Snow to Finish January

Posted on January 31, 2021 by admin

Over the last weekend of January, more snow. Another eight inches — or 10, or a foot, it’s hard to tell — on top of the 7 or so earlier in the week.

Not a blizzard like almost 10 years ago exactly. Just a steady fall for 12 hours or more, and the trucks tasked with plowing the streets were able to keep up with it. On Sunday morning, we dug out our driveway. Tiring and tiresome, but not particularly hard, and so life will resume uninterrupted on Monday.

There wasn’t a lot of wind, but there was some, and I think it knocked over the grill.
One of the three legs was weak anyway, so down went the tripod, as broken and ruined as the Delphic tripod must have been when Theodosius ordered the Temple of Apollo destroyed in AD 390. Unlike that tripod, there’s a replacement grill waiting in the garage for spring to return.

Thursday Kibble & Bits

Posted on January 28, 2021 by admin

Sunny day, but not much meltage. Bitter cold night ahead, and another half-foot of snow forecast for the weekend. Before that, we’ll get Thai takeout at Ann’s request on Friday, and a birthday pie, to make staying at home more pleasant.

Earlier this month, when we were in Naperville, we came across a small park: Central Park. Among other things, there’s a weatherworn obelisk to memorialize local soldiers from the Black Hawk War, the Mexican War, the Civil War and the Spanish-American War. It looked like new wars had been chiseled in as time passed.

Not far from that was a Civil War cannon, looking pretty new, because it was refurbished in this century.
It’s a Confederate cannon.
A prize of war, in other words, formerly shot off by the people of Naperville for “Independence Day, parades and other civic activities” in a less safety-conscious (-obsessed?) time. That’s what we could use a little more of in our time, though I suppose in some places edgy folks might mistake it for hostile gunfire, and maybe they’d be right to.

Willard Scott Jr. was this fellow, no relation to the weatherman, it seems. Among other things, this Willard Scott marched through Georgia, doing his bit to invent modern total war.

Shucks. No evidence of life in the clouds of Venus.

Google “Venus floating platform” and one of the first hits is about the Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) at the Northrop Grumman web site. My estimation of that company just went up a notch. It’s at least thinking about flying a plane over Venus.

“The Venus Atmospheric Maneuverable Platform (VAMP) air vehicle is an aeroshell-less hypersonic entry vehicle that transitions to a semi-buoyant, maneuverable, solar-powered air vehicle for flight in Venus’ atmosphere,” NG says. “VAMP AV will be transported to Venus by a carrier/orbiter spacecraft… It is then released and enters the atmosphere, floating down toward the planet almost like a falling leaf.

“During the flight phase, the AV flies in the Venus upper- and mid-cloud layers and collects science data for transmission to Earth. VAMP AV will be capable of orbiting the planet for a long duration — up to a year.”

Of course, the company is no stranger to space, having built the Lunar Module and Pioneer 10, just to name two marquee projects. These days its marquee project is the James Webb Space Telescope, which can’t get into space fast enough, as far as I’m concerned.

Recently I’ve been getting press releases that say these sorts of things:

X will teach you how to:
Reframe your life experiences as growth opportunities
Rewire your mind-set and embrace spirituality as a lifestyle
Connect to your higher self and integrate healthy lifestyle practices
Tap into universal energy and transmute pain into power
Manifest your new reality and claim your authenticity
Change the world!

***
For your upcoming stories on female disruptors, please consider Y, Founder of Z, helping visionaries reconnect to SOUL, and Live FREE to become their most successful, influential and positively impactful versions. Y teaches women to embody the energy of money and become a vibrational match so it flows consistently and predictably.

Hm. My name seems to be drifting onto all sorts of lists, at some distance from commercial real estate. Though I do like that phrase, “energy of money,” and the idea of it flowing “consistently and predictably” certainly has appeal.

Jet Transits the Moon

Posted on January 27, 2021 by admin

Space.com’s 2021 Full Moon Calendar: “This month’s full moon occurs on Thursday, Jan. 28 at 2:16 p.m. EDT (19:16 UTC), but the moon will appear full the night before and after its peak to the casual stargazer. January’s full moon is known as the Wolf Moon, though it has many other nicknames by different cultures.”

Just after 5 p.m. today, now a little before dark, I needed to go out to move groceries from one of our cars into the house. Though not subzero, the post-snow freeze felt pretty cold, maybe because I’d been inside all day.

Sure enough, the moon looked full, not far above the horizon to the east. As I stood outside my garage, I noticed a distant airplane flying (apparently) near the visible full moon. Then I saw it transit the full moon for a split second. Though looking small as a gnat, the outline of the plane was clear, backed by the pale moonlight.

I don’t remember that I’ve ever seen that before. Now I have. Right place, right time.

Snow Day, But Not Really

Posted on January 26, 2021 by admin

Heavy snow last night and into the morning. We were up at 7 a.m. or so to shovel, but soon postponed the task, since we knew we’d have to do it again in a few hours. And that’s what happened after the snow finally slacked off around noon.

We got 7.5 inches, according to the NWS, making it the first heavy snow of the season — always good when it comes this late — and the most since the unusual snowfall of November 2018.

One reason we were up at 7 was that a phone call interrupted whatever odd dream I was having at the time. Who can be calling now? I wondered.

It was a Schleswig-Holstein High robocall. The school has been holding some classes in person lately — optional, with Ann choosing to stay home. The call was to tell us about a snow day, except that unlike in the past, classes weren’t cancelled, simply moved online. Seems like I was right. Snow days are no more.

Bemis Woods

Posted on January 25, 2021 by admin

This is the funniest thing I saw over the weekend.
A recycling container belonging to the Forest Preserve District of Cook County. As soon as I saw it, I had the urge to peek inside. You’d expect three separate spaces, right? No. Everything goes into the same large space.

We were at Bemis Woods, a forest preserve in Westchester, Illinois, a western suburb just to the east of the DuPage County line and I-294.
We walked from the parking lot to the green trail, then the red trail, then the purple trail, then on the road back to the parking lot. About a mile and a half in all. The trails were a little treacherous.
The snow cover was thin, and where previous walkers had been, some of the snow had been scuffed enough to re-freeze as ice. Some parts of the trail were well covered with slippery zones, others less so.

Evidence of many other walkers, people and dogs, was easy to spot.
Still, it was a good walk through the woods at just below freezing.

We crossed Salt Creek twice. Once at a footbridge. The view from there.
Once along Wolf Road.
A good walk, but summer’s better on the whole. As it is for most things. The last time I was near Bemis — a little to the west, that time — was in August more than two years ago.

Poplar Creek, Winter ’21

Posted on January 24, 2021 by admin

So far winter hasn’t been all that harsh. No blizzards, no subzero stretches. We’ve gotten snow a few inches at a time, which has thinned out during days just above freezing. Still, I suspect an Arctic blast is coming soon. Probably after the heavy snow due tomorrow night.

In the meantime, temps around freezing mean we can take walks in forest preserves. Not long ago we took the dog out to the Poplar Creek Forest Preserve (formally the Arthur L. Janura Forest Preserve). It’s close by here in the northwest suburbs, but we hadn’t been in a good while.

Off the main path is a path to Bode Lake.
Looks frozen over, but I bet the ice is pretty thin, so no walking on the lake unless you’re a small creature. No ice fishing either. If that’s the price of a mild winter, I don’t mind.

Downtown Naperville

Posted on January 21, 2021 by admin

Naperville counts as an edge city, in as much as I understand the term. At about 148,000 people, it could stand alone as a small city — third largest in Illinois, as it happens — and it has a mixed economy: the usual large employers such as the local schools and a hospital, but also Nokia, BP, BMO Harris and North Central College.

For a suburb, Naperville has a remarkably robust downtown core, including retail, office space, and public buildings. After we walked near the river on Saturday, we wandered over to Naperville’s downtown, which isn’t far from the riverwalk.

One reason that downtown has been able to grow, I’ve read, is that long ago the village made sure that the area has a lot of free parking. Want people to drive to your relatively dense town, stop and spend money? Provide free parking. Is that sustainable? I don’t know. Maybe it won’t really be until we all drive electric cars. But for now that brings people in, and encourages them to linger. No worries about feeding the meter.

So simple, so hard for towns who see parking as a revenue stream to understand. I’ll bet whatever revenue Naperville would have gotten from parking fees is vastly outpaced by property tax and sales tax revenue generated by its robust downtown.

Of course, it probably isn’t that simple. Except I have a hunch that it is.

Robust, but not everything’s good, as you’d expect. These are hard times.
There was (to me) a surprising amount of public art downtown, the legacy of a recent public art initiative. For instance, there’s an alley off S. Main St., “Rubin’s Way,” that sports long, twin murals.
One seems to depict idealized modern Naperville.
The other an idealized past Naperville.
“The mural is part of the nonprofit Naperville Century Walk public art initiative and depicts a crowd watching a parade go by. One of the artists, Diosdado ‘Dodie’ Mondero, told the Naperville Sun in 2012 the work is ‘Normal Rockwell-inspired,’ ” the Chicago Tribune reports. Yep.

“At the time of its installation [beginning in 2011], businesses paid $1,000 or more to have their business name on a sign included in the mural, the Sun story said. The cost was $1,000 for a full adult figure, $600 for an adult head and $3,000 for families or groups to be in the scene.”

There’s a petition, with nearly 50,000 signatures now, to add more people of color to the modern wing of the mural.

Not far away, also off Main St., is a mural honoring the Masons, including George Washington and Joseph Naper (1798–1862), founder of Naperville.
Seems Naper was a mason, too. And much else besides — a real 19th-century CV, to quote Wiki: “early Illinois pioneer, ship captain, shipbuilder, businessman, surveyor, state militia officer, soldier, politician, and city planner.”

“Chartered October 2, 1849, Euclid Lodge No. 65 A. F. & A. M. has had a presence throughout downtown Naperville for 170 years, noted Paul Felstrup for the Freemasons during the recent celebration that began with a re-dedication of the Century Walk Masonic Mural ‘Faith, Hope & Charity,’ ” says a site called Pos!tively Naperville.

“Back in 2011, the mural was designed and painted by Naperville artist Marianne Lisson-Kuhn. Formerly gracing the wall at Main and Jefferson outside of Russell’s Dry Cleaners, the mural was relocated to the exterior wall near the intersection of Main Street at Jackson Avenue.”

Also on Main St.
A plaque next it says in part:

HEARTLAND HARVEST 1997

Honoring the soybean, oat, wheat, corn and butterfly-filled landscapes that once dominated the area, this Italian glass tile mosaic pays homage to the historic contributions of Naperville’s family farms…

A block to the east on S. Washington St. is an unusual plaque. Developers don’t get much memorializing, but there is one to Norman Rubin (1929-2010).
It’s at the entrance to a building called Washington Place, a small retail development of Rubin’s that currently includes Athleta, Banana Republic and Ulta as tenants. Just one of a number of local developments for him, since he was instrumental in making downtown Naperville what it is. Him and free parking.

Who Knows, I Might Live to See the 50th President

Posted on January 20, 2021 by admin

Time to dip into the well of presidential significa — don’t call it trivia — for obvious reasons. Much has been made of Joe Biden’s age, for example, and he is indeed the oldest person ever to be sworn into the office, besting his immediate predecessor in that regard as well.

Also, Biden was born before four of his predecessors, as was Ronald Reagan. I recall that once upon a time, Reagan was considered an old man for the job, taking the oath as he did at 69. Time flies, the gerontocracy becomes more robust. Kennedy was born after four of his successors, to look at the other extreme.

Then again, presidents are living longer than ever, along with the general population (well, until very recently). Jimmy Carter has made it to 96, topping that long-time champion of presidential longevity, John Adams, a good while ago now. Biden was just a young pup Senator when Carter was in office.

As of today, Carter has been out of office precisely 40 years, the longest post-presidential span. Herbert Hoover is still number two at 31 years. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama might make it to 40 years: to Jan. 20, 2041 for the former and Jan. 20, 2057 for the latter, but they would be very old men by those dates, 94 for Clinton and 95 for Obama.

Biden’s the first president from Delaware. That state had to wait a long time, considering that it was first state to ratify the Constitution. So far 19 states have been home to various presidents at the time of their election. Twenty-one states have been birthplaces of presidents. Florida Man has never been elected president.

Thus far, 14 presidents were born in the 18th century (ending Dec. 31, 1800, so Millard Fillmore counts), with James Buchanan as the last one; 20 were born in the 19th century, with Dwight Eisenhower the last of those; and 12 so far were born in the 20th century. According to the Constitution, that string has to continue at least until the 2036 election. Still, assuming the office continues as it has, and I certainly hope it does, the first president born in the 21st century may be out there somewhere even now.

And what was it about 1946? Bill Clinton, George W. Bush and Donald Trump were all born that year. There have been a number of other years in which two presidents were born, but that’s the only triple year so far.

I didn’t think it very likely, and sure enough it didn’t happen, but it would have been interesting had Donald Trump resigned in the aftermath of the Capitol Hill insurrection. Just so Mike Pence could beat William Henry Harrison’s record for short time in the office. Also, so that Trump’s term wouldn’t be exactly four years. Eight years, four years, eight years, etc. That’s just not very interesting.

There have never been four presidents in a row who were in office for eight years each. Three in a row, yes. Most recently Clinton-Bush-Obama. Before that, Jefferson-Madison-Monroe. Trump’s loss means four in a row might not happen for quite a while, if ever.

I could go on and on about this. But I’ll end by adding that we’re back up to five living former presidents again, the fifth time that has happened. Because of improved longevity, four of those periods have been recent.

A friend sent me a link to this.

Seems fitting.

Naperville Riverwalk, Winter ’21

Posted on January 19, 2021 by admin

The DuPage River snakes through downtown Naperville, Illinois. The last time we were there, the sun shined bright on the leafy greenery along its riverwalk.

On Saturday, the look was a little different. We took a walk along it.Plenty of trees along the way, including this enormous oak. Ash. Not sure, that gnarled bark could be either, according to my untrained eye. Usually the presence of oak leaves and acorns would confirm that one way or the other, but those tree scatterings are covered by snow these days.
In the hollow of the tree —
— peanuts? Yes. Maybe a squirrel squirreled them away. Or maybe whimsical placement by a human.

Near the riverwalk I spotted a couple of plaques-on-rocks. This one has the look of passing a number of winters (and summers) out in the elements.
DuPage County Sesquicentennial

1839-1989

This recognition has been a joint effort of the DuPage County Sesquicentennial Celebration Inc., the city of Naperville, and the Naperville Heritage Society in honor of DuPage, the voyageur, for whom the county was named. DuPage operated the first recorded trading post at the forks of the DuPage River in Naperville, which eventually became the first county seat.

DuPage might have actually been Pierre Page, but he certainly was a trader in the area and had an establishment in the future DuPage County. Wheaton has been the county seat for a long time, since 1867.

A newer-looking plaque. As it should be, since it’s less than a year old. This is its first winter out in the elements.
I’m not going to transcribe all that, but it honors one Chuck Papanos, a long-time Naperville Park District employee associated with the riverwalk. “Chuck’s hard work helped make the riverwalk a place of beauty for everyone to enjoy,” it says in part.

Attaboy, Chuck. We did enjoy the riverwalk, even on a chilly January day.

Thursday Dust in the Wind

Posted on January 14, 2021 by admin

Much work these days. Lots going on. Will post again on January 19. The more holidays the better, and I’ll bet — considering the inclinations of the incoming administration — Juneteenth will be a federal holiday before long. Or at least the closest Monday.

Ice crystals on our deck. They didn’t last long. Later came snow, which mostly melted.
To follow Sink the Bismarck!, a taut 1960 British war movie, for contrast I recently watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), an engaging French love story set just before the Revolution. I haven’t seen many movies as painterly Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

A few weeks ago, before the violent national scrum, we started watching the short series The People vs. OJ Simpson. Top-quality historical fiction. Doesn’t feel historic, just like a good while ago. An increasingly long time ago, more in feeling than strict chronology. When the trial was actually happening, I remember thinking, do I have to hear about that again? Enough time has now passed for the subject to be of some interest.

That said, do I ever feel nostalgic for the ’90s? No. The underappreciated ’70s is more my flavor, and for the exact same uninteresting reason as most people. Nostalgia for one’s youth.

I didn’t know until I read about it a little while ago, but The Great Gatsby is in the public domain now. I could publish 100 words from that book, in order, or maybe reverse order, until I’d gone through the entire book, with the time needed to put the text in my only real cost. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it’s nice to know I could.

The immortal Ella.

A much later version. Recent, in fact, by the highly talented Hot Sardines.

The Hot Sardines’ singing is top notch, but I’m really taken with the animation in the video.

Another recent version by the Speakeasy Three.

Fine harmonies. The video is so stylized that it approaches parody, but doesn’t quite get there. Somehow, that works. Also, am I right in thinking there are celebrity lookalikes in this video? Recent celebrities, not swing-era ones. I don’t care enough about celebrities to find out, but I get that sense.

A site that visit every few months: The Comics Curmudgeon. On Jan 13, he mocks the comic strip Crock, which isn’t hard, but it is hard to be funny while doing it. The writer of the site, Joshua Fruhlinger, pulls it off.

One the characters says to another one, “I can’t wait to meet the blind date you got me. When can I call her?”

“Anytime but the weekends,” the other character says. “That’s the busiest time for blacksmiths.”

Fruhlinger comments: “I was going to go all in on ‘Why is it funny that this woman is a blacksmith,’ but we all know the reason why it’s supposed to be funny: blacksmithery is not a traditional feminine job so can you even imagine going on a date with a woman who would engage in it? What would you even call her? A blacksmithrix? Haw haw! Anyway, that’s stupid, so instead I’m going to focus on something actually puzzling: the assertion that weekends are ‘the busiest time for blacksmiths.’ I guess that’s when most Renn Faires are? Are we dealing with a universe where blacksmiths are a vital part of the everyday economy, making horseshoes and tools and such, or are we in a more modern environment where mass manufactured goods are omnipresent and easy to get, and the only people who go to blacksmiths are weirdos who are obsessed with swords? This is the Crock worldbuilding background that I have a million times more in interest in than I do in Poulet’s love life.”

I’ve started reading American Slavery, American Freedom, subtitled “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund S. Morgan (1975). I’m not far along, but enough to know he’s a good writer. The first chapter is unexpectedly about of Sir Francis Drake in Panama in 1572, but I think I can see where he seems to be going with the narrative, which will get to colonial Virginia before long.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: January 2021