Good morning.
Thursday in Whitewater will be sunny with a high of 73. Sunrise is 6:57 and sunset 6:28 PM for 11h 31m 19s of daytime. The moon is a waning gibbous with 60.7% of its visible disk illuminated.
Whitewater’s Landmarks Committee meets at 6 PM.
On this day in 1813, The Army of the Northwest defeats a British and Native Canadian force threatening Detroit.
Whitewater is a place of outstanding natural beauty, with a fair number of wild mammals moving through, although I don’t believe that we’ve yet had a visit from bears. Nearby communities have had bear sightings, but we have not had bears in town. See Black bears in Wisconsin, here’s what you should know (“according to information found on a Facebook page titled: “Walworth County Scanner Updates,” black bears have been spotted, as reported by commenters on the site, near Whitewater and Elkhorn.”)
As it turns out, it’s Fat Bear Week in America. If it’s a celebratory week in America, then it’s also that week in Wisconsin; if Wisconsin, then Whitewater. About the week, Natalie B. Compton reports For Fat Bear Week, a close-up look at lifestyles of the fat and famous:
KATMAI NATIONAL PARK AND PRESERVE, Alaska — You won’t be able to hear a bear walking behind you here. Despite weighingaround1,000 pounds, the park’s 2,200 brown bears are inordinately quiet. But you will register their roars from deep in the woods. And the snapping of salmon spines when an apex predator cracks open a cold one.
Those sounds are particularly loud in a “bear vortex,” which is how wildlife guide and photographer Jon Kuiper describes being surrounded by four bears. A “bear-nado” means you’re at the center of six bears. Eight bears is a “bear-nami,” and “double digits is just like, ‘bear-icane,’” said Kuiper, 35, who’s earned the nickname “Bear Daddy.” He has a large tattoo of his favorite bear, 32 “Chunk,” on his right triceps.Kuiper works at Brooks Lodge at Brooks Camp, arguably the best place in the world to see swarms of bears up close.
We may not see any bears, fat or skinny, in Whitewater this week; we may see some in the years ahead.
(NB: a normal community is a place of many people and many activities. It’s possible, and now necessary more than ever, to balance admiration for the natural, the privately charitable, and the politically worthy while also committing to a long campaign against the politically unworthy. A well-individuated person submits the latter to a relentless critique so that it does not stain those former wonders and pursuits. Best of all, almost a blessing one might say: those better wonders and pursuits will sustain normal people in an attritional campaign against the politically unworthy.)
France races to stamp out bedbugs before Olympics: