The crash of CRAZ.

Police have removed protestors pic.twitter.com/1UCL8law7e

— Laura Schulte (@SchulteLaura) August 4, 2026

ADDED: The protesters are ousted, but they have their photo op:

State police are now on scene too. Protestors are alleging that the streets division nearly hit a tent housing people with heavy equipment pic.twitter.com/J2vMshJ20g

— Laura Schulte (@SchulteLaura) August 4, 2026

Live look from about 5:20 this morning when I arrived at the encampment pic.twitter.com/v6fXE1keYG

— Laura Schulte (@SchulteLaura) August 4, 2026

Governor Evers doesn't want to spend any time on "that bullshit that others are talking about."

You can ask him 100 times, and he's "going to give you the same damn answer: The issue is around getting things done."

"We're going to spend time on that bullshit that others are talking about on Twitter? Please."

Gov. Evers campaigning for David Crowley tonight in an attempt to stop Democratic Socialist Francesca Hong from winning next Tue: "You can ask me 100 times, and I'm going to give you… pic.twitter.com/336tlTDfhB

— Matt Smith (@mattsmith_news) August 4, 2026

I'm afraid "getting things done" is awfully generic. Francesca Hong is the frontrunner. You can't just refuse to talk about her. I'm not even sure what he's calling "bullshit." Is it Hong's issues or is it what her antagonists are saying about her? I don't see how refusing to engage and asserting that your candidate will "get things done" can turn things around. I'm here in Wisconsin, planning to vote in the primary, and monitoring the news every day, and David Crowley has made no impression on me. Personally, I'm a sucker for blandness and normality and moderation, but I understand the appeal of a candidate like Hong who stands for something and offers to shake everything up.

ADDED: I published this post and clicked on my "David Crowley" link and realize "that bullshit that others are talking about" may refer to the dirt (McGirk) about Crowley. Crowley had made an impression on me, 2 weeks ago, but the impression had worn off. Evers cleverly kept me from remembering it. I'll give him that.

Sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

"A statue of a dancing woman captures the light, happy spirit of Dagmar in SoHo, a dispensary designed to appeal to sophisticated women."

From "The Quirky, Luxurious and Stylish Cannabis Dispensaries of New York/In a crowded field of legal sellers, stores in New York City are leaning into looks and vibes to find their customers" (NYT gift link)(lots of photos of store fronts and interiors).

Top-rated comment: "Sorry, but I still support my local dealer, who risked arrest, supplying me with pot for 50 years and still delivers."

Unidentified Floating Object.

"We do not become good readers and learners by mastering generalizable skills but rather by acquiring the vocabulary, grammatical knowledge and stock of information..."

"... that allow us to make sense of a text. A child who knows a lot about baseball will do a better job reading and summarizing a passage on baseball than a child with a higher reading level but no knowledge of the subject. From this perspective, it is better to read a classic than a relatable contemporary story not only because one is beautiful and the other is not, but because a classic, by the very fact of its persistence over time, has become part of our shared culture. It thus increases our conversancy with all the texts from that culture. That is why it makes sense for fifth graders in Texas to read 'The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe,' 'The Phantom Tollbooth,' 'Paul Revere’s Ride' and even, speaking of baseball, 'Casey at the Bat.'"

I'm reading "What Blue States Can Learn From the Texas Book List" and "Texas Book List: See What Students Will Be Required to Read/What is essential reading? Texas has an answer: Classics, including the Bible" (NYT gift links).

I liked reading that booklist. Interesting to see various Bible readings pop up amid the poems and storybooks. You know what the first Bible story is? I comes up in Kindergarten: Jonah 1:1-5, 10-17, 2:10. What translation?, I wonder. And what verses are skipped over? Are the little ones going to read...

The water came over me and choked me;

the sea covered me completely,
and seaweed wrapped around my head.
I went down to the very roots of the mountains,
into the land whose gates lock shut forever

"This is the untold story of the autopsy that won’t die."

I'm reading "Author of Democrats’ 2024 Autopsy Says Party Left Out Key Chapter/A dispute over the chapter between the author and the Democratic National Committee has added to the party’s turmoil as it tries to look forward, not backward" (NYT gift link).

Read the chapter: here.

"When I was younger, I definitely felt smug about how much money I was saving. I felt like I was doing something secretly smart..."

"... living this ultrafrugal lifestyle in preparation for a day when I wouldn’t have to answer to anyone but myself. But I don’t feel that way anymore. If I drop dead of a heart attack tomorrow, most of my friends will have had more fun in their lives than I had in mine. Right now, I’m playing catch-up on fun. But I’m still pretty far behind...."

From "She Retired at 35. The Only Problem? It’s Lonely" (NY Magazine).

"And only since I retired have I started looking hard at what achieving all this shit was actually going to do for me. What emotional need was I trying to meet? My ambition level, the way I used to think of it, is now gone. But what did it serve?... I have a lifetime goal to foster and adopt out 100 animals, and I’m three-quarters there already.... I am not bored or underchallenged at all. I feel like I am busier than I’ve ever been, just with different things. I have the flexibility to help my friends with their kids, which — as I don’t plan to have kids — is pure joy...."

"'I deliver almost every single meal, almost every single day, because I hate to cook and I’m incredibly lazy,' she says..."

"... with a practiced, self-deprecating laugh to her camera, propped against the wall as a portable LED light bathes her in a warm glow. 'It is 10:15 a.m., and my first delivery just arrived, and it is my Starbucks coffee.' The coffee, an almond-milk iced latte with cold foam, two pumps of vanilla, and a pinch of cinnamon, costs $25.18. 'When I really want to rage-bait, I’ll order coffee. People get so mad at me,' she tells me. The Starbucks, after all, is only three blocks from her apartment, and most of the time she grabs it while walking her dog, an English cream miniature dachshund named Linguine...."

From "'You Can’t Just Be Showing Matcha-Pilates-Alo'/Lifestyle influencers used to post cute photos and make millions. Now they have to pivot" (NY Magazine).

"Once upon a time, influencers could post beautiful photos of their lives — their outfits, their coffee, their vacations, their children — and, with enough consistency, amass an audience of followers who looked to them for inspiration or escape.... Now... [t]he only reliable way to reach mainstream or even moderate recognition against all the noise is to either carpet-bomb social media with clips or to enrage wide swaths of the public...."

A quiet sunrise.

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

RFK Jr. excoriates Dana Bash: "You're talking nonsense. You're making assertions. You can't support it. And then when I call you on them, they're you're telling me I'm arguing...."

"Do you see your job as ending vaccine hesitancy or do you see your job as telling the truth to the American people?... All you know how to do is repeat things that people told you and say trust the experts. That's what you do.... Now we know that Anthony Fauci, who was the expert, was lying about everything about masks, about social distancing, about natural immunity, about the transmission from the vaccine, about the source of COVID. He was lying. And you were punishing people for not trusting the experts. And now you're rolling out the experts again to talk about something that you have no personal knowledge of...."

"Seattle went though this years back. A whole block, lots of people. The city just gave it a little time and then one morning at about 4am..."

"... came in and announced the street will be cleaned in 10 minutes and everyone had to get out. They just rolled trucks down and tossed everything away and that was that. I think Madison will just need to do the same here. Let people do their thing for a bit, then wipe it clean and everyone moves on."

Says a commenter at the Reddit post, "A stroll through the autonomous zone. Who is responsible for bringing out all these porta-potties?"

"Mirror," the tag.

That last post really needed the tag "mirror." How did I come so far without a tag for mirror? I made one, then had 22+ years of the blog to search to add the tag retrospectively. It was easy to search for the word "mirror," but hard to separate the posts that deserved the tag — the ones referring to the object, a mirror — from the ones that did not — the ones using "mirror" as a dying metaphor (ideas "mirror" other ideas and so forth). And then there's the drudgery of adding the tag and republishing. But in the end, there's the fun of clicking on the tag and peering into the kaleidoscope.

There was "Fun with Mirrors" in 2008:

There was, also in 2008, the convex mirror I loved and wanted to buy:

"It's expensive — over $1800 — but as I thought about possibly buying it, I realized what I wanted it for was to take pictures, and therefore what I really should buy is a fisheye lens for my Nikon D50." So I got that fisheye lens. If you're nostalgic for those days, click the tag "fisheye." 

There was this advice about dolphins, in 2014: "People, can you just leave the dolphins alone? They don't want to swim with you, despite the 'expression' you see on their faces. The love you think you are experiencing is nothing more than self-love. Stay home, save your money, and stare in a mirror until you get a deep, accurate assessment of how true your self-love is. Is there a fixed smile on your face? I hope not, but if there is, it's not because you share the spirit of the dolphin. The dolphin is 'smiling' because nature played a dirty trick on him, drawing idiot humans into his domain. Get out. Leave the dolphin alone."

There was the mystery of what a monkey sees in a mirror, back in 2005: "What's in the monkey's mind when he looks in a mirror? Higher minds -- human beings, great apes, dolphins -- figure out, when they are looking in a mirror, that they are seeing themselves. Other animals, it's long been thought, think they're seeing a stranger. But a new study shows that the monkey occupies a middle position, where it doesn't see itself, but it doesn't see a stranger either. The monkey sees a 'Puzzling Other.'"

In 2024, I had Grok outline a book for me. It was titled "Through the Glass/Exploring Mirrors as Portals to Other worlds."

I was surprised to see that, back in 2013, I'd contributed to my long-running men-in-shorts theme with this stark advice: "Take a good look at yourself in the mirror when you've got your shorts on. Ask yourself if I were a woman, would I fuck me?"

There was this good question, in 2013: "If someone holds up a mirror and you say 'I look like an idiot,' is the mirror-holder calling you an idiot?"

There was the sunset in my rear-view mirror as I drove 500 miles to see Meade in 2009:

"Many Christians believe pride is not only a sin, but the original one, and the worst of them. It is demonic, 'the complete anti-God state of mind'..."

"... as C.S. Lewis wrote in 'Mere Christianity.' Pride is a turning away from God, and an exultation of oneself.* The mirror is a symbol of pride and vanity, but it also symbolizes our incomplete, earthly knowledge. As the Apostle Paul wrote about God in his first letter to the Corinthians: 'For now we see through a glass, darkly; but then face to face.'... In Islamic mysticism... a smudged mirror is a metaphor for the human soul. It is only when the ego is annihilated, and the surface is polished clean, that the divine becomes visible.... In 1967, Michel Foucault darkly described the mirror as a kind of threshold, a mix between a fantasy world, a utopia and some weird other place on the margins — which he called a 'heterotopia.' The mirror is one such strange place because we discover our presence and our absence at the same time. 'I see myself there where I am not,' he wrote, 'in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface.'"

A small sample from "All This Staring at Our Faces Is Messing With Our Heads" (NYT gift link), by Catherine Shannon.

___________________

* Shouldn't that be "an exaltation of oneself"? Are we not talking about raising ourselves above God (as opposed to jubilating over how wonderful we are)? Think about it. We say "an exaltation of larks," not "an exultation of larks."