The West Gallery of the State Capitol in the evening.

If I could live anywhere in Madison, I'd love to move into The Baskerville on Hamilton Street.

Not only would I be able to walk through these doors every day, but I'd be less than one block away from capitol square and right across the street from the Tornado!

The Tornado on Main Street must have been a pretty swank place at one time ... and it still may be — I have yet to visit. The sign out back dates the Tornado to the neon era.




And the neon still burns strong! Here's the sign at the Hamilton Street entrance of the Tornado by night.

Michelangelo's on State Street (although this is the Carroll Street entrance). Our favorite coffee shop in Madison, if not in Wisconsin.

What's up, Doc? He's lost his carrot, and he's putting on a bit of weight. A martini-drinking Bugs Bunny on the side of a building, Carroll Street.

This is the Steensland mansion on Carroll Street, owned by the Bethel Lutheran Church, which has used it for years as a thrift shop. The shop will close on November 30th, and the fate of the mansion is uncertain.

The mansion was built in 1896 and is quite ornate. The walls inside the first floor of the house are covered with tin plate pressed with a floral design, and all the wood trim is carved with these faces and curlicues.

The ornate turned rail and paneled stairway to the second floor of the house.

I took a walk north along Carroll Street today to look at the old mansions. Most are now subdivided into apartments but this one didn't appear to be, and was beautifully kept up.

The first patch of ice I found this season had an interesting mosaic of leaves caught inside.

Steam curled up from the surface of Lake Monona in the frigid temps yesterday morning, even after the sun had been up for several hours.

Snows first began to fall the night before, but by noon yesterday traces were beginning to collect on the ground, barely noticeable around the base of the lonely tree at the entrance to the Central Public Library.

Snow flurries in capital square in Madison at about one o'clock yesterday. Temps dropped through the day until they reached the teens last night.

Main Street in downtown Madison at about four-thirty last night as flurries brought the first snow to the city.

Snow swirls through the floodlights around the capital dome at about four-thirty yesterday evening.

What happened to the wireless access in the Starbuck's on cap square, dammit? It's supposed to be there! I wouldn't have even thought of going in there except they were supposed to have wireless access, and I had about a half-hour to check the morning news, so I settled in with a cup of coffee but when I fired up the laptop — no access! Just a signal from another nearby laptop, probably searching for a signal from Starbuck's, too. And the coffee wasn't that good. I'd much rather drink the good stuff at Michelangelo's.

Amtrak Director David Gunn Fired

And why should you care? Is there a reason any longer for America to have a cross-country passenger railroad service running on a regular schedule? The thickly-populated east and west coast have almost always needed a fast, reliable mass transit system, but few people seem to want to ride the train from coast to coast, chosing instead the speed of airline travel.

Congress has kept Amtrak afloat, but only with a metaphoric nose above the water by providing it a little over a billion dollars each year, the barest minimum subsidy. (Commerical airlines and road maintenance, it is worth noting, received subsidies worth hundreds of billions each year.) The Bush administration this year proposed a subsidy for Amtrak of $630 million and demanded that it find a way to make the railroad pay for itself, something no major passenger railroad has ever done.

Gunn was reported to "clash" with the Amtrak Board of Directors, all of whom were appointed by President Bush, most of them to interim appointments that will expire when Congress retires from the current session. Is it possible they'll appoint a new director with no ties to the Bush administration, a director who will miraculously find a way to run the railroad at a profit on a budget of a billion dollars a year?

I figure it this way: Cross-country passenger trains will be cut back to next to nothing, if not eliminated entirely, when states refust to fund passenger rail within their borders. The bulk of Amtrak's subsidies will end up in the northeast corridor. California will fund their passenger rail largely on their own, maybe with a small subsidy.

Faith Healer Loses Patient During Routine Miracle

The American Faith-Healing Association issued a statement saying that trinity-invocation and snake-handling guidelines were followed during the procedure. [link to The Onion]

Too Much Sex On TV? What Channel Are YOU Watching?

I read in the paper today that seventy percent of all television shows include an average of five sex scenes each and every hour. Five sex scenes every hour? I don't watch a lot of television, but I've never seen any show with five sex scenes in it. What are they counting? Kissing? I see more sex flipping through the pages of one issue of The Onion than I do in an evening of watching television. They've got to be watching channels that I don't get.