Runway model at Paris Fashion Week

I have in the past been chastised by readers for using the fashion subsection of TYWKIWDBI to make fun of modern trends in designer clothing, revealing my apparently unimaginative "retro" frame of mind.  To keep myself and readers here up-to-date on style, I will continue to post selected images, but rather than offer any personal commentary, I'll just let the ipsa loquitur for the res.  Via.

But I can't help pointing out that none of the viewers along the catwalk are smiling at this design.  They are taking it all quite seriously.  Perhaps the model has just arrived after attending a hockey game.

A pie-cutting template from West Point

"More recently, though, pie at West Point lost its innocence. For cadets who passed through the Academy in the later decades of the 20th century, a favorite form of hazing centered on pie. At dinner in the mess hall, plebes were made to cut the dessert into a mathematically impossible number of exactly equal slices: seven, nine, or 11. Upperclassmen looked on, taunting. The Zip-Locks under plebes’ hats? They held pie-cutting templates—literal pie charts—that helped plebes cut perfect slices and, most importantly, avoid their elders’ wrath."

Posted for Pi day 2024. 

A boy and his... capybara

This interesting photo (credit: Sergio Attanasio) was the winning entry in the "Lifestyle" category of the 2024 Sony World Photography Awards.  Via a gallery of winners at The Atlantic.

Remembering my cousin Bruce (1945-2024)

The lead photo is from his college years at Carleton (1965); the others are sequential from a childhood in North Dakota to a youth in Florida to an adult in New Mexico.

Gone but never forgotten.

Addendum:  some excerpts from his obituary in the Cibola Citizen:

Bruce was born on October 4, 1945, in Rochester, Minnesota to parents Bruce and Sylvia Boynton. After attending Carlton College in Northfield, Minnesota, Bruce went on to earn his Juris Doctorate at Vanderbilt University.

After earning his law degree Bruce headed to the Southwest and began his career working for Pueblo Legal Services in Zuni, New Mexico. He eventually went on to open a private practice in Milan, New Mexico where he also served as City Attorney as well as Attorney for the Grants Public Schools and Cibola General Hospital. Bruce was a member of the Ramah Rodeo and a long-time active member of the Rotary Club. In 2020 Bruce celebrated 50 years of law practice and continued helping countless citizens of Cibola County until very recently. His kind heart and wise advice will be greatly missed.

As many of his friends know, Bruce was an avid bird watcher and traveled to Central and South America on birder excursions. Among his many passions, Bruce loved fly fishing, cultivating orchids and had a particular love of Latin music, Flamenco, and Latino literature as well. One of Bruce’s favorite quotes (and word of advice) was “Don’t let the truth get in the way of a good story.” He will always be remembered for his quick and dry wit.

In lieu of flowers, a donation may be made in Bruce’s memory to the following: Grants Cibola County Schools, P.O. Box 8, Grants NM 87020. Memo on check: Rotary Club School Backpack Program.

The "Four Yorkshiremen" sketch

John Cleese and Graham Chapman (before their Monty Python fame), with Tim Brooke-Taylor and Marty Feldman, lampooning the stereotypical "rich people claiming they were happier when they were poor."

One of my favorite comedy bits of all time - and one that is especially relevant in times of economic uncertainty.   I had posted this a long time ago, but the video was pulled from YouTube - so watch it now, because it may not stay up long.

Reposted from 2010 because that old video was in fact taken down a second time, but a Britbox version is now available on YouTube, so this may stay up for a while.

Reposted for 2024 because we need laughs now more than ever.

A new word puzzle at The New York Times

"Strands, the new word-search game still in beta, seems to fuse some of the best features of Wordle, Connections, and the crosswords... Connections may torment its players with little room for error, but Strands rewards wrong guesses, in a way, by filling in a progress bar that gets you to a hint. The game displays its daily theme front and center, crossword-style, which helps you with the first, and toughest, word to find. From there, each further discovery shrinks the board and makes the next one that much easier, delivering a pleasant sense of acceleration toward victory."

The embedded graphic shows my attempts in order (used a hint, found four theme words, then the unifying "spangram" phrase, then the last three theme words).  As discussed at the link, Strands is essentially an advanced form of word search, which for me is a rather unsatisfying time-wasting game.  I will probably try it a few more times and then drop it, as I did with Wordle and Connections.  If you want to give it a try, the game is currently available online here.

Distinguishing Sundial lupine and Western lupine

We have had lupine in our gardens for 10-15 years - in part because it's a showy, attractive plant, but also because it is the host plant for the caterpillars of the endangered Karner Blue butterfly.  But I didn't know until recently that there are two types of lupine.  Lupinus perennis ("Sundial lupine") is native to the eastern and midwestern U.S., while Lupinus polyphyllus ("Western lupine") is native in the western states.  The video embedded above explains the morphological differences between the two lupines [TLDR: the Western lupine has 11-17 leaflets on the palmate leaf, while the Sundial has 5-11].

The distinction is important because only Lupinus perennis ("Sundial lupine") will support the Karner Blues.  If Karner Blues lay their eggs on Western lupines, the cats will die.  See this excellent page from the recent Prairie Moon Nursery catalogue:

Western lupine has been introduced in the east because it is somewhat more showy, but it should not be encouraged, for the sake of the Karner Blues.

See also my 2015 post Pursuing the "Karner Blue" butterfly.

A shout-out to Prairie Moon Nursery

There has been a significant increase in recent years of nurseries offering and emphasizing native plants for gardens.  One of the best of these is Prairie Moon Nursery, based in Winona, Minnesota.  We have purchased seed packets from them for several years, and when their catalogue arrived yesterday [as archetypal springtime garden porn] I was delighted to see that they now incorporate into the catalogue the names and photos of the lepidoptera (butterflies and moths) that use these plants as host plants (i.e. as depositories for eggs and thus food for the caterpillars - as opposed to nectar plants supporting adult pollinators).  Here is a sample page:

Some of this information is also codified in a massive table to big to embed -

- but easy to access via the Prairie Moon Nursery website.

Iditarod mushing is way different from other sports

As reported by The Athletic newsletter: 

Dallas Seavey, a record-tying five-time Iditarod winner, told officials with the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race early Monday morning that he was forced to shoot the moose with a handgun out of self-defense, “after the moose became entangled with the dogs and the musher,” a statement from the race said.

Seavey told an Iditarod Insider television crew he then “gutted it the best I could, but it was ugly.”

According to Iditarod Rule 34, if an edible big game animal — like a moose, caribou or buffalo — is killed in defense of life or property, the musher is required to gut the animal and report it to race officials at the next checkpoint. Mushers who follow must help gut the animal when possible and no teams may pass until the animal is gutted and the musher gutting the animal has proceeded. Any other animal killed in defense of life or property must be reported to a race official but is not required to be gutted. 

Race Marshal Warren Palfrey said officials “are making sure that every attempt is made to utilize and salvage the moose meat,” according to the statement.

Seavey encountered the moose 14 miles outside of the Skwentna checkpoint, roughly 80 miles from the starting point in the 975-mile race. When he reached the next checkpoint at Finger Lake, Seavey dropped off his injured dog who was immediately flown to Anchorage and, as of Monday, was being evaluated by veterinarians there.

On Tuesday, Seavey’s X, formerly known as Twitter, account posted an update saying that the injured dog, Faloo, had surgery and is in critical condition. [other news sources say Faloo is recovering]

Word of the day - "monger"

A dealer or trader in a commodity. The Random House Dictionary states the ultimate origin is from the Latin "mango", meaning .... salesman! ["Death of a mango?"]

"Monger" was once used as a verb, but it now is typically only employed as the second element of compound words. My OED says examples of such formations are "unlimited", with examples beginning in the 13th century: hay-mongers, holy-water mongers, insect-mongers (?) etc. The most familiar would likely be cheesemonger, costermonger (fruit/veggies), fishmonger, ironmonger, and whoremonger.

As the last-named example suggests, the OED notes that from the 16th century onward, the term nearly always carries the implication of a petty, disreputable, or comtemptible trade in the material - as in the modern "rumor-monger" "gossip-monger" and "scandal-monger."

Here is a costermonger:



...and there is a fearmonger at the end of this brief [2008] video:

Reposted to add yet another example:

Cartoon by Rob Rogers in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, via the political cartoon-laden Jobsanger.

Reposted from the last election cycle to add some examples of current fearmongering:

The Democratic party went through a heart-wrenching primary process, during which the voters ultimately rejected the radical left in favor of a moderate Joe Biden.  But the Wisconsin Republican Party combined Biden with images of their standard behemoths of radicalism to claim that they control him.

And Trump is using this same tactic:

“People that you’ve never heard of” are controlling Mr. Biden, he told the Fox News host Laura Ingraham. “People that are in the dark shadows.”

“What does that mean?” Ms. Ingraham asked. “That sounds like conspiracy theory.”

“No,” Mr. Trump answered. “People that you haven’t heard of. They’re people that are on the streets. They’re people that are controlling the streets. We had somebody get on a plane from a certain city this weekend, and in the plane, it was almost completely loaded with thugs wearing these dark uniforms, black uniforms with gear and this and that. They’re on a plane.”

This is not conventional confrontational politics.  These are the ramblings of a deranged mind.

Reposted from 2020, because Donald Trump is at it again.  But this time his fearmongering tactic isn't directed towards Biden but towards.... LANGUAGES???

“We have languages coming into our country. We don’t have one instructor in our entire nation that can speak that language,” Trump said before a crowd of thousands of supporters at the Conservative Political Action Conference outside Washington, D.C., last month.

“These are languages — it’s the craziest thing — they have languages that nobody in this country has ever heard of. It’s a very horrible thing,” he added.

Trump repeated the comment the following week during an appearance at the southern border alongside Texas Gov. Greg Abbott, saying that migrants are entering the country speaking “truly foreign languages.”

“Nobody speaks them,” he said after a tour of the border in Eagle Pass.

It is certainly true that uncommon languages are coming into our country.  Some of you will have seen John Farrier's recent post at Neatorama: "Of the 700 Speakers of Seke, a Nepalese Language, 150 Live in Two Apartment Buildings in Brooklyn."

In 2013 I posted this map of counties in the U.S. in which at least 10% of households English was spoken as a second language:

We all know what's going on here.  He's not referring to some exotic Czechoslovakian or Slovenian dialect.  His reference is to languages spoken by brown-skinned or African residents.  This speech was a dog whistle to the racist and xenophobic elements in his base.

I know there are sensible and well-spoken Trump supporters who have been faithful readers of this blog.  I invite you to offer any explanation I've overlooked as to why migrants speaking "truly foreign languages" is a "very horrible thing."

Fireflies

I'm sure I've posted other nighttime photos of fireflies in the past, but this must be the most remarkable one I've ever encountered.  Considering the extremely long exposure time needed, I'm sure the photographer must have had to mask out the relatively-brighter distant skyline or perhaps stacked multiple images.

From the Natural History Museum's Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition.  Image credit Sriram Murali (and many more excellent photos at the link).

Sweden is "hopelessly unprepared for war"

Excerpts from an opinion piece at The Guardian:

The Russian invasion of Ukraine in February 2022 came as a rude awakening for Sweden. Across the country people suddenly realised that national security vulnerabilities were everywhere. The entire public transit rail network in Stockholm, for example, is operated by MTR, a Hong Kong-based company with ties to the Chinese Communist party.

In the event of Stockholm being attacked by foreign forces, most of the detail about critical infrastructure and tunnels running under the city centre – home to the Swedish parliament, the prime minister’s residence, the state department, the royal castle – could be shared with enemies...

The problem isn’t necessarily the privatisations per se, but the reckless way in which they were executed, often without due diligence or background checks. Officials often just chose to do deals with the private contractors that submitted the cheapest bids. The globalisation optimism of the 1990s, when Russia and China were expected gradually to open up and eventually ally with western liberal democracies, paving the way for peace ever after, was so firmly rooted in Swedish politics that local officials until very recently were offering deals on critical infrastructure to investors with ties to adversarial governments...

There’s a Swedish expression for this attitude: fredsskadad, “peace damaged” – the idea that Sweden’s two centuries of peace have left its citizenry ill-prepared for a crueller reality. Swedes have long taken their safety for granted, while government officials recklessly sold off public assets and critical infrastructure to foreign powers...

The government has also cut funding for the free press, for civil society organisations and independent research institutes, which might further undermine citizens’ ability to educate themselves about potential threats. It is little comfort to think that, as bad as things are, many Swedes will have nothing to fear – because they will be unaware that they should be worried.

Egret on the shoreline

It takes a while to mentally process this image and realize that it is not manipulated in any way - the image was captured by careful placement and timing of the photographer.  Nicely done.  Found at the nocontextpictures subreddit in case you need an explanation.

Tongue lesions of Mpox

From a case report in the New England Journal of Medicine:

Testing of a tongue lesion with a polymerase-chain-reaction assay for the virus that causes mpox (formerly known as monkeypox) was positive. A diagnosis of mpox was made. During the eruptive phase of mpox, a rash is very common, but isolated oral mucosal lesions may be the only mucocutaneous manifestation — as occurred in this case. 

"What do you mean by 'we,' kemosabe?"

I'll hijack the punchline of a joke from the 1950s as a title for this excerpt from a New York Times article about language:

In the Kwaio language of the Solomon Islands, the word for “we” differs, depending on whether you mean yourself and the person you’re talking to or yourself and someone else. There are also different words for “we” if you are talking about yourself and three people including whom you are talking to or three people not including whom you are talking to or more than three people. Kwaio can leave an English speaker with we-ness envy.

Reminds me of my introduction to "y'all" during my ten years in Texas, and the sometimes use of "all-y'all" instead.