At the Ice Skate Café...

... slide in here if you want to talk about anything other than the Oscars. (The Oscars post is here.)

At the Under-the-Bridge Café...

... you can skate on through.

Water and ice — on spring-fed Lake Wingra.

This afternoon, dogless, Meade and I took a walk down to one of the other lakes.

Owlsing in the browls.

An image from the Rijksmuseum, which has a fine website, where I was browsing in the owls... owlsing in the browls...



I really don't know what's up with these ice-skating owls. I just like them.

"Ah, Godspell. How you shaped our ’70s Catholic school childhoods by influencing an entire generation..."

"... of semi-closeted nuns to pick up their guitars and force us to learn half the songbook. Do they still have guitar masses? Or did all those Birkenstock’d nuns finally drop the veil and head off to the Lilith Fair?"

The first paragraph of Tom and Lorenzo's recap of the most recent episode of "Project Runway All Stars."

Are you watching this season? I am. I still can't tell you the names of the 2 people they've got in the Heidi and Tim positions, but they're doing a decent job helping us deal with being deprived of familiar things.

And, as long as I'm rummaging around at Tom and Lorenzo's, check out these stiletto-heeled ice skates.

Kite-assisted ice skating.

Video by Meade, who braved the cold out on the ice of Lake Mendota today, while I took refuge in the car.

"All the gay websites couldn't figure out why I was such a jerk that I wouldn't talk about it."

Said the ice skater Johnny Weir (who people have long assumed is gay, even though he wouldn't say it):

"But pressure is the last thing that would make me want to 'join' a community... The massive backlash against me in the gay media and community only made me dig my 'closeted' heels in further."

So, what do we learn from this? Possible lessons:

1. Although in the past, it was fear of negativity from heterosexuals that kept gay people in the closet, these days, a gay person might choose the closet because of the negativity of other gay people.

2. If a celebrity wants to write a successful book about himself, he needs to withhold at least one juicy piece of information. For Weir, this was that news — even though the only real news was that he's saying what he'd never said before.

3. Some people think of themselves as, above all, individuals, and when others think the most important thing is their membership in a particular group, they resist. They don't want to be defined by a single quality, especially when it's a quality that makes other people see them in terms of the group stereotype, and not personal uniqueness. There was a special playfulness to this notion in Weir's case, because he engaged in the very open "flamboyant" style that people think of as stereotypically gay.

4. Just because you're gay doesn't mean you like other gay people and want to join their team. Heterosexuals don't naturally love all the other heterosexuals. Gay men may need to look for their sexual partners in the pool of gay men,* but there's no reason why you have to like everyone in your category of potential sexual partners, and, indeed, it's a good idea to reject the vast majority of potential sexual partners. You only need one (at most). You're entitled to think that most of them are jerks.

5. Ice skating is not a team sport.

_________

*By the way, this is the pool of gay men:

Ice skating conditions on Lake Mendota today...

... after yesterday's sun on clear black ice, it's hard to tell that thing is the sun and the ice is powdered over with snow:



It was a bit unnerving to skate so far from shore without the visual confirmation of the thickness of the ice that we had yesterday. But the ice couldn't have melted since yesterday. Could it? What was that strange pinging sound, like the lake was a tight-stretched drum and some unseen hand was dropping boulders on it somewhere in the distance?

At the White Ice Café...

... today is so different from yesterday.

Skating on Lake Mendota, Part 3.

At the Black Ice Café...

... there's plenty of room.

Skating on Lake Mendota, Part 2.

Skating on Lake Mendota.

We started out from Picnic Point...



... and skated across toward downtown....



... and then back, against the wind.

Beautiful!

"I didn't feel my inner peace, I didn't feel my aura."

The WaPo is giving out its own Olympic medals. Example:

Best Johnny Weir Quotes

Gold: "I never felt comfortable in this building. I didn't feel my inner peace, I didn't feel my aura. Inside I was black" (after finishing a disappointing fifth in men's figure skating).

Silver: "I could very likely wake up and feel horrible, like Nick Nolte's mug shot" (before skating his long program).

Bronze: "I dragged myself out of bed, had my Starbucks, put on my self-tanner and went from there" (after winning the national title last month).

Oh, and I love this one:

Things We Still Don't Understand

Gold: Curling rules.

Silver: New figure-skating scoring system.

Bronze: The Lenovo ThinkPad commercial.

Yeah, what's with that commercial? And, with all that time NBC spent on skating, they should have figured out a perfectly brilliant way to teach the new scoring system and make us care about it.