November 22, 2009

At the Quiet Pool Inn...

DSC05532

... things are so serene right now.
Posted by Ann Althouse at 10:08 PM
Tags: , ,

17 comments:

Chip Ahoy said...

Would you care to see my second attempt at mastering the art of risotto?

11/22/09, 10:27 PM
lucid said...

the risotto looks great, chip.

and ann, i just have to say how much i loved your approach to michele goldberg. you were so emotionally real and communicative and truthful that she really didn't know what to do. her vapid reliance on unthought cliches became very apparent.

11/22/09, 11:01 PM
Chip Ahoy said...

Thank you, lucid.

I wonder; why are her books so well reviewed on Amazon? They seem to be rather short at 250 pages, how insightful could they be. I'm imagining rehashing of the same worn-out complaints we've heard for decades about the fear of so-called moral majority or religious right aligned with Republican party, as if the Democratic party was bereft of religious affiliation, which it isn't.

Then women, and their cervixes, and their control of their own bodies, and the future of humanity coupled with recoiling from a a real-live non urbanite who manifests all those things in a way that doesn't fit the pattern she formed by her own limited analysis.

She's enamored or at least satisfied with a president simply because he's a constitutional law professor, and it doesn't matter to her at all that he'd stomp all over her constitutional rights in ways Palin would never dream. But she doesn't care because he satisfies her requirement of perceived elitism.

I honestly doubt I could stand reading even a few pages of either of her books, I'm imagining their stereotypical-ness to cause me to toss them against the wall in bitter frustration, and I've read a lot of difficult books.

I do think Ann was rough on her at first. I'd want to leave too if I couldn't work a word in edgeways on a subject I didn't care for to begin with. So credit to her for sticking with it. But, bleh. This Palin hatred is ridiculous. Hatred should be reserved for the people trying to kill you, not the people ideologically differentiated.

For the record, I wouldn't care to have to read Palin's book either, and it's not much of a pleasure listening to her.

11/22/09, 11:25 PM
Chip Ahoy said...

Apart from quiet pools and Michele Goldberg, my relatives on Facebook are beginning to piss me off. They're generating page after page after page of Farmville this, Farmville that, Mafia wars, buttons, Facebook-prepared messages, so an do so is now a friend of so and so, line after line afet line, as if the whole point is to build up lists of friends. Utterly vapid of real news or content, and this goes on day after day. If I were to judge from Facebook, most of them have absolutely nothing going on in their lives except the goofiness of Facebook itself, or else they're all too reticent to talk about it, and when they do it's "I got the chunky peanut butter today." "Tyler made mommy mad this morning." "Sally barfed her cookies on the kitchen floor." If they don't stop it, I'm going to shut them all down.

11/22/09, 11:34 PM
Ron said...

Is Janet Leigh at the bottom of that pond?


wv:"logic"

11/22/09, 11:41 PM
vbspurs said...

I love how the topmost part of the photo is alive with happy colours; wood-burnished golds, spicey oranges, and autumnally tamed greens. Then suddenly, the reflecting pool of water is darker, menacing yet impenetrable.

It's night and day in one.

Cheers,
Victoria

11/23/09, 12:04 AM
Michael Haz said...

Chip, you hit Facebook right in the head.

I'd prefer that Facebook be hit once between the eyes, and twice in the chest, just to be sure.

Relatives of mine, people who are otherwise normal beings, have sunk portions of their lives into Farmville. They bleat about losing a sheep, or wanting me to buy their damn blueberries, or raising money for a new tractor, or selling bushes, and all other kinds or craziness.

And the automatic messages - don't get me started. I'm pretty damn sure that I don't have another 133 relatives who want to meet me. All relatives are present and accounted for.

I sure as hell don't want to "friend" the sloppy surfer guy that an errant niece met in Oahu a couple of winters back, but the slacker bastard is insistent, abetted by one fucking algorithm or another at FB world HQ.

And stop sending me fake fucking martinis, dammit. I can make my own martinis, and I don't have to fill out a questionnaire to get one.

Here's a tip to those with whom I attended high school in the days that were 70% through the previous century: I'm not interested.

If I wanted to know about your third wife or your ugly fucking ADD grandkids or how the stint in prison went, I would have called you by now, capice?

I need a martini.

11/23/09, 12:12 AM
Penny said...

I was about to say that one of us was at the wrong pond tonight, Althouse.

But, in the nick of time, I reconsidered.

11/23/09, 12:26 AM
Fred4Pres said...

Sarah Palin's Uterus has a blog!

11/23/09, 1:45 AM
Fred4Pres said...

Ann is already on it, two posts back.

11/23/09, 2:09 AM
Anonymous said...

Michael Hasenstab: You should tweet that.

11/23/09, 4:29 AM
KCFleming said...

That quiet pool has the menace and dread of southern gothic about it.

LOL on the Facebook-hate.
Had to look up Farmville, though. Is it some sort of SimCity copy?

11/23/09, 6:35 AM
Unknown said...

That is a movie quality shot. In fact, I think I saw something much like it in "The Alamo" (the old one, of course, with John Wayne and Richard Widmark).

11/23/09, 7:05 AM
lucid said...

chip--if you see this--do you think the photo at the top of the post works better upside down?

11/23/09, 7:50 AM
lucid said...

chip--i agree about palin. she's not my cup of tea. but i do think she somehow serves a useful purpose. anything to puch back against and to infuriate the smug lefty hegemony in the media, pop culture, and the academy.

while tey are fulminating, she sold 700,000 books in a week. she is going to be a very rich and influential woman.

hell, maybe she will be oprah's replacement.

11/23/09, 8:27 AM
traditionalguy said...

I stayed up late reading the Rogue's book. I was surprised that so much was "in her voice" with a ghost writer's added thought placed at the end of her expression of herself. She has an impact. I now understand why McCain and his Campaign Czars were unable to contain her message. They were trying to keep a force that connects to people out of their way as they did a careful Rino walk thru the media controlled world of perceptions. Trouble was the perceptions that they were striving to create were hopelessly out of date while Palin naturally went viral with her connection with the Voters instead of the media. That is the war today...National State Media vs the voters. At last the voters have a voice and its name is Sarah Palin.

11/23/09, 8:46 AM
Chip Ahoy said...

Lucid, yes the photo works upside down. But I do not think that makes it better. Inverting it dries it out completely. The pond becomes the sky and the trees become solid trees and not reflections of trees. This is a much more interesting picture because, like Escher, you half expect a fish to surface. This bears on why we enjoy Ann's photography so much. I'm convinced she tends to see the whole world around herself as framing possibilities, while the rest of us tend to rush by.

11/23/09, 10:57 AM

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