smile

polar bear at 6 mos.

bear island

a very cool documentary... or is it a series? that's what it kind of sounds like from this press release you can read. we randomly caught it on pbs tonight.. the 1 hour premiere... fortune!

et tu?

we have taken the first step toward getting this little pup
named brutus. that is, we have emailed the

rescue expressing our interest in meeting
him. but we have not heard back.
so i'm getting worried that he
is destined to another
family. sigh. think
good thoughts.

flower season

our calla-fornia calla lilly...

our flower basket...

wild flowers at the gardens...

a gardener's plot... sadly, not ours...

our plot...from one of the beatrices...

a grander view of the newer plot...

the little mysteries... turning into chives?

in other news... we are losing dirt in our courtyard...

Oyez! Oyez! Oyez!

go to oyez.org to hear oral arguments in front of the u.s. supreme court.

update

it seems as though the longer the days get, the less time i seem to have... or perhaps i try to be outside when i'm not working or at class or doing homework, because the weather is finally so nice and in wisconsin, those nice days are not to be taken for granted. anyhow, some indoor pictures for now...

saturday we got serious about cleaning up. that is, we seriously talked about it and we thought very seriously about the food that was to get us through the planned evening of chores...

monday was my birthday and as such, i took a picture from my desk at work so that i could remember the beautiful, sunny day that it was not...

tuesday i got sworn into the bar... so that now i am officially a licensed attorney in the state of wisconsin...

signing the roll of attorneys that goes back to before statehood... so they say...

a good friend from the very first days of law school, who, within minutes of meeting me said, so, you're going to invite me to your wedding right? we are wearing the same suit. so embarrassing.

and now it's back to homework.

memreees

some quick background: greg once lived in tennessee and has an uncle who flew small planes. greg tells me that one time this uncle flew to visit him and his family in tennessee.

so... we are listening to this american life, episode #188- "kid logic." this leads to both of us recalling that when we were little, we thought airplanes landed in people's driveways and dropped them off... however... greg has a distinct memory of his uncle's plane parked in his driveway in tennessee.

last week continued

i was afraid this posting would be redundant for those who read tm's blog until i realized that i moved... rather than copied... all of my pictures from the family reunion we attended last weekend to greg's cousin's flash drive and so they are no longer with me. so if you are interested in those pictures, click on tm's blog above... speaking of tm... or cw... or tw... or tt... or whatever her initials may be... here is the only picture she is a part of that i am forcing her to endure on veralouie this time around...

not so bad... it's not even nearly a close-up!

more from the beach of white lake...

sarah creates tomato soup with cattails at her beachfront restaurant

while sister hannah shops for only the finest ingredients...

meanwhile, some of us walk to the turtle pond...

our destination...

dragonflies...

and near the beach... a dinosaur...

having spotted no turtles we head back to the house and eventually four of us head all the way back across lake michigan.

on the boat...

discovering good food in milwaukee...

geo-ffrey at dinner...

back in madison... a small garden update...
the unknowns...

the tomatoes... warning us that if we don't soon put up cages we will be sorry...

onions...

strawberry...

our young food

from 1983's american wholefoods cuisine by nikki & david goldbeck:

"just as we cannot put unleaded gasoline in our 1950 Chevy pickup and expect it to run efficiently, modern technological foods may be inappropriate for our prehistoric bodies. processed and fragmented foods and those that add unnatural amounts of sugar, salt, and fat, as well as modern food chemicals, are still very new to our system."

snapshots

eek! it has been a week since i've posted, so here are some random shots from the first half of last week.

our shrimp. the only one in the house.

this picture is for the person who planted these mystery weeds... or chives... or whatever-they- may-be-plants...

scrumbles upon scrumbles of lettuce...

three scrumbles-worth of spinach...

bok choi beetle bitten

yellow strawberry, since turned red and eaten...

subtle purple

the orchid's last stand... for now...

madison morning traffic jam...

mottled moth on car windshield...

voyage...

windsday

today we rode our bikes to work... past two lakes and along one river... it was exhilaratingly wonderful...



in other news... if you listen to music online... sign up at www.pandora.com... it is the music genome project. you enter in an artist you like to listen to... they pick songs from other artists they think you might like, and you tell them if you do or if you don't... so that it becomes more and more a station full of songs you want to hear.



in other news... bug fun!

okay, we're just not going to LOOK anymore

'Bush to cut back climate-monitoring satellites'

more tangents

this one from an article in sunday's new york times entitled Iraq's Curse: A Thirst for Final, Crushing Victory.

the tangents go something like this:

is this article fairly convincing that we should leave iraq? i would argue that... arguably, it is (although 1 or 2 hesitations in referencing this article for the potential that (what i would argue) could be a misreading that, either, iraqi groups are "barbarians" or that, if they are, that they are really so different from other individuals or groups (past or present) with "enemies."). (another hesitation... (this one about my "arguable argument")... is that 1 article makes not a definitive position statement... but hence all of the "arguable" qualifiers i suppose).

the article (if i've got it right) goes something like this: the u.s. opened the floodgates but that does not mean it is going to be able to (or is necessarily being asked to) close them. the floodgates being the civil strife among the ethnic groups who are seemingly determined to duke it out and are simply biding their time for the real fight once the u.s. leaves... and that even the (self-proclaimed) moderate Sheik interviewed for the article concedes (or is it a concession?) that iraq needs "a strong dictator" (i.e. not a democratic government) because, well, when you have gripes going back to the 7th century, and the perfect storm presents itself, it's not going to go away until someone (i.e. a "strong" dictator...i.e. not a democratic government) quells it.

tangent 1: thinking of places like nigeria and how borders sometimes serve only to pen-up groups who would otherwise never choose to be pent up together = oh so many issues.

tangent 2: thinking of this quote in the article: "That sense of [Sunni] entitlement is fed by the notion that Iraq's Shiite Arabs are just proxies for Iran's Persian rulers." Is it possible to make (broad) analogies to the dominant (or shall we just say it... white) group in the u.s. and non-dominant (i.e. non-white) groups in the u.s.?

tangent 3: death penalty, justice, retribution... a discussion over caesar salad about this article got us talking about saddam's execution which got us thinking, "man... it's so weird, it seemed to have happened so quickly yet with a strange anti-climax, and yet, thinking about it now, it's just...so...weird..." him being the only world ruler whose execution we can think of (from our own lifetime) which got so much attention... and how maybe he was executed for being the ruler of an army in (subtle?) civil strife who made orders to his army to do a bunch of bad things which, arguably... depending on your take on the death penalty and etc... deserved death, but contrasting (or is it comparing) it to other (unnamed) "rulers" of armies in (not-so-subtle) foreign strife/war/occupation making orders to their armies to do a bunch of... well anyway....

tangent 3.5: death penalty, justice, retribution... (pre(r)amble: my thoughts on this usually go the other way... sorry but true... based in many ways on a course on 'sentencing and corrections' where we spent many hours pondering what sentencing's (e.g. jail/prison sentencing's) purpose is... and i've come to the (granted, mutable) theory that it should not or cannot be for retribution... not so much at least... or... maybe... retribution for whom... the victim, the victim's family/friends, the state?)... anyway, back to the tangent... and thinking about the book i'm reading now-- Native Son by Richard Wright (which i haven't finished, so don't give away the end) and about what happens when there are consequences for the perpetrator of two crimes... but when the consequences would be the same whether or not the perpetrator had committed the second crime... because, for whatever reason crime #1 was the one that mattered (in this case... the victim of crime #1 was much more important to the dominant group)... and thinking (finally, from the flip side), if it is about retribution... does it matter to victim 2 that perpetrator was punished for crime 1? arguably no... and well... what a waste for victim 2... because for one, their victimization was seemingly purposeless (though not maybe from the perpetrator's standpoint, depending on the motive) and two, from the perpetrator's standpoint (and obviously taking no moral considerations into consideration)... why not victimize victim 2... because it's not going to result in additional penalties (again, not thinking about "higher" justice) which could get us onto tangent 4... 'how much 'morality' does the u.s. system of justice have' (or... 'should sentencing be about retribution and if so, what about the unprosecuted victimization of victim 2'?)... but it's late, and i have to be at work in the morning and so do you (if you're not there already).

why i should stay on-task:

because if i don't, i read random articles online that often claim to be news, but are hardly news (but what is news to one person v. another) like this one about tom cruise and katie holmes (tomkat) and how katie wants to have more kids (and really, who cares) but the brain likes to create connections from one thing to another so that it can retain things in memory, so reading it gets me thinking about other random things i have recently read, thought, or heard about which have nothing having to do with my real work (namely an extra-large assignment due for the teaching program which i thought, "i will just take a small little break from...") like, for instance, celebrity gossip, celebrity babies v. real babies, and blindness...

which tangent shall we go on first? i think they are all somehow connected although maybe not, and i really should get back to work so i will just be quick so as to let us both get back to work more quickly on those things that really matter to each of us.

so here goes:

question: are we becoming increasingly obsessed with celebrities? i'm not sure because i haven't studied the history of celebrity obsession so i can only hypothesize and think back on my own history (let's see... from age 5 to 16 in chronological order, i was going to marry michael jackson, peter from the monkeys, b.j. armstrong from the bulls, and ed kowalczyk from the band live...). but on a grander scale, i'm guessing we have become more interested in the lives of celebrities: obviously, we see more of them with television and the internet... but why should that matter? why do we even care about them? we don't know them (and okay, some of you are reading this saying, i don't care about celebrities... well, sure... i'm not talking about you)... and this is where my brain remembers reading or hearing something somewhere (and apologies for the lack of acknowledgment to the author of this theory) about looking at this from an evolutionary standpoint... the theory is something like this: for most of our 250,000 or so year history, we lived without photographs or similar technology. if we recognized a face, it was because we knew that face from personal interaction or at least close proximity. fast forward to modern life-- we recognize a celebrity's face, not from personal interaction or even close proximity, but through the marvels of modern technology. we know we don't know that person, but our brains don't necessarily know. Our brains did not develop contemplating seeing and recognizing a face that, in reality, we have never actually seen in person. if we recognize a face, it is because we have been face-to-face with that person. hence, we are interested in that person's life just as we are interested in the lives of people we actually know, because... we think we know that person too. i suppose this doesn't explain why we got interested in celebrities to begin with... but, at least with regard to actors, we saw them on film, as that is their job, and thus started the facial-recognition ball rolling. which i suppose is where we get onto the topic of blindness and a story i recently heard on npr about individuals, who, once blind, have taken advantage of technology allowing them to see and how those who had been blind since early childhood, once able to see, were unable to recognize faces, no matter how many times they saw the same face. the part of their brain devoted to facial recognition, realizing it was going unutilized, devoted itself instead to other tasks. so, (tangent one) i wonder... how much would these individuals care about the tomkat article? i listen to tom ashbrook almost every night on the radio, and i suppose i might read a gossip article about him (not that i imagine such an article would ever materialize) but i guess i don't really care so much about his personal life. i imagine howard stern became more popular and famous after making his movie and putting his radio show on tv. (tangent two) thinking about how infants recognize facial expressions and how humans, including infants, recognize facial "beauty" and the individuals who have regained sight, recognize neither, and why at least the former is important from an evolutionary standpoint and not sure about why the latter is necessarily important, except maybe for procreation purposes or some such something or other. okay, whatever. and tangent three having to do with a conversation i had recently with my mother-in-law about parenthood increasingly becoming a "joy" with each successive generation, no doubt because of increased wealth and resources and thinking again about celebrities and their babies and how celebrities are seemingly at the pinnacle of wealth and resources, and thus potentially at the pinnacle of joy when it comes to raising babies, as quotes from holmes in the above-article seem to imply, and thinking about celebrity adoptions versus some of the first adoptions in the u.s., namely the 'orphan trains' of the 1800's where orphaned children in large cities were sent on trains to midwest (and other) farming towns and how in reality, many (though certainly not all) of those children were adopted for the purpose of having extra farm-hands (but certainly (or hopefully) many or most were treated like the biological siblings).

and this is where i think i have to end my pointless meanderings and get back to work.