Monthly Archives: January 2019

A Slightly Less Gelid Day

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Zero degrees Fahrenheit isn’t warm at all, unless compared with 20 degrees below that. I spent a few minutes out early this afternoon — with temps actually at 5 below or so — and it was tolerable for what I needed to do, which was make sure the garage door closed.

Very low temps cloud the electronic eye, I think. At least, rubbing the lens clear seems to help.

“Surfing” never seemed like the right verb for wandering around the Internet. Maybe that’s why you don’t hear it much anymore, 20 years after it was common. Wander, meander, ramble — these seem better. More descriptive of the way I approach the Internet anyway.

The polar vortex loose on the Upper Midwest naturally led me to read a bit about Antarctic exploration, some about Shackleton but also, in a classic online tangent, the ship Southern Cross, which sailed on the lesser-known British Antarctic Expedition (1898-1900), a.k.a. the Southern Cross Expedition (and not Kingsford Smith’s aircraft, which I heard about years ago in Australia).

The Southern Cross was mostly a sealing vessel and eventually she went down with all hands in the North Atlantic — 174 men — in the 1914 Newfoundland Sealing Disaster, an incident about which I knew nothing.

Reading about that led me to information of the Newfoundland sealing industry, something I also knew nothing about. Here’s a short item about that industry, with footage of Newfies bounding around on dangerous ice floes in the days before the Canadian equivalent of OSHA.

That naturally lead to other information about Newfoundland. Apparently there’s a Newfoundland tricolor, but it’s not the official flag. There’s a song about it anyway.

I looked up the official Newfoundland and Labrador flag. Not bad, exactly, just a little odd. Though it had one designer, it looks like a compromise between two factions of the same committee.

This Gelid Day

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I got up this morning and before long pulled up the Weather Underground page for my suburb. At about 9 a.m. the temperature was minus 23 F. “Feels like minus 43,” the site helpfully added, since there was some wind.

At O’Hare, the low was one degree colder, it seems. “This morning’s minimum of 24 below zero was the coldest in Chicago in the 36 years since the morning of January 20, 1985, when Chicago’s all-time record low of minus 27 was recorded,” WGN reports. Even in Nashville, I remember that things were pretty cold around that time in ’85.

Not to worry, we had a high of minus 15 F. to look forward to today. That happened around 1 in the afternoon, but as of about 7 p.m. we were back to 17 below. Remarkably, the weather savants say that the local air will be above freezing by the weekend. Hope so.

Early in the afternoon, the dog wanted to go out to do what dogs do outside. So I let her out. During the minute or so she spent in the frozen landscape, I couldn’t resist the urge to document the scene — as quickly as possible through a door that was open for a few seconds.
No adjustment of the image necessary. Looks like the camera also caught light dispersing through ice crystals in the gelid air.

At temps like this, it’s easy to anthropomorphize the cold. It feels like the cold is pressing on all the doors and windows, trying to put its icy fingers through the cracks, eager to invade the house and equalize the temperature outside and inside. As if central heating is an affront to its idea of the way things should be.

My work desk faces an outside window. Even wearing socks, I could feel the temps under the desk to be lower than usual today. Behind one of our kitchen cabinets is an exterior wall. The air was noticeably cooler in the cabinet today. Last night, I heard the house pop and creak a little as the outside temps dipped below zero. That is unnerving.

Some years ago, an occasional BTST reader said, you sure write about the weather a lot. The implication was, I think, why are you wasting your time with trivia like that?

I’ve thought about that question occasionally since then. Odd what some people consider trivial. Like the weather. Which is the state of the atmosphere in which we live 24 hours a day, seven days a week, except for a handful of astronauts for a little while. You’d think it would be worth some attention.

Actually, in this iteration of BTST at least, weather is a main category in only about 10 percent of the postings: 132 of a total of 1,342. Seems like a healthy amount of attention to me.

Of that category, only 18 postings (like today) are tagged “dangerous weather,” all of which I’ve experienced myself. Winter storms, hurricanes, very heavy rains, high heat, usw. (Well, I’ve never been near a hurricane, but I did hear a typhoon rush by outside in Osaka.) “Unpleasant weather” gets 43 tags while “pleasant weather” gets 23, so I guess I’m not one to accentuate the positive when it comes to atmospheric conditions.

Ignore the weather at your peril. The unnamed protagonist in Jack London’s “To Build a Fire” didn’t give it much thought, and look where it got him: frozen to death.

“Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost. Such fact impressed him as being cold and uncomfortable, and that was all. It did not lead him to meditate upon his frailty as a creature of temperature, and upon man’s frailty in general, able only to live within certain narrow limits of heat and cold; and from there on it did not lead him to the conjectural field of immortality and man’s place in the universe.”

Image Adjustments

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Not long ago I downloaded a new version of PhotoScape, the program that I use to adjust images. I’d used an earlier version for years, mostly to do simple things, such as crop, adjust sizes and lighten or darken an image.

The new version, even the non-premium one, has a lot more bells and whistles. Curious, I decided the other day to play around with some of the added functions. I picked an image from my files for that purpose.

In case the scene isn’t familiar, that’s the Heald Square Monument on E. Wacker Dr. in downtown Chicago, dating from the late 1930s. Prominently placed yet seemingly little noticed. It’s a bronze by the renowned Lorado Taft depicting George Washington and the two main financiers of the American Revolution, Robert Morris and Haym Salomon.

It’s also the kind of thing I take pictures of. I took this one on January 29, 2013. The light wasn’t especially good and in fact I brightened up the above image somewhat. Still a little drab. It was a drab day, I think.

So add a little color. Add a mirror image to the bottom.

Or do other effects the names of which I forget.
Or finally, my own favorite, kaleidoscope.
That’s only a small sample, not including the functions you have to pay extra for. Interesting.

Reading About the Wazir of Wham in the Pit of Winter

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Sliding into the pit of winter. The abyss. The Mariana Trench. With any luck temps won’t be any colder in February.

The snow was intense enough this morning that school was cancelled and garbage pickup didn’t happen on our street today as scheduled, though the recycle truck came more-or-less on time in the mid-morning, even before the plows.

I decided to go ahead and read the biography of Babe Ruth that I have handy, Babe Ruth: His Life and Legend by Kal Wagenheim (1974). Not overly scholarly, but fun. A book about good-time Babe Ruth that isn’t fun isn’t trying very hard. Also, it was written long enough ago that plenty of old timers were still around to tell stories about Ruth.

Been a while since I read any baseball books. Can’t remember the last one. Might have been You Gotta Have Wa.

One amusing thing to read about is the array of nicknames that sports writers invented for the Babe. The Sultan of Swat or the Bambino, everyone knows (or should), but less-well known is the Colossus of Clout or the Behemoth of Bust. Or the Caliph of Clout, Wazir of Wham, Maharajah of Mash, Rajah of Rap, Mammoth of Maul, Wali of Wallop, the Mauling Monarch and the Terrible Titan.

Cow Ride at the Mall

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Australia Day has come and gone. Oz is reportedly suffering a viciously hot summer this year. Adelaide, a pleasant place in my recollection, seems to be getting hit especially hard.

Meanwhile, here in North America, or at least my part of it, after being a slacker for most of December and part of January, winter is hitting hard. Dead ahead, according to the NWS on Sunday evening:

WINTER WEATHER ADVISORY REMAINS IN EFFECT FROM 9 PM THIS EVENING TO 6 PM CST MONDAY… Heavy snow and blowing snow tonight with freezing drizzle and blowing snow likely at times Monday. Snow rates overnight into early morning are likely to reach up to an inch per hour at times. This will result in very low visibilities and rapid snow accumulations into the early morning commute. Total snow accumulations of 3 to 7 inches and ice accumulations of a light glaze expected.

This after subzero temps on Friday, and ahead of temps as low as minus 20 by Tuesday (Fahrenheit, the only scale that’s made for humans). Still, on Saturday things had warmed up to low double-digits, so we were out for a while. The three of us and a friend of Ann’s, on the occasion, not quite precisely, of Ann’s birthday. Nice to get out of the house.

We ate at Gabuttø Burger at Ann’s request. Since I discovered the place at the Mitsuwa food court, the Japanese burgerie has moved into a small strip center on a busy street in Rolling Meadows and seems to be doing well there. We visit a few times a year.

Then to a northwest suburban mall. Not the biggest one, the 2.1 million-square-foot Woodfield, but a smaller one. The one we visited isn’t a dying mall, but it has lost an anchor or two, along with some of its inline stores.

Still, the mall is doing what it can. It now sports a number of places to take children and entertain them, for instance. Not playplaces in the middle of the mall, but small entertainment venues that used to be more conventional retail.

Including a place where you can rent animal-ride scooters for a few minutes. She’s not in the main demographic, but according to Ann, it was a birthday thing to do, so she and her friend spent 10 minutes tooling around the mall.

She picked a cow. Looked like she had a jolly time of it.

Thursday Bunkum

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Our latest snow was less convenient than previous ones this winter, falling in mid-week. I spent a fair chunk of Wednesday shoveling more snow around, this time wetter masses than the last snowfall. Now an arctic blast is blasting its way toward northern Illinois. Subzero temps ahead.

Ah, fun. We’ve been down this road before, of course.

I just found out today that the Emperor of Japan is going to abdicate on April 30. That was news in December, but I missed it. I chanced across the information in a copy of the bilingual Chicago Shimpo, a paper Yuriko picks up for free periodically at the Mitsuwa grocery store.

The Imperial Household Agency, known for its mossback ways, is on board with that?  Yet abdication from the Chrysanthemum Throne isn’t unknown. The most recent abdication was of Kōkaku, who quit in 1817. Pretty recent, considering the longevity of the Yamato Dynasty.

In even earlier times, back when the emperor was more of a political football than in recent centuries, one emperor was sometimes forced out to make way for another.

Now that I’ve finished reading Stalin — which I read after John Wayne: The Life and Legend by Scott Eyman (2014), an excellent book — I’ve decided to read some more biographies. A biography bender. Next I want to pick one from around the house, one that I haven’t read.

My choices, at least those I’ve found so far, include works on Francis Bacon, Benedict Arnold and Babe Ruth.

Something called Indywire asserted recently that: Coen Brothers Shock With ‘Buster Scruggs’ Oscar Nomination

I’m not shocked. I’ve seen five of the six stories in the The Ballad of Buster Scuggs so far and they’re really good, especially “Meal Ticket” and “The Gal Who Got Rattled.” Not that being good necessarily gets a movie nominations, but it helps.

All the stories get the Coen Brothers treatment, so you know that something bad is going to happen to at least one of the characters. In the “The Gal Who Got Rattled,” the feeling was particularly poignant, because as the story moved along, both the man and woman evolved into remarkably sympathetic characters. Then one of the dangers of the 19th century smites them.

Parts of the movie were based on sources much closer to the 19th century than our own, such as “The Girl Who Got Rattled” by Stewart Edward White and Jack London’s “All Gold Cañon,” while other parts evoke cowboy pictures of yore.

That only goes to show that there’s a vast and largely untapped galaxy of source material for movies — books, short stories, historic events, myths, graphic novels and on and on. Do moviemakers show any interest in mining these riches? Mostly not, seems like, and if they do, commercial pressures disabuse them of the notion. The Coens are exceptions. I’m glad they’re able to make the movies they want to.

Joe the Georgian in Story and Song

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Sometimes you pick up a book that’s been on the shelf unread for many years and you think, time to read it. So it was around the beginning of the year with a copy of Stalin, subtitled “The History of a Dictator,” by H. Montgomery Hyde (1907-89).

It’s a paperback, originally published in 1971 and which no doubt my brother Jay bought. The copy’s pages are yellow and a little brittle with the passage of so much time, and the front cover is partly torn — and repaired with tape — but the book withstood my reading it. Not bad for a paperback not meant to last long.

Of course there are newer biographies of Stalin, such as the work of Stephen Kotkin, whose three-volume bio had its second volume published in 2017. Those sound really good. Later books have the advantage of at least partly open former Soviet or other Communist archives, including things unimaginable in 1971, but even so I wanted to read Hyde’s book. For one thing, it’s on my shelf.

More than that, I was curious how Hyde approached the subject without access to those archives. With a fair number of workarounds, it turned out, and perhaps leaning a little too much on Khrushchev, who has to count as an unreliable narrator. On whole, though, I’d say Hyde did a good job with the material he had to work with.

Sometimes, Hyde pointed out, history and the fate of millions (very possibly) turn on a small event: “If the final stroke of apoplexy had been delayed for a few months or weeks, or even days, Lenin might have succeeded, even without Trotsky’s help, in ousting Stalin from his place of power, such was the immense following Lenin could command in the Party and country. But it was not to be.” (p. 203)

The book isn’t the only Stalin-related diversion for me lately. As in the last year or so. While in New York last March, I went to the Brooklyn Academy of Music’s Rose Cinemas, where I paid New York prices to see The Death of Stalin, then a first-run movie.

It was worth full price. As dark as comedy gets, Death managed to be a funny movie about one of history’s most unfunny subjects, Stalinism. Loosely based on actual events and hardly solid history, but that didn’t matter because of the rule of funny.

Another reason to like the movie: it irritated humorless, authoritarian bureaucrats. According to the imdb: “The movie was banned in Russia on January 23, 2018, two days before it was due to be released… One member of the Culture Ministry’s advisory board was quoted as saying, ‘The film desecrates our historical symbols — the Soviet hymn, orders and medals, and Marshal Zhukov is portrayed as an idiot,’ and added that the film’s release in advance of the 75th anniversary of the end of the Battle of Stalingrad (February 2nd), would be ‘an affront to Russia’s World War II veterans.’ ”

Whatever, Ivan. I will point out that Zhukov wasn’t played as an idiot, but as canny and flamboyant. Canny the real Zhukov surely was, but flamboyant I doubt. Again, the rule of funny. The movie Zhukov was a hoot.

One more Stalin-oriented bit of entertainment: “Joe the Georgian,” an Al Stewart song (1995). Back when I saw him at the Woodstock Theatre in 2008, he sang it, and did his usual patter beforehand. I don’t remember the exact words, but he said that his agent or his label or someone encouraged him to write a dance song. Dance songs sell.

“So I wrote a dance song,” he said. “The trouble was, it was about Joseph Stalin.” Enormous laughter from the audience.

In the song, an unnamed Old Bolshevik, newly arrived in Hell, ponders how he got there.

We all set off together
On this sorry ship of state
When the captain took the fever
We were hijacked by the mate
And he steered us through the shadows
Upon an angry tide
And cast us one by one over the side

His consolation is that when Stalin arrives in Hell, as he surely will, the Old Bolsheviks will torment him with heated pitchforks for “the next few million years” while they “dance, dance, dance.”

Snowy MLK Weekend

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The weather’s been strangely accommodating so far this month. Ten days ago, snowfall held off till Saturday afternoon. This is what it looked like in Chicago, as Ann and I went to lunch after Titus Andronicus.
At Mr. J’s Dawg ‘n Burger. Glad it’s still there.

Last Friday, heavy snow started to fall well after rush hour, which was a few hours later than forecast. After finishing work in the late afternoon, I went to a grocery store. The place was jammed. We all could have gone a few hours later and still avoided driving in the snow.

By Saturday morning, about a foot of snow covered the ground. Spent a fair amount of that morning removing snow from the my driveway and sidewalks, but not so enthusiastically that I found myself in a hospital or worse. At least the snow was light, unlike the heavy stuff in November.

On Sunday, the high was 14 degrees F., the low 4, and the previous day’s clouds had cleared off. Here we are in the pit of winter. This encouraged us to stay home.

As I was taking out the trash in the evening, I looked up at the full moon and noticed that part of it was missing. A shadow had taken a bite. Then I remember the expected total lunar eclipse, which I’d forgotten.

A little later, at about 10:50 pm, we all went out in the single-digit temps to see totality: a pretty penny in the sky. Lunar eclipses are better in the summer, but they are when they are. Less than a minute outside looking at it was enough.

The Rantoul Historical Society Museum

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Back on Tuesday. Take holidays whenever you can get them.

Rantoul, Illinois, is a town of about 13,000 just off of I-57 and roughly 20 miles north-northeast of Champaign-Urbana. For the last two years that I’ve been driving regularly between metro Chicago and Champaign, it’s been a sign on the Interstate. I knew that there had been an Air Force base there, and then an air museum on the site, but that both were gone. That’s about all I knew.

So on Sunday, I took the Rantoul exit and made my way to the Rantoul Historical Society Museum. Support little local museums when you can. Besides, you never know what oddities you’ll see, such as White Star brand tomatoes.

The museum is in a former church building on a main road.
Not a particularly old church, either: the Rantoul Presbyterian Church, dedicated in 1953.
The church is something of a microcosm of the town. When the museum moved into the building in 2016, the Rantoul Press did an article about it.

“At one time, when Chanute Air Force Base was open, membership was strong and the building was the site of a number of church and social events,” the Press noted. “But membership tailed off dramatically when the base closed.”

Chanute Air Force Base was open from 1917 to 1993, beginning as an Army Air Corps training facility and ending in a round of base rationalizations. When the base went, most of the local economy went with it.

A good part of the museum is given over to Chanute AFB.

The church’s former sanctuary isn’t used for displays, but a number of other rooms are chock-full of items, some in display cases, some not: photos, paintings, posters, newspapers, other printed ephemera, clothes, household items, knickknacks, toys, furniture, machinery, and items about the Illinois Central RR, which was the town’s reason for being in the 19th century.

In short, the museum sports anything that the good people of Rantoul wanted to give to the historical society after parents and grandparents died, or debris they cleaned out their homes before moving, or things they simply couldn’t bear to throw away. It’s Rantoul’s attic and Rantoul’s basement.

I spent about an hour looking around. I was the only person there besides the fellow watching the place. When I came in, he greeted me and turned on the lights in the other rooms for me. Otherwise, he said, they stay off.

Wonder who Mr. Rantoul was? The museum tells you. And shows you what he looked like.
Robert Rantoul Jr. (1805-52) was a U.S. Representative from Massachusetts and a director of the Illinois Central Railroad. As far as I can tell, he never visited Illinois, but when the Illinois Central was naming towns along its route, he got the nod.

I enjoyed the case full of old telephones.
There were plenty of displays devoted to bygone local sports glory.
A leather football helmet.

I’ve heard you can make a pretty good case that chronic concussion injuries would be reduced if football went back to leather helmets. Besides, they look cooler.

A few of the artifacts hint at someone’s long-ago personal sadness, such as this.
Boy Scout Vest Worn By: Jerry Wright

The picture must be a high school yearbook shot with “1954” added. No doubt the vest was tucked away somewhere by that time. Gerald Wright, it says under the picture. Deceased. Band 1,2,3. Football 1,2.

Titus Andronicus

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The event we’d gotten up early for on Saturday was a reading of Titus Andronicus at the Newberry Library, done for a few hundred people seated in one of the library’s large rooms. A reading because the actors had scripts with them and there were no sets or much in the way of costumes. But they were good actors and they interacted with each other as if it were a full stage show. So we enjoyed it as much as a standard staging.

Titus Andronicus is an early Shakespeare work, early 1590s, and apparently popular in its time. Later it fell from fashion and has certainly been overshadowed by other Shakespeare plays. After the early 17th century, it wasn’t performed much at all again until the 20th century.

It counts as a revenge play. I can see why. One character is wronged and that sets off a cycle of revenge and more revenge. When Titus Andronicus’ characters seek revenge, things get pretty stabby. The play’s got it all: hate, betrayal, rape, a lot of murder, mutilation, decapitation, even a touch of cannibalism.

I can’t say that the play’s exactly back in fashion, but 21st-century audiences have no shortage of the old ultraviolence in our entertainment, so Titus Andronicus fits right in. Quentin Tarantino ought to do a movie version.