The "eternity" of slow-motion falling in a car plunging 40 feet off the Chesapeake Bay Bridge.

What it felt like for the 22-year-old woman, Morgan Lake (whose name is nicely aquatic.) Her car was struck twice, and the second hit "propelled it upward 3½ feet to the top of the concrete Jersey wall."

The car straddled the wall for a time... then...  it tipped over, and she was falling for what “felt like eternity.” It seemed almost to be happening in slow motion, Lake said. The drop was estimated to have been 40 feet or more. Then the car hit the water, its windshield and the driver’s side window shattered.

The car filled with water, Lake said, and she “felt I was going to die.” She said she actually “started to drown.” But then, she said in a telephone interview late Sunday, “I got myself together,” and refused to drown. She told herself that she could save her own life, and she did.

It took an "eternity" to fall, and then this drowning process was also time-consuming. I'm picturing her sitting there, thinking okay, here I am drowning, I have to accept this. Then: This is getting dull, waiting for the end. What else is there to do here?

“I went from panic to calm,” she said. She proceeded in steps, first unbuckling her seat belt, then grabbing the window and getting out of the car.

She said it seemed to take a long time to reach the surface. 

Again: The long time line.

She gasped for air as many as five times. She looked around and...

There is time to observe and collect your thoughts.

... began to swim.

There is always more time. You might as well see it that way, like Morgan Lake, who survived. At some point, it won't be true, and you will disappear along with all the rules for living you've kept in your head.

"With this kind of work it is not push, push, push; you need to relax... you have to massage the stone rather than push it."

Said Jacob Arndt, one of 2 men doing the stone carving restoration work on the University Club building here in Madison. Arndt has been working alongside Gayal Oglesbay since last fall.

“I really rarely find someone who carves stone,” Oglesbay said. “A lot of people will putz around or use machinery, but people who carve it originally with hammers and chisels and use math and come up with the exact product are hard to find.”

There are 50 to 90 stone carvers in the United States, according to Walter Arnold, treasurer and past president of the national Stone Carvers Guild, who says the number depends on what standard you apply: "if you limit to those good enough by 1913 standards to have held down a job in a good shop back then, the current numbers are significantly lower."

***

I'm making a new tag for this, artisans. I almost went with one of my old tags: art, sculpture, architecture, careers. Those are all almost there, but they are off in a way that amplifies the very problem the article is talking about. I also have a tag I'm not making a tag for this, but I could make a second new tag I am making a new tag for this. Having made the new tag, I wish I could go back and add it to all the old posts where it could have been used. I'd like to be able to see what has come up over the years, discussing the highly skilled work of those who produce beautiful things but do not think of themselves as artists. Or perhaps some of these people do think of themselves as artists (and maybe some painters and sculptors don't like to think of themselves as artists). I'd be interested in pulling together all that old material. If only I'd had better blogging craftsmanship.

UPDATE: The Blogger software changed and tags stopped working properly when I had more than 5,000 of them. Systematically eliminating tags, I got rid of "I'm not making a tag for this" and "I am making a new tag for this." So don't go looking for that now!

"How come it's always the guy who doesn't take his suit jacket off, eats too much red meat, and refuses to use a personal desk fan who controls the AC for the whole office?"

That's a comment under this NYT piece by Ginia Bellafante about how air conditioners ought to be set at 78°.

The title of the piece is "What’s Cooler Than Cool? 78 Degrees on the A.C.," because they'd like you to think that somehow fancying yourself as a hipster, following a trend, will feel better than actual physical comfort. Setting the thermostat high — in this view — is like wearing stilettos. You look marvelous. You should suffer for fashion.

Meanwhile, the male who seeks banal, normal comfort is presumed to be the culprit. The imagined demon man — who's always controlling everything — is just wearing the ordinary professional garb that has been worn with little fuss for over 100 years and eating the food that people who don't think too much about food enjoy eating.

But is it really men who feel the need to set the thermostat low? What does it matter? If at any point you feel uncomfortable, focus on the notion that men, manifesting their male characteristics, are doing this to you. That seems to be an acceptable form of amusement. But if you don't find it funny, you might get heated up... beyond the power of your personal desk fan to deliver relief.

"Why Men Need Women" — the headline to an article about "Why Women Are Good At Getting Men To Give Away Their Stuff."

Instapundit finds a choice example of "the Althouse rule." Here's the underlying article, "Why Men Need Women," which reports a study that finds that "The mere presence of female family members — even infants — can be enough to nudge men in the generous direction."

Instapundit notes that this is the kind of finding that could rankle feminists, who should resist the idea that society's purpose for women is to tame men and structure their otherwise destructive energy for the good of the group.

Fortunately, though, this political incorrectness is offset, as the piece by Adam Grant adheres slavishly to the Althouse Rule on writing about gender, which is that you can report anything so long as you do so in a way that portrays women as superior.

Here's my post from 2005 stating the rule and demonstrating its application in the context of a study about the response to cartoons, which was reported under the headline, "Women May Enjoy Humor More, if It's Funny." "That's not funny" is a punchline for jokes about humorless women, but somehow the reporter of the study transformed the old deficiency into an asset.

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Take the poll.

ADDED: The poll is radically unscientific. Those who have stopped reading because the comments are gone should not be here to take the poll. Everyone choosing the last option — "Without the comments, this blog means nothing to me" — is confessing to lying. Those 265 voters (out of 2,071 total) might be expressing anger or lobbying for the return of the comments. Telling me what I write doesn't matter except as a jumping off platform for commenters doesn't work as an argument, directed at me, to bring back comments.

I needed help dealing with the overwhelming proliferation of commenters who intended to ruin the blog — that is, commenters who thought of my work as nothing, or, really, worse than nothing, and hoped to achieve their goal of getting me to nothing.

The 345 people who voted to say that they "feel aggrieved" and see what I did as "wrong" also fail to speak appealingly to me. They are perhaps wrapped up in their own experience and unwilling to see what I went through. They might like the endless party restarted, but their lack of interest in what it's been like for me shows why the party had to end, abruptly on one terrible night, and why I've got to go forward solo.

Those who voted in the bottom 2 categories — more than the ones who voted in the top categories, the supportive answers — reinforce me in my decision to go it alone here.

"Rahm Emanuel Dancing to Blurred Lines..."

"... at the Taste of Chicago."

Via Throwing Things, who says "How powerful is 'Blurred Lines?'  Powerful enough that it can get even Rahm Emanuel to dance." I don't get the "even." The man is a dancer.

Records From My Father, Part 1: "Make Love to Me."

I told you here that I was about to start a new project. I'm going to call it "Records From My Father." I inherited a big stack of record albums that my father bought in the 1950s and 60s and that were part of the home I grew up in. I didn't really understand what I was hearing and what these things meant to my father, who has been gone a long time.

I decided to listen to one album at a time — not that I'll endure all of them — and see what I think. I don't expect to recall my childhood memories or to reconstruct the inner life of the man who existed in ways that couldn't be understood by me at the time. I don't expect anything, really. The idea is simply to encounter these albums, because I have them, because he bought them, and because I know they have meaning, even though I don't think it is possible to find that meaning.

The first selection is "Make Love to Me," a 1957 collection of "standards" and "new pieces," sung by Julie London.

Biking in Madison.

I walked downtown to meet Meade at Graze for brunch, where I had what I'd had yesterday as well, the corned beef hash. Outside the restaurant, some dumb/inconsiderate bikers U-locked their bikes to a struggling sapling. How hard would it be for a thief to saw through that tree (or even to break it off)?



Meade had his mountain bike from a long morning ride, and I got a B-Cycle for the ride along the lake path and back home



Meade stowed his bike, then rode the B-Cycle back to the nearest kiosk — at the Natatorium —  and I got in the car and drove over to pick him up, so we could go to Whole Foods and load up on supplies so we could get back to making breakfast at home.

"High-End Stores Use Facial Recognition Tools To Spot VIPs."

Surely, this is the moment when we find ourselves on the cusp between the old and the new.

The Old: There was etiquette and common courtesy, and you felt called upon to regard everyone as a very important person. Sly and the Family Stone sang it best: "Everybody Is a Star." And Jesus said: "Truly, I say to you, as you did it not to one of the least of these, you did it not to me."

The New: Everyone will have Google Glass with facial recognition and everyone, high-end or not, will know the identity of everyone, celebrity or not. Everyone will know that you know who they are, and your ability to recognize anyone will say absolutely nothing about your character and discernment.

Althouse without comments.

Althouse without comments.
	The comments are gone? I didn't notice.
	Comments or no comments, I read the posts, which were always the main thing here.
	I used to spend a lot of time in the comments, but it's fine without comments.
	It's a rough transition, but I'm still reading and will see how it goes.
	Cutting off comments was wrong, I feel aggrieved, and I'll read here only grudgingly.
	Without the comments, this blog means nothing to me.
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ADDED: How is it possible that anyone can pick the last option? A conundrum!

Freddy Mercuryovich and The Floating Vulva Box.

You know what I'm talking about?

AND: Much as I love Tom and Lorenzo's on the armpit-sniffing unicorn boy from Milwaukee...

You signed up for reality TV and then proceeded to act like a ridiculously obnoxious attention whore. Now cranky queens are making it their life’s mission to make you cry before this is all over.

... the guy knows he won't win, and he's going all out making himself a character who's got a shot at getting cast in some other reality shows. You can only blame the producers for spiking the show with comic noncontenders like this. Timothy must go big and comic, and so must Tom and Lorenzo. It simply must be done. For sustainability.

Sunday rest.

Enjoy the day.

And if you've got any shopping to do, please consider using this link to shop at Amazon.

"I don't like being described as 'sniffing'?"

Says Meade, reading the last post. I'm going for vivid verbs, but I'm still attentive to image control. Meade's not a big language pedant, but he says: "I do object to the suffix '-wise,' like 'weatherwise.'"

"But when I said 'weatherwise,'" I say, referring to the time I said 'weatherwise' the other day, "I was making an allusion to that Frank Sinatra song. Weatherwise, it's such a lovely day... Come fly with me...."



When that album came out, in 1958, my father looked exactly like that. It's funny, when you're a kid — I was 7 — you can get the feeling that if someone looks just like someone else, that they kind of are that person. And not just in that jokey separated-at-birth way. (You never see them in the same place at the same time, ever notice?) But in some mystic way. Even when you know it's not true. It's still kind of true.

The verb "opt."

I like it... and used it in the previous post. ("[O]bviously if you have a single-parent household, you'll need some kind of income stream to opt to say at home." I liked the "obv... opt" combo.) But Meade sniffed at this usage. Is it as off as using "impact" as a verb? (Which I don't do.)

The (unlinkable) OED has the earliest usage of "opt" as a verb coming in 1853 — which is relatively recent — and written by Frederick Douglass:

1853   Frederick Douglass Paper (Rochester, N.Y.) (Electronic text) 16 Sept.,   This course will not suit a discriminating public. They must opt for something more than long winded and rapid declamations.

There are 3 other 19th century examples, and both put "opt" in quotes. ("1899... The two boys 'opted'  for the Navy.") By contrast, the word "option" goes back to the 1500s. So I guess it's like "enthuse," which the OED comes right out and calls "an ignorant back-formation" (from "enthusiasm"). But why isn't "opt" called "an ignorant back-formation"? What makes a new usage "ignorant"? Or does it make more sense to say: There's one thing that makes it not ignorant: when the first use appears in the writings of the revered former slave Frederick Douglass.

"I can food."

Did that look like something a LOLcat would say? If so, I guess you haven't arrived at "The New Domesticity."

I knit. I can food. I garden. I cook, and when I’m not actively cooking, I’m thinking about what I’m going to cook next... I didn’t grow up doing these things.... So you can see why Emily Matchar’s new book, “Homeward Bound,” sounded as if it could be a mirror into my soul.

This is the pithiest part of the review (at WaPo, by Becky Krystal):

Some of the new domestics think feminism isn’t just about being in the workplace; it’s also being able to choose to not be in it. 

Feminists have been saying that all along, but kind of only because they have to, and there always seems to be this qualification that if you choose the home life option, you've got to do it the right way, which is not because of tradition and not in subordination to a husband. By contrast, if you choose the moneymaker option, the conventional and/or servile aspects of what you're doing are more likely to go unnoticed (or so it may seem to the go-along-to-get-along subordinates to feminism in its most banal form).

Strange flowers...

... I found these rather odd. Water lilies, presumably. Fuzzy and bright yellow-green.