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:

"We know that the lake is toxic"... but it's turquoise and so Instagrammable.

It's turquoise because "It's a highly toxic artificial pond used to dump ash from a nearby coal plant, and, warns the company that runs the plant, unsafe for swimming in" — CNN reports.

"In the last week, our ash dump of the Novosibirsk TEZ-5 has become the star of social networks," [said the Siberian Generating Company]. "But you CANNOT swim in the ash dump. Its water has high alkaline environment. This is due to the fact that calcium salts and other metal oxides are dissolved in it. Skin contact with such water may cause an allergic reaction!"

Oh, that doesn't sound so bad. And it's turquoise. And they're in Siberia.

The water gets its spectacular color from its depth and the various metal oxides dissolved in it, the company said. It is also extremely alkaline, with a pH of more than 8.

My poking around on the internet says that 8 is moderately alkaline — not "extremely alkaline" — and it's in the traditional range recommended for swimming pools in Denmark. In the U.S., it's 7.2 and 7.8 (with the problem being that a higher PH may make chlorine less effective in killing bacteria).

I think the American media are taking a cheap shot here because the story fits a popular frame: Social media is making people stupid and blind to the dangers of the real world. But the Russians in the article are clear that they know the lake isn't for swimming, they're not swimming it — just posing by it as if they would swim in it — and I don't think what makes it bad for swimming makes it a problem to stand next to. We often stand next to water we wouldn't bathe in! The only complaint here is that it's phony to pose as if you're at a great swimming location when you are not.

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A post shared by R I N A K O V E (@rina_kove) on Jun 19, 2019 at 6:38pm PDT

In social media photography — as in professional fashion photography — the models try to look as though they're having a magnificently pleasurable time and that's disaggregated from the reality of whether it's any fun at all for them. Mainstream media is hot to cover social media — they want to look youthful and trending — but their posing is FAR more of a problem. It's fake news!

IN THE COMMENTS: Howard said:

Drinking moderately alkaline water (9.2-pH) is all the rage with hipsters.

I did not know that, but he's right! Here's a NYT article from last year, "Is Alkaline Water Really Better for You?":

"The professor was just offering up some red meat so the racists and phony hero's would crawl out of their caves and show their disgusting underbellies."

"This blog is one big troll and the commentariat are the unwitting subjects of a psychopathology experiment."

Said Howard in the post about the 5 teenagers who taunted and laughed and recorded video as a man drowned before their eyes.

I'll just say... The phony hero's what?

And let me give you an example of a commenter who used that thread as an occasion to tell a story of his own (phony?) heroism. Gahrie wrote:

I was a longterm substitute teacher at a middle school that took the entire 7th grade to the museums and beach in San Diego. The kids were allowed to go in the water, and at least half did. I was the only teacher in the water. Six kids, all of whom were chronic trouble makers I later discovered, got caught in a rip current and were trapped where the waves were breaking also. No one noticed but me, and I immediately swam out to them without thinking. All six grabbed on to me, and thank god I am a large man (buoyant), or I would not have been able to keep the seven of us up. The lifeguards eventually saw us and rescued all of us. They said I probably saved the life of at least a couple of the kids who were exhausted.

When I finally got the shakes and reacted, the scariest thing to me was that I didn't think about what I was doing, and instead just reacted.

And let's also see what the race-conscious analysis was like. (The drowning man was black, and people are assuming that the 5 teenagers are black.) First, here's Chuck:

I am going to give the [NY] Times a pass on their having not posted video. Although I'll bet dollars to doughnuts that if a black man had been drowning and the monstrous do-nothing onlookers had been white, that the Times would have posted all of it along with three [new] columns on the state of race relations.

And here's Clyde:

[T]o play devil's advocate: In Florida, any sizable body of water such as a pond has a very good chance of having an alligator in it. There's a very good chance that the black teens don't know how to swim. It's apparent from listening to the video that the victim drowned quickly and would have been dead long before help could arrive even if they had called 911. And since they were at the park smoking marijuana, calling 911 would just have gotten them involved with the police, which they obviously didn't want to happen, and you can't call 911 anonymously.

And, responding to Clyde, YoungHegelian:

Yes, all this is true.

I'd like to add, in my experience with teen-age boys, & especially the black teen-age boys in the DC area, that sort of goofy bravado is default behavior when caught in an unfamiliar situation. It's like you never, ever show fear or concern, for such would be seen as a sign of weakness.

You have no idea how many times I've been out driving & some young black man will just step out boldly to cross against traffic. And you know what? He'll never look up the entire time! It's almost as if when he makes eye contact with a driver, the jig will be up. Hell, I'd look up & around when jaywalking just to make sure I don't get splattered by some clown who's looking at his cell phone & not the road. Not these guys.

And, yes, it gets them killed. In my county in suburban DC (Montgomery County, MD), each year more pedestrians are struck & killed by cars then there are victims of murder.

And here's Big Mike:

I want to add that I'm very distressed to see the comments that raise a racial issue (or potential racial issue). I grew up in [a] small Midwestern quarry town, and the white teenagers among whom I grew up would have acted no differently. Well, except fifty-five years ago they wouldn't have had cellphones, they'd have been smoking cigarettes and not weed, and there was no 911, no Internet, no social media.

"Man cave."

It's the July 23, 2009 Urban Word of the Day. Here's definition #1, with 831 up, 51 down votes:

A room, space, corner or area of a dwelling that is specifically reserved for a male person to be in a solitary condition, away from the rest of the household in order to work, play, involve himself in certain hobbies, activities without interuption. This area is usually decorated by the male that uses it without interferance from any female influence.

Definition #2 is similar. But watch out for Definitions #3 and 4, which have been strongly disapproved of by Urban Dictionary voters.

So do you have a man cave? Tell us about it. And I mean that in the Definition #1/2 sense. I know you've got one in the Definitions #3/4 sense, and you probably haven't got anything entertaining to say about it (unless you are Titus).

IN THE COMMENTS: Howard said:

Another depressing example of the continued sissification of America. Giving a special cute name to normal quiet behavior and/or a garage screams of estrogen.

If you have a garage band in that garage, you can call it Screams of Estrogen. And write a song called "Normal Quiet Behavior."