The battleship Wisconsin, reduced to a size that's easy to display, at the Veteran's Museum on Mifflin Street in cap square. She plied the high seas with The Great White Fleet in the age of the dreadnaughts. That's the helmsman's wheel from the real thing off in the background.

A dive-bomber's-eye-view. The modeler put a lot of love into this one. Sadly, the artist's name isn't posted beside the model.

This version of Wisconsin, built to slightly larger specs, was launched on the anniversary of the Pearl Harbor attack. She's a sister to the Might Mo.

Again, the modeling is exquisite. Rigging the antennae alone must have required hands as steady as stone.
Again from above. When all the guns were blazing to hold off an attack, it must have looked, sounded and smelled like the crack of doom vomiting hellfire at the sky.


Wisconsin's fantail. How many sailors did it take to swab that clean?


The full-sized Wisconsin is still afloat and maintained as a museum in Norfolk, Virginia.

The Philosophy of Beer Drinking, in t-shirt form (part II):

Because the beer fest was inside the tent (instead of around the outsides of the tents, as it was at the Great Taste of the Midwest), I had some trouble getting a clear shot in the low light.

This happy sampler's t-shirt reads, "fizzy yellow beer is for wussies."

This guy was in a hurry to meet somebody at the other end of the tent and I couldn't catch his attention to make him stop a moment, so I had to take several snapshots on the fly. The final word of this "Scottish proverb" is thirst.

Quivey's Grove beer fest ... the carefully posed photo:

And what we really looked like:
(blurred vision and all)

I tried to take a couple photos of our beer-guzzling group by holding the camera at arm's length and snapping away. A fellow taster, passing by, offered to take a proper shot of us. He did a great job (and thanks very much), but I can't help feeling that the bottom photo better captured the mood, the action and the fuzzy-headedness of the event.

The beer fest at Quivey's Grove is one big tent (as opposed to three big ones and several smaller ones at the Great Taste of the Midwest). The brewers set up on tables around the outer edge of the tent so you can circle it once around the inside to make sure you try everything, a pretty clever way to keep things simple for twenty-five hundred soon-to-be-drunken ticket holders.

I made it all the way around the tent this year and tried at least one beer from every vendor. I think Jim and Gabe may have tried every beer, but I haven't had a chance to confirm that. It's too early in the morning to risk waking them from what I'm sure is much-needed sleep.