End of July Notes

I saw some Olympic diving out of the corner of my eye last night and wandered over to the TV for a look. Svelte lads in ridiculously tiny suits -- wait, there are two of them jumping at the same time. Since when has that been an Olympic event? Shows you what I know: since 2000.

Somehow or other, I'd never seen synchronized diving before. Actually, I know how that happened. I didn't watch much of either 2000 or '04 Games and simply missed the contests in '08, when my viewing was less-than-fanatical.

A credit card offer came in the mail today. Nothing unusual about that -- based on the continuous stream of offers, you'd think there had been no painful recession recently. It was a Disney-themed card issued by a too-big-to-fail bank. But not just any Disney theme: a mockup of the card attached to the letter features the Sorcerer's Apprentice Mickey in full-magic mode. On the back of the card is Mickey and a couple of the broomstick servants he created.

I thought about that. He's one of the iconic Mickeys, of course. But he's also the one who inadvertently creates a catastrophe instead of the useful servant he imagined he was getting. It started small, but got out of hand. You know, something like a credit card can.

The toys of the moment for Ann are her Monster High dolls. They're Mattel creations, released only a couple of years ago now, and the conceit is that they're teen offspring of famed public domain monsters -- Frankenstein's, Dracula, the Werewolf, the Mummy, et al. Lately Ann has been creating derivative characters on paper based on monsters not mentioned in the series featuring the dolls. Sometimes she asks me for input.

So far, we've come up with the children of the Bogeyman, the Devil, Godzilla, the Loch Ness Monster, a Bug-Eyed Martian, a Roc, the "Seaweed Monster" and -- my favorite -- the daughter of Them. As in monster ants, the kind featured in Them. That was her idea.

She's also been taking pictures of her Monster High dolls.

In black & white, for some reason.

Those Weren't the Days

The XXX Olympiad has put me in the mood to read about the III Olympiad, among other things. I'm funny that way. But it's interesting to read about, mainly because the St. Louis Games had fiasco written all over them.

Back when Chicago made its futile pitch for the 2016 Games, I thought one claim the city had on the event was the fact that St. Louis had snatched the Games away from Chicago in 1904, to complement the Louisiana Purchase Exposition -- the Meet Me in St. Louis world's fair. Some sources say the fair organizers essentially bullied Baron de Coubertin by threatening to hold separate athletic events to overshadow the Olympics. In any case, the Games ended up being overshadowed by the fair anyway. Also, they were badly run; hardly international at all, since most of the best European athletes didn't want to come; and marred by various notorious incidents, both in the opinion of people at the time and more recently.

The story of the marathon that year is bizarre in the extreme, and well-told at Marathon & Beyond. This amusing podcast is about the runner who actually won the race, as opposed to the guy who cheated. Throw in a Cuban who stops to eat apples along the way, some Zulus recruited to the race at the last minute, and racers having to dodge auto-mobiles and horse-drawn vehicles on dusty, pre-modern roads, and you've got kinetic comedy. I'm surprised no movie along the lines of The Great Race or Those Magnificent Men in Their Flying Machines was ever made from the story.

The disgraceful history at "Anthropology Days" at the Games is discussed by Slate in 2008 and the Daily Mail this year. Go to the IOC web site, and the incident is downplayed considerably in the short page about the 1904 Games. That is, not mentioned.

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.

RIP, Other Joe Montana

Yes, I would say spring is here. No doubt about it. My gas bill came today and it wasn't that high.

And there's all that greenery out there. I saw a fair amount on a drive I had to take toward Chicago today, but not actually into the city. East on Irving Park Road, skirting O'Hare's south end to an event in Rosemont, the little burg nestled like a truffle next to O'Hare; then home, westward by way of Touhy and some other streets that run north of the airport. So I drove an elongated loop around one of the busiest airports in the world, seeing a fair number of planes arriving and departing.

Driving in, I saw two separate marquees mentioning Joe Montana. One said, "We'll miss you, Joe Montana." The other, "Joseph Montana," with a birth year I didn't catch and a death year of 2012.

I thought, the football player is dead? I hadn't heard. But that's the kind of thing I'm likely to miss. Interesting that two organizations with marquees -- a business and the Schiller Park Village Hall -- wanted to memorialize the man that way. Later, I remembered to check, and the football player is not dead.

From the Franklin Park Herald-Journal: "Leyden Township Trustee Joseph Montana, 74, husband of Schiller Park Mayor Anna Montana for 49 years, died Monday. Joseph Montana also was a member of the Schiller Park Village Health Board.

“ 'The village’s most heartfelt and sincere condolences go out to Mayor Montana and her family during this difficult time,' said Kenneth Kollar of the Franklin Park/Schiller Park Chamber of Commerce."

Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball Near Block 37?

One more curiosity from my downtown wanderings this week. I saw this on State Street, just outside the entrance to the Block 37 retail shops.


Or rather, I saw and heard this array of (I assume) little lamps on small poles, because a speaker in the flowerbed played a song, namely, "Did You See Jackie Robinson Hit That Ball?"

A nearby sign explained:

HEAR THE SOUNDS OF AMERICA'S PASTIME

From all-American hits to the roar of the crowd, baseball season has come to Lightscape: A Multisensory Experience on State Street.

ChiLights.com

The Schiller Park Greyhound Track

While coming home from an event in Rosemont on Tuesday, I stopped for a light at the intersection of Lawrence Ave. and Mannheim Road (US 12), which is on the eastern edge of O'Hare International Airport and (I think) happens to be in the small suburb of Schiller Park. I noticed a sign I'd never noticed before, and I happened to have a camera handy. Normally I'd take such a picture for reference only, but it turned out reasonably well, considering it was taken on an overcast day through a car windshield. So here it is.

Former Site of Dog Track • Raced Greyhounds • Schiller Park Historical Commission (Bullet points added.)

So a dog track used to be here. O'Hare was built in the 1950s, so it must have been before that. Maybe on clear, moonless nights when the traffic isn't so heavy, you can stand near the sign and hear the faint baying of ghostly hounds, forever rounding the track to the cheers of Depression-era working men.

Curiously, according to testimony heard by the U.S. Senate Special Committee to Investigate Organized Crime in Interstate Commerce in 1950, "During the heyday of Al Capone, the Capone syndicate was in control of dog tracks in virtually every part of the country... The Capone syndicate czar of dog racing during that period was Edward J. O'Hare, who was killed in gang warfare in Chicago on November 9, 1939."

Edward "Easy Eddie" O'Hare testified against Capone in the early '30s and for that, we can be sure, he eventually bought the farm. He was also father of the fighter pilot Edward "Butch" O'Hare, for whom the airport is named, and who didn't live much longer than his dad, since he was killed in action in the Pacific in late 1943.

It seems likely that the Schiller Park dog track would have been in the orbit of the elder O'Hare. For all I know, the track might have been small potatoes to him, but he surely must have visited on occasion. I doubt that he could ever imagined something so important in the area would someday have the same name as him, though honoring his son.

Go Greater Prairie Chickens!

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Woman in the Propeller Beanie

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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.

Hole 3b, "The Tail of the Whale"

In the summer of 1979, my friend Mike and I goofed around on a golf course on the island of Moloka'i. By goofed around, I mean driving our golf cart most anywhere we wanted, though I don't think we vandalized any greens by doing doughnuts (which would make a better story, so maybe I should remember it that way). We also hit golf balls without regards to the rules of the game, the holes or anything else.

We could do that because we had the place completely to ourselves. Thirty years ago, Moloka'i wasn't often visited by tourists, which may still be true, for all I know. So we played a kind of bizarro golf in which hitting balls into sand- and water traps was a good thing. Neither of us were interested in playing real golf in that warm, tropical spot.

I still don't have any interest in playing golf, tropical or otherwise, but I didn't want to pass up the opportunity to try to hit a ball into the sea at hole 3b at one of the Jack Nicklaus Signature Golf Courses on Punta Mita. After visiting some properties one morning, we went to see the golf course, which is exceedingly lush in the controlled way tropical golf courses can be, without being overgrown. To get to 3b, we drove five or six golf carts along a golf-cart road through the course. I was the driver in my cart, with a woman from Toronto as my passenger. It may have been the first time I'd driven a golf cart since 1979, though I wouldn't swear to it.

This is a map of 3b, next to the tee. The plaque along with the map says (in Spanish and English): "Hole 3B. 'Tail of the Whale.' You are about to play the world's only natural island green. Course designer Jack Nicklaus describes 3B as, 'probably the best par 3 I've ever designed.' We trust 3B will be a hole you'll never forget."

This is what 3b looks like from the tee. It was low tide when we were there, so it was possible to walk to the green. During high tide, we were told, it really is an offshore island.

Golfers have the option of playing 3a for scoring, and then playing 3b for grins. There were no golfers in our group except one of our guides, who managed to hit the ball almost to the island. But it went into the sea. My ambition was to get it at least into the water, and for my swing I had a driver nearly as big as my foot. But I'm no golfer, not even a bad one, and my ball didn't even get wet.

Knock It Out of the Park, Peanut!

After the fact, that is after I spent the money and the experience had come and gone, I did some comparisons. A ticket to a Chicago Cubs game in mid-June -- and every home game in June counts as a "prime" game, that is, more expensive compared with "regular" and "value" games -- at a middle distance behind home plate will run you $66. (All summer games are in fact, prime; the value games are mostly in April, and a few in May, when there's some chance you'll freeze your kippers off watching a baseball game.)

Compare: a ticket behind home plate in mid-June at a Schaumburg Flyers game costs $11. I was able to buy tickets to the Flyers game last Friday, with a fine view of home plate, for my entire family plus an old family friend, for $55, less than going alone to Wrigley would have cost. Not counting extras.

Of course, there are $20 tickets at Wrigley on a prime game days. These are called Upper Deck Reserved, which might be ideal for people with enhanced bionic vision. And, amazingly, the bleachers at Wrigley aren't the least expensive tickets -- the bleachers, where you don't even get a reserved seat, and the risk of being thrown up on is very real. They go for $45 on prime dates.

So, to editorialize, and I'm hardly the first to notice: MLB = a pack of gouging bastards. Certain counter-arguments can be made -- the players are better in MLB; a place like Wrigley Field is very special indeed; and MLB is only charging what the market will bear. All those things are true, but not so true that I'm going to pay $66 for an experience when I can pay $11 for one that's just as pleasing, and vastly more convenient. The MLB experience at Wrigley Field is not six times better than the Northern League experience at Flyers Stadium -- which, by the way, took Wrigley Field as its inspiration.

On Friday the 13th the Flyers played the Gary Southshore Railcats. After skies that threatened rain most of the day, the warm evening sported puffy clouds, colored by the waning Sun, ideal for baseball and sitting around outside. We arrived in about the third inning, after not hurrying through our dinner of hamburgers and chips at home. From not far behind home plate, we got a good look at not only the pitching, catching, swinging and hitting, but also the crowds on either side of home, the cheerleaders (officially the Flyers Dance Team) who came out several times, the brief contests between select fans -- hitting a golf ball, tossing tennis balls -- and the Flyers mascot, a man-sized teddy bear with aviator goggles. He didn't actually run around on the field that much, but instead waved a lot. Must be hot in that suit. Happily, the cheerleaders were in little risk of overheating in their uniforms.

Naturally, MLB players are going to be technically more proficient. One of the Flyers pitchers -- let's be charitable here -- was still working on that strike zone concept, for example. But on the whole, the Flyers and the Railcats played some good ball. The crack of the bat sent balls both fair and foul, infielders and outfields caught some and missed others, and men were safe or out. The crowd made noise, people were in more or less constant motion up and down the stairs, a few vendors came by, and food and drink was sold and consumed. The place smelled of beer and nachos. There were plenty of sound effects, but few fancy electronic scoreboard displays. The batter's name, number and a few other details were posted electronically, and lights tracked strikes, balls and outs. But the score itself was posted manually. Nice retro touch, that.

The Railcats took an early lead, the Flyers nearly caught up -- Flyer Peanut Williams, the designated hitter, clearly the crowd's favorite all evening, hit a homer early on -- but a little later the Railcats got more runs and at one point led 6-1. Then the Flyers rallied in a quick, exciting way, having a couple of very good innings, and toward the end of the game it was Railcats-Flyers 9-8.

All this time, the boys in the seats behind us kept up a constant patter. Lads of 12 or 13, they were obviously good friends. It could have been awful, moronic chatter, but it wasn't -- they were bright lads, occasionally funny. Mostly they wanted to talk to each other about rock and punk music. For boys that age, they had an astonishingly broad, if not particularly deep knowledge of bands popular 30 or 40 years ago. And strong opinions: Ozzy Osbourne = Megalegend! The Sex Pistols = Never Mind the Bollocks! If You Don't Know KISS = You Don't Know Rock 'n' Roll! They disparaged hip-hop, country music and emo. "I'm gonna lock myself in my room, eat ice cream, listen to emo, and cut myself," one of them said. Ice cream?

They were also eager to see foul balls come their direction, despite the netting behind home plate, and excitedly made up stories about what happened to various fouls. "It hit the owner, man. He's unconscious! His tooth went that way!" We could have had a lot worse chattering neighbors.

The end of the game could have come straight out of a baseball movie. In the top of the ninth, the Flyers didn't allow any Railcat hits, so the game entered the bottom of the ninth still Railcats-Flyers 9-8. Before long it was two outs, with men on third and second. Peanut Williams came to bat. Yeah! Hit it, Peanut! Ball, strike... then he hit a bouncing ball to one of the infielders, who didn't quite have control of it for a moment, but tossed it to first just as Peanut arrived at the base.

Peanut was out. Game over. The crowded booed loudly. "Kill the umpire!" someone said. Wait, that was me. Of course I didn't really want to harm the fellow. It just seemed like part of hallowed baseball tradition to say it. The stadium was so loud at that moment that no one heard my contribution anyway, and pretty soon the crowd moved passed its brief anger (Schaumburg 2008 isn't San Salvador 1969). We had fireworks to look forward to.

We'd picked June 13 because it was one of the half-dozen fireworks nights at Flyers stadium. A few minutes after the final out, we were treated to about 20 minutes of fireworks, shot off from behind the center field fence. What's a summer without some fireworks?

A Little More Michigan

Ludington, Michigan, has a pleasant main street, sporting a mix of shops, many catering to out-of-towners. Maude's Garage, where we bought a couple of small items, is an interesting adaptive reuse. Their line of antiques and bric-a-brac was fine, but I was more interested in the old newspaper articles and magazine ads plastered to the walls.

Not far away is a town park, long and narrow, near the town beach, which is also long and narrow. The park features the one and only monument to the little-remembered Armistice Day Storm of 1940 that I've ever seen. It may be the only one anywhere. This isn't an especially good image, but here it is.

This particular monument recalls the men who died when their ships sank in Lake Michigan as a result of the unexpectedly strong winds that began that day. Elsewhere, especially in Minnesota, the extreme temperature drop caught a number of hunters unprepared, and they froze to death. Such was life before satellites, radar and the Weather Channel.

Can't visit the edge of Lake Michigan without seeing a lighthouse, and Ludington provided that as well. You have to walk along a long breakwater to get there, but once you do, you see this:

And a fine view of the lake to the west and the shore to the east. The wind was brisk and cool, but a shade above uncomfortably cold. A lot of people were out on the breakwater, but only one sailboat was within sight, and so were two guys on jet skis. They buzzed around, and seemed to consider the people on the breakwater as a kind of audience.

Near both the breakwater and the park were two other points of interest: a municipal shuffleboard court that was fully occupied -- mostly by people younger than me. It's always nice when life defies stereotypes. A nearby playground also caught our attention, actually the attention of the girls. Its distinction was that it was built on sand, rather than grass or soil of some kind. While the girls played there, we heard the SS Badger carferry blow its horn as it approached Ludington, ending its journey across Lake Michigan from Manitowac, Wisconsin, and watched it sail toward its slip.

He Tied the Mark at 44, July the First You Know

More meltage today, leaving gray Slushee covering parts of the driveway. Or would that be dirty-ice Slurpees? Hard to say. Won't last, anyway. Cold front is on its way. Winter, bah.

I spent most of the day writing about the hotel I saw last week, so not much new to report in the seen category, which usually gets top billing in these postings. But I can report hearing new things, or rather some old things previously lost on me. Toward the end of summer last year, I visited an estate sale by myself one day, on impulse, following a hand-lettered sign posted next to the road, and left with a few cassette tapes of old popular songs. Set aside for a time, lately I've been listening to them. As the snow falls and then melts, I've been listening to a dead man's tapes.

The best of them is a collection called Let Me Off Uptown. Among other gems, it includes this song, to remind me of summer. But not just any summer, a particular summer 20 years before I was born. Few pop songs are so temporally precise.

Olympiastadion

I don’t check very often to see who’s been reading my writings here, because I have a fairly good idea of who does. But the other day, I took a look, and noticed that in the last few weeks that someone from Chile spent about eight minutes looking at my pages, and someone from Indonesia visited as well, spending about four minutes. This makes me glad, even though I’m sure they came to my site via the “next blog” function on Blogger -- i.e., at random -- and that they’ll never come back.

Still, in case they do, I want to extend the hand of international friendship and hey-nonny-nonny to my readers in Chile and Indonesia, who may only think they know us here in the United States, since they’ve surely seen a lot of our movies. It might be more informative to read more of our blogs instead. But they’re probably busy following the World Cup these days, rather than random web logs.

Like with the Olympics, I’m more interested in the venues of the World Cup, and the circumstances surrounding the events, than the actual sport itself. I looked around at the FIFA web site recently, and discovered that the Olympiastadion in Berlin is not only being used for some of the matches, but that the finals will be played there on July 9. Also, the stadium was renovated recently with the World Cup in mind (from FIFA):

“Reconstruction had to be carried out with the greatest of care due to the listed status of the structure, originally designed by architect Werner March and built between 1934-36 for around 42 million Reichsmark.

“The new stadium incorporates VIP and Sky executive boxes, Business Seats, a Hertha BSC megastore, underground warm-up facility (including a 110m running track and long-jump pit) and an underground car park. The rebuilding project was primarily aimed at optimising functionality and spectator comfort. For example, practically all the 74,200 seats are covered, whereas previously only 27,000 seats were protected from the elements.”

Sure, the Germans can spend 242 million euros putting on a roof and adding VIP and Sky boxes, but it’ll always be the stadium of the Nazi Olympics, though of course the Olympic Committee had originally awarded the games to Weimar Germany, shaky as it was. Or, if you prefer, it was the Olympics in which Jesse Owens seemed to have been the only competitor, considering how often his participation is highlighted in ten-second spots mentioning those games. In any case, I hope the new boxes are nice, full of amenities far beyond the twisted dreams of the Führer.

In July 1983, drawn by the place’s historic associations, I took the U-bahn out to see the stadium and the Olympic pools nearby, famous from Leni Riefenstahl’s Festival of Beauty, which I’d seen in film class a few months earlier. Nothing was going on that day, so the place was almost empty but open anyway, so I wandered around. What I remember most were the large statues here and there on the grounds, a sort of stern German interpretation of the archaic Greek style, probably meant to evoke heroic Aryan youth. They had weathered the war and perhaps caused mild embarrassment to the Germans of the Federal Republic, but they weren’t overtly Nazi, so they stayed. The FIFA site doesn’t mention them, but I assume that since the stadium has “listed status” (it’s on a list!), they’re still around.

Item from the Past: UP II

September 6, 2000

We’ve just returned from the Upper Peninsula. On the whole it was a good trip, though it didn’t quite go the way we planned. Our original thinking was to spend the first night in a motel in Green Bay, and then two more nights at the Hiawatha National Forest, at a place called Pete’s Lake, in our little tent. That’s more or less what I did by myself over Labor Day weekend in 1989, though at that time I stayed in Marinette, Wis., overnight, which is a little further up the road. And I stayed at Pete’s Lake two nights, but not by plan. It was just the place I picked.

This time we went to a Microtel motel in Green Bay for the first night. Odd name, and a brand I’d never stayed at, but the description in the guidebook sounded good, and turned out to be accurate. The rooms are basic, the price not too bad, and the best part was the pool, which Lilly was very happy to use on Saturday morning. It had fountains, a whirlpool effect in one corner, a “volcano” that dribbled water, basketball nets and water slides that were too big for her. Mostly the other guest were people with small children, a fact confirmed at the pool that morning, which was chockablock with kids and their chunky, middle-aged parents. I fit right in.

On Saturday, we pressed on to the Nat’l Forest, picnicking along the way, setting up camp at little Pete’s Lake, eating noodles for dinner and bedding down fairly early, as we tend to do while camping. Sometime in the dark night, an enormous thunderstorm broke over the Upper Peninsula. Over our tent, in fact. No light except the lightning, intense rain and rolling thunder, and the whoosh of the wind through the endless rack of trees. It was like being inside the storm. Lilly slept through it. Yuriko and I didn’t.

It would have been quite a thrill, but for one thing. We discovered that night the value of a ground cover, which we did not have under our tent. We’re only camping dilettantes, and fortunate enough never to have been rained on in the half-dozen campouts we’ve done, so we didn’t have one, and we didn’t appreciate the creep of water through the ground and up into the tent and into our sleeping bags & pillows &c. We do now.

The next morning (Sunday) everything was wet enough, with no prospect of sun to dry it all out, for us to change our plans. We discussed spending the day in the UP and returning to Green Bay, but the travel spirit moved us and we decided to return home via lower Michigan. Then, after breaking camp, we drove up to Munising, Mich., and the Pictured Rocks Nat’l Lakeshore. Lake Superior was foggy, cold and grey, the austere patriarch of the Great Lakes. (“Lake Huron rolls, Superior sings/ In the rooms of her ice water mansions.”) I want to see more of it someday. Say, from the wilds of Isle Royale or Whitefish Point or from the Canadian side. There’s a place on the Canadian side called Thunder Bay. Is that not cool geo-nomenclature?

We crossed the Mackinac Bridge (third-longest suspension bridge in the USA, says my almanac) on Sunday afternoon and began looking for a place to stay. Unlike Pete’s Lake, which was less than half occupied, the accommodations were mostly full around the Straits of Mackinac, so we headed south and ended up at Gaylord, Mich., in a golf/snowmobile resort. The golf season is declining, and the snow season hasn’t started yet, so we got a good deal on a fine room and access to an excellent outdoor heated pool. Which of course Lilly liked best of all. While I was sitting around in that pool with Lilly, a clutch of other guests — two middle-aged couples — discussed in great detail all the places they’d played golf. It’s a subculture I’ll never understand.

Monday was a tough drive home. You’d think that rural Interstates in Michigan would be free of traffic jams, but no, not on Labor Day. We did stop briefly in Lansing, and saw the outside of Michigan state capitol. In a way, it was all a test to see how Lilly would take to a long car trip, and in that she did very well. That is, she didn’t complain too much, and often we were able to provide her with things to do. For as long as I can remember, I liked those long trips. Maybe that’s part of growing up in Texas. Or more likely, that’s just me.

Fishin’ Lilly

I’m not a recreational fisherman. When I was seven or eight, my grandmother’s next-door neighbor took me with her son, who was about my age, to a lake in south Texas for fishing. I remember disliking the worms and dreading the fishhooks—I’d heard they were painful and hard to remove, if you got one in your finger. I avoided that problem, but sitting around in the heat waiting for the pole to move didn’t seem like much fun. Especially since it never moved.

Much later, after I’d grown up, I tried again. This time I went fishing in a stream in Idaho. Fishing in Idaho. I’d read my Hemmingway. I knew this was supposed to be a fine place to fish. Probably it was. But even sitting around in the shade, waiting for the pole to move, wasn’t much fun. Especially since it never moved.

Lilly may feel differently about fishing someday. Among the sport fishers at the lagoon near our campsite was a middle-aged woman by herself, parked near the water, managing two poles. On Saturday evening, Lilly and Ann spent a lot of time near the water’s edge. Ann especially was fascinated by poking a stick into some of the algae scum. Lilly became fascinated by what the fisherwoman was doing, and started to watch her.

The woman was nice, and we talked to her a little. Eventually she let Lilly hold one of the poles. I didn’t think any harm could come of it, so while Lilly was doing this I went back to our campsite to build the fire. About 10 minutes later, Lilly came to me holding a bucket. She’d caught a fish. A small thing, who knows what kind, but alive in the bucket. “I caught a fish! I caught a fish!” she said, as pleased as could be. There wasn’t anything we could do with it, so she soon threw it back. Still, that’s more luck that I’d ever had fishing.