Been There, Seen That

Come to Australia, You Might Accidently Get Killed

2012-01-26T19:14:00.000-06:00

It's that time of year again, that is, Australia Day. Unfortunately I've lost touch with my Australian friends from the early '90s, but I hope they're well. I understand that staying well can be a tough proposition down under.

“The taipan is the one to watch out for. It is the most poisonous snake on Earth, with a lunge so swift and a venom so potent that your last mortal utterance is likely to be: 'I say, is that a sn--' ”

― Bill Bryson

Knock 'Em Down

2012-01-25T23:35:00.006-06:00

The February 2012 issue of Boys' Life arrived in the mail today. I was happy to see one of my articles in it, on a two-page spread.

"Knock 'Em is the fitting title, since it's about building demolition. What boy doesn't like to see things knocked down? I enjoyed writing it, too, learning such things as exactly what a shaped charge is.

Nice work by the editors and graphic artists. In these hard times for print magazines, BL is still a class act.

Pointing Out the Pointers

2012-01-24T19:00:00.003-06:00

Early last week, Ann asked me to go outside with her and point out some stars. She'd been studying the sky in school. It was one of the clear but cold nights just before we actually got snow around here, but I was only too happy to oblige. The sky's not very dark in the suburbs, but dark enough for me to show her some basic items, including the way that the easy-to-identify Big Dipper and Cassiopeia appear to circle the North Star tightly.

After we went inside, she said down and drew this. Not for school, just because she wanted to.

Spot-on, except for the minor detail that the Pointers actually refer to Dubhe (α) and Merak (β) at the edge of the Big Dipper's bowl, not Cassiopeia and the Big Dipper itself. I showed her that when you draw a line from Merak to Dubhe and beyond, it will point to Polaris (without bothering with the stars' formal names; I never can remember which is which, anyway). It's unlikely that she'll ever forget how to find the North Star.

This evening the sky was layered with high thin clouds, but when I went out to the garage I could still see a thin-crescent setting Moon (new moon was yesterday), a bright Venus above that, and a less bright but still visible Jupiter high in the southern sky. I went inside and asked the girls to come look at the sky. Lilly didn't want to, citing the cold (only about freezing), but Ann went. The Moon, she said, looked like a smiley face.

The Coke Freeze

2012-01-23T19:23:00.005-06:00

So there I was, shoveling snow from the driveway late Saturday morning. Frozen precipitation had visited northern Illinois on Friday in quantity. Unless there's a snow blower active nearby, shoveling snow is a fairly quiet time: the softened hum of traffic in the distance, your own breath, or panting, the thump of your pre-heart attack heart beat, the tap-tap-tap-tap-tap of a woodpecker. Wait, what?

It usually isn't until March sometime that I hear the characteristic woodpecker pecking, but I heard tapping from a tree above, with eight or so inches of snow on the ground below. It didn't fit. I looked around and there it was, tapping away, high in a neighbor's tree. Maybe the winter has been so warm -- until about 10 days ago -- that there were some grubs in that tree for the bird. Or maybe he just likes showing off.

The January cold has taken its toll, especially on a Coke can accidentally left outside of the garage refrigerator. The contents expanded and the top popped off. I decided it needed to be documented.

This is the bottom of the can, compared with one that didn't freeze.

This is the can, viewed from above. To make the can stand up, I put a stapler next to it.

The frozen contents look a little unappetizing, but after the frozen Coke slush melted, it was drinkable.

Item From the Past: A Day Off For LBJ

2012-01-22T19:18:00.002-06:00

A few years ago while visiting my mother, I found this scrap of pink paper tucked away among the few relics of my time in grade school, the same place I found this photograph. I don't know why I kept it. Maybe I knew I'd have a special interest in dead presidents some day, but more likely I put it away because it was unusual.

January 24, 1973

NO CLASSES THURSDAY, JAN. 25TH

School will not be held in the Alamo Heights School District on Thursday, January 25, 1973 to honor the memory of former President Lyndon B. Johnson. No make-up is required as the action is authorized by the Texas Education Agency.

For your information, we will have school on February 19 and March 16. These are the make-up days for the "ice holidays." Please change your school calendars accordingly.

George M. Moore, Principal

The school made this announcement during my last year there, sixth grade. Of course, Lyndon Johnson had died two days earlier, on January 22, 1973, of a heart attack, and his funeral was held on the 25th at the National City Christian Church in Washington. No doubt it was televised. I have no memory of watching the funeral or anything else I did that day. I just know I wasn't in school. Texas was honoring one of its own.

The "ice holidays" had happened earlier in January. We got out of school from two whole days because of an ice/snow storm on January 11 (I had to look up that date). We got all of 0.8 inches of snow that day, according to the NWS, but I suppose the ice really shut things down. We did not know -- could hardly imagine -- that there would be another winter storm on the night of February 8, 1973, leaving more than two inches on the ground. The next day was a Friday, which we got off. I don't remember making it up, but we must have.

Those were the only times I got off school for snow during the entire 11 years I went to school in San Antonio. And the only time I got off for a presidential death, all during the same few weeks.

George Moore, incidentally, was the only principal we'd ever had at Woodridge (we, as in the students who finished in 1973). According to this short history of the school, he had been principal since the unimaginably distant year of 1962, but would only be there until 1974. I don't remember much about him, except that he always wore a coat and tie.

Brazil, Where the Nuts Come From

2012-01-19T21:20:00.001-06:00

The following description from a product label just about made my day. Sometimes that's all it takes. The product is a can of mixed nuts, nearly empty now, because they are tasty mixed nuts. For the record, Southern Grove brand, sold at Aldi.

The can says: "Peanuts product of USA and Argentina and Mexico, Cashews product of Vietnam and India and Brazil, Almonds product of USA, Brazil Nuts product of Peru and Bolivia and Brazil, Hazelnuts product of Turkey and USA, Pecans product of Mexico and USA."

An international festival of nuts, if there ever was one. I was glad to learn that at least some of the Brazil nuts come from Brazil. Also, I stumbled across the Brazil nut effect because of a Google autocomplete. I knew it was worth getting out of bed today, even with temps in the single digits.

The Model of a Modern Major Plutocrat

2012-01-18T23:08:00.002-06:00

Another cold day. January has settled into its normal routine, figuring better late than never.

I'm no expert on the architecture of the Internet nor copyright law, but SOPA and PIPA sound like bad ideas. And with friends like the RIAA and Rupert Murdoch, what bill needs enemies? As for Murdoch, he couldn't be more of a caricature of a plutocrat if he tried. Of course, it helps that he is a plutocrat. The last of the old-fashioned robber barons? Time will tell.

Not that robber barons will go away, just the old-fashioned kind. At this point in his life, rather than bitching about Google, or like King Cnut commanding it to recede, the least Murdoch can do is build an insanely lavish home, if he hasn't already (I'm not up on his residential properties). That way it can be a future tourist attraction along the lines of the Hearst Castle, the Breakers (Vanderbilt's property in RI, not the hotel in Palm Beach) or Biltmore. That kind of project should be on the bucket list of any robber baron worth his salt.

Car Meets Tree

2012-01-17T19:14:00.001-06:00

Icy roads this morning. And ice has its consequences. Today I noticed evidence of a recent car-tree encounter (in the morning, probably) in my neighborhood and decided to document it. I saw tire tracks, made by one side of a vehicle, running from the street straight into a tree. A fainter, parallel track runs the same direction. I assume that that side of the car didn't gouge the ground very much.

This shot gives a better idea of the size of the tree -- fairly large -- and that the car must have glanced off it back toward the road. The car must have been damaged, but maybe not so much that it couldn't drive away. As the next photo shows, other tire tracks led away from the tree.

I took a pic of the base of the tree, but it's hard to see anything that in the image. It looked like the tree suffered some chipping near its base, but otherwise it didn't look too badly damaged. No evidence of paint flecks or the like, but then again it was too cold for me to linger. Still, it's an example of speeding car + patch of ice = bad day for someone.

Let Your LOVE Lights Shine

2012-01-16T21:50:00.004-06:00

Cold over most of the weekend, enough to keep the snow on the ground, but then we had an MLK Day warmup today with partial meltage. A random survey of suburban houses, also today -- that is, what I saw as I drove along -- revealed only one set of holiday lights still glowing, some small strings on a few bushes near the house.

But I also saw some Valentine’s lights. That was a first. Fairly modest by Christmas standards, but outdoor decorative lights all the same: white and pink, one heart-shaped, one Cupid, and one that spelled out LOVE. Are companies that specialize in holiday lighting are looking for the next market-expander?

Maybe in a few centuries, people will be astonished that no one lit up for Valentine’s Day before the mid-21st century. After all, marketing is sometimes astonishingly effective in inventing romantic notions (e.g., diamond engagement rings). Or it could be that the notion of romantic love as a basis for marriage will have been discarded, replaced by a psycho-genetic compatibility algorithm.

Item From the Past: The Salt Lick

2012-01-15T22:23:00.003-06:00

Driftwood, Texas, in the Hill Country west of Austin, has a number of charms, but the one I remember best is The Salt Lick. It does one thing and does it well: barbecue. In January 1993, Yuriko and I stopped by on the recommendation of an Austinite friend, and feasted on beef, sausage and pork ribs -- you can get all that on one plate, and we did.

The Salt Lick Pavilion, a venue for large events, is located near the restaurant itself. "An 8,000 Sq. Ft. Open Air Pavilion on the Banks of Onion Creek, a Scenic Setting Available for Private Parties, Weddings, Receptions, Company Picnics & Seminars," as the sign puts it.

I'm glad to know that Salt Lick is still around, and in fact has another location in Round Rock, Texas, northeast of Austin, and an outpost at Austin-Bergstrom International Airport. One of these days, I'm going to visit again. I'm sure the other locations are fine, but I'll hold out for the original, sitting at the long tables of the Salt Lick in Driftwood.

Winterlude

2012-01-12T19:04:00.002-06:00

Sure enough, we had a "snow event" today. Not a dramatic blizzard, just a steady snowfall starting at about 9 a.m. and continuing lightly even now. It's adding up, but not enough to impede ground travel that much. I ducked outside for a moment at about 3 p.m. for the customary first-snow snapshot. This was the view from the back door, looking roughly southwest.

We're ready for it. Ann was ready for it weeks ago, often sporting the cap she got for Christmas.

Snow Event, Dead Ahead

2012-01-11T18:52:00.002-06:00

Those wise in the ways of meteorology say that soon we will have snow we can trudge through -- would that be trudgable snow cover? -- here in northern Illinois. Blanketing the entire Midwest, in fact. One headline screams: BIG Snow Event Headed for the Midwest!

How many inches would that be? Three to seven here. I realize it hasn't snowed much this year, but that's only a mid-sized snow event. This is a BIG snow event.

But I guess it's about time. Weather.com tells me that "according to the NOAA/NOHRSC, a mere 15.8 percent of the Lower 48 States had snow on the ground Tuesday. Last year at this time, that figure was just under 62 percent."

I was interested to learn that NOHRSC, which needs a snappier acronym, is the National Operational Hydrologic Remote Sensing Center, an arm of the National Weather Service that does national snow analyses, among other things. It's headquartered in Frostbite Falls, Minnesota.

I mean, Chanhassen, Minnesota, which I'm sure is a lovely suburb of Minneapolis, but it would be more interesting if the organization that keeps track of the national snow cover, and which is a "remote" sensing center, was somewhere remote. On the shores of the Lake of the Woods, maybe in the Northwest Angle.

Incident at Ranger Pond

2012-01-10T18:58:00.000-06:00

The car-in-pond incident yesterday was unusual enough to merit a short article in today's Daily Herald. According to the paper, it was a one-car accident. That's not what a store employee outside for a cig told me yesterday -- he said two cars -- but I think I'll go along with the newspaper in this case.

"A woman was treated for mild hypothermia after driving her vehicle about 40 feet into a Hanover Park pond early Monday evening, according to fire department officials," Paul Biasco wrote. "Rescue crews responded to Ranger Pond, located just off Barrington Road about two blocks north of Irving Park Road at 5:30 p.m. and fond [sic] the small passenger vehicle in the middle of the pond, said Hanover Park Fire District Batallion Chief Eric Fors.

"The driver, who is in her 30s, was driving north on Barrington Road when her car left the roadway and ended up in the pond, according to Hanover Park Police Deputy Chief Tom Cortese. The vehicle was about 40 to 50 feet from the shoreline, fire department officials said."

That's what it looked like to me -- right in the middle of the pond. Since the pond is so shallow, I guess it was possible for her car to drive along the bottom until flooding caused engine failure.

I like that phrasing: "her car left the roadway." What was the driver doing at the time? The newspaper account mentioned mild hypothermia, but maybe she has worse medical problems than that, the kind that cause blackouts. Or maybe she wanted to end it all, in which case she needed a colder day and a deeper pond. At least she didn't take out another car or some pedestrians.

Ranger Pond? I never knew it had a name.

Car in the Drink

2012-01-09T21:08:00.001-06:00

At about 5:30 this afternoon, I left my usual grocery store, and in the major thoroughfare beyond the large parking lot was a collection of emergency vehicles, lit up and ready for action. A ladder truck, a pumper, an ambulance (or two?), cops and more. One of the store employees, out for a cigarette, said there'd been a two-car crash, and that the Jaws of Life had been involved. Also, something about a car driving into a pond.

On the other side of the thoroughfare is a large pond ringed by a footpath. I put away my groceries and walked across the parking lot to the thoroughfare. A knot of people stood there, looking across the street. So I did too. All of the emergency vehicles and first responders were on the other side of the street, and two lanes (out of four) were still occupied with traffic -- slow moving traffic, but moving -- so I decided it was wise to stay on my side of the street to see what I could see.

At first I couldn't see it, but then the outline emerged: the top of a small blue car, halfway submerged in the pond. Its emergency lights flashed. I couldn't see anyone by the car, either occupants or rescuers, but a sizable crowd of onlookers stood on the far side of the pond. The car was smack in the middle of the pond. How did it get there, assuming it came from the thoroughfare? Did it run off the road and then float there by its momentum? Well, maybe. At least it wasn't upside down, which would have made escaping the car harder.

Bad day for someone. But at least the car ran into merely cold water, rather than icy cold water, as would have been the case in almost every other January.

No Country for Old Christmas Trees

2012-01-08T18:57:00.003-06:00

The curious snowless winter continues. There has to be some downside to this, besides a loss in seasonal income for workers that specialize in snow-related activity, but I'm hard pressed to think of what. No ice lurking on the sidewalks, no biting winds in my face, lower heating costs: all good things. But maybe waves of vicious insects that a cold winter would have otherwise killed in their pre-larval stage will rise to plague us in the summer. Guess we'll have to take that chance.

It's the time of year to anthropomorphize your Christmas tree. "Say, what are those plastic tubs you've put next to me?" the tree wants to ask. "I seem to remember them from somewhere."

Christmas trees, as a rule, have poor memories. The last time the decoration storage tubs were near the tree was about a month ago.

"When is it going to be time again for another -- I don't know what it was, but I seemed to be the center of attention," the tree further muses. "The small ones came to me and seemed quite excited. They spent a while right there on the floor, opening boxes and eating something. I thought that was a good time. Let's do it again. Ah, you're taking a few things off me. Good. I felt a little cluttered anyway..."

So it goes for another year. I never did get a good picture of the '11 Christmas tree. So here's one from 2005, taken on Christmas morning. That tree looks about the same as this year's tree. The girls, on the other hand, seem a bit different now.

Franks Diner, Kenosha, Wisconsin

2012-01-05T22:32:00.002-06:00

I've been to a diner or two in the Upper Midwest. But none quite like Franks Diner in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We were there recently, as a side trip to another southern Wisconsin destination. It's one of those places whose charms are not visible from the sidewalk.

Enter through the unremarkable front door and inside you find something much more remarkable: a genuine rail car-style diner dating from the 1920s surrounded by that brick exterior, which was added later (but probably not too much later). The main room, long and narrow -- narrow as a rail car -- features a stone-top counter with 18 stools and a narrow food-service area behind the counter, complete with a large griddle given over mostly to the preparation of Franks' specialty, the Garbage Plate, more about which later.

The place had that diner smell: eggs and meats and hash browns and coffee. It also had that diner sound: the murmur of conversation, workers calling to each other, silverware scraping plates, metal clinking metal, the hiss of the griddle.

It was packed. A row of people sat at the counter, while others were at booths in the small rooms added to the counter room. A line of people waited for their seats in a long row behind the people at the counter. When seating was free, the people at the front of the line squeezed between the people sitting at the counter and the people behind them in line to reach either empty counter seats, or a small door that went to the rooms with the booths.

Franks Diner has a history. The Jerry O'Mahony Diner Co., a corporation whose specialty is long lost, built the original rail car-style diner in 1926 in Bayonne, NJ. Taken to Kenosha by flatcar, "there was some real excitement in downtown Kenosha when six horses pulled Franks Diner to the spot where it stands today," notes the Franks Diner web site. "Anthony Franks, who first learned of the unique restaurant opportunity through a magazine article, paid $7,500 plus $325 in shipping charges to launch his business. He added a dining room in 1935 and a larger kitchen in the mid 1940s."

I have to add that $7,825 in 1926 dollars was quite a risk, totaling more than $95,500 in current dollars. Mr. Franks must have really wanted to make a go of it, and I'm glad to say that the Franks family owned the joint until 2001. The current owners have only had it for about a year, and apparently have not meddled with success. At one point, an enormous man -- large of height, large of stomach, bald and wearing a white apron with food stains -- emerged from the back kitchen, and by his conversation with someone else, I knew he was one of the co-owners. "Did you have a good year?" I asked him. "It's been great," he said.

Diner authenticity is one thing, but without Franks' great food, the restaurant would have vanished long ago. The star of the show is its Garbage Plate, a concoction of hash-brown potatoes, eggs, green peppers, onions, jalapeños (if you want them), and a choice of three or fewer meats (or including no meat). The thing is seriously large. The standard Garbage Plate has five eggs, while the half plate has three. Most of the people I saw leaving Franks were carrying to-go boxes probably full of garbage, so to speak. Yuriko and Lilly split a full Garbage Plate, and I was able to sample some. Wow. My own meal, a couple of large pancakes, was superb, but not as good as garbage.

The Wasabi Kit Kat

2012-01-04T23:04:00.004-06:00

January brought winter cold, but no snows yet. Odd how I've been acclimated to snow. It seems like something is missing, and I guess it is. But I expect we'll get slapped with a blizzard before too long -- just not this weekend, which will be in the 40s, they say.

Nestle does not make wasabi-flavored Kit Kat chocolates for the U.S. market, but I got a hold of "fun-sized" one recently, a genuine example of made-in-Japan-but-not-for-export candy. That's true even though there's an English slogan on the package: Have a break, have a Kit Kat.® Japanese packaging is peculiar that way, and I've given up trying to figure it out.

At first, the taste is standard Kit Kat chocolate. But then you sense a faint but unmistakable hint of wasabi, the same spice as on sushi, though dialed down considerably. It's strange. It's completely out of place. It must be an acquired taste. I don't think it's ever going be exported to this country, so few will be the Americans who acquire the taste. I will not be one of them.

We’ve Wandered Many a Weary Foot

2012-01-03T19:22:00.005-06:00

Another new year. It's just now sinking in. But not just any year -- a leap year, an election year, an Olympiad and the 30th anniversary of the release of "The Safety Dance."

This New Year's Eve was almost Lilly's first with friends, rather than her family, but the party fell through. Next year, I figure, they'll pull it off. Gathering for the new year is something youth should do.

Last summer, a high school friend of mine published this picture on Facebook, and she's kindly letting me put it here. It dates from December 31, 1981, during a gathering of high school friends a few years after we'd finished high school.

I'm actually in it -- barely. That's the edge of my leg, arm and head on the left. At least, I'm fairly certain that's me. Left to right from there, top: Tom, Catherine, George, Ellen, Lynn, Louis, Elysse, Tom, Debbie; bottom: Stephen, John, Nancy. I'm not sure who took the photo.

I'm glad I have an image of Stephen, the fellow with his tongue out, a pose he struck sometimes. Stephen Humble in full. He was born in December 1961, so had he lived, we would now both be 50.

That occurred to me a while ago, and when I had the thought I happened to be near Google, so I put his name in. There's a psychiatrist in Nashville by that name, and an English cricketer of that name who has a Wiki entry and a Facebook page, and a number of other references that probably don't point to the person pictured above. Deeper in, there are other references to other people, but I have to put in "Stephen Humble MIT" to get a few fleeting references to his name in dusty user group archives and academic papers. Maybe those are faint traces of the person I once knew.

So I thought he should have a better mention somewhere on line. Here, for instance. Stephen Humble was my friend in high school and a memorable character for those of us who knew him ('umble, he said it was pronounced, but not even the teachers said it with a silent h). He was exceptionally bright and insatiably curious about a lot of things, with a special facility for mathematics, the sciences and languages, at one point studying Turkish "for fun." He was the only male flautist in our high school band. He appreciated strange humor and weird incongruities, had a vigorous laugh for someone with such a skinny frame. In his high school years to proved to be a freethinker and all around odd duck.

So naturally Stephen gravitated to my group of friends. Fit right in, he did. I know he caught a fair amount of flak from, let's say, less enlightened kids, though probably more so in junior high than high school. Too bad for them. They missed out on a lot by not listening to what he had to say.

He's the only one, besides former Sun-Times columnist Zay N. Smith, ever to appreciate my line, which I made up one day after Latin class: "I move that the subjunctive be abolished from the English language." Stephen laughed out loud at that, back when that was an actual activity rather than Internet shorthand. Of course, it's not really a laugh-out-loud joke; but as I said, Stephen was a highly literate oddball.

He went to MIT in the early '80s. I don't really know what he did for a living after that. He was a Unix expert, among other things. I remember once he told me how user-unfriendly Unix was, noting that when you made an entry mistake, the only reply the system would give you was a question mark. I think he spent some time in Europe, doing who knows what, but by the last time I saw him, in 1995, he was back in Cambridge, Mass. At that moment in his life, he had an enormous, Old Testament-prophet head of hair and beard.

He also had a boyfriend. That was a surprise. Not, ultimately, that he preferred men, but that he had a sex life at all. Knowledge of the carnal sort seemed to be one of the few kinds he wasn't interested in, but I suppose our high school assumptions were wrong, as they often were.

I don't know why he killed himself in 2002. How could I know that anyway, even if I'd seen him more often during the last 20 years of his life? Whatever troubled him must have been powerful, to subdue his love of learning. But I won't dwell on his end. All I know is that my life was more interesting for having known him, and so requiescat in pace, Stephen.

New Year Entertainments

2012-01-02T18:37:00.006-06:00

The stretch of days between Christmas and New Year's proved to be brown and dry, at least around here, except for the rain and dank drizzle on Friday, and a weak spot of snow on New Year's Day. It's like November never ended -- the least-white December I've seen since '94 in London, which, a native told us, was a strangely warm month as well. Suits me.

Unlike last year, we didn't happen to see any of the holiday movies showing at theaters, such as We Bought a Cemetery for Christmas, Who Cares About the Adventures of Tintin? or The Girl Regretting Her Dragon Tattoo. I did manage to see Duck Soup on television on New Year's Eve.

That was my nth viewing of that movie at intervals of once every two or three years since the mid-70s. I know all the gags but laughed again all the same, and saw some details I'd never noticed before (or had forgotten). I paid particular close attention this time to Margaret Dumont, whose face was remarkably expressive. I've come to doubt the story that she didn't get most of the brothers' jokes, which sounds like something Groucho would make up.

I also paid closer attention to Edgar Kennedy, the lemonade vendor tormented by Chico and Harpo. Turns out he had quite a career and, if Duck Soup is anything to go by, a fitting sobriquet in "Master of the Slow Burn."

Over the holidays I also chewed at some of the books I've been reading lately, such as The Warm Bucket Brigade: The Story of the American Vice Presidency (Jeremy Lott, 2007), an entertaining read that (among many other things) makes a good case for regarding President Tyler more highly. Still, I didn't find myself in the grip of an intensely good book, as I did with True Grit this time last year.

I did spend some time reading the entertaining blog Lifetime, Wow! which consists of reviews of movies shown on the Lifetime Movie Channel. I'm not particularly familiar with Lifetime, but apparently it shows a lot of risible movies, and the bloggers at Lifetime, Wow! shoot those fish in that barrel with glee. The blog's plot synopses are probably more fun than most of the movies themselves.

Stille Nacht

2011-12-22T19:13:00.004-06:00

Merry Christmas and Happy New Year to all. Posting will resume again around January 2, 2012.

You'd think we'd hear this English version of the song more often, but no.

I'm Dreaming of a Brown Christmas

2011-12-21T23:59:00.003-06:00

A solstice fact for the day, courtesy timeanddate.com: "December 20 and December 23 solstices occur less frequently than December 21 or December 22 solstices in the Gregorian calendar. The last December 23 solstice occurred in 1903 and will not occur again until the year 2303. A December 20 solstice has occurred very rarely, with the next one occurring in the year 2080."

Looks like Christmas Day in northern Illinois will not feature crystalline water ice coating the mixture of clay, sand and organic matter that serves as substrate for plant growth. That is to say, there's no snow on the ground today, and none predicted for the next few days. I wonder, was a "white Christmas" a popular idea before the Irving Berlin song, or did the song foster the idea? Probably the latter, considering how astonishingly successful the song has been.

Roy J. Harris claims in the article linked above that "longing for Christmas snowfall was hardly a common image before Berlin's song." But it is now. My own daughters are complaining about the prospect of a brown Christmas. But that doesn't bother me, since it's just like the ones I used to know.

I had a fine time driving home from Phillies (see yesterday), listening to Christmas music on WXRT, which has started playing it from 8 p.m. to midnight. That station, which normally plays a broader range of popular music than most, has figured out an alternative to the repetitive, unimaginative approach WLIT takes to Christmas music every year. First of all, XRT plays it only four hours a day; that should be more than enough for anyone. More importantly, countless artists have recorded countless holiday titles over the years, and the station dips deep into that well.

The selections include unheralded versions of classics, lesser-known songs, and a variety of demented holiday tunes. You never know what you'll hear next. I was enjoying the songs, but after awhile Lilly wanted me to change to WLIT, so she could hear "something I can sing along with."

"What, you can't sing along to 'Father Christmas'?" I asked. That was the song playing at that moment. (The Kinks, 1977; not exactly unknown, but the Christmas Lite wouldn't touch it.)

But the last time I played Father Christmas
I stood outside a department store
A gang of kids came over and mugged me
And knocked my reindeer to the floor

They said: 'Father Christmas, give us some money
Don't mess around with those silly toys.
We'll beat you up if you don't hand it over...'

I allowed that maybe "Father Christmas" didn't quite inspire the holiday cheer she was looking for, so we went back to the usual suspects for a few minutes. And what do you know, WLIT soon played the original Bing Crosby version of "White Christmas." I can't really complain about that. A few songs can take the repetition.

Italian Sausage & A Visit to the Expo

2011-12-20T23:44:00.002-06:00

Over the weekend we visited our old haunts in the western suburbs, and had a fine supper at a place called Phillies in Willowbrook, Illinois. "Old Fashioned Thin Crust Pizza is Our Specialty," its card says. The girls had some pizza, and it was a good thin-crust pie all right. I had a first-rate Italian sausage sandwich.

Good food is important, but Phillies has something else no other restaurant I've ever been to has: an entire room dedicated to the World's Columbian Exposition of 1893. Dozens and dozens of framed photos of the world's fair hang on the walls of that room, with some other pics scattered around the rest of the restaurant. Buildings, interior shots, pictures of people attending the fair, machines on display, the first Ferris wheel, and more -- including two rows of photos of denizens of the Midway Plaisance in native costume. It was a marvelous exhibit.

This list gives a good idea of the variety to be found on the Midway during the fair, and these photos include some of those on the wall at Phillies, especially the individuals posed in their native garb. As we were leaving, I made sure we all looked around the room. "As soon as I get my time machine," I told the girls, "I know where I'm going."

Christkindlmarket Chicago '11

2011-12-19T18:30:00.003-06:00

I visited at the Christkindlmarket Chicago on Friday as an appendage to a longer visit downtown, as during previous years, since it isn't something I would make a special trip just to see. The ornaments are pretty and all, but not so dazzling that I'd drive to a Metra station, ride an hour on a train, and walk six or seven city blocks just to gaze upon them.

Nice baubles.

It might be a misapprehension, but it seemed like there were more food vendors at the market this year than before. Such as this purveyor of pretzels.

It was a fairly cold day, though not actually freezing -- been a strange December that way so far, with little snow or ice. But it was cold enough for pigeons on Daley Plaza, site of the Christkindlmarket, to seek out warmth wherever they could.

That's Daley Plaza's Eternal Flame, dating from 1972, whose plaque says, Eternal flame in memory of the men and women who have served in our armed forces. Army, Marines, Navy, Air Force, Coast Guard, National Guard, Reserves and Merchant Marines. In Pigeon, it might be called "the Warm Place Always."

Item From the Past: Urakami Cathedral

2011-12-18T19:32:00.003-06:00

We happened to be in Nagasaki around Christmastime in 1993, and visited St. Mary's Cathedral, better known as Urakami Cathedral, after the district in the city in which it's located. We were there during the day and then in the evening on Christmas Eve, to attend church.

The place has a melancholy history. Begun in the late 19th century after the legalization of Christianity in Japan, the cathedral was finished in the early 20th century. On August 9, 1945, it was only about a third of a mile away from the atomic bomb blast, and so destroyed. The current structure dates from 1959, with a renovation in 1980 to make it more closely resemble its original French Romanesque style.

Not far away is the Nagasaki Peace Park, where you can encounter this 30-foot fellow, created by Sculptor Seibou Kitamura, a Nagasaki native.

I'm not versed on Buddhist iconography, but I'd guess that the sculptor took inspiration from it. In any case, the Nagasaki Tourism Guide says that "the raised right hand points to the heavens to signify the threat of atomic weapons while the left arm is raised horizontally to represent the wish for peace."

The Name Salad

2011-12-15T23:10:00.002-06:00

Got an e-mail from Americans for Gary J today -- how did I get on that list? -- and the subject said: Gary Johnson is Angry! Find Out Why. I have a pretty good idea. He's asking himself, why isn't it my turn? Even the pizza guy got a turn.

We attended the Rosa Luxemburg Junior High Winter Band Concert this evening, in which Lilly participated as a trombonist. For anyone worried about the "winter" in that name at the expense of Christmas, I can report that the program included no fewer than four songs with "Christmas" explicitly in the title, plus others with obvious Christmas associations. Some tunes I wasn't familiar were "Santa at the Symphony," "Funky Ol' Saint Nick," and "Rhapsody in Red & Green."

I looked at the lists of kids in the bands (7th grade, 8th grade, the district junior highs' jazz band) and I'm pleased to report a multi-ethnic salad bowl of names, out here in the homogeneous suburbs. A selection: Avila, Begbaaji, Freiburger, Gonzalez, Hirjoi, Jones, Khokari, Kim, Li, McCoy, Nagorzanski, O'Connell, Patel, Popovic, Rizvic, Scalafini, Schmaus, Stribling, Takizawa, Walker, Woo. As for first names, the likes of Ann, Alex, Caroline, Jessica, Jonathan, Kevin, Lilly, Mike, Patrick, Rebecca, Sarah, Thomas and William are represented, but so are Aya, Ena, Jemi, Koryana, Malik, Mumbua, Reena, Sergio, and my own favorite, a kid named Vlad.

Failed Coinage

2011-12-14T18:44:00.002-06:00

How does the saying go? December showers bring January... nothing really, unless the ground is still damp enough to freeze solid. It rained much of the night last night and much of the day today, leaving large puddles in our back yard and an even larger one in our neighbor's back yard. A cold rain, but not an icy one. It felt like a slice of March broke lose and lodged here in mid-December. I like it, but it can mean only one thing: a few rounds of blizzard in the not-too-distant future.

I was bummed to read that the number of presidential coins minted going forward is going to be slashed. That's two of my favorite things, coins and presidents, in one package. But I have to say that I haven't gotten around to collecting any of the presidential dollars, either in circulating or proof condition. On those few occasions when I get cash from a human teller at a bank, I ask for dollar coins (and sometimes $2 bills), and usually they have some presidentials along with Sacagaweas and even Susan B. Anthony pieces. Then I go out and circulate them.

I don't actually want to see the $1 bill discontinued, since it's iconic, but I don't mind using dollar coins, either. I'd go for U.S. $2 coins, too, as long as the $1 and $2 pieces were distinctive enough, like the Canadian loonie and toonie.

In an idle moment today I rummaged through the container where I keep the small change of other nations that I've accumulated over the years, and it occurred to me -- since I've been writing some about the problems of the euro lately -- that I have some defunct currency in that container. At the moment there are 17 euro-zone nations, and I found bits of the former currencies of nine of those countries in my possession, ten if you count 1 pataca from Portuguese Macao, all as worthless as car-wash tokens from car washes that have gone out of business.

Besides the pataca, the others include: 1 DM, 20 French centimes, 100 Italian lira, 1 Dutch guilder, 10 Belgian francs, 1 Austrian schilling, 1 Finnish mark, 20 Estonian senti and 50 drachma. All collected in their countries of origin, except for that drachma. While in St. Petersburg, Russia, we stayed in a guesthouse with WCs down the hall. One time I went to use the bathroom, and there sitting on top of the tank was a 50 drachma coin.

Mostly copper, between the size of a quarter and a half-dollar, and minted in 1988, the coin sports an image of Homer on one side, a trireme on the other. It's a nice piece of money. Bet the Greeks are missing their drachma something fierce about now.

Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit

2011-12-13T22:21:00.004-06:00

I saw about five minutes of the feature-length abomination known as Dr. Seuss’ How the Grinch Stole Christmas on TV this evening. That's all I've ever seen of it at any one sitting over the decade or so since it was new, and I've never formed a better opinion of it. An alternate title might have been, Dr. Seuss’ Heirs Eager to Cash In, No Questions Asked.

But at least it reminded me that I own this book, which goes by the fine title Quomodo Invidiosulus Nomine Grinchus Christi Natalem Abrogaverit. It's a translation by the husband-and-wife team Terence and Jennifer Tunburg, unless that's a ruse, and the original was actually on a fourth-century Greek/Latin codex rediscovered at Mount Athos in the 19th century (and updated a bit in modern versions, to exclude such details as the Grinch's heresy trial for following Arianism).

It was one of the better Christmas presents I've received over the years -- I think it was the Christmas after Lilly was born -- from some old high school friends of mine. Now that's an adaptation of a classic children's tale we call all get behind.

The Indoor Display of '11

2011-12-12T18:35:00.004-06:00

Finding and setting up a Christmas tree was another weekend project. Find one we did, at a Lutherian church lot at some distance from our house. It's a balsam fir, about six feet high -- a shade shorter than usual, since that was cheaper, and I always have to trim a few inches off anyway to crown the thing with the golden plastic star.

So far, I haven't got a decent picture of the whole thing. But Ann took a couple of closeups. One is of a electric multicolor star-shaped ornament that I refuse to put on the top because the golden plastic star goes there, since it's exactly like the star on the top of the trees of my youth, except not silvery. This year, the electric multicolor star-shaped ornament is near the base of the tree.

Ann also set up a gang of Christmas characters at the base of the tree.

Be of good cheer, they seem to say, or else. Santa's got some muscle with him in the form of that Christmas bear. Sure, he's smiling. He enjoys his main job, which is keeping the elves in line.

Synchronized Electric Holiday Cheer

2011-12-11T19:47:00.002-06:00

While visiting a drug store this weekend, I noticed that A Christmas Story has become a cottage industry -- a fairly major cottage industry, I'd say, to get a whole endcap display of its themed merchandise at this particular large chain. Maybe this year I'll get around to seeing that movie, since somehow or other I've missed it over the years. I'd never even heard of it until some years ago, when I read that the house in Cleveland used for exteriors had been converted into a museum devoted to the movie. Or I could just read about the movie, so that I'll understand the significance of a female leg table lamp in the story.

Until this weekend, I'd also never seen home Christmas lights synchronized to flash in time to a musical score, though I'd been vaguely aware of such displays, which are still fairly new. An early example of synchronized Christmas lights "was the work of Carson Williams, a Mason, Ohio, electrical engineer who spent about three hours sequencing the BB Light-O-Rama channels that controlled the 16,000 Christmas lights in the 2004 version of his annual holiday spectacular," says Snopes. "His 2005 display included over 25,000 lights that he spent nearly two months and $10,000 to hook up. So that Williams' neighbors wouldn't be disturbed by constant noise, viewers driving by the house were informed by signs to tune into a signal broadcast over a low-power FM radio station to hear the musical accompaniment."

Another source says that Williams spent three hours sequencing each minute of his display, but whatever the total, I'm sure it was a lot of work. Now, in the holiday season of 2011, either the techniques involved in creating this kind of light show are being defused to the benefit of Christmas-display enthusiasts, or Christmas-display specialists have learned Mr. William's strategies and are finding a market for their services. Or both. But when you chance across an elaborate synchronized display in the heart of the northwest suburbs, you know the thing's got some legs, at least among homeowners for whom static Christmas lights just aren't enough.

One of Lilly's friends told us about a synchronized display a block from her house, and when Lilly and I were in the area on Saturday evening, we stopped in front of the house for a few minutes and watched. It's exactly as described above: thousands of lights and a hand-lettered sign advising us to tune into a certain unoccupied FM frequency. As we watched, the lights flashed in artful on/off patterns to "Dance of the Sugar-Plum Fairies" and a few other songs. A remarkable sight. I plan to take Yuriko and Ann to see it soon.

12/8/41: A Strong Passive Tense

2011-12-08T20:17:00.004-06:00

I played the Pearl Harbor address, so easily available online, for Lilly today. At the moment she happens to be studying World War II in her social studies class (please never to call it "history"), but her teacher didn't play it in class, despite today being a perfect time to do so, and the fact that it's one of the most famous speeches ever given by an American president.

Listening to it again myself, it occurred to me that the very first sentence belies the idea, advocated with unreasoning vigor by some editors and English teachers, that the passive voice is a mark of namby-pamby or evasive writing. It can be used those ways, of course ("mistakes were made"), but so what?

I've seen editing guides that discourage the passive, and no less a writer than George Orwell discouraged the construction in the famed "Politics and the English Language." But Orwell wasn't right about everything, and nor are editors and English teachers. FDR knew how to create a powerful passive. There it is, in the first sentence.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date that will live in infamy -- the United States of America was suddenly and deliberately attacked by naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan."

Now, imagine that a narrow-minded editor had gotten ahold of it.

"Yesterday, December 7, 1941 -- a date that will live in infamy -- naval and air forces of the Empire of Japan suddenly and deliberately attacked the United States of America."

In this case, the active is weak and the passive is strong. The president wasn't trying to deliver a news report. Emphasizing what happened to the United States of America was what he set out to do, and he did it.

Vocal Refain By Glee Club

2011-12-07T23:32:00.003-06:00

Up in the southeastern sky at about 10 p.m. this evening was Orion, trailing a fairly bright Moon. But he was bright in the winter air. So winter's here.

Is anyone recording topical songs any more? I suppose someone must be, but I'm too out of touch with contemporary recording to know. So I look around a little and the answer is "yes." If you can call "Osama bin Laden Is Dead!!!" a song. I don't have the urge to listen to it.

Today I did listen to a few of the songs listed at "Pearl Harbor - Popular Songs" by the UMKC University Libraries. It seemed like the thing to do. All of them have long faded, but I did know "Remember Pearl Harbor" by Don Reid and Sammy Kaye. Recorded 10 days after the attack and a best-seller in its time, it's the World War II song that sounds the most like a college fight song. "Go to meet the foe?" How gallant.

I knew it already because it was on the soundtrack of Radio Days. Which I acquired while living in Japan. Life's peculiar sometimes.

Gansito Snack Cakes

2011-12-06T18:56:00.002-06:00

Woke to a dusting of snow this morning, but I can't call it the first snowfall of the season, especially since most of it melted by noon. By evening the sky was clear, with a bright Venus following the Sun down, and waxing gibbous Moon not far from Jupiter on the other side of the sky. A pretty nice celestial show for the suburbs.

Recently I bought a package of Gansito brand snack cakes (pastelito relleno) on impulse at a grocery store that features a good many Mexican items (and Polish items, for that matter; this is metro Chicago). I turned my research assistant Señor Google to the task of finding out more about it. He came back with a number of interesting things, such as the contrast between this (I assume) older Gansito commercial and a newer one.

Of course, once you start watching vintage Spanish-language commercials, there's no limit to the amount to time you can waste with it. Still, it might be worth 30 seconds to become acquainted with La Negrita brand pancake mix.

Gansito ("little goose," or "gosling") is a product Marinela, a division of Grupo Bimbo SA de CV, a vast Mexican food conglomerate (revenue $8.8 billion in 2010). So vast, in fact, that it bought Sara Lee's North American Fresh Bakery unit in 2010 for nearly $1 billion. Now Rainbo bread, among others, is technically a Mexican brand.

The Gansito package is as colorful as you'd expect, pink and blue and orange, and features an anthropomorphic gosling in t-shirt, baggy pants and athletic shoes. The package I bought has two cakes in it, for a total of 3.5 oz. (100g). It's clearly made for export to English-speaking lands, though with Spanish flourishes, such as "Búscame en Facebook: Gansito Marinela," in case you want to be the cake's amigo on Facebook.

Another assistant of mine, Señor Wiki, claims that they are "similar to Twinkies," but I disagree. They're both cylinder-ish in shape, and creme filling is a component. But Gansito also includes strawberry filling, and is coated with dark chocolate covered in chocolate sprinkles. They're not bad at all. Not something I'd buy any more than Twinkies, which isn't that often, but a good alternative when the snack-cake urge strikes.

Basic Trash-Can Policy

2011-12-05T22:53:00.000-06:00

Near freezing temps expected for tomorrow, and maybe a little snow. We shall see.

"Why are you going slow?" Ann asked me not from the back seat long ago, as I was backing out of the driveway. Usually it's a time for proceeding slowly, but at that moment I also didn't want to hit my full trash cans, which I leave next to the curb, near where the driveway means the street.

"I don't want to hit the trash cans," I told her.

"Oh. So it's your policy not to run over the trash cans."

Where did she pick up that turn of phrase? But yes, I had to agree that it's my policy not to run over my own trash cans.

Lighting the December Nights

2011-12-04T22:04:00.004-06:00

This weekend proved to be unexpectedly warm (that is, not biting cold) and November-like. Much rain on Saturday morning instead of snow. Go figure.

I took the opportunity to light the outdoor lights, which have been in place since last year, when I had to replace most of the older strings. I also festooned one of our small evergreens with the new, aforementioned LED lights. Then I put out one plastic and one ceramic snowman, neither of which lights. Yuriko acquired the ceramic snowman last summer at a yard sale, and he's not bad looking.

Here in our suburban neighborhood there seem to be about as many inflatables as ever, but icicle lights, so popular in the late '90s and early '00s, are now pretty scarce. Replacing regular outdoor, wall-mounted lights with red and green bulbs, once a novelty, now seems fairly common, sometimes to supplement other decor, sometimes as the only decor. One house not far away put in red and green lights to replace the usual white, but also opposite-colored lights at ground level, shining up at the wall-mounted lights. That is, green shines up to a red light, and red shines up to a green light. It's a pretty effect.

One family down the block, who always decorates for Halloween with items that include an animated dark figure sporting sinister blue-light eyes, also decorates with some elaborateness for Christmas. They've put out my favorite lawn decoration so far this year: some Christmas chickens. No, really. The ensemble includes lighted figures, the largest of them a chicken with a scarf and a top hat and a raised baton. Smaller chicken figures (chicks?) are nearby, apparently taking musical direction from the larger chicken. I've never seen the likes of it before.

Fill 'Er Up With Premium Electrons

2011-12-01T22:43:00.004-06:00

On Saturday, we went to Chicago Premium Outlets, which is actually in Aurora, Illinois, just off I-88. I saw something there I've read about, but never seen before: an electric vehicle charging station.

Cool. A U.S. Department of Energy web page tells me that there are currently about 75 nonresidential charging stations in Illinois, though as a state, Illinois' total is fairly low. California has well over 500, and Florida, Michigan, Texas and Washington state all have between 100 and 200. Then again, some states have none, including the yawning stretches of Montana and the Dakotas.

Chistmas Light Transition

2011-11-30T23:32:00.006-06:00

We've slipped into the first extended freezing period of winter, but at least no snow is predicted for the first real day of the hard-cold season, December 1. But any time now, we'll get that first coating.

Not long ago we visited a big box store that specializes in DIY goods, but for the holiday season the store has a sizable section devoted to Christmas decor, gewgaws and gimcracks. We bought a net of LED lights promising eight square feet of coverage. They are indoor/outdoor lights, and I have a front-yard bush in mind for their use. This marks a small technological transition, our first Christmas LEDs. Future generations might marvel that anyone ever put incandescent lights on their trees, just as I puzzle about lighted candles on Christmas trees.

”While more expensive in stores than their incandescent brethren, LED lights burn for more than 4,000 hours compared with less than 2,000 for standard bulbs, cost 14 cents to operate a 50-foot string for 300 hours compared with $8 for C7s and $11 for C9s, going by Consumer Reports figures," says The Street in a slide show called "Six Holiday Traditions Fading Into Obscurity," which it says includes intensely hot Christmas lights. (Another "tradition" cited is the aluminum Christmas tree; my grandmother had one, and it fascinated me as a small child; but I'd call that more of a mid-century fad than a tradition.)

C7s and C9s are terms I'd never heard for Christmas light-bulb sizes. More detail than anyone needs to know about "Christmas lighting technology" -- except Christmas-light manufacturers, who would probably want to read it in Cantonese -- is at this Wiki page. But it is good to learn that bubble lights inspired a series of complex and lengthy court cases over patents, if this charming page, "The History of Bubble Lights," is accurate.

Until well into the 1980s, my family's Christmas tree included a '50s-vintage string of six or eight bubble lights, except that all but two of the globes had been broken or had burned out in the misty years before I was old enough to appreciate them. The missing lights had been replaced by regular globes. I took over the annual decoration of our tree some time in the early '70s, and had a great fondness for the two surviving bubble lights, one blue, one red, which I unpacked and handled and repacked with great care.

A Teen Birthday

2011-11-29T19:40:00.005-06:00

Strong cold winds this morning, and strong winds on Tuesday mean garbage cans in motion. Plus a variety of loose trash in the yard. So the first thing I did this morning was deal with that situation. More wind tomorrow morning, I hear, but at least the trash cans will be in the garage.

Lilly's birthday was before Thanksgiving, but her party -- a group of the usual suspects in the living room, these days including a sprinkling of boys along with the girls -- was on the day after Thanksgiving. All in all, she had a good time.

As usual, I took a picture of the cake.

She chose the wording this year. Anything you want, I said, as long as the bakery doesn't have to call me up to make sure I really wanted that on a cake. They didn't question her choice.

Thanksgiving Eats

2011-11-28T22:09:00.006-06:00

This year we went with beef for our main Thanksgiving meal. Tenderloin, as it happens. We're rotating through the meats. Maybe ostrich next year.

Also on the menu were baked potatoes, stuffing from a box, a green salad, rolls, two kinds of olives (it isn't a Thanksgiving meal without olives), and apple pie to finish. St. Julian brand sparkling white grape juice was the main drink. The bottle says, "Proudly Produced and Bottled by St. Julian Wine Co. Inc. Paw Paw, Michigan 49079." and "Try all 10 flavors of St. Julian 100% sparkling fruit juice." Think globally, drink fruit juice locally (regionally, anyway).

Breakfast on Thanksgiving featured something we'd never had before, but which I can recommend, namely Trader Joe's brand pumpkin pancakes. Being a Trader Joe's item, there's plenty of description on the box, of which I'll only quote a little: "... the sweet subtle taste of pumpkin and aromatic blend of cinnamon, ginger and nutmeg." The ingredient panel says the mix includes allspice and vanilla, too. I wouldn't eat them all the time, but they were good for a change of pace.

Call of Duty: MW3, Grand Theft Auto & Best of All, Death Race

2011-11-21T23:24:00.019-06:00

This evening I pulled up Google News and one of the Top Stories headlines was, "Mitt Romney's Dark Side: Presidential Hopeful Tried Cigarettes, Beer." For a moment I thought an Onion article had wormed its way into the standard Google feed. But no, it was from Reuters.

Early this afternoon, as I pulled up to a red light at a major intersection, I noticed a fellow on a unicycle cross the street on the other side of the intersection. Riding casually across, one-wheeling his way to his destination. That's the first time I've ever seen anyone on a unicycle here in the suburbs, unless you count the performers at the circus a few years ago, which was technically in the suburbs.

Come to think of it, I can't remember seeing too many non-circus unicyclists on the streets of Chicago or Nashville or San Antonio, either. But I did see kids on unicycles sometimes in Osaka, and heard that some schools teach it in PE class.

At the grocery store today, I bought a popular soft drink whose commercial tie-in at the moment is Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 3. The clerk, a young man in his 20s, asked me if I'd played it. I said no, not interested. He told me that the soft drink packaging includes (I think) some kind of code that gives players extra ammo (or maybe a kit containing one forty-five caliber automatic; two boxes of ammunition; four days' concentrated emergency rations; one drug issue containing antibiotics, morphine, vitamin pills, pep pills, sleeping pills, tranquilizer pills; one miniature combination Russian phrase book and Bible; one hundred dollars in rubles; one hundred dollars in gold; nine packs of chewing gum; one issue of prophylactics; three lipsticks; and three pair of nylon stockings).

Apparently the game was released last weekend, and for some this event was a big hairy deal. I know this because Lilly told me about it. The release caused a lot of chatter at her school, especially among the boys she knows. I asked her if she had any interest in playing herself and she said maybe, but among that kind of game she likes to play -- at other people's homes -- Grand Theft Auto. You learn all kinds of things about your kids if you pay attention.

By golly, I think I'm supposed to fret that such a violent game will affect my daughter in evil ways. You know, just like the urges people my age felt to run down pedestrians because of the primitive arcade game Death Race. Ah, the screeching wheels, the screams of your victims. Doesn't that take you back? No? Wiki asserts that "because of its limited production run and the number of units that were destroyed, Death Race is very rare today. Collectors will sometimes pay $2,000 for a working unit in good condition." If it doesn't have one, the Smithsonian needs to get one.

In the late '70s, Mike, a guy I knew in high school, and I would sometimes visit the airport in San Antonio and play games at its arcade room, which was usually empty in the evenings. Death Race was one of the games there, and we played it. It was probably all we could do not to commit vehicular homicide on the way home.

That Which We Have

2011-11-21T23:24:00.017-06:00

Happy Thanksgiving to all. Posting will resume next Monday. Eat meat or a meat substitute, entertain yourself and dwell on what you have, rather than what you don't.

And remember those pious puritans at the near-mythic First Thanksgiving, who ate freshly killed animals; sang and danced and played games with Indians; and got good and drunk. They'd had a hard couple of years, after all, and probably were just glad to be alive and able to celebrate an English harvest festival (with new native elements) on these new shores.

Since I live at some distance from the rest of my family, it's been difficult for all of us to join together over the years. But we did so for Thanksgiving 2001, in Dallas.

Left to right: Yuriko, me, Lilly, my nephew Robert, brother Jay, mother Jo Ann, nephew Dees, brother Jim, Eleanor (Deb's mother) and sister-in-law Deb. My nephew Sam isn't in the picture because he took it, and Ann isn't in it because she hadn't been born yet, making her appearance about 14 months later.

Item From the Past: Ishiyama-dera

2011-11-20T20:00:00.001-06:00

November 30, 1991

"Warm and sunny day, flawless weather to visit the exquisite Ishiyama-dera. I went with Ed and Lynn, two former fellow teachers, and Americans as it happens, to the temple, which is in Otsu, Shiga Prefecture. It's near the shores of unscenic Lake Biwa, the sludgepot that provides greater Osaka with its drinking water.

'No, that's not the best way to begin to describe Ishiyama-dera, which is set in the forested hills not far from the lake. You forget about Biwa while visiting the fine old wooden structures, which manage to convey their great age through their smell, somehow, maybe redolent of centuries of incense. This time of year, the temple also has the aesthetic advantage of seasonal reds and yellow. It augments the aura of esoteric objects honoring esoteric gods on remote shores."

Not much of a description, but I can fortify it with more information. "Ishiyama Dera was established in 749 by a Kegon priest named Ryôben at the request of Emperor Shômu (701-756; reigned 724-749) to enshrine an image of Nyoirin Kannon," says the Yamasa Institute's Japan Travel Guide. "At the time, the Emperor was praying for the discovery of gold to assist in his undertaking of the construction of the great Buddha of Tôdai-ji Temple in Nara.

"The Hondo, or Main Hall, designated a National Treasure, was built upon a great megalith, which contributes to the temple’s fame as one of the eight scenic views of Ômi, the Autumn Moon from Ishiyama-dera. The Hondo was built architecturally in a veranda construction style called 'Butai Zukuri'. The Tahoto Pagoda (treasure tower) was built by Minamoto Yoritomo in 1194 in the Kamakura period, and is the oldest of its type in Japan.

"Inside the Hondo is the Room of Genji, where Shikibu Murasaki created the plot of the Genji Monogatari or the The Tale of Genji, a famous court story of the Heian period and believed by many to be the world's first novel. Murasaki is said to have begun writing The Tale of Genji, at Ishiyama on the night of the full moon in August 1004. The temple is mentioned in the Ukifune chapter of the story. A life-size figure of the author at work is displayed in this room."

I remember seeing the Lady Murasaki mannequin, looking pale and mannequin-like. Years ago I read the first few chapters of The Tale of Genji, a Charles E. Tuttle Co. publication (Tuttle Publishing these days) of a translation by British orientialist Arthur David Waley. My copy, a two-volume paperback boxed set, resides in one of the bookshelves near the desk, quietly reminding my that I'll never get around to reading everything I'd like to.

Go Greater Prairie Chickens!

2011-11-17T21:31:00.003-06:00

Our village's quarterly publication, The Cracker Barrel, arrived today. From it I learn a number of things of local import, including the fact that the name of the new local minor league baseball team will be the Schaumburg Boomers. That puzzled me for a moment -- wouldn't that be better for an Oklahoma team? -- but the article helpfully explains that the team is named after the "male greater prairie chicken."

Those birds sound like this. Isn't the Internet great?

The new team will be in the Frontier League, which also includes the Beach Bums, the CornBelters, the Crushers, the Freedom, the Grizzlies, the Miners, the Otters, the Rascals, the Rippers, the RiverHawks, the Slammers, the ThunderBolts and the Wild Things, so I guess Boomers will fit right in. The old team, the Schaumburg Flyers, went kaput after the end of the 2010 season, and so no ball was played this summer at Alexian Field (often called Flyers Stadium, but no more). We attended a few enjoyable games there back in the '00s. Games featuring the new team will begin on May 25, 2012.

The water tower closest to the stadium is painted to look like a baseball. Until recently, it still had the Flyers logo on it, too. I knew the logo was going away, and toyed with the idea of taking a picture to document it, but one thing or another (sloth, for instance) kept me from doing so.

In late October, I was driving by with Lilly in the front seat with her camera, and I pulled into the median and told her to take a picture of the thing. It's not a high-traffic area, but I still didn't want to dawdle in the median, so I didn't change the car's position even when she said, "A telephone pole is in the way." I told her to take the shot anyway.

Of course, other people have taken better shots. But I'm still glad I bothered. Last week I noticed that the logo -- but not the seams of the baseball -- had been painted over, presumably pending a new logo featuring a greater prairie chicken.

It isn't the only sports-themed water tower I've seen. About 10 years ago we drove through the small town of Hebron, Illinois, up in McHenry County very near the Wisconsin border. You can't help but notice its water tower.

It commemorates the fact that Alden-Hebron High School won the state basketball championship in 1952, despite the fact that fewer than 100 students attended the school. Wiki asserts that it's the smallest Illinois school ever to win the title, and I believe it. There's a feel-good sports movie in there somewhere.

Social Media and Its Discontents

2011-11-16T23:40:00.007-06:00

Hard freeze dead ahead. The first taste of the coming months, which always feature all the winter details: the icy crunch underfoot, the wind blast in the face, the snowflakes and icy rain and slush. But also the indoor sensations -- the whoosh of the furnace, the dim gray morning light in the bedroom, the trappings of Christmas.

I just checked my Facebook page for the first time in about two weeks, and it seems that no rogue programs are trying to link to dirty pictures there. "Over the past couple of days, many users have complained about finding links on their Facebook pages taking them to images depicting jarring violence and graphic pornography," the WSJ noted. "Although the way the latest spam messages spread isn't new, their content is more shocking than the typical scam enticing a free iPod shuffle."

Dang. I never get interesting spam. I'm mostly done with Facebook for now, anyway. It's refusing to repost BTST in my Notes section, which was its main job as far as I was concerned.

But it's possible for the site to waste your time even if you don't visit it. I put "Facebook" into the Google search box and the autofill suggested mostly innocuous words like banners, mobile, timeline, status, full site, emoticons, login home page, symbols, quotes. But when I put "Facebook is," autofill suggested is down, issues, is evil, is like jail, is stupid, isnt working, is not working, is like prison, is for losers, is bad. Even better, I then tried "Facebook wants" and got my phone number, you to pay, to be a tastemaker, to change, a phone number, money, photo id, your unborn child, to buy instagram, your kids.

The Code for Efik is 144

2011-11-15T23:19:00.004-06:00

I have on my desk a "Student Master Enrollment Form" that I need to complete to register Lilly for high school next year. In fact, I've already completed it. I just need to return it to the school, which I'll call Schleswig-Holstein High.

Some of the answer boxes require codes, including for language spoken at home. A helpful list of the three-numeral codes is on a separate sheet, listing 165 human languages out of the what -- 6,000? -- that are still in use worldwide (a dwindling number, I understand). The English code is 000, for example. Japanese is 011. Esperanto isn't on the list, but that's expecting eccentricity from a standard form, and that isn't going to happen.

I ran down the list to see how many languages I'd heard of. That is, the number I could associate with some part of the world or some group of speakers. That number is 112, including only those I'm completely sure of, though there were others I could guess at. Not bad, but I'm shockingly ignorant of many -- I'm guessing here -- African languages, the lesser-known languages of China, and maybe some stray Filipino tongues, with something from the diverse language stock of Papua New Guinea thrown in.

Efik, for instance, which is spoken by people who "inhabit the coastal area of South Eastern Nigeria and are very well known nationally and internationally partly because of the prominence of Calabar in Nigerian history and also due to their rich cultural heritage," according to the web site of Nka Ikem Esit, which says it's "dedicated to the provision of services that contribute to the socio-economic development of the peoples of Calabar (Nigeria), and minorities in the Washington DC Metropolitan Area."

I think "well known.. internationally" is a bit of a stretch, but then again part of the art of self-promotion is claiming you're already well known. From that web site, I also learn that "the Obong of Calabar is a democratic monarch, the paramount traditional head of the Efiks and the protector of the Efik tradition." Now that's a title, the Obong of Calabar. Apparently there was some kind of crisis in the mid-2000s regarding who would be obong, though the current title-holder seems to be Edidem Ekpo Okon Abasi Otu V.

I could pursue more information about that subject by going down the rabbit-hole of the Internet, but there's only so far I want to take this tangent. Still, it's remarkable where a standard form can lead you, if you're inclined to follow.

Teeth & Bones

2011-11-14T20:22:00.005-06:00

There will come a time when I see very little children's TV programming, maybe none if I play my cards right. Even now I don't see all that much, but enough to be amazed occasionally at some toy or other I'd never heard of. Such as Dr. Drill & Fill, a Play-Doh-based toy that simulates dentistry. That's a real toy? People really buy that for their children, even those who haven't expressed a desire to grow up and practice dentistry?

Maybe there's a market for this toy among the most demented kids, who like to re-enact scenes like this.

Ann brought home some mouse bones today. This was unexpected. She told me that the bones were created when an owl swallowed a mouse whole, digesting the good-and-soft parts, but later bringing the bones and fur up again. I'm not sure exactly where the school got these bones and pellets -- I like to imagine that the process involves a friendly farmer who owns a large barn staffed with hungry owls, and who cleans the residue and brings it to Ann's school for science class.

Ann's share is in a small clear-plastic Solo cup with a lid. Honestly, the pellets aren't that much to look at -- like fuzzballs that a vacuum picks up. But the bones are interesting. She picked them out of the cup and showed them to me: a skull, a jaw bone, some leg bones. "It's interesting and particular," she said.

Item From the Past: The Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building

2011-11-13T19:38:00.003-06:00

Near constant wind today, but not the blustery, cold blow you usually get in November. It was an unusual day, more springlike than anything else. But it's a trick. Winter is bearing down on us.

Oddly enough, I have a soft spot for the Tokyo Metropolitan Government Building in the Shinjuku district of that city. During my very first walkabout in Japan in March 1990, I rested for a few minutes in a small green spot -- and there aren't that many of those in Tokyo -- not far from structure, which is about 800 feet high. It's an impressive skyscraper, designed by Kenzo Tange, and for a number of years the tallest building in the country.

At that moment the building wasn't finished. The skin was on, but there was still a lot of construction noise coming from the interior. In November 1993, when Yuriko and I visited Tokyo for a long weekend, we looked at the building from the same vantage. This time, I had a camera.

If the observation deck had been open then -- and I don't think it was at the time -- we would have certainly gone up for a look. These days not only is it open, it's free. Can't say that about to many things in Tokyo.

Armistice Day 2011

2011-11-11T11:00:00.000-06:00

Give November Its Due

2011-11-10T21:29:00.002-06:00

I went outside at about 1 p.m. and it was snowing. Big, full flakes. The snow came and went for a while, but none stayed on the ground. Later it was sunny. Then bleakly cloudy again. Cold but not quite freezing. This evening, we had a bright full moon. How much more November can you get?

November, not December. This happens every year, and every year I'm going to complain about it. Lilly was changing radio stations in the car today and came across "Do You Hear What I Hear?" Even Lilly was astonished, commenting that it's too soon for Christmas songs. It's enough to make you go home and queue up something to blast it right out of your head.

The Christmas Lite station is back on the air -- before Veterans Day, much less Thanksgiving. No thanks. Christmas (that is, the marketers' Christmas) needs to leave November -- chilled, melancholy, bittersweet November -- alone.

Boilerplate Apollo With a Sounding Rocket on the Side

2011-11-09T19:46:00.001-06:00

I've posted about the Cernan Earth and Space Center before, but that was some years ago. The planetarium still has its modest collection of space artifacts, many of them associated with Gene Cernan, including the spacesuit he wore on the Apollo 10 mission, but also some spare hardware. Inside the building is a never-used lunar module ascent engine and a Gemini retro motor (Cernan flew on Gemini IX-A), among other things.

Outside the building is an Apollo test capsule, which is the white cone-shaped object in the photo.

"Having the same size, weight and weight distribution of an operational Apollo capsule, test capsule like this one were used by NASA and the U.S. Navy to practice ocean recoveries during the 1960s," notes a nearby sign. The space program argot for such a capsule is a "boilerplate," a term I learned reading about the Apollo program as a kid. It wasn't until later that I heard other uses for the word, including the paragraphs near the end of a press release that describe the company for whom the release was issued, and which are reused many times.

According to A Field Guide to American Spacecraft, this particular boilerplate Apollo is BP-213, one of a number scattered around the country. Most are at museums, as you'd expect. But one is (fittingly) at the Apollo Middle School in Hollywood, Fla., while another is (strangely) at a Dairy Queen in Franklin, Pa. At least it was as of 2007, says Roadside America.

Next to the test capsule is a Nike Tomahawk sounding rocket -- first stage Nike, second stage Tomahawk. The Directory of U.S. Military Rockets and Missiles says that "the first Nike-Tomahawk flew on 25 July 1963. The rocket could lift a payload of 45 kg (100 lb) to 370 km (230 miles) or 115 kg (255 lb) to 215 km (134 miles) altitude. The USAF launched 38 Nike-Tomahawks between April 1967 and November 1983, mainly on aeronomy and plasma physics missions. The last of almost 400 Nike-Tomahawk launches by any user was a NASA flight in November 1995."

The Cernan Earth and Space Center

2011-11-08T19:20:00.004-06:00

Classic Northern November today. Gray, rainy, mostly leafless, though some yellows and reds are hanging on. Not too chilly, at least, and there was other good news from out there, beyond the clouds: the asteroid 2005 YU55 didn't actually hit the Earth.

On Sunday I took Lilly to the Cernan Earth and Space Center, a planetarium in west suburban River Grove, Illinois, named for the last (most recent) man on the Moon, and part of Triton College. It's a little far to go regularly, and it had been a while since we last went -- four or five years, though Lilly said she'd also gone there on an elementary school field trip.

The show, "Journey to the Stars," promised to be "a multimedia program that combines stars, video, panoramic scenes, planetarium special effects and numerous space images to describe what research astronomers now know about the birth and death of stars, how backyard stargazers can better understand the immense scale of the universe, and how humans have developed space probes and manned spacecraft to extend our reach into space."

The show promised, in other words, to cover a lot of ground. Or rather, cover a lot of space. So it did, with some narrative cohesion. That's my complaint about most of the planetarium shows I've seen as a adult. Lights go down, stars come out, and there's tons of neat stuff in space! This, that, and the other thing! I'm not sure what kind of thinking goes into writing like that, but it might be that since the show's for youth, any damn thing in any order will do, as long as there's enough light, noise and motion. A lot of cartoons seem to be created on the same principle.

"Journey to the Stars" was mostly familiar territory for me, but not as much for Lilly, which of course was the point of bringing her. Later I asked her what she hadn't heard before, and she said the prediction that the Sun was going to expand to a red giant in some billions of years and fry (or completely engulf) the Earth. The show offered that information in the context of the life cycle of stars, including stellar endgames, from supernovas or plain novas or mere expansions to collapses into dwarf stars or neutron stars or that famed bizarro celestial object, the black hole.

Naturally there was also some discussion of the Hubble Space Telescope, but no mention, not even in passing, of the other orbiting Great Observatories, the lost Compton (gamma rays), Chandra (x-rays) and Spitzer (infrared). Too bad. Individually and as an ensemble, they're marvels of the age.

Before the main event, the planetarium also showed the equivalent of a newsreel -- namely, what's in the sky in early November -- and a cartoon -- namely, a mini laser show, "Mini Pepper." The laser images danced around to three songs from Sgt. Pepper's Lonely Hearts Club Band, mostly colorful Spirographic-like images, but sometimes laser-drawn representations of the lads in their day-glo band uniforms, except not day-glo but neon in outline. Interesting effects, but 10 minutes was about enough. I'm not sure I could have sat through a longer laser show, but then again I wasn't in a chemically enhanced frame of mind.

The Cernan web site -- which doesn't address the issue of chemical enhancement -- says that its equipment is "a Voyager V-17OWC laser projection system [that is] is one of the most advanced domed theater visual projection display systems in the world. Manufactured and installed by Aura Technologies Inc. of Chicago, Ill., this system represents the latest in state-of-the-art entertainment and educational laser display technology. The laser itself is a Color Pro krypton-argon water-cooled laser, which is capable of producing more than 18 quintillion color combinations, stunning special optical effects and dazzling aerial beam effects."

Tippecanoe and the Comet Too

2011-11-07T19:37:00.002-06:00

Today is the 200th anniversary of the Battle of Tippecanoe, so naturally I poked around a little and found out about other things. I have a knack for tangential learning.

Also 200 years ago, the people of the world were treated to the Great Comet of 1811 -- and presumably both sides at Tippecanoe saw it overhead. The Comet Primer says, "One of the largest comets in history was the Great Comet of 1811. It was one of the few comets in history to be discovered with a relatively small telescope at an unusually great distance from the Sun, in this case over half-way to the planet Jupiter's orbit. The nucleus has been estimated as between 30 and 40 kilometers in diameter. At one point during September to October 1811, the coma reached a diameter roughly equivalent to the diameter of the Sun and was a very notable naked-eye object seen by people around the world."

We need one like that to liven up the sky again in our time. After all, it's been a while since Hale-Bopp, and the 1811 comet sounds brighter yet (even though Hale-Bopp was bright enough to see within the city of Chicago). A new comet might help make up for the visual disappointments of the most recent Halley's and Kohoutek before that. Even better would be the entertainment provided by those who see the end of the world in such an event -- and there would be such people. Along with others to help them prepare for the end of the world, for a small fee.

The fine radio program Stardate did a two-parter about the Comet of 1811 recently. This is Part One and Part Two of the program, in transcript and podcast form.

Item From the Past: St. John the Divine Detail

2011-11-06T18:47:00.004-06:00

On November 5, 2000, I did a walkabout in Manhattan, including a visit to the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine and some other points of interest. The cathedral is a magnificent house of worship, well worth the effort to get there from more commonly trod parts of Manhattan. (The cathedral also inspires crackpots. One web site I saw warns the world that "the cathedral tricks unsuspecting church goers into its occult house of worship," run by the masons. Ah, those masons.)

The three-ton bronze doors of the cathedral, which are works by Henry Wilson, and the Rose Window above the door, are justly famous. My photography of those famed features didn't turn out so well. But I did like this shot of some of the stonework around the doors, scanned in black and white. An assortment of saints, I assume.

If I've read my sources correctly, the work only dates from the 1990s, when British stonemasons came over to train Americans in the art for the purpose of continuing work on this famously unfinished cathedral. (Masonry being a lost art in the United States. Unless the masons secretly control everything.)

Commie Plots

2011-11-03T23:35:00.005-05:00

Forest Home Cemetery, part of which is the old German cemetery Waldheim, is gorgeous in fall. This is what it looked like on Wednesday at about noon.

It's also the location of the Haymarket Martyrs' Monument by sculptor Albert Weinert, which I mentioned recently. I last visited in 2002, despite the fact that I drive by the cemetery periodically on the Eisenhower Expressway, along with thousands of other motorists.

I didn't have a lot of time for yesterday's visit, but I did want to find a few permanent residents that I'd missed before, such as that all-purpose early 20th-century radical, Emma Goldman. I don't know how I missed her memorial when I first visited the Haymarket monument, since it's only a few feet away. A stone's throw, if you're in a reactionary mood. Anyway, this is her memorial.

And a close up of the bas-relief of her by sculptor Jo Davidson, who did a lot of portraiture -- quite a list.

Next to Emma Goldman are a cluster of plain, rectangular stones, marking the final resting places of other, lesser-known radicals. Most of the stones included fitting epitaphs. Among others, there was:

Elizabeth G. Flynn "The Rebel Girl" • Fighter For Working Class Emancipation

William Z. Foster Working Class Leader • Tireless Fighter for Socialism

Eugene Dennis Communist Leader • Fighter for Working Class Internationalism

Jack Johnstone A Life Dedicated to Human Freedom

Sylvia Woods Heroine in the Struggle

Wish I could have stayed longer. Sometime I want to hunt up Billy Sunday and Samuel Gompers, and spend a little more time looking at the funerary art.

Return to Showmen's Rest

2011-11-02T21:32:00.005-05:00

Besides being the Day of the Dead, it so happened that I had an interview and property tour to do in west suburban Berwyn, Illinois, today. So my plans could easily be expanded to include visits to the west suburban cemeteries of Woodlawn Cemetery and Forest Home Cemetery (Waldheim), both in Forest Park.

I posted about Woodlawn and its Showmen's Rest six years ago. Has it really been that long? This time I brought a camera. It was a fine fall day, after all.

The symbol of the Showmen's League of America -- the organization of circus workers -- is an elephant. Four elephants flank the showmen's graves, and one is among the graves. Their trunks are down, as if in mourning.

Circus workers from 1918 to the present are buried here, most notably 56 victims of the circus train wreck of June 22, 1918. The Showmen's League web site tells the story. On that day, it says, "the Hagenback-Wallace Circus was scheduled to present its fabulous spectacle in the Show Grounds at 150th and Calumet Avenue in Hammond, Ind. At about 4 am while the train was heading toward Hammond, carrying 400 performers and roustabouts, [it] had to make a stop near Ivanhoe in order to cool an overheated wheel bearing box...

"An empty troop train was approaching at full speed from behind, piloted by engineer Alonzo Sargent, who had previously been fired for sleeping on the job. Ignoring the red lights and the efforts of a frantic flagman to signal the oncoming train, it plowed into the back of the circus train, destroying three sleeping cars before finally coming to a halt. A fire then broke out.

"Survivors of the crash, trapped under the wreckage, were unable to free themselves and escape the flames. An estimated 86 people died in the accident. No animals were killed. Most of the dead were roustabouts who had been hired hours or days earlier for the Hagenback-Wallace performance in Michigan City."

Many were buried anonymously.

Or identified only by what they did, such as the "4 Horse Driver."

Besides being a time of war and plague, 1918 was a bad year for U.S. train wrecks as well. The Great Train Wreck of 1918 in Nashville killed more than 100, and an accident in Brooklyn killed nearly 100.

All Hallows' Inflatables

2011-11-01T23:30:00.006-05:00

All Saints' Day turned out warmer than Halloween, even in the evening, with a touch of wind and a clear sky. Jupiter is riding high these evenings.

For years I never could remember which was All Saints' and which All Souls', even though I know All Hallows' Eve is the giveaway. Not that anyone asked or tested me on that; I just like to know my calendar. Anyway, all the saints come first. Of course they do. Hierarchy is hierarchy.

Never as common as Christmas decorations, Halloween decorations disappear a lot more quickly too. I took note of the remaining Halloween decorations when driving a few hours ago. Only handful of lights remain, plus a few glowing inflatables. Good riddance for most of those inflatables, I say. Really, what's the excuse for this?

Then again, Scooby and his pals do seem to run into fake ghouls with alarming regularity. Every day is Halloween for that crew.

Candy Collection Completed

2011-10-31T23:52:00.002-05:00

After a Novemberish day of rain and wind on Sunday, Halloween was clear, nearly windless, and cool, about 50° F. Not a bad day to roam a suburban neighborhood. Beats the snowy havoc on the East Coast.

Like last year and the year before, this Halloween I took Ann to visit her friend Elizabeth, who counts as an old friend, I guess, since they go back to preschool, though they attend different elementary schools. The two of them set out in her neighborhood, with Elizabeth's dad and I not far away. Then we did the same in my neighborhood. Ann wore black and was a "vampire queen," though she decided false vampire teeth were too much trouble. Elizabeth wore black and was a bat.

Ann collected a few pounds of candy, which now sits in a pillow case (Lilly has one too). Mostly they're products of the candy cartels. In no special order, the contents of the bag include Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, M&Ms, Skittles, Tootsie Rolls, Snickers, Twizzlers, Laffy Taffy, Reese's Peanut Butter Pumpkins, Nestle Crunch, Dots, Tootsie Pops, Nerds, Whoppers, Wonka Bottle Caps, Dum Dums, Air Heads, M&M Minis, Twix, Milky Way, 3 Musketeers, Reese's Pieces, Smarties, KitKat, Jolly Rancher, jawbreakers, peppermints, SweetTarts, Hershey bars, 100 Grand, PayDay, Snickers Almond, Butterfinger, Starburst, Skittles, Baby Ruth, Junior Mints, Peanut Butter M&Ms, and Starbursts.

Plus a few oddities, such as Market Pantry brand Halloween fruit snacks (no, that isn't more healthful than candy), Hi-Chew Green Apple fruit chews (ditto), a small bag of pretzels, Soft 'n Chewy Now and Later, and a thing called Snickers Peanut Butter Squared, which I understand is new this year.

As a longstanding fan of the Snickers bar, I wonder about this hybrid. If it says Snickers, it shouldn't have peanut butter, which is the bailiwick of other brands. If it says peanut butter, it shouldn't say Snickers. Somewhere in the realm of Forms is the Snickers Bar, which material Snickers bars mimic. It doesn't include peanut butter.

Item From the Past: Lilly's First Jack o' Lantern

2011-10-30T19:38:00.005-05:00

We got around to creating a jack o' lantern this evening. Ann drew a design on the pumpkin, then I carved the top off. I insisted that she remove most of the pumpkin seeds and slimy orange entrails. I'm tired of that task, and I also wanted a visceral Halloween memory for her. Then I cut some more holes.

I would put it outside tonight with a candle, but it's an intensely windy and wet night out there, so it can go out on Halloween itself.

Lilly said that she wanted to help with this year's carving, but when the time came, she didn't bother. When Lilly was just a few weeks short of her first birthday in 1998, I took a picture of her examining a curious orange orb.

Later, I put the jack o' lantern on our front porch.

Later still, squirrels -- or very small minions of Beelzebub -- feasted on it, making it more frightful.

The Day of the Flapper

2011-10-27T23:43:00.003-05:00

The chain inside the upstairs toilet broke this morning, so after everyone else had left for school or work, I made my way to the hardware store formerly known as Ace (now it just says the generic "Hardware"). Toilet chains are sold only in combination with toilet flappers, and I got one.

It made my day just to learn that name. I've seen the part in operation over the years, of course, but never thought about its name. I also today learned even toilet flappers have a web page, as everything seems to: "All the flap on THE FLAPPER." Read and learn.

It didn't take long to replace to flapper-chain combo. The old flapper, with its bulbous front end and two prongs sticking backward, could be a small model for a Romulan or Klingon ship or the like. That is, a sinister-looking Enterprise sort of model.

For all my grousing about Halloween, I am looking forward to some parts of it, such as accompanying Ann and her friend on their rounds. It won't be many more years before I won't do that any more, as Ann wanders in a pack with her friends, just as Lilly does (even though I chide her that she's too old for trick or treating -- but we both know that attitudes have changed since I was in junior high).

Lilly never wore the costume to the right for Halloween activities, but she did pose for a picture. I think I took it 10 years ago. The costume came as a special section to some Japanese magazine. We unfolded the section and did some re-folding and presto, some child-sized space armor and a helmet emerged, ready to wear.

Grumbling About Halloween

2011-10-26T21:58:00.002-05:00

Against my better judgment, I went with my family to a big box retailer on Sunday that has a lot of Halloween merchandise right now. The store was crowded. The store was noisy. The store was stocked with overpriced faux-macabre trappings for a holiday that doesn't need many trappings. Some of the made-for-dollar-in-China adult costumes were $40 or $50, but even the flimsiest, cheapest item wasn't cheap.

I managed to get out without spending anything, but only because we could go to another big box nearby, one with a different array of normal merchandise that hadn't gone over so heavily toward Halloween. But it was advertising Halloween items at a significant discount, and it turned out to be true. We managed to outfit the girls with some costume items -- things they actually wanted -- for a little less than $15.

Halloween, bah. Or rather, the ridiculous trappings of the day. It's gotten even more annoying since Beldar Conehead complained about it.

Beldar: Oh, Connie, I want no knowledge of this human activity. Halloween, a miserable Earth festival. It is regrettable that the High Master demanded that we return to this planet. On our home planet, Remulak, at this moment, all cones are celebrating the Harvest Under the Moons of Meepzor. Now, that's a party! All the gellato spirots will be harvested and smoked.

Connie: So what? Big deal!

Prymaat: The Harvest of Meepzor, long ago, was when I first saw Beldar's cone. How young and strong he looked as he pursued and captured the greased garfok, which was roasted for all to consume.

Beldar: This miserable Earth festival is nothing but a ritual costume fantasy for the young ones, who move through the night demanding small consumables.

Those Few, Those Happy Few

2011-10-25T19:55:00.003-05:00

I suspect that today was the last warm day of 2011. Warm, windy, cloudy. I eked out a short while to sit on the deck and read.

I picked up Ann from her school this afternoon to take her to the dentist (no cavities, glad to report) and noticed that a white board in the school office said: Today is Denim Day. I don't think they meant this. Maybe it was this, but that's off a few weeks. I didn't ask the staff. Later, I asked Ann about it. She had no idea.

Never mind. It's St. Crispin's Day. I've posted about it before, but here's another rousing performance of the St. Crispin's Day speech, this one by a young Richard Burton.

More Cantigny Tanks

2011-10-24T14:25:00.011-05:00

Lilly and Ann climbed on four or five of the 11 tanks at the Cantigny Tank Park yesterday. One of the smaller ones is the M5 Stuart, a mere 16.5 tons. Cantigny's web site says, "The M5 Stuart was the Army’s standard light tank at the beginning of World War II. It was primarily used in reconnaissance, flank security and infantry support roles... Originally designed as a light battle tank, its role was limited because its 37mm main gun and thin armor could not stand up to German tanks in direct combat. The tank did prove effective in an infantry support role, where it knocked out machine gun nests and other enemy strong points, supporting soldiers as they advanced."

Below is the M41A3 Walker Bulldog, during a rare moment when no one was climbing on it. A Cold War-era tank, Cantigny notes that "the M41 tank series never saw combat with the US Army, but was exported to over 18 countries."

Finally, this is the turret of an M24 Chaffee, with daughters no. 1 and 2 perched on top. It replaced the M5 Stuart as the Army's light tank in World War II. "Along with mechanized infantry support and reconnaissance missions, the M24 was also able to destroy enemy bunkers, buildings, and other strong points," Cantigny explains.

An Afternoon Among the Flowers and Tanks

2011-10-23T20:51:00.006-05:00

Today was one of those increasingly rare warm days -- clear and nearly 70° F. during the afternoon -- so we decided to visit Cantigny Park. The last time we were there was during the full blaze of summer, more than a year ago.

Fall coloration is far along, as it is everywhere else, but the gardens are still lush with flowers. We haven't had a hard freeze yet, and the Cantigny horticulturists must see to it that the gardens feature plenty of late-season bloomers.

Besides the flowers, we also went to Cantigny to see 11 tanks permanently parked on the property, such as this one.

All of them belong to the First Division Museum at Cantigny and are exhibited on the grounds outside the museum building. According to the sign, that's a 48.5-ton M46 Patton. On a day like today, kids (and some adults) were all over the tanks.

Another One Bites the Dust

2011-10-20T14:19:00.011-05:00

On days like today, I find my way to Wiki lists such as "List of longest ruling non-royal national leaders." According to that list, the late and not lamented Col. Gaddafi came in at number four, behind such other tyrannic notables as Castro, Chiang Kai-shek and Kim Il-sung. As usual with Wiki, grains of salt are in order. For instance, it counts Castro as "out of office," and while that might be true in some technical sense, it's hard to believe he still isn't boss.

Number five on the list is the amusingly named (to our ears) Omar Bongo of Gabon (died 2009). The name probably isn't so amusing if you live there, especially since the strongman's son, Ali Bongo, is now president.

Coloration and leaf-drop is pretty far along here in northern Illinois. Not long ago I caught some trees in transition.

And one far along yellow.

Others are completely bare, here in the full flush of fall. The mood of the season inspires me to look for sentimental poetry with an autumnal theme. I didn't know until today that Iggy Pop did a version of "Les Feuilles mortes," and a pretty one at that.

Peanut Butter of the Argentine

2011-10-19T23:10:00.004-05:00

Drizzle came down today, wind blew and leaves fell. My thoughts turned to Argentine peanut butter.

My preferred discount supermarket set up a Dollar Aisle recently. Or as the store probably should call it, the Near-the-Expiration-Date Aisle. Anyway, I took a look around the aisle today and found Pampa brand peanut butter. I know that brand. (I Googled "Pampa Frosted Flakes" and my posting was on the first page.)

Argentine peanut butter? Does Argentina have a major peanut crop? Yes it does: "Every year more than 200,000 hectares of well selected farmland is used for the cultivation of peanuts," asserts a web site maintained by the B&F Trade Agency, a Dutch specialist in groundnuts and cocoa beans. "The total yield of raw shelled peanuts is more than 550,000 metric tons and the total export of shelled and processed peanuts comes around 400,000 tons."

That's a big mess of goobers. The site continues: "The major exporters of peanuts are the United States, Argentina, China, Sudan, Senegal, and Brazil. In recent years Argentina has become the leading exporter. China will soon convert from principal exporter to principal importer as the domestic consumption will rise (double by 2020) and loss of arable lands."

Clearly this 12-oz. jar of peanut butter that has come so far has something to teach me, in a roundabout way. I didn't know that the Chinese will double their peanut consumption by the end of the decade, for instance. They need a slogan for that: Let a Thousand Jars of Jiff Open!

Checking the ingredient label, I see that Pampa peanut butter contains exactly the same things as standard peanut butter in North America, including peanuts, sugar, "totally or partially hydrogenated vegetable oil (palm)," salt and molasses. The only difference between Pampa and the domestic jar I compared it to is that the domestic product includes rapeseed, cottonseed and/or soybean oils -- whatever was a penny a gallon cheaper the day the peanut butter was processed, I guess. I also see on the Pampa jar: Best if Used by Dec. 3, 2011. Yep. Thought so.

Pampa isn't a hippie peanut butter than promises no sugar or vegetable oils to keep the peanut oil from separating out. I'm always amused to see that kind called "natural" peanut butter. Of course it's natural -- straight from the mines near Dothan, Alabama, which has been the main U.S. producer since the discovery of the Great Nut-Butter Lode in 1838.

I opened the jar to find out how Pampa compares to the peanut butter I'm accustomed to. Smell: same. Consistency: same. Taste: same. The jar is obviously for export to Estados Unidos de América, and it seems that the Argentine peanut-butter makers know their market.

Winter is Nigh, Maude Drove a Truck, and Braces Are Gone

2011-10-18T23:57:00.003-05:00

Got a short note from Winter today. Seems he'll be coming soon for a considerable stay. But there's been no freezing temps just yet. We need to harvest those Lilliputian tomatoes still on the vine in the back yard.

I wasn't able to go out among the falling leaves today, but the day wasn't a total loss. I learned (sketchily) the difference between admitted and non-admitted insurance for an article I wrote. Who knows, that factoid might come in handy some other time. Also, I learned mostly by chance -- chance favors the idly curious on the Internet -- that the late Bea Arthur was a truck-driving marine. Who would have guessed that Maude did more time in the service than John Wayne?

Also, Lilly's braces are finally off and she's been fitted with a retainer. The ortho did a fine job. More importantly (for me), I don't have to pay him any more.

Retro Moment

2011-10-17T21:40:00.002-05:00

I was in line at the post office today -- something that might be remembered as retro someday -- when I heard a phone ring from ahead of me in the line. Nothing odd in that, except it was a real telephone ring.

That is, a Western Electric ring that anyone my age or even somewhat younger would remember as very common during the period before the breakup of the Phone Company. I was a little startled. Other than at my mother's house (and on old TV shows), that's a ring I never hear any more. I guess the guy with the phone, who probably about 30, was going for a retro-cool ringtone.

Occasionally I toy with the idea of making a list of things most of us never see or hear any more, but I've never gotten around to it. One thing comes to mind is the way -- to give a visual example -- television sets used to power down after they were switched turned off (using a knob). When I was small, I was fascinated by the way the picture compressed quickly into a small, bluish dot that lingered for a while, sometimes drifting away from the center of the screen before it faded completely.

That's as gone as TV station signoffs complete with the National Anthem. Except that online, everything lives on. This is a 1978 Dallas-Fort Worth station signoff, which is close enough to what I saw in San Antonio.

FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944

2011-10-16T19:40:00.004-05:00

FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944 by David M. Jordan focuses on the neglected story of that election, and Jordan does a fine job of telling it, from the pre-primary maneuvering among both parties, but especially the Republicans, through to the surprisingly energetic campaign, both on the part of ailing FDR and his remarkably young opponent. Dewey was only 42 at the time, the youngest-ever Republican nominee for the top job and the first major-party presidential candidate born in the 20th century.

This particular election is generally glossed over in histories of the period, probably because hindsight considers it a foregone conclusion. In the event, it wasn't that close: FDR-Truman took 432 electoral votes and 53.4 percent of the popular vote vs. Dewey-Bricker's 99 electoral votes and 45.9 percent of the popular vote. Still, before the election, pollsters weren't quite so sure of the outcome, with some even predicting Dewey's election. That and '48 might tell us that pollsters weren't very good at predicting national elections in the 1940s, but that's with the benefit of hindsight. A Dewey upset was considered plausible at the time, even if not very likely, and in point of fact '44 was the closest presidential election in which FDR participated. As Jordan makes clear, Dewey ran a spirited campaign in the face of the odds.

But at a curious distance from the electorate. Apparently Dewey and his men thought it best, at least at first, to focus on radio speeches more than personal appearances. During an early campaign trip by train to the West Coast, for example, Dewey only made a handful of rear-platform speeches, the kind so effective for President Truman four years later. No doubt the strategy reflected Dewey's personality. "The man had one of the coldest personalities of anyone who ever contemplated a run for the American presidency," notes Jordan. "David Brinkley wrote, 'In public, Dewey came across as pompous and cold. And for good reason. He was both.' He was generally conceded to be intelligent, efficient, a master of detail, 'serious-minded to the point of severity' as one contemporary noted. 'He is as humorless as a man can be,' noted another."

Balancing the Republican ticket that year, at least in one respect, was Gov. John W. Bricker of Ohio. "The governor of Ohio... was an almost complete opposite of Thomas E. Dewey," says Jordan. "John William Bricker, it was said, was 'excellent company.' People liked being around Bricker, and he enjoyed being around others... Big, jovial John Bricker, one author wrote, 'had the essential of popularity, a real and lively interest in people.' " Bricker also represented the conservative wing of the Republican Party, as opposed to the more moderate Dewey, and had the endorsement of Sen. Robert A. Taft ("Mr. Republican") in the early '44 primaries. Bricker didn't fare well in those contests, however, but well enough to be an acceptable choice for the number-two slot.

No one is forgotten faster than a failed vice presidential candidate (e.g., William Miller, who did a "Do you know me?" Amex ad after the '64 election), and Gov. Bricker certainly falls into that category, though some lingering memory of him might remain in Ohio. Bricker did, however, offer the ticket a rhyming slogan, an example of which the book shows in a photo of Republican campaign memorabilia: "Win the War Quicker With Dewey and Bricker." Apparently the slogan wasn't that commonly used, and not destined for the fame of "Tippecanoe and Tyler Too." Dewey and Bricker lost, after all, but even before that the Republican ticket probably didn't want to emphasize that their victory would indeed mean a change in the management of the war effort, since that was in fact what the Democrats were emphasizing as a negative ("don't change horses in mid-stream").

As for the Democrats, the Roosevelt campaign didn't show much zing until the "Fala Speech" in late September, during which the president had some amusingly choice words for the Republicans, much to the delight of the audience, who were mainly Teamsters leadership. Late in the campaign, and thus late in the book, FDR went on an open-car motorcade through four of the five boroughs of New York City, which Jordan describes in fascinating detail. The president began at an Army base in Brooklyn, went through downtown Brooklyn, then on to Ebbets Field, then through Queens, then across to the Bronx, then down through Harlem and finally on down Broadway and into Times Square. "Through it all, the rain kept coming down, the wind blew, and Franklin Roosevelt kept smiling and waving to the thousands watching for him, with Fala by his side," Jordan says. "After all was over, the police estimated the total crowds at 3,050,000, though it may have been, as Ray Brandt of the St. Louis Post Dispatch put it, "a mere million or two."

The book spends an entire chapter and more on the central mystery of the 1944 election, namely how and why Harry Truman was chosen as the Democratic vice presidential candidate. No account of that event that I've ever read quite spells it out clearly, probably because it isn't quite possible to do so, but Jordan takes a good whack at it. Vice President Henry Wallace wanted to keep the job, but boll weevils and other conservatives in the party wanted him out. President Roosevelt seemed to prefer James Byrnes, but he also seemed to accept the judgment of other party leaders that as a Southerner, Byrnes would cost more votes (Northern blacks, labor) than he would win -- something FDR never told Byrnes he believed. Other names were bandied about, such as Sam Rayburn, Alben Barkley, William O. Douglas, Truman and even John G. Winant (American ambassador to the Court of St. James's at the time), though he wasn't very seriously considered.

Eventually, Democratic Party leaders held an informal but important meeting with the president at the White House before the convention that seemed to settle matters in favor of Truman -- except that it didn't quite, and Truman wasn't really told about it anyway, going to the convention supporting Byrnes for vice president, and even planning to put his name in nomination. When FDR's men told Truman, at first he said he didn't want it, but was famously persuaded by a brusk phone call from President Roosevelt to a room that Democratic leadership had rented in the Blackstone Hotel (not the first time the Blackstone made a president). Even then, Henry Wallace might have been re-nominated by his supporters at the convention, but FDR's men put a stop to it using hasty parliamentary maneuvers, and almost resorted to cutting an electric cable to stop the convention organist from playing "Iowa, Iowa, That's Where the Tall Corn Grows," a song associated with Wallace at the time.

The book also offers interesting sketches of some of the lesser figures in the election. The Republicans' 1940 surprise candidate, Wendell Willkie, wanted another shot and entered the early '44 primaries, only to lose to Dewey. Even more interesting for us (though not for him) was the fact that Willkie died unexpectedly about a month before the election, without endorsing Dewey -- or Roosevelt either, and while it seems hard to believe he might have, it was considered possible because he didn't believe Dewey was internationalist enough, or at least was bowing too much the isolationist elements in the Republican Party (presumably those isolationists would have finished the war and then rejected American participation in the likes of the UN, the Marshall Plan and NATO).

Another supporting character is Harold Stassen. Good old Harold Stassen, always running. That's how we remember him now, but 1944 was before all that. That year, Lt. Comdr. Stassen was off in the Pacific theater as Adm. Halsey's flag secretary, having resigned the governorship of Minnesota to do his part. He wasn't really a contender in '44, but his star was rising (he'd given the keynote at the Republican national convention in 1940), and he later had an important part in nominating Dewey again in '48 and Eisenhower in '52, after which he settled into his recurring-candidate mode. That's another story.

The book also provides some food for speculative thought. After all, we know that FDR was near the end of the line in November 1944, even if at time the electorate didn't. What if he had died six months sooner -- a few weeks ahead of the voting? Who would the Democratic National Committee have picked to take his place? Would Dewey have won against that person, and if so, how would have he deployed the atomic bomb? Assuming that FDR dies in 1945, as he did, what kind of president would Wallace have made, had he been allowed to stay on the ticket? Would he have used the bomb? And what kind of president would John G. Winant made, anyway? In history as it happened, the three-time Republican governor of New Hampshire, first chairman of the Social Security Board, head of the International Labor Organization and ambassador to the United Kingdom through much of World War II, retired to private life after the war and put a bullet through his head in 1947.

That's just my digression, but it only goes to show how many fascinating stories there are in a good work of political history, such as FDR, Dewey and the Election of 1944. Well worth reading.

Rajaratnam, Roddenberry & Redshirts

2011-10-13T20:05:00.004-05:00

I can't say that I've been following the case of Raj Rajaratnam very closely, but I did note that he was sentenced today for insider trading -- 11 years. I read a NYT article about the sentencing, and it said: "Prosecutors accused Mr. Rajaratnam of using a corrupt network of well-placed tipsters — including former executives of Intel, IBM and the consulting firm McKinsey & Company — to illicitly gain about $70 million."

Rajaratnam is a hedge-fund billionaire, as recently as 2009 the 559th richest person in the world or some such. His elaborate scheme netted him all of $70 million, vast money to almost anyone else, but only about 5 percent of his net worth. What's the psychology of that? He did it for sport? Because he was bored? Because he was absolutely sure the government would never make an example of him? Guess he miscalculated on that score.

He didn't testify, but I doubt that his thinking involved anything as grand as shaping the future (how could it?), as the rich villain Noah Cross told Jake Gittes in Chinatown, when Jake was able to ask him why he'd perpetrated his land grab.

Jake Gittes: How much are you worth?

Noah Cross: I have no idea. How much do you want?

Jake Gittes: I just wanna know what you're worth. More than 10 million?

Noah Cross: Oh my, yes!

Jake Gittes: Why are you doing it? How much better can you eat? What could you buy that you can't already afford?

Noah Cross: The future, Mr. Gittes! The future.

I didn't have much time to waste today, but what little I did I spent watching a trio of videos on YouTube posted by one "led4acs." They're fun watching for anyone familiar with the original Star Trek. The videos keep a running track of all the deaths on the show, and illustrate them with well-edited clips and occasional funny comments. The dead include crew members, guest stars, assorted extras, aliens and even the sentient computers that Capt. Kirk manages to destroy.

Some 26 redshirts bite the dust, in case you're wondering. Joining Star Fleet is clearly going to be a lot like shipping out with the Dutch East India Company in the 17th century -- a third or a half of the recruits aren't coming back. Sure, Gene Roddenberry imagined a more rational future for mankind, but Star Trek is also a carnival of death.

This is Part One, followed by Part Two and then Part Three.

No More Gumby for Me

2011-10-12T23:32:00.006-05:00

Cool rain ahead, they say. Today seemed to be the last day I could eat lunch on my back-yard deck in some comfort, so I did. A leaf fell into my drink. But that's better than attracting bees, as al fresco summertime lunches sometimes do.

The last lawn mowing of the year was recently as well. Maybe. Part of the function this time of the year is to deal with leaves without raking them.

Gumby gets a Google doodle? Really? Or rather, Art Clokey, the creator of Gumby, is the honoree. His claymation artistry should be acknowledged, I guess, but Gumby the character? Gumby was shown on weekday afternoon kid shows when I was a kid, but I never could get that excited about it.

Yet I'm (sometimes) willing to revise my opinions in the light of new experience, so I looked up an episode of Gumby easily available on YouTube, an early '60s one called "Scrooge Loose," and watched it. Obviously a lot of work on the part of Clokey and his staff, but otherwise I'm still not that impressed, though I did chuckle once.

The Least of Holidays

2011-10-11T23:13:00.007-05:00

Leif Erikson Day has come and gone, and are we better for it? No, wait, that was Columbus Day (Observed). Lilly and Ann weren't in school yesterday, and we didn't get any mail. Except for those things, Columbus Day around here might as well be Leif Erikson Day.

The first U.S. president to proclaim a Columbus Day holiday was Benjamin Harrison, who did so for the 400th anniversary of the landing on San Salvador. Not, as you would think, on October 12, 1892, but instead on October 21, 1892. Columbus and his crew might have landed on October 12, but that was using the Julian calendar -- the Gregorian correction wasn't introduced to Catholic Europe until 1582, after all. In the 15th century, the difference between Julian and Gregorian would have been about nine days, so to be mathematically correct about the anniversary, you'd have to mark it on the 21st.

How learned of the Harrison administration. Or pedantic, take your pick.

The difference is still nine days, but clearly Congress wasn't interested in such subtleties when it created the federal holiday in 1937, so October 12 it is, at least until the holiday completely withers away, which we might live to see. But we still need some kind of holiday in October, to bridge Labor Day with Veteran's Day and Thanksgiving. Maybe Towel Day can be moved to October 12, since that's the anniversary of the publication of the first of the Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy book in the series in 1979.

Burn!

2011-10-10T18:52:00.006-05:00

The main event for us at the recent fire department open house were the room burns. I'll bet a lot of other people at the event felt the same way. Firefighters set up two three-sided "rooms" built of plywood and furnished with (no doubt) donated items. One room had an automatic sprinkler system installed. But I didn't take any pictures of that one, since the efficient dowsing of a room fire isn't nearly as photogenic as an out-of-control fire.

So without further ado, up goes the unprotected room. It burned for about three minutes.

The demonstration also completely demolished the dangerous Hollywood myth that you can see what you're doing in a burning building without special equipment. A pair of firemen in full turnout gear and SCBAs (self-contained breathing apparatuses) then put the raging fire out in about two minutes.

Ann left the open house with some public safety tchotchkes.

Her favorite was a police backscratcher, pictured here.

Rollover Test Dummies in Action

2011-10-09T19:56:00.001-05:00

This is National Fire Prevention Week, per presidential proclamation, as the week including October 9 has been since the Coolidge administration, though President Wilson inked a National Fire Prevention Day proclamation in 1920. But fire's serious business, so it soon got a whole week.

Driving by a local fire station recently, I spotted "Open House" on its marquis. The hours indicated right then. I had to see that, so I turned around. Ann was the only other person with me at that moment, and she whined about the prospect of not getting home for a while, but eventually she decided to humor her dad. Later, she admitted that she'd had a great time.

"Don't say I told you so," she said. So I didn't. But I'd known she would like it, and I had told her so.

State and local police were participating in the open house too. Before the fire department did its demonstration, more about which later, we saw this device in action.

It resembles a state police truck and simulates rollover accidents. The passenger cabin rotates, as if on a spit. Dummy passengers without seatbelts spill out and suffer gross bodily harm or death. Dummies with belts stay put.

It's a fine demonstration that only dummies don't wear seatbelts.

Norma Jeane and the Robot King

2011-10-06T19:42:00.002-05:00

In the summer of 1978, I took some summer school classes and one day happened to be at the school library after class when two fellows I knew, Lester and Trey, brought in an odd-looking piece of equipment and took it to one of the library's audio-visual rooms, where they fooled around with the thing, connecting it to a television. It was an Apple II.

Whose machine it was or where they got the money for it, I don't know. I joined them for a while, but soon decided it wasn't my kind of hobby. A lot of other people felt differently and, eventually, I also came around to an admiration for Apple products. RIP, Mr. Jobs.

After poking around the Lurie Garden downtown on Sunday, we walked northward on Michigan Ave. until we reached the giant statue of Marilyn Monroe near the Tribune Tower. It's the work of J. Seward Johnson, the same fellow who did the play on "American Gothic" a couple of years ago. That statue, I liked. Johnson added a fillip to the icon, the suitcase with the travel stickers. By contrast, the 26-foot "Forever Marilyn" statue had no extra touches to make it interesting. It's a straightforward reproduction of the publicity images for The Seven Year Itch, and shows exactly zero imagination on the artist's part.

Marilyn Monroe needs to be left to rest in peace anyway. Marilyn Monroe and Elvis Presley and Buddy Holly and James Dean; enough already. Next summer's going to be the 50th anniversary of her death, and I'm sure we'll hear all about it for days.

How about a giant statue of Jane Russell and a pistol, if the subject is to be a mid-20th-century sex symbol? But if the statute must be Marilyn Monroe, what about a giant figure based on this photo? A fetching brunette holding a propeller. Call it "Norma Jeane and the Propeller." Now that would be different. People might be shocked to see her brown hair.

At the southeast corner of Michigan Ave. and Wacker Dr., we saw the "Robot King" doing some busking.

He did his robot dance. A nearby sign said that he's from Miami, but other than that, I haven't found out anything else about him. This little-watched video gives some idea of his act. I thought he was more interesting than the overblown pop icon not far away on Michigan Ave.

Urbs in Horto at the Lurie Garden

2011-10-05T19:25:00.001-05:00

It's warm again. Today's small pleasure was lunch on the deck. Only a few more of those kinds of days left in '11.

Even in early October, the Lurie Garden in Millennium Park is still fairly verdant. But late in the afternoon on Sunday, it was hard to capture that lushness with a basic digital camera.

Measuring about five acres, the garden is sandwiched between the Pritzker Pavilion and the Art Institute, but hidden by a 15-foot hedge. The Lurie Garden web site claims that the hedge is a symbolic "shoulder," as in the City of Big Shoulders, but that seems like a contorted effort to squeeze a symbol out of a physical presence.

The garden, designed by Gustafson Guthrie Nichols Ltd., Piet Oudolf and Robert Israel, features perennials and bulbs, grasses, shrubs and trees in great profusion. The web site lists them, and I was glad to see that the designers weren't native-plant purists, though the majority are from some part of North America. Species from Europe and Asia seem to be well represented as well. If you insisted on native plants only, what would that be -- a vacant lot with weeds?

The Lurie Garden is also noteworthy because it's essentially a rooftop garden, since parking garages are below. It's been called the largest green roof in the world, though you'd never know that just walking around.

The Special Envoy Selects His Ice Cream

2011-10-04T22:22:00.003-05:00

I attended a day-long conference at a hotel in downtown Chicago today and listened to a number of speakers, some talking about commercial real estate, others about the wider economy. Some were more interesting than others, as usual for these events.

After the lunchtime program, I took the opportunity to shake George Mitchell's hand. As in former Senator and Special Envoy George Mitchell, who was one of the luncheon speakers, and an intensely interesting one at that. He managed, for example, to describe the Arab-Israeli conflict in a way that was worth listening to, rather than being the same retreads about that situation that you hear ad nauseum.

At the moment I approached him, he was considering which kind of ice cream bar he wanted for dessert. Rather than serve dessert at the tables, the event provided it outside the ballroom, a selection of pastries, cookies and Dove Bars.

I didn't interrupt him for long. Just long enough to express some admiration for some of the work he's done for his country (and baseball, though I didn't mention it). He thanked me and that was that. Unfortunately, I didn't have a chance to take his picture.

I did, however, take pictures of the other lunchtime speakers, former Secretary of Defense William Cohen (Republican) and former Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (Democrat). Daschle, obviously used to such attention, assumed that I would want to pose with him as well as taking his picture, so I did. The pic was taken by another journalist I know who was also attending the event.

That's more former federal government officials than I've ever met in one day.

Chinatown Details

2011-10-03T19:49:00.003-05:00

It's been a while since we visited Chicago's Chinatown. Lately we've had an urge for the kind of dim sum that Chinatown provides, but rain and other things delayed our visit for a few weeks. Sunday was clear and not very cold, so we drove to Oak Park, stashed the car in a conveniently free parking garage (free Sundays only) and rode the El to Chinatown -- Green Line to Roosevelt, transfer to Red Line for Chinatown.

On the sidewalk near the corner of Archer Ave. and Cermak Road, which is near the edge of Chinatown, Ann spotted a face on the sidewalk and pointed it out to me. Maybe the work of a guerrilla graphic designer. Not a Toynbee Tile, but it'll do.

We ate at Phoenix on Archer Ave., which serves up pretty good dim sum, though mysteriously at first the dim sum wagon ladies only would offer us "chicken feet with homemade sauce" and other items we didn't want. Actually, I would have gone for the chicken feet, but no one else wanted any. Eventually we obtained shrimp rolls, barbecue port turnovers, noh mai gai (sticky rice in lotus leaves), ha gao (shrimp dumpling), chui chow dumpling, pan fried vegetable & meat bun, mango pudding and sesame balls.

Then we wandered around the neighborhood. Mostly I was interested in talking pictures of details. Such as a dragon lamp.

And wall details on Wentworth Ave.

I noticed a lot more RPC flags hanging from buildings in Chinatown than even a few years ago, for whatever it's worth. But I also noticed that there will be a parade in Chinatown this Saturday to celebrate the 100th anniversary of overthrow of the Qing Dynasty -- Double 10 Day (even though Saturday is the 8th) -- which I understand is celebrated in Taiwan rather than the mainland.

The Woman in the Propeller Beanie

2011-10-02T19:57:00.005-05:00

At about 5:30 this afternoon, we were riding the CTA Green Line westbound from downtown Chicago, headed for the Oak Park station in Oak Park, Illinois, an inner western suburb. Yuriko and I were sitting together; behind us was a young woman we'd noticed getting on at the State Street station, as we did. Behind her were Lilly and Ann.

The woman was noticeable because she was wearing a Bears jersey, sported face paint in Bears colors, and had probably been wearing a propeller beanie at some point during the day -- I think Bears colors, but I'm not sure only a few hours later. The propeller beanie hung on the back of her neck when we saw her.

Are propeller beanies the new thing at football games? Or a not-so-new thing? I wouldn't know, but I'm also fairly sure I'd never actually seen anyone wearing a propeller beanie. Otherwise her Bears getup wasn't so strange. The Bears played the Panthers today at Soldier Field, and during the late afternoon in Millennium Park, we'd seen a lot of people in Bears jerseys and t-shirts and so on (but no other propeller beanies).

The propeller-beanie woman was on her phone, and mostly I wasn't paying attention. But then she said, "My flight is at 7. I think this train will get me to O'Hare by 6."

Odd. I thought about that for a moment or two, and then I heard her say, "I didn't know you felt that way." She was quiet for a while, and then she said it again. She must have hung up after that, but in any case the next thing I knew, I heard her crying. Did someone dump her over the phone? It sounded that way, but you can't quite be sure.

It's useful to know at this point that the Green Line doesn't go to O'Hare. Not even close. So I wondered whether I should say something to her about that -- or did I misunderstand her? But before I'd decided anything, she asked me, "Excuse me, does this train go to O'Hare?"

I turned and saw her face. The Bears face paint was tear-streaked. I told her no, the Blue Line goes to O'Hare. This is a Green Line train to Oak Park.

She asked if I was sure, and I said I was, pointing to the Green Line map in the car. "You need to go back downtown and catch a Blue Line train," I explained. I didn't much like bearing more bad news, but Oak Park is no place to be if you want to catch a plane.

She got off at the next stop. She had no luggage. Maybe she'd flown in just to see the game. Maybe she'd been expecting to see some now-former boyfriend at her destination. Impossible to know. All I knew for sure was she still had a propeller beanie hanging on the back of her neck.

Thursday Scraps

2011-09-29T23:37:00.005-05:00

Windy night out there. Not a dark and stormy night, particularly, just dark and windy enough to knock more leaves off the trees, along with small branches. Green's still the majority foliage, but yellow and brown are expanding aggressively. The tree across the street from my front yard -- which I see daily from my window, here at the word mill -- has gone flush yellow in a matter of days.

The other day Ann said that she participated in a school assembly about bullying. I think this is something that pedagogues have cooked up recently, since I don't remember Lilly attending such an event five or so years ago, but then again that's the kind of thing I forget. Anyway, it was all I could do not to say something along the lines of, "You mean an assembly to help bullies improve their techniques?"

Mocking aside, I doubt that such well-intentioned anti-bullying assemblies have much effect, at least on bullies. Who among the kids will think, "Ah, I've been such a bully. Think I'll turn over a new leaf." Who considers himself a bully?

On the other hand, I remember a low-intensity bully in elementary school, a strapping fellow named David who wasn't consistently a jerk but who had his ugly moments. One day in the fourth or fifth grade, he said -- using that exact phrase above -- "I'm turning over a new leaf. I'm going to be nice." And he did it. A pretty rare transformation, now that I think about it. But I don't think his inspiration was a school assembly.

I watched part of The Big Chill on TV the other day, first time I'd seen it since I caught it at a dollar (two-dollar?) second-run theater in Memphis in late 1983. Before watching it this week, I vaguely remembered thinking it was an entertaining ensemble movie that had been lacquered with an irritating and Hollywood-contrived social message pandering to the vanities of people born right after World War II. After seeing it again, I still agree with my 1983 assessment.

Maybe I should see The Return of the Secaucus 7 again. I don't remember much about it either, except that it was an entertaining ensemble movie without much of an irritating social message, or characters who were ridiculously successful in their mid-30s.

I also saw Secretariat recently. It's a well-made, feel-good horse movie, and a good example of Disney craftsmanship. The movie also reminded me of Secretariat's intense fame in 1973. Like a lot of people without much previous interest in thoroughbred racing, I watched him on television as he won the Belmont and thus the Triple Crown. The movie encourages you to cheer for Secretariat and his plucky owner, of course, but I felt a little bad for Sham, the horse Secretariat famously bested. Clearly a great three-year-old, but one completely overshadowed by an even better horse.

Yuriko's birthday was earlier this month. She didn't want a cake, but custard-and-fruit creations from a bakery in Arlington Heights.

Boy, were they good.

Set in Stone

2011-09-28T23:15:00.008-05:00

Busy day. Little time to ponder the gathering autumn, or any of mankind's most persistent questions, such as, "What's that plaque doing on that rock?"

When I see one, I feel the urge to document it. The more obscure, the better. This one's perfect in that regard, found in Lords Park in Elgin, Illinois. "LILACS Gift of Elgin Better Gardens Club October 1939."

Or this one, at Oakton Park in Skokie, Illinois.

"These trees were planted by the children, parents, faculty & friends of Kenton School, District 69, in honor of its 23 years of service to the community. September, 1955 to June, 1978 Marjorie Wedell, principal"

Make It Rain, Roger

2011-09-27T20:49:00.003-05:00

I posted this today at Dead Presidents Daily, but it's too much fun just for that site. Today was another grayish day outside, and a busy one inside, so the opportunities for whimsy were small. Luckily, You Tube is always around.

Link for Facebook readers, provided Facebook gets around to re-posting these items.

A Precious Few

2011-09-26T20:13:00.003-05:00

Fine weather for the equinox and the weekend just past. So on Saturday we had to go somewhere for a walk. Such as the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve. It has the largest field of goldenrod I've ever seen.

Very late in the evening on Sunday, cool wind blew in, along with rain. It's been raining on and off since then, creating cold puddles and the first large scattering of leaves we've had this year, though most of the foliage is still green and hanging on.

Rainy days aren't necessarily melancholy. I'll bet the recent rains in Texas were happy rains, considering how bad the drought has been. But today's rain, here in the cooling North, had a melancholy vibe. Summer's gone. Pack it away. Get out your jackets and coats. Blink and January will be here.

Just the kind of day to listen to one or more of the many versions of "September Song," such as this one by Sarah Vaughan. She also did a cover of "September in the Rain," but if you listen closely to the lyrics -- as I never did until today -- it's actually a fairly cheerful song.

Item From the Past: Moscow Big Mac

2011-09-25T19:24:00.001-05:00

In late September 1994, we visited Moscow, seeing many of the places that tourists usually see: Red Square, the Kremlin, Lenin's Tomb, St. Basil's, the Pushkin Museum, and the world's largest McDonald's. You know, the McDonald's that had opened to such curious interest from Muscovites in 1990. I've read that the 23,680-square-foot McDonald's remains the world's largest even now, though an even larger one is slated to open in London in time for the Olympics next year.

By 1994, the lines were still longish, but not around the block. Even so, the Moscow location was sprawling and busy. It had bouncers. It was the only McDonald's I've ever been to that had bouncers.

Among the small group I went with that evening, I was the only American. Also represented were a Japanese (Yuriko, that is), Britons, Australians, a Swiss, and I forget who else, but it was a motley international crew. Maybe we all wanted to confirm, once and for all, that the West had won the Cold War. The food turned out to be exactly what you'd expect. It was a McDonald's, after all.

I managed to find a souvenir during my visit, one that few others probably have. A paper place mat. It's too large to scan in toto, so I did it in two pieces. First, the happy McDonald's crew. Maybe happy because it beats working on the collective farm their parents did.

The right side of the mat featured what looks to be a job application.

To residents of Russia in 1994, the application might have been just as much of a novelty as the McDonald's itself.

Some Useless Information to Fire My Imagination

2011-09-22T23:17:00.001-05:00

Got a message from the friendly folks at Facebook recently. And one from some spammers in a non-English speaking nation. First, the Facebook message.

Hi Dees,
We're trying out a new feature to reduce the amount of email you receive from Facebook. Starting today, we are turning off most individual email notifications and instead, we'll send you a summary only if there are popular stories you may have missed.
You can turn individual emails back on and restore all your original settings at any time.
Thanks,
The Facebook Team

Suits me. I get too much in my in box anyway. This was, of course, a day when the social media site annoyed many millions of -- I suspect -- its middle-aged users by changing something suddenly. Seems like this has happened before, but I can't remember now. The main thing Facebook does to annoy me is forget to republish BTST to my Notes section, which has been happening this week. Guess the Facebook servers have been too busy gearing up for the Next Big Thing to attend to routine business.

Got a chuckle out of this in the New York Times today: "Facebook, the Web’s biggest social network, is where you go to see what your friends are up to. Now it wants to be a force that shapes what you watch, hear, read and buy."

Don't we already have an entity like that? You know, television.

Here's the spam. Of the two messages, I preferred the spam. I get so little quality spam these days. "Septimus Obama"? I have to like that.

Howdy Septimus Obama is without a doubt giving Gov Grants that can help family members locally to help stimulate the particular financial state. Investigate for yourself N7Gov . com tend not to pass up. It's not going to last lengthy!!

The Lucille Ball Translation Chain

2011-09-21T19:45:00.003-05:00

I Love Lucy was never a favorite of mine, but I did watch a fair number of episodes as a lad, mostly after school, when it tended to be paired with the likes of The Honeymooners. One scene that has stuck with me all these years involved Lucy getting into some scrape in Paris, through a typical hi-larious Lucy misunderstanding, and being hauled in by a gendarme. But the police at the station had no English, and of course Lucy had no French.

Ricky shows up and asks if any of the police speak Spanish. None do, but they bring out a fellow obviously arrested for public drunkenness who speaks German and Spanish. One of the cops can speak German as well as French, so they set up a translation chain: from the monolingual French sergeant to the French/German policeman to the German/Spanish drunk to Spanish/English Ricky to monolingual English Lucy. Even as a kid, I appreciated the comic inspiration of the setup.

Naturally, the clip is on YouTube, and information about the episode is freely available elsewhere (original air date: January 12, 1956). Lucy had paid for something with counterfeit money, it seems. I'd forgotten that detail. But for something I hadn't seen in at least 40 years, I remembered the gist of the scene almost exactly. Guess it made an impression.

I thought of that scene recently when using Google Translate to gather information from some German and French web sites. I wondered what would happen if you ran some famous text through a translation chain. As someone familiar with English signs written by Japanese speakers, I know that human translation can be drop-dead funny. But what about machine translation?

So I ran the Gettysburg Address through a Lucy chain: English to Spanish to German to French and then back again to English. Not as funny as Macho Business Donkey Wrestler, but interesting for its rough spots, and also for the things that came through exactly, such as the famed last phrase. Maybe the equivalent phrase is almost as famed in other languages. Anyway, this is the translation.

For 87 years, our ancestors on this continent a new nation, conceived in liberty and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are in a great civil war testing whether that nation or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We met on a great battlefield of that war. We arrived at a part of the field as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live to pay. It is only right and proper that we need to do this.

But in a broader sense, we can not consecrate - we can not consecrate - we can not hallow - this ground. The brave men, living and dead who struggled here have hallowed above our poor power to add or delete. The world will little note nor long remember, what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, but now the unfinished work which they fought so far so nobly dedicated. It is rather for us to be is the big task ahead dedicated - that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last and devotion - to solve that this high dead have not died in vain - that this nation under God, then a new birth of freedom - and that government of the people by the people and for the people shall not perish from the earth.

And the original, for reference.

Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal.

Now we are engaged in a great civil war, testing whether that nation, or any nation so conceived and so dedicated, can long endure. We are met on a great battle-field of that war. We have come to dedicate a portion of that field, as a final resting place for those who here gave their lives that that nation might live. It is altogether fitting and proper that we should do this.

But, in a larger sense, we can not dedicate -- we can not consecrate -- we can not hallow -- this ground. The brave men, living and dead, who struggled here, have consecrated it, far above our poor power to add or detract. The world will little note, nor long remember what we say here, but it can never forget what they did here. It is for us the living, rather, to be dedicated here to the unfinished work which they who fought here have thus far so nobly advanced. It is rather for us to be here dedicated to the great task remaining before us -- that from these honored dead we take increased devotion to that cause for which they gave the last full measure of devotion -- that we here highly resolve that these dead shall not have died in vain -- that this nation, under God, shall have a new birth of freedom -- and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.

Salt Creek in September

2011-09-20T19:36:00.005-05:00

The stretch of the Salt Creek Trail near Mile 0 doesn't actually pass next to Salt Creek. To reach Salt Creek, you have to take one of the well-worn but unmarked dirt paths that people use mostly to access fishing spots. I didn't have fishing in mind on Saturday, but I did want to visit the creek again.

This is looking roughly east, toward the Arlington Heights Road bridge. The bridge in the distance looks small, but it's actually four lanes. Under and near the bridge, but hard to see, are a handful of people fishing.

Looking roughly west. Not far away is a dam that creates the main body of water in Busse Woods, which is popular with recreational fishermen too.

Dragonflies and other bugs flitted around the banks and the water. Near the far bank, a large turtle was sunning himself on a large rock poking out of the water. Elsewhere, ducks paddled by. Hard to believe this spot will be icy only three months from now.

Salt Creek Trail, Mile 0

2011-09-19T19:24:00.003-05:00

I forget now who described meeting Eleanor Mondale, but he was a fellow in my high school English (?) class (senior year? That would put it in '78 or '79), and he was a casual, only-in-class acquaintance. I got the impression from what he said that their meeting didn't quite rise to the level of a "date," perhaps because of a persistent Secret Service presence. I don't remember the exact circumstances of the meeting, though if I had to guess I would say that his parents were locally important donors to the Democratic Party -- even in Alamo Heights, there must have been a few such.

Anyway, that's my Eleanor Mondale story, tenuous as it is. Hadn't heard anything about her in years, but it's never good news when you hear about someone dying at only 51 -- someone, in theory, you could have gone to school with.

It was finally warm again on Saturday, so I made my way to the Ned Brown Forest Preserve (Busse Woods) for some walking. But on pleasant Saturdays at Busse Woods, a walker like me shares the trail with a lot of people who have taken to their bicycles. I can't begrudge them space on the trail, but bicyclists whizzing by every other minute or so makes for a less relaxing stroll. So I walked down the Salt Creek Trail, which connects with the main trail at the Salt Creek Trail's Mile 0, but which doesn't attract nearly as many bike riders.

The scenery's pretty much the same as on the more crowded trail. This time of the year, that means a still-summer green tinged with goldenrod. The much-maligned goldenrod, taking the rap for ragweed pollen.

In some spots, a lot of goldenrod.

But that's not all. I don't know this species, but I like its looks.

Also, a few manmade items. Such as one of the more obscure plaques anywhere in the Chicago area.

Actually, the rock and its plaque aren't on the Salt Creek Trail, but on the main Busse Woods trail, very near the Mile 0 sign. The plaque bears the shield of the American Society of Civil Engineers, and says:

Illinois Section Outstanding Civil Engineering Achievement - 1986

Upper Salt Creek Watershed Floodwater Management Plan

I'm sure it was the crowning achievement of someone's career.

Item From the Past: Waldheim Cemetery

2011-09-18T19:38:00.005-05:00

Way back in the spring of 2003 -- seems like a different era, doesn't it? -- I posted about visiting Waldheim Cemetery (a.k.a. Forest Home Cemetery) in western suburban Forest Park, Illinois. Warm September days are fine times to visit cemeteries, I think. Yesterday would have been a good day for such an expedition, since it was warm after a string of unseasonably cold days, but I didn't make it. Today was cool and rainy, so no go.

I wrote: "I went to see Waldheim Cemetery early last September [2002], on a warm day when I unexpectedly had a few hours free. Besides some lawn maintenance men, I had the place practically to myself. It was all you would expect in a cemetery dating from the 19th century, plenty of ornate old headstones set in lush grass, surrounded by big trees, and featuring inscriptions ranging from the laconic to the poetic. Many were in German: VATTER and MUTTER were popular on family stones."

This formally posed couple, as I recall, were one such Vatter und Mutter pair, looking out at us from the late 19th century.

I continued: "The Haymarket Martyrs' Monument is near the entrance, and so was easy to find. That day there were fresh flowers at its base and costume jewelry around the neck of Justice and the fallen worker.

"According to Graveyards of Chicago, the 'Haymarket Martyrs' Monument was erected in 1893... It features a granite shaft and two bronze figures — a woman as Justice placing a crown of laurels on the brow of a fallen worker, while preparing to draw a sword. Sculptor Albert Weinert designed this monument based on a verse from the "Marseillaise," which [the men] had sung before their hangings.

“ 'The monument was dedicated June 25, 1893. Thousands of workers and visitors to the World's Columbian Exposition marched to the downtown train station and then rode to the cemetery. Floral tributes had been sent by several nations, and red bunting decorated the monument and speakers' platform. Speeches were made in English, German, Polish and Bohemian, and an orchestra played the "Marseillaise." ’ ”

At the time I posted that, no memorial to the victims of the Haymarket Riot existed besides the one at Waldheim. One was erected on the site of the riot a few years later.

"The cemetery had other interesting spots, only some of which I could find, considering the maddeningly vague guide pamphlet. I saw the mound that was a burial site for Pottawatomie Indians before the 1830s, which was one of the reasons this area later became a cemetery. I also happened on the large headstone of Samuel Fallows, who was a bishop of the Reformed Episcopal Church — a breakaway group from the Anglican Communion — and a lesser-known brigadier general in the Union Army.

"But I couldn’t find several better-known people, such as Emma Goldman, Samuel Gompers or Billy Sunday. Some other time, perhaps."

I haven't made it yet. So many interesting cemeteries, so little time (till one must become a cemetery resident oneself).

The President is a Sick Man

2011-09-15T23:29:00.006-05:00

The President is a Sick Man (Matthew Algeo, 2011) is my kind of book. A crisply written, popular history describing a fairly well-known yet astonishing incident in presidential history, namely Grover Cleveland's cancer and its secret treatment. The book fleshes the story out with plenty of interesting context and detail. Such as the extreme dread cancer posed for those living in the 19th century. Who can doubt it? Cancer is dreadful enough now. Imagine when the diagnosis meant an almost certain lingering death, the kind that Ulysses Grant suffered.

Turns out that President Cleveland had a rarer, much less dangerous kind of tumor in his mouth than former President Grant. But it was dangerous enough. It seems that medical science was just advanced enough in 1893 for Cleveland's doctors to excise the growth without killing the president, but it must have been a near thing.

"It's worth mentioning just a few of the tools that the surgeons would not have had at their disposal, simply because they had not been devised or perfected," writes Alego. "They would have no suction apparatus for draining blood or other fluids from the operative site and no means of artificially resuscitating the patient should his heart stop. There would be no electronic monitors, no ventilators, no laryngoscopes, no endotracheal tubes. Surgery had come a long way since the Civil War -- but still had a long way to go."

And, of course, no blood transfusions or antibiotics. Fortunately for Cleveland, his doctors were fully persuaded of the benefits of sterile surgery, then a fairly new idea. As Algeo put it, "surgery pre-Lister was a gamble that most patients were bound to lose." So Cleveland got vastly better treatment than poor President Garfield did only 12 year earlier, when doctors examining his GSW couldn't be bothered to wash their hands, even though they must have heard of Joseph Lister's ideas by then.

The medical drama's only part of the story, however. Doubly astonishing is the fact that the July 1, 1893, operation -- performed on the yacht Oneida in Long Island Sound, of all places -- was kept a secret until 1917, long after Cleveland had died of another kind of cancer (probably) elsewhere in his body.

Well, not quite a secret. One of the best-known journalists of the day, E.J. Edwards of the Philadelphia Press, found out about the operation and published a major exposé. But in an age when newspapers -- being the cable news of their time -- weren't above completely making things up, Edwards was discredited. Mostly because the president and everyone else on the ship lied like dogs about what had happened. President Cleveland just went fishing for a few days, that's all. Oh, and he had a few teeth pulled on board. And he has a touch of rheumatism. E.J. Edwards is damnable liar! The book's subtitle tells the tale: "Wherein the Supposedly Virtuous Glover Cleveland Survives a Secret Surgery at Sea and Vilifies the Courageous Newspaperman Who Dared Expose the Truth."

Conspiracy buffs, take note. Edwards found out about the operation because one of the doctors involved blabbed about it to a colleague, who then told someone who knew Edwards, who then went to the doctor who'd first blabbed, who then confessed the whole thing to Edwards.

The president was able to pull off the deception for a number of reasons, but probably most of all because he made a remarkable recovery, and was able to wear a vulcanized rubber prosthetic jaw so lifelike that no one noticed it. (A fact I remember learning in high school U.S. history class from a fine teacher, Mrs. Collins. It amazed me then, and still does.)

Also, to be fair to President Cleveland, he was certain that maintaining secrecy was the right thing to do, since news of his cancer -- about the worst health problem he could have, and still be alive -- would have made the Panic of 1893 even worse, and it was bad enough as it was, idling countless workers and bringing much commerce to a halt. He made a political calculation, too. Being perceived as ill with cancer would have hurt his chances of persuading Congress to repeal the Sherman Silver Purchase Act, a cause dear to Cleveland, who was a gold-standard man. It's hard to imagine now the passion of the 1890s political quarrel between goldbugs and silverites, but some of it comes through in the book. It was the polarizing issue of the time, a collision of vested interests.

Cleveland got lucky, too, in that questions about his health were pushed off the front pages by a couple of large hurricanes that hit the United States in the late summer of 1893. One Category 2 storm hit New York City, and among other damage, destroyed an entire barrier island off Long Island. Another storm hit the Sea Islands of Georgia and South Carolina, an estimated Category 3 that probably killed a few thousand people and made tens of thousands more homeless.

The story of the Sea Islands Hurricane of 1893 is a fascinating aside in Algeo's book for a number of reasons, such as the fact that such a tremendous storm, on par with Katrina, has been completely forgotten (as has the 1900 storm that nearly destroyed Galveston or even the deadly New England Hurricane of 1938). It's also worth noting that neither the states nor the federal government provided much relief to the victims of the hurricane, partly because most of them were Gullah subsistence farmers, and partly because the Cleveland administration didn't believe disaster relief was within the purview of the federal government. Federal disaster relief is a 20th-century idea and, as far as I'm concerned, an important bit of progress since the Gilded Age, no matter what Ayn Rand-inspired jackasses tell us in our time.

The President is a Sick Man has a happy ending of sorts, in that in 1917 one of the surviving doctors, William Williams Keen, a dean of American medicine, wanted to tell the world what had happened. Cleveland's widow (the remarried Francis Cleveland Preston) agreed to it, so Dr. Keen published a long article about the operation in The Saturday Evening Post. Newspaperman E.J. Edwards was elderly at the time, but still alive, so he lived to see his vindication.

The Wit & Wisdom of Foghorn Leghorn

2011-09-14T22:44:00.003-05:00

A chill enveloped northern Illinois today. Mild compared to the arctic waves inevitably coming in future months, but still a sizable drop compared with Sunday or Monday. Winter's in his dressing room, getting ready for his big show.

A virus has blown through as well -- only through our house, as far as I'm concerned. Ann stayed home today with a mid-level cold. Treatment: bed rest, fluids, cartoons. I was feeling it too, but maybe my more experienced immune system held it off better. I sneezed and blew my nose from time to time, but I still filed the stories I need to file.

I also watched a few cartoons with her. One was "Strangled Eggs," a late (1961) Foghorn Leghorn vehicle. Been a while since I've seen any of those. During my major cartoon-watching years, Foghorn Leghorn was a Warner-stable favorite of mine. He still is. I can appreciate him better now, in fact. Such lines as these (from "Strangled Eggs") would have meant little to me at Ann's age:

"Bare, I say, bare as a cooch dancer's midriff."

(Said as he looks at his empty cupboard. I had to look up that old slang.)

"I got, I say, I got this boy as fidgety as a bubble dancer with a slow leak."

(More burlesque. What don't we know about Foghorn Leghorn?)

"My pappy used to say, 'Shoemaker, stick to your last.' And this is my last!"

(Said as he failed to get what he wanted, right at the end of the cartoon.)

Will Not Go There, See That

2011-09-13T18:14:00.005-05:00

Got a peculiar press release the other day (because I'm on some peculiar lists): "So-and-So Travel Co. announces its 2012 group tour packages to North Korea... Highlights include:

The April 2012 tour coinciding with the 100th birthday celebrations of North Korea's Eternal President and founder, Kim Il Sung;

New visits to beautiful Kumgang, the "Diamond Mountains," open to tourists for the first time since 2008;

New visits to several pristine remote DRPK mountain ranges for intrepid travelers."

Yep, a starving population does have a way of keeping those mountain ranges pristine.

As It Happens, the Moon is Full Tonight

2011-09-12T21:40:00.003-05:00

And a fine silver moon it is, rising from behind my neighbor's honey locust, if I stand on my deck. It's a breezy, warmish evening, so I did that just now.

I should know better than to read comments posted at any web site (except here), but sometimes I do it anyway. Such as the comments at a short article accompanying photos of the Apollo landing sites taken by the Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter. Here's a good one -- entirely sic:

These “pictures” prove nothing. I could do that in photoshop.
The moon landings were faked. All the facts show this without doubt. Anyone with a bit of knowledge knows this. For one thing the moon isnt a planet and so doesnt have any gravity. The “landers” should be floating in space. And why are there “tracks” on the moon? After 40 years they should have vanished. Outside my home a car track doesnt last 1 month. LOL!
Also look at the picture of the “flag” on the moon. It’s WAVING! But there is no wind on the Moon!
Don’t be fooled by the great scientific conspiracy. They use these things to control us to take away our freedoms. Put your faith in God not “science”.

I can see that guy's last point. He'd best put his faith in God, since he knows no science. Besides, God is famous for protecting fools, besides drunks and children.

Remembrance

2011-09-11T19:25:00.007-05:00

Schaumburg had a remembrance ceremony this afternoon at Veterans Gateway Park, including an invocation and a laying of wreathes. I stood a few feet away from the VFW member who played Taps, a gentleman of advanced age (Korea? An older soldier in Vietnam?). Age didn't hold him back. He played the melancholy notes flawlessly.

It didn't seem right to take any pictures during the ceremony. But afterward I took a few. This is the Schaumburg Fire and Police Color Guard, right after the ceremony.

The park is at the junction of two major thoroughfares, Schaumburg Road and Roselle Road. It features is a tall brick clock tower ringed by memorials to the armed services. The four wreathes -- one for each hijacked flight and its victims -- were at the base of the clock tower.

Who Shot What's-His-Name?

2011-09-08T19:13:00.001-05:00

I read that All My Children is going to end its run this month after 40-plus years. Not counting spoofs such as Soap and Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman, it was one of only two soap operas I ever took any interest in. That's because during the 1979-80 academic year at Vanderbilt, my freshman year, I roomed on the fifth floor of Lupton Hall with a fellow named Harry. We'd been put together randomly, or so I assume. I believe random roommate selection is usually a good thing, since you're bound to learn something from your random roommate.

I hope Harry learned something from me. I know I did from him. For example, some people live in Indiana and feel some affection for it. Also, some people care deeply about sports and even have an astonishing talent for sports statistics. Finally, I learned that soap operas have other viewers besides housewives.

Harry, for one. He watched All My Children regularly, even arranged his schedule (I think) so that he could be back in our room to see it. Sometimes other lads from down the hall would watch it, too. TVs were a fairly rare item on the hall, hard as that is to believe. All Harry had was a small black-and-white set.

I watched enough of the show to get the gist of the story sometimes, and knew some of the characters' names. In the spring of 1980 (again, I think), there was a weeks-long story line about the murder of one of the characters, an unlikable man who had many enemies among the other characters. For weeks, it seemed, the show teased the audience with the question of who'd shot the bastard. Come to think of it, that story line might have been inspired by J.R. Ewing's shooting, which was the same spring. The goal of goosing up viewership was certainly the same.

I don't remember how that All My Children story arc played out. But there was a fair amount of speculation about whodunnit among the Lupton 5 residents who came to our room to watch. I made my own suggestion, mostly to annoy Harry, which was the "some guy" theory. That is, none of the regular characters did it. Some guy came in off the street and blew him away.

Bastrop State Park

2011-09-07T18:47:00.006-05:00

I was unhappy to learn over Labor Day weekend that much of Bastrop State Park has burned to the ground. The park is in Bastrop County, Texas, not far southeast of Austin. It isn't a large park, a little shy of 6,000 acres, but it is distinctive for its loblolly pines -- a patch of piney-green East Texas dropped into Central Texas.

I've been there more recently, but my fondest memories of Bastrop are of two camping trips to the park with high school friends in the spring and summer of 1979. If I pause for a moment, I can picture the campsite, the fire we tended late into the night, the sloping ground nearby blanketed by pine needles and rich in pine cones -- which we spent time throwing at each other. I can hear the voices of my friends, but not quite what we said during our many and varied conversations (we had no electronic entertainment, and were better for it). I can almost smell the pines, but I'd need to visit a stand of loblollies for the memory to return with any olfactory gusto.

Over the weekend, wildfires encouraged by the windy leftover of Hurricane Lee ravaged the drought-dried Bastrop SP and, unfortunately, hundreds of homes in the vicinity. I understand that loblolly pines grow back quickly, but still. It's a damned shame.

Permanent Residents of Schaumburg

2011-09-06T19:01:00.010-05:00

The holiday weekend included a visit to Septemberfest, the not-very-German festival that Schaumburg, Illinois, puts on each Labor Day weekend. It was lively and crowded. This year I noticed that the carny games were offering Angry Bird plush toys as prizes, along with Rastaman bananas, which I think I saw last year.

Not far away is a much quieter place, the graveyard of old St. Peter Lutheran Church near Schaumburg Road, which is much more German than Septemberfest is ever likely to be. I've posted about it before, but without pictures. This is old St. Peter.

And its cemetery, populated by diaspora Germans and others.

Many of the permanent residents of the cemetery were born in Germany, or had parents who were. I suspect that Friedrich Redeker here (1813-96) was one of the former.

A few of the names, such as Springinsguth, are now major street names in this part of metro Chicago.

According to the Schaumburg Township Historical Society, burials began at St. Peter in 1847, and its permanent residents now number over 1,000.

Earth, Air, Fire & Water

2011-09-01T20:09:00.004-05:00

It was hot today, up in the 90s F. It hasn't been that hot since we returned from Washington, but for the opening days of September, we get a warm blast to remember summer by. By Labor Day, they say, a mass of cool air will be in from Canada to reminder us of all the much colder masses ahead. Still, looking out at my back yard, it's a little hard to believe that all the flush greens will be gone by the opening days of December, and the ground will (probably) be covered with frozen water.

No posting till Tuesday, since Labor Day weekend is no time to blog.

I can't let September 1 pass with noting that I met two of my closest friends in college, Dan and Steve, on this day 30 years ago. I know this because I wrote about meeting them in a diary I kept at the time, though it took a while for the significance of the day to become apparent. Anyway, here they are, Steve on the left and Dan on the right.

The picture was taken in 1986, which is close enough, considering how young we were. I have no images of them in college. Can college kids today imagine such a thing?

On September 1, 1981, Rich and I -- pictured here, also at the same 1986 event, and looking rather young ourselves -- met Steve and Dan.

That evening we went to a party at Vanderbilt's McGill dormitory, where we met a girl named Kim, who in turn introduced us to Dan and Steve and some other people in room 320. It was a lively bunch.

I described the meeting: "The talking went on. My mind tingled with all of it. Many subjects, a lot of laughing."

By the spring of '82, "Earth, Air, Fire & Water" was one way we described our complementary temperaments. Yet as tight as we were during my last two years in college, this is probably the only picture of the four of us together -- that same moment in May 1986, in Washington, DC, as it happens.

Left to right: Freeman, Bill (two high school friends of Dan), me, Dan, Rich, Mike (a close friend of all of ours) and Steve.

Washington Leftovers

2011-08-31T19:01:00.024-05:00

On some days during our time in Washington, I would get up early and walk around by myself in the neighborhood around our hotel, which stands at the corner of 15th St. and Rhode Island Ave. I was among other walkers, joggers, bicyclists and dog-walkers and their dogs, and I passed shops, restaurants, the embassies of various nations, foundations, nonprofits, trade associations, churches, gardens and small parks. But more than any of those, restored row houses and mature trees gave the neighborhood its charm.

The still-blooming flowers helped, too, even this riot of past-prime sunflowers.

Just down the street from the hotel on 15th was Grace Reformed Church. While in Washington as vice president and president, Theodore Roosevelt was a member of this church, often walking to Sunday services from the White House, presumably in the company of barely necessary bodyguards, considering TR's big-stick personality. I passed by the church often, but never saw it open.

Neighborhood details, such as the green fire alarm boxes, were easier to access.

A sign on the box said, "Fire alarm boxes such as this one (originally painted red) were installed in the District after the Civil War. Telegraphs transmitted the box number (top) to a fire alarm center. This system was used until the 1970s, when the boxes were converted to a telephone system. By the 1990s, the callbox system had been replaced by the 911 system and was abandoned." As recently as that?

Not all statuary in Washington is of the memorial or monumental variety. This fellow exults across the street from Grace Reformed Church.

Still, some of our area's statuary was quite traditional, down to frequent visits by pigeons, which I saw atop the heads of Daniel Webster and Winfield Scott, both of whom have statues at Scott Circle. Also near the circle is this monument -- a highly aesthetic one, I thought, even if it honors an odd choice: Samuel Hahnemann (1755-1843), father of homeopathy.

I'll give Herr Dr. Hahnemann the benefit of the doubt, since standard medicine in his time was dodgy at best. "Like cures like" was probably as reasonable as most medical ideas of the time. In our time, there's no excuse for homeopathy. There might as well be an aesthetic memorial in Washington to Franz Joseph Gall for developing phrenology.

On one of my walks I discovered Trio, which is at the corner of 17th St. and Q St.

Make that re-discovered, because I'd eaten lunch there on May 8, 1982. There were few other eating options on that particular stretch of 17th at the time. I had veal, served by a waitress with intensely white hair. While not top-notch, the meal had satisfied me as greasy spoons often do.

In 2011, I recognized Trio instantly. The memory rushed back all at once. I hadn't remotely expected the place to still be there after almost 30 years, or even thought about looking for it before I chanced upon it again. The next day we all went there for breakfast, eating al fresco on a flawless summer morning. I had tasty French toast and felt a little of the old satisfaction return. As we were leaving, I spoke to the owner, a gentleman somewhat older than I am. His father, a Greek immigrant, had opened the restaurant in the early 1950s, and it had survived the decline of the neighborhood and later its gentrification -- no mean feat in either case.

"You know, I ate here almost 30 years ago," I told the proprietor.

"You ought to come back more often," he replied.

Early on, I also discovered an upmarket grocery store in our temporary neighborhood, part of a successful national chain. We foraged there a fair amount. One day as I was looking for a small container of milk at this store, standing there in front of a refrigerated case with one of the doors open, a face suddenly appeared in one of the gaps left by removed milk cartons. "You got everything you need, son?" said a man, visibly older than me. I was startled, but said I did. It was a retail experience unlike any other.

We often exited the Metro at Dupont Circle and walked back to the hotel from there. The area around the circle been gentrified. Or, as a native of the Washington area told me, it's "less stabby" than it used to be. But there still seem to be comedians roaming the area.

I like that post, but I don't think I was the first one. Note the building behind the post. It's the embassy of Iraq.

On the whole, the Metro proved reliable for getting around town, though I only speak as a tourist, not a long-time commuter. I'd forgotten the waffle-iron ceilings inside the stations and how often one changes at Metro Center, but it all came back to me. We noticed fairly quickly the high number of down escalators (and a few up ones) that weren't working -- broken due to deferred maintenance or off due to energy costs? Either way, it was annoying.

The voice of the people says so too. This was on a bench at I forget which station.

Dupont Circle's north entrance had the worst of the bum escalators -- 188 feet deep, with the down escalator not working. It's just a down escalator, right? What's the problem? Going down that many steps, especially steel-grooved escalator steps, was mesmerizing, and not in a good way. So we avoided that entrance for boarding the Metro from then on.

While walking around the Tidal Basin, the bottom of one of my shoes came loose. Not completely off -- but enough that I suddenly had a long rubber flap hanging from the bottom of the shoe, making walking a tricky business. Lilly lent me a hair band and I wrapped that around the shoe. It was a temporary fix. Every few hundred feet, the flap would come loose and I would have to re-wrap it. But I managed to see the Jefferson Memorial, the FDR Memorial and the line of cherry trees around the Tidal Basin in that condition. The next day I went to the posh retail nexus at Connecticut Ave. and L St. and found one of the street's non-posh retailers, Filene's Basement, where I scored some new and very comfortable shoes for $38.

Though famed for their brief flowering -- as they should be -- the Tidal Basin cherry trees are also remarkable in summer. The oldest ones are near the new MLK Memorial. Seldom have I seen such gnarled specimens in such profusion, almost blocking the path in places, hogging their patch of the ground tenaciously. It looks like the Park Service long ago planned for the time when these cherry patriarchs, a 1912 gift of the Japanese Empire to the United States, die off. In a lot of places I saw younger cherry trees planted a little further from the edge of the water.

The Reflecting Pool and much else besides between the World War II Memorial and the Lincoln Memorial is currently fenced off for renovation. The sun had already gone down by the time we headed toward the Lincoln Memorial, so the area beyond the those fences was dark and forbidding. But at one point I could see the outline of the District of Columbia World War Memorial off in the distance.

I stumbled across that memorial on a previous visit to Washington. Dedicated to the 499 residents of DC who died in World War I, it was forlorn and in bad shape when I saw it. But maybe someday it will be the national memorial for all the Americans who died in the Great War. The doughboys should have one. Go ahead, sign the petition.

Abner Doubleday is buried not far from Arlington House at Arlington National Cemetery. There's no mention of baseball on his stone, since that story was made up some years after his death. Elsewhere, we saw Audie Murphy. I told Lilly who he was.

As I've said before, pay attention to the famed of a cemetery, but don't ignore the obscure completely. While at the national cemetery, I took a look at some headstones at random. It's good for a moment's reflection, if you're in the right frame of mind. What was this soldier's story? I hope someone knows. He survived the war, but died young anyway.

We spent some time in Washington's Union Station, either buying things or eating things. It's a splendid beaux-arts structure by Daniel Burnham, mostly refashioned in our time to be a mall, though it's also Amtrak's main Washington terminal and connects with the Metro. Much history has passed through.

Because I'd read about them beforehand, I knew about the station's Roman soldiers. "The Main Hall... features a 96-foot high, barrel vault with a decorative, coffered plaster ceiling," notes the station's web site. "Standing around the ledge of the balcony is 36 figures of Roman legionnaires hollow cast in plaster with sand finish. The figures were originally cast as nudes, but railroad officials, fearing the public would be offended, ordered shields be strategically placed on each statue. The shields remain in place today."

Indeed they do.

Speaking of statues, there's a mess of them at the U.S. Capitol. We got in for the last tour of the day on a Saturday, which means we saw the crypt, the rotunda, the old House of Representatives chamber and a few other spots, but not the House or Senate chamber, which are closed on weekends. Getting in at all required a timed ticket, a pass through a metal detector and a bag inspection. Future generations will probably have to submit a DNA sample or undergo a retinal scan. I dimly recall passing through a metal detector and wandering around the U.S. Capitol on my own in 1982, as if it were a state capitol.

Among the National Statuary Hall Collection -- each state gets to place two, except Virginia, which gets an extra one for Washington -- I spied Ronald Reagan, Jack Swigert, Caesar Rodney, Kamehameha I, Dwight Eisenhower, Ephraim McDowell, Huey Long, Hannibal Hamlin, Samuel Adams, Gerald Ford, William Jennings Bryan, Po'pay, John Burke (of North Dakota), James Garfield, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Washington and Jefferson. I looked in vain for Philo T. Farnsworth, since who wouldn't want to see him?

On a whim, I took a picture of Lilly at the foot of the John Burke statue. Now she's probably one of the few teenagers in America to have her photo taken with both Burkes, since I took one of her and Burke at the North Dakota Capitol in 2006. Looking at these pictures side-by-side, I see that they are the same statue.

In the Old House Chamber of the Capitol -- called Statuary Hall these days -- there are small plaques on the floor identifying the location of the desks of House members in the chamber (1807-57) who later became president: J.Q. Adams, Tyler, Polk, Fillmore, Pierce, Buchanan, Lincoln and A. Johnson. I found a few of them and had the satisfaction of standing where Millard Fillmore occasionally sat.

It's likely the only memorial in Washington to the 13th President of the United States. Sign the Compromise of 1850 and send Perry to Japan, and that's all you get. Whatever its other seductions, high office doesn't guarantee immortal fame.

The National Sculpture Garden

2011-08-30T20:27:00.002-05:00

I forgot to mention that the West Building of the National Gallery of Art now occupies the site formerly occupied by the Sixth Street Station (Pennsylvania Station) of the Baltimore and Potomac Railroad, built in the 1870s and demolished in 1908. On July 2, 1881, President Garfield went to that station to leave town, since anyone with any sense leaves Washington during summer, but instead was shot by Charles J. Guiteau there.

While the station stood, a plaque marked the spot. As I knew from reading Assassination Vacation (Sarah Vowel, 2005), nothing marks the spot now. But near the U.S. Capitol, Garfield has a statue. I didn't see it this time around.

Across 7th St. from the West Building is the National Sculpture Garden, bounded by 7th St., Madison Dr., 9th St. and Constitution Ave. It's a part of the National Gallery of Art, and relatively new, opening only in 1999. At its heart is a large fountain. Not an ornate one -- you might expect a little sculpture at such a place -- but still a great place to sit and soak your feet. Dozens of people were doing that on the warm late afternoon we visited. We all did too.

The garden has 17 works installed in the landscaped area around the fountain. Below is probably the best known of them, "Typewriter Eraser: Scale X" by Claes Oldenburg and Coosje van Bruggen (1999), with an orange traffic cone for scale. I don't think I've seen a regular-sized one in years. A typewriter eraser, that is. I suppose that's part of the charm.

These are two views of the stainless steel and concrete "Graft," by Roxy Paine (2008-09).

Next is "Moondog," by Tony Smith, who died in 1980. The painted aluminum work was created posthumously in 1990, based on versions done in 1964 and 1970.

Finally, "Thinker on a Rock" by Barry Flanagan (1997).

The rest of the works can be seen at the National Gallery's web site, except that it needs to be updated, since "Graft" seems to have taken the place of a work called "Cluster of Four Cubes," which is still listed.

The National Gallery of Art

2011-08-29T23:28:00.007-05:00

The old copy editor within me is always looking for mistakes in news stories. CNN published an article this morning called "Luxury, horror lurk in Gadhafi family compound," the gist of which is the shocking (shocking, I say) revelation that families of tyrants tend to live in gaudy palaces and abuse whomever is handy whenever the urge strikes, which is often. Anyway, the vanguard of the current Libyan regime change reached one of these palaces, and CNN was there to film it. "We filmed them quixotically studying the labels of Cristal champagne and fine St. Emilion Bordeaux, apparently not realizing each bottle is worth hundreds of dollars," the author wrote, referring to rebels ransacking the palace.

Quixotically studying? In the manner of Don Quixote? Waving the bottles at windmills, maybe? I think "quizzically" is what the writer needed here. I won't be too hard on the writer, because I do this kind of thing often enough -- think of one word and then write a similar one that's completely at odds with the meaning I wanted. But I will be hard on CNN because it's supposed to have someone to catch that kind of mistake. Then again, I checked the same story a few minutes ago, and an editor had removed "quixotically" all together, so someone caught it.

The National Gallery of Art in Washington, DC, isn't part of the Smithsonian. Yet it's housed in two large buildings on the National Mall and doesn't charge admission, so for tourist purposes, it might as well be. The museum also has a feature that many other large institutions of its kind should have more of: places to sit in the galleries with backs. Maybe it's a mark of my increasing age, or just that we walked a lot in DC and appreciated the National Gallery's seating more than backless benches, which seem more common in museums. Of course, the benches can be too comfortable. In one room I noticed a well-dressed middle-aged woman sitting on a bench, fast asleep. A few minutes later, a guard wandered in an gently woke her up.

Comfy benches or not, we didn't spend quite as much time at the National Gallery as we wanted (a persistent theme on this trip), but managed to take note of some noteworthy works, including items I remember seeing before, such as David's "The Emperor Napoleon in His Study at the Tuileries," and others I must missed before, such as "Ginevra de' Benci," which has the distinction of being the only Leonardo da Vinci painting in the Americas. No albino dwarfs in the service of Opus Dei attacked me while I was looking at the painting.

"Gallery of the Louvre" by Samuel F.B. Morse is also currently on loan to the National Gallery, and I spent a while looking that. Morse's backstory is just as interesting as the canvas. Not long ago I read "Henry, Morse and the Telegraph," a chapter in The Heroic Age of American Invention by L. Sprague de Camp (1961), which mentioned Morse's career as an artist, which was notable but not tremendously successful. So he made a career change. As an inventor, de Camp wrote, "Morse was not so much an outstanding inventor as a promoter of an invention and a manager of inventions." There's something to be said for that. It's Morse code, after all.

Done in the 1830s and newly restored, " 'Gallery of the Louvre' depicts masterpieces from the Louvre's collection that Morse 'reinstalled' in one of that museum's grandest galleries, the Salon Carré," says the museum web site. That is, he painted the salon like he wanted it to be, not like it was, and stacked it with paintings he admired.

It's an odd subject to modern eyes. Why paint a painting of paintings? But we're awash in instantly copied and transmitted images. They were not. Paintings of galleries weren't so unusual then, a time of greater scarcity of manmade images, and neither was the hanging of paintings floor-to-ceiling in a gallery, or for that matter, in private homes that could afford them. That was a detail that made me smile, the cluttered museum wall. We imagine that our way of doing things -- such as the spare, uncluttered formality of an art museum -- are timeless practices, but it isn't so.

Also temporarily on display at the museum, in its spacious West Building rotunda, is "The Capitoline Venus," on loan to the United States for the first time. I was glad to see her. She had her own guard, looking a little bored there in the rotunda because mostly people were wandering past the statue and not showing any interest, much less an urge to deface it.

For a statue 1,800-plus years old, the Venus in fine shape. Usually on display at the Capitoline Museums (Musei Capitalolini) in Rome, the work made me ponder certain questions, such as why the hell didn't I visit the Capitoline Museums? Just look at the "Gallery" section at the Wiki page. I've seen most of those works used to illustrate histories or other works about Antiquity, but not with my own eyes. I was right there in the Piazza del Campidoglio, surrounded by the Capitoline Museums, although that was during the evening and I guess they were closed. I did notice that the equestrian statue of Marcus Aurelius wasn't in piazza; air pollution had been eating at him, I think, and he had been taken inside the museums.

Just another reason to go back to Rome, though I suspect the clock might run out on me before I can make it. But if I do go back to the shores of the Mediterranean, maybe Leptis Magna will be easier to visit too, provided things have settled down in Libya. Mrs. Quarles, my Latin teacher in high school, told us of visiting the site in the days before Gadhafi came to power, and somewhere in my head ever since has been a synaptic-based index card reading LEPTIS MAGNA: GO THERE IF YOU CAN.

The Church and the Basilica

2011-08-28T20:25:00.001-05:00

Two weeks ago we attended 10:30 a.m. services at St. John's Episcopal Church, which happens to be on Lafayette Square in Washington. It's an elegant church inside and out, originally designed in the 1810s by Benjamin Latrobe, Surveyor of the Public Buildings of the United States and the architect who oversaw the restoration of the U.S. Capitol after it burned, among many other projects.

It's also a church steeped in presidential history, counting a number of sitting presidents since James Madison as members. It's been customary since the time of Madison for each president, whatever his denomination, to visit at least once during his term. According to the National Park Service's "A National Registry of Historic Places Travel Itinerary," that even includes William Henry Harrison. Maybe he was heard to be blowing his nose and coughing more than usual during a service in March 1841. There was a presidential visit as recently as this July.

Pew 54 is called the "President's Pew." When the service was over, I went to look for it. Not only is it so marked with a small brass plaque, the kneeling cushions at Pew 54 and a good many other pews in front of it -- there are no built-in kneelers -- have the presidential seal as part of their design, along with the name of an individual president. I suppose they're all represented, from Madison to Obama.

On our last full day in Washington, we rode the Metro to the Catholic University of America and crossed the campus to reach the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception. It was either there or the National Cathedral, and the basilica won out because we could reach it without the extra bus ride that reaching the cathedral would have entailed. So the National Cathedral remains a sight to see, should I ever return to Washington.

The basilica is enormous. That isn't really the measure of a church, but it's striking all the same, even if you've read about it beforehand. At about 76,400 square feet, the basilica is the largest Catholic church in the United States. A cursory look at Wiki's "List of Largest Church Buildings in the World" puts it at 21st in the world and third in the United States, after the Cathedral of St. John the Divine in New York and the National Cathedral, both of which are Episcopalian. Other sources say it's the 10th largest church in the world. Another way to describe it is about half the size of the interior space of St. Peter's in Rome.

Done in a blend of Byzantine and Romanesque styles, and without structural steel, the Basilica of the National Shrine of the Immaculate Conception is also mind-bogglingly intricate, with dozens and dozens of chapels and side chapels and a few oratories on the main level and down in the crypt level too, many completed with funds from Catholic congregations around the world, such as Mary, Queen of Ireland; Our Lady of Guadalupe; Our Lady of Czestochowa; Our Lady of China; Our Lady of La Salettel; Our Lady of Siluva; Our Lady of La Vang; Our Lady of Bistrica; Our Lady of Lourdes; Our Mother of Africa, and more. Other chapels take their inspiration from the many and varied titles of Mary, such as Our Mother of Good Counsel, Mary Queen of Missions, Our Lady of Hope, Mother of Perpetual Help, Mary, Help of Christians, and more. All the various chapels are ornate, but so is pretty much every surface, nook and cranny of the basilica.

Vaulting overhead are large mosaics. Only one dome remains unfinished in this regard, and I understand plans are afoot to complete a design for it in some future decade. Among all the building's impressive mosaics, the most striking (fittingly) is the depiction of Jesus in north apse. According to the basilica, it measures 3,600 square feet and contains nearly 3 million tesserae. "Christ in Majesty has an apocalyptic nature," the basilica's web site says, "Jesus' strong youthful face and expression is consonant with the earliest images of Him in the Roman catacombs."

Even Roadside America has a take on this image, calling it "Mortal Combat [sic] Jesus." This is a good image of it -- better than on the basilica web site -- as well as a thoughtful blog posting. Jesus does have an unusually fearsome expression, at least to modern eyes, who are used to more placid views of the Savior. It reminded me of that bumper-sticker religious wisdom, "Jesus is coming, and boy is he pissed."