Subtle in the woods

First seen here. Not exactly seen, but you know what I mean. First not seen there.

This reminds me of an Ambrose Bierce story, but it's much more pleasant than the thing in the story.

I am the egg man ...

… and I'm hungry! Watch out, potatoes!
Sort of like the man in the crescent moon, only hungry. Looking at those taters with that big yellow eye, mouth wide open. You see it or you don't.

Autumn's come again

This, by Gerard Manley Hopkins, is about a hundred years old, and eternal.



Spring and Fall:
to a Young Child

Márgarét, áre you grieving
Over Goldengrove unleaving?
Leáves, like the things of man, you
With your fresh thoughts care for, can you?
Áh! ás the heart grows older
It will come to such sights colder
By and by, nor spare a sigh
Though worlds of wanwood leafmeal lie;
And yet you will weep and know why.
Now no matter, child, the name:
Sórrow's springs áre the same.
Nor mouth had, no nor mind, expressed
What héart héard of, ghóst guéssed:
It is the blight man was born for,
It is Margaret you mourn for.
___________________________________
(Photo by Ann Althouse, used under Creative Commons licence.)

I think this is a portulaca

Flower in the driveway crack,
I leave you there, bravely blooming;—
Weed or no, I'll stay my hand,
Little flower — so small, and yet so grand
A show of color on the pavement black,
Steadfast and unassuming.

On tour of New England

Remember when Randy, the Internet Ronin, went on a tour of England, and posted all those great photos? He's doing it again, in New England this time. Some noteworthy leaf-peeping can be found at Rambling Around.

Bats drinking

On the fly.

More here. From Jerry Pournelle's mail.

A few days in the mountains ...

… with no Internet, and all heck breaks loose. Sotomayor's on the Court, ObamaCare protests are breaking out all over, and Althouse is married.

I'll get caught up.

design classics only

Here. Elegance, occasional weirdness; things I'd seen before, things I hadn't. Cars, computers, telephones, china. Everything manufactured is designed.

Found this as a result of looking at this collection of East German artifacts, via Althouse.

The clock-work heart

See it here.

Jessica Palmer says, "What does it signify? Does it represent the gradual replacement of the natural world around us with technology, to the point where our own bodies become artificial? Is it critiquing the reductionist tendencies of neurobiologists who believe our deepest emotions are complex but purely chemical reactions? Is it a steampunk Valentine?"

An enigmatic image. Meaning? You, you human beings, you make the meaning. You create the meaning. So be careful, be mindful, of what you are creating.

***

Abrupt shift in tone:

19th-century pacemaker, that's my guess. Maybe the thing under the floor that so upset [the character written by] Edgar Allan Poe.

Harry Reid -- he'll stick it to ya

This could go viral.

Image created by Chip Ahoy, and posted to Althouse on March 27, 2009.

Already picked up by Power Line. How many more, how soon?

The image is so powerful, all by itself, that the context — Reid accusing Chief Justice Roberts of lying about, uh, what, exactly was that? is irrelevant.

For the benefit of the search engines: Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, American Gothic, Grant Wood, fork, pitchfork.

Alternate title: Reid and Pelosi to America: "Get Forked!"

Update: Obama has started talking about pitchforks, leading to another version of the image. More to come before it's done.

Gleanings

More on the Antikythera Mechanism, including a working model. The 76-year cycle sounds like Halley's Comet. Or can you think of something else with that periodicity?

The Modern Drunkard interview with Gary Shteyngart. Lotsa vodka, a little caviar, some reflections on the condition of Russia, literature and the writing life (via).

Frozen bubbles. Via Althouse, who calls it a "cool photography stunt." Cool? Below freezing, I'd say!

Self-handicapping excuse artisans. "I coulda been a contenda." If all the if-only's were laid end to end … (via)

Wreck of the bark Trajan discovered in Newport harbor.

Faggots in the raw. (SFW!)

UFO sighting in Cumbria, UK. Turns out to be Chinese lantern balloons, released at a wedding at this hotel. Nice hotel!

Morris dancing in danger of extinction? Probably not just yet.

Speaking of dancing, in Finland they spell YMCA with a NMKY (via Althouse commenter jdeeripper).

These Obama photos are a little different ...

… from the usual ones.

"I'm a Midnight Toker" -- Getting Stoned with Barry O

Hey, we all had our youthful indiscretions, right? And wrote about them in a couple of autobiographies? And went to prison, and found that our options for the future were not at all constrained, afterwards.

Van der Leun has the words and pictures: here is the music. Start this video, then read the linked post in another tab while the music plays to get the full effect.

Update: The video I had before does not work any more. Try this one instead.

Orpheus

On tour of England

Randy the Internet Ronin has been posting some gorgeous pictures from England.

Go look at them. I'll still be here when you get back.

Gleanings

Just another batch of things that caught my eye.

Drug war casualty: "Marie Walsh was the very picture of American suburban respectability. She and her husband, a company executive, lived in a £400,000 house in an affluent area near San Diego, California. But the 53-year-old had a secret that even her husband and three children did not know: she was really Susan Lefevre, a convicted drug dealer who had been on the run for 32 years after escaping from the Detroit House of Corrections."

Fierce comment threads at Althouse and Volokh on Ayers and Dohrn, and Barack Obama's relationship with them. The Althouse thread inspires a post by Blake: Terrorism and Indoctrination vs. Education, which gets some silly comments by yours truly.

Adopted Man Finds Biological Father on Death Row.

Bagpipe bands violate EU noise regulations and must be muted. (via)

PSA from Hungary intended to promote bicycling. Looks pretty persuasive to me.

How'd you like to walk (or cycle) across this footbridge? (via)

Strange But True photos at the L.A. Times.

Great tits cope well with warming. Well, that's good news! (via)

ROFLcon. Sounds like fun. Over, though; it was held the last weekend in April. The blog includes a list of Sleeper Hits of the Internet, a bunch of (mostly) fun videos that you may have missed. And that seems to require a mention of ROFLMAO. "Do-doo-do-do-do."

The Earth and Moon as seen from Mars

Beautiful in itself; useful when explaining that it's not the Earth's shadow that is responsible for the phases of the Moon. Click the pic to go to the HiRISE zone at U of AZ. Thanks to Bad Astronomy.

Gleanings

Beginning with the gruesome, moving on to the funny.

This seems to be a custody dispute. From Saudi Arabia: Toddler beheaded in supermarket. Arab News: Man Butchers 15-Month-Old Nephew in Jeddah Supermarket. Follow-up from Saudi Gazette: Dad Denies He was there at Son’s Beheading. (via)

Terri Irwin and Australia Zoo are in trouble with the tax authorities in Australia.

I knew I had seen FDR with a halo, or at least a nimbus, in old movie shorts. Lileks has found one of these, in which Jimmy Durante sings "Give a Man a Job." The post includes some commentary on the NRA (not the National Rifle Association, the other one.) (via)

If you have a copy of Love and Consequences by Margaret B. Jones, hang on to it. It's going to be a rare book. (via)

New supersonic business jet on the way. Shiny! (via)

Unusual instruments: I suppose this is a form of glass harmonica, but what a form! Michel Lauzière plays Mozart on wine bottles, on rollerblades. (via)

A new typographical term: keming. I have been having trouble with modem and modern for years. Though one can usually tell by context, with that pair. (via)

Photoshopped comics, not a new idea but very well done indeed: Rampant plagiarism. (via)

Continuing the discussion from comments at BitMaelstrom on smart TV shows, Jennifer Ouellette, of Cocktail Party Physics, mentions a bit of genuine erudition on, not "Buffy," but "Angel." Close enough. Also: the music of the spheres. And from the same post at Flares into Darkness, some photographs whose intensity makes them dreamlike: 20 beautiful HDR pictures. (HDR = high dynamic range.) There's a lot of griping in the comments about how unreal they look; I would have thought that was the point. It would be easy to slip into Thomas Kinkade or Velvet Elvis land with this effect, but it's just another tool in the toolbox. Here's a Flickr group for this technique. Also on photos with dreamlike intensity, take a look at this. The reds on left and right seem to *pop*!

Speaking of photos, the Library of Congress has uploaded a large collection of images to Flickr. Two sets so far, 1930s-40s in Color, and News in the 1910s. From the LoC blog: My Friend Flickr: A Match Made in Photo Heaven.

Gruesome, or funny? More on the funny side, I think: LOLTHULU: Cthulhu Fhtagn Cheezburger.

How did the Amazon reviews for Tuscan Whole Milk, one-gallon size, become a repository of gloriously absurd short fiction, and some poetry even? I have no idea. But I laughed and laughed. Look at the customer images too. (via)

Did you ever see a dune ...

… walking?

Another candidate enters the Presidential race

LGF correspondent Zombie managed to attend three campaign events last Sunday. There was a Hillary! event, an Obama event, and another event, in which Frank Moore, of the Just Makes Sense Party, took part. Of course he has a website and a blog. He makes about as much sense as most of the other candidates. As usual with Zombie's reports from California's moonbat zone, the photos are many and colorful.

Analemma

Analemma with included total eclipse = Tutulemma.