worse," said Roberts. "But when it comes to a society like ours, an open society, do there have to be some checks and balances, not national, but maybe website to website on who comments on things?"

Not national... I think that means he's saying the federal government should not be doing the checking and balancing. Roberts is saying that "website to website" something should be done — maybe just a rejection of anonymous comments. It's annoying that Roberts doesn't distinguish between pseudonymous bloggers and anonymous (or pseudonymous) commenters, but I don't see any place where he agrees even with Phillips's use of the word "legally," which was completely vague and most likely referred only to defamation lawsuits.

CNN's two regulation-happy reporters...

They never mentioned regulation! I think they were talking about the marketplace of ideas in which we are all the gatekeepers. In that marketplace of ideas, I'm cracking down on Newsbusters! This much-linked article is reeking crapola. And yet it is raking in traffic.

CNN's two regulation-happy reporters think the Sherrod situation can help bring attention to the "necessity" of blogging reform if she brings a defamation lawsuit against Andrew Breitbart.

What is the sentence with that word "necessity" in it? I went to the video, and I couldn't find it. I listened to the end of the segment 3 times, and it seems to me that the 2 reporters peter out with Roberts talking about how we all have to "be aware" and how he always tells young people not to put naked pictures of themselves on the internet.

"Regulation-happy"? "Blogging reform"? "Crackdown"? What nonsense!

IN THE COMMENTS: Old Dad said...

CNN's real problem is cablecasting boring and pedestrian filler.

Exactly. Newsbusters, ironically, is making them seem exciting. I think Roberts knew they were being pointless and tedious. That's why went all naked teenagers!!!!! in the end.

The $35 "iPad."

Here.

At the Hair-and-You Café...

... you can show your style.

“Shirley Sherrod, who didn’t know who Andrew Breitbart was 72 hours ago, now knows him well enough to say that he wants to put all blacks back into slavery."

"If I were David Axelrod, I’d be calling this woman and beg her to stop talking. And, yes, she does owe Andrew an apology."

Apologies, apologies, apologies. I'm more on the side of standing by what you have done (unless you actually believe you were wrong). Defend yourself!

For example, here was Rush Limbaugh on the radio yesterday:

People have asked me about this woman Sarah Spitz, who's now "apologized," and they want my reaction to it. And this is another thing I'll react to it but I really don't want to. This bores me as well, this whole concept of forcing people to apologize for things they meant to say. Why is she gonna apologize? She meant to say it, she wrote it, stand by it. You want to watch me die, Sarah? Say it! Where are your guts? Well, she's "apologized."...

[It's] the latest trend in apologies, "That's not who I really am." You know, "That's not the person I am." Bull! It is who you are! You are a commie! You are a full-fledged Marxist liberal! You do wish I was dead. It is who you are.

I don't care whether it's Tiger Woods saying, "You know, that's really not who I am." It is. It is who you are! What, did somebody steal your personality for a day and grab hold of your hands and start typing on your keyboard and it wasn't you? "This is not who I am. I want everybody to know, as a publicist I understand and this is not who I am." It is who you are!

Ha. Exactly. I said the same thing about Tiger Woods, by the way, back in February.

"I don't think you can be a journalist and carry water for a politician, and that's what they were doing: 'Here's the line on Palin.'"

"These are political hacks, and I think they should stop calling themselves journalists. It discredits the rest of us."

So said Tucker Carlson, quoted in a Howard Kurtz analysis of the Journolist leaks on The Daily Caller.

Kurtz concludes: "None of this quite adds up to a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy, and there is no reason to believe that some conservative commentators don't have similar discussions. But there is no escaping the fact that some of the list's liberal literati come off sounding like cagey political operatives."

Japanese glass fishing net floats.

They broke free of their nets and floated all the way to America. I'd never heard of these things before, but people collect them. We'd been looking for the perfect gazing globes for the window box, and then we noticed these things in the window of a cool store here in Madison called Unearthed. The floats themselves are more unoceaned than unearthed, though, don't you think?

***

Here's a blog about Japanese fishing floats.

Do you play Disc Golf?

We did. At this place. I'm a bit ashamed to say the tall grass swallowed my disc. Gone! But it was fun while it lasted. We enjoyed the characters out there — one duo toting a 6-pack of beer and smoking cigarettes but throwing great shots. Meade said, "I think this is kind of a 'Big Lebowski' sport."

"Maybe there'll be window in heaven where he can watch Nixon slowly roasting on a spit."

The first comment on the Gawker post "Journalist Daniel Schorr Dies at 93."

"The state playing God like this gives me the chills."

People react to what is, in fact, a great plan. I wish Wisconsin would follow suit.

That squirrel-beer reminds me of a cigarette dispenser my grandfather had.

Ah! Yes! Like this:

"The strongest, most expensive and most shocking beer in the world."

The End of History "is to beer what democracy is to history."

A Freudian slip about euthanasia?

Bob Wright, inviting Robert P. George to address the topic of euthanasia, lays out the scenario with respect to seriously persons who "feel that they are so unpleasant... uh... unhappy..."

It's also, I think, a slip to say "euthanasia" instead of "assisted suicide," isn't it? Wright must mean only to refer to people who are choosing to die. Euthanasia goes beyond that, and covers killing individuals whom others find — shall we say? — unpleasant.