Laissez le Super Tuesday roulette!

Image found here.

In some sort of socio-political Harmonic Convergence, it is Super-Fat Tuesday. How appropriate, no? Both celebrations of excess, for certain, and more than a little frivolity and triviality before the much more serious business of Lent/the conventions and General Election. As I write this, my daughters in Mobile--the birthplace of Mardi Gras celebrations in this country--are preparing to head downtown to the parades with, oh, a couple hundred thousand or so others to catch moonpies and beads and doubloons and cups and, if they're lucky, a stuffed animal or two. Meanwhile, hundreds of thousands of our fellow citizens will be caucusing or voting today/tonight.

Is this a great country, or what?

Anyway, before we become intoxicated in the usual way or via political excesses, I wanted to post links to a few things that caught my eye/ear this morning:

Over at Crooked Timber, Michael Bérubé replays a replay from Super Sunday. I must have been getting a beer when Messers. Buck and Aikman engaged in that debate over Wittgenstein.

Two stories from NPR: First, this story on The Walden Project, in which a teacher uses Thoreau's ideas to teach high school students to understand "community" as a web connecting not just people to each other but each of us to nature.

Second, there's this story about the music of Stephen Scott, "The Bowed Piano: Fishing for a New Sound": 10 musicians stand around a grand piano and do various things to its strings to produce truly beautiful, elegant music. Be sure to listen to a selection or two.

Finally, over at Domestic Issue, my new blog, I have a short teaser post on the colonial Latin American genre known as casta ["caste"] paintings. I hope to have a little time this weekend to post something more substantive on these paintings; really, though, the larger point of this notice is just to let you know I finally have a wee bit of new content over there.

Happy Super-Fat Tuesday, y'all.