2. What light through yon cloud cover breaks? It is the East, and Meade is the sun! I thought I would have no sun in my sunrise photograph, but Meade has importantly and profoundly worn a sun-costume on his globelike head. I only discovered his head as a sun substitute when I got home. If I'd noticed at the time, I'd have repositioned myself to frame the sun-head right where the sun was rising behind those clouds.
3. Something I did notice at the time — with Meade's helpful, flappy gesturing — were 2 bald eagles. I said "You have good eyesight," but then I got closer to one. It was huge! Quite seeable. Meade also had hearing, unlike me, with my AirPodded music, and when I wondered if I could recognize the call of a bald eagle, he reminded me that I knew it through "The Colbert Report":
4. There were bald eagles and — in the Meade-is-the-sun pic — coots. The coots were massing in a different place today...
5. Maybe they'd repositioned themselves because of the advancing ice, the extent of which the new snow crisply delineated:
6. A sign warns me not to swim. It's 21°, so no temptation to swim. Oh, perhaps a fool or an ice water lover would be tempted to walk out on that:
7. There were bald eagles and coots, but today I did not see swans. And I didn't hear swans though I heard "swan" (on my new playlist, the one with songs from John's Best of the 2010s list): "You sang your swan song to the dogs/'Cause they made mincemeat of the dreams you hung your hopes on/So you counted out what your sins cost/While money talks to your conscience, looking like a fool for love." (That's Beck, listen here.)
8. Running in the cold, I also heard: "Got a little soul/The world is a cold, cold place to be/Want a little warmth/But who’s going to save a little warmth for me?/We know the fire awaits unbelievers..." Hot and cold! Better find good in the cold. Heat can go awry! (Here's the whole song, by Vampire Weekend.)
9. Though I never saw the actual sun, the actual sunrise time was 7:24 — the moment when I stopped to catch the vision of the snow on the path up over the Indian burial mound:
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72 comments:
Bald Eagles are big, but when you see them next to a Steller's Sea Eagle, they look kind of puny. They are in adjacent cages at the National Aviary in Pittsburgh.
Bald eagles! I haven't seen one here in several years. Congratulations. But remind me not to go birding with Meade. Flapping motions are not generally productive in spotting wild birds in the field.
a yellow orb comes into view...
A post by Flora Poste?
Are there a few mallards among the mud hens? Thanks you for the pictures of the advancing ice. The ice and the long shadows yesterday at Lambeau Field are harsh reminders that the winter solstice is coming soon.
Nice. I was in La Crosse last week for work. They have bald eagles all over the place, because of the Mississippi River.
I bike along Lake Monona every day for my commute. Today for some reason there were hundreds--possibly thousands-- of loons on Lake Monona. Very unusual. Usually I see at most 20 loons on my commute during migratory seasons. It's more typical to see lots of coots and mallards. Coots and mallards usually stay close to the shore. Loons prefer to hang out in deeper waters have a very distinctive profile. Loons lie low in the water, don't hang out as a flock, and they have a wide head. I wondered if it's because there are so few open lakes now in Wisconsin? Do loons even travel in flocks?
I'll wager that the Colbert Report opening uses a Red-tailed Hawk's cry.
We got to 70 degrees today, but big thunderstorms are coming in a few hours.
Do loons even travel in flocks?
Yes. The flocks are called Political Parties.
(Someone had to say it)
Not sure about this but my professional naturalist daughter tells me the screech that sounds when an eagle is shown or referred to in the media is that of a hawk. I just listened to the Cornell University Ornithology Lab's recording of eagles and it sounds nothing like what one hears on the Colbert promo.
kwenzel is right. Bald Eagles' actual sound is rarely used in sound effects. Not awesome enough. Here's an Eagle.
Do loons even travel in flocks?
Yes. It's Canadian money
Was Meade's helpful flappy gesturing anything like Red Skelton doing Gertrude and Heathcliffe?
Supposed to be a low of 30 tonight in Tucson. Not yet time for the frost covers but it will be soon.
Matt Kuchar did some happy, flappy dance after we kicked the hell out of The International field yesterday. The uppity Internationals had some beef with Reed. His caddy was booted.
Us Americans did it after starting yesterday down 8 - 10. Ernie Els really must dislike America's successes, poor guy.
Well, soon it will be the US against the Euros again. Good luck and God bless everyone, except the Spaniards.
"Was Meade's helpful flappy gesturing anything like Red Skelton doing Gertrude and Heathcliffe?"
More like President Clem Kadiddlehopper.
I’ve heard that coots are good eating, but I find that suspicious as they include fish in their diet. And they’re ugly.
Vanna is back at the Wheel this week. (Of course, it is more like her second day of taping.)
Who's in the coffin in the first picture? What are you trying to tell us? Is it like McCartney on the cover of Abbey Road? What are you trying to tell us?
Yeah, you don't want mess with that crate.
Isn't it about time to release the FBI MLK files?? That would be a tasty shot across a lot of peoples' bows in these troubled times. I'm just sayin'.
Looking at these beautiful pictures and then coming across a story about Trump dispersing Federal agencies and the employees resisting banishment from DC. I thought we, that is Wisconsin, should be recruiting tiny little sections of .gov to move out here, sections that are appropriate to the state. Like the Wetlands section of the EPA which would like it near Lake Mendota, where there's lots of wetlands or the Economic Research Service of the USDA which would like Madison. Each little .gov section has a budget of several millions so it's really like recruiting a business except here it would be a "quid pro quo", rather than recruiting. (I think that's the phrase somebody was telling me about the other day. It means in exchange for a vote on legislation we get a .gov section transferred here.) And if the DC Crats won't move, then Wisconsin people get the jobs. If we try to break up .gov, it might not work but if we scatter out .gov sections to the states that will break up Big .Gov and make the process of breaking it up an interesting occupation for state legislators. And decrease unemployment and hold our college graduates in the state. ON WISCONSIN.
Are those gaiters over athletic slacks or is this a men in shorts picture? I can't quite tell (definitively) even by enlarging.
Looking at these beautiful pictures and then coming across a story about Trump dispersing Federal agencies and the employees resisting banishment from DC. I thought we, that is Wisconsin, should be recruiting tiny little sections of .gov to move out here, sections that are appropriate to the state.
Anyone, no matter how highly paid, who refuses to relocate to flyoverland should be put to work clearing the highways of litter. Would it not be delicious to watch an arrogant DoJ GS-15 lawyer wearing a safety yellow vest collecting McDonald's debris from the right-of-way of I-95?
Bald eagles are magnificent, especially when in flight. We have them here, in northeastern MA, along the Merrimack River.
I'm a lifelong Masshole, but certainly not a coastal elite, either by my own definition nor anyone else's. I have no objection to living in 'flyover' country except that my family is here - children, grandchildren, siblings - as are almost all my friends and acquaintances. I can understand how people would resist displacement.
These photos capture the moment and, as today, the mood as delivered by the weather. Keep em coming please. Are you force fitting the commentary into a list of nine? Might be fun to do seven one day, eleven the next, then back to nine. Even numbers are right out.
I live near a large lake in Seattle. The bald eagles are by far the apex predators. They swagger.
Although, I have seen a humming bird flying backwards, and poking at the eagle's eyes while in flight.
I've also seen a falcon engage an eagle. Falcons like to strike from.....well.....12 o'clock high. Eagles can fly upside-down, and engage their talons with any adversary. The eagles are really quite acrobatic.
• the China trade deal commits them to more than double their imports from the US by 2021, a huge stimulus to growth.
• Ratification of the USMCA deal is bullish for farmers, autoworkers and US labor generally.
• The latest NFIB survey shows business plans to raise wages in the next three months are the highest since December 1989
Surprisingly!
In his interview on the Area 45 podcast John Cochrane said something something I never heard about FDR
Wealth Under Attack
Cochrane mentions that after FDR raised taxes on the wealthy and the wealthy fled overseas, FDR years later wrote letters to them asking them to return to the US to provide capital to build the war machine. Cochrane implying it wasn't the economic activity of the war that got us out of depression. Rather it was the return of capital to the United States.
Can anyone confirm FDR wrote to the wealthy overseas asking them to return to the United States?
My family lived on Lake Chelan in Washington for a time and there the eagles would fly down from Alaska to winter. They were thick like pigeons. Majestic...unless they were eating road kill or garbage behind the restaurants.
James Comey is eerily skilled at selling delusions
Blogger Begonia said...
"Nice. I was in La Crosse last week for work. They have bald eagles all over the place, because of the Mississippi River."
Eagles like to winter near open water where they can scavenge dead fish. There is a dam and spillway on the Mississippi near La Crosse that provides open water in the depths of winter.
"Loons prefer to hang out in deeper waters have a very distinctive profile. Loons lie low in the water, don't hang out as a flock, and they have a wide head. I wondered if it's because there are so few open lakes now in Wisconsin? Do loons even travel in flocks?"
Loons often form flocks, but in smaller numbers than ducks and geese. Their flocks are less organized and lack the "bombers in formation" migration flights that geese display. If geese are like highly organized Germans, you might say loons are somewhat like flying Norwegians (including the wide heads).
Authentic Wisconsin Polka Billy music:
There's No Norwegians in Dickeyville - The Goose Island Ramblers
Red Skelton. The pride of Vincennes Indiana.
Christmas gift suggesion. Instead of gift certificates, give appreciated stock.
Good news on Bald Eagles. I know people such as Instapundit rail against the banning of DDT, but removing this pesticide from the ecosphere has had an enormous impact upon eagle populations.
By 1980 there were only 3 pairs of nesting Bald Eagles in the entire state of Pennsylvania. By the late 90s it was up to 25 pairs. Today it is over 300.
Yea, I have a general disdain for hyper-environmentalists, but in the case of DDT they had it right.
.
The book "Polkabilly: How the Goose Island Ramblers Redefined American Folk Music (American Musicspheres)" is available on Amazon using the Althouse Portal.
Yoo and Epstein discuss impeachment paths and the Horowitz thing.
https://ricochet.com/podcast/law-talk/check-your-executive-privilege/
Epstein can't read Trump so is a priori against Trump as out of control and egotistic but even more disgusted by the dems.
They make these details too meta
https://mobile.twitter.com/ChanelRion/status/1206709246496268288
Can anyone confirm FDR wrote to the wealthy overseas asking them to return to the United States?
If there's no script, you must acquit.
Beethoven would be 249 today. Who's planning a big do for him next year?
FDR was a very very charismatic guy.
By the way, almost nobody understands him anymore.
His wife does not look all that good in the photos of her when she was middle aged but when she was young she was really hot, with an amazing way of moving her body and dancing, and she had extremely, almost comically extremely, beautiful eyes, and her hair was at the level of the best models for the pre-Raphaelite painters. Her voice was like this voices that the women DJs had on those old NYC album rock stations, intelligent and seductive and playful and thoughtful, and she knew more about the right perfumes and the right clothes than all but a few of the best of the Parisian women of her day.
And just think, after reading that, what I think of the caricature of her and FDR that most people think is the way they were.
Via Rantburg:
Daily Mail, where America gets its news]
In October, Secretary of State Brad Raffensperger released list of over 313,000 voters whose registrations were at risk of being cancelled
The voters were mailed notices and had 30 days to respond to keep registration
Mass purge is set to take place overnight Monday and into Tuesday, officials said
Exact number and names of voters removed wouldn't be known until after purge
About 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012-18
That’s 1/2 mil just from 2 states.
Which would also affect census and Fed funding.
This keeps up this could get interesting.
Well ill grant you his speeches really had a punch whereas most of the dems swing between tapioca and histrionics.
Via Rantburg:
...Giuliani then said, "Shokin’s medical records show he was poisoned, died twice, and was revived."
"Lots of heads will roll in Ukraine if this opens up," he added.
"All of a sudden Shokin gets this communique from Latvia that shows a $16 million laundering transaction ‐ classic laundering transaction," Giuliani said. "It goes from Ukraine, to Latvia, it’s disguised as a loan to another company to ’Wirelogic’ I believe ‐ it then goes to Cyprus, gets disguised as another loan ‐ this is called "Digitech" then it’s dispersed as payment as board fees," he added.
Giuliani added, "Now you don’t make two loans to make board fees unless you’re laundering the money. $3 million gets to Hunter Biden in that way."
"That is a straight out violation of a money laundering statute," he said....
Yikes, they only drugged the prosecutor investigating yeltsin.
Man in shorts, or are those knickerbockers?
narciso, RIchard Jewell was a hero who risked his life, and they tryed to destroy him
God slumbers not nor sleeps
I am speaking in the caucasus context of course there was the poisoning of one of those fellows. They play hardball over there.
Trotsky wrote a biography of Stalin. It's over seven hundred pages, and life's too short for me to read it. I did browse through a few pages, however. I got the impression that Trotsky didn't like Stalin. He wrote that Stalin was from Georgia. He speculated on whether Georgians were slovenly, violent, and stupid because of genetic or because of cultural reasons. He comes down in favor of the cultural explanation. He claims that Georgians are not Asiatic and are technically European, so I guess you can't call his disparagement of Georgians racist.
Getting the cold here now, that we dodged in Europe . . . not that our cold is usually intense or lasting, as so many posters here endure (my only word for it).
Not seeing many avian predators, nor hearing many owls; geese were pretty thick on the ground for a while.
Narr
So good night, I say, good night
Via Lucianne:
Robert Powell, the husband of Rep. Debbie Mucarsel-Powell, D-Fla., reportedly took $700,000 from a Ukrainian oligarch named Igor Kolomoisky. Mucarsel-Powell sits on the House Judiciary Committee, the committee that drafted two articles of impeachment against President Donald Trump for his alleged abuse of power with regards to Ukraine. In 2018, the Daily Beast reported that a number of businesses linked to Kolomoisky hired Powell as an attorney. One of those firms paid Powell at least $700,000 over two years, according to public records. The Miami Herald reported Powell was working for companies tied to Kolomoisky for 10 years....
So kolonoisky who owns privat bank that defaulted on 1.6 bil, which in turn owns burisma funded mr mucarsel so the miss could defeat carlos curbelo got all that.
Who's in the coffin in the first picture?
Yeah, you don't want mess with that crate.
It's for the Envious Moon ! ( Romeo and Juliet: Act 2 Scene 2 )
Wake Up & Smell the Coffin !
Stalin more a muzik than an intellectual, like trotsky but they didnt really argue about ends but the time table and sequence. Trotsky wanted global revolution, atalin wanted to focus on one country
Kind of like fidel raul abd che, camilo was perhaps the well intentioned one
https://mobile.twitter.com/GordonGChang/status/1206669024412815360?ref_src=twsrc%5Egoogle%7Ctwcamp%5Eserp%7Ctwgr%5Etweet
Scandal Reopens?
Court Papers On Democrat IT Aide Imran Awan Make New Revelation
https://www.dailywire.com/news/scandal-reopens-court-papers-on-democrat-it-aide-imran-awan-make-new-revelation/
The Department of Justice said this month that it could not release records on Democrat technology aide Imran Awan due to “technical difficulties,” but later admitted in court documents that it could not release records on him because there is a secret ongoing case related to the matter.
Seeing Red said:
"About 1.4 million voter registrations were canceled in Georgia between 2012-18.
That’s 1/2 mil just from 2 states. Which would also affect census and Fed funding."
Can you elaborate? I thought the Census was independent of voter registration rolls.
Biographies of Zhukov, Stalin's best general, make for fascinating reading, whether in Russian or English.
Remember, Zhukov was to the Russians what Patton would be to Americans if Americans had lost 20 million to an invading force and Patton had defeated the enemy that did that.
And so, here is a brilliant detail ...
when he was old, someone asked Zhukov if he had any regrets.
The old man replied, well," sometimes I would wander around the encampments a few dozen miles from the front lines, and often there would be NCOs who could play the Russian accordion so well, in the evening, and so fast, and with such heart ----- I always wished I could play the Russian accordion that way (poitye, garmonika, poitye or better ---poyotsa odinochkaya garmonika po vecheram, et cetera) .... I would have loved to be able to play the Russian accordion that way"
They have all been dead a long time, the successful and famous men of that evil generation, but they were human too, and God has judged them, and God will one day judge us too.
NO matter how much power you have in this world, for good or for evil, It is super important to be kind to people and to animals and to obey the commandments.
and Putin is an angel of light compared to Stalin, remember that, and no worse than Churchill or lots of Churchill's contemporaries
Yes on the first, youre going to have to explain the second.
finally, the True Meaning of Christmas, in a nutshell:
https://twitter.com/i/status/1191241954920685569
the great school of leadership includes reading the histories of all the kings of Israel and Judah.
if you are interested in that sort of thing, it is all set forth in the Book of Chronicles as historical fact
and in One and Two Kings with the less official descriptions of what God thought of the kings of Israel and Judah.
All the kings were bad, but some were sort of good among the badness.
There is a good list by J. Vernon McGee, which I memorized a couple decades ago, but I have forgotten it.
The google search you want to try is "the good and bad kings of Israel"
and "the good and bad kings of Judah".
Putin is sort of at the Hezekiah level, Stalin was at the Ahab level, but a lot worse.
Churchill was at the Hezekiah level too.
Compared to Ahab, Hezekiah was an angel of light.
Hope that helps.
I live near a large lake in Seattle. The bald eagles are by far the apex predators. They swagger.
Of course ahab gets worse billing but how a bout jeroboam
When I wrote about the crate, I was thinking of the Creepshow story that starred Hal Holbrook. A true classic in horror film.
which look do you prefer for Trump 2020 ?
A) Regular Trump
B) Badass Trump
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/EL44A8zX0AA6xOL.jpg
Court found Sytnyk guilty of corruption so he has to leave office
---
...and 'what if' Cruz was another candidate spied-upon?
Would that then be 'real, REAL Sloppiness'? Weaponized Sloppiness??
"World's Premier Law Enforcement Agency"-level sloppiness??
...or an "'unintentional', pro-Hillary" kind of sloppiness??
The Top Gear lads drive top sport coupes through Georgia and Azerbaijan in an episode of The Grand Tour. Present day Georgia is extraordinarily modern clean and beautiful. Batumi looks like Cannes and Tablisi could be A pointy Vienna. They also stop at the Stalin museum where his boyhood home is preserved. You can see where Stalin as a boy sat at the breakfast table and proclaimed, when I grow up I want to be the biggest bastard the world has ever seen!...
I recommend the hilarious episode...if you like the idea of The Three Stooges meets Motor Week. Seriously, the cinematography of Georgia is amazing...
@Ann:when I wondered if I could recognize the call of a bald eagle, he reminded me that I knew it through "The Colbert Report".
It's been pointed out above, but bald eagles don't sound like that. They sound "pip pip" or "yik yik" but drawn out, and VERY high pitched.
And huge up close. Toddler-sized. They live in my neighborhood but the crows and other corvids mob them.
Thanks for the info on loons, commentariat!
Today I realized that what I was seeing on Lake Monona were not loons, but Common Mergansers. They were so far out on the water yesterday that I couldn't see the coloring or the females' crested heads. But on my commute in today, there were a bunch of Mergansers close to the shore.
I also saw a bald eagle, sitting way out at the edge of the ice looking over the open water, and wondered if it was the same one Althouse saw yesterday on Lake Mendota.
The strangest bird I have ever seen is the Eurasian Eagle Owl. The local Raptor Center has one. Sitting on its perch, with large orange eyes, it stares at you as if it were looking into your soul. The wingspan of the female is over 6 feet.
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