Scraps of Mid-September

Sept 13, 2012

Some rain, some sun, hot some days, cool others. After dryness and more heat than usual, this September is turning out to be fairly ordinary, at in terms of the weather outside my door.

The gas bill came today. For the period August 10 to September 10, the charge for the natural gas itself was $7.50 – 19.22 therms at 39 cents each. The FAQ section at the U.S. Energy Information Agency reminds me, because I’d forgotten, that a therm equals 100,000 Btus. So we used nearly 2M Btus over 30 days to heat our water and cook some food. For some reason, the thought of using a few million of anything makes me smile.

That’s not the majority of the bill, however. Delivery charges were $14.40, or nearly twice as much as the gas charge. Guess it’s worth it. Natural gas would be a little tricky to pick up and take home yourself.

On the Wednesday before Labor Day weekend, I had jury duty. I have a receipt now to prove that I showed up, as summoned, at the downtown location of the Circuit Court of Cook County on August 29, 2012, and received $17.20 for my trouble. (Almost enough to pay the gas bill.) And what did I do? I read a book and worked on an article on my laptop.

I got a panel number and sat in the non-TV side of the large waiting room and waited. As the morning stretched on, other panel numbers were called and people left the room to report to their judges, but my number wasn’t called. I read 1493 by Charles Mann, an engrossing book about the Columbian Exchange. I worked on my monthly CRE tech article. I waited.

Lunch came and went – there’s a really good pita place, aptly called Pita Express, in the food court of the State of Illinois building (Thompson Center) – and by about 3, only a few of us were left uncalled. The woman in charge of the room then said, “You’ve done your jury duty, come collect your checks.” That was that.

A quote from The New York Times a little while ago, in the obit for actor William Windom:

“While stationed in Frankfurt, during the postwar Allied occupation, [Windom] enrolled in the new Biarritz American University in France and became involved in drama there. ‘To be honest, I signed up because I thought it would be an easy touch,’ he told The New York Times in an interview for this obituary in 2009, ‘and we had heard that actresses had round heels.’ ”

Round heels. There’s some slang you don’t see often any more. Maybe that's just as well, but I still enjoy running across old slang in new articles.

There's Such a Lot of World to See

 Sept 26, 2012


As I stood in line at a grocery store earlier today, I heard the cashier say to the customer ahead of me, "Did you hear that Andy Williams died?" The customer, a woman in her 70s at least, didn't react much. It was news to me, but I'd spent much of the morning working on an item that didn't require that I look at Google News, or I would have.

Naturally the articles about him mention "Moon River." You have to wonder whether he ever got tired of it. Maybe not: as the AP reported, "... though 'Moon River' was covered by countless artists and became a hit single for Jerry Butler, Williams made the song his personal brand. In fact, he insisted on it. " 'When I hear anybody else sing it, it's all I can to do stop myself from shouting at the television screen, "No! That's my song!" ' Williams wrote in his 2009 memoir titled, fittingly, Moon River and Me."

Less mentioned in Williams' obits -- not all all, that I could see -- is the The Claudine Longet Invitational, but my mind has some roundabout and peculiar associations sometimes.

Item From the Past: Cachi the Falling Poodle

In late February 1992, I saw a short article in one of the English-language newspapers in Japan with the attention-getting headline: Poodle's plunge fatal to 3 people. It was a Reuter-Kyodo story with no byline, but a Buenos Aires dateline.

"A dog that fell from a 13th-floor balcony Friday night triggered three deaths in a row in central Buenos Aires, police and witnesses said. The dog, a poodle named Cachi, hit 75-year old Marta Espina on the head and both the woman and the dog died instantly..." the article began, citing anonymous police sources. Another woman in the crowd watching the incident died when a bus hit her, and a man at the scene had a fatal heart attack, according to the article, which ended: "It was not immediately clear why Cachi fell."

Twenty years later, the way to share an article like that would be to hit the forward button. In 1992, I photocopied it a few times and, since the article was short, used the blank parts of the pages to write letters. At the time I'd recently visited Toba, Japan, the place where cultured pearls were invented, so that was the subject of the first part of the letter. The main thing I can say about that visit now is that at Mikimoto Pearl Island, you can see a one-third-sized replica of the Liberty Bell, made out of cultured pearls.

I added my own comments about the article to the letter, in the form of paragraphs in between the description of Toba and other things.

"Not clear why Cachi fell, indeed. I say these are more drug-related deaths. Remember puppy uppers?"

"Why did the cop request anonymity? Maybe he's afraid of the poodle gangs of Buenos Aires. They're mean and they look out for their own."

"Surely you heard about the attempted coup in Venezuela. Poodle gangs had infiltrated the military's office corps in that country, you know. It's a problem all over South America."

"Remember the Shinning Path in Peru? Perhaps you don't remember their quaintly Stalinist slogan, 'All Power to the Workers' and Poodles' Soviets!' "

Just now I ran Chaci poodle Buenos Aires through Google, something not possible in 1992, and it seems that the story of the falling South American poodle is lost to the Internet. Rather, I got hits like this: Tom Bosley Dead at 83.... Oct 20, 2010 ... Condolencias para Buenos Aires de @elReydeInternet ... The chicks loved the poodle skirts and the '50s styles, the dudes loved the cars and ... Days were "Laverne & Shirley", "Mork and Mindy", and "Joanie Loves Chachi."

The Model of a Modern Major Plutocrat

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.

Incident at Ranger Pond

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.

Failed Coinage

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.

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

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.

Social Media and Its Discontents

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 autocomplete 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.

Another One Bites the Dust

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.

Rajaratnam, Roddenberry & Redshirts

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.

Norma Jeane and the Robot King

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.

Some Useless Information to Fire My Imagination

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!!

Salt Creek Trail, Mile 0

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.

Bastrop State Park

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.

The National Gallery of Art

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 and 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.

Now is the Perfect Time to Panic

Someone with a nom de net "blackton" posted this in the comments section of a New Republic article yesterday. How often are online comments so literate? (Even though I had to fix a few bits of punctuation.)

Into the shadow of default rode the 242

Half a government half a government,
Half a government onward,
All in the valley of Default
Rode the 242:
"Forward, the Tea Brigade!
"Charge for the Dems!" he said:
Into the valley of Default
Rode the 242.

Tax cuts to right of them,
Tax cuts to left of them,
Tax cuts in front of them
Cantor'd & Boehner'd;
Limbaugh'd at with snot and smell,
Crazy they rode, not well,
Into the jaws of Default,
Into the mouth of Hell
Rode the 242.

Apologies to Lord Tennyson

With any luck this will soon be just an amusing comment from an uncertain period in U.S. history, not a bitter reminder of the cheerful summer days before the Panic of 2011.

A Blow for Civilization

I decided to check my e-mail accounts one more time just before bed last night, and saw the no-extra-charge news feed that fronts the opening page of one of the accounts. That's how I found out that a certain mortal enemy of Western civilization -- make that civilization, period -- had been dispatched by the skill and valor of the U.S. armed forces yesterday.

At first I thought it was a speculative story, along the lines of "an unnamed source with ties to Pakistani intelligence officials says that Osama bin Laden reportedly slipped on a bar of soap in 2005 and died from complications of the fall. He was secretly buried in a secret location, according to the anonymous source." You know, one of those not-really-news items.

But no. It was the real deal. I'm a little sorry that I wasn't watching TV or listening to the radio, so I could see or hear a regularly scheduled program interrupted. But then again I guess "We interrupt this program..." is passé anyway.

Though I had much else to do today, I made some time to read about the event. Leon Wieseltier, who was at Lafayette Park in Washington last night, wrote astutely in The New Republic today: "This crowd burned nobody in effigy, nobody’s flag, nobody’s books. It had assembled to celebrate an entirely defensible act, whose justice could be proven on more than merely nationalistic grounds.

"After all, Osama bin Laden killed even more Muslims than Americans, and represented one of the most poisonous ideas of our time: the restoration, by means of sanctified violence, of a human world without rights. There is no decent man or woman anywhere... who does not wish to see this armed political theology defeated. If any death justifies rejoicing, the death of Osama bin Laden does."

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.

The Smokey Bear Tangent

I remember the last time the federal government shut down. I happened to visit Washington DC in December '95, during the event. That was the last time I went to that city, in fact. The shutdown thwarted my desire to visit certain places, such as Mount Vernon and the National Zoo (because who wouldn't want to truthfully say, "I've been around the world, and I've been in the Washington Zoo"?).

I thought it a little odd that the federal government runs the zoo in DC, but then again it was created by Congress in 1889 and is part of the Smithsonian Institution, its full name being the Smithsonian National Zoological Park. It's also where Smokey Bear lived most of his life.

Re Smokey Bear, a blog produced by the Smithsonian, "The Bigger Picture," says that "Smokey was a popular attraction at the National Zoo, and received millions of visitors during his twenty-six year residency. He became so popular in fact that he received more than 13,000 letters a week and was granted his own zip code."

Quasi-Spring Break

Not a bad spring break, if you could call it that, since temps hovered down toward the freezing end of the thermometer most days, with the bonus of cold rain several times and a light snow at least twice. The equinox has come and gone, and so has the new year's day of March 25. Orion tilts toward the southwest in the evening, and there are more birds around that before. But all those things don't quite add up to spring, which won't be till I can sit on my deck and read.

Missed the perigee full moon on the March 19. "The biggest moon in 18 years," said National Geographic on its web site. I'm sure it was up there somewhere over northeastern Illinois, but an overcast sky denied me the sight.

Last Thursday afternoon I went downtown with Ann. At Dearborn and Adams at about 5:45, we passed by a small demonstration. Why they were at that particular location, I couldn't say. Ann was eager to keep going, so I barely had a moment to document the scene, taking this shot from across the street and on the flip side of a banner that said "Stop the War on Libya Now!" Almost the entire group is in the image, plus a handful of passersby.

The building in the background is the 1.5 million-square-foot Citadel Center. I inadvertently captured an image of its copy of the Winged Victory (Nike) of Samothrace in the lobby -- the golden shape in the upper right.

Last week I also learned that Utah now has an official state firearm, the Browning M1911 semiautomatic pistol, along with a state tree, animal, fish and cooking pot (the Dutch oven). I'm glad the Utah legislature was able to take time out to tackle that subject. It reminded of a graffito I saw in a bathroom in the early '80s in Logan, Utah. "Don't sing in the shower," it said. "Utah shoots john singers."