The Other Side of the Erlenmeyer Flasks.

In case you were wondering what it looked like from the other point of view in The Wine Beaker Erlenmeyer Flask Café, you have to go to The Other Side of the Ocean (and scroll sink to the bottom).

Shhh.

I'm reading. You can talk all you want but keep it down in there.

“I love Madison. It’s a ‘real’ place. It has a sense of itself... It is what it is, and it’s fun to watch.”

That's a quote from me in an article about me at WPRI—Wisconsin's Free Market Think Tank, written by Sunny Schubert, whom I talked to over coffee for about an hour.

But [Althouse] gets irked by the insistence of so many residents that “this is a town for the left and if you don’t think like us, you don’t belong here.”

Ironically, she says, “These are people who like to think of themselves as so kind and gentle.” She is amused by the “self-love involved when you think your policies are so right, nobody could possibly disagree with you.”

At the Negativity Café...

... it's not all bad.

The break's over.

... time to get to work.

At the Green Grass Café...

... I need a break!

Question — "What accounts for the differences between these 2 fliers?" — answered.

Asked here, 2 days ago. The advertised event is this evening (7:15, Room 3253). From the comments thread:

I assume you objected to the original "Pissing Match" poster planned for your event?

That's basically it, from Ignorance is Bliss. When I was invited to participate, I didn't want to commit to being on the other side of whatever our guest might decide to say. I prefer conversation and commentary, drawing out questions that somebody else might not be asking. I'm not going to promise to put up a fight. Maybe I'll agree with Professor Garry.

Thanks for dinner!

Nina makes dinner.

Althouse on Fox News with Megyn Kelly.

The video.

Althouse on Fox News at 1:45 ET/12:45 CT.

I'll be on for 5 minutes around that time, talking to Megyn Kelly about the video Meade and I made of the children doing protest chants in the rotunda.

"Keep your eyes open for the Ann Althouse cameo appearance at 1:20."

Ha.

(You can have that hat if you like it. It's a classic man's fedora.)

"Ask me for a flower, and I will show you a Light."

At yesterday's protest, some people did their own thing. Here's a friendly gentleman in a "PEACE" hat, with a framed picture of John Lennon, a scattering of sayings, a small "Recall Gov. Scott Walker" sticker, and a lot of postage stamps. The stamps, he told me, were his contribution to the government.

Also in the photograph:

Right side: The man-in-tights blogged here.

Top left: Corrugated cardboard signs, readable in the super-enlargement. Why do people do signs on sorry-ass broken-open cardboard boxes?

Top right: The lined-up police who were keeping the pro- and anti-Scott Walker people apart. I suspected that there was an official police policy to keep the Tea Party crowd from getting big. We were forced to enter the Tea Party group at corner of the block and blocked from walking across the lawn. I expressed my theory to a woman standing next to me, and she said: What do you expect? Whose side do you think the police are on? Meaning: They're all public service employees too.

I said that I wanted to get over to the Tea Party group and complained about the difficulty of getting through the crowd to the entrance point at the corner. Her attitude toward me suddenly changed. She snapped: "You're a Republican?" Pussy that I am, I said: "I just want to get into the Tea Party group." Actually, I'm not a Republican, but I backed away from the challenge so reflexively — a habit of 25 years in Madison — that my conscious rational processes never crystallized into the lucidity that would have produced a simple "no." 

A midday ski.

Meade and I squeezed in a lunch-hour ski break today.





Feel free to talk about anything you want in the comments. The photography — by Meade — is just for fun. This is an open thread.

ADDED: I changed the video. This one has more of a semblance of motion.

"What did you want? attention? congratulations, i know you. i also know who hitler, ted bundy, and michael vick are."

Maybe serving lion tacos wasn't such a great idea.

Years ago, I took my sons to a restaurant, and one item on the menu was baby loin ribs. My younger son said "Oh, no! That's terrible!" What's so terrible? "Baby lion ribs!"

The warm spell wrecked the snow for skiing...

... but it's cold again and...



... we got skates for Christmas!

The iPhone captures an antique look.

As Meade photographs Althouse on the north shore of Lake Mendota, yesterday, at sunset:


(Enlarge.)


(Enlarge.)

Hey!

I'm in the NYT.

Talking about Sarah Palin with Jacob Weisberg.

L.A. Times on the Jon Stewart rally: "Nearly 225,000 people had RSVP'd on the event's Facebook page as of Thursday morning."

Why do journalists keep writing the RSVP number like that? Look at the Facebook page. The number who say they are attending is (currently) 10,019.

239,164 RSVP'd to say they are not attending. 112,812 say — are they just being polite? — they are "Maybe Attending." Hey, me too. I'm maybe attending! I could wander about, see how people look, get some photos — especially of any signs that are excessively left-wing or just nasty. Perhaps someone will shove me or stomp me and that will prove how nefarious these terrible liberals really are.

But if I were to go, I couldn't be here — on the last weekend before the election — scanning the internet for last minute developments and blogging all sorts of things instantly. I'd be in the car for many hours — off line. And I'd become preoccupied with photographs. I'd be sidetracked. I'd sidetrack myself, in the interest of observing the crowd and bringing those observations to this blog, but it would still be a sidetrack. Who knows what I'd miss?

And what of these other folks who really do care about enhancing the Democrats' performance on Election Day? Aren't they being sidetracked too? Why aren't they at home, working for their local candidates, doing what they can, instead of trekking off to Washington — emitting carbon — lured by entertainment-world celebritites?

—2:15: Sheryl Crow performs for five minutes, followed by speakers and guests (to be determined).

—2:30: Musical guests (still being lined up) come on.

Come on? I think not. Something about the words Sheryl Crow flicked off the movie in my head that showed me, this weekend, traipsing about the Mall, photographing placards and evading head-stompers.

ADDED: Ana Marie Cox and Rich Lowry talk about the rally.

UPDATE: Now, Friday at 9:35 AM, I'm seeing the Facebook numbers completely rearranged, so that 227,170 are listed as "Attending." 111,864 are "Maybe Attending. And 10,000 are "Awaiting Reply." I didn't know it was possible in Facebook for the headings in a sidebar to be switched around like that. Some people in the comments thread have talked about the numbers changing:

Ann, I'm not kidding, the numbers just flipped while I refreshed. It now says 226,000+ attending and 10,000 not attending.

And:

Three minutes ago, it said 226797 attending, 10002 maybe attending, 10001 awaiting reply, and 240932 not attending.

Aaaaaand then I refreshed, and then it said, 10015 attending, 112016 maybe attending, 10001 awaiting reply, and 240940 not attending.

And:

I just saw the numbers in Facebook flip too. Started out around a quarter million, a minute later it was 10,040.

Breaking out the programming forensics, looks like they want the numbers to update in real time, so they track new rsvp's, but instead of adding that to a true baseline, it gets added to 10,000 instead. (A number that must have seemed reasonably outsized when they coded this.)

Oh, now it's back to 227,138.

Sounds like a computer glitch. I'm assuming the 200,000+ really does belong with "Attending." That would explain why I keep seeing that high acceptance number in the newspapers. I was truly puzzled by the 10,000 number. It was so out of whack. I didn't set out to trash the reporting or the rally.

UPDATE 2: The numbers just flipped for me too when I went back to the page to recheck! I took a screen shot:

"Who Gets To Be a Feminist?"

DoubleX asked a bunch of people, including me.

Stay-at-Home-Dad complains about the special treatment he gets as the one dad amongst the moms at a library storytime.

And the commenters — this is in the NYT — assail him:

I was all ready to be sympathetic to the father, but by the end of this piece I was irritated. People were trying to be nice and you ended up getting special treatment. Welcome to being a man! Has this never bothered you before? Or were somehow you able to suck it up in other situations?

I'm sure that if he continues to have such a negative attitude about his role as a stay at home dad, and all the activities involved, that all the moms will be more than happy to ignore him. I know I would.

It continues. And yet... the guy got his little essay into the NYT. But it's ironic... if his point is he wants to not to be noticed.

This is all deja vu for me. 30 years ago — 30 years! — I was married to a writer who was the stay-at-home parent, processing this kind of material in writing. It became a novel, published in 1991 1988. I thought we were in the middle and toward the end of this situation as a new cultural phenomenon. 30 years ago. And now... it's still fodder for a NYT parenting column. Good lord! Will these sex roles never go away?