Monthly Archives: January 2015

Thursday Stew

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A bit of meltage today, with temps around freezing, and the sunshine doing the melting where it hit snow directly. Compared with last week, the air felt good. But hard winter will be back, count on it.

Started working my way through Deadwood around New Year’s. When the show was still fairly new, the profanity put me off it. Not the profanity itself, but the fact that I considered it grossly anachronistic. Now I understand it as an intentional anachronism, done for good reasons. The show’s impressive: one that helps make the argument that now is a golden age of television, or at least the 2000s were.

Ann’s been reading Through the Looking-Glass lately, and looking for our copy of Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, which has gone missing. Not long ago she read The Wizard of Oz. And she’s asked me to find our copies of The Hobbit and the first Harry Potter book, so she can read them. The kid’s got some kind of bug.

I have an ambition to scan more coins, specifically those I’ve encountered lately that don’t feature any Roman letters or even Arabic numerals. In the old days, it was a chore figuring out the origin of coins like that, so much so that for some time as a youngster I had a 1 yen coin that I thought was a 1 yuan coin. These days, all it usually takes is a focused Google search.

But I’ve alternately been too busy and too indolent to do much coin-scanning. I did get around to this one. Forgot to check the box that would correct for dust (the scanner’s got some impressive features for a cheaper model; guess the tech’s improving).

Ethiopian 10 SantimIt’s a well-worn brass 10 santim piece from Ethiopia. 100 santim = 1 birr. The lion, I suppose, is the Lion of Judah.

My Definitive Bucket List, Because I’ve Changed My Mind and Now Think It’s a Swell Idea

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Heck, I’ve changed my mind. I’ve decided to make a bucket list after all. The following are the places I absolutely must see or things I must do before I become stiff, bereft of life, resting in peace, etc. I’ll start with 10 domestic sights. See America First. No particular order.

The peninsula near Finn’s Rear Range Lighthouse in New Jersey that ought to be part of New Jersey but is somehow part of Delaware.

The Martin and Osa Johnson Safari Museum in Chanute, Kansas.

The grave of Wink Martindale. Wait, he’s not dead yet. The grave of any late great game show host would do, then.

The Sopchoppy Worm Gruntin’ Festival in Sopchoppy, Florida.

A meal at the remotest McDonald’s in the nation – by which I mean the one furthest from all the other McDonald’s. This might take some research, so maybe I can just have a sausage-egg-cheese biscuit in a place like Winnemucca, Nevada, and then check it off my list. I want to go to Winnemucca anyway because it’s in the Hank Snow song. Or I could just use the song as my list; already been to a fair number of them.

Mardi Gras in Mobile, Alabama.

All of the public men’s rooms in Grand Central Terminal. (No funny business, just to pee.)

The spot in Wisconsin where 45 degrees N latitude meets 90 degrees W longitude.

Take the 3:10 to Yuma. It probably isn’t possible to take any such public conveyance, so I can start driving to Yuma from somewhere at 3:10 one day.

The Brazilian steakhouse about a mile from my home. Never gotten around it, probably because dinners are fairly expensive. But a lunch special wouldn’t be bad and I bet it’s tasty.

Ah, Haleakalā

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In his TEDx Talk (see yesterday), Ed also mentioned a transformative experience – maybe transcendent experience — he had at Haleakalā, the enormous volcano on Maui. Brave fellow that Ed, walking into a volcano against medical advice.

Even against the advice of the National Park Service, which says re Haleakalā National Park: “The Summit and Kīpahulu Districts are remote. An ambulance can take up to 45 minutes to arrive at either district from the nearest town. People with respiratory or other medical conditions should also be aware that the summit of Haleakalā is at 10,000 ft.”

Can’t say that my experience at Haleakalā was transformative, except that incremental transformation one gets living day to day, with a handful of those days including things marvelous to behold. The vista down into the cone was certainly that, like no place I’d seen before.

Haleakala79-1Mars. I thought of Mars, with its rocks and rusty terrain. When I gazed down into Haleakalā in 1979, and took a few of my own pictures, the pictures taken by Viking were still pretty fresh. But I knew it was Earth; a rare part of Earth, accessible to the likes of me only because of the twists and turns of history and personal circumstance.

That day I made the acquaintance of the silversword, Argyroxiphium sandwicense macrocephalum, which grows nowhere else, though another subspecies grows on Mouna Kea.

Haleakala79-2Say that to yourself: The Silverswords of Haleakalā. Fun just to say. Sounds like one of Edgar Rice Burroughs lesser-known works.

Silversword79Plenty of fully grown men and women who didn’t exist when I took in the vista of Haleakalā and its silverswords are now loose in the world, so long ago was it. But I get some satisfaction from the almost certain knowledge that the vista hasn’t changed at all since then.

Ed in Maui

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This is the video of a TEDx talk in Maui late last year, featuring my old friend Ed, whom I’ve known since the early ’90s. We both happened to be in the same part of Japan at the same time working for the same company.

On the whole, he’s right. The bucket list is an inane concept. Though we probably differ a bit in that I sometimes visit famed sights in large part because of their fame. What, I wonder, is all the fuss about?

More often than not, the place turns out to be famed for good reasons, and even if it’s something everyone everywhere knows about, you can still take something novel away from the experience. Take the Eiffel Tower, for instance. Can’t very well go to Paris for the first time and not visit that. As we sat directly underneath it, I thought, wow, this is a hell of a metal sculpture.

And there are places I’d visit in preference to others. That seems only reasonable. Iceland, say, rather than Bayonne, NJ. But if I never make it to Iceland? So it goes. Life is short, the world is large. Can’t go everywhere.

First Night Parade 92/93

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Back on the last day of 1992, Yuriko and I found ourselves in Boston. I don’t remember exactly where the First Night parade was – along one of the streets next to the Common, probably – but we were there, ahead of dinner with friends and a gathering in Cambridge to see ’93 in.

Like the Greenwich Village Halloween parade, First Night featured rod puppets of various kinds. Figures of people:

firstnightboston92-2The camera had an annoying feature that we forgot to turn off for that picture. It would time stamp the images at the bottom. The camera had been set to do so in Japan, so remarkably it stamped 93 1 1, which would have been correct had the camera still been in Japan. (We used it, and film, until 2007).

firstnightboston92-3Costumed participants paraded by as well.

firstnightboston92-1Not sure what this was supposed to have been, but it was colorful.

firstnightboston92-4My urge to go out on New Year’s Eve has flagged over the years (though usually it was to a gathering of friends, not a public event). This year, Lilly was out. In a few more years, Ann will be out.

Thursday Debris

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Snow’s back in some quantity. We even have a minor drift on the deck, caused by persistent wind. Doesn’t seem to bother the hound.

Dog in Snow

Yuriko’s been back from Japan for nearly a week. Just got around to copying the pictures she took from the SD card. Here’s one I liked.

Osaka Public Hall, Late 2014

It’s the Osaka City Central Public Hall on Nakanoshima, aglow in the night. I used to walk by that pre-war structure often (almost pre-first war, since it was finished in 1918). It had to good fortune to survive the Pacific War, as they call the second war in Japan, and post-war urban uglification, too.

She also enjoyed some artful eats.

Sushi in Japan

Japan’s a good place to find that.

The worldwide competition for Barbarian of the Year got an early start in ’15, alas. We don’t even really know who the latest entrant is. Last year it was a toss-up between ISIS and Boko Haram. The jury’s still out on that one.

Millions Will Freeze!

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The hunger for eyeballs – which sounds like a concept from some zombie movie – is leading to ridiculous web site headlines. Then again, draw-’em-in headlines goes all the way back to yellow journalism. This from Weather.com this morning, in the wake of a completely ordinary January cold front pushed that through much of North America.

DANGEROUS ARCTIC BLAST IMPACTING 190 MILLION: IT COULD FEEL LIKE 50 BELOW!

50 F below, if you happen to be in Bismarck or Bemidji or some such; a circumstance local residents would call “Wednesday.” Granted, it’s probably fairly cold in the South as well – 26 F above in Nashville this morning, for example, but it’s winter there, too. This event didn’t even count as a blizzard.

Anyway, I just wanted to check our local temp at about 9:30, which turned out to be 0 F. Not to worry, it’ll be back in the upper 20s by Sunday, which will seem positively toasty. But not toasty enough to melt our modest coating of snow.

I will say that if scroll down far enough at Weather.com – past most of the click-bait stories – you’ll come to a graph that details the apparent course of the sun throughout the day. It tells me, for instance, that solar noon today was at 11:59 am, and that sunset came at 4:37 pm. Even better, it demarks civil twilight, nautical twilight, and astronomical twilight – 5:09, 5:43, and 6:17 pm, respectively. Also, moonrise and moonset: rise is at 7:25 pm tonight.

I probably won’t be out for any of these events, since it isn’t going to get above zero today, but it’s nice to know when I can track them without going outside.

Moo & Oink

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All of the holiday-themed merchandise you’d actually want to buy is long gone by now, snapped up at discounts in the days after Christmas. That leaves the likes of the Ugly Christmas Sweater Cookie Set that I saw for sale today: a ridiculous item at a very steep markdown. Makes 6 to 8 ugly sweater cookies, the box said. It was illustrated with cookies shaped like brightly decorated sweaters.

When and how did the notion of ugly Christmas sweaters become popular? It happened while I wasn’t paying attention. I’ll continue to be apathetic about it, so I won’t bother to look into it. (But I will record here that Lilly went to a party with that theme this year.)

I didn’t buy the cookie set. I did need some barbecue sauce, and happened across an 18 oz. bottle Moo & Oink High 5 BBQ Sauce. That I bought.

Marketing verbiage on the bottle says: “Let’s face it, you take your BBQ seriously. So when it comes to what you put on your ‘Q,’ serious BBQ lovers are brushing on the thick & tasty blend of ingredients in HIGH 5™ BBQ Sauce.” The first ingredient is high fructose corn syrup.

Seems to be residuum of the Moo & Oink grocery stores that used to be on the South Side of Chicago, but which closed in 2011. I never went to any of their stores, but I did occasionally see the commercials.

Time for A Time for Gifts

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Bitter cold today, and it’s only going to get bitterer. Maybe minus 15 F. by Wednesday, after another round of snow. At times like that, icy little puffs push through the cracks in your house to remind you that the chilly world is indifferent to your fate, you who came from subtropical climes but were headstrong about migrating toward the pole.

My reading material at the turn of the year is A Time for Gifts (1977), in which Patrick Leigh Fermor, who died in 2011 at 96, recounts part of his walk as a very young man from the Hook of Holland to Constantinople in the winter of 1933-34. A remarkable story, well told, and reminds just about everyone else (such as me) that their travels are pallid indeed compared with his.

It features a lot of interesting detail: “I pestered Fritz Spengel, the son of my hosts, with questions about student life: songs, drinking ritual, and above all, duelling, which wasn’t duelling at all of course, but ritual scarification. Those dashing scars were school ties that could never be taken off, the emblem and seal of a ten-years’ cult of the humanities. With a sabre from the wall, Fritz demonstrated the stance and the grip and described how the participants were gauntleted, gorgeted and goggled until every exposed vein and artery, and every inch of irreplaceable tissue, were upholstered from harm… and the blades clashed by numbers until the razor-sharp tips sliced gashes deep enough, tended with rubbed-in salt, to last a lifetime.”

And musings: “The Thirty Years War, the worst of them all, was becoming an obsession with me: a lurid, ruinous, doomed conflict of briefs and dynasties, helpless and hopeless, with principals shifting the whole time, and a constant shuffle and re-deal of the main actors. For, apart from the events – the defenestrations and pitched battles and historic sieges, the slaughter and famine and plague – astrological portents and the rumour of cannibalism and witchcraft flitted about in the shadows. The polyglot captains of the ruffian multi-lingual hosts hold our gaze willy-nilly with their grave eyes and their Velasquez moustaches and populate half the picture galleries in Europe…”

Hard Day’s New Year’s Eve

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Snow today, after a rain-ice mix yesterday that made slush. December ’14 was remarkable in that not a bit of snow fell here in northern Illinois, none that stuck anyway. That suited me, though mostly it was cold, especially as the month ended. Everyone who was out after midnight on New Year’s braved temps around 15 degrees F., with some wind.

I stood outside for a short spell to capture the sounds of the early ’15, just after midnight. It’s faint, but if the volume’s all the way up, you can hear the steady pops of technically illegal fireworks. Not sure what the loud pop is at about 10 seconds.

 

Before midnight I watched A Hard Day’s Night. Fun movie. Somehow or other I’d never seen it before, except for the famed opening, in which a mass of screaming girls chase the lads through a train station.

One amusing line — which must be understood less and less as time goes by — involved “Paul’s grandfather.” (Wilfrid Brambell played Paul’s grandfather, sometimes stealing the show. I thought he looked familiar. Turns out he played the father in Steptoe and Son.)

At one point, Paul’s grandfather sneaks off and runs up a tab at a posh club. The Beatles and their manager show up to collect the old man, and the club manager says, “There’s the matter of the bill.”

The Beatles’ manager looks at it and says, “180 pounds?”

“180 guineas!” answers the club manager.