Deer Grove Ahead of the Greening

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Not long ago, on one of the warmish days we had before the more recent chilly run, we made our way back to Deer Grove Forest Preserve in Palatine, one of the many such green spaces in the northwest suburbs. Except it hadn’t greened yet. The last time we were there, during the pandemic spring of 2020, it was full spring and lush green.

Still, there’s a certain charm to the slumbering brown-gray earth, provided the air isn’t that cold and the paths are fairly dry. Had a good walk.Deer Grove Forest Preserve

Trees before budding. It won’t be long.Deer Grove Forest Preserve Deer Grove Forest Preserve

Grassland waiting to green up. That will come even sooner.Deer Grove Forest Preserve

Recent rains – including much of yesterday – are hastening things along. I cracked the window last night to listen to the micro-splash rhythm of the falling rain, but didn’t leave it open too long, as cold air snuck in along with the pleasurable sounds.

The Odds

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A random thought today: Do the Irish bookies take bets on when and which company will be indicted next for antitrust violations? One table of odds for the U.S. and a different one for the European Union?

Not sure why I thought of that. Just one of those passing notions.

Gone the Way of Columbia Wearing a Phrygian Cap

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A few years ago, a meme about Presidents Day came to my attention. The text: Think you should have Presidents’ Day off work? Name this man.

The image was that of Warren Harding. For me, that was easy. Maybe not so much for a lot of people, though I suspect no survey about President Harding’s enduring fame has ever been done.

A better obscure president for the meme would have been, say, James Garfield or Rutherford B. Hayes or Benjamin Harrison, since Gilded Age chief executives tend to merge into a single hazy gray-bearded visage, except of course for the moustachio’d rotundness of Chester A. Arthur and Grover Cleveland.

Fame wears thin. That came to mind this time last year at the Harding library and museum in Marion, Ohio. Among a number of other interesting artifacts, the museum posted newspaper reactions to the president’s unexpected death on August 2, 1923.Warren G Harding death editorial cartoons Posted in Marion, Ohiov Warren G Harding death editorial cartoons Posted in Marion, Ohio Warren G Harding death editorial cartoons Posted in Marion, Ohio Warren G Harding death editorial cartoons Posted in Marion, Ohio

Note that Columbia is wearing a Phrygian cap. Whatever happened to Phrygian caps? Whatever happened to Columbia in editorial cartoons? They just faded away. Something like the memory of Harding, so vivid once upon a time.

Newspaper editorial cartoons don’t necessarily capture public sentiment, but I understand Harding was a popular president in his lifetime. In terms of reputation, then, he got out while he still had a good one. Not long after, the scandals of his administration came to light, along with allegations of an illegitimate daughter (which were true). A hundred years later, he’s obscure enough to meme-ify, except among historians, who don’t like him.

Nephi on the Sidewalk

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Today I’m reminded of the old joke whose punchline is, “He called me from Salt Lake City.” If you know it, you know it, but enough to say that Mormonism is the crux of that joke.

We took a walk around a northwest suburban pond late this afternoon, a familiar place, but there was unfamiliar writing on one of the many stretches of sidewalk.

Illustration to the left.

3 Nephi 11:14? That didn’t sound familiar. Maybe a book in the Douay version I don’t know about? I’ve never been able to remember all of its distinctions from the KJB. I forgot about my passing, and erroneous, thought until I downloaded the pictures later. That was the time to look it up. It’s from the Book of Mormon.

That’s a first in my experience, Mormon graffiti.

Somehow the Bernie Bros Missed This One

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A few weeks ago, I went again to Ollie’s, whose appeal is the randomness of its merchandise, and there he was, among the packaged foods and housewares and small appliances and furniture and bric-a-brac, no other stuffed politicos around, no tag or bar code.

“This the funniest thing I’ve seen all day,” I said to the clerk. “How much?”

I was only kidding. It was the funniest thing I’d seen all week, maybe all month. He spent a minute or so tapping into a laptop near the register, but soon gave up the chase. “How about $3.99?” he said.

Sold.

A product of Fuzzu, a Vermont designer of pet toys. I’d say maker, but for Bernie at least that occurred in China. Bernie isn’t alone — well, he was when I found him, but had he been separated, a la Toy Story, from the rest of the Fuzzu stable? Joe, Kamala, Donald, Mike, Hillary, Bill and Rootin’ Tootin’ Putin.

Mike? The former Mayor Bloomberg, it seems, since on his back is “Pop Cop.”

Now Bernie joins my small collection of presidential ephemera: postcards, a few buttons, my Franklin Pierce bobblehead and William Henry Harrison Pez dispenser and Eugene V. Debs ribbon. My definition of presidential is pretty broad, and certainly includes serious if quixotic candidates for the nomination.

Early Equinox

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Our downstairs calendar is astronomy themed, obtained from my Secret Santa at work during the holidays. The year before, I’d asked for postcards, and got some packs of them. I decided an astronomy calendar would be the thing last Christmas, so that is what I asked for.

It’s called Astronomy with Phil Harrington, published by Willow Creek Press. Harrington seems to be something of a cottage industry when it comes to popular astronomy works. As for Willow Creek, it publishes scads of calendars, from Abstract Art 2024 to Zoo in a Box. Good for them. My calendar suggestions for 2025: Great Elevators of Europe, Vintage American Bottle Caps, and Classic TV Shows That Lasted A Season Or Less.

It’s a fine calendar, chock-a-block with information, and excellent images of celestial sights. For March, the Hubble Ultra-Deep Field image, said to capture roughly 10,000 galaxies, an imponderable number of places and yet a vanishingly tiny fraction of them all. For April: a photo of the total eclipse of 2017, for obvious reasons.

I look at the calendar often. I looked at it this morning and learned that today is the vernal equinox, at 10:06 p.m. Central Daylight Time, when the sun appears straight above the equator, headed (so to speak) northward. Not, I think, the “first day of spring.” Not around here anyway. For the last week, the chill we didn’t get much in February has slipped into March.

I’d have thought the equinox would be on the 20th or 21st, and I suppose by Coordinated Universal Time it is on the 20th, but the time I care about is CDT. Turns out the vernal equinox is earlier than usual this year, due to the leap year and other factors too complicated for me to relate.

As if to mark the vernal equinox – though I’m sure it’s a coincidence – a tree service hired by the village came by today to trim the trees along the street. Those in the “parkway,” that is, the land between the street and the lot lines, and thus belonging to the village. Public trees.

After the trimming, which I was too busy to document, came a wood chipper. I was ready for that.

I noticed that the machine is a Morbark brand. (Not Mo’BetterBark.) I had to look that up. Turns out the village is supporting Michigan manufacturing by having one.

“The year was 1957 when Norval Morey, a local sawmill operator, took the first risky step into manufacturing armed with a patent for a portable pulp wood debarker,” the company web site says. “The Morbark Debarker Company was born that year, and nobody in Winn, Michigan, could have predicted the growth that the company would experience over the next five decades.”

Fearsome machines, those wood chippers. The kind of death maw that a villain dangles James Bond over, only to fall in himself when 007 inevitably makes his escape from the trap.

The Bond bon mot at that moment (Roger Moore, I picture it): “Bet that chap has a grinding headache.”

Monday Moonery

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Why should we start sending people back to the Moon? Because it’s still there? Besides that. Rather, because the ranks of those who have flown to the Moon are getting pretty thin – something I thought of when I learned that Tom Stafford (Apollo 10) died. Now only seven of them are left, four who landed on the surface and three who got really close without landing.

At 88, the youngest of this rarefied group is Apollo 16’s Charles Duke. Three have passed just in the last few months, including Ken Mattingly (also Apollo 16) and Frank Borman (Apollo 8) and now Stafford. It wouldn’t be right somehow to have the experience of being close to the Moon slip out of living memory. The plan is for these astronauts to go next year on Artemis 2; we shall see.

If Artemis 2 does come to pass as planned, it would include among its crew one Jeremy Hansen, who happens to be a Canadian astronaut and would be the first non-American (non-citizen of the United States, to nitpickers) to pay a visit to the Moon. Assuming a knot of taikonauts doesn’t surprise the world before Artemis’ flight by appearing on the lunar surface hoisting the flag of the PRC.

Hansen, as Wiki succinctly put it, “Canadian astronaut, fighter pilot, physicist and former aquanaut.” If that’s not an action hero’s resume, I don’t know what would be.

Lots of rabbit-hole material here: Canada currently has four active astronauts (one of whom is Hansen) and a number of retired ones, including the dude astronaut who played “Space Oddity” on the ISS about 10 years ago. They work or worked for the Canadian Space Agency, which has been around since 1989 but I’d say is fairly low profile. Canadians have been going to space since before then, since Marc Garneau went up on a 1984 Shuttle mission. He happens to be a Québécois and until recently fairly highly positioned in the current Trudeau government.

Here’s a question for Moon landing deniers: how come some other nation (say, you know, China) hasn’t faked going to the Moon by now? Certainly Xi Jinping would be able to marshal the resources, by various carrots and sticks, to get the filming and other fakery done.

If someone (say, you know, Kubrick) could fake it using late ’60s video tech, wouldn’t the vast improvements in digital image creation since then mean a higher quality fake by the Chinese government? One so good no one would question it? Except of course for brave Moon-landing deniers.

Paper

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Sometimes I think about writing paper letters regularly again. Something like once or twice a month maybe, just short notes to different people I used to correspond with that way. Even those of us who used to create voluminous amounts of paper letters – and I did – don’t do so any more. I keep up the volume of postcards, but not letters. I toy with this idea, but nothing has come of it yet.

That came to mind rummaging through my letter files recently. I found this.

Twenty years ago, my 78-year-old mother in Texas writes to her six-year-old granddaughter in Illinois, whose 26-year-old self happens to be visiting us now. I don’t think my mother sent an email or text message in her life, and she was no worse for it. I’d say as long as this paper letter and others of hers are accessible to those of us who knew her, her memory is no worse for it either.

Payton the Bassador, ca. 2009-2024

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Today was the sad day we had our dog, Payton, put down. In the end, it was quick and painless. The time had come. She couldn’t even move much as of the weekend, refused all nourishment during the last few days, and howled in pain for minutes at a time. Dogs don’t have many advantages over people, but not having to suffer as much at the end of their lives is one they do have.

“Payton” by Emi S. (2023)

She had been with us nearly 11 years, and came with the name Payton. We couldn’t decide on a new name, so that’s what it remained. Back when we got her, if you Googled “Payton” and “bassador” – for she was a basset-lab mix – her image would appear at the web site of the organization we acquired her from, with a banner on the pic announcing ADOPTED.

I got it in my head, soon after she came to live with us, that if I published her name and picture, whoever gave her up might see it, track us down, and demand her back. Not likely at all, but as a result I got into the habit of simply referring to our dog or the dog, beginning from day one. This is the first time I’ve used her name.

In the fullness of time, I may post other images, maybe even a short video of elderly Payton guarding her food a few weeks ago, back when she had an appetite. For now, enough to pause for a few days in her honor, till next Sunday. She wasn’t people, but she was a member of the family.

RIP, Payton.

A Palatine Water Tower in its Blue Period

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On short Sunday, we made our way to Palatine, Illinois, in the afternoon. As home to more than 67,000 residents, it’s no small chunk of northwest Cook County.

Those residents need water.

I’d driven by that water tower on the Northwest Highway (US 14) periodically for years, and decided it was high time I took a look while standing still. Once upon a time, up until 2016, the tower was painted to look more like a stereotypical lighthouse, including figures that evoked the sort of windows you might see on a lighthouse. That was done away with, but it’s a pleasant blue.

Another source tells us that it is an “18,000 ton water tower,” but not whether that’s without water or the weight of the water that it can hold. Wouldn’t the capacity of water towers be in gallons? It is, at least according to Watermedia.org.

Not far away, but tucked away from any major street, is the village hall.

Looks newish, as indeed it is: completed in 2016 by Camosy Construction.

I couldn’t go inside. Maybe that’s where the distinctive civic details of Palatine are, such small memorials or plaques or the like? There was nothing outside that I could see, unless you count this.

The mayor’s parking spot, within view of Wood Street, named for a resident of early Palatine (founded 1866). The mayor, since 2009, happens to be James Schwantz, a former pro football player.