"The scope of what some museums now call 'rapid response collecting' has expanded significantly in recent years."

"Curators often mingle with crowds, scoop up fliers and ask people to part with signs, or perhaps a piece of clothing. Such collecting has taken place at demonstrations around the death of Freddie Gray in Baltimore in 2015, and during the 2014 protests in Ferguson, Mo., after the death of Michael Brown."

From "Museums Collect Protest Signs to Preserve History in Real Time/Curators surveyed the area outside the White House on Wednesday for artifacts that will help record the emotional turmoil" (NYT).

They swoop in.

This morning, driving to the sunrise, at the turtle crossing, we saw birds picking over the smashed body of a plate-sized turtle.



I thought: How mean of the birds. But the birds didn't smash the turtle. Yes, but they delighted in the corpse.

At the Third Quarter Café...

... you can talk about whatever you like.

At the Waning Gibbous Café...

... you can wax eloquent.

And you can shop though the Althouse Portal to Amazon.

"I don't want to touch an object," I found myself saying, socially distancingly.

The sun was rising, and 3 young women...



... had asked me if I'd take a picture of them — the kind of request I've always happily agreed to. And here I was being stand-offish, in the manner of a person with OCD because they wanted to hand me their phone. It's covid19world, and we're all OCD now, so I couldn't go along with that, and I knew they'd understand. Actually, they'd probably have understood in pre-covid19world and simply regarded me as a person with a disability to be treated with empathy.

But in  pre-covid19world,  covid19world, and  post-covid19world, there is a solution to the problem of not wanting to touch the other person's phone. You don't need to refuse the lovely social opportunity to take someone's picture for them. It's AirDrop. Take a photograph on your own iPhone and AirDrop it to their phone. You just have to remember, and fortunately I did.

It was nice to encounter some young people, up for a 5:40 sunrise, experiencing our strange time with optimism. Nothing more optimistic than a sunrise.

The walk back from the vantage point had the sun at our back and the fading Flower Moon up ahead. I always love when Meade sings. He began "When the moon...." but it wasn't the "When the moon" song that I thought it was. There are at least 3 well-known songs that begin "When the moon...." Which is the first one that you think of? Two are optimistic but they take entirely different paths of optimism. The other one is sad. I don't know why the sad one is the one I thought of, such a sad old Depression-Era song...

"Mid-morning and still no new Althouse post. I'm beginning to feel isolated."

Said Sebastian at 8:52 a.m. in last night's café... which was just as I was finally getting around to working up a post — published, below, at 8:58.

It wasn't just a matter of needing to get out to see the moon refuse to set...



It was also the news itself. I was reading around in my usual manner and not finding anything suitable (not until that one thing you see below). There's a great deal about the coronavirus, but I'm not just doing news updates here, I don't repeat things I've already done, and there's the ineffable feeling of blogginess, without which I won't blog. Please consider the absence of posts in that light.

Sebastian's comment struck me, because it's either sad or funny. We are taking on isolation, and, in fact, one of the articles I read this morning and rejected as non-bloggable was something about how going on line and engaging with social media would not work in the context of isolation taken on in response to coronavirus. It felt concocted out of old material about how social media isn't a good enough substitute for in-the-flesh relationships. Just add coronavirus, and you've got another coronavirus article. I'm not a vector for that.

Anyway, good morning.

Your blogger at sunrise.

Photo of me by Meade:



And, thanks to Meade, I got to pose, unaware, in a panorama along with the sun and the moon (click and click again to enlarge):

Morning story.