At the Butterfly Café...

... you can fill up on purple.

ADDED: Video shows just how many butterflies there were today:

"Tripoli Zoo: Libyan Lions Left Behind."

A HuffPo headline suggests the notion of a Rapture for animals.

If there were a Rapture for animals, which animals would be left behind? I'd say hummingbirds and butterflies. They are jerks.

And, sorry, I don't mean to seem unsympathetic to the zoo animals who are suffering in Libya. Who thinks of the zoo animals when there is a war? Here's a book: "The Incredible Wartime Rescue of the Baghdad Zoo."

And a truly cool novel about zoo animals at the mercy of a human-made disaster is "Life of Pi." It's not a war, but a ship wreck after a zoo in India is dismantled and some of the animals are packed on board en route to Canadian.

Two.

(Enlarge.)

One.

Butterfly.

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!

Monarch.

Chip has his way with yesterday's photograph:

Butterfly.

Seen today in Governor Nelson Park... along with lots of mosquitos... and black raspberries.

At the Middle/Far/Closeup Café...

... you can be as friendly or standoffish as you want.

At the Closer Look Nightclub...

... let's talk intimately.

AND: Here's the more distant view of the butterfly (moth?). [Thanks to commenter Seneca: "Butterfly. Moth antennae are fluffy."] And, from the same beautiful herb garden, a hummingbird.

ALSO: Thanks to Instapundit for linking. By the way, when my titles designate a post as a "nightclub," "café," "tavern," "restaurant," or some such place, it means you can use the topic thread to talk about anything you like. It's an open thread, so don't think anybody in there is hijacking the thread or disrespecting my photography.

AND: Chip animates my first photo:

In the Bliss Café...

... could life be this beautiful?



Hmmm?

What happened on Bellyache Ridge.

Here we are just married, on the rock where moments before, we exchanged rings — solemnizing our own marriage, pursuant to Colorado's wonderful statutory law.



You can see that my toenails are fortuitously painted the same color as the mountain asters that surround the wedding rock that we found atop Bellyache Ridge. (Enlarge photo.) (The color is actually called "Done Out in Deco," not "Mountain Aster.")

I'm standing, in order to take this picture, and Meade is still sitting, using his iPhone, talking to his mother, the only one of our parents who is still living. I've already finished my iPhone calls to my sons and my comment to this blog, but I sat there alongside my new husband for a good while after our private wedding vows and the putting on of the rings.

Now, you may ask: How come there was cell phone service way up there? It was funny, but we drove up Bellyache Ridge Road, which went way up a mountain, including a long section at the top that was a narrow dirt road, and after we found a place to ditch the car and hiked farther up, we encountered a big old cell phone tower:



We had to wonder if this was a pretty enough place, now, but next to the tower, we saw a wild garden of what I had called "living Koosh Balls" in a blog post earlier in the day. (They're really called musk thistle.)



Look closely — or enlarge the photo — and you'll see that there is a yellow swallowtail butterfly on one of the Koosh balls. The flowers and the butterfly and everything else seemed to say that this was the place, and we found our big flat rock to sit on and performed our wedding. And only later did we realize how useful and apt it was that we could use our iPhones there — apt because Meade and I had met through this blog, and blogging, emailing, texting, and telephoning had been a big part of our relationship. So that ugly tower really did belong on our wedding mountain, Bellyache Ridge.

The mountaintop had been deserted when we climbed up and while we took our vows, but then suddenly a lone runner came over the ridge, like some kind of angel sent to witness. After she passed by, we talked about her and how she was our witness and how strange it was that she'd had no idea that she was our witness and that we weren't merely a couple sitting on a rock, but we were newlywed within that minute. Then, when we finally climbed back down the path, she was looping back, so we saw our angel again. We called out to her and told her everything. She took our picture for us:



Thanks, Millie!

The beautiful endangered butterfly survives by imitating an immature red ant.

"[The newly hatched caterpillars] secrete chemicals and even make noises that make the red ants believe they are wayward grubs. The ants then mistakenly carry the caterpillars to their underground homes and keep looking after them even though the adopted intruders gobble ant grubs for 10 months before forming a chrysalis and flying away as adult butterflies."

The beautiful ones are so cruel...

"I was like, 'I’m going to glue rhinestones on my eyelids, bitch!'"

At long last, Adam Lambert tells his "I'm gay" story.

Here's the cover:



A cute butterfly and a green snake approach Adam's exposed zipper.

Loveland mural.

"you know i have the transmigrated soul of a composer" writes our favorite insect, blogging cockroach.

Yesterday's last post, with its showy outdoor insects -- bee and butterfly -- lured the cowering, timorous bug from the shadows. It's not easy hopping about on the keyboard, and these days there are new dangers. Here then, in full, is what blogging cockroach had to say:

ooh that is such a beautiful picture



brings a tear to my beady eyes to think
of a world of light and air and pretty flowers
while i'm stuck under the fridge in the dark
except when i can get to tommy's computer
--tommy is the boy whose computer i use--
and all that beauty makes me think of music too
--you know i have the transmigrated soul of a composer--
and i do wish tommy would put on the music i ask for

now, what music does that scene remind you of...
me, i think of a bartok string quartet
tommy's usually playing the ramones

anyway, speaking of air
tommy's mom got a new macbook air
you know the one you could wrap fish in
if you're not careful
tommy wants one too
says it will eat less space in his back pack
only trouble is i watched mom snap that thing shut
--whap--
i asked tommy how could he make sure
he wouldn't just slam that sucker shut when
i'm in the middle of a comment
he says there's lots of room between the keys
sorta like an old typewriter my great great great, etc.
grandfather had to hop around on,
but could also hide in when the time came
no room to hide near modern technology i'm afraid
my only hope would be to flatten myself out
next to the command key, which has a flower on it

anyway, i told tommy he could just leave me the fish
after mom mistook the computer for a freezer bag

she was wondering if she could get a glass of sancerre
to calm her nerves at the genius bar

I'm touched by the solace of the non-flower on the command key, and I wonder what a tear would look like in beady eyes of a cockroach. How can I show my feeling? I've added a thumbnail of the picture that moved the little beastie and a link to help readers understand his ancestry. A here's one more thing, evidence that I did trouble myself, yesterday, to look into the eyes of the insect...



... with apologies that it was an outdoorsy fellow, with a real flower.

ADDED: Yes, that's a moth, not, as I wrote, a butterfly. I talk about this mistake -- and blogging cockroach -- in the new vlog.

"I’m totally amazed that my art is selling while banks are falling."

"I guess it means that people would rather put their money into butterflies than banks — seems like a better world today to me."

£111 million for Damien Hirst.

Robert Drew's great documentary "Primary" -- about JFK and Hubert Humphrey in the Wisconsin Primary -- free, tonight, at Cinematheque.

New students, old residents, you should know about Cinematheque. Drop by tonight at Vilas Hall at 7:30 for this fine 60 minute film.

And make note of the rest of the films in the "Vote Cinema: American Politics on Film" series. There are various different series and special events this fall, including "Deviants, Delinquients, and Do-Gooders: Hollywood Social Problem Films of the 1950s."

Here's the whole fall calendar.

Cinematheque is one of the coolest things about UW-Madison. And again: It is free.

ADDED: Here is an interview with Albert Maysles (the cinematographer) about the part of the film where we see Jackie Kennedy's gloved, fidgeting hands:



And here's a long clip from [another] film that gives background on Richard Nixon. I love the charming retro "Stick with Dick" sign. And Richard Nixon, turning on the charm for Nikita Krushchev, just hilarious. Lots more too.



ADDED: Sorry, I misread the label on the second video clip, which popped up in YouTube. It has a completely different documentary style, but some great historical clips. If I remember "Primary" correctly -- I've seen it but have loaned out my DVD -- it's entirely about Kennedy and Humphrey in Wisconsin. Here's some background on the style of "Primary":

[C]inema verite -- choosing moments where action might occur instead of creating it -- ... was the brainchild of Robert Drew, an editor at Life magazine. He believed the magazine enjoyed its success because it brought into the home pictures of action in the midst of happening -- four soldiers struggling to plant the flag at Iwo Jima, for instance -- and he wanted to extend that concept to documentaries. "I thought all we had to do was put a Life photographer who valued candid photography behind a motion picture camera, and we could make a new kind of film." But thanks to an eight-man crew that had to stop and set heavy equipment on tripods, action eluded capture.

Then Mr. Drew started to experiment with lightweight cameras and sound recorders. In 1959, under the banner of Drew Associates, he put together a film crew, all of whom went on to write their names on the pages of documentary history: Albert Maysles, Terence Filgate (a film maker well known in his native Canada), Richard Leacock ("Monterey Pop") and D. A. Pennebaker ("Don't Look Back," "The War Room").

The film makers set out in the dark: they were making documentaries with no directors, no scripts, no sets, no lights, little or no narration and no interviews. To be at the right place at the right moment was everything. They considered themselves neutral observers who merely recorded ongoing events and had, as much as possible, no point of view. Their first important work was "Primary," which tracked Senators John F. Kennedy and Hubert H. Humphrey through the cold 1960 Wisconsin Democratic Presidential primarily...

Their approach, says Mr. Filgate, offered an alternative to the Edward R. Murrow style of documentaries. "It was as if we were butterfly hunting. We knew there were butterflies in the woods, but we didn't know what kind, and we didn't know how we were going to catch them; whereas in the journalistic documentary, a reporter says, 'On my left, hidden in the bushes, are thousands of butterflies.' And then the camera cuts away to the bushes. Drew, with 'Primary,' broke that mold."

An atypical day.

Thanks to everyone who wrote in the comments today and helped keep this thing alive. I was up before 5 a.m. to drive 88 miles to the Brown Deer golf course outside of Milwaukee for the U.S. Bank Open, a PGA golf tournament. My nephew, Cliff Kresge, had a 7:10 tee time, and so we had to get started way too early. We gamely walked the course, Cliff shot -4, the golfers wore long pants, and the caddies wore shorts. After all that sun and a Cheesecake Factory lunch, I had to slap myself in the face repeatedly to keep from dozing off during the 88 mile drive back to Madison. We made it home, went to a butterfly exhibit, accomplished a garden walk, had a dinner of pizza and mojitos, bought shoes, and stumbled into a movie — "The Children of Huang Shih" — which, of course, I slept through part of. An atypical day. If anything happened in the news today, I didn't see it.

If it was legal, would you want to be a prostitute?

Megan McArdle's readers insist that her support for legalized prostitution ought to force her to deal with the question whether she'd do the work herself. Her answer — sensible up to a point — is there are plenty of jobs she doesn't want to do. Her post doesn't explore whether we ought to protect young, weak, and economically hard-pressed individuals from doing things that will probably hurt them. The question is how harmful is the work — if you consider what it would be if it were legal? So thinking about whether you would want to do it — when you are not a weak or desperate person — is a decent test of whether it is so harmful that the law should be used to protect people from it. Admittedly, this is only looking at whether the prostitute is harmed by prostitution, but let's focus on that. Would you consider a career in prostitution? Assume reasonable benefits: great pay, excellent health care, a safe, well-run workplace, interesting colleagues. Would you?

ADDED: I reconsider the question in light of butterflies.

Butterflies are very discreet.

Visitors to the vivarium are not.