Althouse: Surf's up for a bleak sunrise over Lake Mendota, 2 mornings before the big snow.

November 27, 2025

Surf's up for a bleak sunrise over Lake Mendota, 2 mornings before the big snow.

Video by Meade.

Chitchat about swifts by Althouse.

More about swifts:

"We developed a new technology — a small backpack that we put on the bird...."

46 comments:

Meade said...: I’m thankful today that the gales of November at least didn’t come early.; 11/27/25, 8:56 AM
Mark said...: Snowblower is full of gas and ready to go, much like I will be at 6 PM after the big family get together.

Excited for a big snow.; 11/27/25, 9:00 AM
Gerda Sprinchorn said...: I stand amid the roar
Of a surf-tormented shore,
And I hold within my hand
Grains of the golden sand —
How few! yet how they creep
Through my fingers to the deep,
While I weep — while I weep!
O God! Can I not grasp
Them with a tighter clasp?
O God! can I not save
One from the pitiless wave?
Is all that we see or seem
But a dream within a dream?

-EAP; 11/27/25, 9:16 AM
rhhardin said...: The late 40s Globe Swift was famous for being likely to stall and spin. "While it has a reputation for being a fun and economical plane, pilots note it can have demanding handling characteristics"; 11/27/25, 9:23 AM
Dave Begley said...: I learn something new every day on the Althouse blog.; 11/27/25, 9:29 AM
tcrosse said...: Drivers of EVs in the UK will be required to pay the equivalent of 4 US cents a mile. Hybrid owners will pay 2 cents a mile. They will also have to go to inspection stations for an odometer check. Brits do not celebrate Tnanksgiving.; 11/27/25, 9:53 AM
john mosby said...: One big detrimental effect of the trans movement is now, whenever I see a tall, aquiline, and/or muscular woman, I immediately suspect her of being trans. I wonder if such women have noticed a dropoff in men approaching them? Or heck, an increase? Weird Thanksgiving thought, I know. Prompted by the Macy's parade and an interview of the Rockettes - some of the girls have dieted and danced themselves into very wiry specimens with no fat in their faces. And I thought, oh, poor thing - do guys think she's trans? CC, JSM; 11/27/25, 9:53 AM
john mosby said...: Tcrosse: The first Thanksgiving, after all, boiled down to "this place kinda sucks. But at least it's not England! Thanks, God!" CC, JSM; 11/27/25, 9:55 AM
Lem Vibe Bandit said...: AI translation of a poem found on that swifts website Althouse linked to.

I want to live this way,
I don't want to die yet,
They shouldn't place shards [of pottery, a traditional burial custom]
on my eyes.

I want to live to see,
The happy time,
To see my brothers
Freed from suffering.

The time is not far,
This must happen soon,
But I must fall
Al Kiddush-Hashem [as a martyr for God's name].

I leave my testament [Zawoe]
In ringing songs/poems
For my tormented
Sisters and brothers.

AI appends a plethora of meaning I'm leaving out.; 11/27/25, 9:58 AM
Yancey Ward said...: Shouldn't you have an electric snowblower, Mark?; 11/27/25, 10:01 AM
bagoh20 said...: This comment has been removed by the author.; 11/27/25, 10:15 AM
Clyde said...: tcrosse said...
Brits do not celebrate Thanksgiving.

Or the Fourth of July.; 11/27/25, 10:16 AM
n.n said...: Taylor Swift

You got that long hair, slicked back, white T-shirt
And I got that good-girl faith and a tight little skirt
- Style; 11/27/25, 10:33 AM
imTay said...: Brits are also working on the nullification of the Magna Carta by ending jury trials, probably because getting a jury to agree to a prison sentence for criticizing the ruling party seems problematic.; 11/27/25, 10:38 AM
Beasts of England said...: Happy Thanksgiving, and a special thanks to Althouse for this blog and its menagerie of commenters…; 11/27/25, 10:39 AM
rehajm said...: …a number of years ago I sat in the front row at Radio City for the Rockettes Christmas Spectacular. No recommended as for some of the costumes and dance routines I can attest there were no trans in the lineup that year…; 11/27/25, 10:52 AM
rehajm said...: …as god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly…; 11/27/25, 10:53 AM
peachy said...: 10 months in the air? what? that makes me want to take a nap.; 11/27/25, 10:54 AM
tcrosse said...: Brits do not celebrate Thanksgiving, but more and more of them celebrate Eid al-Fitr.; 11/27/25, 10:54 AM
Saint Croix said...: Happy Thanksgiving, everyone!

When I was a kid, I did not believe in Satan. My church (Episcopal church), never taught me Satan. It wasn't part of our theology at all. He never came up in any sermon that I heard. Not that I was listening much as a kid.

Satan was a cartoon figure. I figured he was a myth, like Santa. Santa is actually an anagram of Satan. (You could argue that Satan invented Santa).

In 2013, Justice Scalia shocked the liberal world by saying he believed in Satan. Google it sometime. I still wasn't paying any attention. I just didn't think about Satan. I wasn't thinking about God much, either. I wasn't praying, or going to church, or reading the Bible. The Big 3, I skipped them all.

When my film career crashed -- my parents were paying for my rent by the end of it -- my father suggested I move back to Charlotte. I had no money, so that's what I did. I started doing that damn legal work again. And my parents invited me to go to church with them. So I started doing that again. And I got bored with official Sunday school. So I wandered into a Bible study that was studying Screwtape. One of my favorite books! It's a great study of evil. I thought it was fiction, you know. It is fiction. And then the Bible study class went back to studying the Bible.

You read the Bible like poetry. You take one little snippet, and discuss it for an hour. And I discovered that Jesus believed in Satan.

What happened, Jesus was fasting and praying for 40 days. Trying to improve his connection with God. So he would know what his mission was. After 40 days of this, who shows up? Satan. It means, "the other." I figured, Jesus knows more about the after life than I do. Evil exists in the after life.

Why does God allow it? The Bible doesn't say. My guess is, it's the same reason God allows evil in this world. God believes in free will. He doesn't want robots or slaves. So, it follows, he's not going to strip us of our free will in the after life. God allowed for Hitler, and Stalin. So it's kind of illogical to think God wouldn't allow for Satan, too.

Satan can be terrifying. An evil bigger than us, that we cannot see or stop?

It was actually Christians who mocked Satan, and put him in red tights and gave him a pitchfork. That's when I feel when I watch a Satanic movie. The Exorcist put me to sleep. I'm sure it gets better. I fell asleep.

When bad shit happens to you, maybe it's God giving you a test to make you stronger. Or maybe it's Satan. Who knows? I know a girl, she lost her father in a car wreck. And she quit believing in God. Her atheism was an emotional reaction from a child. Why would take my Dad?

The Lord gets that. We're all children to him. Anyway, there's a lot we don't know about the universe. I figure humanity has maybe 1% of the universe figured out. Maybe less than that. Our ignorance is impressive. But if you ever get scared, or angry, or hateful (my demons have names, and they are called Hate, Anger, and Fear), just remember that love is the way. And Christ can teach you how to do it. And I am grateful for that.; 11/27/25, 11:02 AM
Saint Croix said...: …as god as my witness, I thought turkeys could fly…

that episode was so funny!; 11/27/25, 11:09 AM
Saint Croix said...: I got my own personal timeline wrong in my 11:02 comment. My film career fell apart in 2010. So when Scalia made his comment in 2013, I was in 100% agreement with him.; 11/27/25, 11:12 AM
Saint Croix said...: Brits are also working on the nullification of the Magna Carta by ending jury trials

wow

One thing I found out in law school is criminal trials pretty much ran through the Catholic church. There was one guy who could read (the judge) and 12 people who were probably illiterate (the jury). And the jury developed as an analogy of the 12 disciples. If all 12 were united, it was hoped, our ruling was correct. And the jury had the power, not the judge.

Around the time of Roe v. Wade, the Supreme Court start whacking big holes in the jury. It went from needing 12 and unanimous agreement, to 6 is fine. And majority rule is fine. The state was allowed to do whatever the hell it wanted, in criminal procedure, apparently. And then another state reduced the jury to 5 and the Supreme Court was like, "oh shit, we can see where this is going." So it can't be less than 6. They just make shit up sometimes.

Anyway, as far as I'm concerned, any conviction when the jury is less than 12, or it's not unanimous, is invalid. You've violated the jury clause of the U.S. Constitution. And this is why I believe there are innocent people in prison. And our justice system has very likely executed innocent people on death row.; 11/27/25, 11:20 AM
Saint Croix said...: I liked both of those videos. I've never been a bird man. I never even heard them singing when I was a kid. I was doing my own thing.

I remember, when I found God? I started hearing the birds in the trees.

Also, when you pay attention to birds, crows really do sound Satanic. So that's when I understood The Birds a lot better.; 11/27/25, 11:38 AM
john mosby said...: St Croix: ref JC being tempted by Satan in the desert: I always had problems with this passage. First, the temptations aren't really temptations. 2 of them are things JC has the power to do: changing rocks to bread, levitation (alright, very slow falling). 1 of them is something JC is never going to do (worship Satan). Also there's the whole logical absurdity of what happens to JC if he sins? Do his dual natures separate, and the man Jesus of Nazareth goes to hell while the Son just says "sorry, mate?" Does the Son go with him? That would be a heck of a sacrifice.

Most importantly, Satan knows JC. Everywhere else in the gospels, the demons know Him and what He can do. So the prince of demons should know Him really well. They used to hang out together in heaven, pre-Incarnation and pre-Angelic Rebellion. Satan must know that his temptations are nonsense.

So in about the last year, I finally landed on two theories to explain the temptations. One is that Satan is acting as the man Jesus's Christology tutor, and specifically using the Socratic method. Even more specifically, using the argumentum ad absurdum. "Do this!" "No, I'm not doing that!" "Because why, Mr Bar-Yusuf?" "Oh...." I mentioned the dual natures above. We humans, with the benefit of 2000 years of thinking about it, don't fully understand the doctrine. It is possible that the man Jesus, within his human intellect, didn't understand it either. Until he was tutored.

My other theory is the Infomercial Theory. You know how in an infomercial there's a guy who asks dumb questions about the product? "But is it dishwasher safe?" etc. That guy is an employee of the company - he knows the answer. But he asks it for the benefit of us, the audience. In the same way, the Satan of the Temptations is asking questions that are dumb for him, but doing it to enlighten us, the gospel readers. It's a device of the gospel writers, who had experience with rabbinical and pagan-philosophical dialogues.

None of this is to say anything one way or the other about the existence of Satan as an individual personality who promotes evil. Your excellent discussion of that point made me think of this tangentially related one. CC, JSM; 11/27/25, 11:43 AM
Rabel said...: Disaster has strucken me. Computer disaster.

Two days ago I opened Firefox and all my favorites were gone and all efforts to retrieve them failed. It's how I get around.on the net. Can't access the bookmark file or save new bookmarks.

And yes I turned it off and back on. As well as all the other things.

So I thought, well, Microsoft has been bugging me to upgrade to Win11 and I took the plunge. Surely that would fix the problem.

Well, Fuck me.

Now everything is screwed. Had to start using Edge (spit) just to be able to recreate a favorites list but nothing else works right.

I can't get into Blogger to comment here on Edge so I have to go back to Firefox to comment and then back to Edge for everything else.

Very awkward and bothersome.; 11/27/25, 12:16 PM
wildswan said...: Saint Croix
I've always said that every Christian has one good sermon in them - their own conversion story (conversion includes reaching an adult understanding of the religion you were taught as a child.) Great story for Thanksgiving.; 11/27/25, 12:24 PM
narciso said...: He subjected himself to these trials as he did with his arrest on crucifixion he certainly had the power to avoid this in every way; 11/27/25, 12:35 PM
FullMoon said...: "Rabel said...
Disaster has strucken me. Computer disaster.

Two days ago I opened Firefox and all my favorites were gone and all efforts to retrieve them failed."

Updated Firefox a month or so ago. Lost ability to delete my comment on Althouse as well as to make comments on other blogs.
Finally gave up, after many ff years, using chrome for most things now; 11/27/25, 12:39 PM
Mason G said...: "Brits are also working on the nullification of the Magna Carta by ending jury trials..."

Minnesota is doing something similar. They're still having a trial but when it's over, the judge ignores the jury's verdict and substitutes her own preferred verdict instead.; 11/27/25, 12:53 PM
narciso said...: Of course he subsequently related the story to Luke because they werent witnesses; 11/27/25, 12:57 PM
wildswan said...: Let is now thank famous men and the tribes that came before us.
- For the foodstuffs the tribal women developed which now represent 65% of all the foods grown world-wide. All the corn, beans, chilis, potatoes, peanuts, squash, chocolate and more.
- For the recipes the tribal women developed which are the basis of regional cooking throughout the US. As turkey, potatoes, cranberries, squash, blueberries from the Nrw England tribes; barbecue from the southeastern tribes; beans and chili combinations from the southwestern tribes; and more
- For the basic road map of the US. Tribal trails were developed by the fur traders into pioneer roads. For example, Daniel Boone found the Wilderness Road through the Cumberland Gap when he was a fur trader and used that tribal trail. The pioneer roads are the basic road map of the US.
- For providing most of the muscle that made the fur trade the largest industry in the US from 1610 to 1830.
- For providing the basic ideology underlying the US conservation movement. Hunters and fishermen from the Boone and Crocket club learned basic ideas about wilderness preservation from tribal guides on hunting trips. When these wealthy and well-connected young men became powers in the land they implemented those tribal ideas as founders of the conservation movement. See Madison Grant.
- For providing the start for all the forms of recreation based on hunting, fishing, canoeing, kayaking, camping and minimalist camping as done in America.

At this present moment the tribal "representatives" are unanimous in regretting anything they did that helped the US. But some of this sentiment comes from Bangladeshis who never did help us. The rest - for the real descendants of the tribes, their history can never be other than a mixture of pain and pride. But isn't that the truth on one way or another of us all?
We Americans should acknowledge the good start the tribes gave us and thank them in our hearts. That's justice.; 11/27/25, 1:03 PM
Kakistocracy said...: Need inspiration for your Thanksgiving cooking? This sheet pan organic dry-brined turkey with an anise orange reduction—served with hazelnuts and morels atop an heirloom fingerling potato confit—will make you feel like a corrections officer cooking for Ghislaine Maxwell!; 11/27/25, 1:04 PM
Saint Croix said...: Thanks Wildswan; 11/27/25, 1:39 PM
narciso said...: Yes the tribes were worthy allies and later adversaries

King Phillips War went badly; 11/27/25, 1:41 PM
Old and slow said...: Rabel, have you described your browser problem to Grok (or another AI) and asked for help? I have found AI to be incredibly good at solving technical problems. It has "read" all of the relevant tech literature and discussion groups. I was a tech geek for decades, and I can hardly imagine how much easier the job would be now.; 11/27/25, 1:52 PM
imTay said...: Why do we say that women developed these crops when it is no secret that native men had zero problem ordering their women around. Most likely some shamans found the wild precursors and who thought of cultivation is anybody’s guess, but let’s pretend that we are being scientifically literate and believe that which is politically correct.; 11/27/25, 2:05 PM
Beasts of England said...: ’This sheet pan organic dry-brined turkey with an anise orange reduction—served with hazelnuts and morels atop an heirloom fingerling potato confit…’

That was funny, Kak - Happy Thanksgiving!; 11/27/25, 2:17 PM
Saint Croix said...: JSM, As Christians we believe in the Holy Trinity. God and Jesus and the Holy Spirit, all united. Jesus doesn’t talk about the Holy Trinity much. It’s something Christians have interpreted from the teachings of Christ. He approached prayer as a man trying to know God. I do not believe he fasted for 40 days in order to talk to himself. He wanted to understand God’s plan. For instance, in the garden, Jesus prayed to not be crucified. He knew it was God’s plan. He was asking his Father to change his mind. And his request was denied. Jesus accepted it. On the cross, Jesus asked God why he had abandoned him. This is a very human feeling. Mick Jagger characterized it as a moment of doubt and pain. I think that’s right.

I think the purpose of the passage is that fasting and sacrifice will increase the strength of your prayer. (Christians disagree on this). Also, be on guard and discerning when you get an answer to your prayer. Satan is the father of lies. I used to joke that if you pray and get an answer in English, it’s probably Satan.

Have you fasted for 40 days? Believe me, food is a temptation. (I bail at 3 days).; 11/27/25, 2:25 PM
Saint Croix said...: Also, JSM, you might be right. Christians recognize the idea of a “devil’s advocate.” Many of us learn best via challenge and argument. Indeed, the ministry of Christ is filled with challenge and argument. The way of Christ is not an easy way.; 11/27/25, 2:46 PM
Tina Trent said...: I've never been colder than in Florida. My first and last camping trip was the week the Challenger exploded. We waded through swamp for two days (alligators likely too hunkered down to eat us) and were picked up by a BBC reporter so louche he smelled worse than us and used us to give color footage from Ocala to Miami.

Never trust a man from Albany to go camping. Nothing good has ever come out of Albany. Not one damn thing. He was a juggler and amateur clown too. In all fairness, a really nice guy. But a clown-juggler from Albany? Being a teenager is no excuse for that.

We were close enough to see it go up, but mostly, we talked about how stupid and cold we were.; 11/27/25, 4:11 PM
john mosby said...: Tina Trent: I have also been way too cold for words in Florida. Eglin AFB, winter Ranger School.

Well written vignette, btw. You sound kind of like Hunter S Thompson. CC, JSM; 11/27/25, 6:30 PM
john mosby said...: St Croix, re devil's advocate: supposedly one of the Hebrew words for the devil translates as 'prosecutor' or 'accuser.' And of course the Holy Spirit is the Advocate. So definitely some forensics going on. Like in Job, where the devil seems to be able to come and go from the heavenly court whenever he likes. CC. JSM; 11/27/25, 6:35 PM
rehajm said...: Funny I happened to be in Albany when Challenger blew up. Some shop with a radio playing and the dj came on. A guy behind the counter pulled out a little tv and we all stopped and watched…; 11/27/25, 8:35 PM
rehajm said...: I tried to think of something good from Albany…nope.; 11/27/25, 8:36 PM
Rusty said...: John Mosby @ 11:43

Did you ever stop to consider that Satan just might not be too bright? After all. He did leave a cushy life up top to be here with us. This must have been so disappointing.
You have to admit that most of the evil shit we get up to we do on our own. Satan's biggest contribution is that there will be no consequences later.; 11/28/25, 7:23 AM