A vogue word, rejected.

You don't need to care about the NYT crossword to be interested in what follows — it discusses a current buzzword — but it does reveal a couple answers. 

From Rex Parker's write-up of today's puzzle:

My 18-year-old Audi TT is still the only car I want...

... but I've just learned that the 2023 TT will be the last in this beautiful line:

... Audi has announced that the reign of its small sports car is over. The Audi TT will die at the end of 2023. But it won’t be going quietly into that good night, as the German automaker will be sending it off with one Final Edition. Audi is preparing to release the TT Final Edition in both coupe and convertible forms, bringing exclusive specs and design flourishes to the sports car for one last time.

Feel free to goad me into buying another TT or tell me why I should treasure my 2005 TT into its vintage years or rid myself of all TTs and step into the new era, which is, at least from the Audi point of view, post-small-sports car.

By the way, if I were a German car company — or a German anything — I wouldn't use "Final" in my branding.

At the Snow Car Café...

 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

(I took that photo at 6:04 this morning. We got a lot of snow, and it's quite cold, and it's going to be cold all week.)

The car and the crane at 6 a.m.

Here's the action version — just 4 seconds:

"Exhausted, confused, isolated and depressed Americans are not buying the Democratic line that things are better than they look."

Writes Maureen Dowd, in "Can Dems Dodge Doomsday?" (NYT). Focused on helping the Democratic Party in the next election, she looks to 3 Democratic Party strategists — James Carville, David Axelrod, and Stan Greenberg.

Biden’s advisers are urging him just to sell harder and people will get it. Axelrod disagrees: “You cannot persuade people if their lived experience is telling them something different. We’ve been through hell in America and around the world.”...

Carville [says Democrats] should work not to seem like an “urban, coastal, arrogant party”... “People don’t like you.”...

... Greenberg warned Democrats not to use Obama.... “Obama did not give voice to the hurt and anger that working class voters were feeling,” Greenberg wrote.... Fretting about the threat of Trumpism, given that the Democrats are bleeding working-class voters, including Black and Hispanic ones, he told me, “If they don’t listen this time, we’re going to end up with fascism, dammit.”

To sum up. Axelrod says: empathize with the people. Carville says: stop being so damned dislikeable. Greenberg says: do class politics, not race politics.

ADDED: I'm reading the comments over there and it's overflowing with denial: Stop trashing Biden! I'm tired of attacks on Democrats! 

One comment with over 1400 up votes ends with the poorly thought-out line: "D to go forward; R for reverse....over an endless series of catastrophic cliffs." Don't go forward over even one catastrophic cliff, because that will be the end of it all, and what lies beyond is irrelevant. If the endless cliffs are behind us, so that going in reverse would take us over them, how did we get here in the first place?

Do you visualize history as a landscape? Do you think of the government as a car driving over that landscape? Does that car have an automatic transmission? When I get in my car, I don't see a "D"...

The Friday sunrise run.

1. In the car, waiting for Meade to join me for our morning outing, I listened to Bach's "Concerto for Flu"... you know, Bach's "Concerto for Flu"?



2. In the comments, Howard said, "What a Bum. Meade doesn't warm up the car for you? He better be fixing you bulletproof coffee or something." I had been up for 3 hours by that time (about 7 a.m.), and I had already had enough coffee. Meade was getting his first coffee of the day, and he probably would have preferred to have gotten to the car first, because he did not appreciate my style of driving, which he called "herky-jerky," because it splashed his coffee over the rim of the unlidded cup. Funnily, that happened at exactly the same place where his driving splashed my coffee out of its unlidded cup 2 weeks ago.

3. I've got other photographs to post here, but I took the time to put "Concerto for Flu" up over at Facebook, which — for its own reasons — quoted to me something I wrote exactly 3 years ago. It was interesting, because out on my sunrise run today, I was imagining someone asking me how I liked retirement, and my answer was simply I love the freedom and independence. Back then, I wrote: "I'm down to my last 3 classes. It's an interesting test of whether it's the right idea to retire. I could be thinking: Oh, no! I'll never do this again, I must savor the last few moments! But I'm not. I'm just in the usual mode of doing the same thing one more time. There are always new insights and unknowns and excitement about interacting with a group of students, but that I can see that I'd prefer to have my time free to read and talk about whatever I want at any given moment. And I prefer to have conversations with people who are talking to me because they're into doing exactly that — not as a means to an end or because it's required but because of its raw intrinsic value."

4. The northern view at 7:22 (actual sunrise time was 7:15):



5. If you got here a bit earlier, you'd have seen a different picture there at #4. I mixed up my pictures and mistakenly showed you the eastern — CORRECTION: WESTERN! — view at 7:32 (which was much more vivid!):



6. This eastern view is the classic sunrise orientation, and here's how it looked at 7:40 (with ducks and geese):



7. A glove ambiguously pointed the way:



8. The view of the Capitol at 7:24:



9. A view, looking north, at 7:26:

At the Dark Day Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

My car, right now.

I can't drive until after my eye surgery, so let it sleep soundly under its fluffy white blanket.

Snow layers.

Just now.

What a rain!

The sky darkened and the storm hit just as class ended today. Meade picked me up at the law school and we headed very slowly home in the TT. At the top of Lathrop Drive we saw a confused racoon rousted out of his sewer. Here we are stopped at the corner of North Charter and University Avenue, with the rainwater flowing up over the curb in a wave onto the sidewalk:



Look at that drain. You can see what flummoxed the racoon. Hail began hitting the windshield, and we headed for higher ground, into University Heights, where we saw a young woman running on the sidewalk with her feet plunging through ankle-deep water. What a crazy storm! It would have been better to shelter in place. As we arrived home — 1.3 miles from the school — the sun burst out and everything was fresh and pretty.

Inside, I reassured the dog and got big towels to soak up the rain that was all over the floor, and, outside, Meade took out the rake and cleaned up the leaves that had fallen. The leaves are still green here, and they mostly held tight, preserving our good hopes for bright fall-color season. But what a rain! The biggest rainstorm I've ever seen in Madison.

UPDATE: How much rain was it really? Only 0.91 inches. But it fell within about half an hour.

Details from the front yard.

I'm just trying to figure out my new camera, which is a Panasonic LUMIX DMC-LX100, perhaps more camera than I need, but the slight extravagance motivated me to try to read the manual, a mind-bending — eye-bending — experience that led me to buy this book, which seems to be written in actual English sentences meant to be read by a human being. And now I'm going to try to become more knowledgeable about all the features.

I'd had my eye on this camera after reading this article about what a photographer packed on his trip around the world, but I'd decided against splurging. I had a good-enough, cheaper Lumix — about like this — and it was still working. But then on our first day in Colorado last week, I did something stupid with it. I really shouldn't reward my bad behavior, but I needed a new camera and I'd already done the desire-formation around a particular camera, so I closed the deal. It was very much like the way I wanted an Audi TT, but I had a perfectly good VW Beetle and resisted the urge to buy something new and expensive. Then I wrecked the Beetle and got the TT.

Living in the country...

1. Can you picture it? From interior of the TT, yesterday, we saw some interesting parcels of land.

2. Use the comments for talking about anything, including real estate dreams... and Badgers football/basketball.

3. If you need to shop, may I recommend The Althouse Amazon Portal?

"Audi has said the new TT will look like a cross between the beautiful first-generation TT and the always-striking R8."

"It's kind of hard to tell from this one image."

It's not a great look at the car, but it's clear enough to see that it's evolution and not revolution for the coupe. But it's always been a pretty good-looking car, so why change things much? 

To get back to the beautiful original. I'm waiting for the full circle.

ADDED: Here's my 2005 TT, as I caught it lurking, as we finished our hike on the Ice Age Trail:

"MOTH: Sloth? This is Moth./SLOTH: Hello, Moth."

I wasn't going to link to this, because we already talked about the sloth-moth article in the NYT, but in last night's "Retriever Café," roger wondered "when are we going to get back to discussion of sloth shit............" Yeah, those are roger's dots, and I wanted to help.

This blog is about helping people, you know. For example, I also helped the person who said that "Daily Show" embedded video was autoplaying. I edited in a page break so you'd have to click "more" to get to it, even though another commenter (rh) had already given some tech advice about how to prevent autoplay — which is something, I guess, that's built into Safari, because it wasn't autoplaying for me, but I don't want it autoplaying for anybody.

And Kevin asked (about the photo at the Café): "Was that imac back in the corner bad? Is that why you gave it a 'time-out'?" So I'm helping Kevin by answering: That computer is bad, but it took its own time out, and the time out that it chose was forever. If only mild, maternal chastisement would restore its goodness, but it was good for a long time, and I'd love to give it a nice send-off, but it's hellishly hard to rid oneself of an old computer. Even though I have tech people to help me, I have 25 years of expired Macintoshes in corners of my various rooms, all unburied.

Quaestor drops down out of his tree to poop on iMacs:

All iMacs are bad and should be relegated to the darkest corner of the unsold merchandise warehouse. With a lot of swoopy plastic style to wow the yokels, and a lot more instant obsolescence built in (not a bug, but a feature)....

Not a bug, but a moth......... Hey, Quaestor, my last 4 iMacs are metal and they're no more "swoopy" than an iPhone, which wowed people — those whom you call "yokels" — with the simplest possible design, in glass and metal, back when they were used to plastic phones with the kind of linear ridges about which carmakers are sometimes delusional.

"Does how to cook bacon count as my personal life?"

"If you say yes, then 1 of 11 posts today is about my 'personal life.' If not, then 0 of 11. Going back before today, I counted 47 posts before I got to one that could arguably be considered about my personal life, and it was only a photograph of our backyard garden with the TT parked next to it."

That's me, responding to Pete, who has the impression that other lawprofs blog mainly about law and occasionally put something in about their personal lives, whereas "the reverse is true" for me.

I'm posting to say that Pete's wrong, but I'm pleased by that wrongness. I like that this feels personal. But the notion that you're seeing my personal life... where does that illusion come from? I hope you're getting pleasure too... from this faux voyeurism.

And here's the garden + TT, in this morning's light-and-shadow.



Data mine that, peepers!

At the Double Arc Café...

... you can talk about anything you want, but this is a photo I took this morning from an upstairs window after Meade commented on the perfect parking place for the TT, which is to say, replicating the arc that he made to mark the transition from lawn to garden.

At the Cardinal-on-Car Café...

... you can find your perfect place.

A midday outing on New Year's.

Kind of gloomy. But the worst of it was the ice. Hard to walk at all.

Turkeys and Jesus.

11 minutes of walking and driving, with Althouse and Meade... and turkeys and Jesus.

Class warfare, Madison-style.

Last night, around 6 p.m., Meade — who's driven cars for 40 years without ever getting into an accident — was driving our Audi TT in the right lane on University Avenue, going the speed limit. Suddenly, a Toyota Yaris cut directly in front of him, missing our front left fender by half a car length. About 150 feet later, the Yaris braked and turned into the Whole Foods parking lot. Meade turned there too and drove over to where the Yaris was parking. When driver — a 40-ish white female — emerged, Meade called out, politely: "Excuse me. Do you realize that you cut me off over on University Avenue?"

Her comeback, in an acid tone: "Honey, if I had your Audi, I would drive better."

Why mention the Audi? What was she thinking? I mean, it's hard for me to imagine saying anything but "I'm really sorry." And there's no way Meade could have driven better. I assume she meant he should have driven faster, above the speed limit, because she wanted to go faster, and she needed to be in the right lane so she could make her turn into Whole Foods. We were just annoyingly in the way. And annoyingly riding in an Audi sportscar. She's in a Yaris. We're in an Audi TT, so fuck us. Honey.

IN THE COMMENTS:  edutcher said:

She was trying to bluff her way out of the fact she was at fault. 

Not so much bluff as distract. Like she's saying: You think I did something wrong. You did something wrong. You own something expensive. Not shame on me. I am the 99%. Shame on you!