Warmish today, tomorrow and the next day even better. A pandemic might be on, but at least it’s spring. Except for those few crummy May days — and by that I don’t mean rain. Rain is usually good. What’s better than falling asleep to light rain? I mean any day cold enough to wear a jacket.
Saw a truck driving down the street the other day with “Lares Landscaping” painted on it. Landscaping is still ongoing. I don’t mention that to make a comment on business conditions or restrictions, just to say that the first thing I thought of was, what about Lares & Penates Landscaping? You know, trim your lawn to be on the good side of your household deities.
I have Mrs. Quarles to thank for that train of thought. Henna-haired, eccentric, garrulous — my high school Latin teacher. Or maybe my Latin professor at Vanderbilt, the bald, eccentric, garrulous Dr. Nabers.
We have a fine crop this year.
I refuse to put poison on my lawn just to prevent the annual sprouting of ephemeral dandelions. That’s a tenet of my landscaping. That and no more leaf raking. All through winter, leaves lay on my lawn. By May, they’re gone. So the point of raking leaves is… what?
The dog doesn’t mind the dandelions either (or brown leaves in season). In a few days, when the lawn is dry enough, I will cut the dandelions down. They’ll be back before long. Happy to report that once gasoline was put in the tank, the machine woke from its long nap — though not as long as some years, since I remember mowing last just before Halloween.
The grass is high and persistent rain over the last 24 hours will make it higher, except for the dandelions, which are temporarily beaten down. Once the lawn dries out, and I manage to buy some gas for the mower, I’ll cut it. Assuming the mower wakes from its hibernation.
I bought gas for my car on April 17 at a warehouse retailer. Almost no one was in line, which is rare. Around $1.75/gallon, I think, so just over $22 was enough to fill the tank completely. I couldn’t remember the last time I’d done that. I also couldn’t remember the time I bought any gas before April 17, so I checked.
My handy bank records tell me it was March 16. That purchase took it up to 3/4 of a tank, roughly — which is more in line with my gas-buying habits — so in a month, I used only 1/2 a tank, and a fair portion of that was to drive some distance to attend to some business in Des Plaines shortly after the March 16 purchase.
As predicted, not much driving these days, mostly just forays to nearby parks. Guess the air’s a little cleaner for it and the roads a little safer. Still, if this goes on too long, I’ll start missing long drives. Not something I would have predicted before the crisis.
On Sunday we took advantage of the warm conditions and went to Meacham Grove, which is part of the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County.
Been a while since we’d been there. Maybe this long ago. Ann said she didn’t remember the place. We walked around the Maple Lake, mostly following the gravel path.
The grass along side the lake is green. The trees just beginning to bud. On the south end of Maple Lake is a small hill. You can walk on the path along the south side of that hill or the one on the north side of it. Or you can climb the hill. That’s what we did. A sizable hill for Illinois, but not really that steep.A scattering of people were on the hilltop, and on the trail around the lake for that matter. Easy to keep one’s distance anyway.
O’Hare is a few miles due east of Meacham Grove. In normal times, planes would fly over every minute or two. These days, it seemed to be every three or four or five minutes, though I didn’t keep an exact record. Still, there’s no doubt that traffic in and out of O’Hare is way down.
Saturday: cold rain almost all day. Sunday: pleasantly sunny and warm. Had the whole variety of spring weather this weekend. We probably would have stayed home Saturday even in normal times, for reading, watching TV, cleaning up, etc.
No movies over the weekend, just TV shows: Rake, a new bilingual Japanese-English cop show called Giri/Haji (Duty/Shame), the first episode of Downton Abbey, which I’d never gotten around to seeing before, the Star Trek episode “Balance of Terror” and because I told Ann she should see one episode of Lost in Space, “The Great Vegetable Rebellion.” Really, how could you do any better — and I mean worse — than that?
I think I last saw part of that episode on TV in a motel room more than 20 years ago, but its fame (notoriety) proceeds it anyway. I’d forgotten that Stanley Adams played the man-like carrot. He of course played Cyrano Jones in “The Trouble With Tribbles.” And how many actors appeared on both Lost in Space and Star Trek? The answer is, a few. I’m hardly the first person to wonder.
Ann was much amused by the whole thing. She also pointed out how amazingly colorful the show was, including not just the vegetables, but the Robinsons’ clothes, something I’d never really noticed before. I told her that color TV was brand new at the time, and that a number of shows took advantage of it to go full psychedelia on the audience.
Though I’m not one of them, “The Great Vegetable Rebellion” has its defenders, such as this amusing essay published by MeTV.
“Packer [the scriptwriter of the episode] had ideas,” the article notes. “A planet populated by sentient plants is an idea. A birthday party for a robot is an idea. Vines crying out in pain like electronic piccolos is an idea. A hippie with purple hair and lettuce heart is an idea. A giant fern attacking Will and Judy is an idea. Dr. Smith transmutating into a massive celery stalk is an idea. An eight-foot, anthropomorphic carrot clutching at his breast and crying ‘Moisture! Moisture!’ before splashing water over his torso from a gas pump — that’s an idea!”
I see that Fiesta San Antonio is now scheduled for November this year. The first time in its century-plus-decades history it hasn’t been in April, but such is our time. Social distancing isn’t the norm for Fiesta.
Yuriko and I went to a few Fiesta events in 2000, parking toddler Lilly with her grandmother for a few hours, but I remember my high school Fiestas better. Each year from 1976 to ’79, I was with the Alamo Heights HS marching band in the Battle of the Bands at Alamo Stadium and then — with one exception — the Battle of the Flowers parade downtown a few days later.
It’s officially called the Battle of Flowers Association Band Festival, but no one I knew called it that. It was the Battle of the Bands. High school bands from all over the metro area came to compete.
The best a band could do was score a 1 in music and 1 in marching. For decades, Alamo Heights had always scored two 1s — until sometime in the early ’70s, before I was in high school.
Since then, including my freshman, sophomore and junior years, the band had gotten a 1 and a 2. Very good, but not top.
So we were keen to score two 1s in the 1979 Battle of the Bands. I don’t remember what music we played or what steps we marched. All I remember was the announcement afterward: two 1s! The band exploded with joy.
I can remember only one other exuberant moment like that for the band: early junior year when, after two years of losses, the AHHS football team actually won a game, narrowly. The Battle of the Bands moment was better, though — we’d won that for ourselves.
That was a day or two before the ’79 Battle of Flowers parade — April 26, 1979 — that didn’t happen because of a wanker with a gun. Fortunately for us, at our staging area the band wasn’t close to the shooting. I didn’t even hear any shots, though at one moment heard the roar of a suddenly panicked crowd at a distance.
Even that day had its lighter moments. The parade cancelled, we in the band got back on our buses to leave. Just before we left, a non-band senior got on as well, someone most of us knew. Our band director asked him to leave, and the boy, who was chemically enhanced, got the opposite of belligerent.
“All right, all right,” he said in an almost sing-song voice, smiling and giggling. “I’m getting off now. Don’t worry, I getting off now!” (I’m re-constructing those words; but that was the gist.) It was a little puzzling then, but looking back on it, I think he’d done more to prepare for the parade than drink a little beer or smoke a joint. At that dour moment, he was having a good trip.
I don’t drive around that much these days, but every time I do the signs of the times are out for me to see. Literal signs. During a walk this week, a common area closed. At least the walk around the small lake was open.
The latest movies in the stay-at-home-on-demand-movie-watching-extravaganza: Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (Ann’s suggestion) and Goldfinger (mine).
I’d never seen the former all the way through. I remember first seeing part of it in the common room of some cheap accommodations in Pusan. Watching it now, I’m willing to argue that there’s a touch — just a touch — of magical realism to the thing. I may be the only one to think that.
As for Goldfinger, I told Ann that if she watched only one Bond movie, that should be it.
Our latest Star Trek episode was “Amok Time,” the one in which Spock goes all funny in the groin because hyperrational Vulcans have to mate like salmon every seven years or something. Ann was much amused by the Vulcan costumes. Yes, I said, the costume designers must have had a grand old time working for Star Trek.
This can be found in our back yard. A retired inflatable yoga ball, you might call it, but I think of it as our model Neptune.
Also, an image to play around with, applying the PhotoScape Bokeh function that I didn’t know I had until now.
The dog in a favorite position. I believe she’s officially an old dog now, though I don’t know which office determines that. Anyway, no new tricks for her. She never was one for them even as a younger dog, though we didn’t try to train her all that hard.
Update: Gabuttø Burger is closed. At least the one in Rolling Meadows is, which used to be the only location. Maybe I should have mentioned that before, since we found that out one day in November (I think) when we dropped by for its fine sort-of-Japanese burgers and found it locked.
So the Yelpers are right. The place wasn’t a victim of the pandemic, though at times I wonder which of our favorite non-chain restaurants will not emerge from their current retail comas. On the other hand, a restaurant is always a high-wire act. No matter how good a joint is, it can still be the victim of regular retail churn.
Gone from Rolling Meadows, but Gabuttø Burger was planning to re-open in Elgin. Not as convenient for us, but we still would have gone occasionally. Unfortunately, word was it was supposed to open in March. I suspect that didn’t go too well.
I never did take a picture of one of its burgers. One time, however, I did take a picture at the Rolling Meadows Gabuttø Burger — of something arrayed like I’d never seen before. More valuable than the restaurant or I realized at the time. I hope the proprietors remembered to take the supply of paper with them when they left.
Speaking of retail in peril, what about the fate of Buc-ee’s? If there ever was a place that encouraged the opposite of social distancing — that would be social cramming? — it would be Buc-ee’s, with its mass crowds in its massive stores. Then again, such is the pull of Buc-ee’s that maybe it’s been deemed an essential operation in Texas.
I go off on tangents fairly easily, but then again they’re about the only trips you can take these days. I had a good one yesterday evening, after work and after dinner and after our walk. A discussion some time ago about writing good headlines inspired me to think about a half-remembered list in The Book of Lists, which I pull off the shelf every few years. Specifically, Dr. Demento’s 10 Worst Song Titles of All Time.
I checked. It’s on p. 178. Back when I originally owned the book, in the late 1970s, you’d read such a list, be amused, and that was that. You might hear one of the songs on the list on Dr. Demento, if you listened to the show. I wasn’t a regular listener back then, though I did hear it sporadically — often enough to hear the likes of “Fish Heads,” but never anything on the list that I remember.
So I decided, true to form when on a tangent, to look more closely at some of those bad song titles, at least in Dr. Demento’s opinion (a list he created for The Book of Lists). I toyed with the idea of reposting all of the titles here, but most of the 10 titles are pretty long, and I didn’t feel like all that transcription, so I looked to see if they were posted elsewhere on line. As far as I can tell, there are other versions online, such as this one, that certainly features some bad song titles, but none of them are on ’70s list in The Book of Lists.
Or this list, which claims to be a ’90s version of the original, but has only one title in common with it: “How Could You Believe Me When I Said I Loved You When You Know I’ve Been A Liar All My Life.”
In our time, you can go to YouTube and see most if not all of the bad-title songs, such as “How Could You Believe Me…,” which I have to say hasn’t aged that well.
So I picked a few of the songs from the ’70s list and looked them up. Such as “Would You Rather Be a Colonel With An Eagle On Your Shoulder Or A Private With A Chicken On Your Knee?” That might count as a bad title, but it sure is amusing.
I was happy to find that it was a WWI song, recorded by Arthur Fields but also sung by Eddie Cantor. If I’m not mistaken, the “chicken” in the title had an innocent connotation in referring to flirtatious French girls, but also a less-innocent connotation for those in the know, referring to French prostitutes.
Next: “I’ve Got Those Wake Up 7:30, Wash Your Ears They’re Dirty, Eat Your Eggs and Oatmeal, Rush to School Blues,” a novelty song recorded by Jimmy Boyd in 1953.
Hm. Couldn’t place Boyd until I read he did the first recording of “I Saw Mommy Kissing Santa Claus” the year before. Ah, that singer. Popularized a song that will not die. Boyd had his heyday as a boy singer, but didn’t have much of a career later — or didn’t want one, hard to say. Anyway, here’s the song.
I decided to look up one more from the ’70s list, three out of 10 being enough for now: “A Woman is Only a Woman, But a Cigar is a Good Smoke.” That was a song title? In college (I think) I told someone that Freud had said that. Maybe I believed that myself. Thought it was a quip from Jokes and Their Relation to the Unconscious, though that’s a work I’ve never read nor even lightly grazed.
But no: it’s from Kipling. From a spot of late Victorian comic verse. In 1905, tunesmiths Harry Smith and Victor Herbert wrote a song called “A Good Cigar is a Smoke,” so perhaps Dr. Demento didn’t quite get the title right, though one of the lines in the song is, “For a woman is only a woman, my boy, but a good cigar is a smoke.”
You know, I ought to claim that Smith and Herbert actually just translated the song from German. Sigmund Freud wrote it and included it Jokes, which was published in 1905, same year as the English version of the song. Mere coincidence?
The tangent trip isn’t over yet. Just getting to the best part. After I listened to “A Good Cigar is a Smoke,” the YouTube algorithm suggested “Ashokan Farewell.” Pretty song. I hadn’t heard that in a good while, so I listened to it. Then the usually dense algorithm suggested this.
“Wayfaring Stranger” performed by Hayde Bluegrass Orchestra. A Norwegian band, of all things. Wow.
Another Sunday, another longish walk with the dog. Yesterday, with all the snow melted and the sun overhead, we went to Mallard Lake, which is part of the Forest Preserve District of Du Page County.
Considering the time of the year, it didn’t look so much different from this visit. One difference was the number of people. With fewer out-of-house diversions now, people seem to be visiting parks and forest preserves more than before. A fair number of them came to fish, while others like us had their dogs along, or were just out taking a walk. Even so, there was plenty of room to keep at a good distance from everyone else.
The entrance is on Schick Road. I marked the entrance with a red diamond.
From there we drove to the parking lot, circled in red. Then walked clockwise on the white path (gravel) around Mallard Lake, 1-2-3. A mile, maybe. Between 1 and 2 are two small islands connected by footbridges, and the rest of the path partly hugs the shore.
Nice walk, except for a while the wind kicked up and blew across the still-cold lake, dropping temps a good deal. Without much wind, it was an early spring day; with the wind, it was a late winter day.
Enough already, I cried to the heavens. Not really. It was more of a mutter. Yet I seemed to get an answer, because the snow melted by Saturday and today we enjoyed a fine spring day.
I even heard people out mowing their grass this morning. The flush of spring hasn’t quite inspired me to yard work, however.
Two years ago, when I spent about a day and a half in Amarillo, I took a walk along Sixth Ave. the evening I arrived. It has the distinction of being part of U.S. 66 at one time.
“The U.S. Route 66-Sixth Street Historic District comprises 13 blocks of commercial development in the San Jacinto Heights Addition west of Amarillo’s central business district,” the NPS says. ” Developed as an early 20th-century streetcar suburb, the district was transformed by the establishment of a national transportation artery running through its center.
“The U.S. Route 66-Sixth Street Historic District is Amarillo’s most intact collection of commercial buildings that possess significant associations with the highway. Featuring elements of Spanish Revival, Art Deco, and Art Moderne design, these buildings represent the historic development phases of this early 20th century suburb and the evolving tastes and sensibilities of American culture.”
I’d read about the street, but more importantly at that moment, I was looking for something to eat. I didn’t find anyplace I wanted to eat, but I did see some of the historic buildings on the street. I was inspired to take a picture of only one of them. A detail of one of them.Skulls. They’re on a wall of the 6th Street Massacre Haunted House. Note also the plaque. It says that the building is on the National Registry of Historic Places. This is a wider view.
It was once the Rex Theatre, which opened in 1935 and lasted until 1956 as a movie venue. It’s a little hard to see it as a theater building from Sixth Ave. The view around the corner shows it better.
A movie palace, it probably wasn’t. Just a neighborhood picture show. I think that makes it just as interesting, historically speaking, as one of the palaces, but not as nice to look at.
In a few days, when the lawn is dry enough, I will cut the dandelions down. They’ll be back before long.
Happy to report that once gasoline was put in the tank, the machine woke from its long nap — though not as long as some years, since I remember mowing last just before Halloween.
