"Wisconsin GOP Advances Bills Controlling How People On Welfare Eat And Pee."

Headline at The Huffington Post.

I know. I should punish The Huffington Post for distorting things to such an absurd degree, but it is so absurd that it's self-undermining � the "pee" part is just about requiring drug tests � and, besides, HuffPo also has this headline: "Florence Henderson Describes How Former NYC Mayor John Lindsay Gave Her Crabs."

Look how handsome John Lindsay was:



If you're going to get crabs from a New York City mayor, he's the one. There have been 109 NYC mayors, going all the way back to Thomas Willett in 1665. I can't say I know what they all looked like � and did they have crabs? � but here's DeWitt Clinton, who's not that cute, but I love the painting:



DeWitt Clinton (March 2, 1769 � February 11, 1828) was also a U.S. Senator and, most notably, a governor of New York. His great achievement was the Erie Canal:

Many thought the project was impracticable, and opponents mocked it as "DeWitt's Ditch." But in 1817, he got the legislature to appropriate $7,000,000 for construction.... The cost of freight between Buffalo and Albany fell from $100 to $10 per ton, and the state was able to quickly recoup the funds it spent on the project through tolls along the canal... [T]he New Hampshire Sentinel [wrote:] "His exertions in favor of the great Canal have identified his name with that noble enterprise, and he will be remembered while its benefits are experienced... Yield credit to Clinton, and hail him by name."

Hail, Clinton!

By the way, "crabs" are pubic lice, pthirus pubis. From Amy Stewart's "Wicked Bugs: The Louse That Conquered Napoleon's Army & Other Diabolical Insects":

Body lice evolved from head lice about 107,000 years ago, around the time humans started wearing clothing. Pubic lice, however, are more closely related to gorilla lice� and were transferred to humans through some sort of intimate physical contact with gorillas, the precise details of which remain a mystery....

Pubic lice... lock their claws around a strand of hair and almost never let go. Their habit of feeding in one place for most of their life means that their feces accumulate around them, making for a truly unpleasant situation. They inhabit all parts of the body covered in coarse hair, including eyebrows, chest hair, mustaches, armpits, and, of course, pubic hair.... Because pubic lice can only survive a few hours off the host... [s]exual contact is really the most efficient means of transmission, which is why the French call pubic lice papillons d�amour, or butterflies of love.

Now, here's Florence, singing about the butterfly of love:

"The first lesson he taught was what to leave out... He was a demon about clutter."

He = William Zinsser, author of "On Writing Well," who has died at the age of 92 dead at 92.

William Knowlton Zinsser was born in Manhattan on Oct. 7, 1922. He escaped the urgings of his father to join the family�s shellac business but could not escape his mother�s counsel that being cheerful was a Christian obligation.

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The mantis is ready for its closeup.

Wednesday morning at 4 a.m., this is what I'm staring into:


Reverence ibook from Elaine Strutz on Vimeo.

Via io9.

Scorched earth.

In Governor Nelson State Park today.



ADDED: Some commenters were puzzled by the scorching, but it's routine and unpuzzling to us. Here's an old post from 2009 � "Smoldering landscape. 'Looks like the day after a battle.' 'Did we just stumble into a forest fire?'":

[W]e ran into the forestry worker who was managing the burning � "prescribed fire" � there in Cherokee Marsh, and he explained how he did it and why. Black cherry trees are always threatening to clutter up the space under the big oaks, and red osier dogwood, if left to their own devices, would turn the marsh into a place where the cranes can't walk.

What I wanted people to notice were those humps distributed through the charred field! Those are huge ant hills, and I can verify that the ants did not perish in the fire. They were alive and kicking.

"Mission to Improve Global Health Through Insects won Climate Quest, a UW-Madison sustainability competition... for efforts to implement mealworms to improve malnutrition and climate in Zambia..."

"UW-Madison graduate students Rachel Bergmans and Valerie Stull... are creating samples of kits they plan to present this fall to communities in Zambia, where insects are already part of community diets... Stull and Bergmans have created recipes such as smoothies and cookies that include mealworms to help promote the consumption of insects."