The Houdini shop...

... outside of the "Houdini: Art and Magic" show.

The Return of the Heart-Shaped Balloon.

You might remember last year's protest kitsch: a red heart-shaped balloon that — for months — remained inflated and trapped high up in the Wisconsin Capitol dome.

We were at the Capitol today, and somebody's managed to get a balloon back up there....

A year ago at the Wisconsin protests: Jesse Jackson Came town.

He compared the scene to the recent uprisings in Egypt and Tunisia.

There were people with signs: "This is what happens when nobody votes." And I wondered...

Who's she calling nobody? Well, the good people didn't vote, and look what the hell happened: "Adolf Walker/Union Buster."

There was a lady with a "Dread Scott" sign, and I asked her if "she meant to suggest a connection between Scott Walker and the era of slavery. She said 'Of course.'"

There was an American flag on the ground next to a sign that said "Never have so few ignored so many," but it was an American flag with a picture of a fish on it, so that meant whatever it meant.

There were signs likening Scott Walker to Stalin and to the Wicked Witch of the West.

Inside the rotunda, there were huge, chanting crowds...



... but I said "I've seen absolutely no anger, nastiness, or rudeness. Not even any pushing to get into a better position. Everyone is quite nice, really. You need to understand that. Even when my dear bodyguard is not close to me, I don't feel at all endangered." Later, I would not be saying that, but this was February 18, 2011.

At he end of the evening, Jesse Jackson gives what I call "a generic speech" outdoors to a crowd he'd kept waiting "a long, cold time." I thought he was grandstanding, making the day "in a state that is not his state, revolve around him." I said:

It was quite selfish, especially when you contemplate the Wisconsin citizens the protesters are trying to influence. Why would Jesse Jackson's generically left-wing speech sway the people of Wisconsin to throw their support to the employees who have well-paid jobs with excellent benefits that they don't want to lose?

"Santorum Mocks Romney Over Olympic Games Experience."

"He heroically bailed out the Salt Lake City Olympic Games... by heroically going to Congress and asking them for tens of millions of dollars to bailout the Salt Lake Olympic Games. In an earmark."

At the Shadowy Figure Café...

... skies are slippery grey.

"Islamists’ Ideas on Democracy and Faith Face Test in Tunisia."

A new article by Anthony Shadid, the "gifted foreign correspondent whose graceful dispatches for The New York Times, The Washington Post, The Boston Globe and The Associated Press covered nearly two decades of Middle East conflict and turmoil" who "died, apparently of an asthma attack, on Thursday while on a reporting assignment in Syria."

From the new article:

[T]he generation embodied by [Said] Ferjani [was] shaped by jail, exile and repression and bound by faith and alliances years in the making....

“We don’t fear freedom of expression, but we cannot allow disorder,” he said. “People have to be responsible. They have to know there is law and order.”...

“Everybody has to be careful not to be dragged into a dictatorial instinct, no matter what happens,” he said. “We can’t lose the soul of our revolution.”

"Consumption smoothing" — the right way to die penniless.

It's done by putting all your money into annuities. If you think it's wrong not to leave something to your children, just make gifts from the annuity income.

The 69-year-old Paul McCartney announces he's quitting smoking pot after 50 years.

For the sake of his 8-year-old daughter (not that he hasn't had other children over the years).

"I smoked my share... When you're bringing up a youngster, your sense of responsibility does kick in, if you're lucky, at some point."

And that point, for Sir Paul, is age 69.

Come on, everyone in the world, let's all go to the New Hope Baptist Church in Newark, New Jersey today.

There's a big funeral, and you're all invited.

Oprah Winfrey will be there. And Alicia Keys. Dionne Warwick. And the love of a lifetime, Bobby Brown.

"It turns out that 'the party of science' really is just the old-fashioned 'party of equality,' science be damned..."

"... Left-wing biocons seem to believe that protecting human dignity requires the rich and poor to remain equally diseased, disabled, and dead."

At the Late Night Tavern...

... you can talk all night.

How to win "Survivor."

10 astutely crafted rules.

Are you watching the new season? They've got the 2 tribes living together, and one tribe is all women and the other all men (including "The Gayest Gay Man In The History Of Survivor," who keeps trying to cross over to the female team, but maybe he's got a clever plan). At least the way they've got it edited, the women seem to be acting out the stereotype of women in groups of women: They're destroying each other with emotional crossfire. Everything has way too much meaning. Meanwhile, the men hang together and laugh. Since the women are all on the other team, they don't need to play up to them in the usual fashion. It's interesting.

A year ago today here in Wisconsin...

... the Joint Finance Committee had just passed Gov. Walker's budget repair bill, and Meade and I were talking about the previous days protests...

He laughed... did the exaggerated flailing arms and stomping legs of drumbeat dancing, accompanied by the chant "THIS is WHAT deMOCracy LOOKS like." Putting the mock in democracy....

The fact is that the Republicans decisively won the governorship and both houses of the state legislature — probably with next to no votes from the people who came to the demonstration. If you're asking — like Shilling — for the Republican legislators to listen to democracy, they should look at the last election, the people all over the state who voted for them and, presumably, for fiscal responsibility and shared sacrifice.

I posted a bunch of photos Meade had taken the previous day, showing the big mess of signs and sticks that were thrown around outside the entrance to the Capitol.

"Educators... care..." enough to leave signs to be trampled into the texture of the wet concrete....

"Proud" pile of dirty snow promises to "fight."

I contrast this to the tea party rallies where people famously leave the place clean. I think this post of mine had an effect. It got picked up by various pro-Walker sites and shows, and thereafter the protesters were fairly scrupulous about litter — of the horizontal, outdoor type. Taped-up signs, signs stuck in snow piles, and horizontal indoor arrays of signs would proliferate like mad.

Meade interviewed a woman who had a sign portraying Scott Walker as Hitler. At 0:46 she does a take that we've never forgotten.

I took a photo of a woman holding a Walker-as-Hitler sign in front of her face.

I asked the woman if she thought Scott Walker was like Hitler, and she said "Yes." So I said, "Are you saying that you think fascism could come to America," and she said, "It's what's happening."

I video'd a guy with a "Sic Semper Tyrannis" sign, which is an allusion to assassination.

A collection of photos I took of signs at the day's protests — including "Trap the Rat."

More signs, by Meade and me, including a misspelling of the sort lefties had been mocking as "Teabonics" when made by tea partiers.

Protest dogs.

One of my favorite videos from last year's protests, showing very enthusiastic teenagers marching from West High School toward the Capitol. Lots of screaming and jumping. Meade quips: "They're so happy to be out of school."

Late that evening, we got the word that the 14 Senate Democrats had fled the state. And I saw a news story that said "It appears that tomorrow may well be the biggest day yet at the Capitol in the current wave of activity...." I asked — it's funny in retrospect — "Could things get any bigger?"

A photograph of protesters in the Capitol around a big American flag hung upside down, and I sympathetically opined: "I don't think most of those people posing around it realized they were part of a tableau of disrespect." Some commenters informed me that the flag hung upside down is a signal of distress and snarked "google and basic deduction can be your friend." I Googled and came back:

This isn't a ship in distress. It's an appropriation of our national symbol to make a political statement. I'm very familiar with this from the 1960s.

Debate ensues.

We get the news that the Madison schools would close for a second day it becomes known that teachers will do another sick-out to protest.

"In no scenes were these maidens seen navigating the oozing bits of Gauguin's body, but once you know even a little about him, you find that he is just so vividly, eye-catchingly gross."

"If you flay him as a historical figure and lay him out on a table, you find a maggoty cross section of the monster the postcolonial 20th century became, presided over by whiny, violent, and jaw-droppingly self-centered white dudes. One of the direct effects of the century of French colonization that preceded Gauguin's arrival—whose effects he loudly decried both in his writings and in his paintings—was the decimation of the population from causes including diseases like the one he brought into the bedroom of his final girlfriend."

Jen Graves emotes about art.

What's so bad about a college course on the Occupy [Your City] movement?

Glenn Reynolds has some fine ideas about what could be taught:

1) The Higher Education Bubble and Debt Slavery Throughout History....

2) Bourgeois vs. Non-Bourgeois Revolutions: A Comparison and Contrast.... [S]ocial-protest movements are sometimes orderly and sometimes disorderly as a matter of approach, and it would compare the effectiveness and ultimate success of such relentlessly bourgeois movements as the tea party, the pre-1964 Civil Rights movement, Women's Suffrage activists, and the American Revolution, against such anti-Bourgeois movements as the post-1968 Black Power and New Left movements, and the French Revolution....

3) Class struggles and the New Class...

4) Scapegoating and anti-Semitism in mass economic-protest movements....

5) The Fragility of Public Health....

6) Class Differences Within Economic Protest Movements. ...

2 women do the math about women and math — and science and engineering — and say it may take 100 years before 50% of professors in the STEM fields are women.

Cheryl Geisler, dean of the faculty of communication, art, and technology at Simon Fraser University, says:

"In the last four years we're seeing 27 percent of new hires in science and engineering are women... It was 25 percent earlier in the decade, so it's just been creeping up."

Her co-author, Deborah A. Kaminski, a professor of mechanical engineering at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, says:

At that rate, it may be 2050 before 50 percent of new hires in science and engineering are female... And even after one-half of all faculty members hired are women, "it will likely take at least another 40 years before the actual population of science, engineering, and mathematics professors is 50 percent women"...

They did the math about women and math. Care to check their work, guys?