Did you go outside at 1 a.m. to watch the lunar eclipse?

We did, but not with a tripod and telephoto lens. That's just my iPhone pic. We had binoculars, so we saw a bit more than what you're seeing there. We talked about the moon — its history, its phases, whether it looked red — the "blood moon" — or fashionably brown.

For the annals of Things I Asked Grok (after thinking of the question while watching the worm moon): "How exactly did the moon come into existence and what would Earth be like now if that had not happened?" In the total eclipse, we could not arrive at a total answer, but then neither could Grok, queried just now. But it did sketch out 6 things that would be different about Earth if the event that produced the moon never happened. I could only think of No Tides. And no moonlight. 

"My wife is going to hate it because nothing makes you look older than when an older guy dyes his hair."

Said George Clooney, quoted in the London Times, with a photo that shows how right he is:

I clicked on that headline because I thought it was going to be about brown clothing. Did you know the color brown is a fashion trend? See, from last October, "Chocolate Brown Is Fall’s Breakout Color Trend" (Harper's Bazaar).

But it's about brown hair. I notice George only speaks for older guys. 

AND: So you go to some play because a famous actor — famously handsome actor — is in it, but then there's just some guy on stage and he doesn't even look like him. But it's not supposed to look like him. It's supposed to look like Edward R. Murrow!

Another year has passed in The Althouse Sunrise Project.

Yesterday was the 5th anniversary of my daily photographs of the sunrise. A few days were skipped for bad weather and once or twice I overslept, but the ritual practice is nearly every single day. I try to get good pictures, but many days are like other days and simply doing it is more important to me than getting a distinctive photograph. Still I rejoice on those days when it looks especially great, and I take this annual occasion to repost a few of the best.

Like this one, with the most unusual color, from May 21:

And this, from April 26, where white showed its worth as a sunrise color:

And just last week, on September 3, brown was a delicate delight:

The woods at sunrise — 7:32 and 7:47 — notice how the color shifts from blue to brown in 15 minutes.

"Everything — hair, makeup, jewelry, wardrobe and nail care — seemed to communicate calm, control and, especially, neutrality...."

"[Cassidy Hutchinson] wore minimally visible makeup — what appeared to be light bronzer, but no discernible colors of lipstick or eye shadow.... Social media teems with thousands of tutorials on 'reshaping one’s face' with contouring makeup, how to make eyes look bigger, noses smaller, skin smoother. The overall messages are clear but contradictory: 'become an artist of the self,' 'make yourself beautiful' and 'do it imperceptibly.' It’s a tall order — time-consuming, hard to ignore and subject to wide interpretation. And it’s especially hard for women in politics.... Many of the (often young and attractive) women of the Trump administration favored an overt, high-glam style, and we saw a lot of very long hair, dramatic false eyelashes, sheath dresses and stiletto pumps — a 'beauty pageant' vibe said to be favored by the former president.... At the hearing, Ms. Hutchinson’s image was distinctly different from that aesthetic. She dressed as if ready to blend into the corridors of power, to do her job, to convey depth over surface (although she was noticeably telegenic)..... And the nation is unlikely to forget the day Cassidy Hutchinson, with her precise, low-key style, told her disturbing story."

From "Muted Tones Spoke Loud and Clear/At a surprise session of the Jan. 6 hearings, Cassidy Hutchinson calibrated her appearance to keep us listening" by Rhonda Garelick (NYT).

I'm laughing at the happenstance of seeing "surprise" again so soon after going on about the tedium of surprise. But I'm blogging this piece because I'd blogged, just yesterday, about Cassidy Hutchinson's makeup: She seems to be wearing dark foundation on her face that doesn't match her skin tone. I'm saying that based on the light pink color of her hand, which we keep seeing held up next to her face, because that's the appropriately evocative taking-the-oath position.

"I feel like a woodland creature or like a Laura Ingalls Wilder girl.... I think the brown hair brings out my hardworking and serious side, which is good for the winter — like the fable of the ant and the grasshopper."

Said a 25-year-old software engineer/swimsuit designer, quoted in "Why Is Everyone Going Brunette?/Warming, feel-good colors like chocolate milk, gingerbread and sable will be big in 2022, stylists say" (NYT). 

And one hairdresser says her clients "feel like brunette gives them more power and strength." That color theory reminds me of dumb TV shows of the 1970s like "Three's Company" and "Charlie's Angels."

Moving more deeply into this NYT update on hair-color trends, we learn that "On TikTok, blond hair was declared 'cheugy,' in the neologism of Gen Z." 

Is being blonde, like, cheugy?

At the Brown Café...

... you can talk brown talk or whatever you like.

The image comes from the 1869 book, "The Slang Dictionary: Or, the Vulgar Words, Street Phrases, and 'Fast' Expressions of High and Low Society."

The brown spot.

From "Through a Glass Darkly" by Lev Mendes (New York Review of Books):

I recently discussed [the Balthus painting] Thérèse Dreaming with an older woman, an architect and former museum conservator. She told me that one thing she disliked about the painting was the brown spot on the girl’s underwear, which guided the viewer’s attention in a way that felt manipulative. I wasn’t sure if she was bothered by the brownness of the spot—with its possible menstrual or scatological connotations—or just the spot’s function as a focal point that drew one in, that narrowed one’s attention (like the punctum of a photograph, in Roland Barthes’s phrase—the point of interest, “that accident which pricks me”). Whatever the case, I was highly skeptical—in fact, in complete denial. I had looked carefully at the painting and had never noticed a brown spot. The whole thing struck me as absurd. The spot, I told myself, must be a projection of her imagination onto the painting.

Feeling unsettled, however, about my own dismissiveness, I returned again to the Met and to Thérèse Dreaming. This time, I saw it, a sort of brown triangular shadow across the bottom of the girl’s panties and the slip of her skirt. I had been wrong after all about the absence of the spot. Still, it remained for me a rather incidental detail. I experienced no “prick”; it did not draw me in; it barely registered at all. Certainly I did not feel that I had been manipulated by Balthus.

Here's the painting...



... seen previously on this blog, last December, in "The Metropolitan Museum of Art declines to remove a painting that is — according to a petition — 'undeniably romanticizing the sexualization of a child.'"

ADDED: What's great about the painting is that it makes you aware of your own mind: What is it about this painting that is making me uneasy — that's making think strange things that I don't ordinarily think? 

You study the painting. You try to find what the artist did to inspire these sensations. You may think: It can't be me. It must be the artist. 

That's what so interesting about people like that architect lady who decided it was the brown spot.

You might wonder: Is this artist a genius for doing what he did to me with this image? Or is there something about me?!! 

And perhaps you get to this sort of reasoning: He must be a great artist or there's something wrong with me. So then... he's doing it, and that's so wrong of him! Punish him! You must punish him so that I may go free and get back to my comfortable life!

But art should make you uncomfortable, and it would be wrong to help you find your way back.

At the Real Monochrome Café...

... we've made the adjustment to reality (after the Fake Monochrome Café yesterday). Thanks to the reader who believed me that the shirt was really brown (not blue) and manipulated the photograph into the truth.

And also true is that it's "Cyber Monday" — just another cyber Monday — and you might be shopping, so I want to nudge you to use The Althouse Amazon Portal. Your humbly brown-clad blogger will now return to the eating of cookies.

At the Monochrome Café...

... may your Thanksgiving weekend come in for a gentle landing.

(And this is an open thread, so I must follow my ritual of steering you toward The Althouse Amazon Portal.)

"Auction houses, consignment stores and thrift shops are flooded with merchandise, much of it made of brown wood."

"Hardly a day goes by that we don’t get calls from people who want to sell a big dining room set or bedroom suite because nobody in the family wants it. Millennials don’t want brown furniture...."

"Millennials have stuff on discs and flash drives.... I don’t think my sons are going to want my walnut table, eight chairs and buffet."

The children of Baby Boomers don't want their shit.

In the arb today, a spectrum...

... from white...



... to brown...



... to green...

The sound of ice formation...

... on the last day of fall, on Lake Mendota, in the state park of the Gaylord Nelson, where we hiked across stretches of a thousand shades of brown...



We need more ice and more snow and we settle in for the solstice.

ADDED: I don't know about you, but for me, when my clinking ice video ended, YouTube sent me to an ASMR video "Bowl of Ice Cubes, wonderful tapping/rain sounds."

"In New Mexico... [t]he high desert is normally the color of baked pie crust; now, it's emerald."

"We now have this green carpet covering all the mesas, the lowlands... And we're just not used to seeing a pistachio-green color in the landscape out here. It's very, very unusual."

The current state of Meade's leaf composting process that I called an "art installation"...

... last November.

Today, Meade did the last of moving the leaves out of the semi-circle lawn, which had taken the form I call "the protractor."



Looking for the picture from last fall, I searched this blog for "leaves," and one thing I found was "Right now, the tiny oak leaves look like flowers." I wrote:

They're pink and less than a half inch long.

Look closer, and they seem like sugar-coated candy.

Who can picture them all brown and leathery? I can. There are still so many of last year's oak leaves strewn about the yard.

That's a post from April 30, 2007. I met Meade in person for the first time in January 2009, but Meade is there, in 2007, in the comments:

What, you mean you didn't rake, bag, and send them off to the landfill back in November?

And the answer to that question, I now see, was: No, I have been keeping them for 25 years, right here — in situ — for that art project of yours.

At the Northern Colors Café...

... it's perfectly beautiful.