At the Rainbow Café...

... this is reality.

"The blood drive at the state Capitol was cut short Tuesday because American Red Cross workers decided it was too loud inside the rotunda to continue."

What the hell? We've quit monitoring the protests at the Capitol. What is going on these days? Stopping a blood drive?!

This is why it was the right decision to vote for Paul Soglin for mayor.

He's actually using his brain to make real decisions. Not bullshit gestures to pander to Madisonians... like Mayor Dave.

"Do the alleged benefits of eating vegetables outweigh the terrible cost of having to eat them?"

"In a word, no."

"Socialism never took root in America because the poor see themselves not as an exploited proletariat but as temporarily embarrassed millionaires."

Somebody at Metafilter is reminded of that Steinbeck quote after reading an AdAge white paper saying that "mass affluence" is over.

"Sunday's travel theme here in Rome was death."

"OK, for an anthropologist you have to imagine this is more cheerful than it sounds...."

It is not the distance of time that touches me about these people. I study bones that are tens or hundreds of thousands of years old, distances so vast as to be unimaginable in human terms. Yet the bone persists. The individual is marked in it, and touching her bones creates an immediacy of connection, like traveling through time.

"Alice Mullholland, 18, convicted of stealing some boots, sentenced to 3 months."

From a collection of photographs of Newcastle criminals, 1871-1873.