Next Voyage for the Swan: Faroe Islands

Got another postcard from Ed today. His cards can be counted on to be from far-flung places I’m unlikely to visit. Sure enough, today’s missive from the Shetland Islands, since he’s on a long tour of near-Arctic places best visited in August.

I’m more likely to visit the Shetlands than, say, Uganda, but even getting to Scotland, much less remote islands to the north, would be something of an achievement. It’s a lovely card, one of the long ones (8.5 x 3.5 inches, or more likely in the EU, 21.5 cm x 9 cm). The image is a waterside view of Lerwick, capital of the islands, looking very Nordic, or maybe a Scot-Nordic blend. The back of the card simply says The Swan.

There’s no other explanation of that, so I had to look it up. It’s the sailing ship in the picture, near the right side of the card: a restored vessel that the SwanTrust calls “one of the finest boats among the Scottish fishing fleet, and… the largest ever built at Lerwick in Shetland… The Swan Trust offers voyages around the Shetland Islands, and to other destinations such as Faroe, Norway, Iceland and Amsterdam.”

Ed mailed it on July 30, so that’s only four days in transit, a minor marvel by itself. It costs 87p to send a long card from the Shetlands. Her Majesty is still looking not elderly on her stamps, unlike the woman who opened the Olympics last week.

Be Not Afear'd; the Isle is Full of Noises

About four years ago I wrote, "the London Games would do well not to ape [the Beijing] show, but instead try for something simpler, more focused on individuals, rather than masses. China's got masses, that's for sure. Western Civilization is about something else."

We watched most of the opening ceremony on Friday, and liked it in spite of NBC's dumbed down, annoying presentation (and its ludicrous decision not to show the implicit 7/7 tribute). I don't know that I'd call the '12 ceremony simpler than '08, since there were a lot of moving parts. Sure was more festive, though.

And something of an answer to Beijing's message: Look here, we're strong and modern! To which the London replied, we invented modern. While having a spot of fun. Do the Chinese have an equivalent to Mr. Bean? Probably they do, but the party mandarins wouldn't dream of putting him front and center before a worldwide audience of a billion.

Ann was full of questions for me: What's that? What are they doing? What's that supposed to be? I told her as much as I could, but the references were flying by. The onrush of British content was something to behold, and must be bewildering if you're nine. Still, she'll pick most of it eventually. Such are the connections between the UK and the rest of the English-speaking world. I was reminded just how fortunate I am, being able to understand (most) of what the British have to offer the world, in the original language.

How is it I never made it to Glastonbury Tor? I don't think it was that obscure before the opening ceremony featured a model of it. But when I visited Bath in '83, which isn't very far away, I probably hadn't heard of it yet. During later visits to the country, it never occurred to me. Ah, well. Just another place to visit if I live long enough (and there are many such places in the British Isles).

We sat through the Parade of Nations, though as usual it was butchered by NBC. Why, for instance, since it's on tape delay, does the network pretend that a number of teams paraded by when the commercials were on? Sometimes the patter of the announcers told me some interesting tidbit about the teams, especially about one or another of the competitors, but a lot of the time their assumption was that the audience didn't know anything about anywhere, and didn't really need to.

Also as usual, I got to wonder how it is that some subnational places get Olympic committees, while others do not. American Samoa, Aruba, Bermuda, the BVI, the Caymans, Guam, Hong Kong, Palestine, Puerto Rico and the USVI all count as non-nation participants, though in the case of Palestine, it's pretty much a de facto nation (or two) and Hong Kong makes sense because it was a distinct entity for so long. But if Puerto Rico can get its own team, why not French Guiana? American Samoa but not French Polynesia? The British Virgin Islands but not Martinique? Maybe Martinique isn't big enough to field a team, but I'm sensing a pattern. French territories compete for the glory of France, or not at all. C'est la vie.

The Olympic cauldron lighting was pretty cool, with 204 copper petals, one for each team, rising up to be conduits for one of the many fingers of the giant flame. Not bad, but it couldn't top Paralympian Antonio Rebollo shooting a flaming arrow into the cauldron in Barcelona (or near it, since I've read the flame wasn't actually lit by his arrow, but who cares). Still, the London lighting was effective, and I didn't learn until today that the unexplained girls in floaty dresses carrying cup-like items along with each team were in fact carrying the copper petals that would be part of the cauldron. Nice touch.

One more question: What about Ringo? Couldn't he have played drums with Sir Paul? I haven't heard that he's ill, and surely he could have played that short set list. Maybe there were other considerations. Still, it would have been fitting.

I suspect the '16 ceremony will be a whole lotta festive. After after, it's Rio. But we'll have to wait and see.

In Old Fantasy Scotland

Dry. That's the best way to describe northern Illinois at the moment. I don't ever think I've seen my yard so brown, just to take one very small sample. Little rain is forecast for the days ahead. Cracks are appearing in patches of ground not covered with brown grass. Wind blows clouds of dust from the baseball field in the park behind our back yard.

At least the temps have cooled down. But back when it was still hot, on Friday, we ducked into a movie theater, a time-honored way to escape the heat (we have air conditioning, but never mind). Ann wanted to see Brave, so we all went. Even when not at their best, Pixar movies are usually worth seeing in the theater, and so it was with this one. Better than most animations that I've seen, but not as good as most of the other Pixar animations I've seen.

Still, I was taken with the way the Fantasy Medieval Highland forests were drawn. Gorgeous backdrops. The story, I could take or leave. Not quite enough drunken brawling and bloodletting, if you asked me. We're talking about medieval Scotland, after all.

But I did entertain myself dreaming up sequels that will never be made. The story involves an independent-minded daughter of the king of Scotland, who ultimately refuses, in a very modern way, not to marry into any of the powerful neighboring clans to keep the peace. The king also has three young sons, triplets apparently, whose main function is to make chaos. Add to the mix a bit of drunken brawling, archery, a comic witch, magic spells, an angry bear, an anachronistic theme of mother-adolescent daughter conflict, and a happy ending, and there you have it.

Anyway, I imagined that a few years later, the princess did marry, and according to her wishes, not to a Scotsman. Instead she married one of the younger sons of the king of France. The purpose, of course, was to cement an alliance against England. She comes to like the court of France but, alas, dies in childbirth. As for her brothers, as soon as the old king is dead, they immediately make bloody war on each other.

The "Zou Bisou Bisou" Tangent

I'm surprised that Lionsgate or AMC, in a fit of copyrighteousness, hasn't quashed this high-quality clip of Megan Draper (Jessica Paré) dancing to "Zou Bisou Bisou," which was a high point of Mad Men's season premiere in late March. Who knows, maybe they've figured out that clips like this will inspire people to seek out the entire episode. You know, as a kind of marketing.

Like most of the audience, I'd never heard of "Zou Bisou Bisou" before seeing the episode, not being as interested in mid-century French pop culture as Matthew Weiner seems to be. But it's a charming song, light and sweet as meringue. Also, it took me on a tangent. I'm often willing to be taken on tangents, which can be little trips from the routine of settled life. First, I went to the Gillian Hills version of the song, the video of which must have been made for the French Scopitones.

Proceeding from that, I learned that nearly 10 years later Gillian Hills was one of the girls with the ice lollies in A Clockwork Orange, and that her father was Denis Hills. They don't make 'em like him any more. Once I started reading about the elder Hills, I remembered where I'd heard of him before.

In 1975, he ran afoul of Idi Amin, who threatened to execute Hills for writing disparaging things about the Conqueror of the British Empire -- foolishly writing them, as Hills was still in Uganda at the time. A wrangle between the UK and Uganda followed, and eventually a message from Queen Elizabeth herself, which presumably stoked the dictator's vanity, persuaded Amin to spring Hills. All of this played out in news reports that year, which I remember hearing (that was also the year Franco died so slowly).

A Chipper Voice

Light snow at this late hour, at the end of a busy day. BTST usually isn't a place to post about how busy I happen to be, but this week is exceptionally so. Features and shorts must be done. There's nothing like deadlines to inspire flying fingers.

Other members of house were watching the Grammies last night, but even if I hadn't been busy then too, I would have skipped it. Still, at one point I couldn't help overhearing Adele's speaking voice, which I'd never heard before. What a delight, an internationally famed singer who talks like someone who takes your order at a fish and chips shop.

Guns as Big as Steers & Shells as Big as Trees

Back again after Memorial Day weekend. This year, as it happens, the Monday holiday also falls on the actual holiday, which is May 30. It's fitting to remember the war dead of this country, of course, but also spare a moment for the servicemen of allied nations, such as the sailors on the HMS Hood, lost 70 years ago this week.

With that in mind, here's an unusual version of "Sink the Bismarck." I didn't know the Blues Brothers did a cover of the song, a bit of folk history originally written by Johnny Horton and Tillman Franks, but they did. Apparently the Blues Brothers' version was to have been in the movie The Blues Brothers, but it didn't make the cut.

Also, a scene from the 1960 movie Sink the Bismarck!, depicting the loss of the Hood. No CGI, but better for it. If you hear your inner Patsy whisper, "They're only models," the right thing to do is say shhhh!

The Yabba-Dabba-Doo Virus

We spent the last few days of April recovering from a virus on the loose in the house. Last week, Lilly had it, then Ann, then me. Ann had to stay home from school on Friday, then I felt crummy on Saturday. While I was on the couch for much of that afternoon, Ann, mostly recovered, decided it was time to watch a lot of the fourth season of The Flintstones, a DVD set that was given to us some time ago.

I appreciate its spot in the annals of TV animation, and like it for the most part, but the show was never a top favorite of mine. A half-dozen or so episodes is more than enough at one sitting. Still, the season premiere that year, which guest stars Ann-Margret more or less as herself, is an exceedingly charming cartoon. Maybe that's because the show's husband vs. wife antics are toned down for the episode, with the addition of a musical score that's aged a lot better than the premise of the show. I don't ever remember seeing this particular episode in repeats, and I don't know whether my family would have been watching on the original airdate, September 19, 1963, but I wouldn't remember it from then anyway.

I'm mostly recovered from the virus now, and back at the word mill. So I saw the May Day Google Doodle featuring the anniversary of the opening of the Great Exposition of 1851, including the Crystal Palace, a steam locomotive, and the Koh-I-Noor Diamond, among other marvels of the fair and the age.

Does "doodle" seem the right term, considering how much planning probably goes into them? My own choice for today's doodle would have been dandelions, which have sprouted in great number on my lawn, other lawns, vacant lots, roadsides and other green patches that I can see. But that's just me being narrow-minded. The Great Exhibition is well worth remembering.

Among other things, The Guardian notes that, "the building and the original show helped create the English euphemism 'spend a penny,' meaning go to the toilet, after sanitary engineer and plumber George Jennings created the first public loos. The so-called Monkey Closets were located in the Retiring Rooms, and visitors, who were also offered a shoe shine, were charged a penny to use them.

"The first show was a big success and the profit made was used to found London's Victoria and Albert Museum, the Science Museum and the Natural History Museum." Full article here.

Those are all fine legacies of the expo. Never heard of "spend a penny," but it seems to count as old slang. Any museum that has full-sized copies of Trajan's Column, as Victoria and Albert does, is all right by me. Though overshadowed by other London attractions, I can attest that the Natural History Museum and Science Museum are also excellent.

Dieu et Mon Droit & All That

It's too late in April to be this cold. But April ignores our pleas, and fobs the job of the warming of the Northern soil onto May.

I've developed some rules of thumb for reading about Prince William and Kate Middleton, though I can't say I've been reading about them all that much. Anyway, (1) don't read articles with the term "fairy tale" in the head or the deck or the lead paragraph or in a photo caption or pretty much anywhere; on the other hand, (2) don't take sour (ex-)British republicans very seriously either, such as Christopher Hitchens. We get it, Chris. The Windsors stubbornly refuse to live up to your standards. But so does everyone else, it seems, including God.

One of the more interesting ideas I've read in recent years regarding the British royal family came by way of advice columnist Dan Savage, of all people. Somehow or other the question of a Briton still being Canada's monarch came up, and he suggested that Prince Harry, being a spare and all, should immigrate to Canada to found a new dynasty for that country -- provided he marries a French-Canadian woman and makes bilingual babies with her. Not sure how the Canadians might feel about that, but it did strike me as an intriguing suggestion.

I'm not planning to watch the event. I skipped Charles and Diana's broadcast in 1981, too. Not out of any particular antipathy toward the participants, but just my odd idea that either you see a wedding in person, or not at all. It's something that shouldn't be televised. Besides, this time around it's at some ungodly hour here in North America.

Nuclear Notes

Time, I figure, to reacquaint myself with other nuclear accidents. Back when I took a seminar about the Manhattan Project, that subject was an appendix to my studies. That was so long ago that Chernobyl hadn't happened yet, and previous Soviet nuclear accidents were mostly still secret, such as the one at the Mayak nuclear fuel reprocessing plant near the city of Kyshtym in 1957, when tons of nuclear waste overheated and apparently caused a non-nuclear explosion that released radiation in an amount second only to Chernobyl.

Chernobyl might have remained secret longer but for how far the radiation blew. Word got out, of course. The first I heard of it was at a little store, and post office substation, in the first floor of the building in Nashville where I worked at the time. The proprietor, a bearded, chatty fellow, told me that "a nuclear power plant blew up in Russia." Unlike the Challenger accident a few months earlier, I don't remember that we huddled around our small workplace black-and-white TV that day to find out more, and looking up information on line wasn't an option.

I haven't had time to make it all the way through "Meltdown in Chernobyl," an episode of the excellent series Seconds From Disaster, but what I've seen so far is good.

The Windscale fire of 1957 -- clearly a bad year for nukes -- is an incident that ought to be better known. Maybe it is in Britain, but not here. In those days, the British were eager to make plutonium and tritium for an assortment of nuclear weapons, and let's just say that corners were cut. I'm not any kind of expert on nuclear energy, but even I'm astonished that Windscale featured an air-cooled reactor. With a chimney. The accident involved a massive fire in the reactor and clouds of radiation going up and out through the chimney. It seems that the crew narrowly averted a much larger disaster.

The gruesome SL-1 accident in early 1961 in Idaho inspires morbid fascination. I might be misremembering, but I first saw it mentioned on a calendar I had at some point in the mid-70s (published by National Lampoon?). The theme of the calendar was something bad every day, and the January 3rd entry mentioned that three men had died in a nuclear accident that day, but details were sparse, it being a calendar.

"Three workers were reassembling the control rod drives on 3 January in preparation for startup the following day," notes a site called Johnston's Archive, which is maintained by a physicist. "At about 9:01 PM the three workers were on top of the reactor when one manually removed the center control rod as rapidly as possible, over a 0.5-second period. The reactor became supercritical... producing a steam explosion. The worker who extracted the rod was killed instantly, impaled on the building's ceiling by a control rod... [One] hypothesis is that the rod was intentionally withdrawn in an act of murder-suicide; this was the conclusion of the investigation of the incident."

So as not to end on such a glum note, here's an amusement from Johnston's Archive, "A TEXAN definition of a planet." Or maybe he's serious. But I'm amused.

It's Not For Girls

No croci yet, but I heard a woodpecker this morning drilling into wood. For insect eggs? I couldn't say for sure, but it's still too early even for larval insects. Maybe woodpeckers need to get into practice before the spring drilling season.

Speaking of edibles, not long ago I discovered that a major retailer around here carries Yorkie bars. I'd never seen them for sale in the United States, so it was my impulse buy for that morning. This particular store has an international aisle with mostly the usual -- "Polish Foods," "Mexican Foods," etc. -- but also "British Foods." That was odd enough for me to look at the selections, and there it was.

Note the slogan right there on the package, It's Not For Girls (emphasis not added by me). Predictably, that upsets some literal-minded people, but I have a feeling it doesn't really discourage any girls from buying Yorkies in Britain or anywhere else. Lilly tried some, at her insistence, and seemed to like it. The UK adverts seem to have fun with it as well, such as this one, which I've linked to before.

The Victorian Internet

We're having a short run of warm days. No one expects it to last. Today I didn't have much time for the outdoors, but I did manage to walk all the way around Volkening Lake, a large pond where the Schaumburg Park District rents canoes and paddle boats in the summer.

The Victorian Internet by British writer Tom Standage is an interesting book, and an interesting turn of phrase to describe the worldwide telegraphy network established in the 19th century. Originally published in 1998 during the flush of the dotcom boom, the book points out parallels between the telegraph and the Internet, though without overstating the case too much.

The comparison can be overstated, because after all Internet has grown into much more than a way to send e-mail, as important as that function is. Then again, as Standage notes, the telegraph was more than just a messaging system, and mind-bending to early Victorians in ways we might not fully appreciate, since a world without instant communications is unimaginable for us, but not for them. The telegraph was something astonishingly new.

Comparative technologies is one thing, but I'm more interested in reading about the history of the telegraph -- about the largely forgotten optical telegraphy of the early 19th century; the men besides Morse who contributed to the building of a practical electrical telegraph; the history of pneumatic tubes, whose first major use was to send telegrams between telegraph stations or to nearby buildings; the struggle to lay the first trans-Atlantic telegraph line; the use of codes and cyphers in telegraphy; and the use of the telegraph by governments, businessmen, journalists and criminals. The book discusses all those and other odd tidbits too, such as the fact that Thomas Edison was a master telegrapher in his youth, and that people occasionally married at long distance, using a telegraph.

Missing in Standage's book is a discussion of the telegraph and the war between the United States and Mexico, a subject I've read about elsewhere. Telegraph lines were expanding across North America before the war, but the outbreak of hostilities spurred their further growth, so that war news could be transmitted faster to the East Coast. If I remember right, by the end of the war dispatches were being sent by fast boat from Veracruz to New Orleans, which had just been connected to the telegraph network, for transmission to Washington and New York and other places.

There's a pointless thesis out there about the use of the telegraph in literature or other media. I remember thinking it odd, for instance, that characters in Of Human Bondage, which I read about 20 years ago, often traded telegrams even with people who lived nearby. But in a world without cheap telephony, it makes sense.

In the Personal Memoirs of Ulysses S. Grant, Gen. Grant describes his telegraphic conversations with Secretary of War Stanton -- which went on for hours, sometimes. I could imagine a rumbled Grant sitting at a table, cigar in hand and drink glass in front of him, blowing puffs of smoke and telling the telegraph operator what the tell Stanton, and then sipping his whiskey while the reply came through (and was decoded? I'd think so).

Without the depiction of telegram deliveries in old movies ("Telegram!"), no one my age would know much about the device or the lore surrounding it. Fewer and fewer people watch these kinds of movies, so I suspect even a second-hand sense of the telegraph is vanishing. Too bad. The lore is rich.

I sent a telegram only once, in 1990. I'd arrived just the day before in Japan, so it seemed a better -- and probably cheaper -- option than figuring out how to use the local phone system for an international call. The main post office in Tokyo offered the service, so I filled in the blanks and paid (a few hundred or a thousand yen? I can't remember). The message was (I think) ARRIVED JAPAN OK. My mother probably still has it somewhere.

I didn't realize that Western Union was sending telegrams as recently as five years ago. But not many. As this New York Times article says, "At the height of business in 1929, more than 200 million telegrams were sent around the world. Just under 21,000 were sent last year [2005]."

Gog & Magog at Greenfield

Besides Edison's complex (see yesterday), there are plenty more historic structures at Greenfield, roughly organized into themes or "historic districts" such as "Main Street" and "Working Farms" and "Porches and Parlors," which are historic houses. In one place or another on the museum's 240 acres, you'll find a roundhouse, a windmill and a covered bridge; barns and waterwheels; a machine shop, gristmill, printing office, tin shop and glass shop. There's also a church, post office, tavern, riverboat, bicycle shop and courthouse. The bicycle shop happens to be the one that the Wright Brothers owned, and the courthouse one in which Lincoln did some lawyering. The homes of Ford, Edison, Noah Webster and Robert Frost are on site as well.

We saw a fair number of these things, but of course there was much we didn't. One day was clearly not enough to do the place justice. Luckily, we didn't miss some of the highlights, and I don't just mean Edison's workshop or the Wright Bros. place of business. I mean the likes of Gog and Magog.

The figures are perched above the entrance of the re-creation of Sir John Bennett's establishment. Sir John was a noted Victorian clockmaker, dead by the time Ford had his shop moved from London and reconfigured in Dearborn in the early '30s. The Depression was on, so I suppose pretty much everything was for sale, including entire buildings, if the price was right. In any case, Sir John's shop has come a long way from the smoggy climes of Victorian London. The odd thing is why Ford wanted it here, since most of Greenfield is distinctly American.

Gog and Magog strike the bells every quarter hour. They're the British Gog and Magog, not the end-of-days Gog and Magog, and are associated with the giants reputed to roam ancient Albion (before shorter Britons took over, presumably). They're the traditional guardians of the City of London. A long-winded explanation of that connection is at the Lord Mayor's Show web site.

As for the building, the Greenfield web site says: "In 1931, Henry Ford had the original five-story building trimmed down into a smaller two-story building. Except for the clockwork and a few parts of the building front, the building itself and its interior were created in Greenfield Village. Today it serves as a sweet shop."

Note the dragon weathervane up top. I'm pretty sure I've never seen one of those before. It's a little hard to see in my pic; a better one's here, plus a description: "The dragon — made of hammered copper and detailed with sharp claws, taut bat-like wings and a fiery tongue — is a quiet masterpiece of design, craftsmanship, and balance. Its swept wings and extended tail are designed to catch even the slightest breeze; its head is weighted with lead in order to balance the body and allow for free pivoting."

In the Bleak Midwinter

More snow today, snow on snow. It's been piling up inch by inch lately, but that doesn't necessarily make for a contemplative experience. Maybe it does for a short while, as the snow comes down, but then the snow blowers rev up. Bleak midwinters aren't what they used to be, in other words.

I might be wrong, but the carol "In the Bleak Midwinter," based on the poem by Christina Rossetti, doesn't seem to get as much attention on this side of the Atlantic as it should. Maybe we don't like carols with "bleak" in their titles.

(Link for Facebook readers.)

In the bleak midwinter
Frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron,
Water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow,
Snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter,
Long ago.

Item From the Past: Bensons MapGuide

Early in our stay in London in December '94, I lucked into a Bensons MapGuide London Street Map. Or maybe it wasn't strictly luck. I wasn't going to stay a month in London without a decent map, so I spent some time at a bookstore looking at the options. The Bensons MapGuide must have impressed me enough that I bought it, but it really impressed me as we used it to navigate the famously convoluted streets of the city. It's one of the best practical maps I've ever used.

I'm glad to report that the map is still in print, even in our time when GPS threatens to foster map illiteracy. The British map seller (mapmonger?) Stanfords says it well: "This map is simply streets ahead of all its competitors, as anyone who has explored central London on foot will testify: great overall clarity of presentation, excellent placing of names, exceptional presentation of small passages and shortcuts between buildings, etc...

"Excellent use of colours and symbols enables the publishers to indicate parks and green spaces; markets, prime shopping areas, and selected shops; pedestrian zones, elevated walkways, and access to streets and passages by steps; places of interest including tourist information centres, theatres, cinemas, and selected well-known pubs: transport network including streets with bus routes, Underground stations, overground railway lines with local and main line stations, and coach stations; for drivers, car parks and streets with restricted access or no entry, although one way streets are not marked; selected hotels, places of worship, post offices, police stations, viewpoints, etc., and last but certainly not least, public toilets!"

For some reason, I scanned the map's cover some years ago. That's good, because I can't find the thing now, not at least where I keep most of my other leftover maps (someday, I should gush at length about the greatness of Nelles Maps, many of which I used in Asia). I want to consult the Bensons MapGuide to see if I can pinpoint the location of this picture, taken in London that December.

Then again, it's probably Little Venice. London isn't generally known for its canals, not at least by casual North American and Japanese travelers, but they have a long history in the British capital and of course there are modern-day, web-site making enthusiasts. Even in December, the walk along the tow paths of Little Venice was a pleasant one.

Guy Fawkes, Where Are You?

Guy Fawkes Day, that's what this country needs. The Gunpowder Plot might be a little obscure for Americans, but there's no need for the day to be anchored to any particular historic event. We could burn effigies of other hated figures on November 5 just because we need a day to burn effigies. Last year, for instance, it could have been effigy Wall Street bankers.

But it will never happen here, and if news accounts are to be believed, the custom is being elbowed out in Britain by North American-style Halloween. Our British cousins are making a mistake, if you asked me.

Speaking of Halloween, the candy haul was large this year for both daughters, and much of it is still in the bags in which it was collected. I was mildly disappointed as I pawed through the selection because there was little in the way of unusual candy. Not even any Mexican or Polish candy, which would be quite easy to get around here.

Next year I'm going to make a point of giving away something off beat -- dollar-store or Big Lots items, maybe -- since we too were guilty of giving away only the usual this year: 3 Musketeers, Reese's Peanut Butter Cups, Baby Ruths and Nestle Crunch. These are all good candies, but nothing to make a kid say, "What's this weird one?"

Inspected For Your Safety?

I got a couple of Geof Huth postcards from Manchester, England, recently. One of them was postmarked May 4 and featured a picture of an early 2000s Manchester building known as Urbis. On the card, and his blog, he describes a city well worth seeing. Good thing he updated my notion of Manchester, because the last thing I heard about it involved a football riot last year.

Attached to the message side of the Urbis card was this curiosity:

I'd never spent any time looking at the TSA seal before. It's a not-very-imaginative variation of the Great Seal of the United States, complete with displayed eagle. Instead of arrows and an olive branch, the eagle ought to be holding some scanning wands.

I didn't know the TSA bailiwick included inspecting incoming postcards. Maybe it doesn't. The TSA does inspect bags and issue stickers at JKF, however, and maybe Geof recycled it. The sticker is placed on exactly one of the few spots that has no printing or handwriting. In fact, it seems like the handwriting goes around the sticker slightly.

Still, I like the image of a fellow in some TSA warren somewhere reading overseas postcards with a decoder ring nearby, hoping day after day to catch some bit of useful data.

From May to June: Items from the Past

The May-June junction came on a weekend this year, and both days were pleasantly clear and warm (unlike the bizarre chill of last Tuesday). It was also a pleasant weekend in other ways, mostly in the company of my family, at home or within a few miles of it. But some years have found me further away. I never thought about it before, but they all involved heavy rain:

June 1, 1983.

We woke fairly earlier and assembled in the common area for a breakfast of egg, ham, toast, canned spaghetti and tea. I sat next to an old German and a young one, and near the English schoolboys, but the Australian was missing. Soon I headed into town and spent the rest of the day by myself, wandering around Cambridge.

Early in the day, I visited a sizable bookstore, then King’s College Chapel and its magnificent ceilings & intricate stonework & stained glass. It was partly cloudy and cool, so I walked a long way along the banks of the River Cam, eying the famous flatboats on the river and the ducks on the shore, which seemed to be everywhere, feeding on a harvest of earthworms that washed up in last night’s tremendous thunderstorm.

June 1, 1994.

Yesterday we were supposed to leave early from Bangkok, but Olivi Travel made a mistake, booking us to leave for Ko Samet this morning. We pointed this out, and they arranged for us to take a bus leaving in mid-morning. Along the highway SE of Bangkok there seemed to be an endless variety of warehouse space, but then we turned onto a smaller road, passing agricultural land, but also a surprising amount of unused land – bumpy green hilly tracts.

So today we are on Ko Samet, a smallish island in the Gulf of Thailand, not to be confused with Ko Samui, which I’ve read sports a much larger tourist infrastructure. Our bungalow is partway up a hill from the beach, a little wooden shack, really, but the bed is fairly comfortable and has its own mosquito net, an essential item in these parts. Last night a large storm blew through, rattling the walls, tapping heavily on the roof and whooshing the trees around the shack in various directions.

At the moment, I’m sitting under the trees at the shore of Ao Phai, one of the island’s beaches. The sand is very fine and very white. Yuriko is bobbing up and down out in the surf. There’s a wind from the sea strong enough to cool me & drive away most of the biting insects while I read short stories by Isaac Bashevis Singer.

May 31, 2002

Our last full day in Montreal was punctuated by thunderstorms. We sought shelter in various places around the Quartier Latin that morning, including Café Croissant de Lune on Rue St. Denis, for a fine breakfast, and various parts of the University of Montreal.

By afternoon, we went to St. Joseph’s Oratory, which includes a large basilica and some other religious buildings set on a hill some miles from Old Montreal. Its founder, one Brother Andre, was reputed to be a healer, a circumstance attested by piles of crutches near his tomb. The view of Montreal from the steps of the basilica was grand, but the interior (completed in 1960) was not — it was austere enough to pass for some kind of Protestant church. My favorite part of the complex was a small museum devoted to nativity scenes, displaying scores of them from dozens of countries, made from an amazing variety of materials, including a chocolate one.

The Largest Distillery in the British Empire?

What do you do with the following description: "The largest distillery in the British Empire"? I don't know about other people, but I turn it over in mind. It's an historical description, of course, since everyone except Lyndon LaRouche knows that the British Empire is a thing of the past. Still, distilling more whiskey and spirits than anybody else in that 19th-century world-spanning polity, the one-fifth of the globe that was pink, would have been a fairly impressive activity, if that's what the phrase means. I heard it used more than once to describe The Distillery district in downtown Toronto, a pedestrian-only mainly retail redevelopment of a massive former distillery.

Is it accurate? I didn't hear how being the largest was measured, but I did find out that by 1871, the Gooderham & Worts Distillery, which is what the establishment used to be called -- at other times it was Worts & Gooderham, apparently -- was producing 2.1 million gallons annually, and throughout the decade of the 1870s exported a million gallons a year to other parts of the Empire and the world. High Victorians, indeed.

Or maybe "largest" was measured in physical size. The site has 44 buildings totaling over 300,000 square feet on 13 acres. We arrived for a look at the complex late in the afternoon last Wednesday, just in time for a serious rainstorm, which added a touch of noir atmosphere to the brick streets and looming brick structures. But from under an umbrella, it was a little hard to appreciate their style, which I've read is called industrial Gothic. Impressively solid, I'd say. Something important was made here, the otherwise mute bricks say: Whiskey to get through those long Canadian winters, and to put Canada on the map among the whiskey-drinking nations of the Empire.

Either there's a serious monograph out there somewhere that quantifies how Gooderham & Worts was the "largest distillery in the British Empire," or that's the claim of a Victorian copywriter handed down through the decades unquestioned. Either way, Google the phrase in our time, and you'll see that it's still repeated often.

No whiskey has been made at the Distillery since 1990, but between then and the time it became a retail property in the mid 2000s, a number of movies were made there, more than 800. Famously (infamously, in Chicago), Chicago was filmed in Toronto, at the former Gooderham & Worts Distillery.

These days, no chain stores are allowed to lease space at the Distillery, so we visited some one-of-a-kinds, such as a clothing store named after Galileo and a coffee shop named after Balzac. I didn't quite understand the reasoning behind the choice of Galileo, but I do remember that Balzac's coffee-drinking marathons are part of literary lore.

Much, much more about the history and architecture of the place is here.

Zero

Ed reports from the UK of a visit to the Prime Meridian: "I went to Greenwich today. Interesting, but much less impressive than crossing the Arctic Circle. I think we give more weight to latitude than longitude. Maybe that's just because we all hit all the longitudes long ago."

I can't describe crossing the Arctic Circle, though I have an ambition to do so (the ambition is fairly dim in February, however, when the Arctic has come to me). The closest I've come is Vyborg, Russia, latitude about 60° 42' -- roughly six degrees short. I've passed through all of the longitudes, as Ed has, and had before Yuriko and I made it to Greenwich near the end of 1994. Still, I got a kick out of standing on the Prime Meridian, as illustrated here, though I've since read that the zero line used by the Global Positioning System is about 100 meters east of the former line, now the tourist-attraction line, at the Old Royal Observatory.

The sign behind Y is, or was, actually a vending machine. Insert a pound coin and you get a time-stamped souvenir. (As a very small child, Lilly got a hold of this souvenir, causing the damage visible here).

"Some interesting stuff in the maritime museum," Ed continued. "The first actual Franklin relics I've ever gotten to see. Pretty exciting for an Arctic geek like me."

John Franklin relics -- very cool indeed, and I don't mean that as a gag line. I went to the Greenwich Maritime Museum, too, but don't remember seeing anything associated with the famed Arctic explorer. Maybe I was of too ignorant of Franklin at the time to notice, or maybe those items weren't on display. I do remember a fine exhibit on John Harrison and the Longitude Problem, which impressed me, and added to the experience of standing on zero degrees east-west.

Item From the Past: Mrs. Dow’s Recommendation

Haven’t done dusted off any old ’n’ moldies for a while, but the Dog Days are a good time for idle reminiscing.

Aug. 10, 1983 – Gatwick, England

After our afternoon naps, which we sorely needed, Mrs. Dow, middle-aged, fat, cheerful, our landlady for the night, recommended a pub called Six Bells. She gave us detailed directions for walking there, which we promptly forgot, and so we spent some time wandering through town looking for it. But it didn’t bother us much. Eventually we found the church she’d mentioned, and the churchyard, and a walk through the churchyard and its ancient stones takes you to Six Bells. We never did figure out if it was in Gatwick proper, or nearby. There’s been a town of Gatwick a lot longer than an airport of the same name, of course.

First we drank some pints. Then we ate. The food was served upstairs, accessible by a narrow and dark staircase, which was a little hard to negotiate with a full plate of food in hand. The upstairs room itself was claustrophobic, hemmed in by dark brown support beams. But contrary to the reputation of British pubs, the food was very good.

The place was crowded, and we shared our ground-floor table with a couple in their 50s and a gentleman of 76 -- a fact he revealed at one point. Our tablemates sometimes bought rounds, and we did too, and we got drunk in fairly short order. The elderly fellow, who had intensely bushy white eyebrows and blinked a lot, told us about being evacuated from Dunkirk.

Who would believe it? I met a chap who lived through that famous incident. The gist of the story was that “We ran across Belgium and were picked up by a steamer. Most of the time we didn’t know what the hell to do, because it was chaos.” Chaos was a word he used more than once, and who can doubt it?

The other couple owned a B&B -- seems like a common thing in Gatwick town -- and the man at least said he was a jack Mormon. It hadn’t occurred to me that Mormonism was sufficiently developed in the UK for there to be a nonobservant population. But there he was, putting down the pints with the rest of us, so at least in that way he qualifies. Late in the evening we staggered back to Mrs. Dow’s B&B, through the dark church graveyard, which might have been spooky had there been no streetlights or noises from the road. Also, it needed fog and maybe a couple of howling dogs in the distance and some unkempt grass. Life so seldom imitates gothic stereotypes.