Lake Mendota — in the early afternoon.

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Globular icicles.

Lake Mendota, today at 1:53 p.m.

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The lake at noon... freezing up.

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Icicles and iPods.

A deadly combination.

At the Whale's Icicle Café...

... don't get stuck.

View from the bedroom window at dawn.

Icicle update #4.

It's 46° here in Madison, Wisconsin, and for 24 hours, what was deep snow has been melting into thick fog. I'm no longer looking out my window as if from an ice cage.

Icicle update #3.

Christmas dawn icicle update #2.

Icicle update ... Christmas dawn.

Is that the devil's icicle?

I wonder, as I look out my window and see that... pitchfork.

Icicles.

The big snow came just at the time that I'm having the gutters on my roof replaced. The gutterless roof edge is a prime breeding ground for icicles.



These things will have to break and fall. I plan to dart out the front door more quickly than usual for the next few days.

It's whimsical -- and you become the fly on the corpse.

I like this art:

Gelatin - also known as Ali Janka, Florian Reither, Tobias Urban and Wolfgang Gantner, 30-something friends who met at summer camp in 1978 - have created a 200-foot-long, 20-foot-tall bunny knitted from wool and stuffed with hay. Since late September, it has lain prostrate at the summit of the Colletto Fava, a nearly mile-high peak above the rustic village of Artesina. It looks cute, all soft and cotton-candy-hued - until one notices that it's meant to be quite dead. The rabbit's (stuffed, colorful) entrails stream out on the scrubby ground; its mouth is open in a wide and surprised "O."

"It's rotting away and the intestines are running out of its side, but it's really sweet," Mr. Janka said. "It has a warmth and a gravity. It's nice to lie on it." It's especially nice if you're interested in the way things rot: grass has sprouted through the rabbit's knitted skin, it's beginning to ooze a brown liquid, and animals have foraged inside. Decay, it seems, is the whole point. "You climb upon the rabbit and feel like a maggot in its flesh," Mr. Janka said. "And then you are so happily transforming into a fly, and floating away."

Then there's Gelatin's other work:

[A] massive icicle made of urine for this year's Moscow Biennale of Contemporary Art; a nude "human birthday cake" - with candles held in a way that defies description in a family newspaper - for the 2003 Frieze Art Fair in London. And in the summer of 2000 they secretly removed a window on the 91st floor of the World Trade Center, then inched out onto a homemade balcony where they were photographed. On Nov. 16, the group is to take up residence at the Leo Koenig Gallery in Chelsea - and live there, in a box, for seven straight days, making free facsimiles of any object or document visitors give them.