At the Big Crack Café...

 

... you can talk all night. 

This morning the snow was gone and the ice on Lake Mendota had a massive crack. It was overcast, and the sunrise looked like this:

Sunrise.

 

Talk about anything.

Sunrise.

 

Talk about anything you like.

Sunrise.

 

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can talk about anything you want.

 

The photos were taken today at 6:25, 6:40, and 6:42.

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can write about anything you want.

At the Sunrise Café...

 

... you can write about whatever you like.

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At the Sunday Night Café...

 

... you can talk about whatever you like... including Trump's CPAC speech, which I'll probably write about in the morning. It's my quiet time now. Probably. So: Good evening.

The speech hasn't started yet... late for some reason... but you can watch live here. 

Full moon at dawn.

 

This morning at 6:42.

The sun looked like this:

 

Talk about anything you want in the comments.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can talk all night. 

That's a photo by Meade, and if you look closely, you can see me out there on the Lake Mendota ice. Here's the picture of the sunrise I was taking:

At the Sunrise Café...

 

 ... you can talk about whatever you want.

About that neckace.

I went out running this morning to catch the dawn... 

 

... and as I was running, I was thinking about the post I'd just put up at 6:23. (The photograph was taken at 6:45.) 

The post talked about a WaPo columnist who had pasted together a ramshackle argument that rested absurdly heavily on a couple things Trump's nominee for ambassador to Germany had said about how women look — that Hillary Clinton was "starting to look like Madeleine Albright" and that Rachel Maddow ought to "take a breath and put on a necklace." 

I was thinking while running about how it's important to be able to talk about the way people look. Life is — in great part — visual, and we're going to think about looks, we live within looking, and looks are not entirely superficial, they speak of depths, and even what is superficial is crucial to the feeling of being alive. We're not morally obligated to blind ourselves. We want to see and to talk about what we see. 

But what did it mean to say that Rachel Maddow ought to "take a breath and put on a necklace"? The man who said it was Richard Grenell, who is himself gay and therefore at least presumptively nonhomophobic. But the old tweet is deleted, so I can't search for the context. I only see it used against him. Example:

According to the pro-LGBTQ Washington Blade, Grenell’s history of insulting women on sexist and homophobic grounds is long and toxic. He has written that Rachel Maddow, an MSNBC lesbian news anchor, “needs to take a breath and put on a necklace.”

Did he mean women should all adopt a feminine fashion style? I don't know. I'd object to that, even though I think we should be able to talk about how people look. But you ought to let them choose how they want to present themselves, so don't criticize them for failing to do something they're not trying to do. If a woman is going for a boyish look, talk about whether it's a nicely done boyish look. You're a jerk to talk about how it's not feminine. 

If that's what Grenell meant by "put on a necklace." Maybe it had something to do with Maddow's high school yearbook photo....

That got press in 2010, and Grenell made his remark in 2011.

I was running along, thinking about looks and the importance of the visual world and, specifically, that necklace, and these lyrics came up in the song I was listening to: "I was thinkin’ about turquoise, I was thinkin’ about gold/I was thinkin’ about diamonds and the world’s biggest necklace."

What is the world's biggest necklace? Is it this?

There's a limit to how big a necklace can be, since it's not a necklace unless it can be worn around the neck. A colossal statue could have a neck and thus a necklace. You could get around the limitation that way. In Dylan's song — which I quote in part, above — he leaves his wife, who is named after an an Egyptian goddess, Isis. I'm picturing colossal Egyptian statues. In the song, Dylan meets up with "a man in the corner" and they go riding off until they come to the pyramids. 

Theoretically, the "world's biggest necklace" could be there, in the world's biggest tomb. In the song, the tomb is empty, and I take that to be a reference to the resurrection of Jesus Christ. In light of Jesus, the "world's biggest necklace" seems to relate to the parable of the pearl: "Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it."

At the Headless Snowman Café...

 

... you can talk about whatever you want.

6:50 a.m.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write about anything you want.

Meade took this picture of me looking at the sunrise at 5:24.

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5:22 a.m.

That's today, the 9th of the 10 days with the earliest sunrise time, 5:17.

I was there at 5:17, but the sun had not yet broken over the shoreline.



I don't have a view of the horizon. The first direct bit of sun became visible at 5:20:



You see why I picked 5:22 as the best. It wasn't because I was 5 minutes "late." I wasn't late! Were you?

At the Pre-Dawn Café...

... you can write about whatever you want.

The photo was taken at 5:10 a.m. today, the 8th of the 10 days when the sun rises at 5:17, the earliest sunrise time of the year.

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I didn't think it would work...

... but you actually can point your iPhone camera directly at the sun.

To the eye, the sun looked perfectly orange and the sky was blue. The camera interpreted the sun as white, and that required the sky to be perfectly orange.

At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write until dawn.

That photo was taken at 5:20 this morning, the 7th of the 10 mornings with the earliest sunrise of the year — officially: 5:17.

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At the Sunrise Café...

... you can write until dawn.

That photo was taken at 5:19 this morning — the 6th of the 10 days with a 5:17 actual sunrise, the earliest sunrises of the year.

Here's how it looked — at my secondary vantage point — at 5 a.m.:



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