Althouse: Rising before dawn...

January 7, 2013

Rising before dawn...

... to see this...

... before this:

14 comments:

kjbe said...: Same beautiful sky I saw on the bus stop, this morning.; 1/7/13, 9:07 AM
CarolynnS said...: Too bad Thomas Kinkaide is dead--he could use your first picture as a model!; 1/7/13, 9:11 AM
ndspinelli said...: Some of your photos carry me back to my surveillance days. We see the world through unique prisms.; 1/7/13, 9:16 AM
Michael said...: Professor: I see that you are keeping to your plan to rise early this winter. I would be interested in learning if this has changed your normal schedule for bedding down or if you are learning to live with less sleep. I am trying to edge back my own wake up time with an ultimate goal of 4:30 which would match my wife's normal time of hopping up.; 1/7/13, 9:35 AM
edutcher said...: Nothing quite like a winter morning, crisp and clear.

Glad to see more pics.; 1/7/13, 9:41 AM
Chip Ahoy said...: I just heard the phrase 'pay it forward.'

Whenever I hear that phrase it's as if a brand new idea is discovered, freshly minted, and brilliantly newly conveyed.

Don't you hate it when someone orders you to do something, or suggests it, when you're already doing it? Makes the brat inside me go, just for that, I'm not doing it, so then I have to overcome myself to get back to normal. It's a drag being a jerk.

The Egyptian study group is starting a new thing. They're translating something that's already translated. I can bring up four copies of it in that many seconds, two in hieroglyphics and compare them and two in English and compare them, then compare all four. They're all different.

When you see a full screen of those little pictures that someone else drew there are some things that jump right out at you, like "eternity" and "multitude" (it's a gecko) and "pa" (like ka, a flying duck), "breath" (sail) And since the text is already known you can instantly peg the things that jump out with the text that is known. It's as comforting as seeing a star on Christmas tree and wrapped boxes and Santa Clause, and reindeer and a nativity, an angel, a camel, and such thrown together in a yard with blinking lights and reading all that at a glance and grasping their separate meanings and place in a text.

So I start at the beginning than as a beginner student would do and sounded them out in Egyptian, and sounds made are Egyptian words for things but the concepts correlate believably well with ASL and as I signed the hymn of the Aten to myself early this morning I realized how much my understanding of sign informs my understanding hieroglyphics and visal versey. I do talk like an Egyptian. I absolutely cannot resist any parallelism wherever possible. And never could resist it. I realized early this morning I had been doing that all along ever since I was a little kid. I must look a bit weird doing words like "bring" and "suggest" with strict parallelism when it's not really called for, there I am trying to make myself look like an Egyptian wall painting. I can't help it. And when I say the word "Egypt" bang there's a uraeus right on my forehead and it isn't crooked.; 1/7/13, 9:47 AM
Anonymous said...: Red sun in the morning sailor take warning...; 1/7/13, 11:01 AM
alan markus said...: Walked down to the paperbox this morning with my Golden Retriever in this light (1st pic). She was tugging more than usual on her leash - I could just make out 3 deer standing in the middle of the road. They wouldn't move until we turned our backs on them.; 1/7/13, 11:08 AM
Charlie Currie said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 1/7/13, 11:39 AM
Charlie Currie said...: "But of course: that is the essence of government medicine. It is intended to benefit politicians and bureaucrats, not patients."

Our coming healthcare:

http://www.powerlineblog.com/archives/2013/01/annals-of-government-medicine-22.php

Stay well.

Cheere; 1/7/13, 11:42 AM
chickelit said...: The lighting in the first photo reminds me of an old 19th century landscape, "Coalbrookdale by Night", by Philip de Loutherbourg: link; 1/7/13, 12:57 PM
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...: Hey, Chip ... why dontcha stitch these two photos with a L->R transition to the dawn. She gave you a lot to work with.; 1/7/13, 4:51 PM
Bart Hall (Kansas, USA) said...: Hey, Chip ... why dontcha stitch these two photos with a L->R transition to the dawn. She gave you a lot to work with.; 1/7/13, 4:51 PM
Craig Howard said...: The first picture is outstanding.

Don't you love it when that happens?; 1/7/13, 7:12 PM