The lakeside breath of freedom.

And here we were talking about that 4:23 a.m. post about Kierkegaard and anxiety:

If you had to argue that birds are right wing or left wing, what side would you take and how would you support your position?

That's a prompt I used on Grok this morning after seeing the typo — speako, really — I'd made in a prompt earlier this morning when I used AI to identify a bird. It was a Rose-breasted Grosbeak. I'd said: 

"It's got black and white on top and white on the bottom and there's some right orange patches."

"right" = bright, of course.

Meade said, "Yeah, 'right' orange patches sounds nazi." Hence, my new prompt.

Do not click for more if you don't want to read AI-written material, but I do think this one is at least worth scanning. It's a crisp outline. Grok takes the position that birds are right wing:

"The idea that trying too hard is deeply uncool is... nothing new. In the ’90s, it was the central dogma..."

"... of the grunge era.... Similarly, the current just-rolled-out-of-bed look might be seen as a pendulum swing away from looksmaxxing, big blowouts and heavily filtered social media photos. Guido Palau, who styled the windswept ponytails at the Prada show, describes the look as 'weirdly bourgeois' and designed to keep people guessing. 'If you’re wearing the most beautiful cashmere jumper and it costs a fortune, you want people to know but not to know,' he says, and messy hair works the same way. 'There’s a kind of inverted snobbery.'"

From "Want to Stay on Trend? Stop Brushing Your Hair. With messy mops showing up on both runways and red carpets, the key to fashion’s new favorite hairstyle is doing less" (NYT).

I've long been a fan of this kind of hairdo. When I was a teen, in the 1960s, I imagined myself becoming famous as the hairdresser who invented the style called The Mess-Up. How could you get people to rave about your brilliant work when what you were doing is messing up their hair? I don't know, but it's genius if you can make that happen. I had the vision to mess up the hair just the right way, the way that looks so nonchalant and witty. 

Life took me elsewhere, but the inspiration of The Mess-Up must have formed an underlying anti-structure.

You know, I didn't stumble across that link myself. Meade texted it to me, and I'm pretty sure that had to do with my criticism of the hair of the women on the various news commentary TV shows he watches. I loathe the shows, but I sit there, often with noise-cancellation AirPods in while I read my iPad, but I do take in the visuals enough to become annoyed by the messy cocker-spaniel ears that festoon the female heads. Make is sleek! Pin it up! Look professional!

"What's he doing in there?"

Video by Meade, on the shore of Lake Mendota, today in the afternoon. We don't know what that man was doing out there in the water. Perhaps limnology. 

Later, I had no idea Meade was making this video of me, traipsing about in the forest:

 

An angel gets his wings.

Me and Meade, after the blizzard:

AND: Here's Meade's video of this morning's sunrise:

I love the music he chose — "Wichita Lineman." The lush instrumentation prevented me from really liking it at the time, but it's great now. I enjoy the subtle evocation of telegraph noise, which made me think of another old song with a representation of telegraph noise. It's much noisier:

That's "Western Union," by The Five Americans. I played it out loud for Meade, and then I played another Five Americans song with a title that had caught my eye.

Meade liked it and asked me what it was called. I told him and he sent me another video:

 

"Regarding the current U.S.-Iran conflict, former President Trump (who appears to be back in office based on recent reports)..."

"... declared at a rally in Hebron, Kentucky, on March 11, 2026, that 'we've won' the war against Iran, claiming it was effectively over 'in the first hour.' He has repeated variations of this, including that the U.S. has 'already won' but needs to 'finish the job,' amid ongoing military operations. The war itself seems to have begun around late February or early March 2026, with U.S. airstrikes and other actions escalating quickly...."

So wrote Grok, after I asked about the difference between 2 events — the victor's winning and the loser's surrender.

I was amazed to see the phrase "former President Trump (who appears to be back in office based on recent reports)."

Meade suggested that Grok was attempting to appeal to what it knew to be my sense of humor. I quoted the phrase to Grok and asked "are you trying to make me laugh?" Its answer made me laugh again:

"No, not at all—I'm not trying to make you laugh. That phrasing was just my attempt at cautious wording based on the flow of incoming reports at the time, but clearly it landed awkwardly...."

Ha ha. Cautious wording! Of all the things you might hesitate to answer with confidence!

"Cow Licking."

I've been a huge admirer of Georgia O'Keeffe since I first saw the Life Magazine article "Georgia O'Keeffe, on the Ghost Ranch." That was 1968, and I was 17. I've looked at so many of her pictures, in person and in books, but I had never seen "Cow Licking" until this morning. 

I love it. Don't you? But let me tell you how I happened to run across it this morning. It was 5:43 a.m., and I'd been downstairs in breakfast-and-blog mode for a while when I got this text from upstairs:

Well, the Book of Leviticus and Deuteronomy
The law of the jungle and the sea are your only teachers
In the smoke of the twilight on a milk-white steed
Michelangelo indeed could've carved out your features
Resting in the fields, far from the turbulent space
Half asleep near the stars with a small dog licking your face

I know what that is. It's Meade, sending me a Bob Dylan lyric and boldfacing the part about a small dog licking the face of whoever "you" is. Who is this person whose only teachers — law professors — are Leviticus, Deuteronomy, the jungle, and the sea? He rode in on a white horse, he's buff and handsome, and now he's lolling about in a field with a small dog licking his face. Maybe you remember being told that this song, "Jokerman," is about Jesus.

I don't know about that. I see that Dylan said it was something "mystical" that came upon him down there in the Caribbean — something "inspired by these spirits they call jumbis."

I didn't get far into that because Meade texted "What is that famous painting?" And he didn't mean that Dürer painting that is the first image in the "Jokerman" video, that image that just about everyone thinks is Jesus but is the artist himself, Albrecht Dürer:

Meade was thinking about something else: "Black man, lying supine on desert sand with stars above and a small dog."

I immediately thought of Henri Rousseau's "Sleeping Gypsy":

Yes, that's not a dog. It made me think of this scene in a Chaplin movie I'd watched upstairs last night while Meade was watching basketball downstairs:

Texting this morning from upstairs, Meade thought it might be a different Rousseau painting. I found "La Noce," which has a "comically oversized and awkward" dog that, we're told, takes "the eye deep into the composition" and asserts the artist's "position as the master of spatial paradox."

I text-typo'd "that’s the only rousseau with a god that i found."

I asked Grok, "What's that famous painting with a dog licking a person's face." And then "Is there ANY famous painting showing any kind of tongue-licking?" and "Dog or person or other animal — now I'm just looking for licking. I'm thinking licking isn't seen as something worth painting — too in-the-moment and active to be frozen into a still image. But maybe somebody did it. All I can think of is that Rolling Stones logo."

And that's how I found "Cow Licking."

UNANSWERED QUESTION: Why did Meade send me that Dylan lyric and boldface "with a small dog licking your face"? I think it had something to do with the rumor that Mayor Mamdani has a secret plan to run all the dogs out of New York City.

Juiciest dog rumor since "They're eating the dogs."

Come on and find it.

ADDED: I have never been able to understand the words to that song — "Come and Get Your Love." I'm reading the words today for the first time, and I still had trouble understanding it. "Get it from the main vine"? Meade thought it was a drug reference — like "main line." And I thought it was phallic.

But Grok says: "According to explanations tied to the band—particularly co-founder Lolly Vegas (who sang lead on the track)— 'main vine' is a metaphor rooted in the band's Native American heritage (Redbone's members had Yaqui, Shoshone, and other Indigenous ancestry). It symbolizes Mother Earth or the primary, fundamental source of life, love, and spiritual connection."

The line I used for the post title is: "What's the matter with your mind.... Nothing the matter with your head, baby, find it/Come on and find it...." The chorus makes it clear that "it" is love. Whether that's sexual love or something grandly spiritual is in the ears of the listener.

Stalking the wild sun.

It's our lucky Friday the 13th, February Friday the 13th.

Winter morning.

Have you experienced this "Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right" or is the NYT pushing it at us to foment contempt for conservatives?

I'm reading "After Renee Good Killing, Derisive Term for White Women Spreads on the Far Right/Vocal Trump supporters are demonizing Renee Good, her partner and their allies, with some even using an acronym: AWFUL, or Affluent White Female Urban Liberal" by Clyde McGrady.

I hadn't seen this term, and I read all sorts of things every day, so that makes me think this term isn't really a thing... though I've certainly noticed that people of the right are passing around a lot of videos of highly emotional left-wing white women.

But then I asked Meade, and he had heard the term and it seems to be catching on. 

Needless to say, I don't like the term. I don't like expressions of contempt and I don't like commentators  trading on the idea that women are over-emotional. I also don't like freaking out and yelling in public (or at home), but you can say just that, without contributing to sex-based hatred. 

Despite that NYT headline, McGrady's column isn't really about the term AWFUL. It's more about the phenomenon of going after activist liberal white women:

Trump questions the Shah's support-garnering capacity.

The news as displayed at Memeorandum:

From the Reuters article, a quote from Trump: "He seems very nice, but I don't know how he'd play within his own country. And we really aren't up to that point yet. I don't know whether or not his country would accept his leadership, and certainly if they would, that would be fine with me."

I know he's not the Shah. Not yet. Just testing the concept on you after Meade called him the Shah. I said he's not the Shah, and Meade said it was like addressing a nun as "Sister" when you're not Catholic. I said: "You mean like using someone's preferred pronouns?" It doesn't matter what you think the person really is, you're showing respect. 

Is it wrong to call Reza Pahlavi the "Shah"? Does it help him garner support or not? He's not in power, not yet anyway, but is there good reason to refer to him as the Shah?

Meade catches Althouse catching the moon and the sun.

ADDED: One more:

Am I the only one who remembers Willie the Worm?

That is a puppet show — on WCAU Philadelphia — that got started in 1950. I myself got started in 1950, in Texas, of all places, but I emerged in January 1951, in the Philadelphia television market, so I had the great good fortune to encounter this simple worm character when I was young enough to get the sense that he was important and well-loved.

It must have been more than a half century since Willie the Worm crossed my mind, but my memory was jogged yesterday as I was walking through the neighborhood with Meade, and we stopped to look at an elaborate yard display that had a sign with the lyric "Whisper words of wisdom" from the Beatles' song "Let It Be." The painted letters were a bit blobby and misshapen, and Meade read it as "Whisper worms of wisdom." My memory whispered the name of that worm of wisdom: "Willie."

I'm so touched to find video of my long-lost childhood friend, the puppet Willie the Worm. But let me acknowledge 2 other Willies the Worm:

Sunrise — 7:01.

Both pictures were taken at the same time, the first one by me and the second one by Meade:

It's funny, when I saw the time stamp on Meade's, I thought the iPhone got the time wrong and wondered how. I'd only walked part way out, stopped for a photo, then retreated, because the path was atrocious, ruggedly bumpy with ice-slicked snow. Meade walked all the way out to the usual vantage point, and I was counting on him to get some later photos, closer to sunrise. What you see above is my favorite of the pictures he took. Because his picture is lighter and because I wanted a later photograph, I got sidetracked into puzzling over why the time stamp went bad. But that goes to show how thinking goes bad. There was one thing I didn't want to believe and it was the thing that was true: Meade and I snapped our pictures at exactly the same time. We were both standing in the same darkness, but he zoomed into the lit up spot on the distant shore. The iPhone adjusted the exposure.

Anyway, what wrong thinking and unexpected coincidence have you encountered lately?

Or... write about whatever you want.

Sunrise — 7:01, 7:34.

It was very cold this morning, and the refrozen snow was incredibly slippery, so I only made it this far:

I would have put up with the cold and the wind, but the extra slippery — and bumpy — surface made me opt out of the full sunrise walk. I drove home and Meade walked out to the distant vantage point and then all the way home. Here's my favorite photo of his:

Write about whatever you want in the comments.

Today at the crunchy steps, coots.

Some ducks finding their way into the fringe of coot society, but basically coots.

Crunching on the steps, that's Meade, not me.

Here I am — another coot video'd by Meade:

Simultaneous sunrise.

By me:

"What did you think of that Supreme Court oral argument?"/"I'm enjoying learning about the parts of speech."

That's a snippet of phone conversation between Meade and me — my question, his answer — as we'd been listening separately, through headphones, as we were walking toward our meeting spot in the lakeshore woods. 

From the concordance to the transcript of the argument in Learning Center v. Trump:

noun [5] 16:19 52:3,25 53:

20 85:22 ...

verb [9] 11:25 16:10 40:8 

52:3,11 53:20 100:13 135:

4 176:21

verbs [29]11:25 12:2,7 16:

19 28:16 29:3,16,22 30:2

Context: 

GENERAL SAUER: Dames & Moore... said, this particular provision, where Congress has given these broad verbs, I mean, "regulate" is a capacious verb, admittedly, so are "nullify," so are "void," so are, frankly, all the other verbs there in the -- the language in IEEPA. 

Today's sunrise — photographed at 5:59 — and a look back to yesterday.

Today, it was quite clear and most interesting 36 minutes before the orb popped:

So let me go back to yesterday, that very misty morning. I have a few more pictures I wanted to show you. I caught this odd looks-out-of-focus image 9 minutes after the official pop: