In the Monday fog, a hidden sunrise.

1. I could hear rain as the sunrise time (7:18) approached, so I considered skipping a day. It was foggy too, but not foggy enough to worry about the drive. I stepped outside in my slippers to check the intensity of the rain. It was exactly the kind of rain that, years ago, I started calling my favorite kind of precipitation — little droplets that seem suspended like a mist.

2. It feels nice on the skin, gentle, though the look of things is rather creepy. At 7:21:



3. Something that makes a run happen is to not think about it much. Just do one thing after another. Get your shoes on, your jacket, put the right things in your pocket, get in the car. Don't even think ahead to the next street after the next turn until you've turned. Don't imagine getting out of the car, just continue until the point where you get out of the car. And so forth. Isn't that how we live life most of the time? Be in the moment and accord each step the dignity of regarding it as complete and worthy in itself.

4. In all my sunrise runs, there has only been one other day when there was fog that made it impossible to see the opposite shore of Lake Mendota. That was October 31, here (with lots of snow). Today, it looked like this at my vantage point. You'll just have to try to remember where the shore line is supposed to be. This is 7:25, 7 minutes after the actual sunrise time:



5. By 7:37, the shore came vaguely into shape. The little dot of light is not the sun, but car headlights:

"The 33-year-old self-proclaimed anarchist from Janesville smiled as he closed one eye, cocked his head and made a clicking sound to mimic gunfire coming from an assault rifle..."

"... one of more than a dozen guns he admits he stole a few days earlier from a Janesville gun shop. 'Those were the best days of my life,' said [Joseph] Jakubowski, then the subject of one of the largest manhunts in Wisconsin history after he mailed an anti-government manifesto to President Donald Trump, stole the weapons, burned his truck and disappeared on April 4. 'For once in my life I was free. Nobody told me what I had to do. All I had to do was wake up and live.'.... But the hike took a toll. The two heavy backpacks he carried as well as a duffel bag in which he said he kept the stolen guns eventually wore him down. He also had to forage for food because the apples, oranges and noodles he brought with him lasted just a couple of days. 'I was exhausted at the end, mainly because I was so hungry,' he said."

From "Joseph Jakubowski's one regret: that he survived his failed quest to 'get off the grid'" (Wisconsin State Journal).

The shooting he's reminiscing about in the quote in the post title was of a wild turkey that he seems to have been able to kill and eat.

"Despite her delicate features and voice, Disney expects us to believe that Mulan’s ingenuity and courage were enough to carry her to military success on an equal basis with her cloddish cohorts."

"Obviously, this is Walt Disney’s attempt to add childhood expectation to the cultural debate over the role of women in the military. "

Wrote Mike Pence, back in 1999. I'm reading this out loud to Meade....

I suspect that some mischievous liberal at Disney assumes that Mulan’s story will cause a quiet change in the next generation’s attitude about women in combat and they just might be right. (Just think about how often we think of Bambi every time the subject of deer hunting comes into the mainstream media debate.)

At which point Meade says: "I'm bored." And I said: "That goes without saying. It's Mike Pence."

But let's continue:

"Healthy Justice Louis Brandeis every day ate one spinach leaf between two slices of whole wheat bread..."

"... whereas Justice Harlan Stone consumed platters of French cheeses with paired wines... Justice David Souter would eat for lunch 'just… plain… yogurt,' Ginsburg said with perfect delivery. Sotomayor added that sometimes he would have an apple, but Ginsburg maintained that the apple came later in the afternoon..... [T]he Justices eat together when one of them is celebrating a birthday; Chief Justice John Roberts will often bring a bottle of wine on those days... Ginsburg recalled the various foods hunted and prepared by their 'dear colleague,' the late Justice Antonin Scalia: fish, fowl, even 'Bambi,' she joked fondly. Sotomayor told a story in which Justice Stephen Breyer decided to serve his grandchildren pheasant, which Scalia had recently bagged. Afraid that pellets might still be in the bird, the children refused to eat it."

Link.

"Mezcal is integral to life in Oaxaca. It is medicine and social glue. Spooked children have mezcal spat into their faces..."

"... rashy ones have mezcal rubbed onto their skin; fussy ones have it massaged into their gums. 'Mezcal is a way to welcome you home,' Ruiz told me. 'It makes you cry, sing, dance, hug the neighbor you just met an hour ago—and then your soul rests.' If your eyes are burning, if you said something insincere, if you have a hangover the next day, you are drinking mezcal wrong. One enthusiast I met, a Colombian woman whose extreme version of a dining club involves hunting for the main course, told me, 'You must kiss the mezcal.' Besides the jícara [the dried hull of a fruit] the most popular vessel is a glass votive holder with a cross etched on the bottom. The first sip is mouthwash—harsh, disinfecting, functional. The second reveals the flavors. By the third, people are saying the word 'magic,' and it’s not that embarrassing. After another round, your mouth is fresh; your cheeks have turned to wax. You can sleep to the sound of fireworks—because it’s Tuesday in Oaxaca City—and wake up cheerful to unsynched church bells and crazed birds."

From "Mezcal Sunrise/Searching for the ultimate artisanal distillate" by Dana Goodyear in The New Yorker.

(Click through if only to see the excellent illustration by Bjorn Lie.)

Justice Scalia spent his last days, it seems, in the company of members of a "male-only society" that wears "dark-green robes emblazoned with a large cross and the motto 'Deum Diligite Animalia Diligentes'" ("Honoring God by honoring His creatures").

WaPo reports on the "exclusive fraternity for hunters called the International Order of St. Hubertus, an Austrian society that dates back to the 1600s":

After Scalia’s death Feb. 13, the names of the 35 other guests at the remote resort, along with details about Scalia’s connection to the hunters, have remained largely unknown. A review of public records shows that some of the men who were with Scalia at the ranch are connected through the International Order of St. Hubertus, whose members gathered at least once before at the same ranch for a celebratory weekend.

Hubert is the patron saint of hunters and fishermen.

“There is nothing I can add to your observation that among my many guests at Cibolo Creek Ranch over the years some members of the International Order of St. Hubertus have been numbered,” [Cibolo Creek Ranch owner John] Poindexter said in an email. “I am aware of no connection between that organization and Justice Scalia.”

French kids can't cope with "coping."

"More than 10,000 French pupils have signed a petition calling for the education minister to cancel an 'impossible' question in this year's baccalaureate English exam."

The exam... presented a passage from Ian McEwan’s “Atonement” relating to the book’s central character, Robbie Turner. The notorious “Question M” asked, “What are three of his concerns about the situation?” and “How is Turner coping with the situation?”...

Pupil Arthur, 17, (whose family name was not given) told reporters on Monday that after the exam he spoke to a friend at a different school who also had trouble with “coping.”

“So I launched a petition to see if others were as baffled as us, and it went viral,” he said. “Loads of people were stumped with 'coping'. It’s obviously not a word in common usage.”

ADDED: Here's a little help from the OED:

a1825 R. Forby Vocab. E. Anglia (1830) Cope. The use of this word is confined to warreners, who are said to ‘cope’ their ferrets, when they sew or tie up their mouths, to prevent them from biting rabbits, when they..drive them from their holes.

ALSO: Let me be seriously helpful, using the (unlinkable) OED. The original meaning has to do with coming to blows, and it actually comes from French, the word couper, meaning "to strike (now to cut)." The figurative meaning is "To contend with, face, encounter (dangers, difficulties, etc.)," often in the context of a successful fight.

I remember much discussion, back in the 1950s and 60s, about the use of "cope" without "with [something]," and the OED acknowledges this as a colloquialism. It offers a quote that shows the problem language commentators had with it:

1958 I. J. C. Brown Words in our Time 41 ‘She suffers from copelessness.’ I have heard this said of an unsatisfactory employee. The use of cope as a verb by itself to describe dealing with all kinds of situations is a recent usage. In my youth we tried, or were told to try, to cope with this or that problem. We were not required to cope in general.

I'd never noticed the word "copelessness" before. I searched the NYT archive for it and found exactly one usage — by Andy Rooney (of all people). It was 1987, and what he wanted was a presidential candidate who didn't want to be President. So, he's imagining this character  — "someone above the fray who is barely willing to serve if chosen" — talking to a reporter who asks him if he has anything embarrassing in his personal life. His answer includes: "I saw a psychiatrist in 1969 when I was suffering from copelessness, and recently I read about Jessica Hahn in Playboy while I was getting a haircut."

Now, do I have to explain who Jessica Hahn was? Or is that too far down the rabbit hole? My lips are coped!


Sam Kinison Wild Thing by Celtiemama

"I need over 7 rounds (rapists are harder to kill than deer)."

Sign at a "Guns Across America" rally.

CNN tried to extract a colorful quote about debate prep from Paul Ryan

Interviewed about his debate prep, Ryan said "I do a lot of reading, that's what I've always done -- briefings and reading," which CNN duly quotes. Then it's on to hunting. How does he prepare for deer hunting? The interviewer has background info from a friend of Ryan's:

The friend said that before Ryan goes hunting he washes his clothes in unscented detergent, takes a shower with unscented soap and sprays unscented material on his boots -- all steps that hunters are known to take generally, but Ryan takes it to a completely different level.

"If you're into archery and bow hunting, that's the way to do it and be successful. I like the strategy of bow hunting and it takes a lot of preparation and I do take it seriously because I am much more successful if I do things properly and prepare the right way," Ryan said.

"I have always just believed that if you're going to do something, do it well."

He's invited to connect this to debate prep (presumably with the hope that he'll say something more colorful than I read a lot):

"This stage is kind of new for me and I'm taking it very seriously," he replied. "I'm just doing my homework and studying the issues and I'll know he'll come and attack us. The problem he has is he has Barack Obama's record to run on."

I think he just mostly said I read a lot again. Nice try CNN. Maybe go interview a friend of Ryan's about Ryan's pre-Biden shower routine. Any relevant aromatherapy? Any "material" sprayed on his shoes? Unscented... scented... Maybe Ryan could stink it up and thereby trick his prey into screwing his face into a disgusted sneer of some kind. We the viewers have television — not the once-dreamed-of smellovision — so the ruse would go undetected. Suddenly, Biden's nice-guy image erodes.

Actually, some of us are still dreaming:



"In the future we will be picking our political leaders at least partially based on their smell," says Weird Al.

Are Pennsylvania hunters upset about the boom in natural gas drilling in the state?

Katharine Seelye deploys some purple prose to help NYT readers think that they are.

STATE GAME LAND 59, Pa. — For those who have ever stalked deer, turkey and bear here in “God’s Country” in north central Pennsylvania, this hunting season is like no other.

God's Country? Yeah, that's the way the folk talk out there in State Game Land 59, Pennsylvania.

For one thing, it is louder. The soundtrack of birds chirping, thorns scraping against a hunter’s brush pants and twigs crunching underfoot is now accompanied by the dull roar of compressor stations and the chugging of big trucks up these hills.

This sounds like one of those NPR reports with a soft-voiced radioman crunching through the leaves.

The Marcellus Shale, a vast reserve of natural gas lies beneath some of this state’s most prized game lands. And now, more and more drills are piercing the hunting grounds. Nine wells have cropped up on this one game land of roughly 7,000 wooded acres in Potter County, and permits have been issued for 19 more.

7,000 wooded acres! Oh my gosh! That's half the size of Manhattan! Before long, what will be left of Pennsylvania?

An old dirt road that meandered up a ridge here has been widened and fortified. Acres of aspen, maple and cherry trees have been cut. In their place is an industrial encampment of rigs, pipes and water-storage ponds, all to support the extraction of natural gas through the process of hydraulic fracturing, known as fracking.

Acres of the most beautiful possible trees that people in NYC are capable of picturing. Aspen! Maple! Cherry! Replaced by — God help us! — industrial equipment! Oh, noooo! We had our heart set on thinking about you Pennsylvania rural types as rust-belters.

Remember Barack Obama, campaigning for President, back in 2008? He said, speaking to elites in San Francisco:

"You go into some of these small towns in Pennsylvania, and like a lot of small towns in the Midwest, the jobs have been gone now for 25 years and nothing's replaced them... And they fell through the Clinton Administration, and the Bush Administration, and each successive administration has said that somehow these communities are gonna regenerate and they have not. And it's not surprising then they get bitter, they cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them or anti-immigrant sentiment or anti-trade sentiment as a way to explain their frustrations."

Somehow these communities are gonna regenerate... and now, they are regenerating. They've got a fabulous boom in the works. But the NYT would like us to think that the boom is mussing up the old hunting grounds? There's machinery grinding and clanking making it harder to hear the crunch of fallen leaves!

“Who wants to go into their deer stand in the predawn darkness and listen to a compressor station?” lamented Bob Volkmar, 63, an environmental scientist who went grouse hunting the other day through these noisy autumnal woods. “It kind of ruins the experience.”

Volkmar is a hunter, yes, but he's also an an environmental scientist. That is, he's got a pretty sweet job. What does the average Pennsylvania hunter think? Isn't he stoked about the economic development and the potential for good jobs for lots of Pennsylvanians? And doesn't he know plenty of alternative hunting grounds?