The actor Joseph Gordon-Levitt confronts his paparazzi.

Via Metafilter.

I love when the one paparazzi guy tries to explain himself by citing "La Dolce Vita" — the movie where the term "paparazzi" originates — but then he can't think of the director's name and the actor says "Fellini."

By the way, I love "La Dolce Vita." Remember that time FireDogLake attempted to insult me by saying "Every time I look in over there, something so weird is going on that I feel like I just bumbled on to the set of a Fellini film" and I was all...



And remember "I don't want an egg at this hour."









(Note: The man in the backseat is the character named Paparazzo.)

"Greener than green, I'm saving the planet/Just like my friends Daryl, Sean, Toby and Janet."

"No greenhouse gas, a tiny carbon footprint up your ass/I'm on a motherfucking bike/Sharing my aggression is what that I do/Every day I'm riding the 'Tour de Fuck You'/Banging on hoods and kicking in fenders/a right-of-way-aholic on a permanent bender..."



Yes, that is exactly what it is like out there!

ADDED: Move!

At the Wisconsin protests today — one year after protesters stormed the Capitol.

As the Wisconsin State Journal puts it: "Union members rallied outside the Wisconsin Capitol on Saturday to mark the anniversary of the Republican-led Legislature's passage of a hotly-disputed measure that stripped most public union workers of collective bargaining rights."



How do they know who's a union member? There was a huge crowd, including lots of children (and dogs!) on this sunny warm Saturday:



They couldn't have all been union members. But I saw lots of generic printed signs and flags, and there were massive trucks painted with "Teamsters" and "Boilermakers" imagery.

Speaking of imagery, here's a woman holding a sign depicting Governor Scott Walker's head emerging from a hairy asshole. The sign reads "Buttholes for Billionaire$:



Another sign depicts Scott Walker peeing on the words "Public Employees." Walker has a Hitler mustache and the words read "Gov. Dick Tater":



(Is this sexist, an insult to all men, to call one man a "dick"?)

The socialists were there:



They want to tax the rich.

There were puppeteers... who had trouble wrangling the papier maché Scott Walker in the March wind:



There was this young woman aligning Governor Walker with murderers Ed Gein and Jeffrey Dahmer:



"Wisconsin regrets Ed Gein, Jeffrey Dahmer, and Scott Walker." Oh, there's always so much to regret. Grisly mass murders... balancing the state budget...

... spending a beautiful Saturday photographing the deeply aggrieved.

"I fell in love with Benihana because, if you sit at a table full of strangers and you don't say anything to anybody..."

"... you're an asshole...."

So, [Tracy Morgan] says he started using the restaurant regularly as a way to try out jokes on the public. "You've got a built-in audience. It's like a small comedy show, and this is the stage."

As we're talking, Morgan notices a guy at the next table listening. When asked what he likes about the vibe, Morgan answers loudly, for the other guy's benefit....

Go to the link for the — warning: offensive — routine.

James Taranto is "surprised to see @annalthouse sort of defending" Charles Blow.

Taranto's tweeting. Citing 2 of my blog posts — "Mr. Blow may attempt to delete that Tweet..." and "Our reflexive response to 'Everybody Draw Mohammad Day'... was sympathetic/But Althouse prompted us to reconsider" — he wonders whether I think we "should mock religion or not."

Let's get a few things straight:

1. I was not defending Blow's infamous "Stick that in your magic underwear" tweet. My post quotes Jim Geraghty making the usual double-standard criticism about which religions are mockable, then asks — asks! — if you'd like to see the counter-argument, that religion should be vigorously mocked, and links to Crack Emcee. I'm just setting up discussion there, not drawing my own lines about what I think people should be saying about religion.

2. My "Everybody Draw Mohammad Day" post is demanding that people look at a double-standard problem, using the hypothetical "Everybody Burn the Flag Day." You need to think about what you're doing when you decide to leverage your protest on deep reverence that other people feel.

3. I've never stated a general rule about mockery and religion. I don't have one. Comedy is a great and dangerous force. Most people aren't too good at using it. It can communicate good fun or extreme contempt. You can be a complete asshole with comedy — which you have a right to be, but if you go too far in that direction, you'd better be good! You're probably not as funny as you think you are, but if you want to go to extremes, you're stupid if you don't know there's a risk. Now, the riskiest stuff is also the funniest stuff. Ask Lenny Bruce. No, you can't. He died. Remember when Michael Richards tried to do that Lenny Bruce thing? His career died.

4. Instead of a pathetic and necessarily futile hope for rules for humor, let's think deeply about what humor is. Here's a classic starting point:

In Freud's view, jokes...  happened when the conscious allowed the expression of thoughts that society usually suppressed or forbade. The superego allowed the ego to generate humor. A benevolent superego allowed a light and comforting type of humor, while a harsh superego created a biting and sarcastic type of humor. A very harsh superego suppressed humor altogether.... Freud followed Herbert Spencer's ideas of energy being conserved, bottled up, and then released like so much steam venting to avoid an explosion.

5. Underpants.

The "Walkerville" tent-city protest was supposed to start at 7 a.m., but that's not what Meade found on the Capitol Square this morning.

"All the assholes are over on the other side," says a man on the street, beginning my edit of what Meade caught on camera as he biked around the square a couple hours ago.



I think the anti-asshole man is anticipating the Walkervillians — Walkervillains? — but the closest thing to anybody camping out is that one guy at the very end, but he might not be protesting Scott Walker. But you know, nobody's ever taught you how to live on the street, and now you find out you’re gonna have to get used to it.

UPDATE, 2 p.m.: Absolutely no sign of Walkerville. Lots of action around the Capitol today, though, with the Farmers' Market (which is there every Saturday) and the annual Cows on the Concourse event, both of which are seen in the video. There was also "Cars on State," which is an exhibit of classic cars on State Street. That's not in this video, but I'll have some photos of it soon.

UPDATE, 10:25 p.m.: We went over to the square around 8:30 and saw plenty of tents set up for the night, including directly in front of the hotel on the square and right next to a restaurant's sidewalk café. The protesters were completely mellow. There was a group of people standing in a circle at the foot of the Forward! statue and they were singing "We Shall Overcome" and other civil rights/labor movement songs. I shot some video and photographs, which I'll put up in a new post soon.

It's not a hummingbird.

At the botanical garden today, 2 women were staring at a little beastie that was going at the butterfly bush. It was not a butterfly.


(Enlarge.)

"Do you think that's a hummingbird or an insect?" asked one of the women, who seemed quite involved in the identification process. It wasn't easy, because it was small and darted around. The wings were nearly invisible.

I said: "To me, it looks like a miniature flying lobster, so I'm going to guess insect."

She said, "Yes, I think you're probably right, because it keeps hanging around, and hummingbirds are shy."

Instinctively recoiling at sentimentality and remembering this, I said, "Oh? I've seen some very aggressive hummingbirds. I've seen some hummingbirds who were real jerks."



Hey! Look at the tongue. Maybe it is some kind of crazy butterfly.

IN THE COMMENTS: Irene says it's a hummingbird clearwing moth.

AND: Peter Hoh thinks it's a snowberry clearwing, and that looks right to me.

AND: Rick Lee said:

I just posted one of those also... I asked my friend the entomologist if it was a hummingbird moth and she said it was a close relative, the bumblebee moth.

Hey, he got his to hold still... plus he's a professional photographer. No fair!

Finally, Mickey Mouse will be an asshole.

He needed some edge.

Hummingbirds are jerks.

Somebody wanted to see hummingbirds. Was it Chip? Meade seems to think it was Chip. So here they are, and let me tell you, they are little bastards. They are tiny — for birds — but if they were bees, they'd be huge and horrible. Watch this video and you'll see, a hummingbird cares only for itself. If you could read their thoughts, translated into English, it would be: "Get the fuck out of my way. This is mine, all mine."

Birds are assholes.

And people are hilarious. [HEY: Watch the video at the link! I tried to embed it, and the code didn't work. There's another video below, but it's a bonus video.]

And here's the whole movie "The Birds" compressed into 1 minute and 40 seconds: