High Water in La Crosse – 2023 Mississippi River Flood

Every once in a while, there are massive piles of snow in the Great North Woods that melt quickly enough to raise the river levels downstream. Watersheds from the Dakotas, through Minnesota to northern Wisconsin all send their water through La Crosse and we get a big flood every 10-20 years. This year was one of those years.

The “normal” river level in La Crosse is 6 feet. (“Zero” is 626 feet above sea level.) Flood stage is at 12 feet, and the highest level recorded was just under 19 feet in 1965. Yesterday the gauge nudged 16 feet, the third-highest level in history (highest since 2001).

An image of “A Simpler Time” during dryer times.

A popular photo subject at the riverside is the sculpture called “A Simpler Time”, portraying a boy, girl and a dog waving to river boats. I’m including an image of that artwork from dryer times to illustrate the “normal” level of the river.

Crescent Sunset

Just after sunset on November 6, 2021, our lenses captured the thinnest crescent moon I had ever witnessed.

(Click to embiggen)

Hoarfrost

Hoarfrost is not the look you get from a sex worker who just received a lousy tip.

It’s a word that describes the kind of frost you get during freezing fog. Normal frost is a layer of ice crystals deposited on a cold surface. When the crystals are built up into a deep and elaborate structure, you get hoarfrost.

On Sunday, January 3, 2021, we were greeted by a spectacular display of hoarfrost. In some places, it looked like a layer of snow that stuck to everything, but closer examination revealed its true structure.

It was early afternoon by the time we headed out with our camera, but we still managed to capture this rare event. Enjoy!

Winter in the Spring

On the morning of Wednesday April 18, I rode my bike downtown on clean dry streets. By 7pm, the world around purplearth world headquarters looked like this:

The Sun As a Dark Star: Eclipse 2017

On the morning of August 21, RoZ and I were in Service Creek, Oregon for the total solar eclipse. We were with our friend Sage, his 8-year-old son Cosmo and their greyhound Serendipity.

We had driven 300+ miles from Seattle the day before and camped on the roadside near an old back-country stage stop. After marveling at the high-desert skyscape, we got a good night’s sleep and had breakfast at the stage stop in time for the big event. Read on

Birds of La Crosse River Marsh

A week ago, we took our first Limo ride of the season on the La Crosse River Trail, which crosses a few miles of marsh as it leaves town. I packed the “good” camera, just in case…

On our way out, we saw blue herons, egrets, and Canada geese… the usual suspects. As we stopped at our favorite bench, a sandhill crane passed closely overhead.

Once I got the camera out, they all hunkered down…

A heron and an egret stay low and far away, out of reach of our long lens.

A sandhill crane alongside the bike trail suspiciously watches human activity a quarter mile away.

After we got on our bike for the trip home, we were greeted by geese with a group of newly hatched young. The cranes and the egrets came closer.

Then on the city marsh, we saw this:

A flock of pelicans forages for food on the La Crosse Marsh.

Thankfully, after a day of watching the “usual suspects” keep their distance, the unusual visitors came close to say “Hello.”

A DNC Perk

It appears that having been a delegate to the DNC got me on the White House (at least Obama’s White House) Holiday Card List. It was a Really Cool surprise to find this in the mailbox this morning:

Hi Mom!

I grew up reading MAD magazine, and a common element of portrayals of crowd shots on TV was someone holding a sign that said, “Hi Mom!” I started thinking about this after coming home from the Democratic National Convention, around the time the emails and text messages started coming in that started with, “I saw Obbie on…”

The first such message came from RoZ’s brother on the Sunday evening after the convention. He had seen me in a report on a Showtime political show, and offered the following image:

onShowtime

I remembered the camera coming by as I sat along the aisle during roll call Tuesday night, which was confirmed in the brief video clip he sent along to show the context… a clip where my mug was visible for about a quarter-second.

So while my brother-in-law was ribbing me about my “fifteen minutes of fame”, it wasn’t even fifteen frames, and most people didn’t even notice.

I found some other stuff while looking around for a video that I still haven’t found. On the first night, I was in the second row up from the main floor and watched as a CBS News crew set up to interview someone in the first row, directly in front of me. While the crew was live, I remembered this advice from George Carlin:

This is something you can do for practical…humor. Do this on television; if you can get into a kind of a side of a television story…, the kind of thing where you’re not the center of attention ’cause they’ll edit you out if you do this as the center speaker. You must be on the sideline. And what you do is you don’t say this, but you move your lips to it. And what you move your lips to is- “I hope all you stupid ******* lip readers are looking in!”

So I tried that. I also mouthed the words, “Hi, Rozie.” As the crew was setting up, I sent her a text that read, “go to CBS,” and a few minutes later a text came back that read, “I just saw you, love.” I never did find any video of the interview that took place right in front of me that night, but while looking for it I found this:

noTPP_night1

This was found in the online version of USA Today (embedded in an article about the hell we raised at Ron Kind’s appearance before the Wisconsin delegation breakfast on Wednesday). While the guy to my left was going ape-shit every time a speaker mentioned Hillary’s name, every camera in the building seemed to converge upon him.

The next day, a friend emailed us a smartphone-picture of a page from the dead-tree version of the New York Times containing the same picture (Page B4 on Wed, 7/27). On Monday of this week, we received the actual paper in the mail, so I upgraded the picture a bit:

NYT_20160727_B4_combo

Unfortunately, the caption said the picture was taken outside. A correction was requested, and one was issued about a week after the story ran.

A picture caption on June 27 with the Economic Scene column, about the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, misidentified the location of the photograph showing delegates to the Democratic National Convention protesting the agreement. It was taken on the floor of the convention hall, the Wells Fargo Center — not outside the building.

Did they really say “June 27” when the image was published on July 27? The Old Grey Lady is slipping.

Relaxing at home one evening last week, we watched one of Bill Maher’s shows from convention week, and during the “New Rules” segment we saw this:

onBillMaher

It looks like I was trying really hard to make it clear that I was not with this guy.

Just to complete the collection of what I’ve found so far is this one that I came across yesterday (Tuesday):

Bernie-Sanders-Supporters-Delegates-DNC-AP-640x480

I was there for four days, but nearly all the pictures I find of myself in the media were taken within seconds of each other. And the only reason I show up at all is because I was sitting next to a camera magnet.

I know there are at least three videos out there where I was directly interviewed on-camera. The first was taken on the second day while I was sitting on the aisle in my green & gold tie-dye, but I have no idea who the crew was with. On the fourth day I was interviewed in the hallway by “Italian TV”, and on the floor by “Norwegian TV”. If anyone happens to have copies of these videos, I’d love to see them, if only to find out whether they translated my comments correctly.

Now that I’m home, seeing myself in the media isn’t that much of a thrill relative to the feeling I get when I watch news reports as DNC events reverberate thru the country. For instance, I keep seeing clips of Michelle Obama or the Khan couple, and as I realize how these events are now part of political history, it blows me away to remember that I was actually there.

Trump: The New Profanity

There’s a carnival clown on our TVs. His surname is the word you get when you merge tush and rump. Since those words are synonymous with each other, the merged word must also be a synonym of tush and rump.

I suggest we use this new word to replace another synonym – a word that some consider vulgar even though it appears in so much of our common lexicon. It would give us a way to say these things in “polite company.”

For instance:

Be careful in the winter or you might “slip and fall on your trump.”

When faced with an annoying and difficult task, you could call it, “a pain in the trump.”

One that is willing to vote for the carnival clown could be said to “have his head up his trump.”

A football coach could encourage a player to hustle by yelling, “Get the lead out of your trump.”

Before the big game, that coach could end his pre-game pep talk with, “Now go out there and kick some trump!”

Hopefully by now you’re thinking up more of these on your own, and laughing your trump off as you do so. Have a good weekend!

BONUS ADDENDUM: Some years ago, a sitting US Senator had his surname turned into a disgusting profanity. It would be easy to build a sentence containing both of these new words, but I’ll leave that up to you.

Our Cat is a Basket Case

A few days ago, I found Gizmo taking a nap in a very odd position, and in a very odd place.