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.

Tire Story

Something pleasant for me this morning: a flat tire on one of our cars. I was told before breakfast, before I was really conscious, that the air had seeped out of a left rear tire overnight, and was tasked with putting on the spare. Which is really only part one of the repair process, since the spare is one of those anemic temporary tires.

A college friend of mine once told me years ago the he'd driven some hundreds of miles on a highway using a temporary tire, and maybe he did. He had a reckless streak, besides a vast talent for sports writing even as a young man. I occasionally wonder what became of him, but make little effort to find out. His name's common enough that a mere Google search doesn't turn up much; or much that's new, anyway, since he seems to have some professional sports bylines from the late '80s lingering in on-line archives.

Or maybe riding fast on the temp tire isn't really so reckless. I'm not in a position to know. Anyway, I took some Dutch comfort in the tire-changing task. That is, thank God it's no worse. It could have still been raining (the car was in the driveway); it could have been 100°; it could have been out in the middle of nowhere. The last time I changed a tire in the driveway, there was snow on the ground. So today wasn't so bad. Removing the lug nuts, as usual, was the hard part, but they eventually surrendered to the force of my weight pushing down on them.

Yuriko wanted to have the tire repaired right away, or get a new one, but I had things to attend to at the word mill, so she went to the repair facility of a major auto dealer not far from us. Soon I get a call from her, and she tells me something I find a little hard to fathom. She'd been told, alas, that a new tire was needed. Sharp shards had torn up the tire's innards, but good, the bastards (I'm paraphrasing a little). A new tire would be $250.

I ask to talk to the fellow who told her that. I ask him about that price.

"That's, uh, the price for that model," he says. "I think, I'll have to check."

"Two-hundred fifty dollars for one tire?"

"Well, uh, maybe not quite that much. I have to check."

I tell him that yes, he should check on that. That was our conversation. I've had to replace a few tires in my time, and I'm fairly sure our car isn't so remarkably uncommon that we need special, expensive tires of some kind. It isn't like we have (say) a '79 Le Car and the things have to be custom made.

Later, Yuriko tells me that the shop had another look at the flat and decided, by golly, that it could be repaired after all. And so it was, for about $30.

I'd be shocked -- shocked -- to learn that the shop had a (strictly unofficial) policy of special pricing for people whose English isn't native, even though fairly fluent. I have no proof, of course, just my suspicions. But I don't think we'll be going there again. Suspicion is more than enough on which to base a consumer decision.

Adios, Ultra Foods

Do fireflies prefer wet or dry summers? Can't say, but I did see the first fireflies of the season on Saturday evening. Just a handful, though. Maybe the dry summer so far will keep their numbers down, or maybe they're advance scouts for a firefly invasion.

Over years I've mentioned visiting a "discount grocery store" and almost each time it's been Ultra Foods of Hanover Park, Ill., one of a small local chain of stores anchoring a shopping center not far from where I live. From its parking lot, I saw a car floating in a pond; chanced across a box of Quisp there but didn't buy any; found peanut butter from Argentina there and did buy some; likewise some cookies from Columbia; bought domestic peanut butter for 88¢ a jar there during the peanut scare of early 2009; saw some shoplifters on a perp walk out of its doors; found Black Jack and Clove gum on its shelves; and more.

I got to know the place pretty well, in fact. Mostly I went there for its frequent discounts on soft drinks and a few other items, but we also enjoyed some of the deli's meats and cheeses, and the bakery's French bread and its doughnuts, some of which were very good.

Friday afternoon, I arrived to pick up some of these very items, though I'd noticed that there was no Ultra Foods circular in Wednesday's paper (the grocery circulars are, alas, one of the main reasons to hang on to the subscription). I figured it was left out by mistake.

But no: a sign at the Ultra Foods in Hanover Park said, THIS STORE IS CLOSING. EVERYTHING 20% OFF. What? That can't be right. Closing? Why? Didn't make its numbers? Lost its lease? I thought discount grocers had done well in the hard years since 2008, but it's always been true that the grocery business is a thin-margin high wire act.

The store had closed its bakery and deli, and was no longer restocking items that sold out. Certain aisles were practically empty. It was about as depressing as a grocery store can be without being visibly infested by rodents. One employee, a fellow about my age, was restocking some fruit, or maybe just re-arranging it. He looked miserable. I expect he was, since the ax hadn't fallen that long ago.

"When's the last day?" I asked my cashier, a young woman. She wasn't that upset, because she was going back to school in the fall anyway. She wasn't sure when the last day was, though. Whenever everything is sold off. Soon.

So long, Ultra Foods. I will not, as the sign also suggested, be visiting the Wheaton location, unless I happen to be there anyway. It's a fine store, but that's too far to go for groceries, especially the discount kind. Time to look elsewhere.

A Recent Complaint Letter

To: Customer Service, Mid-Sized Retail Chain

Date: April 29, 2012

To Whom It May Concern:

This letter is regarding account number 0000-0000-0000, under the name Us Guys.

Recently, you charged me a $25 late fee for a payment that was apparently one day late. But it wasn't really late, since I paid the bill electronically -- a next-day payment -- on April 10, four days ahead of the due date. The bank records the payment date as April 11. Mysteriously, you record the payment date as April 16.

In any case, this is outrageous treatment for a customer. I do not have to use your card or shop at your store.

I will pay the $27.68 for my recent purchases. Otherwise, I am asking you to cancel the $25 fee.

You may, of course, continue to bill me for $25, which I will eventually pay. If you do so, however, I will cancel my account and take my business elsewhere, under separate cover. So it is your choice: $25 now and zero business later, or my continued patronage.

I'm glad to report that the retailer saw things our way and cancelled the outrageous charge.

Fill 'Er Up With Premium Electrons

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

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.

Grumbling About Halloween

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.

Peanut Butter of the Argentine

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.

Make It Rain, Roger

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.

I've Been Around the World and in the Washington Zoo

Actually it's the Smithsonian National Zoological Park, as mentioned on the banner at the Connecticut Ave. entrance on the warm afternoon of August 16. The prospect of an earthquake and then a hurricane wasn't on anyone's mind, I can assure you.

We didn't spend quite as long as we wanted for various logistical reasons, but we did take a look at a number of large animals and some smaller ones, especially in the Small Mammal House -- naked mole rats, meerkats, golden lion tamarins, lemurs, etc. -- where we lingered because of air conditioning.

We also experienced the full force of the zoo's panda cottage industry. Panda marketing begins with this innocuous bronze.

Since the zoo charges no admission, I'll cut the Smithsonian a little slack regarding its eagerness to sell panda gewgaws and gimcracks. But only so much slack. A panda shack near the entrance to the panda exhibit offered some panda merchandise, such as these panda umbrellas.

Stranger still, the shack also sells a t-shirt with the Hello Kitty character wearing a panda suit. For saccharinity, that's like putting honey on sugar cubes. But the shack was small potatoes compared to the indoor Panda Store across Panda Plaza. Pretty much all your panda needs can be met there.

In case shopping for panda merch makes you hungry, and willing to pay $10 for a hot dog with fries, there's always the Panda Plaza Grill.

Finally, the zoo is home to a couple of actual pandas, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian. Unlike the late Hsing-Hsing and Ling-Ling, which I believe played ping-pong (well, maybe not) and were given to the United States by the People's Republic of China in the early '70s, the current pandas are only borrowed from China under an agreement that runs until 2015, unless it's renewed.

As leisurely as a panda's life might seem, Mei Xiang and Tian Tian have to breed or risk being returned. "If... either panda is found unsuitable for breeding, the two institutions will discuss the possibility of exchanging them with breeding pandas from China," the zoo's web site says. So the bears need to get it on. Again. They had a cub about five years ago that was sent to China last year to do stud duty for the pandas there, in as much as that's possible,

The National Zoo pandas were visible during our visit in separate indoor spaces. They were doing what I understand pandas do most of the time, eating bamboo. None of our pics turned out even remotely well, so I'm not going publish them and pretend they're Hipstamatic. But the bears looked well. A lot better than the dirty, flea-bitten pandas we saw at the Beijing Zoo.

Temmy's Sweet Flakes

Part of getting ready for Ann's recent birthday party involved visiting a nearby dollar store. I hadn't been there in a few months, and it looks like the place is under new management. Or at least the franchiser told current management that basic merchandising -- in this country, anyway -- doesn't include leaving piles of goods on aisle floors in jumbles. In other words, the place has been tidied up. Remarkable how much of a difference that makes in improving the tone of the store.

Serendipity was with me. I happened across some 7 oz. boxes of Temmy's Sweet Flakes, a brand I'd never heard of. Discounted to 50¢, it was an easy impulse buy, and wasn't the first time I've chanced across an odd brand of cereal. It also happened that I had a box of Kellogg's Frosted Flakes at home, so I could make a direct comparison between the two, both in ingredients and taste.

The ingredients are similar, if in fact Temmy's "corn" means "maize," as it does in Frosted Flakes. Temmy's doesn't have as much sugar as Frosted Flakes, and no corn syrup. It's sweet, but not nearly as sweet as the cereal that Tony the Tiger shills. Also, Temmy's has no added vitamins. All together, it's a pleasant, crunchy breakfast cereal.

Where's it from? I checked that almost before anything else on the box, which says Product of Egypt. That made my day, or my hour anyway. Egyptian cereal: Gives you the energy you need for a full day of civil disobedience.

When Black Friday Comes

Back after Thanksgiving. The prognosticators are calling for a touch of snow and deep chills around here, so it will be a good day to stay home.

"Got a Black Friday shopping strategy?" an article in the Chicago Tribune asked yesterday. "If not, you're likely to waste a lot of time and effort on the madcap day after Thanksgiving."

Madcap day, eh? Is Harold Lloyd going to hit the stores? But I do have a shopping strategy for "Black Friday." Namely, stay home. And I don't mean stay home to shop on line. I might waste some time, but it won't be in pursuit of more things to add to our large collection of things.

Also, we need to come up with a new name for the day after Thanksgiving. Black Friday sounds like a stock market crash or other financial dislocation. In fact it refers to any number of events, some financial, including the popping of a gold bubble -- artificially inflated by Jay Gould and James Fisk -- on Friday, September 24, 1869.

"The economic fallout caused stock prices to fall 20%, export agricultural products (mainly grain crops) to plummet over 50%, several brokerages to go bankrupt, and severe disruption in the national economy for months," notes The New York Times regarding the 1869 Black Friday. Something to think about for those gold-starry-eyed folks who dream of a return to the gold standard.

State-of-the-Art Bogus Money

I gave a clerk a $20 bill for a purchase recently and he took out his special counterfeit-detecting pen and marked the bill. The marking came out yellow, meaning the bill is genuine US Bureau of Printing and Engraving work, the kind you want to have in your wallet. Like most people, I've seen clerks do this, but never has asked about it before. The store was empty besides us, so I figured I could take up a little of his time with a question.

"What happens if the bill isn't genuine?" I asked.

Instantly he obliged me by taking a small bit of newspaper -- definitely not money -- and marking it with the special pen. The mark came out black instead of yellow. The inky chemistry of that isn't something I can understand, but the results are clear enough.

"One time, I saw a bill with a yellow mark on it already," he said. "I almost let it pass, but we're supposed to mark them ourselves, so I did. It wasn't real. But it looked real and it had the yellow mark on it, so people would think it had already passed. That was clever."

The Leaves Haven't Even Fallen Yet

"Daddy, do you want to come to my tea party?" asked Ann, setting up her plastic cups, saucers and teapot not long ago.

"I've got to work up some rage against the federal government first," I said. I couldn't resist. She ignored me, because children are wise in the ways of ignoring politics. I sat with her a few minutes and drank some air tea.

Over the weekend I made it to a warehouse store to pick up a few items, but mainly to eat free samples. There's an aisle of Christmas goods on display already. Just one aisle, which will certainly expand later.

I played a little game: find an item not made in China. It was hard. The most elaborate made-in-China Xmas item was a Nativity set that promised it was "hand-painted," "antique style," and complete with "faux gold leaf accents." I guess that last one would involve gold-colored paint.

Elsewhere was a Lighted Santa -- maybe better to look at from a distance, and on a dark December night -- Ornamental Lanterns in various styles, and LED lights in diverse arrays: icicle-style, along with 100- and 50-light strings. But my own favorite were the flameless candle sets, which sport LED flame-like flickers, a vanilla scent, and remote control. Just how many settings do these flameless candles have, to be operated by remote control? The box didn't say.

Still no non-Chinese items. Even a pair of porcelain Nutcracker Tealight Candle Holders began its journey to northern Illinois in eastern Asia. But one of the two on display will end up in a landfill. That is, it will be deposited there sooner than the rest of the items, since everything I saw is destined for a landfill in the fullness of time. Someone, by accident or on purpose, had decapitated one of the nutcrackers, but then carefully placed the head next to the figurine's feet. Was it an homage to the headless nutcracker character in The Nightmare Before Christmas?

Finally I found one holiday item not only not made in China, but actually made in the United States, for what that's worth: a box of ornate Christmas cards. But then I realized the game wasn't worth the candle, since I didn't much like the cards, and besides, it's September.

Texas '10 Oddments

Back to posting on September 7 or so. An enjoyable Labor Day weekend to all.

On our last full day in Texas, we ate barbecue with my brother Jim, who suggested we go to Texas Pride, a joint east and a little south of San Antonio on Loop 1604. As the name says, that road loops all the way around the city, making an even larger circle than Loop 410, which is part of the Interstate system (though no one ever calls it I-410). Much of Loop 1604 is a rural, two-lane highway, and so it is near Texas Pride.

The place is going for that former gas station/road house look, I guess. Had some good 'cue there and a Frostie Root Beer. Can't remember the last time I had one of those.

On the way back, I asked Jim if I could drive (we were in his car), and he agreed to that, so I drove a little south on Loop 1604, and then turned west on US 87 back toward the city. The point of this maneuver? So I could pass through China Grove, Texas, the subject of a fairly nonsensical but still memorable 1973 song. Going home that way wasn't out of the way, so I figured, why not? I'd never been there before, song or no song. In China Grove I saw a scattering of businesses, including gas stations, an industrial bakery and a convenience store. I didn't stop. Maybe the interesting parts of the town are off the main road.

I had more interest in the San Antonio River and its headwaters on this trip than at anytime before, perhaps because of my visit to the now-dry spring at Cathedral Park that was flowing in the late 1970s. This web page is remarkably detailed on the subject of the headwaters. I wish I'd seen it before I visited (that happens often). Next time I'm in town, I'm going to visit the Headwaters Sanctuary and the Blue Hole on the campus of the University of the Incarnate Word.

There were a lot of objects around my mother's house, photos but also smaller items, that I wanted to scan and post sometime or other. Trouble was, I had no scanner. Not even a computer. That was one aspect of the trip that I liked best, since I need to leave my electronics behind now and then. Not quite all of my electronics, since I had my digital camera, and so I took a few pictures of unusual objects around the house. Such as this one.

That's a commemorative plaster plaque from the American Legion National Convention in San Antonio in 1928, which my grandfather attended. So did Gen. Pershing and Col. Lindbergh, who are the floating heads above the Alamo chapel. My mother says she has a faint memory of her dad in a Legionnaires parade (she would have been three years old). He didn't buy the plaque at the time of the convention. I don't think that would have been in character for him. But many years later, my mother found it at a garage sale or the like, and got it as a retroactive souvenir.

I've read that H-E-B, or more formally the H.E. Butt Grocery Co., now has nearly two-thirds market share in San Antonio, and I believe it. There were many to be seen during our drives through the city. Once upon a time, back in the retail mists primeval BW (Before Walmart), H-E-B was one of three major grocery operators in the city. The other two were Piggly Wiggly and Handy Andy. Piggly Wiggly left the market all together, I believe, while Handy Andy is a shadow of its former self with only a handful of stores. Maybe. I haven't seen any for years, and the most recent articles I found on the subject are some years old, never a good sign about whether a business is ongoing.

A Handy Andy was within walking distance of the house I grew up in. This was an important consideration in the days before getting a drivers license, so I went there often enough. It seemed so large then -- it would be small now -- and by the mid-70s had a deli. That was an exotic innovation. Besides an impossibly large selection of meat and cheese -- which would be small now -- the deli also carried exotic goods such as Tiger's Milk nutrition bars and canned bear meat. We rarely bought anything like that, but it was somehow good to know that you could.

There was also a mini-mall attached to the Handy Andy, all under the same roof, which was there as recently as 1994, when I had some film developed at the mall's camera shop. The entire area now an H-E-B, with no trace of the mini-mall; the grocery store swallowed it up. The site of the small barber shop where I got my hair cut every six months or so is now part of the store bakery, way at the back. My regular barber back then was a good ol' boy from somewhere in East Texas. He fit the stereotype, too (someone has to). In the early '80s I remember seeing a report on the barber shop TV about AIDS, before it even had that name, I think. The reporter explained that the mysterious disease seemed to afflict Haitians, homosexuals, hemophiliacs, and heroin users; and my barber said that any disease like that was all right with him.

On the streets of Alamo Heights, a small city completely surrounded by San Antonio, I saw a number of black signs with white lettering that simply said: NO SOCIALISM. I'd heard about these signs, and others, which appeared last year during the long hot-n-bothered period before the passage of health insurance reform. I wondered whether the signs represent a principled stand against public ownership of the means of production (and service industries, in our time) or resistance to an entitlement program that will not benefit the sign-placers personally.

Since both Lilly and I were traveling by car together, we each sought San Antonio radio stations on the dial not necessarily to the other's liking. But here's the twist: I remember some of the same stations from years ago. Especially KONO, which now is an oldies station. In other words, it plays almost exactly the playlist it might have in 1979. KTFM, on the other hand, now plays contemporary music. In the 1970s it was an album-oriented rock station until suddenly one day in January 1979 it went 100 percent disco. I left town before the station, I imagine, sheepishly pulled the plug on that format sometime in 1980.

But in any case I wondered: which of these two stations hasn't really changed? One plays the same stuff as it did 30+ years ago; the other plays new stuff, which it did 30+ years ago.

Some lawyer or architect or accountant needs to lease this building, which is on the Austin Highway at its junction with Broadway in Alamo Heights. It was once a Mobile gas station, in case the Red Pegasus wasn't a giveaway.

The station closed in 1985, and I've read that Mobile allowed the new owners of the building to keep the trademark on the building as a "permanent loan." Good to see than not all landmarks disappear when you leave town for a few decades.

The Wonderland Mall 3.0

This is what I get for being a real estate writer. While in San Antonio, I wanted to drop by the former Crossroads Mall, which was the Wonderland Mall before that, to see how its redevelopment was going. I'd read about the project earlier this year. The effort to remake the mall caught my attention because of profession interest, since not that many retail properties are being redeveloped these days. But I also have a fond memory of the old Wonderland Mall: I saw Star Wars in the summer of 1977 at the Wonder Theatre, which was either one or two screens at the time. A Dave & Buster's occupies the site now.

Amazingly, photos of the Wonder Theatre are posted here, about mid-way down the page, along with other long gone North Side movie theaters, such as as North Star Mall's Cinema I, II & III (went there sometimes) and the Central Park Fox (went there more often, not sure why).

Last Tuesday, I took Lilly to North Star Mall because she wanted a new shirt for school (which started this Tuesday). North Star has not only survived but has thrived in recent years, though of course most of the stores I remember are gone. Where art thou, Chess King? J. Riggings? Kay Bee Toys? The book store in the middle of the mall whose name I forget, but where I browsed often? My first job was at the North Star Joske's of Texas department store; it's now Dillard's.

"Here's what I learned at that first job," I told Lilly as we walked through the Dillard's. "A manager is someone who forgets what you want him [her, in my case] to remember, and remembers what you want him to forget."

After we were done at North Star, we drove down Loop 410 a few miles to the Wonderland of the Americas, which is the Crossroads Mall's new name. The new part of the mall -- the Marketplace -- was closed. Closed on Mondays and Tuesdays. Hm. But I took some pictures, noting that the new part of the mall is distinctly colorful, and adorned with the flags of the Western Hemisphere.

On Thursday last week, after dropping my mother and Lilly off at a beauty parlor for a hair-do and manicure, respectively, I went back to Wonderland of the Americas and unexpectedly happened upon a grand opening ceremony for the Marketplace. Mostly the event involved refreshments and a mariachi band. I took the opportunity to make notes and interview the mall's leasing director and some of the merchants because I knew I would be able to write about it. As retail goes, it's a step above the mall kiosks, but not quite standard shop space, since the retailers are separated by see-through ironwork. Most of the Marketplace shops, including clothiers, jewelers and other specialty stores, have a distinctly Hispanic flavor.

But not everything. I also spotted a place called Ooples, which carries “anime and geek apparel,” and Nine Tails, a “cyber punk goth industrial fashion” store. I spoke briefly with the young men who own Ooples and Nine Tails. Young men indeed, not even zygotes when my high school friends and I came to this place to see that famed movie. Now they're out in the world looking for the main chance through fashion that didn't exist a few decades ago.

I expect people will start calling the shopping center Wonderland again, for short, and at least that will be the same as when the property opened in 1960. But 50 years ago you wouldn't have been able to drop by Wonderland to pick up a Black Butler t-shirt (Ooples), a pair of Trashville-518 boots (Nine Tails) and a couple of piñatas (Toudouze Market).

Thread Counts

Sometimes Lilly will bring up a subject -- maybe some factoid about some celebrity I don't know and don't want to know -- and my response has evolved into, "I'll put that on my list." She knows what this means: my list of things I don't care about. It's chock-full of celebrities, for one thing. I'd go into more detail about the concept, but that would mean writing about things I don't care about.

Occasionally I'll pull something off the list and spend some time thinking about it because of a random incident. Such as the following:

"I never paid any attention to how many threads," the woman said. "I buy sheets and sleep on them, and I sleep pretty well."

Just a bit of conversation I heard recently when walking by two people, including the middle-aged woman who made the comment, at a store that offered an array of sheets, among other things. The sentiment seemed reasonable to me, and stuck in my mind, so back home I Googled "thread count." The very first hit was a place that sells sheets, but doesn't put a lot of stock in the concept of thread count either.

"In a quality product, the incremental comfort value of thread counts over 300 is very little," the site asserts. "A 300 thread count can feel far superior to a 1000 thread count. Thread count has become a simple metric used by marketing people to capture interest and impress with high numbers. The problem with mass-produced high thread-count sheets is that to keep the price down, [other] important elements of quality must be sacrificed, meaning in the end the customer gets a product with an impressive thread count but that probably feels no better (or even worse) than something with a lower thread count."

I still don't care enough about thread count to investigate how accurate that assessment is, but it sounds right. It wouldn't be the first time that marketing focused on something simple and only partly accurate in the interest of characterizing an ordinary item as a luxury good, and charging accordingly.

Retreat From the Warehouse Store

Much excitement at a northwest suburban Chicago warehouse store on Friday afternoon at about 3. On the way to the store, the radio told us about a fast-moving thunderstorm headed toward our part of the world. Sure enough, dark clouds roiled off to the northwest, where most of our weather comes from. But they seemed fairly far away. Maybe some rain would cool things down, since it had been a clear, sticky, fairly hot day up until then.

I bought ice cream for Ann (Lilly was at a friend's house) at the break-even, keep-the-customer-here food court while her mother collected items in the large shopping cart. She ate the ice cream, I helped. Her mother joined us just as Ann finished, leaving the shopping cart on the other side of the checkout lines, because there was an item she wanted my comment on before she put it in the basket. "First, wait here," I said. "I need to look at the weather."

A warehouse store effectively isolates you from all kinds of weather. Except, I thought, tornadoes. A tornado might invite itself in and re-arrange the thousands of items every which way, many on top of hapless customers. But how much warning would you have? Would store management have any clue and sound some kind of alarm?

Tornadoes were on my mind because I overheard people in the storm talking about a tornado warning. Had they heard right? I went out the exit and eyed the vast expanse of ink-dark clouds now bearing down on us. They looked evil all right. I could imagine those clouds spawning destructive winds.

I returned by way of the entrance, where you have to show your membership card. A curly-headed college kid at his summer job was inspecting cards at the entrance. "Is there some kind of evacuation plan for this store?" I asked him. "You know, in case of a tornado?"

From the look on his face, I might has well have asked him, "What do we do if zombies attack?"

"Sure. We have a plan," he said.

"Do you have a basement to go to?"

"We don't have a basement. We'd go stand under the plastic pool floats over there."

"Whatever you say," I said, walking away, meaning, Whatever you say, wiseass. I don't want to be near you in a disaster.

When I got back to the food court, I said, "A bad storm is coming. Let's go home." By which I meant, let's check out and go home. A few seconds later, the lights in the warehouse store flickered, and then part of them went out. A few seconds after that, almost all of the lights went out, though some emergency illumination kicked in.

"Let's go home," I said. This time I meant, now, right away. Forget the merchandise. Yuriko readily agreed, so we went outside into a strong wind. The rain wasn't heavy, but it was going to be soon. In the 30 seconds or so it took us to get to the car, the rain did become heavy.

I decided it was better to be mobile than idle in a large parking lot, so we drove to a not-too-crowded side street nearby instead of one of the arterial roads. It was slow going, so thick was the water flapping on the windshield. Huge puddles gathered at the edge of the road and trees beside the road were dancing in the wind. Lightning flashed at a good pace, but not as vigorously as I've seen before.

Eventually, we had to turn on Roselle Road, a major street, passing by a small tree near the intersection of that road and Remington Road that had been split by the wind. The rain lessened, but traffic gridlocked. A fire truck and some cops roared by in full emergency mode. I figured that some cars had hit each other, but no: in the parking lot of a strip center near the vast intersection of Roselle Road and Hubbard Road was an SUV, among other vehicles. A lamppost was sprawled on top of it. It looked like the lamppost wasn't merely blown over, but detached from its mooring and then blown over.

So we were visited by bursts of fierce wind. A lot like the wicked storm of August 23, 2007, but in the end, not as intense (though some windows popped out of the Sears Tower). No tornadoes were spotted. A TV weatherman later explained that we'd had a wind storm, but not the kind that usually births tornadoes, so the loose talk of tornadoes I heard at the warehouse store was just that. Still, we didn't regret our skedaddle from there.

The storm cooled things down, but that wasn't the end of violent weather for the day. Late in the evening, another storm blew through, not nearly as windy, but featuring plenty of thunder and lightning. At about 10, as I relaxed with a book, the power went off. We pretty much decided that meant bedtime. At about 2 a.m. Saturday, the TV came on to announce that electricity was moving through the house again.

Shine Little Glowgolf, Glimmer, Glimmer

There are only 18 Glowgolf locations currently operating -- in Colorado, Connecticut, Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, North Carolina, Tennessee and Wisconsin -- but I understand that more will be opening this year. It's a growing retail operation, something of a rarity in our time, and as such I took a professional interest in Glowgolf. One of these locations also happens to be a few miles from where I live, so I packed up Lilly, her friend Rachel, and Ann and went to play Glowgolf today.

Miniature golf's native habitat is outdoors, but some are tucked away indoors. (I need to play this basement course before it disappears.) All of the Glowgolf courses reside in malls. We went to the one at the Stratford Square Mall in Bloomingdale, Ill., on the upper level across from Cold Stone Creamery. Unlike the rest of the stores in the mall, the Glowgolf space isn't brightly lit with regular white light. Instead it's well illuminated with black lights, and the usual black-light effect of glowing shirts and shoelaces kicks in right away.

The golf balls glow too. They're infused with something that makes them a variety of pale colors under black light. The wood beams that define the holes are more brilliantly colored in green or orange or yellow. The walls are black but painted with brightly colored images -- undersea images in the case of the Stratford Square Glowgolf, including giant sea turtles and sea horses, octopi and schools of fish. Let's be charitable and call it vernacular art. That fits in the with the whole esprit de minigolf anyway. (See the Glowgolf site photo gallery for more decor in other locations.)

Otherwise it was a fairly straightforward 18-hole miniature golf course. Some holes had obstacles such as a windmill or lighthouse or a painted board with a small hole at the bottom; others were merely laid out challengingly. Lilly and her friend had a giggling good time in the way that 12-year-old girls do, hitting the balls well, or indifferently, or so badly that they wandered outside the bounds of the hole. Ann didn't know what to do with the club at first, since I don't think we've ever taken her to a miniature course before. Any younger than she is and your main worry is going to be the kid whacking things that aren't balls. I showed her how to hold the club and she took to it immediately. In fact she was the only one of us to hit a hole-in-one, there on the 14th hole.

Not that we were keeping track very closely. Or score either. My own favorite hole sported a loop-the-loop that rattled as the ball sped through. The hardest hole for everyone featured some small plastic trilithons anchored in the floor. I called it the Stonehenge hole, though it didn't really look like the monument (now that would have been interesting).

Buying a round of Glowgolf allows you to go around the course three times if you want. We went through more-or-less in order once, then played the holes we liked again a time or two. This was easy enough since the only other customers at the time were a young couple who seemed more interested in each other than the finer points of the game. The 18th hole has a sign that explains that it will take your ball for good, and not to play it unless you wanted to quit. It had two holes. Hit hole #1 and "win a prize." Hole #2 merely takes your ball. Only Lilly hit hole #1, which made a little light and noise when she did -- and so she got a card good for a free game.

The Golden Age of Video Stores

A fine warm day today -- pushing 70° F., which I'm told we'll actually hit tomorrow. I re-acquainted myself with the backyard deck for a short while. It can't possibly stay like this until summer comes along, though. I'm excepting a 20- or 30-degree rollback soon.

My college and post-college friend Victor once said, many years after we'd finished school, that he was glad that at no time during our college days did anyone say among friends, "Let's go rent a video." I'm with Victor on that one.

Video rental was in its extreme infancy in those days, and no one we knew had a machine -- except for a wealthy fellow I met in the summer of '81 who had a Betamax, but we didn't go to school with him. We found enough ways to entertain ourselves without videos.

It occurred to me in the dying video store late week that I might be making my last visit ever to a retail store devoted solely to videos and games. I couldn't remember when I first visited one, though by 1989 I was renting items from a Blockbuster (?) on the corner of Broadway and Berwyn in Chicago some Fridays on my way to my then-girlfriend's apartment, because she had a TV and VCR and I didn't. That store was the only one I ever saw with a section called Le Bad Cinema. It included what you'd expect: Plan 9 From Outer Space, Surf Nazis Must Die, etc.

Facets Multi-Media on Fullerton had a much better selection in those days, and I hope it still does, but was a fair amount of trouble to get to.

My favorite video store anywhere was in Osaka in the early '90s, a place simply called Cinema (using roman letters). It was on the way home from my subway exit. It didn't have a vast selection, but a large enough one that I often found things I wanted to see -- usually movies I'd never gotten around to before. Two days' rental was (I think) ¥250, a little over $2 in those days, and most of the tapes (all VHS) were subtitled in Japanese.

One day I noticed that Cinema was selling off old stock for ¥500 a tape. I found one I still have, a Japanese-subtitled Dr. Strangelove (on the left). If I'd seen it on DVD last week, I would have bought that version of it too. It's one of those watch-every-two-or-three-year movies.