At the Ice Bike Café...

... you can talk all night.

You have to look closely to see the 2 cyclists out on the lake ice. This isn't a sunrise picture. It was a bit too cold for us again. This is Lake Mendota at 2 in the afternoon.

Sunrise — 7:04, 7:17, 7:20, 7:24.

What's that thing in the ice? See "Man rescued after ATV breaks through ice on Lake Mendota." The man was rescued yesterday, but the ATV was still out there this morning, partly submerged in the ice.

Anyway, write 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.

Icy lakeshore — afternoon.

Write 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.

Sunrise — 7:18, 7:24.

At the Freezing Lake Café...

...you can talk all night.

And please support the Althouse blog by doing your Amazon shopping going in through the Althouse Amazon link

Lake Mendota ice at noon.

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

"While England endeavors to cure the potato-rot, will not any endeavor to cure the brain-rot, which prevails so much more widely and fatally?"

Wrote Henry David Thoreau, quoted in "Oxford’s 2024 Word of the Year Is… Brain Rot" (NYT).

Thoreau published that sentence in 1854 — it's in "Walden" — but somehow, 170 years later, his word/phrase is the official Word of the Year. I'm just going to guess that Thoreau would consider choosing a word of the year to be a rotten-brain activity. 

Is this word-of-the-year-choosing "Oxford" really the same as the Oxford English Dictionary? The NYT says it's "the publisher of the august Oxford English Dictionary," but I look up the word in the OED, and I get:

"Mondrian didn’t believe in ice cubes because cold food was bad for the health. He stood ramrod straight..."

"... and never had a hair out of place, refusing to take off his jacket in company even on hot nights. He was given to incomprehensible monologues and Garbo-like utterances such as 'You don’t seem to understand that I want to be alone.'... He once entered a room, wrinkled his nose, and commented to his host, 'It smells old in here.' Mondrian was known for planting bizarre, forceful and one-sided kisses, some lasting 30 minutes, on women. Yet he mostly felt women got in men’s way; the feminine was 'hostile to the spirit.' He once remarked, 'Every bit of semen expended is a masterpiece lost.'"

Writes Dwight Garner, in "Piet Mondrian: An Orderly Painter, a Deeply Eccentric Man/A new biography of one of the quintessential artists of the 20th century" (NYT).

"For more than 30 years, the world’s largest iceberg was stuck in the Antarctic. Five times the size of New York City’s land area and more than 1,000 feet deep..."

"... the mammoth piece of ice finally became loose in 2020 and began a slow drift toward the Southern Ocean. Now, A23a, as it’s known, is spinning in place. After leaving Antarctic waters, the iceberg got stuck in a vortex over a seamount, or an underwater mountain. Imagine a piece of ice about 1,500 square miles in area and as deep as the Empire State Building spinning slowly but steadily enough to fully rotate it on its head over the course of about 24 days."

The NYT reports.

Haven't used my "vortex" tag in a long time.

Were you aware of the "Southern Ocean"? "The Southern Ocean, also known as the Antarctic Ocean, comprises the southernmost waters of the world ocean, generally taken to be south of 60° S latitude and encircling Antarctica.... The National Geographic Society recognized the ocean officially in June 2021...." 

How do we speak of the ocean/oceans? "The ocean is the body of salt water that covers approximately 70.8% of Earth. In English, the term ocean also refers to any of the large bodies of water into which the world ocean is conventionally divided...."

Listening to ice melt.

Today, in the late afternoon, the ice on Lake Mendota was melting and flowing noisily.

(Write about anything you want in the comments.)

At the Frozen Lake Café...

... you can talk about whatever you want.

At the Ice Lake Café...

... you can talk about the Packers or anything you want.

Large iceberg the size of a small iceberg... I mean, large iceberg the size of the smallest state.

"'It’s a state-sized iceberg. It’s a big, big iceberg, it’s also equivalent to about the size of Rhode Island,' said Walter Meier, a senior research scientist at the National Snow and Ice Data Center."

From "A ‘megaberg’ three times the size of New York City is on the move" (WaPo).

That headline got me. "Megaberg" sounds like it means large mountain, and a large mountain is "on the move."

If you're like me, you thought "Billy the Mountain." 

They left that night, crunchin' across the Mojave desert/Their voices echoing through the canyons of your minds/"Ethel, want to get a cuppa cawfee?"/"There's a Howard Johnson's want to eat some clams?"

Frost at 7:08 a.m.

"With this summer’s heat waves in Europe, Americans wearing shorts and ordering ice water may butt up against etiquette and norms in some areas."

A caption under a photograph of so many tourists at the Parthenon that it makes me think it's absolutely pointless (aesthetically) to visit the Parthenon. That's my cultural norm. I don't want the sight I'm seeing to be other tourists.

But the article is about the cultural norms of the people in the place the tourists are visiting: "Iced Coffee and Flip-Flops as Europe Broils? Not So Fast, Americans. As large numbers of U.S. tourists visit Europe during a record hot summer, their efforts to stay cool are running up against cultural norms" (NYT).

The article still takes the point of view of the American tourists, because the reason for paying attention to the cultural norms of the place you are visiting is that you aspire to "blend in with the locals."

A man from a place called Dildo has taken a photograph that turns everyone into a comedian.

Link to CBC.

And, yes, Dildo is a real place. I looked it up. It's on the island of Newfoundland. Wikipedia:

Sunrise — 6:42, 6:44.

The winds had blown the ice into an entirely different position, with different parts of the lake open and covered and a high wall of plates of snow/ice piled up against the shore.

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

Mendota ice crack at sunrise — 7:11 a.m.

At the Icy Morning Café...

... you can talk all night.

Ice-cycle.

 

This morning, at dawn.