The return of the flying creature.

At 5:18 this morning:

I believe it's the same bird observed at 5:23 on Monday morning, here. In the comments there, Quaestor and rehajm said owl. "Owl," "Yes, totally owl."

Jaq said: "I think that we are going to have to use Bayesian logic to figure out the bird, and before I zoomed in my first thought was buzzard, but after zooming in, I am betting my case of whiskey on owl," and then "Nah, I was thinking about it and I think that time of day, milieu, and the general silhouette has me changing my bet to a night heron flying home after working the night shift fishing," and then, "the tail is not right for a night heron."

Quaestor returned to say: "Night heron? Not enough beak or neck showing Furthermore, a night heron's legs trail behind the deck feathers in flight. I'm sticking with an owl, probably a great horned owl. They aren't usually associated with lake environments, but they are opportunistic hunters. This one could have spent the night hunting ducklings."

Rusty concurred: "Yeah. Goin' with owl. Good catch."

What movie did I watch?

 

ADDED: Marcus Carman identified the actor: "That's Cornel Wilde."

That caused Yancey Ward to guess: "Well, if that is Cornel Wilde, then a clown makes me think 'Greatest Show on Earth.'"

Ha ha. Does that look like a circus setting? Does Wilde seem like a circus person there?

Then Quaestor got it right: "Leave Her to Heaven."

Think what you will about this movie, but here's my description: A woman marries a man because he looks like her father, and though she's incredibly beautiful, the new husband would rather sit around typing novels and go swimming with his much younger brother and sing folk songs with the hired man than have sex with his wife. It's not a comedy.

"[E]ven if we spend another year between now and the election carefully analyzing the structure and shape of the madhouse we’re locked in, it’s still a madhouse."

"As infuriating as it is to admit the electorate may choose another Trump term, the only answer may be to hold on to that truth. Rejecting reality only replicates Republicans’ errors that led to Trump’s rise. Exercise your reason, stay informed, understand what’s happening in all its detail. But at those times when you want to scream in fear and anger, don’t think you’re being foolish or irrational. It just means you can see what’s in front of you."

Writes Paul Waldman, in "How not to have a psychic meltdown when you see new Trump-Biden poll numbers/As infuriating as it is to admit the electorate may choose another Trump term, the only answer may be to hold on to that truth" (MSNBC).

I can barely understand what Waldman in trying to say. He stresses "truth" and "reality," yet the truth/reality that he claims to see is that our country is a "madhouse." So hold onto that and never forget: We're locked in a madhouse! 

I guess one could approach life this way: I'm not crazy, the world is crazy. It allows you to distance yourself from other people: They're not worth understanding or even respect. You're right to fear and hate them. 

IN THE COMMENTS: Wince links to this:

  

And Quaestor adds:

Soulcraft.

I don't remember ever noticing the word "soulcraft" before today, when I saw it in a David Brooks column. Writing about "the cultural transformation" that could be achieved through the Democrats' $4 trillion in spending, he declared: "Statecraft is soulcraft." I blogged that — with disapproval — here. 

But what is "soulcraft"? If "statecraft" makes sense, it must mean the work of the state, so shouldn't "soulcraft" mean the work of the soul? But, in context, it seems to mean the state's work is to work on the soul. I think he's saying that the state ought to engage in massive spending with the aim of shaping the soul of the people who live under the power of the state, and the lack of parallelism in the use of the ending "-craft" is disturbing.

I try to think of other "-craft" words. "Witchcraft" is the work of witches, not the shaping of witches. It's done by witches, not to witches. It fits with "statecraft," not "soulcraft."

In the comments to my post, Lloyd W. Robertson and Peter Spieker independently bring up George Will, and Quaestor writes: 

Found in our little yard...

... a cardinal's eggs!

Finding and photographing by Meade.

IN THE COMMENTS: Quaestor said: "Wasn't there an egg on the sidewalk some years ago that we debated the identity of?"

Yes! Here: "Breakage." It looked like this:



Not the same. Blue with spots, but different.

I asked for an explanation of Hillary's giant-gaping-collar costume, and you answered!

Here's where I ask, and here's the puzzling outfit:



I'm going to say right off the bat, my favorite — because it made me laugh a lot and because it's pretty damned arty — comes from Unknown, who remembered this get-up worn by the actor Emil Jannings in the 1930 movie "The Blue Angel":



And extra points to Eric the Fruit Bat for subtlety, saying "I'll let the link do the talking" and taking us here:



And to m stone for having the same idea but spelling out the functionality of a big, gaping collar: "The collar is designed to accept the bubble helmet that is worn with it." He chooses "the Alan Shepherd model":



Then we've got 2 from "Star Trek," from Quaestor and madAsHell, respectively:





The first guy is doing especially well in the gaping collar department, while the second one connects with the medallion around the neck.

And, also with a bold medallion, it's the Emperor Ming, from yoobee:



ObeliskToucher said "She's Sontaran, obviously...":



And finally — also getting a LOL from me — Joe Schmoe said "I thought she was going for the turtle look":

"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.

"Mrs. Helen Althouse, the well-known mysterious Attica sleeper..."

"... had a narrow escaped from death from poisoning this week."

Two men visited Mrs. Althouse Thursday evening, and it is said one of them, while in the sick room, was seen to handle a cup of coffee and milk from which the patient drank occasionally.... The men were unknown to the family, but Mrs. Althouse seemed to know who they were, although she declined to talk about them. Vague talk about money and Mrs. Althouse's husband adds to the mystery. The men are said to be from Syracuse...."

An article published in the NYT on June 24, 1888. If it was mysterious at the time, it's even more mysterious now. How does one become "well-known" for being a "mysterious... sleeper"? Presumably — given that the men were said to be from Syracuse — Attica is Attica, New York... which you probably associate with the prison, the one with the riot and the Al Pacino... but the prison was not built until 1930.

ADDED: Several commenters are piecing together the story. Apparently, the woman's first name was not Helen but Emma. Edutcher found this old newspaper article, which includes some efforts at understanding the woman's condition (falling asleep for 25 days or more). One doctor said: "It is simply a condition of hysteria. The subjects are almost invariably women and of a particular temperament. There must be this temperament. I don to wish to be  understood as ascribing it to outside hypnotic influences." (The doctor was interested in hypnosis as a treatment for hysteria.)

Quaestor suggests Kleine-Levin syndrome — AKA "Sleeping Beauty Syndrome" — which has a Wikipedia page here. There doesn't seem to be much understanding of the cause or the treatment even today. But it's not true that the subjects are mostly women. They are 3 males to 1 female.

It's such an odd thing that we fall asleep and then wake up. We assume that will just happen. We've all had trouble sleeping, I assume, and when that happens we may observe the mystery of sleep. We seem to know how to do it but not how to do it. We don't so much worry that we won't know how to wake up. Outside of the unique problem of dying in one's sleep, we take it for granted that we will wake up. We have the knack. Who knows why?

"I was a corn-packer. And I know that term is offensive. To some people. Because corn-packer is a derogatory term for a gay Iowan."

Colbert responds to Iowa Republican Steve King.



IN THE COMMENTS: Quaestor said...

Some impression[s] I've formed on this matter:

1) A disgusting and puerile corruption of the legislative process. Thank you Colbert, the Comedy Channel, and the Democratic Party (a wholly owned subsidiary of the Comedy Channel) for your efforts to uplift the cultural milieu of our heretofore tawdry government.

2) Colbert has been jealous of Jon Stewert's bottom line for years. Being a witness before a Congressional committee adds product recognition at taxpayer's expense.

3) A "Punch 'n Judy" show aimed to distract the MSM from Christopher Coates testimony before the Civil Rights Commission.

4) Witnesses before Congressional committees are typically sworn. Is Colbert liable to perjury charges?