Hawk saving face high above Owen Conservation Park in Madison

Sometimes hawks are a lot like cats. They have their predator's image to maintain and will affect a sublime nonchalance when they miss a kill. Predators fail more often than not, and saving face is an essential skill: "Who, me? I was just passing by." Just seconds before I took this photo, the hawk had set its sights on a crow in flight, closing rapidly with lethal intent, but the crow -- no dummy itself -- swerved away at the last instant and made for a nearby thick tangle of branches that did not seem to appeal to the hawk. The hawk acted as if it had not even seen the crow. It started wheeling in the air, riding the thermals above the hilly park, as if it had nothing better to do than trace lazy, imperious spirals across the sky all day long.

Castle Mania

That was the name of this obstacle course attraction for kids -- part of the ecarnival that was parked out by Toys R Us in back of West Towne Mall Saturday. I wandered over to take some photos while my car was getting its tires rotated. It was a chilly, gloomy day, but you wouldn't know it from the way kids were scrambling around and enjoying the rides.

Mother's Day at Trader Joe's in Madison

The entire westside of Madison seemed to be in Trader Joe's Sunday morning. Whole families of overscheduled westsiders, caught by surprise by the holiday, seemed to flock to the store with Mom in tow for a one-stop shopping experience -- flowers, food and beverages for Mom, lured by the nice selection of flowers at a good price.

Happy Mother's Day

Here's some sunshine for the day, since the weather apparently isn't going to cooperate. Photo taken at Madison's Olbrich Botanical Gardens on a sunnier day.

Friday Crane Blogging: Sandhill on John Nolen checking out the ones on the Madison skyline

Several years ago, we were bicycling on the John Nolen Drive bike path when we saw this Sandhill Crane by the side of the path, looking at the downtown skyline -- which included some very different cranes. It was back during the height of condo madness. I wondered if the Sandhill noted a family resemblance. More likely, it was probably thinking, "This real estate boom can't last." Smart crane.

What do you do for an encore after Al Roker goes to a Minuteman missile silo? Duck and Cover drills?

I couldn't believe my eyes. When I walked into the living room yesterday morning, Al Roker, the Today Show's ebullient weatherman, was visiting a Minuteman missile silo and command center in Montana -- addressing Armageddon with all of his customary gusto. "The most powerful weapons the world has ever seen!" he enthused. And his inquiring mind wanted to know how things worked. "These missiles have been sitting for a long time. How do we know they will work when we need them?" he asked. He was reassured that we had ample quality control procedures in place to ensure that Doomsday will come off as planned. (I tried to find a link to the video clip on the NBC site, but it doesn't seem to be there anymore -- maybe the Air Force found a security lapse somewhere in the picture, or just didn't want people studying the visuals for too long.)

It was flashback time for me. I haven't seen such cheerful optimism about The End of the World As We Know It since the old Duck and Cover days of Bert the Turtle. If you can breeze through a short update on nuclear devatation as part of a weather report, it can't really be all that serious, can it?

I couldn't help but wonder whose agenda was being served here. Stories like this don't just happen. Preparations have to be made. Several possibilities came to mind.

• There must be some GE technology somewhere in those Minutemen. Maybe somebody in GE Public Relations woke up one morning and said, "We have to do more to promote our technology of mass destruction. Let's send Al Roker to a missile base."
• Maybe the Air Force is seeking some good PR for upcoming budget battles. Maybe a Public information Officer woke up one morning and said, "Hey, let's invite Al Roker to a missile base."
• Maybe we're planning to attack Iran and its nuclear sites, possibly with nuclear bunker busters. You don't use Minutemen missiles for that, but maybe the administration is trying to ramp up nuclear awareness a bit and at the same time desensitize the public to what's coming. Maybe Dick Cheney woke up one morning and said, "Hey, let's invite Al Roker to a missile base."

Call me a cynic, but I think the third is more likely. If they bring back Bert the Turtle, it's time to get scared. Really scared.

Reinforcing gender stereotypes in Madison

These gendered Badgers are at Genin's Mobil-Hilldale on University Avenue. In the heart of Buckyland, Bucky is the one carrying the ball, while Becky is the one cheerleading. Sure, it's supposed to be cute and funny -- and if Bucky is equated with the University of Wisconsin football team, it's accurate enough. But is Bucky really a one-sport mascot? Doesn't Bucky represent all Wisconsin sports, and in a broader sense, the University as a whole? Seems like an odd message. How do these gender stereotypes fit in with the University of Wisconsin's stringent Bucky Badger licensing rules and regulations? Is there a compliance issue here?

Crows picking over the prairie burn on Madison's west side

The crows had a ball at Owen Conservation Park on Madison's west side Sunday. Good fires make good prairies, and Owen Park is a good example. Pictures at the link show the profusion of grasses and flowers -- among them, coneflowers, goldenrod, and bluestem -- that will erupt from this scorched earth in scarcely more time than it takes for a phoenix to rise from the ashes. The contained burn is what keeps it going.

Why we've watched our last Kentucky Derby

I used to love to watch the Kentucky Derby on TV. There is nothing more beautiful than watching those magnificent thoroughbreds run their hearts out. I'll always treasure my memories of Secretariat's great races, his almost supernatural presence on the track. But first Barbaro in 2006, and now Eight Belles -- two great horses have died of injuries at the last three Derbies. And Eight Belles had to be killed right where she lay on the track, before people who bet on her to place or show had even cashed their winning bets.

There are kinds of beauty we have no right to enjoy, because the price is too great. We have watched our last Derby in our household. Modern thoroughbred racing -- with their over-bred, over-raced horses -- is nothing but socially sanctioned animal abuse. Sally Jenkins wrote about the moral crisis in thoroughbred racing in the Washington Post.

There is no turning away from this fact: Eight Belles killed herself finishing second. She ran with the heart of a locomotive, on champagne-glass ankles for the pleasure of the crowd, the sheiks, oilmen, entrepreneurs, old money from the thousand-acre farms, the handicappers, men in bad sport coats with crumpled sheets full of betting hieroglyphics, the julep-swillers and the ladies in hats the size of boats, and the rest of the people who make up thoroughbred racing. There was no mistaking this fact, too, as she made her stretch run, and the apologists will use it to defend the sport in the coming days: She ran to please herself.

But thoroughbred racing is in a moral crisis, and everyone now knows it. Twice since 2006, magnificent animals have suffered catastrophic injuries on live television in Triple Crown races, and there is no explaining that away. Horses are being over-bred and over-raced, until their bodies cannot support their own ambitions, or those of the humans who race them. Barbaro and Eight Belles merely are the most famous horses who have fatally injured themselves. On Friday, a colt named Chelokee, trained by Barbaro's trainer Michael Matz, dislocated an ankle during an undercard for the Kentucky Oaks and was given a 50 percent chance of survival.

According to several estimates, there are 1.5 career-ending breakdowns for every 1,000 racing starts in the United States. That's an average of two per day.

Enough is enough.

Friday Cat Blogging: Kitty learns to swim

This seems appropriate for a rainy Friday -- graffiti on a Highway 26 bridge pylon where the bridge crosses the Rock River. The river's waters are still high, partially submerging the concrete bridge support.

Somewhat shaky start for the new Cap Times

I'm receiving the Wisconsin State Journal for eight weeks as a free trial substitute for the former daily print edition of The Capital Times, which ceased publication April 26. Its weekly successor, The Cap Times, tumbled out of the morning paper yesterday morning.

A quick read left me underwhelmed. The cover story by Mike Ivey and additional features by Anita Weier and Steven Elbow were decent newspaper stories, but seemed to lack a sense of what makes for good copy in a weekly, as opposed to a set of randomly selected daily newspaper stories (in which case, why just once a week?). The graphic design was terrible, boxed in by a rigid three-column layout that dooms the inside pages to a complete lack of visual variety and interest. Has anyone there ever bothered to look at Isthmus? They should.

But what really caught my eye was the 1/2-page "Week in Review." It contained three short items, and half the space was given to one that read as follows in its entirety:

Quote of the Week
'I was shaking. I just ran over a big-assed cow.'
Helen McCollum of Cambridge, explaining why she failed the "straight walk" portion of the drunken driving test administered to her by a Dane County Sheriff's deputy on April 23.

The "old" Capital Times also covered this story, back last week on April 24. The first time around it was a poignant, ironic story by Bill Novak about a woman who tried to be a Good Samaritan late at night by helping another motorist who had struck a cow, only to end up getting an OWI ticket herself. In the new, improved Cap Times, this gets played for laughs at the woman's expense, making her sound like an uncaring drunk. Maybe they were imitating The Onion -- forgetting that The Onion writes about imaginary people. This just came off as cheap and callous.

Maybe it's unfair to judge from the first issue, but this one definitely looks as if it was slapped together without too much thought or much of a vision of what the new Cap Times was trying to accomplish. Here's hoping they step up their game.

Is this the most photographed sign in Madison?

Probably. Especially if you have a camera with you when you come out at twilight feeling mellow after a couple blackened tilapia tacos and an ice-cold frozen margarita. The sign glows against the darkening sky in all its splendid neon glory. It's almost psychedelic. It feels as if you looked long and hard enough, you might discover the meaning of life. Since it doesn't reveal itself immediately, you take a picture and hope revelation will strike later. Tex Tubb's Taco Palace on Atwood Avenue .

Lighting a funeral pyre brings closure to my long relationship with The Capital Times

The Capital Times, the liberal daily started by William T. Evjue in 1917, ceased to be a daily print newspaper yesterday. As an afternoon paper The Capital Times has been dying for years, and its condition became terminal some weeks ago with the announcement that April 26 would be its last day as a print daily.

I've been in mourning for weeks. Partly, it's a personal connection. The first photograph I ever sold was sold to the Cap Times. The first freelance writing I ever sold was to the Cap Times. As a reader, the newspaper has been part of my life forever. But that's just the personal stuff that doesn't matter to anybody but me.

The real loss is that Madison is losing a unique liberal voice that appeared every day but Sunday for more than 90 years, and which gave Madison some of its unique character as a city. Madison had been unusual for a city its size in having a liberal daily newspaper. Now it doesn't. Nothing lasts forever.

They say it's not the end, and maybe it's not. The Cap Times hopes to be reborn as an internet newspaper with 2x weekly free print distribution. But so many people have taken voluntary or involuntary severance packages that, under the best of circumstances, it won't be the same paper. And, really, who ever spends more than a few minutes a day with even the best internet newspapers? Millions of people read newspapers online -- but a lot of that traffic is search engine driven, and most gets funneled right to the big national dailies with their multimillion-dollar websites.

I was eagerly awaiting the last print edition -- partly so the long deathwatch would finally be over. But I was also curious what sort of closure they would bring to their history as a daily, and what sort of sendoff they would provide to launch their journey into the unknown on the Web. Would they appeal to a different, younger audience that never reads daily newspapers anymore?

The final paper that arrived yesterday was a distinct anticlimax. There was no real closure, and not much of a sendoff. Less a bang than a whimper. The front page, their last real chance to drive traffic to their new incarnation on the Web, was a dud. It featured a picture of an unidentified dead white guy surrounded by men in funny paper hats.

Longtime readers recognized founder Bill Evjue, of course. But everyone else had to read Dave Zweifel's column on the editorial page to find out that it was Evjue pushing the button on a new printing press at their Carroll Street plant in 1961. To the kids who didn't read it, the man was just a white-haired old guy. And the headline "Beam Us Up," came off as a lame attempt to be -- what? hip and high-tech?

Since the Cap Times was not going to provide this subscriber any real closure (except for an offer to try the Wisconsin State Journal free for a few weeks), I decided to provide my own. A funeral pyre seemed appropriate. I would have set the funeral conflagration yesterday, but it was so windy I might have burned down the neighborhood in the attempt. So I nursed my grief and waited for the winds to die down.

Tonight after dinner the time seemed right. With the aid of a match and some charcoal lighter fluid, the Cap Times burst into one final, incandescent blaze of glory. The flames danced around the white-haired face of the indomitable Bill Evjue, and his visage continued to preside serenely over the middle of the page as the flames had their way all around. For an instant it seemed to flicker like a spirit, and then he was gone.

Waiting on a bench for the train to St. Moritz on Madison's Glenway Street

Waiting for the fabled Zermatt-St. Moritz train outside Madeleine's Patisserie at the corner of Glenway and Speedway in Madison. OK, it's a few thousand miles away, but a guy can dream, can't he?

I don't know who painted the trompe l'oeil mural. It predates Madeleine's and was painted when the building housed Michael's Cyclery. The Madeleine's Patisserie website doesn't mention it. Anybody know who the artist was? Inquiring minds want to know.

Late afternoon at Olbrich Gardens

I've always loved the serene simplicity of this sculpture at Olbrich Botanical Gardens. There's a wonderfully expressive tension between the the sheer mass of the stone and the delicacy of the ferns that it portrays. The sculpture is called "Fiddleheads," and it's by Sylvia U. Beckman.

Returning to town on a stormy Friday night

There were thunderstorms and threatening weather on the way home from work yesterday. Thought I'd try for some lightning shots to pass the time on the drive. Set the lens at infinity, underexposed a couple stops, shot a lot and hoped to get lucky. Never did, but captured some weird cloud effects instead. This was shot coming back into Madison on John Nolen Drive at Rimrock Road.

Friday Crane Blogging: Living Dinosaurs?

This time, when I encountered a Sandhill Crane on my noon walk, I had the big camera with me. Got wet feet following it, too. (Click on photo to enlarge.)

In today's NYT there's a story about scientists using new molecular data extracted from T. Rex bones to confirm that birds are descended from dinosaurs.

The research, being published Friday in the journal Science, yielded the first molecular data confirming the widely held hypothesis of a close dinosaur-bird ancestry, the American scientific team reported. The link was previously suggested by anatomical similarities.

In fact, the scientists said, T. rex shared more of its genetic makeup with ostriches and chickens than with living reptiles, like alligators. On this basis, the research team has redrawn the family tree of major vertebrate groups, assigning the dinosaur a new place in evolutionary relationships.

I'm reminded again of Richard Powers' description of Sandhill Cranes in The Echo Maker: ". . . something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter step away from pterodactyls." It's not just poetic license. It seems to be true.

Memories of Sandhill Cranes

This seems to be wildlife week at Letter from Here. I like to take a camera with me on my noon walk, but sometimes it's the wrong camera. A couple days ago I took a DSLR with a telephoto zoom with me, because I hoped to see some Sandhill Cranes. No such luck -- all I saw was a couple of woodchucks. Yesterday I decided to leave the big camera behind, and -- of course -- there were cranes. All I had was my wide-angle point-and-shoot with the short telephoto. So this is not nearly as detailed as I would like, and it's cropped out of a much larger image.

It's hard not to be captivated by these magnificent birds, with their haunting, prehistoric cry. Most but not all Sandhills migrate from the arctic tundra to the Platte River. They're unusual among migratory birds in that they find their way not by celestial or magnetic navigation, but by memory -- a memory so accurate that it guides a pair back to exactly the same nest in the arctic tundra where they hatch their young, year after year, and within months begin teaching them the same route.

They converge on the river at winter's end as they have for eons, carpeting the wetlands. In this light, something saurian still clings to them: the oldest flying things on earth, one stutter step away from pterodactyls. As darkness falls for real, it's a beginner's world again, the same evening as that day sixty million years ago when this migration began.

That passage is from the novel, The Echo Maker, a haunting meditation on human and animal memory by MacArthur Fellow and National Book Award winner Richard Powers -- a book that begins with the great birds' migration.

As the sun sets on the Pennsylvania primary, can Obama and Clinton rise above their caricatures?

Far away from the sights and sounds of this never-ending campaign, there's a serenity to the natural world these days, as spring unfolds across the country and the geese fly north to their summer homes. They can get away from it all. We can't.

With Clinton's win in Pennsylvania by a big enough margin to keep going but not nearly enough to win, this awful Forever Campaign seems bound to keep going until the final round of June primaries nearly six weeks from now (Puerto Rico, Montana and Douth Dakota, totaling 110 delgates) -- and probably beyond. And each day the Democratic candidates become smaller and smaller.

The Democratic race has come up against the oldest law of media: If you repeat anything in the media long enough, it will become a parody of itself, unable to elicit anything but weary laughter. The Seinfeld show became such a parody of itself that the late-night reruns were painful to watch. Repeat yourself often enough, and you wear out your welcome. Now it's happening to Clinton and Obama.

The candidates are being transformed into caricatures of themselves, their policy positions lost in the shuffle of gotchas and spin: Obama, the well-spoken elitist who talks a good game but can't close the sale or get anything done. Clinton, the disingenuous opportunist who will do anything to win and refuses to concede that she's lost. Two bright, thoughtful candidates are being eclipsed by cartoon versions of themselves.

It's tragic. Two of the best candidates the Democrats have had in years, each candidacy a historic first, are diminishing each other, day by day, and in the process, the charisma is draining out of each of these talented politicians.

A few months ago, it was a foregone conclusion that a Democrat would be elected president in November. Now it's less certain. The longer they keep running narrow, tactical primary election campaigns that are geared to driving up each other's negatives, the more they look like political hacks, just out for themselves. It's a recipe for disaster.

Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama are both so much better than this. Each has the power to inspire, to evoke a vision of a better America and how to get there -- to rise above today's petty bickering for political advantage and to speak directly to the American people. If they do, one of them is lkely to become the next president. If not, it probably goes to McCain by default.

Woodchuck bravery

I was taking my noon walk when I saw a woodchuck just ahead of me ten yards or so. They usually run off, but this one didn't. It seemed to be nuzzling a rock. As I drew closer, I saw it wasn't a rock at all, but another woodchuck just emerging from a burrow -- probably its mate. I imagined this conversation:

"Honey, don't look now, but there's one of those huge creatures approaching us with a big black thing hanging around it's neck. You'd better go. I'll distract it."

"Go without you? Why? Can't you come with me?"

"No, I'm going to stay here and keep an eye on it until I know you're safe. Hurry home. Use the back door, and I'll meet you there. Now!"

She scurried off through the underbrush and disappeared.

With the camera to my eye, I approached closer and closer, continuing to shoot, the DSLR mirror slapping loudly in the stillness. Chuck did not move. It seemed strange, because they're usually such shy creatures, quick to run at the slightest sound or movement. Instead, he stood his ground and did not budge while his mate made her way to safety. He seemed to be challenging me.

"You want a piece of me?"

For a moment I thought he was actually going to charge. Then, in the blink of an eye, he ducked into the hole at his feet and disappeared. Mission accomplished.

Monday morning cube farm blues

Monday: After a great weekend, back to the same old same old. (Sooner of later, it seems everyone has to experiment with putting some amateur video up on YouTube. I guess my time has come.)

Unlike some people, our cat follows a prudent asset management strategy

Our cat does not leverage his glitter balls. He values them and treats them with respect. He has not taken out any glitter ball equity loans to buy an SUV or boat. Nor has he taken out a second glitter ball mortgage to finance any glitter ball remodeling projects, and consequently his glitter ball mortgage is not underwater. And any assets he is not currently using, he keeps on deposit in the bank -- the food bank, that is. Good kitty.

Saturday night at the Cinematheque: Barbara Stanwyck in an early Capra film

I'd see Barbara Stanwyck in anything. She's always been one of my favorite stars from the Golden Age of Hollywood, someone who usually transcended the trashy material she often found herself in. That was certainly true of the Cinematheque's Saturday night showing of a restored print of Forbidden, an absurd but very watchable 1932 romantic melodrama directed by Frank Capra and costarring Adolphe Menjou and Ralph Bellamy. Robert Keser wrote about Forbidden in the online film journal Sense of Cinema.

The flame of backstreet melodrama may have died out on the modern screen, but Frank Capra's Forbidden still feels powerfully alive, drawing its energy from the glowing 25 year-old Barbara Stanwyck and the director's response to her. At the time, the project was an admittedly crass attempt to ape Back Street itself, Fanny Hurst's best-selling novel, before John M. Stahl's more elaborate version at Universal hit the screen. Capra won the race even though production on Forbidden was suspended for six months while Stanwyck and Columbia boss Harry Cohn settled a salary dispute.

One of the first stars created in the talkie era, Stanwyck now looks the most modern and least affected of her contemporaries imported from Broadway for their expertise with dialogue (“actors popped out of the ground like crocuses in April”, in one contemporary Hollywood observer's words) (1). If Capra's Ladies of Leisure (1930) made her a star, the fast-moving Forbidden – Columbia Pictures' top moneymaker for 1932 – consolidated her popularity. For the first time Stanwyck's talent expanded to fill an entire movie, thanks to Capra's fresh staging and the gathering intensity that rode over its plot improbabilities.

Judging from the marked intimacy evoked on the screen, star and director clearly were working with more than professional affection. Though Stanwyck was still wedded to the pathologically jealous vaudeville comic Frank Fay, Capra admits that he proposed marriage while shooting Forbidden (or shortly afterward) and was rejected. While no primary evidence proves that they were lovers, and he soon married another woman, the emotional undercurrents pulse unmistakably through Forbidden.

As Keser notes, Forbidden was Columbia's top-grossing film of 1932, and it generally received favorable reviews at the time. One exception was The New York Times. Reviewer Mordaunt Hall begins this way:

With its intermittent bickering and embracing between the principal characters and its peculiar conception of human psychology, "Forbidden," the present pictorial feature at the Rialto, is a cumbersome effort at story-telling. Although there is little, if anything, to inspire them, Barbara Stanwyck and Adolphe Menjou do all that is possible with their rôles.

He tries to summarize the plot (a hopeless venture, really) and then concludes his review dismissively.

After that there comes the pardon and various other happenings, most of which are somewhat tedious.

I wondered whether in 1932 the august Times considered movies so frivolous that they had people writing reviews under pseudonyms. Certainly "Mordaunt Hall" sounds more like a nom de plume than a name of a real person. But it turns out -- oops -- that Mordaunt Hall was not only a real person but the first film critic of the New York Times.

Mark Your Calendar: On Friday, May 9, at 7:30 they'll be showing another restored Capra film, American Madness. Archivist Grover Crisp who was responsible for the series of restorations they've been showing will introduce the film and answer questions.

Loons and turtles and cranes, oh my -- a glorious day for biking in Madison Sunday, April 20

Sunday was glorious biking weather in Madison -- sunny, with mild breezes and temperatures in the lower seventies. The Madison skyline floated above Lake Monona like a dream.

There were a couple of loons in Lake Monona, conducting their diving exercises in full view of the Capitol. (Click through the photo to view large in Flickr, if you want to actually see the loons.)

Every spring turtles come out to sun on this log in Wingra Creek near Fish Hatchery Road, but this year the water level is so high most of the log is submerged. There was just enough space for these two to perch and do their sunbathing thing. As we rode by on our bikes we also heard the strange, primeval cry of cranes in the Arboretum, but we couldn't see them. But it was as if all of nature was celebrating the arrival of spring along with us -- finally, after such a long winter.

Peeling paint graphs the progress of runaway global warming

If the x axis represents time, and the y axis represents temperature, then this patch of peeling paint could be seen as graphing runaway global warming, although we don't know the exact coordinates yet, nor the precise slope of the curve. Runaway global warming will eventually reach some sort of equilibrium at a higher level. For example, the temperature of the planet Venus does not change a lot from year to year. Unfortunately, we do not know whether the equilibrium temperature will be compatible with human life as we know it.

What if Google bought the battered New York Times? Could they save it from itself?

The business headlines the other day told all you need to know about the battered New York Times and the changing face of a newspaper industry confronted by the challenge of the Internet.

New York Times Company Posts Loss portrayed a struggling company that posted a $335,000 loss in the first quarter — "one of the worst periods the company and the newspaper industry have seen." Earnings fell far short of analysts’ expectations, as well as the paper's $23.9 million profit in the quarter a year earlier, which was also a bad year.

Google Profit Beats Wall St. Forecast told how Google's net income for the first three months of the year rose 31 percent on revenue growth of 42 percent from a year ago, topping estimates from Wall Street analysts. The trendlines don't look great for the Times.

The Times is definitely in play now. Earlier in the year, two hedge funds bought major positions in the Times Company's depressed stock. They leveraged these into two seats on the board that are expected to be approved by stockholders later this month.

The Times Company’s declining fortunes have sowed shareholder discontent, and the weak first-quarter results could intensify calls for a shift in strategy. A pair of hedge funds, Harbinger Capital Partners and Firebrand Partners, acquired a large stake in the company early this year, demanding that it sell assets and invest aggressively in Internet operations.Rather than endure a proxy fight, the hedge funds and the Times Company struck a deal, agreeing to expand the board to 15 seats from 13, with the two extra seats going to the funds. That agreement is expected to win approval at a shareholders’ meeting on April 22.

Michael Wolff writes about what's in store for the Times in the new issue of Vanity Fair. Although the new board members can't immediately wrest control of the paper from the Sulzberger family, Wolff writes that they're in a position to make life miserable for the Sulzbergers in a variety of ways.

Continued embattlement. Neither shareholders nor moguls and financiers or other media can force the Sulzberger family to do anything it doesn’t want to do. So it should just ignore the peanut gallery. That’s one stiff-upper-lip thesis.

But the peanut gallery—especially if it has managed to seat a few directors—is going to chew up a lot of the Sulzberger family’s management, not to mention emotional, resources. From a corporate-governance perspective—no matter that the family holds the ultimate vote—Sulzberger and his management team are going to have to tediously justify their every view and action. They will have gone from having a rubber-stamp board to a board of constant inquisition (one terrified of being sued for its every lapse of constant vigilance). This will, especially with a falling or stagnating share price—and a divided board won’t, in the short term, help the price—quickly develop into a battlefield situation, with all sides retaining lawyers and P.R. troops.

It’s a mess that invites other insurgencies and that will result in a dramatic turnover of the company’s shareholder base, with longtime passive shareholders replaced by additional opportunistic activist shareholders. The Sulzberger family, in other words, will find itself effectively partnered with forces, or interests, which believe that the Sulzbergers are the single largest impediment to share-price appreciation. If the family were willing to sell, the stock might double in value. Therefore, the strategy of the insurgents and arbitrageurs and other snakes of the market becomes making life difficult—truly quite unbearable—for management and its directors.

The history of every great American newspaper family is that eventually the heirs lose control of their inheritance. That recently played out at the Wall Street Journal to Rupert Murdoch's benefit. Now it may the Times' turn. Wolff runs through a number of possible scenarios. He seems most intrigued by the possibility of Michael Bloomberg buying the paper (when asked, he just smiles enigmatically). He certainly has the money. And he knows publishing and interactive media, since that's where he made his money.

But I still like the idea of Google buying the Times that was floated by John Ellis in Real Clear Markets last January. They couldn't do worse than current management. They would probably do better. And they have the financial muscle and the technological savvy to help guide a great American institution through the tidal wave of technological and financial changes that are changing the landscape of the media world as we have known it. Who knows? Google might even save the New York Times from itself.

A few footnotes to Charlie Gibson's history lesson

This was the graphic that Charlie Gibson threw up on the screen the other night in that weird, misleading history lesson he used to introduce his question to Clinton and Obama about whether they would commit to putting the runner-up in their race on the ticket as the vice presidential candidate -- on the apparent theory that if it was good enough for the Founders, it should be good enough for them. Why wouldn't they commit? What was wrong with them? Were they un-American?

The quick peek at Article II, Section 1 without any explanation must have resulted in some real head-scratching and puzzled conversation in millions of households across the country. Was this really the law of the land? A few footnotes:

1. The quoted passage is about the Electoral College, not primary elections. There were no primaries at the time. In fact, the public didn't even vote directly for president at the time -- electors were chosen by state legislatures. So much for historical relevance.

2. The process stated here didn't work very well for the Founders, either. This was why, in the election of 1796, Thomas Jefferson (a Republican in the nomenclature of the time) ended up as vice president in a contentious relationship with President John Adams, a Federalist -- adding fuel to the fire of a lifelong enmity that lasted nearly until the day they both died on the 50th anniversary of the signing of the Declaration of Independence.

3. In any event, this section was repealed and replaced by the Twelfth Amendment to the Constitution, ratified in 1804. It's had nothing whatsoever to do with the selection of the vice president for more than 200 years. So why bring it up? Or, if you do -- given that most people learn what they know of the Constitution from television -- shouldn't you at least mention that it no longer applies?

Probably this was just some producer's cute idea of how to make the debate and its Constitution Hall setting more "relevant." But it was typical of the way show business packaging has taken over the network production of the debates. The. Worst. Debate. Ever. They should give the debates back to the League of Women Voters.

Um, Senator McCain, when did you last leave the campaign trail long enough to actually drive a car?

Since your wife is worth over $100 million, give or take a few million, and since you move through life in a cocooned campaign bubble of chartered jets and motorcades, you probably don't spend much time behind the wheel of a car, I'm guessing. The rest of us do. It's how we get to work, how we do our shopping, and occasionally, take a little vacation. I read in the paper that, at a time our economy seems to be entering a recession at the least and a total systemic meltdown at the worst, at a time our infrastructure is crumbling, especially the roads, you think we can get a grip on our economic woes by repealing the gas tax. Before you go ahead and starve the Highway Trust Fund of money this summer, I'd like to invite you to rent a car and drive it around the streets of my hometown for an hour or so. I'd be curious to see if you still want to repeal the gas tax. Most of us don't. Really.

The University of Wisconsin leverages its brand

The University sure likes its "W" logo. It's popping up everywhere. One of its more recent star turns is on the new Grainger Hall addition at the corner of Park Street and University Avenue. It's all about branding. The University used to value "that continual and fearless sifting and winnowing by which alone the truth can be found." Today the administration seems more concerned with the value of their brand.

"Sifting and winnowing" can be laborious and time consuming. Why not get on the fast track to truth, or at least truthiness, with a good PowerPoint template that "leverages the powerful University of Wisconsin brand"? That seems to be what University Communications ("Creativity from Within") seems to be suggesting in promoting their new PowerPoint template designed to be used by faculty, staff and students.

PowerPoint is a common office tool that often suffers from poor execution—canned slides, boring templates, and weak design choices. If a standard format doesn't meet your needs, we can provide an alternative. University Communications is pleased to offer University of Wisconsin PowerPoint templates for your use.

Download these professionally designed templates and customize them with your content for a compelling presentation that also leverages the powerful University of Wisconsin brand. We’ve designed three distinct templates specifically for use by UW–Madison faculty, staff and students. Each template integrates the university’s colors, logo and iconic imagery. By emphasizing the Wisconsin brand, your presentation will be relevant and memorable for both internal and external audiences.

Microsoft's psychically deadening audience management tool has done enough damage in the business world. Using PowerPoint to make classroom presentations more "relevant and memorable" while leveraging the UW brand makes my eyes glaze over. Hasn't anybody at University Communications read Edward R. Tufte? They might start with his article in Wired, "PowerPoint is Evil," which is subtitled "Power Corrupts. PowerPoint Corrupts Absolutely."

In any event, the University has its sights set on bigger game than mere PowerPoint templates. A few months ago the NYT ran an article, "The Graffiti of the Philanthropic Class," about how institutions of all sorts -- museums, schools, medical centers -- are in a mad scramble to sell off their names to the highest bidder. Apparently the Wisconsin School of Business tried to sell its name for $50 million, but they didn't get any takers. That's when, according to the Times, they had a better idea -- greenmailing their alumni into paying them not to sell their name.

As The Associated Press reported last month, the dean at the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business couldn’t find anyone to pony up a cool $50 million to get his or her name on the school. So the dean switched strategies and discovered that several givers were willing to chip in to ensure that, for 20 years at least, the school would not be personally branded, but would instead simply remain the University of Wisconsin-Madison School of Business (a long enough handle, surely). The non-naming fund eventually reached $85 million.

“It is an unprecedented act of selfless philanthropy,” Terry W. Hartle, senior vice president for the American Council on Education, told The A.P. “I hope it is the start of a trend.”

There's lots more information about the transaction gift on their website.

That puts a whole new spin on that big "W" on Grainger Hall, which is part of the Wisconsin School of Business. It's not just a brand. It's a constant reminder to alumni that in 20 years they'll have to pony up again, or the "W" just might morph into a well-heeled corporation's logo instead. Meanwhile, think of all the other schools on campus that can put their names up for sale. If the business school is worth $85 million, think what you could get for the Physics Department. Heck, even the English Department might be worth a few bucks. They're sitting on a goldmine.

A couple weeks ago, the Daily Cardinal ran a story headlined UW sues Sesame Street for using the letter ‘W’. It was an April Fool's Day joke, but when you think about it, they had a point. Brand equity is important. The University owns a valuable resource. Why should they give it away? Today Sesame Street, tomorrow the world!

President Bush confesses he's a war criminal, so let's change the subject to Barack Obama's elitism

Last Friday, George Bush admitted he knew about the meetings of top administration officials to orchestrate torture policy and techniques ("enhanced interrogation," these guys are nothing if not euphemistic). In other words, he confessed to war crimes in his own words to ABC News.

President Bush says he knew his top national security advisers discussed and approved specific details about how high-value al Qaeda suspects would be interrogated by the Central Intelligence Agency, according to an exclusive interview with ABC News Friday.

"Well, we started to connect the dots in order to protect the American people." Bush told ABC News White House correspondent Martha Raddatz. "And yes, I'm aware our national security team met on this issue. And I approved."

Apparently they didn't study the Nuremberg Trials at Yale, or he was absent, or he just doesn't care.

On the same day, the media reported on Barack Obama's words to a San Francisco fund-raiser a few days earlier.

. . . a weekend war of words between the two candidates over remarks Obama made April 6 to donors in San Francisco. His statement -- that some voters have ``gotten bitter and cling to guns or religion or antipathy to people who aren't like them'' -- became public on April 11, and Clinton and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain immediately used them to attack him.

The Bush story sank virtually without a trace, while the Obama story became a firestorm of self-righteous commentary in the media and on the campaign trail. Obama had committed the crime of paraphrasing the argument of Thomas Frank's What's the Matter with Kansas? in language that was far too impolitic for the campaign trail. You would think that John McCain and Hillary Clinton could have spared a few words about White House crimes that made everything for which Richard Nixon faced impeachment seem like child's play, but apparently they were too busy piling on.

The news blackout on Bush was not total, of course. Many spoke up in the blogosphere, including Digby, who was plain-spoken and eloquently indignant.

I think we know what was happening now, don't we? The "principals" were all sitting around the table devising torture techniques based on the previous episode of "24" (or their favorite S&M website), and when Powell meekly objected, they called him a faggot. In the White House. If Bush wasn't in the room, he was listening on speaker phone. This has codpiece written all over it.

Unfortunately, over the weekend attention was focused not on constitutional "high crimes and misdemeanors" -- but something far more important. The burning question was whether an affluent black man, a graduate of Harvard Law and the front-runner for his party's presidential nomination should be allowed to get away with an apparently condescending attitude toward small town America. Compared to the magnitude of that offense, who could possibly object to a little torture for the greater good?

Cinematheque shows the film in which Bogie is called a "blind, knuckleheaded squirrel"

Saturday night we saw a real treat at the UW Cinematheque -- a sparkling restored print of the Nicholas Ray film, "In a Lonely Place." The epithet hurled at Humphrey Bogart comes during a really over the top moment in the film. An enraged Bogie is driving wildly through the night in the Hollywood hills, costar Gloria Grahame at his side, when he sideswipes a car driven by a young man. The other driver jumps out of his car and screams at Bogie that he's a "blind, knuckleheaded squirrel." The words are comically inappropriate, but they enrage Bogie further. He attacks the other driver and almost kills him.

Maybe that's one reason the film notes describe the film as combining noir and screwball comedy elements. It may also be one reason the movie wasn't very successful or well regarded at the time of its release. For example, Pauline Kael was no fan -- in "5001 Nights at the Movies" she totally dismissed "In a Lonely Place."

Humphrey Bogart, as a cynical, tired Hollywood screenwriter named Dixon Steele, in an atmospheric but disappointingly shallow murder melodrama directed by Nicholas Ray.

But eventually the French New Wave turned their attention to Nicholas Ray, who became one of their iconic American auteurs, a favorite of both Truffaut and Godard. "In a Lonely Place" has been growing in critical esteem on both sides of the Atlantic ever since. By 2005, Time magazine named it to its list of the All-Time 100 Best Films, although in 1950 their critic had written, "'In a Lonely Place' is a Humphrey Bogart melodrama that seems to take forever getting to the point and just about as long driving it home."

Director Nicholas Ray was a Wisconsin native, born in Galesville, and his pre-Hollywood years intersected with some other famous Wisconsin native sons, including fellow director Joseph Losey (they attended the same high school in La Crosse), Thornton Wilder and Frank Lloyd Wright.

Born in small-town Wisconsin in 1911, Nicholas Ray's early experience with film came with some radio broadcasting in high school. He left the University of Chicago after a year, but made such an impression on his professor and writer Thorton Wilder that he was recommended for a scholarship with Frank Lloyd Wright, where he learned the importance of space and geography, not to mention his later love for CinemaScope.

Film writer David Thomson wrote an admiring essay in The Guardian about the troubled Ray. "The Poet of Nightfall," he called him. He especially likes Ray's early films of the forties and early fifties.

None of those films did especially well. They were all black and white. But they are filled with anguish and ecstasy and a kind of framing and lighting and camera movement that steadily deepens the routine script material. In a Lonely Place is less showy than Sunset Boulevard, but it is the truer portrait of Hollywood compromise and hypocrisy. The love affair between Bogart and Gloria Grahame fixes on one of Ray's characteristic situations: lovers who are bad for each other. It was a situation from life. The marriage to Evans had broken down, and Grahame became Ray's second wife in a partnership doomed from the start by infidelity and mistrust.

If there was a lot of Nicholas Ray in Dixon Steele, there was also a lot of Humphrey Bogart. In her memoir "Lulu in Hollywood," Louise Brooks devotes an essay to Bogart, a friend in her Hollywood days. It was called "Humphrey and Bogey" to distinguish between the private and public man. The latter, she thought, was eventually undone by what she saw as Bogart's "fundamental inertia." She thought "In a Lonely Place" gave him the opportunity for one of his greatest screen performances because it drew heavily on his own personal traits.

However, before inertia set in, he played one fascinatingly complex character, craftily directed by Nicholas Ray, in a film whose title perfectly defined Humphrey's own isolation among people. In a Lonely Place gave him a role that he could play with complexity because the film character's, the screenwriter's, pride in his art, his selfishness, his drunkenness, his lack of energy stabbed with lightning strokes of violence, were shared equally by the real Bogart.

I first saw "In a Lonely Place" late at night on television more than ten years ago. I thought the "knuckleheaded squirrel" remark was bizarre, and that was about all I remembered. This time I was blown away, and the the film remains vivid in my memory a day later -- a rare event these days, most films being so forgettable. The performances of Bogart and Grahame (now perhaps best remembered for her role as bad girl Violet Bick in "It's a Wonderful Life") are among their best, and Nicholas Ray puts them in the spotlight on his own distinctive dark stage.

Stuff that's left behind when the University of Wisconsin's snow mountain melts

This was how the University's snow mountain looked about a month ago when it was near its height. Every time we took one of our rare winter walks along the Howard Temin Lakeshore Path, we marveled at this rising pile of snow, dirt, oily street sludge and the various kinds of residue that end up on the University's streets and sidewalks and get swept up by the snowplows and removed. The University has to dump it somewhere, so they deposit it on the west end of the campus, north of Goodman Field and next to the marsh that borders Lake Mendota.

We always wondered how they kept it from harming the environment when it melted. Normally, they have some barriers in place. However, it turns out that our record snowfall this year overwhelmed the defenses somewhat, as Anita Weier reports in the Capital Times.

UW-Madison has been storing snow north of Goodman Field and south of a marsh that borders Lake Mendota for years, but this winter the snow overwhelmed the storage space and caused passers-by to worry about effects on the lake.

"A berm surrounds the snow pile, and silt fences and hay bales help filter the runoff from the snow pile. But with this year's snow, as much as we've had, some snow was pushed over the bales and barrier so some runoff is going directly into the marsh," said John Harrod, director of the physical plant for the university.

"We are working to clean it up so we can minimize impacts on the marsh."

Just one more way this winter has been one of the worst in years.