What’s that, I thought from far up the street. Possibly a Ford Falcon? Not a model you see much on the streets any more.
I got closer and no, it was a Chevrolet Bel Air. I’m not enough of a car aficionado to pinpoint the model year, but it looks early ’60s to me. Still not something you see much on our 21st-century suburban streets.
My grandmother drove a Ford Falcon. Shorter than the Bel Air, if I remember right, and somewhat rounder. It was the last car she owned, an early or mid-60s model. Again, I’m not enough of an expert to know the exact year, and it isn’t something I would have asked grandma.
I have scattered, but fond memories of riding in that car. It was gray and mostly, I believe, she drove (when I was with her) the short distances to shops she traded at, such as the Handy-Andy grocery store on Broadway in Alamo Heights, or to Brackenridge Park for my amusement.
Oddly enough, besides reminding me of grandma and the Brackenridge Park Eagle, the memory of that old car makes me also think of survivorship bias. There was no seat belt in the back seat, though the the front had lap belts. I usually rode in the back as a kid and, of course, survived the beltless experience. I consider this good fortune.
Some older people – my age, and I’ve seen it in writing – thus come to the conclusion that making children wear seat belts or other safety devices while in a car is merely the heavy hand of a nanny state. Hey, I survived my belt-free childhood in the ’60s! That’s an example of a statement that’s true but also dimwitted. Are there no children (or anyone else) in their graves from that period who would have survived had belts been in use?
The light is fairly long at that place, so I had time to document his presence not long ago. I don’t know that I see him every summer at this location, at the intersection of two major roads here in the northwestern suburbs, but I know I’ve seen him there over the years. With his straightforward message.
Things are quiet out in the Atlantic, the National Hurricane Center tells us. Maybe a little too quiet, as the cliché goes.
But not around here. An excerpt from a NWS bulletin this evening:
ISSUED: 9:16 PM JUL. 15, 2024 – NATIONAL WEATHER SERVICE
The National Weather Service in Chicago has issued a
* Tornado Warning for…
Southern Lake County in northeastern Illinois… Northern DuPage County in northeastern Illinois… Northern Cook County in northeastern Illinois…
* Until 1000 PM CDT. …
IMPACT… Flying debris will be dangerous to those caught without shelter. Mobile homes will be damaged or destroyed. Damage to roofs, windows, and vehicles will occur. Tree damage is likely.…
We got a fair amount of siren noise, plus some wind and rain, but by the end of the day not enough to do any damage (that I can see). Other places might not be able to say the same. Looks like we got off easy.
Rain, rain, rain. So many times in that last few days I can’t remember how often. The best of them was Sunday not long after midnight. Not a lot of thunder, just rain. I opened the windows in our north-facing bedroom and lay in bed, listening to the rhythm of the falling rain. It didn’t tell me what a fool I’ve been, and even if it had, I’d have told it to mind its own business.
An artifact from Italy, July 1983.
Why do I have this? Just my pack rat nature. It’s in an envelope marked Europe, 1983.
Also, it confirms what I already knew: pre-euro Italy was a good deal in those days, though it took a few minutes to gather some data points on that. Not exactly dirt cheap, but reasonably priced, especially considering the high value, such as the many good meals.
The receipt shows that I exchanged a $100 travelers check for lira at Banco di Roma one day in July. At that moment, the exchange the bank gave me was $1 = 1,502 lira, though the bank dinged me 5,000 lira as a fee, so I didn’t quite get that. But 1,500 lira to the dollar is close enough
I checked the diary I kept during the trip for notes about what cost what. I wasn’t very good at making such notes, but I did mention a few costs in passing, such as the fact that admission to the Forum in Rome cost 4,000 lira.
So, 4,000 lira would be about $2.66. That’s in fatter 1983 dollars, however. A current equivalent ($1 in 1983 = about $3.15 now) would be roughly $8.40. And how much does admission to the Forum cost these days?
It’s a little hard to get an exact equivalent, since the options are more complicated now. Of course they are. The Forum Pass SUPER Ticket has this description: “Roman Forum-Palatine and Imperial Fora in a single itinerary. One ticket gives you access to the new route, which allows you to visit the archaeological heart of Rome in about two hours: the Roman Forum, the Imperial Fora and the Palatine.”
That costs €24. So let’s say three times as much as I paid, more or less. Are the Italians three times better now at maintaining the Forum than they were 40 years ago? I’m skeptical.
Other costs from 1983 (expressed in period units):
A bed in Rome at the Pension Grossi: 7,000 lira ($4.60). Of course, there were about a dozen beds in that room.
A meal at Mario’s in the Trastevere in Rome: 5,800 lira ($3.80). I had a number of wonderful meals in Italy, as you should, but that was one of the best: spaghetti and salad and liver and onions.
A room at the Albergo Italia in Salerno: 15,000 lira ($10)
A meal in Salerno: 7,500 lira ($5). The stars of that meal were gnocchi, along with squid fresh from the Mediterranean, about which I raved. Wish I could actually remember it.
A toilet at the Salerno train station: 200 lira (13 cents). Cheap, but not for something that should be free.
A room in Florence: 10,000 lira each ($6.60)
Doughnuts in Florence: 500 lira (33 cents) each. I remember the gelato in Florence, which we ate more than once, but not the doughnuts. I bet Florentine doughnuts were almost as good. I didn’t record the price for the gelato, but it was probably comparable. A 33-cent doughnut would be about $1 now. Still not bad, and certainly cheaper than any hipster doughnut you can get these days.
We had a bit of rain from what might have been the edge of hurricane Beryl earlier this week, as that weather system petered out over North America. Hard for non-experts like me to say, though. Clear today but a high of around only 80° F. Not bad for high summer.
I looked up Sig Ruman the other day. I remembered at least one of his performances – the pompous doctor with the pointy beard in A Day at the Races (1937), who of course is on the receiving end of Marxian wit, especially Groucho’s.
Ruman was in A Night at the Opera as well. Need a pompous German character for your movie? Siegfried Carl Alban Rumann (d. 1967) was one such during the golden age of the studio system. He has 130 credits at imdb.
I looked him up because he also had a part in A Night in Casablanca (1946), the second-to-last Marx Brothers movie. I found it available to view online (with commercials) not long ago, and decided to watch it. I wasn’t sure I’d seen all of the movie, and if I had, maybe on TV more than 50 years ago, so my recollection wasn’t there.
The only scene I remembered at all was typical Harpo. Early in the movie, he’s leaning against a wall, and another character comes by and says, “Say, what do think you’re doing? Holding up the building?”
Harpo nods emphatically. The other character, unimpressed, drags Harpo away, and naturally the building collapses.
A Night in Casablanca has all of the elements of earlier Marx Brothers movies – each of the three brothers doing their own physical and wordplay shticks, a good-looking pair of non-entities as romantic leads, a story that doesn’t matter or even make a lot of sense, straight characters flustered by the brother’s antics (but no Margaret Dumont), a few songs, and a highly kinetic final half hour or so that ought to have the brothers in top form. Such as in Duck Soup, when they go off to the front to fight Sylvania in one of the funnier romps ever put to film.
Sorry to say that A Night in Casablanca is one of the brothers’ lesser efforts. Not a terrible movie, just not a very good one. There are a few laughs. This is the Marx Brothers, after all. Harpo did what Harpo always did, and Groucho had some good lines, such as to the hotel staff:
From now on the essence of this hotel will be speed. If a customer asks you for a three-minute egg, give it to him in two minutes. If he asks you for a two-minute egg, give it to him in one minute. If he asks you for a one-minute egg, give him the chicken and let him work it out for himself!
A lot of the comedy doesn’t work very well. In one scene, the brothers hide in the room of Count Pfefferman (Sig Ruman), a former Nazi trying to get away with Nazi loot hidden in Casablanca. The brothers sneak in and out of hiding to unpack and otherwise re-arrange Pfefferman’s luggage and personal effects, to delay his departure.
It’s comedy, of course, and it depends on Pfefferman not seeing or being aware of the brothers, whom he overlooks in completely unbelievable ways. Even comedy has to have some attachment to reality, and the scene has none, and so it doesn’t really land. The scene had the feeling of being filler, as well, as it drags on.
Ruman has a fairly large part in the movie, but it doesn’t quite work. He’s the main antagonist and villain, and is as nasty as a comedy allows. He’s a former Nazi only because Germany lost the war. But Teutonic nastiness, combined with the sort of befuddled fluster he got from dealing with the Marx Brothers, isn’t a particularly good mix.
Then there’s the matter of the high-octane comic chase toward the end of the movie. That didn’t work either. It was too much like the thrill-a-minute scenes of a cheap action serial of the period, involving the brothers in a truck chasing an airplane down a runway, climbing into the airplane via a ladder, foiling the villain Pfefferman and his henchmen who are trying to get away with the loot, and crashing the airplane in such a way that somehow resolves the story and doesn’t kill anyone. Groucho, Chico and Harpo as action heroes? I don’t think so. The scene was kinetic, all right. Just not very funny.
Still, I’m not sorry I spent an hour and a half watching the movie. I can be a completist when it comes to the Marx Brothers. But I don’t want to see it again, as I do Duck Soup. Or most of the others.
One more thing: an actress named Mary Dees was in A Night in Casablanca as “minor role” (uncredited), according to imdb. That got my attention, but I’m not going through the movie again to see if I can spot her.
Dees is best known, apparently, as a double for Jean Harlow for a short stint. Besides “minor role,” her other movie parts tended to be the likes of “chorus girl, uncredited,” “redhead, uncredited,” “girl, uncredited,” and “babe, uncredited.” After A Night in Casablanca, she quit the movies and reportedly lived on until 2004.
Postscript on the tent. I returned it today, and the clerk said I hadn’t been the only one who brought it back for leakage. So I suppose my return is now another data point that the retailer is gathering about the tent. With enough data like that, it might vanish from its shelves sometime, maybe in favor of the brand it used to sell — namely Coleman.
The camping gear is now off display there anyway, as far as I could see, as a seasonal matter. The place is very much attuned to seasonable buying patterns, as any major retailer is going to be. Tents are for spring, as people think about camping.
At least no Christmas stuff yet. That I noticed.
I did notice these boxes.
And these.
Just an indication of the further march of bubble tea (boba) into the awareness and buying habits of the American consumer, and the businesses out to meet that demand. If you can find it in this warehouse store, that puts it firmly in the U.S. mainstream. I haven’t taken to it myself, but my daughters have, enough to spend time at the boba tea houses that have opened up locally over the last decade or so.
Joyba happens to be headquartered in Walnut Creek, California, though the bubble tea itself is a product of Mexico. Nearshoring in action, I reckon.
Boba’s distinctive ingredient is the tapioca pearl, and the drinks come with straws large enough to pull the pearls through. Bet tapioca makers – cassava growers – are happy about the new worldwide popularity of boba.
“Bubble tea is said to have originated in the eighties in the city of Taichung [Taiwan]. Several tea companies claim to be the creator, so it’s unclear which is the true founder of the popular drink,” reported the South China Morning Post.
“A decade later, the addictively tasty drink reached most parts of East and Southeast Asia with bubble tea shops popping up in every mall and street corner. Since then, it has spread across the globe, including the US, Australia, Europe and South Africa.”
Did a lot of things today, some involving more effort, other things less. None had a higher aggravation factor than trying to put a tent back in the package that it came in. Normally, I wouldn’t consider such a thing, in favor of keeping the various parts of the tent in more-or-less the same place, whether that’s the garage or in the back of a car.
Earlier this year, I bought a new tent from a large physical retailer, a non-brand I didn’t know, with the idea that there will be a revival of tent camping in this household. Been what – 10 years? The old tent is pushing 20 years, and while it was in good enough shape the last time I set it up a few years ago, it has been leaking since its third summer. As much as a few inches of water inside the tent, that one time in Wisconsin.
New tents, on the other hand, even those that claim only to be “weather resistant,” should not leak the first time they are set up, and only the second time they are rained on. The rain was fairly heavy over the weekend, but not as heavy as it can be, and I expected it to stay dry inside. No. The water wasn’t near the door, either, in case it was a matter of leaving it unzipped a bit, but on the other side from the door. A matter of a lousy seam, it seems.
As I was pondering taking it back to the retailer, I noticed (this morning) that two of the four guylines had broken. Just because of the stress of being anchored to the ground, since there was little wind last night. That settled it. Back in the box and back to the store, never mind the aggravation, and good luck getting me to buy that non-brand again.
July kicked off much like June this year, warmth and sometimes heat alternating with rain, which cools down things for a while. The threat of cicadas so noisy you can’t hear yourself think has not, at least in my little corner of the suburbs, come to much so far. We’re now getting about as much cicada noise as we do every year, focused around dusk, though perhaps beginning a little earlier in the summer than usual; early July instead of mid- or late July.
July 4 was warm and dry. And on a Thursday, which makes a de facto four-day weekend. Just the time to set off fireworks here in Illinois, where all but the most innocuous ‘works are banned. I didn’t set any off myself, but after dark took to the deck to listen to the explosions.
Somewhere not too far away, someone was setting off M-80s or some noisy equivalent every few minutes, it seemed – a little too much of a good thing, I thought, so I moved to the garage, and listened to the bangs and pops and whizzes from there, with the door open and the lights off and the cars parked outside. The surrounding structure dampened the loudest of the fiery hubbub but still allowed me to hear it all.
There was also much less chance of being hit by a shell, in case some wanker out there somewhere was shooting actual firearms. I know that happens in some places here in the USA. I’ll admit that the odds of that seem pretty slim in our suburb, even at the noisiest moments on Independence Day, but even so probably greater than they would have been only a few years ago.
On July 6, 1994, I mailed this card from Malaysia. It was a leftover from Vietnam, from which I’d sent some cards in late June.
I don’t remember seeing the upmarket Rex Hotel in Saigon, though perhaps we walked by it. The hotel is still around.
Mainly, the card was about how we weren’t in Vietnam anymore. I wrote: We’re in Georgetown, Penang Island. I didn’t come here two years ago. It has a quiet, pleasant feel so far.
Three days later, I wrote a letter about our time in Vietnam, using a Malaysian aerogram. Do such things even exist any more? I’d rather not find out.
A bit of an education, these aerograms. I didn’t know — and I didn’t remember until I looked at it today — that the hibiscus was the national flower of Malaysia. Specifically, the Hibiscus rosa-sinensis. As for the Rafflesia, also known as the stinking corpse lily, it is one bizarre flower.
Fifty Malaysian cents was a deal, though = U.S. 20 cents at the time. That was the same price as a postcard stamp.
In my recollection, Saigon was the opposite of quiet. In the letter I called it a “busy, energetic city.”
One of the things to do there is sit and watch the streets from the sidewalk cafes. You can see whole families balanced on motorcycles, and fewer riders (but not always solo) on bicycles, tricycles, rickshaws, and other motorized thingamabobs, numerous vendors and hawkers, kids kicking balls, idlers, beggars, dogs, cats, and roosters.
