Borage.

I'm not sure what borage is good for, aside from being a sure-fire way to bring lots of bees to your garden. And a lucky thing, too, because that's what My Darling B planted them for, I think.

They look pretty good in backlight, too.

The cow on Atwood Avenue has her thinking cap on.

What's she thinking about? It looks like she wants ideas for how to dress up for the next holiday season.

Plenty of suggestions seem to have been given to her. She's showing quite a few of them off for us to see.

What they'll settle on next seems to be anybody's guess, though.

I'm on tenterhooks.

Spotted outside Schwen's auto parts shop on Monona Drive on Thursday afternoon, this old-school Volkswagen microbus.

It doesn't have the safari windows but it does have the split wind screen and sliding side windows. The cargo door's split, too, not sliding, and the air intakes are louvers in the lower half of the body instead of the big, open scoops VW would put in the upper rear wings later on.

The headlights are recessed and the big, silver VW on the front is smack dab in the middle of that iconic dart. I'd love to have one of these in my driveway, but I'm pretty sure I don't make enough money to buy one even in this condition ... which is pretty good, really. Patch up the rust and it'd be gorgeous.

Although some of the softer stuff has been lost, most of the really important things are there. It wouldn't take too much to make this over into a like-new Veedub that would turn heads, not that it doesn't already.

I was a little surprise to see the the bucket seats. I expected something this old-school to have a bench seat in the front.

See? Still in great condition! Well, except for that passenger seat, but the driver's seat looked fine. It was all I could do to keep from slipping into it, just to get the feel of the wheel again, for old time's sake.

It's the thirtieth year of Art Fair On (and Off) The Square in Madison! Wouldn't this saxophone-playing hippo look great in your entryway?

Find the fish.

The guy who makes airplanes out of soda cans wasn't there this year, so the gal who makes fish out of tin is filling in.

If there was a better sculpture for the garden than Sam-I-Am with green eggs and ham, I didn't see it.

A curious thing about Art Fair On The Square is that it's attended by people who would love to buy something like this for the garden, but don't have anywhere near the kind of disposable income it would take to buy a piece like this. Mostly it's just people wandering around, taking photos and munching on two-dollar hot dogs.

"Girl With Her Head Chopped Off" would have made an excellent snack bowl to keep salsa chips in beside the sofa. Too bad the asking price was thirty kajillion dollars.

The sheer size of these artworks made them a show-stopper. If I owned a villa and had a couple hundred thousand dollars of disposable income, I might have taken a couple of these home to hang in the broom closet.

The vendor selling handcrafted bed steads placed this nasty-looking abortion right in the middle of his creation. I don't know if he had an odd sense of humor or it was an effort to keep people from photographing his work. So many of the artisans have a weird aversion to allowing photography of any of their pieces, as if we're going to steal their souls.

This guy did windows, combining lots of cut-glass ornamentation, ordinary cast-glass bowls and other fragments, and this metallic peacock.

Asking price: Forty-two million dollars

Frogs seemed to be everywhere at this year's Art Fair On The Square. There were realistic and fanciful frogs, frogs in sculpture, frogs in paintings, photographs of frogs. Must be something in the water.

The Cow on Atwood Avenue, dressed up in Independence Day Bunting for July.

BMW on Dayton Street

Why do the old BMWs look so much classier than the sleek, modern models? I'd rather drive this than anything BMW is putting on the road these days.

Memorial Day Parade in Monona 2009

Every parade I've ever been to has featured the guys that paint a face on their great big beer bellies and jiggle while "Colonel Bogey's March" plays on the loudspeaker. And the crowds just love them.

I used to drive one of these. although I never had the artistic bent that would have let me decorate it as lavishly as this and didn't have any friends at the time who would have done it for me.

Mine was a few years older than this model, but had the pop-top.

This one's been very nicely cared for. Besides the paint job, the body's in good shape and the interior appeared to be very well-preserved; not a lot of wear & tear evident.

I'd love to have one of these again, if only I had a place to garage it in the winter.