Two Cents Worth of Mad Men

Another new regulation just promulgated by Federal Trade Commission regarding bloggers: Everyone's now required to post at least once about Man Men. Gushing praise isn't mandatory, but if you have pretensions of being an intellectual, anything else is frowned on.

So this is my post. The Spindletop of praise for the series from the chattering classes, especially those commentators about the same age as Don Draper's older children, made me previously suspect that it's overrated. But I got around to renting the first few episodes on DVD recently, and it turned out to be high-quality entertainment. Not the absolute best thing ever on television (that would be this), but well worth watching for any number of reasons, most of which have been discussed in exhaustive and maybe exhausting detail elsewhere, even such minutiae as the typeface used in the series.

The show's high-sheen verisimilitude has been much noted, and for good reason, as has the way it hammers home the point that people behaved differently back then, at least about certain visible vices, a number of now-discredited social mores, and various questions of personal safety. Occasionally the show exaggerates this to the point of unbelievability. Not for a minute did I believe that Betty Draper (or very many mothers at all, even in 1960) would allow her small daughter to run around covered by a plastic dry cleaning bag.

Still, that's a quibble. I'll be renting more of the series, if only to follow the development of such a remarkable fictional character as Don Draper.

H1N1 Up Yer Nose

It was a classic drizzly November day today, with some periods of heavy rain. Grey skies throughout, except for a rim of sunlight from the west just before sunset. Anyway, it's damp out there and the trees are bare. It's only a matter of time before I see Orion in the evening sky and winter begins. I was up in the wee hours one night early last month and for some reason I had to go outside, and there he was with animal companion Canis Major. But that doesn't count. He has to be in the evening sky.

Lilly and Ann received swine flu immunizations up their nose today at school. So far Cook County has declined to likewise immunize the adults of our household. Last week I called the county's flu hotline and, amazingly, got a human being instead of a recorded message. I expressed interest in getting the vaccine, and she asked, "What disease do you have?"

That is, we have to have an existing health problem of some kind if we're between 25 and 64. Alas, we're too healthy right now to get shots from the county, the main advantage of which is the low, low cost -- not free, but no extra charge on top of the taxes we pay to support the the county health department. A rare thing in the hall of mirrors that is health-care pricing.

Cheap Numismatics

A Guam Quarter turned up in change lately. I'm glad that Guam got a quarter as one of the DC & Territorial series, which also includes DC, Puerto Rico, American Samoa, the USVI, and the Northern Marianas. But not US Minor Outlying Islands such as Navassa, home of goats but no people. Navassa also has an "informal" flag, according to FOTW Flags of the World. A completely uninspired design, if you asked me.

This disk also appeared lately at our house, though it's been with us a long time. I just ran across it in an unexpected spot.

It's 10 avos, or one-tenth of a pataca, which is still the currency of the Macau Special Administrative Region, as it's styled now. I got it in change in Macao in September 1990 and it's been in one container or another in my vicinity since then, at least until small hands got a hold of the coin sometime and put it our coffee table drawer.

Cheap oddities made by political entities that don't exist any more, or denominations that don't exist any more; that's what I like when it comes to numismatics. Such as a half-centavo from the U.S. Philippines.

A British West Africa penny. Note the Arabic script.

And two sen from Meiji Japan.

Not many people realize it, but the yen was originally divided into 100 sen, a denomination about as useful as a mill coin in our time would be, when 100 yen isn't quite enough to buy you a drink out of a vending machine.

The Years to Come

Classic November day of the non-drizzle variety -- gray skies throughout the day, cold but not quite freezing, occasional flights of geese making their way wherever it is geese go. The year's nearly gone and good riddance. The decade's nearly gone too, come to think of it, but it hardly seems worthy of the name. Back in the 20th century we had real decades, by gar.

Heard a discussion on the radio today about whether next year will be "Two Thousand Ten" or "Twenty Ten." Since it was NPR, they went to considerable lengths to quote people supporting both stylings, along with various arguments supporting their choices, some more ridiculous than others. Go with your ear, I say. "Two Thousand Ten" for me.

At some point in the next ten years, however, the year will shift to a "Twenty-" format, since 2020 is already called "Twenty Twenty." As the first one to end with "-teen," I suspect 2013 might be the dividing year, but it could also be 2012, since "Twenty Twelve" is fairly euphonious. Then again, the special-effects show in theaters now seems to be calling it "Two Thousand Twelve."

The first decades of the 20th century are little guide, aside from the fact that most of the people who lived through it are gone. "Nineteen" applied to each of the years from the beginning. That reminds me of Mr. Allen, my eighth-grade English teacher, one of whose pet peeves was "Nineteen Oh-One" and the like. He insisted it be pronounced "Nineteen One." His reasoning: "Oh is not a number." I'm pretty sure that in the more than 35 years since he told us that, almost everyone in the class has ignored him on that point. I know I have.

Item From the Past: The 15-Foot Confucius

We had a good visit to Tokyo in November 1993, but oddly enough I didn't write anything down about it. Or maybe I've misplaced the text. Still, I remember visiting such places as Yasukuni Shrine and its military museum, a place that raises hackles in other parts of Asia, as well as the considerably less controversial Tsukiji Market, the metro area's wholesale food market. We ate at a small sushi shop there. Expensive, but the best I've ever had.

We also went to the the Yushima Seido in the Yushima district, an unusual relic of Confucian learning in Japan. According Japan Visitor, "Yushima Seido was established by the Tokugawa shogunate in 1690 as a Confucian shrine and was made a center of Confucian learning (known as the shoheiko) -- one of the earliest institutes of higher education in Japan."

The place lost its government sponsorship after the Meiji Restoration, and its main hall burned down most recently in the Great Kanto Earthquake of 1923, but was later rebuilt. But that structure isn't what I remember. What better to have at a Confucian shrine than a tall statue of Confucius?

An interesting bit of work but not, as it turned out, a particularly old one, nor particularly Japanese. Japan Visitor: "Retrace your steps back down to the Nyutokumon and out left and down a few more steps to the giant 4.57m high bronze statue of Confucius, gifted the temple in 1975 by the Taipei Lions Club."

All Those in Favor Say Aye

"Green Fields of France," posted for Veterans Day, is fittingly somber, but it wasn't the only thing I chanced across while looking for a fittingly somber song to post. One place I found was the web site of the truly remarkable Cylinder Preservation and Digitization Project of the Donald C. Davidson Library of the University of California, Santa Barbara.

"With funding from the Institute of Museum and Library Services, the UCSB Libraries have created a digital collection of nearly 8,000 cylinder recordings held by the Department of Special Collections... On this site you will have the opportunity to find out more about the cylinder format, listen to thousands of musical and spoken selections from the late 19th and early 20th centuries, and discover a little-known era of recorded sound," the site says. It also asks for donations to advance this worthwhile project. As soon as I have any money to spare, I'll donate some.

In the meantime, we all can enjoy such remarkable bugs-in-amber as, "All Those in Favor Say Aye," a comic tune that could have only been recorded in 1919, as indeed it was. The song manages to advocate showing the recently deposed Kaiser Wilhelm the business end of a rope, as well as cleaning the bolsheviks' clocks, but fails to come up with a ringing endorsement of Prohibition. Here it is, for download or streaming.

The singer, the generally forgotten Arthur Fields, made a lot of recordings in his day, it seems, including some generally forgotten World War I songs. They're not necessarily songs that need much playing now, but the titles do make me smile: "Just Like Washington Crossed the Delaware, General Pershing Will Cross the Rhine," and "It's a Long Way to Berlin, But We'll Get There," both from 1918.

I also came across this, which at one time Dr. Demento considered one of the ten worst song titles ever (Book of Lists, 1977), though it doesn't seem to be on later on-line lists attributed to him. It should be.

Armistice Day 2009

The link to "Green Fields of France," for those reading on Facebook.

Good Morning, Captain

To judge by how many days characters from the show have shown up on the Google home page recently, the fellows who founded the search engine, or at least the one who passed his preschool years in Michigan rather than the Soviet Union, seem inordinately fond of Sesame Street. By the time it came along, I was too old for it. I don't actively dislike it, but I don't have a strong sentimental attachment either. Likewise for Yuriko, who reports that the show's Japanese version didn't exist until she was in junior high.

Were our children fond of Sesame Street? No more than their parents, it seems. When Lilly was young enough for it, I was working in an office while it was on. But I heard that she was a little scared of Big Bird, which put a damper on things for her. "Birds shouldn't be that big," was her reasoning. Which makes me wonder: For all his good-guy pretensions, does Big Bird occasionally go out late and commit a few hate crimes against cats? You know, just to even the score?

As for Ann, she would watch it sometimes, but back in her PBS Kids days other shows commanded her attention more. Some of which were annoying pablum (Caillou), while others had modest charms (Arthur). Unfortunately, neither of my daughters had the benefit of a kid's show that taught the valuable lesson, as I learned, that ping-pong balls might fall on you at any time.

Vaccine Demand vs. Vaccine Supply

The road to public health is a bumpy one. Right after their school was over today, Lilly and Ann and I went to the Hoffman Estates municipal building for seasonal flu shots. Theirs, since I've had mine. We noticed right away that things were different this year because a line snaked out the door. Last year, there was a short line for the shots but a longer one to vote absentee in the presidential election. I guess it depends what's on the top of the public mind.

I need to stress that the clinic was offering seasonal flu vaccinations, as it does every year. A number of signs taped to the doors, and the walls along the way, said as much as well: WE DO NOT HAVE H1N1 VACCINATIONS. Sign of the times.

We waited a while, not an intolerably long while, but just before we'd made our way to the table at which you file out your forms, a woman with the clinic told us that the stock of vaccine had been clean run through. Plumb used up. Gone like a sailor's pay on Sunday morning. None of those were her exact words, but she did say that they weren't expecting such a crush of people.

So we left with some dispatch. I wanted to get out of the parking lot before word got through to the people in line behind us, who would then all want to leave at about the same time, like at the end of a concert. Before we left, we did hear from the kindly clinic lady that there will be another clinic, but she didn't know when. Maybe when Togo and Balto manage to bring more vaccine to Hoffman Estates.

Item From the Past: Grant's Tomb

On Saturday, I could sit out on the deck and eat lunch, and then read, without thinking about how various parts of me were getting cold. On Sunday, I could do it again. So I did. How often does this happen in November? Just about never.

But there have been a good number of good walking days in November, as opposed to sitting around outside. On Sunday, November 5, 2000, I had a fine walk around parts of Manhattan that were new to me, including the Columbia University campus, the Cathedral of St. John the Divine, and this structure:

It's Grant's Tomb, a remarkable edifice, and officially the General Grant National Memorial in Riverside Park. According to the National Park Service, "Approximately 90,000 people from around the world donated over $600,000 towards the construction of Grant's Tomb. [In big, fat 1890s dollars, mind you.] This was the largest public fundraising effort ever at that time. Designed by architect John Duncan, the granite and marble structure was completed in 1897 and remains the largest mausoleum in North America. Over one million people attended the parade and dedication ceremony of Grant's Tomb on April 27, 1897."