"Can You Make It Through This Post Without Crying?"

I was tough, but #13 got to me. And the parrot, now that I think of it.

The UW—Madison "worked with the Ho-Chunk Nation on a name for this facility, because this area was home to the Ho-Chunk for thousands of years."

The new residence hall, on the shore of Lake Mendota, will be called "Dejope," which means "4 lakes." The Ho-Chunk Nation passed a resolution approving of the use of the word on the ground that "it is in the best interest of the Nation to support and promote the education of its members and the education of others about the Ho-Chunk Nation."

The residence hall will have features that recognize the influence and importance of tribal culture and of the lakes.

A fire circle will be located on the building’s north side facing the lake, with bronze plaques representing the 11 Indian Nations in Wisconsin. Inside, on the first floor, embedded in the terrazzo floor, will be images of four of the campus effigy mound groups; Observatory Hill, Willow Drive, Picnic Point and Eagle Heights....

Here's the Wikipedia article about the Ho-Chunk, AKA Winnebago:

The term "Winnebago" originally came from an exonym, that is, a name given to the people by the neighboring Algonquian-speaking tribes.... This name has been variously translated as, "people of the stinking water," "people of the filthy water," "people of the stagnant water'" and "people of the smelly waters."

The Algonquian words do not have the negative overtones attached to the French word puant and the English word "stinky." The French translated and shortened the name to simply les puants (or les puans), which was translated into English as "the Stinkards." Many researchers believe that the waters referred to were either stagnant waters of Green Bay or the aromatic, algae-filled waters of the rivers or lakes where the Winnebago were living in the mid-17th century....

Ho-Chunk is the tribe's name for itself, or autonym.... Translations include: "the fish eaters," "the trout people," "the big fish people", "the big speech people," "the people of the big voice," "the people of the parent speech", and "the people of the original language." Current elders say it means, "the people of the big voice" or "the people of the sacred language."

Oscar Wilde to be protected from kisses...

... on his tomb.

In "A Woman of No Importance," Oscar Wilde wrote about kissing:

MRS. ALLONBY. You think there is no woman in the world who would
object to being kissed?



LORD ILLINGWORTH. Very few.

MRS. ALLONBY. Miss Worsley would not let you kiss her.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Are you sure?

MRS. ALLONBY. Quite.

LORD ILLINGWORTH. What do you think she'd do if I kissed her?

MRS. ALLONBY. Either marry you, or strike you across the face with
her glove. What would you do if she struck you across the face
with her glove?

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Fall in love with her, probably.

MRS. ALLONBY. Then it is lucky you are not going to kiss her!

LORD ILLINGWORTH. Is that a challenge?

...

LORD ILLINGWORTH. [Sitting down.] Last night was excessively
unfortunate. That silly Puritan girl making a scene merely because
I wanted to kiss her. What harm is there in a kiss?

MRS. ARBUTHNOT. [Turning round.] A kiss may ruin a human life,
George Harford. I know that. I know that too well.

The Infinity Burial Project — with mushrooms...

... to take responsibility for toxins currently stored within your fleshly being. From bio-artist Jae Rhim Lee (wearing a mushroom death suit):



Will you be a decompinaut?

The University of Wisconsin Marching Band practices "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" in the rain...

... and Meade and I watch from the car. We proceed around town and there's some miscellaneous conversation about ant heads and graveyards and so forth. This is just a late-night trifle for anybody who wants to hang out with us for 14 minutes or less.

"The Constitutional Right to Insult Your Neighbors With Tombstone Displays."

Just one section of an article — PDF — in the New York State Bar Association Journal about Halloween-related lawsuits. (Via ABAJournal.)

The tombstones referenced the petitioning neighbors by name, and each contained a date of death based on that neighbor’s address. For example, one tombstone referencing a neighbor named Betty Gargarz stated:

Bette wasn’t ready,

But here she lies

Ever since that night she died, 

12 feet deep in this trench, 

Still wasn’t deep enough 

For that wenches stench! 

1690

The Seventh Circuit recognized the validity of the plaintiffs’ First Amendment claim. While the court noted that the tombstones were intended to elicit “an emotional response” from the neighbors, they were not “the sort of provocatively abusive speech that inherently tends to incite an immediate breach of the peace” such that they would be considered unprotected speech under the “fighting words” doctrine.

"A green alternative to cremation... dissolving the body in heated alkaline water."

"Body tissue is dissolved and the liquid poured into the municipal water system. Mr Sullivan, a biochemist by training, says tests have proven the effluent is sterile and contains no DNA, and poses no environmental risk. The bones are then removed from the unit and processed in a 'cremulator,' the same machine that is used to crush bone fragments following cremation into ash. Metals including mercury and artificial joints and implants are safely recovered."

Or... try Promession:

Coffins are fed in one end [of a machine], and the body removed from the coffin within the unit and then treated with liquid nitrogen.

The body is then vibrated until the body fragments, after which the remains are dried and refined further, and then passed through filters to remove metals, including dental amalgam. The remains are then poured into a square biodegradable coffin, again automatically, for shallow burial.

And the whole thing is supposed to become soil fairly quickly.

Here's my question: Isn't old-fashioned burial greener? It's carbon sequestration, right?

At the Sunday Café...

... keep the faith.

The end of Trouble.

Trouble, the dog that inherited $12 million from Leona Helmsley has died at the age of 12. A judge later reduced the amount to $2 million, saying when the dog's official caretaker said he could get by on $100,000 a year: "$8,000 for grooming, $1,200 for food and the rest for his fee and a full-time security guard."

The security was necessary after John Codie, a trustee of the $8 billion charitable trust, reported that Trouble had received 20 to 30 death and kidnapping threats....

Helmsley, who cut two grandchildren out of her will and evicted her son's widow after his death, was often seen cuddling the canine, which was always impeccably dressed.

Helmsley, who did 18 months in federal prison on tax evasion charges in the early 1990s, wanted Trouble interred with her in the 12,000-square-foot family mausoleum in Sleepy Hollow Cemetery in Westchester County.

But maybe you've noticed: Cemeteries for human being have a policy against the inclusion of nonhuman remains. Otherwise you'd see dogs buried next to people all over the place.

Revelry at Ground Zero.

Excellent photographs here.

My first reaction: It's not right to party at Ground Zero, where so many people died. You don't dance on their grave.

Second reaction: Where are you going to go? It's New York City, and people want to go out on the street and celebrate. Even if most people regard Ground Zero as a solemn, sacred place, some people are going to think it's... the place.

Third reaction: Even though dancing on the mass grave of the victims is a nontraditional way to celebrate the death of their murderer, it makes sense. If we believe or imagine that the dead are spiritually or symbolically there and that they could know what has happened and respond, then this is the place of celebration, and it's fine to congregate with them for the revelry.

"Even the dead can't escape the ineptitude of the city's Sanitation Department."

"Sanitation crews dumped tons of dirty snow from the Christmas-weekend blizzard into the city's biggest Jewish cemetery, toppling 21 gravestones and wrecking an iron fence."

On a mountaintop in Central City, Colorado.

What is life like for a graveyard tree, rooted in death?

Are their psyches distorted?



But what is any soil composed of...



... if not the dead?

Winter fog... cemetery...

The suddenly warm temperature on top of deep snow raised a lush fog. Last night, driving on a narrow road next to the lake, I said, "This is what death looks like in the movies. Driving into nothing." All the familiar landmarks had become invisible, and I felt lost even when I knew exactly where I was.

The fog remained, but it was easier to see things in the morning. I remembered the photographs I'd taken in the graveyards last December -- here and here -- so I went back to that place to see what the fog was doing to it this year -- and to do some things to it myself with the fisheye lens.

As I drove into the cemetery, just by chance, on the radio's "Sinatra" channel, Van Morrison was singing "That's Life." I can't find the Van Morrison version, but here's Frank Sinatra. Lyrics (by Dean Kay and Kelly Gordon):

I said that's life, and as funny as it may seem
Some people get their kicks,
Stompin' on a dream
But I don't let it, let it get me down,
'Cause this fine ol' world it keeps spinning around...

That's life and I can't deny it
Many times I thought of cutting out
But my heart won't buy it
But if there's nothing shakin' come this here July
I'm gonna roll myself up in a big ball and die

What a crazy song! It's all life affirming and then, impetuously, suicidal.

IN THE COMMENTS: Original George says:

Keep On the Sunny Side...

William says:

I like the Jewish custom of leaving a pebble by the tombstone -- a pittance of memory by the eternity of death. Even if you could find them, a few bright flowers on a day like today would be overwhelmed by the bleakness of nature. Sad that the Irish custom of taking a whizz on the most elaborate tombstone has fallen into disuse. A few yellow streaks against the mausoleum of some forgotten notable reminds us of the transience of life and the abiding value of malice and envy in human affairs.

Sir Archy -- our favorite ghost! -- says:

I know, Madam, that Entertainments of the Nature of a Turn through a Graveyard, such as you have taken, are apt to raise dark & dismal Thoughts in tim'rous Minds and gloomy Imaginations; but, for my own Part, because of my Sanguine Nature, I do not know what 'tis to be Melancholy; and can, therefore, take a View of Nature in her deep and solemn Scenes, with the same Pleasure as in her most gay and delightful ones, especially when contemplating such Pictures as you have made upon this Occasion.

Dark & dismal Thoughts in tim'rous Minds and gloomy Imaginations... I have these sometimes. But I must say that this morning, I wasn't the slightest bit spooked by the thought of all the dead bodies as I stalked about looking for the oldest headstones and the most gnarled trees. The winter cemetery is more evocative of death than the green one, which I have also photographed, but in winter, I work more efficiently. I'm not here for meditation. I'm here for art. I concentrate on that and on not stepping in snowbanks higher than my boots.

George says:

You can get van morrison's version at amazon as an mp3 or on the album 'The Best of Van Morrison Volume 3', on rhapsody, and on itunes...

Ah, yes. Good point. Done, with iTunes. Now, I'm listening to it on infinite repeat as I write this.

What is the difference between a war memorial and a war protest?

Today is Veterans Day, a time to honor all military veterans. It is not, I think, a day to protest war.

Yesterday, I was driving along the Speedway, the road between 2 cemeteries here in Madison. (Here's a picture I took of the area, last December in snow and fog.) Along one side of the road, there was a display of fake tombstones, each about 2 feet tall, lined up in rows of 3 or 4, with signs at intervals saying either "Iraq" or "Afghanistan" and a year from the period of the wars. The tombstones between the signs represented the number who had died in the war in that country, in that year. It takes quite a few seconds to drive past the thousands of markers.

Is this a memorial or is it a war protest? And if it is a war protest, is it offensive -- either because it is next to the cemetery (I'm sure permission was given for the large display), because it appropriates the deaths of men and women (who did not consent to be used in a war protest and may very well have believed in the cause they fought for), or because it has been put up for Veterans Day (an occasion for honoring veterans, not expressing the opinion that the cause they fought for was unworthy)?

Leona Helmsley has left $5+ billion dollars to minister to the needs of the dog community.

All that money for dogs? People didn't like her, and apparently, she didn't like people. Or do you think she just loved dogs that much? There must have been many days when she looked at her little dog and thought: Only a dog can love me. Only a dog knows what real love is.

Her instructions, specified in a two-page “mission statement,” are that the entire trust, valued at $5 billion to $8 billion and amounting to virtually all her estate, be used for the care and welfare of dogs, according to two people who have seen the document...

It is by no means clear, however, that all the money will go to dogs. Another provision of the mission statement says Mrs. Helmsley’s trustees may use their discretion in distributing the money, and some lawyers say the statement may not mean much anyway, given that its directions were not incorporated into Mrs. Helmsley’s will or the trust documents.

“The statement is an expression of her wishes that is not necessarily legally binding,” said William Josephson, a lawyer who was the chief of the Charities Bureau in the New York State attorney general’s office from 1999 to 2004.

Will the lawyers and judges be able to wheedle their way out of of this? Will the force of mega-money and sheer public outrage at spending it all on dogs open a loophole where there is none? Read the linked article, and you'll see that the judge has already been "flexible" about the will that left $12 million to Helmsley's dog Trouble. The dog is only getting $2 million!

[L]ongstanding laws favor adherence to a donor’s intent, and the mission statement is the only clear expression of Mrs. Helmsley’s charitable intentions. ...

... Mrs. Helmsley signed it in 2003 to establish goals for the multibillion-dollar trust that would disburse assets after her death.

The first goal was to help indigent people, the second to provide for the care and welfare of dogs. A year later, they said, she deleted the first goal.

What thoughts went through her head as she deleted the goal of helping poor people? What happened that made her snap?

Now, let's assume the trust stays the way it seems she wanted it, and the money must be all spent on the dog community. How to spend it?

There are many ways the trustees could spend the Helmsley money on dogs. National groups like the Humane Society and the American Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals have programs dedicated to dogs, and many smaller local groups rescue abandoned and abused dogs.

Make sure the cats don't get any of it! Why not stop putting the dogs to death? Build huge dog care centers for all the stray dogs. House their caregivers — luxury style — and pay them well. Now, it's a nice jobs program for the best people — the dog-loving kind.

Or the trustees could use the trust’s money to finance veterinary schools or research on canine diseases.

Found schools of dog medicine. (The cats get nothing! Farm animals? Zoo animals? Wild animals? No money for them!) Very generously fund all the professors of dog medicine at these schools.

You know, being a people doctor isn't so great anymore. So all the best students will want to go to dog medicine school — where tuition is free. Make room and board free too. And make it luxury hotel style.

Found dog hospitals. Provide free care to dogs. Cancer surgery — free. Intensive care units — with the best paid nurses. The hospital food? Hire the best chefs.

Build dog cemeteries. Ornate, grand — have the best sculptors carve marble dog statues for the monuments. And let people walk their dogs in in the cemetery and piss on the monuments all they like. Pay some human beings to clean up after the dogs constantly.

Construct beautiful parks dedicated to dogs on the most expensive city real estate. At the gate, post a sign: No human beings unaccompanied by dogs.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo looks for loopholes:

1. The University of Georgia. Go Dawgs!

2. Footwear for the working poor.

3. Plastic surgery for homely girls.

4. A tuition-free Rap school, founded by Snoop.

5. The world's biggest block party, with weiners by Milwaukee's own Usinger's.

6. Fireplace andirons for everybody!

7. Fund the study of parhelions.

About those Christmas graveyard photographs.

I take fewer photographs in winter. It gets dark early, walks are shorter and quicker, and there's much less happening. I could make a practice of looking harder and forcing myself to see photographs, but mostly I don't. Sometimes, things look photographable, but I'm driving. I could stop, but maybe a dog or a man will come at me to see what trouble I'm causing. In winter, there are fewer dogs and men to worry me, but who stops the car in a snow bank? Photographs go untaken.

Yesterday I stopped. I was driving, as I often do, on the road called the Speedway, that runs between the two cemeteries, Resurrection and Forest Hill.



Was it a joke, naming the road between the cemeteries the Speedway? You are alive, but not for long. Earlier in the day, I'd driven over 100 miles on I-94, and the fog had been much worse. I think I was the only driver on the road who was constantly thinking: This is how 50-car pile-ups happen. I drove so I could stop without crashing if I saw an accident ahead, and no one else did. People are crazy. So the graveyards in the fog called out to me. I stopped and stalked through knee-deep snow to get my pictures.

What first caught my eye were all the wreaths in Resurrection Cemetery:



Resurrection is flatter and less beautiful than the historic Forest Hill on the other side of the Speedway. Perhaps you know that Chris Farley is buried there. He died 10 years ago last Tuesday.



Where are you on the Speedway?

How hail 4+" in diameter caused me to see 18 films.

So I was just hanging around at home, trying to get some reading done, and I see reports predicting hailstorms -- hail 4 1/2 inches in diameter -- baseball size! I have never seen anything close to baseball-sized hail. And I don't keep my car in a garage. So I pack up my things and drive to the mall where there's a covered garage and a café with WiFi.

That was over 5 hours ago.

At the café, I ran into a friend and had a long conversation, then drank coffee and got absorbed into the laptop for who knows how much reading and writing. Still, no storm. It was after 5, so I moved upstairs to the Bistro, drank some wine, ate a salad and continued to fool around with the computer. Still no storm, but the scary baseball-hail was still predicted. It was nearly 7, so I paid the check and went downstairs to the theater.

Surely, the length of a movie will give the hail time enough to come through. I bought a ticket for "Paris, je t'aime," which is 18 short films -- all set in Paris -- from 18 directors. I emerged from the theater 2 hours later, hoping to see piles of hail-baseballs outside, telling me it's okay to go home. But, no, nothing seems to have happened. So I'm sitting in the café again, writing this, wondering if I can leave. Has the hail passed us by?

So let me while away a few more minutes and say the film anthology was swell. The films were so short that I didn't get too impatient -- my usual problem. If anything seemed not so good, it would go away very soon. And all the films were pretty good. The only one I disliked was the vampire thing with Elijah Wood, and even that was bad in an absurd enough way to put up with. My favorite was "Tuileries," which starred Steve Buscemi and was directed by Joel and Ethan Coen. Just a little scene in the subway, with an American tourist who reads in his guidebook, after staring at a reproduction of the "Mona Lisa" that in Paris, you shouldn't make eye contact with people. Then he makes eye contact with a woman, etc. etc.

Various French and American stars show up for their short sequence. Juliette Binoche is very touching. She encounters Willem DaFoe, who's a dream-cowboy. Ben Gazzara has a turn with Gena Rowlands -- they're in a restaurant, and the waiter is Gérard Depardieu. Who is this Margo Martindale? She appears in a very affecting film, the last one, directed by Alexander Payne, who, in an earlier sequence, played Oscar Wilde, suddenly appearing next to his grave in Pere-Lachaise Cemetery.

Still, no baseball hail. The hell with it. (The hail with it.) I can't stay here forever. I'm taking my

ADDED: ... chances. (Somehow, I neglected to finish that sentence. Failed to write "chances." Fortunately, I made it home alive. Or that would have been freaky. For you.)

UPDATE: "Severe Storm a Non-event in Madison."

Still wallowing in the 60s.

I've been listening to the audiobook of Roger Kimball's "The Long March: How the Cultural Revolution of the 1960s Changed America," which is emphatically not a pro-60s book. I'm enjoying hearing the social conservative's ultra-tart judgments about all the terrible things my generation embraced. It's fun to hear the evidence against the 60s marshalled by a sharp writer who really is beside himself at how awful and dangerous all that 60s stuff is. I need to face up to the fact that a lot of the material that affected me was crap or worse, and it doesn't bother me that some of the things I still think are great -- like The Beatles, duh! -- are also crap in Kimball's view or that Kimball won't just laugh off the stuff that we all laughed at and knew was junk at the time (like "The Greening of America"). It's actually pretty amusing to hear Kimball slam that too, especially when said crap was written by a Yale lawprof -- i.e., "The Greening of America."

So, you should understand why a quick skim of this article had me clicking over to Amazon to buy this 3 DVD's worth of "Playboy After Dark," which was a TV show that started in 1968. There are also some episodes of "Playboy's Penthouse," from 1959 -- not quite the 60s, but laying the groundwork, and hence, more interesting to the 60s person than the 1968 show. Hugh Hefner was ridiculously behind the times to a young person in 1968, but he represented the way of the future in 1959. You're wondering if I was allowed to watch "Playboy's Penthouse" in 1959, when I was 8 years old. Let's just say my father was a great fan of Playboy Magazine who had every issue going back to 1953 and always proudly displayed the newest issue on the (kidney-shaped) coffee table (sometimes along with Swank and Escapade!). (I'm really afraid Roger Kimball might read this post and have a convulsion.)

Anyway, back to the article:

As [Cy] Coleman’s smoothly addictive theme plays over the opening credits, elevator doors part and a subjective camera roams the party, stopping when the pipe-smoking Mr. Hefner turns to introduce himself. Not the most natural of hosts, his sometimes awkward presence nonetheless has its charms: if the editor and publisher of Playboy can appear uncomfortable, there was hope for every nebbishy reader, a fantasy that fueled much of his magazine’s success.

‘‘Playboy’s Penthouse,” produced in Chicago over two seasons, also helped break down racial barriers on television. Black performers don’t just entertain and walk off. They socialize. Nat King Cole and Sammy Davis Jr. join the party, chatting, laughing and sipping their drinks. Cole, who does not sing, seems pleased to relax with the likes of [Lenny] Bruce and the novelist Rona Jaffe. Conversations have a natural feel, and Mr. Hefner never rushes anyone.

Bruce is the life of the party, riffing on TV censorship, integration and the definition of a “sick” comedian. And he’s funny, relating how executives from another show wouldn’t let him tell a story about why a tattoo on his arm might prevent burial in a Jewish cemetery. (Mr. Bruce, who died in 1966, need not have worried. He is buried in a Jewish cemetery in California.)

‘‘Playboy After Dark” arrived in syndication in 1968. Taped in color in Los Angeles, the show has production values that are slicker than “Playboy’s Penthouse.” But what was elegant and slightly cool about the earlier series here seems forced. Joe Cocker and Canned Heat share the bill — weirdly — with Billy Eckstine and Vic Damone. Instead of Bruce and company, there is Rex Reed discussing “Myra Breckinridge,” the legendarily awful film in which he co-starred. Under his dinner jacket Mr. Hefner wears a shirt so puffy it could have inspired a famous episode of “Seinfeld.”

I love this kind of thing.

"They were elevated moral landscapes..."

Cemeteries were... once. Shouldn't they be, again? Meet the cemetery architect.

"People always say it's ghoulish," [Michael Howe] says, "but we also design things like lavatories and bathrooms, and that's much more icky. Designing cemeteries is a lot more interesting than designing a middle-class person's kitchen extension."...

The decline of cemeteries can partly be explained by the increase in cremation. ... [T]hose in the "industry" were so convinced by cremation that many thought there would be no need for cemeteries at all. But he points out that 30% of people still prefer to be buried - a figure that has been stable for some time....

"One of the issues that has led to the desecration of burial grounds is fear. Socialising these spaces is absolutely essential, so young people see them as part of the cycle of life and death," he says.

He hopes that people will visit the cemetery as a park and even take a picnic there. "If there are green open spaces and woods, why wouldn't people romp around or have a picnic?"

He adds: "It was only in the 20th century that we stopped using cemeteries in this way. The Victorians thought of them as highly cultured places of genteel resort and instruction. A cemetery was considered a neat and proper place to meet and spend time."

He argues that it is not only the Victorians who can find cemeteries uplifting places. "Everyone thinks of the commemoration of deaths as a Victorian thing, which is amazing since we are not going to get out of the habit of dying."

Indeed.

Here:



Spread out your morally elevated picnic.

ADDED: Here's a nice photoset that my son John took in the Pere-Lachaise cemetery in Paris.