"Am I the only person left in the world who worries about spilling his coffee on his laptop?"

2 years ago.

ADDED: I ran across that after reading the colloquy between AllenS and Meade in the comments to the post about Brett's fuzzy penis:

AllenS: Jenn Sterger (the woman) was hired because of some sexy pictures of her in Sports Illustrated mag, that Brent Musberger thought would be a good matchup for the male dominated football sports sceen. Jenn and Brent are just as much at fault here. I'm thinking of sending the woman a picture of my penis also. Could I borrow the fish bowl lens?...

Meade: It's a fish eye lens. Fish eye. It's for taking shots of massive objects or scenes which a normal lens can't take all in. A fish bowl lens would be for taking shots of tiny things. Like Brett Favre's... ability to make good judgments.

AllenS: Ok, ok. Can I borrow the lens that makes stuff look bigger?

But, in fact, the fisheye works really well to make something look large if you get the camera lens right up at it. Lots of other stuff is including in the picture, arrayed all around and looking comparatively small. Frankly — and this is not an offer to AllenS — it would be really interesting to take pictures of naked men and get the extreme closeup on the genitalia with a well-composed and interesting background. I went looking through my old posts with the "fisheye" tag to find some that prove my point.

The second picture here of the fisheye dog makes this point very well. Get right up to the nose. The scenery in the background isn't as interesting as I'd want for my proposed compositions, but you can see how tiny Meade looks in the background (when in fact he was quite close by). Here's another photograph that illustrates the point, albeit with the female body:



That's from the Khmer Dynasty room at the Metropolitan Museum in NYC. Here's the effect of the lens looking at the room from the other side:



Here's some male and female nudity, to be fair:



That's the Museum of Natural History — not Brett and Jenn. You may recognize that couple from the movie "Election" — which is a great cautionary tale about the inadvisability of cheating on... many things (including your spouse).

And then — searching through the fisheye pictures — I found something that was extremely important to me: the purple tree, which had this.

"Do you guys TRY to not get laid?"

"Cafes... have always been venues for conspicuous contemplation... places to read Camus’ most obscure collections of essays, places to doodle evocatively in your large Moleskin notebook."

Free WiFi users wreck the hip LoFi ambiance of the coffeehouse in Greg Beato's brain.


(Photo by John Althouse Cohen)

Don't be irritating while I'm caffeinating.

Come on, café people. Fix your wobbly tables.



(The main thing is: I'm learning iMovie. That was: My Very First Voiceover. Look out, dear friends. Now that I can voiceover, I might be saying anything about anything.)

At the Too-Early Café...

... it's hard to think of anything to say in this pre-dawn light. You start the conversation.

Coffee, pre-dawn, Mountain Time.

After driving 1000 miles straight through the night.

It's Spring Break at last.

"I am a local artist, who has created sculptings made up Duct-Tape.. 100% no wires, or fillers."

Dennis Gervasio has "created the illusion of pewter." His opposition to "fillers" may explain his shortening of the term "outsider art" to "outside art" and his penchant for the 2-dot ellipsis.



His sign appears in the window of the Albany café called The Daily Grind — a locale also pictured in  "Man in green sneakers reads Sartre. Dog arrives."

The sculptings look like this, seen from inside the restaurant...



... and this, seen through window static...

Man in green sneakers reads Sartre. Dog arrives.

The Sartre book was "Nausea"  — great title for reading in a café. And the combination of Sartre and a café got us talking about Sartre's waiter (in "Being and Nothingness"):

Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He comes toward the patrons with a step a little too quick. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer. Finally there he returns, trying to imitate in his walk the inflexible stiffness of some kind of automaton while carrying his tray with the recklessness of a tight-rope-walker by putting it in a perpetually unstable, perpetually broken equilibrium which he perpetually re-establishes by a light movement of the arm and hand. All his behavior seems to us a game. He applies himself to chaining his movements as if they were mechanisms, the one regulating the other; his gestures and even his voice seem to be mechanisms; he gives himself the quickness and pitiless rapidity of things. He is playing, he is amusing himself. But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café....

The name of the restaurant was — aptly! — The Daily Grind.

If anybody at that tea party yesterday was carrying a sign that had any whiff of racism or insanity...

... you can be sure some anti-tea-partyist took a photograph of it and posted it on a blog.

That's the trouble with demonstrations. You're going to be judged by the company you keep. And nothing's going to make it fair and proportionate.

I've tried to be careful with things like that when I've photographed protests in Madison, Wisconsin. I remember very well the time I made a video of an anti-war march:

Here's the peace march that took place today at about 1 p.m. on State Street in Madison, Wisconsin. This clip shows the whole length of the parade. Note the man at the front, just behind the banners, who is holding a sign that says "Vive Saddam." (It's the third sign from the right.) The entire clip -- which I shot while walking in the opposite direction -- is about 3 minutes long. It includes a large dove puppet and a large papier maché skull.

I describe the worst guy, but I also show the entire parade and mention some noninflammatory details.

***

I walked down State Street today. The Ironman Triathlon was in town. Here's a picture of the winner just before he crossed the finish line:

Photo by Meade.

The winner was Raynard Tissink. He's on Twitter:

Just won IM Wisconsin. A very tough day with stomach issues, but managed to push through and take the win.

Nice going, Raynard Tissink.

Anyway, we weren't protesting. We were stretching out hands to high-five the Ironman, then skittering over to a café to wash our hands, drink iced coffee, and blog.

We saw no protests on State Street today. The closest things I saw to a protest was an old man wearing a light green T-shirt that had on it the image of Che Guevara wearing a light green T-shirt that had on it the image of Che Guevara wearing a light green T-shirt (and implicitly Che images ad infinitum).

I wish I'd stopped him, taken his picture, and — in the style of The Sartorialist — asked him some questions about what he meant by that.

Hey, ain't it good to know that you've got...

... a muffin... and a friend?

I'm sitting here at the Steam & Steel Café in Silverton, Colorado, drinking latte...

... reading the morning blogging, email, and news and wanting to comment on what has been an unfolding series of stories about the politics and public response to the health care bill. It's hard to jump in at this point, because there have been so many different things and I can't be anything like comprehensive. I haven't even been taking regular potshots, so it's hard just to take a potshot. Well, I might take a potshot soon. I'm not promising to sit this one out. It's way too interesting!

For now, here's Memeorandum's current collection of news items that are getting covered in the blogs. You can have at this in the comments.

I'll just say that I think these poor congresspersons going into town hall meetings are like Sarah Palin, last fall, going into interviews with journalists. The questions will come and either she won't answer them — for which she'll be trashed — or she'll answer and eventually say something that will highlight her limitations — and that will produce a quote/video clip that will be used aggressively and endlessly to destroy her.

The members of Congress can't possibly understand the material they are going to be tested on. The bill and its real-world applications are too complicated and unformed (or unknown) for them to prepare for what they are being asked to do. If they try to manage the events by shutting down speakers or excluding people they think are too antagonistic, they'll catch hell for that. Now, I think they deserve hell. They really don't know what they are doing, and they expect us to shut up and let them do it. That is chaos already.

"No More Perks: Coffee Shops Pull the Plug on Laptop Users."

Blares the Wall Street Journal.

Buried in paragraph 5 (after talk of the "economic downturn" and "idle workers" cluttering the cafés):

So far, this appears to be largely a New York phenomenon, though San Francisco's Coffee Bar does now put out signs when the shop is crowded asking laptop users to share tables and make space for other customers.

Ha ha ha. It's just New York. And hello? It was always hard to find free WiFi and a place to sit in New York cafés. It drove me nuts when I lived in Brooklyn Heights from September 2007 to May 2008. My favorite local café was Tazza — depicted in the March 10, 2008 blog post called "Lunch at the Loneliness Café." (Ah, now I never go back to the Loneliness Café!)

Click through to enlarge that first photograph, and you'll see that the white sign near the laptop user's head says: "ABSOLUTELY NO COMPUTERS...." (Why did that guy get to flout the policy so close to the sign? He's cute. Right? That's the reason, isn't it?)

"Commenting from a mountaintop: we are still sitting on the rock where we exchanged rings, and now we are married."

My comment, at 3:59 today, Central Time (though we are on Mountain Time), in the post "We're here in Colorado not just for the scenery, but for the law," which read: "What is the law we love so much — this beautiful example of the benefits of federalism? I will tell you soon!"

The first commenter there, reader_Iam, instantly got the answer:

Are you wanting to solemnize your own marriage, as opposed to having an officiant required?

Yes, in Colorado:

Couples themselves may solemnize their own marriage (perform one's own marriage ceremony). According to Colorado Revised Statute 14-2-109, a marriage may be solemnized by a judge of a court; by a court magistrate; by a retired judge of the court; by a public official whose powers include solemnization of marriages; by Indian tribe officials; by clergy; by the parties to the marriage. If you wish to solemnize your own marriage, you will be responsible for acquiring, completing and returning the license to marry to the appropriate county Office of the Clerk and Recorder.

And that's just what we did. This afternoon, we drove from our hotel in Bachelor Gulch to the Office of the Clerk and Recorder in Eagle County, where we showed our driver's licenses, answered a few questions, paid $30 cash, and got a license that empowered us to marry each other. We drove up Bellyache Ridge — just the 2 of us — where we did things our way and solemnized the marriage on our own. Then, we did the additional red tape — filling out the bottom of the Certificate of Marriage and handing it back to the county official who'd asked us the questions earlier. And now, we're here at Yeti's Grind on Broadway, in Eagle, eating our first food (sandwiches) and drinking our first drink (mango smoothies) as husband and wife. And we're both on the WiFi.

One thing I love about American federalism is that — subject to the limitations of national law — individual states can do things their own way, and we can move around finding the law we like. We decided against marrying in Madison, because under Wisconsin law, not only do you need to pay $125 or so for the license and then go get a minister or a judge to perform the wedding — you have to wait 6 days between getting the license and doing the wedding. What's that all about? It's insulting, not to mention avaricious. We went west, out of the grip of a paternalistic state, for greater freedom and individuality.

And, yes, we think same-sex couples should also have the right to marry. You'll have to travel somewhere other than Colorado if that's the freedom you want. We traveled and got what we wanted, and obviously, we have the additional benefit of getting a marriage that will be recognized everywhere. I hope the day will come when the Coloradan attitude that favored us will smile on gay people too. But for now, I'm just really happy to be married in Colorado, on Bellyache Ridge, with just me and Meade on the scene. Aptly, it turned out that there was a big old cell phone tower on top of the ridge, so we texted and emailed and telephoned.

And I made a blog comment — a comment, not a post, because that's where I found my dear husband, in the comments.

Reason for the late start to blogging this morning.

The Farmers Market. $45 spent on perhaps 12 items, including 2 different tomato purchases. And cheese curds, which we are now squeaking our way through at a State Street café, along with a second dose of coffee... and today's first dose of WiFi.

At the Guys Work Alone Cafe...

... I'm here by myself too.

At the Double Image Café....

... you can take a different view of things.

IN THE COMMENTS: Jason and Andy reference this:

At the Gingko Café...

... you can tell us how you really feel.

Talk about anything at the Autumn Leaf Café.

The Quiet Corner Café.

Talk about anything.

The Featherweight Café.

Where everything is light and airy. If your concerns are ponderous or morose, I must direct you back to The Willow Lounge.

Take a mid-afternoon break at The Fuzzy Thinking Café.

Riffs. Chatter. Free association. Nobody ever gets to the point at The Fuzzy Thinking Café. Come on! Feel the fuzziness.