Swimming twins.

9 months old.

"Jogging with Zeus on Picnic Point."

Yesterday, at moonrise, dog, man, and new GoPro camera get a workout. If you hear music, it's the UW Marching Band.

Summer camp for "kids who don’t fit into society, gender-wise."

Founded by Nick Teich, identified by the Boston Globe as "a social worker who is pursuing a doctorate in social policy from Brandeis."

“Before camp, I was really shy and not confident,” said Gabriel, 15, who has attended camp all three sessions it has been open. “Now, I feel less alone and way more confident.... Here, I realized there isn’t anything wrong with me and there were people like me,” he said. In fact, transgender topics don’t come up all that often at camp, he said. “It’s like it’s not even there, but if we want to talk, we feel totally safe talking to each other.”...

Damien Gabriel, like some of the others, had been on hormone blockers to keep the estrogen at bay and last year started taking testosterone. Two months ago, he had chest surgery to remove breast tissue; he also had a hysterectomy, “which really hurt.”...

The girls tend to wear bikini tops with shorts or little skirts, while the boys wear knee-length swim trunks but leave their T-shirts on. Some, Teich said, wear a binder to flatten their chests. The few who have had chest surgery display bare chests — with horizontal scars.

If a man dares to horse around with children he doesn't know... he could get into trouble.

Look what happened to Madison's Brett Hulsey, who just pled "no contest" to a disorderly conduct charge for —as the police put it — "the totality of the events that happened," mostly "engaging in horseplay with a child who is a stranger to him -- in the water, no less."

According to Hulsey, he chided a boy about splashing some girls and then, as he walked past him, shouted "boo" — causing the boy to roll off his inner tube into shallow water.

Supposedly, this creeped out the parents and grandparents. The mother, according to the police reports "worried if this individual may have done this before or may do more in the future."

Why not fight the charge? Hulsey says he wants to "move on." Does that work in a political career?

There are many old posts on this blog about Brett Hulsey, who represents my district in the state legislature and was a prominent figure in the 2011 Wisconsin protests. Here he is saying "boo" to Meade:



ADDED: Part of "the totality of the events" was photographing the children. Is that wrong? Here's some discussion of that topic:

1. "A pair of photographers began taking pictures of a large group of kids swimming in the Frog Pond at Boston Common when they were told they were not allowed." ("If I am on assignment covering a parade or some type of event, I photograph kids if I see a cool picture, but then I try to talk to the parents and hand them my card and even show them the photo, not that I have to, but I really don’t want to be labeled a pedophile.")

2. "Parents Forbidden From Photographing Own Kids At Public Pool."

3. "Is it ok to post pictures of other people's kids on the internet?" ("Yesterday I ended up in a conversation with a stranger on Facebook in which she said that she took pictures of her kids and their friends at events like her kids' birthday parties and posted them on Facebook for her friends to see. I was gobsmacked...")

4. "Posting Photos of Other People’s Children." ("We all take photos at school plays, sporting events, graduations, whatever our children are involved with.... But do we have the right to impose our decisions about what is public and private on other people’s children?")

God disapproves of Republicans.

Suggests Dana Milbank noting the following trinity of occurrences:

●A report comes out that a couple dozen House Republicans engaged in an alcohol-induced frolic, in one case nude, in the Sea of Galilee, where Jesus is believed to have walked on water, calmed the storm and, nearby, turned water into wine and performed the miracle of the loaves and fishes.

●Rep. Todd Akin, Missouri’s Republican nominee for Senate, suggests there is such a thing as “legitimate rape” and purports that women’s bodies have mysterious ways to repel the seed of rapists. He spends the next 48 hours rejecting GOP leaders’ demands that he quit the race.

●Weather forecasts show that a storm, likely to grow into Hurricane Isaac, may be chugging toward . . . Tampa, where Republicans will open their quadrennial nominating convention on Monday.

If these 3 things belong in a set, I'd say it's a set of things that Democrats and their allied media have gotten excited about pumping up beyond any meaning. Dragging God into the mix is just part of that. Now, I suspect that Todd Akin himself believes that God has sent him this tribulation to overcome, and that's why he's got the spirit to defy the worldly establishment Republicans for the salvation of millions of innocent unborns.

But the other 2 things are the essence of stupid. It's stupid to push them as significant issues, and bringing in God is close to flaunting that you think God is some kind of joke — as fictional as the humanity social conservatives attribute to an embryo.



If God controls the weather, let's not worry about global warming. Or are you going to say He controls the weather but not the climate? We're talking omnipotence, or do you think that's some kind of joke?

But this skinny dipping story... what the hell? Hell, I say. Swimming naked has been the normal way to go swimming since forever. I'm virtually certain Jesus and his disciples swam naked in the Sea of Galilee. God sends us into the world naked. The unborn — are they human? — float naked in the waters of the womb. Is there something wrong with nakedness that the Democrats would like to make a big deal about? Some Republicans were unholy in the Holy Land?

Explain your theory/theology and why it's consistent with American principles of keeping religion and politics separate. (You define your concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life, and I'll define mine. That's liberty for you.)

***

The hurricane that approaches is named Isaac, which makes me think of Bob Dylan's "Highway 61 Revisited" (a song he played at the concerts we just saw in Missoula and Fargo):

Oh God said to Abraham, “Kill me a son”
Abe says, “Man, you must be puttin’ me on”
God say, “No.” Abe say, “What?”
God say, “You can do what you want Abe, but
The next time you see me comin’ you better run”
Well Abe says, “Where do you want this killin’ done?”
God says, “Out on Highway 61”

Driving somewhere between Fargo and Madison the other day, Meade asked me what's Bob Dylan's greatest line. I said "The next time you see me comin’ you better run."

If you really believed in God, you'd be careful how you used his name. You'd be afraid. Dylan's Abraham, told to kill Isaac, said: Man, you must be puttin’ me on... Do you think God is joking?

Do you think He's some kind of joke?

Diana Nyad fails — again — to swim from Cuba to Florida.

But the photos are fabulous (if you love survival).

She was aiming to be the first person to make the 103-mile journey without a shark cage, long rest breaks, or any physical contact from another person. It was her fourth attempt.

She's 62.

Meanwhile, in other swimming news:

A married couple in their 60s drowned while apparently trying to rescue their dog from a pond in Westfield Monday evening....

State Police said preliminary reports indicate the man ­entered the water to retrieve the couple’s small dog after it jumped off the boat.

Then, State Police said, the man became distressed while trying to reach the dog, and the woman entered the water to ­assist him, before she, too, ­became distressed....

The dog survived, Manos said.

Underwater cameras and the grabbing, wrestling, suit pulling and ripping, and the nakedness of water polo.

"The person that invents a suit that’s not going to move is going to make a lot of water polo players happy."

Dolphin kicking — when and why it's illegal and whether Olympic officials should police it more closely.

Link.

The underwater cameras that NBC used throughout the Olympics could easily detect illegal kicks, allowing judges to disqualify scofflaws immediately. So why doesn’t FINA use the swimming equivalent of the replay booth? Probably because it’s less controversial to let swimmers get away with Flipper-izing than it is to kick someone out of an Olympic final. And maybe FINA also realizes that stricter guidelines would slow down times, reducing the volume of attention-getting world records.

"Any time someone has looked like superwoman in the history of our sport they have later been found guilty of doping."

John Leonard, the executive director of the World Swimming Coaches Association, saying that Ye "looks like superwoman."

Leonard rejected comparisons to Michael Phelps, who broke the 200m butterfly world record when he was just 15, back in 2001. "Phelps got consistently faster every year on a normal improvement curve. There has never been anything that you look at in any of Mr Phelps' swims that you look at and say 'well, that's impossible, that can't be done.'... [A] woman does not out-swim the fastest man in the world in the back quarter of a 400m IM that is otherwise quite ordinary. It just doesn't happen."

Michael Phelps swam the first swim "like it was the last."

"Like he has swum it one too many times. Like he was swimming out of obligation, rather than inspiration...."

"[T]hree fried-egg sandwiches, three chocolate chip pancakes, a five-egg omelette, three sugar-coated slices of French toast, and a bowl of grits..."

Breakfast for Michael Phelps. Come on. It's not easy scarfing down 12,000 calories a day.

"In France, they’d be unpacking their glorious foods and beverages. En famille! Not so here."

"We tend to like to plump down on a chair or a towel and feel the sun move from one point to the next. Or, in the inevitable quest for romance, we walk the shoreline, holding hands, thinking this is forever thoughts."

And by plump, she really means plump, based on the 7th photograph. Plump and well-oiled.

Reading between the lines, as I always do on Nina's posts — is there another way to read? — I'm sure I see that the people in France know how to live and we Americans do not.

Many people love to just stand in the water to cool off and that’s fun to watch too. Humankind, lusting for that refreshing moment when the waves gently tickle your legs or splash against your buttocks. Conversations in the water.

Plunge, why don't you, Americans? Get in over your ass, like the French!



Plump, the verb, has an "Ultimately imitative" etymology (according to the OED):

Compare Middle Dutch plumpen (Dutch plompen), Middle Low German plumpen (German regional (Low German) plumpen), all in sense ‘to fall or plunge into water with a plumping sound’, Middle High German plumpen to make a plumping noise ( < Middle Low German; German plumpen), plumpfen, pflumpfen to fall with a thud (German plumpfen (now rare)), Old Swedish plompa to plump, to fall with impact (Swedish plumpa), Danish plumpe to flop, plump, to let fall.

Compare other more or less imitative verbs with final -ump , e.g. bump v.1, dump v.1, stump v.1, thump v., etc.

Comparison has sometimes been made with Romance derivatives of classical Latin plumbāre to weight with lead (see plumb v.; compare plunge v.), but the similarity between the Romance and Germanic words seems no more than coincidental.

Let's plump and bump and stump and thump and dump. Up to our buttocks.

Plump, the adjective, originally meant "Rude, unrefined; intellectually dull, obtuse." (Full and rounded and fleshy and swollen — that's  a later meaning.) It goes back to the Middle Dutch plomp, meaning  "plump, squat, ponderous, rude, clumsy."

Buttock is a word formed from "butt" and "-ock," "ock" being a diminutive. The OED defines "buttock" as "One of the two protuberances of the rump (of men and beasts)." Ah! Another -ump word: rump.

Protuberance is "A thing which protrudes from something else; a rounded projection or swelling; a knob, a bump." Again we bump up against bump. Protuberance goes back to some Latin words having to do with swelling and pushing forth, which is interesting in connection with the American, reticent, barely bumped, unbare rumps Nina was writing about.

Me, I'm seeing the tuber in protuberance. A tuber is:

An underground structure consisting of a solid thickened portion or outgrowth of a stem or rhizome, of a more or less rounded form, and bearing ‘eyes’ or buds from which new plants may arise; a familiar example is the potato.

Oh, Americans, you potatoes, with eyes that do not see! Solid, thickened, underground! Arise! Awake! Consider... the French.

At this point, everyone at Meadhouse jumps up and sings "La Marseillaise." It looks like this.

Come on, children. To the beach!

"There is nobody in this country who got sex on their own. Nobody. You got elected president out there - good for you."

"But I want to be clear. You floated your rubber ducks in bathtubs the rest of us paid for. You hired interns the rest of us paid to indoctrinate. You were safe in a swimming pool that the rest of us paid for. You didn't have to worry that Jackie would return home suddenly, and ruin everything... Now look. You built Camelot and it turned into something terrific. Great idea - God bless! Be a hunk in it. But part of the underlying social contract is you take a few of those Cuban cigars and leave them in the Oval Office for the next kid who comes along."

Meade, commenting on the post about JFK and his 19-year-old intern.

ADDED: In case you don't recognize the source for this satire, it's this.

"Boys Swimming on Girls Teams Find Success, Then Draw Jeers."

Why are boys allowed to swim on girls teams? Because their schools don't have boys swim programs and they have a right under the Massachusetts constitution to equal access to athletics.

Boys swimming is held in the winter, when pool space is limited and expensive to rent, which is a deterrent for many schools. Athletic directors say the sport is not as popular among boys as it is girls, making it hard to field full squads. Some schools in the winter offer coed swimming, where boys and girls compete side-by-side in the dual meets and then separately in the postseason.

Over the years, there have been girls wrestling on boys teams or playing football or ice hockey. Boys have been on field hockey teams and girls have competed alongside boys in golf.

But in wrestling, boys and girls of the same weight compete against each other. And in field hockey and other team sports, a boy on a girls team achieves success through cooperation and collaboration with his teammates.

Equality is complicated.

Why so many deaths in triathlons... nearly all in the swimming phase?

Panic attacks. Officially, drowning, but the root cause may be panic:

“My world is anatomic,” said Steven Shapiro, Vermont’s chief medical examiner, whose office investigated the deaths of two men this year. “I can’t point to the body and say: ‘There’s the panic attack, there’s the arrhythmia.’ Once you’re in my office, there’s no panic and the rhythm is asystole,” he said, using the medical term for cardiac standstill.
Nevertheless, circumstantial evidence strongly points to panic, with the biggest piece of evidence the most obvious. Something is happening in the swim that isn’t happening on the bike or run.

“I was taken by surprise the very first time I did a triathlon,” said James A. Millward, a 50-year-old history professor at Georgetown University. “I swam about 50 yards, I couldn’t get into a breathing rhythm, I felt more and more anxious, and I thought, ‘Wow, I’m having a panic attack.’ ”

Millward has done the Nation’s Triathlon four times and has had the sensation each time after jumping into the Potomac River with scores of other racers. The overwhelming urge is to get his head out of the water. 

It's easy to see why the human body may have evolved this response.

"Sure a baby has a swimming reflex but that doesn't mean watching them swim isn't absolutely terrifying."

Says a Metafilter participant, linking to several videos. I watched these videos and didn't find them terrifying at all. These are people teaching babies ISR — Infant Swim Self Rescue. The babies are learning how to save themselves from drowning. Immersed in pools, with supervision, they learn to roll over face up and stabilize themselves in a position where they can breathe. I was inspired by the success of the babies in learning a very specific and highly useful skill. Hooray for the babies!

As for the people on Metafilter (and in the comments at YouTube) who think it's terrible to scare babies and make them cry.... Well, all I can say is maybe they don't know any babies. You don't melt into a pool of sympathy when a baby cries. You deal with whatever the situation is, if you can figure it out. By the way, a drowned baby doesn't cry.

Madeline Island.

The beach:



The walkway to the beach:



The honor system canoes:



(Enlarge to read the honor system rules.)

A place to canoe:

"No swimming! If we find you in the pond, we shall assume you are a trout and pan-fry you."

At Rushing Waters Fisheries, where Whole Foods in Madison gets the rainbow trout we got at Whole Foods in Madison and Meade wants to catch his own trout, like Bob Dylan did in his picture of the meaning of life.

The war against swimming pools?

Signs:

1. "If we are going to pour such a carbon intensive material into the ground doesn't it make environmental sense to reserve it for public pools that we can all use?"

2. "[S]ubstances form in pool water from reactions between disinfectants such as chlorine and organic matter that is present naturally in the water or is introduced by swimmers from sweat, skin cells and urine. Long-term exposure to the substances has been linked to an increased risk of bladder cancer...."

3. ???!!!

"Obama isn't a Muslim. But here are other things that 20 percent of Americans believe."

Says the Washington Post, a propos of the Pew poll. Well, can we have a poll about whether Americans believe that admitting to peeing in pools is a belief? I say it's not, but maybe that puts me in the 20% of Americans that WaPo would like us to be seen as marginal.