Others may read about metaphysics. Me, I'm making a puppet out of the sugar packet...

... drawing on the recycled-paper-brown napkins...



... and wondering if it's possible to finish a blueberry scone.

The question arose: Is time not an illusion?

At long last, I finished the scone, performed a puppet show to the tune of "Hang on Sloopy"...



... scrounged for the last crumbs of scone, and worrying about the 2-hour limit on my parking spot, took leave of the Metaphysics Café.

AFTERTHOUGHT: Did you notice the chef's hat?

Brunch topics.

Do we celebrate blog-birthdays now? Nina staged a brunch in honor of the first year of her wonderful blog. A certain blogger who doesn't want to be linked without preclearance was a no-show, assertedly because she food-poisoned herself after being intimidated by last night's ice storm into not going out to eat. Worse than missing the brunch, from the bloggish perspective, is not blogging about poisoning yourself. She has not posted since Christmas. Come on! How about some vomit-blogging?

Nina's blog, it should be noted, has not missed a day since it was born. We discussed whether you can celebrate a blog-birthday after only one year if you haven't posted every day. Maybe the post-free days shouldn't count. But if you were in a coma part of a year, you'd still keep your birthday on the same day, I said as we were leaving the brunch.

"Hey, watch out for that ice! I nearly killed myself driving in this ice last night. It would be bad dying on January 1st, but at least you'd have made it into the new year. Even though, not really."

"Your tombstone would be deceptive.

But we survived the brunch. We didn't die or get food poisoning. In fact, it was delicious. Nina put on her usual cooking show, which this time involved using multiple ovens during the event and scones and a cake that had been baked beforehand. Complex drinks were cococted. One trayful of food was burned -- purely for theatrical effect.

"Hey, what is this froth? There's froth on the bacon."

"There's always froth on bacon. It does that when the grease cooks."

"Froth is interesting. I've been thinking about froth. There is good froth and bad froth. There is the froth that we think of as particularly delicious -- cappucino, zabaglione -- and there is the froth that we think of as particularly vile and disgusting -- frothing at the mouth, spittle. Wait a minute, I've got to get my notebook. Not my notebook computer, just a little notebook."

"It's a Moleskin notebook."

"Yes, have you noticed how these Moleskine notebooks are suddenly everywhere and presented as if they are some big, important tradition that we've cared about for a long time? Whoever heard of these things before this year? And now it's Moleskine! I must have my Moleskine notebook! It's the notebook Hemingway used! How did that happen? That was some excellent marketing. Okay, I'm just writing 'Froth: good or bad?' and I'm going to blog about this later. Also 'Moleskine marketing.' Also 'burn something, theater.' I've noticed Nina always burns something, and I'm thinking she does it as theater."

Knowing nods confirm my suspicion. Ah ha! I knew it! So it's true? She actually does always burn something for effect? Apparently, the answer is yes!

So much yummy food was consumed and a long bloggish conversation in honor of the blog-birthday ensued, but as you can see, I didn't simulblog and I stopped taking notes, the better to wield a spoon and fork, so I'll end my little account here.

Soup lyrics.

Here are the four lines of "At Long Last Love" that Cole Porter wrote while he was in excruciating pain with his legs crushed, pinned under a horse for hours, waiting to be rescued--according to John Lahr, writing in the New Yorker (link via A&L Daily):

“Is it an earthquake or simply a shock?
Is it the good turtle soup or merely the mock?
Is it a cocktail, this feeling of joy?
Or is what I feel the real McCoy?”

You know soup does not make an appearance in song lyrics all that often, but oddly enough, just the other day, I was sitting in a cafe, eating an almond scone, and I noticed this bizarrely soup-related lyric in a Sam Cooke song:

Shake it like a bowl of soup
And make your body loop de loop
Put your hands on your hips
And kinda let your backbone slip
Move your body like a whip
And just shake!

Now, you just know the original idea was to shake like a bowl of jelly (like Santa Claus in "'Twas the Night Before Christmas") but he switched to soup for the sake of rhyme.

The only other soup lyric I can think of offhand is the Lewis Carroll lyric "Beautiful Soup." I'll try harder later, but I've got to run to class.

UPDATE: Well, I see Bob Dylan did his own version of Sam Cooke's "Shake." It's called "Wiggle, Wiggle." Here's the soup part:

Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a bowl of soup,
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a rolling hoop,
Wiggle, wiggle, wiggle like a ton of lead,
Wiggle - you can raise the dead.

Pretty funny, and a nice salute to Cooke. "Under the Red Sky" is a Dylan album I never paid any attention to.

And here's the text of "Beautiful Soup," set alongside the poem it was parodying. Carroll substitutes the homely image of soup for the lofty image of a star.

ANOTHER UPDATE: You can listen to "Wiggle, Wiggle," and buy "Under the Red Sky"--cheap!--here, on Amazon. The Amazon commenters are pretty brutal, several calling it Dylan's worst album. "Wiggle, Wiggle" wins special contempt. No one seems to get that "Wiggle, Wiggle" is to "Shake" as "Beautiful Soup" is to "Star of the Evening."

A walk that starts at the zoo.

Chris, who wanted my car so he can go to see "Fahrenheit 9/11" with friends, drove me to the starting point of my walk: Henry Vilas Zoo. As soon as he drove away, I saw that I'd forgotten my camera, so I called him via cell phone, and he came back, drove me home for the camera, and re-drove me to the zoo. The extra driving elongated the conversation, which was about whether you could isolate your view of the art of a documentary film from its message. We agreed that you could. The example of "Triumph of the Will" was raised. Ah, here we are back at the zoo.

The orangutan was meditative:



The flamingoes were in love with the letter S:



Heading back toward home, I climbed up on Bear Mound, an Indian burial mound:



That is centered in the beautiful Vilas neighborhood, where, as a photographer, I gravitated to the unsightly things, like this area behind the bars across from the football stadium:



Can you see the grafitti under the white squares? It says: "Institutions support war. Stop supporting institutions."

Here's another wall I found photogenic:



Go here for the full set of today's pictures: I'm resisting displaying the "proud" grease vat, for example. [ADDED: Hmmm... Jeremy claims he used to live in the above-pictured boarded-up building with the proud grease vat next to the back door. ADDITIONAL ADDED: Now, he's saying he lived next door ... and was traumatized by a dumpster.]

Here's a faded "legalize" sign:



And some sadly under-neoned signage:



Ah, I've reached my midway-home goal, Ancora Café on Monroe Street, with its very blue, very well-ducted ceiling:



I get a tall cappucino and an almond scone and sit down to finish my book ("Stiff," by Mary Roach):



I read about the prospect of disposing of human bodies by freezing them, shattering them, freeze drying them, and then using the freeze dried bits "as compost for a memorial tree or shrub." The shattering part would be easy after freezing, I read, because the human body is mostly water, about 70 percent. Here's a morsel of the author's humor: "[Jellyfish] are either 98 or 99 percent water, and that is why you never see dried jellyfish snacks."

Then it's on to home to post these pictures and ask Chris how he liked the film.

UPDATE: Chris said the film was "okay." In answer to questions, he said it wasn't art, and it wasn't very funny, and it didn't change his opinion on anything political. He said the Madison audience really loved it--especially the brief part when Tammy Baldwin is on screen.

ANOTHER UPDATE: The book "Stiff," pictured above, was prominently displayed in the episode of "Six Feet Under" that ran on July 11, 2004.

Good bad housekeeping tip of the day. If you notice that dust is accumulating, to the point where it's accumulating in the sort of dust ball you could actually pick up, of course, pick it up, by all means, but do you know that you can also use a ball of dust as a duster? It actively attracts other dust, that being its essential nature, its veritable raison d'etre. Then the newly enlarged dust ball can be thrown out in its entirety. Consider the many benefits to this approach:

1. No time is wasted going to get a rag or broom or other implement.
2. No mental energy is wasted thinking about dusting or planning to dust: the dust ball serves as a reminder when the time comes.
3. No damage to the environment is caused by laundering rags or throwing out disposable dusting cloths or pads (e.g. "Swiffers").
4. You don't feel like a household drudge, but more like a household comic performer.
5. It validates waiting for dust to accumulate before doing anything about it.

On this last point, remember the story of the germ-ridden sponge that recently played in one of the back sections of the NYT? Well, if you took that story seriously and started microwaving the allegedly vile rectangle, you could very well have set your house on fire. The link that used to work to get you to the sponge story, now only takes you to the correction, warning you that an insufficiently soggy sponge, microwaved, can catch fire! You may also remember that the article, no longer linkable, said that the least wiped-up kitchens had the least germs, cleaning efforts working mainly to spread the germs around. So point 5, supra, has potential to develop into a general principle (working best for conservatives!).

I was reminded of my dust ball good bad housekeeping tip when a chunk of scone fell into my hot coffee and, with no forks or spoons in the area, resorted to using a chunk of the remaining dry scone to retrieve the fallen piece. And here I was feeling that I had nothing to get the blog started with this morning, until the old scone helped me out.