"My personal favorite at this point is the 29-year-old Australian Michael Johns, who sang 'Bohemian Rhapsody' this week."

I wrote on February 14, 2008 in "Althouse eats chocolate, tweaks photographs, watches 'American Idol' and fails to keep all her body parts out of the aggressive view of the fisheye lens."



I was alone on Valentine's Day, watching TV in what was my temporary home in Brooklyn that academic year. Who knows what the future will bring — which way the wind will blow?

A year later, my Valentine's Day was not spent alone with a TV and a computer screen, but with Meade, who would materialize from my strange, half-lonely relationship with the computer. Michael Johns went on to finish 8th in the singing competition, and, yesterday he died — of a blood clot in his ankle. He was only 35.

Too late, my time has come...

It's Saturday. Make it beautiful.

Meade clipped some zinnias...



... for the dining room table... Lake Mendota is out there, seething...



... and roiling. You know they've got mocha macchiato ice cream down at the Union Terrace...



... get out of house, you crazy fool...

75 years ago today: Albert Einstein wrote the letter to FDR that led to the Manhattan Project.

Einstein signed the letter by that was written by Leó Szilárd:

The Einstein–Szilárd letter resulted in the establishment of research into nuclear fission by the U.S. government and ultimately to the creation of the Manhattan Project; FDR gave the letter to an aide, General Edwin M. "Pa" Watson with the instruction: "Pa, this requires action!"...

Other interesting things about Szilárd:

During the 1926-1930 period, he worked with Einstein to develop a refrigerator, notable because it had no moving parts....

In 1932, Szilárd read the science fiction novel The World Set Free by H. G. Wells, a book which he said made a great impression on him....

NYT reports: "A widow and her four children have been driven insane by eating the Marihuana plant..."

"... according to doctors, who say that there is no hope of saving the children’s lives and that the mother will be insane for the rest of her life."

From a 1927 NYT article — "Mexican Family Go Insane" — quoted a Forbes article titled "A Century Later, The New York Times Rejects The Anti-Marijuana Propaganda It Peddled."

"Frankly, I do not know what one makes from cocoa beans."

"I'm just trying to earn a living with growing cocoa. They make good food from them, but I've never seen that. I do not know if that's true."



(Cocoa farmers experience chocolate for the first time.)

MEANWHILE, on Vagina Mountain, none of that sweet first-world chocolate... "I want you to feel liquid chocolate for the first time. You can totally let go":

Don't drink the water in Toledo, Ohio.

There's "a toxin possibly related to algae on Lake Erie" and "boiling... will only increase the toxin’s concentration." 

AND: In other lake water news: "The lake appeared in the Tunisian desert like a mirage; one minute there was nothing but scorching sand, the next a large expanse of turquoise water."

Hundreds flocked to what quickly became known as the Lac de Gafsa or Gafsa beach to splash, paddle, dive, and fling themselves from rocks into the lake, ignoring warnings that the water could be contaminated with carcinogenic chemicals, riddled with disease or possibly radioactive. Even after the water turned a murky green, they arrived in droves, undeterred.

"Some say it is a miracle, while others are calling it a curse," Lakhdar Souid, a Tunisian journalist, told France 24 television.

The original meaning of emojis.

NPR discusses whether an emoji means what it was originally intended to mean... in the context of some hands that might be praying:

When we think about emojis and what they mean, we have to consider how these symbols have evolved into their own language. Emojis aren't quite a universal form of communication; their meanings are malleable and often develop in unique ways as we build relationships with the people we're texting or tweeting. I assign different meanings to the same emojis based on inside jokes with friends, moods and specific situations.

When things get too simple, they get complex.

"If people make the difference in a locale, that’s also true in Madison — unfortunately. In my dozens of trips to Wisconsin’s capital city..."

"... I found a pleasant area surrounded by many pristine lakes ruined by its residents. Collegians from around the country, their professors and local progressives team up to form Berkeley of the Midwest, where generally one ideological mindset is tolerated. Most of downtown is swallowed by the enormous university. Once you peel through the masses, the capitol building is constantly obscured by either renovations or violent protests, thus you rarely get photos outside or inside the building."

So says Ari J. Kaufman at Pajamas Media, putting Madison at #2 on his list of "10 Most Overrated Destinations in the Midwest." I guess his dozens of trips were back in 2011, during the big uprising against Scott Walker, and even then his observations are none too astute, since the protests, while clamorous, were never violent. Groups that got as large as 100,000, full of people who were really upset and trying to crank up the emotion, did not become violent. That was actually pretty amazing, and the Capitol building, one of the most beautiful state capitol buildings, isn't obscured by anything.

Kaufman seems to be pandering to the PJ Media readership, which is apparently supposed to be a lot of liberal-haters. If you're reading my blog, you've seen plenty of what's great about Madison. I've lived here for 30 years, and Meade has lived here 5 years now. I asked him what he thought of Madison, and he said:

I like it. I like the residents. I find it a very peaceful place to live. I know it's very lefty, but I think most of the real lefties are old, complacent, kind of fat, drunk, and lazy. So it's a nice time to be in Madison, because there's some re-energizing in the politics, and a lot of that is due to Scott Walker Republicans....

ADDED: Kaufman's powers of observation are also deficient when it comes to assessing lakes. They are not pristine.  Here's a picture I took from the Union Terrace on the shore of Lake Mendota a few days ago:



So it's certainly not "pristine." But don't worry, the sign isn't always there, and I haven't seen it recently. And we have Wingra, Monona, Kegonsa, and Waubesa as well as Mendota.

AND: Lake Wingra:

"I think the idea of the 'manly-man' appeals to the far right and not really to the rest of us."

"To me it's kind of a twisted concept of maleness. Not a protector or a dynamic kind of pizzaz but a bully. Putin is a good example of it. People's lives don't matter to him. Power matters to him. Who's the top dog? That's what I think machismo is all about. It's like Saddam Hussein. It's all about a pecking order and who is on top. Pretty boring really. Who has the biggest......weapon :-)"

Said Sunsong in the comments to last night's post linking to Adam Gopnik's New Yorker piece about overemphasis on manliness in a President. That comment made me think of this scene in Charlie Chaplin's "The Great Dictator":



By the way, my father once opined that that was the greatest moment in all of movies. He wasn't a big moviegoer, though, so there were many scenes he missed, but he loved that one because it said the pithiest possible thing about politics, and it says it completely in the visuals, though it's not a silent film.

There is dialogue, but it's almost only background music for the ears — "a barber shop... that also has glass walls... oh, yes, with goldfish swimming inside... they're all dead, that's why I'm building a new barbershop...."

"The Climate Reality Project brought its 'I’m Too Hot' trucks and offers of free ice cream to this week’s Environmental Protection Agency hearings on power-plant emissions..."

"... when the hearings began at 9 a.m. Wednesday in Denver, the temperature was a chilly 58 degrees. Plus, it was raining."

Interesting that this group — founded by Al Gore — is making a show of driving trucks long distances.

Monica Lewinsky is now "officially contributing to Vanity Fair's website on an 'ongoing basis.'"

Politico reports, and here's her new piece: "The Online Rebuttal Is the New Black." If I were writing headlines over at Vanity Fair, I'd avoid using the word "rebuttal" for a piece about a butt. And if I were Monica Lewinsky, a woman notorious for calling attention to her butt by displaying her thong underpants to the President of the United States, I would not choose to make my point about the use of social media to fight back against public humiliation by focusing on a 14-year-old girl making a show of her butt.

Last line of Monica's piece:

In Carleigh’s case, her body-positive photo went viral. An online rebuttal . . . in all meanings. Sounds good to me.

Oh! So it wasn't just the headline writer stumbling onto a pun. Monica punned on purpose. I don't think a 14-year-old girl is well served by having Monica Lewinsky talking about her ass.

"Why Mitt Romney is perfectly poised for a comeback in 2016."

"Nobody has ever rooted for that scrappy Romney kid to overcome the odds. Until, maybe, now."

50 years ago today: "Ranger 7 radioed to earth... the first close-up pictures of the moon..."

"... a historic collection of 4,000 pictures one thousand times as clear as anything ever seen through earth-bound telescopes...."

The still pictures were snapped and transmitted in the last 17 minutes before the spacecraft crashed into an area northwest of the Sea of Clouds.

They meant in effect that the 240,000 mile distance to the moon had been shrunk by man's ingenuity to a mere half-mile in terms of what he could see of its topography.

"Obama’s perceived flaws are the ancient effeminate ones, of the kind that a bigoted tradition ascribed to women..."

"... above all, the criticism reflects the President’s unapologetic distaste for violent confrontation and for making loud threats, no matter how empty those threats may obviously be."

Writes Adam Gopnik in The New Yorker, responding to criticism of Obama for his supposed lack of manliness.

What pushed me over the line as I pondered whether to blog this was remembering that, of my huge number of tags about Obama, I have one for Obama and manliness.

"I don't need a dude. I mean, Neil and David, their twins are beautiful. It's 2014!"

"We are living in the future; we don't need anything. I don't think I'll have to, but we'll see. I'm not anti-men. I love men. But there is an option if someone doesn't present himself."

Katy Perry feels wonderful.

ADDED: I'd have felt wonderful too, if anyone had noticed my Talking Heads allusion. I'd be tipping over backwards.

"The GOP legislation, which was rewritten twice to attract support, had trouble getting off the ground..."

"... and if the House doesn’t vote, lawmakers will head back to their districts to hear from voters with a crisis raging at the border."

The turmoil is stunning considering how far to the right the GOP leadership pulled this bill. Boehner, McCarthy and Scalise, the new GOP whip, crafted a process that would have given the House a vote on legislation to stop the Obama administration from expanding its deferred deportation program. But even that wasn’t enough....