At the Saturday Night Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

The photo is by Meade. Location: Presque Isle Park, in Marquette, Michigan. I think it looks like the set for a production of "Waiting for Godot." Somehow, Meade's photographs convey an air of surreality... at least to me. Maybe because I wasn't there. Fortunately, dear Meade has returned... as you can see by his midge pix in the previous post. I mean those are Lake Mendota midges... not Lake Superior midges.

Sunrise — 5:21.

It was a gray morning here, but Meade was sojourning in the U.P., and he texted me these:

Talk about whatever you like in the comments. And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link.

"[M]y notes weren’t always as illuminating as I’d expected them to be. 'What does ‘Alt’ mean?' I asked Hugh over dinner one night."

"He looked down at the page. 'It’s not "Alt,"' he said. 'It’s "A.L.T."' Then I remembered. We’d been out early that morning, observing a short parade of ostriches. It was misty, and I pointed to a vague shape on the horizon. 'What’s that?' I asked Dalton. He followed my finger and told me it was likely an A.L.T. 'Animal-looking thing,' he explained."

I'm so glad to see a new David Sedaris essay in The New Yorker, "Notes on a Last-Minute Safari/We saw every animal that was in 'The Lion King' and then some. They were just there, like ants at a picnic, except that they were elephants and giraffes and zebras."

I liked seeing the first syllable of my last name in a new context, but more important was the opportunity to find out David Sedaris's opinion of going on "safari," because I had quite recently asserted, to a complete stranger, that going on safari was really basically the same thing as going to the zoo. These things are packaged. It's not as though you're exploring the authentic natural habitat of elephants, giraffes, and zebras.

This morning, it rained, so there are no photos of today's sunrise, but I have sunrise pictures from Sunday, the 13th...

... when we camped on the shore of Lake Superior. This is Horseshoe Harbor, at 6:38 EDT:

6:39:

6:44:

6:45:

About those rocks:

Today's sunrise at High Rock Bay — Copper Harbor, Michigan.

Home now, but these photos were taken this morning, beginning at 6:02 Eastern Time, 44 minutes before sunrise time:

6:31:

6:35:

6:39:

6:45:

6:58:

All photos taken just a few steps beyond our campsite, which looked like this:

The lake is Lake Superior.

Copper Harbor, Michigan.

A little trip 6 hours north got us cool weather — 50s and 60s — and the clear water of Lake Superior.

Lots of rocks and the occasional flower:

Lots of camping in Copper Harbor. Big vehicles. Some powered by Bitchdust: 

Here's our camper — in the background, with me in the foreground:

One sunrise photo: 

Comment on the photos if you like, but you can use this post as an open thread. 

A view from the top of Sugarloaf Mountain in Marquette, Michigan.

Sunrise over Lake Superior.

This morning at 7:34, 7:37, and 7:45 — Eastern Time. We were in Marquette, Michigan:

Here's what the surface we were walking on looked like — very striated from long-ago glaciers:

We hiked in the dark to get to this location, in Presque Isle Park.

We didn't see the Northern Lights...

... but here's proof we tried:

And we did have the cool adventure of hiking through the woods 2 and a half hours before dawn to get to the hidden beach on the shore of Lake Superior near Marquette, Michigan (2 nights ago).

I didn't think about taking photographs, so I didn't have a tripod, just my iPhone. The hump you see is not an elephant inside a boa constrictor but a small island, which, I've heard, people swim to and hike around on. How to swim and then hike? Barefoot? Swim in sandals? Float hiking shoes alongside you as you swim? I don't know. I was only doing one thing at a time and getting to that island wasn't on the agenda.

ADDED: The beach is called Granite Point, and the island is Little Presque Isle.

Yesterday, at 6:18 pm, on the rocks of Presque Isle.

Write about anything you like in the comments.

Putting the hard in Harding: "The Letters That Warren G. Harding’s Family Didn’t Want You to See."

"Honestly, I hurt with the insatiate longing, until I feel that there will never be any relief untilI take a long, deep, wild draught on your lips and then bury my face on your pillowing breasts."

Oh, Carrie! I want the solace you only can give. It is awful to hunger so and be so wholly denied. . . . Wouldn’t you like to hear me ask if we only dared and answer, 'We dare,' while souls rejoicing sang the sweetest of choruses in the music room? Wouldn’t you like to get sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake — for the joy of fevered fondling and melting kisses? Wouldn’t you like to make the suspected occupant of the next room jealous of the joys he could not know, as we did in morning communion at Richmond?

ADDED: What do you make of "sopping wet out on Superior — not the lake"? I was entertaining the theory that "Superior" was his name for his penis (like John Thomas in "Lady Chatterley's Lover").

There's still ice on Lake Superior.

Just a speck.

"Actually, the Althouse animagus scared the crap out of me this morning..."

"... with the rant on [Stephen] King and the intelligent bow to Tyler Cowen who rejects the push-button of good v. evil stories for his preferred superior push-button of having a higher IQ, superior to schmucks frozen in hell with lower IQ’s. The higher IQ test (the end-all criterion for the real hot smarties) juxtaposed against the raw animalistic gaia rant really scared me – until I saw what I felt (I may be wrong about this) was the point, er the two points, er the three points, (I can’t count higher than three, so I must stop here) – expressing palpable bitchery (that had to feel primally good) to provoke exactly the binary good v. evil reaction that Cowen criticizes – whether Cowen is right or wrong is not the issue, because simple rightness or wrongness is not the test – when it’s not the test."

That's just part of what Naked Surfer said in the ice cave a few hours ago. You can't surf naked on Lake Superior, even when you're feeling superior, especially when its frozen, but I appreciate Naked Surfer's effort to understand what was going on here on the Althouse blog at 4:52 in the morning, when I accepted Stephen King's apology and grabbed his abandoned but unforgettable phrase "Palpable Bitchery" for my very own.

The ice cave craze.

Droves of people going to the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore see the "gleaming columns of white and pastel earth tones, translucent stalactites of ice and windblown, feathery creations... the caves... of magic and wonder," so that what was once a mile-long hike out onto Lake Superior has gotten much longer because it's hard to snag parking at the Meyers Beach parking lot.

The eerie beauty will have a different feeling with such large crowds, but maybe it's a grand winter festival. We want to go. It's pretty cold up there right now, but actually less cold than here in Madison. I've been in those caves in the summertime, by kayak: see. But I'd love to see them with the ice.

Sandy could bring waves as high as 33 feet to the Great Lakes.

"The National Weather Service... says waves on Lake Michigan could be 10 to 18 feet by Monday afternoon, then build to 20 to 33 feet on Tuesday before subsiding. Waves on parts of Lake Superior and Lake Huron could top 20 feet."

ALSO: "Crew of HMS Bounty forced to abandon ship as Hurricane Sandy bears down on East Coast."

AND: My "coastal cities" theory could apply to Milwaukee (and tip Wisconsin to Romney). In the most extreme, it could tip Illinois (because of Chicago).

MORE: Nate Silver says:

[I]t is probably unwise to anticipate what affects [sic] the storm might have within particular states, such as whether it might affect the Democratic parts of Pennsylvania more than the Republican ones. Hurricane Sandy is just too large a storm, and has such unpredictable destructive potential, to make reliable guesses about this.

Why would it be unwise to anticipate something? It's just speculation based on the available evidence. I suspect Silver is saying that because his methodology involves processing polling, but I don't see what's unwise about thinking about other things unless you impute more weight to the evidence than it deserves. And even if you do... so what? We're just guessing about what will happen in the future. No one is relying on any of this. We're just talking about the future event as we pass the time waiting for Election Day.

Polar bear flees its zoo pen in Duluth, escaping the flood.

There was some heavy rain up at Lake Superior today.

“Even though it’s a large white object, it’s pretty nerve racking,” police spokesman Jim Hansen said of the chase for Berlin [the polar bear]. Zoo officials said she was tranquilized by the zoo’s vet and placed in quarantine....

Two seals managed to swim out of the zoo but were quickly recaptured just outside. Wolniakowski said no dangerous animals left the zoo grounds and that all have been secured.

"It's of absolutely no agricultural or economic significance, but it is a previously unrecognized biological entity and, as such is intellectually interesting."

University of Wisconsin–Madison botanist Robert R. Kowal, talking like a professor about the new flower he found on an island in Lake Superior. Kowal is an expert on the genus Packera, which sounds like something that belongs in Wisconsin, but it's simply the sunflower. The new species is Packera insulae-regalis ("the Packera of Isle Royale"):

"The species is known only from one population along the trail used by hikers moving along the ridge that forms the spine of the island... The plants are probably saved by the trail. If the area was allowed to go to forest, this species would probably be shaded out and go extinct."

And here are the beautiful illustrations of the flower, by Kandis Elliot, an artist in UW–Madison Botany department (who won the 2010 International Science & Engineering Visualization Challenge for a poster called "Introduction to Fungi").

Twilight, Lake Superior.

This evening, in Bayfield, Wisconsin.

"Two Wisconsin men are grateful to be alive after surviving two terrifying hours on ice floes in Lake Superior as heavy waves crashed around them."

"Skip Wick, 80, of Hurley, and Mike Popko, 61, of Saxon, ... were among 50 to 75 ice anglers fishing on 1-foot-thick ice near Ashland. Wick was about 500 yards from shore when cracks suddenly appeared. He and Popko made their way shoreward as heavy swells below the ice expanded the fractures. But as they jumped from one ice chunk to another they ran out of steppingstones. They rode out the storm on separate floes while waves raged as high as 12 feet."

"Wisconsin isn't actually the center of the universe. A convergence of events has just made it seem that way."

Writes the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel.

This week alone, President Barack Obama visited the state, U.S. Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wis.) gave the Republican response to the State of the Union address, and the Green Bay Packers were on the fast track to becoming America's sweethearts.

Wednesday night's "American Idol," spotlighting auditions it conducted in Milwaukee in the summer and fall of 2010, was just icing on the cake....

Performers stood in front of a blue scrim with the "Idol" logo, judges sat at the prow-like front of the [Windhover Hall of the Milwaukee Art Museum] and interviews were conducted in the museum's whalebone white hallways.

A stormy Lake Michigan was a feature throughout and could be seen dramatically changing colors and textures behind the judges....

Jennifer Lopez referred to it as "the ocean."

Hey, we were already planning to go to the Milwaukee Art Museum this weekend. So don't think, when you see my photographs, that we only went there because of "American Idol." We're going there because we're excited about seeing Masterworks of North Carolina Earthenware:

The exhibition explores, among others, work... by Moravian immigrant potters who...  found a home in the North Carolina Moravian missionary settlement. Superior in quality to the pottery the early American colonists were creating, the slip-decorated earthenware, though utilitarian, represented the religious beliefs for which their makers had once been persecuted, and allowed the settlers to maintain a sense of cultural identity in the new world.

I'm a descendant of Moravian refugees from persecution, and maybe the mysterious Meade will tell you why he's interested in the show too.