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Christmas Leaves &c.

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Back to posting around December 29. A good Christmas to all.

For a few years a while back, we received boxes of butter toffee from Guth’s End of the Trail Candy Shoppe in Waupun, Wisconsin, from some PR men we knew well for Christmas. The toffee was insanely good and never lasted long. The Christmas card that came with the candy included Madonna and Child images hand-painted on delicate leaves by, I think, artists from the Indian subcontinent. They have lasted a lot longer than the toffee. I took to taping them to one of the walls in the kitchen.

The leaves occasionally fall to the floor. I then refresh their tape and put them back, but time has taken a toll.Madonna and Child Madonna and Child Madonna and Child

I visited a big box crafts store a few days ago (not this one) at Yuriko’s request. I didn’t really want to go, but I’m glad I did. Got a look at some of the Christmas items. Ho ho ho Ho ho ho
Ho ho ho

A different picture than would have been possible decades ago, or even a single decade ago. Good to see, actually, if only to annoy anyone who might get upset over the complexion of Christmas tchotchkes.

Christmas at Ollie’s

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Choose unwisely during this time of the year, and you end up in a crowded retail setting. Not the worst fate imaginable, but I can think of better things to do, such as visit less popular stores – or at least less crowded at any given moment – and look at things.

Christmas at Ollie’s, you could say.

I might be mistaken, but I believe agriculture in the polar regions is meager indeed. On the other hand, Santa surely controls land in temperate zones, including productive cropland of all sorts. His is an operation with a global reach. But doesn’t he have farmer elves to do the actual work?

Be the life of the party.

Put something under the tree for the small fry.

Yahtzee Jr.? Kids these days. We played the same Yahtzee as the adults when we were kids, as we liked it. Actually, I only remember playing Yahtzee a few times, mostly with my cousin, and not especially liking it. Now I’ve forgotten what it involves, except rolling dice a lot. Maybe I should look it up and re-acquaint myself with it. Nah.

Not a Christmas item particularly, but the thought of shooting dog treats just makes me smile. It might or might not really work, in the sense of getting the dog to play along. Of course, it is food, so dogs might be keen to chase down the treats from the get-go. Watching that would be the amusement for the human. I haven’t lived around a cat long, but my sense is that if you shot treats at a cat, the animal would make itself scarce.

Watch Out for Angel Number 000

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The other day, I wanted to know the place associated with an area code I didn’t know, so I put the numbers into the search engine and as soon as I typed the letter “a” – planning to put in “area code” – it immediately auto-suggested “angel number” and only second “area code.”

Angel number?

It’s a minor curse (sometimes) to be as curious as I am, since that represented the entrance to an enormous rabbit hole. Not only that, a fairly stupid one, too. In I went, until it got too stupid, which wasn’t long.

That authoritative source that is Cosmopolitan tells us: “Repeating numbers (like 111) or numbers that appear in a significant sequence (like 1234) do mean something, and they’re referred to as ‘angel numbers.’

“Whenever you spot an angel number at a crucial moment in time… you can be sure an angel just dropped you a wink and a kiss. Angel numbers are a sign from the divine (whatever you call it — God, a source, your higher self, the universe, etc.) that you’re on the right track.”

According to the writer of the Cosmo item, one Jaliessa Sipress (which I have to say is a wonderful name), angel numbers can show up anywhere as you wander your way through this uncertain world, such as on license plates, house numbers, even retail receipts.

Jaliessa helpfully explains what some of these numbers mean. Such as 111, which “signifies that things in your life are coming into divine alignment,” or 333, which is “associated with femininity, creativity, and intuition.”

That infamous number 666 apparently has a bad rap, being associated with the Antichrist and all. As an angel number, she says, it is more benign: “The spiritual meaning of 666 is an encouragement to refocus. Seeing 666 tells you to pay closer attention to any fixation you currently have on earthly problems and details,” she says in a separate, linked article about that specific number.

Her bio line says: “Jaliessa Sipress is an Astrologer, writer, and artist committed to making spirituality and self-care simple. Her focus is on life-purpose and cultivating mental and emotional clarity to create lasting change in all areas of life.”

Damn, is it too late in my life to become an Astrologer, with capital A? No! I can discover hidden truth with the best of them. After a spot of mediation under my aura, I even know what some other angel numbers mean. Such as:

2525 – this angel number should make you reflect on the big picture, such as whether man is still alive, or woman can survive. Other similar numbers are 3535, 4545, and on up to 9595, which should inspire you to reflect on how men take everything you give and don’t put back northing.

5440 – this number means that the angels are telling you to fight for what is yours – or take what belongs to someone else, whatever.

31415 – the angels are telling you to eat more pie.

1234 – a wink from the angels that it’s OK not to set a new password.

Also, one doesn’t have to rely on mere wandering around to get an angel number. Google “Angel Number Generator” and see what I mean. Those many sites, which first ask for a name and birthdate, don’t seem to be asking phishy questions at all, no sir.

A twist to the angel number story: the woman who invented them – that is, tapped into a free-flowing vein of numerology to undercover their true significance – later said she made it up and discovered she could sell books about it, according to The Cut. One of the article’s comments sums things up nicely. Commenter sarah.kg noted: So you’re telling me this obviously made up thing… was made up?!

Musical Maps

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This is quite a site: Musical Maps, whose title isn’t quite descriptive, since it lists and illustrates the locations of a wide variety of music album cover photos. Still, it’s a place to meander for a while, to sample and follow your idle curiosity, only to find our more time than you thought disappeared while looking up the location of x, y and z. And another one after z. And that reminded you of another – scroll down – wait, what about a, b and then c?

The cover of Hotel California, which does such a good job of evoking some dark desert corner of California, a place of colitas smell and no exit — is for example actually urban, on Sunset Boulevard in Beverly Hills.

Looks like there’s been some gentrification since Grandmaster Flash & The Furious Five posed on 123rd St. in Manhattan in 1982.

Our Man in New Orleans – an Al Hirt disk from 1963 that I’m pretty sure was around the house when I was growing up – features the trumpeter in front of 941 Bourbon Street, at night with shadows for that extra New Orleans vibe (and probably to avoid the heat).

Good to see that at least two Chicago albums depict Chicago in some form. Chicago 13 is a variation on Marina Towers.

Part of the site is organized geographically. The inordinate number of shots taken in New York City and California and various parts of the UK is little surprise. This isn’t a list of Bollywood soundtrack albums, after all.

I was inspired to look for the most remote location, at least on this list. I was hoping someone, maybe some prog rocker of the ’70s, had used an image of a moai or a row of them, which would put it on Easter Island, but apparently not.

Hit Collective goes Bossa Vol. 1 features a view of Rio from Christ the Redeemer, which seems fitting, but a little further away is that busy set of musicians called Various Artists and their album Guitare, whose cover was shot at the colorful Dr. del Valle Iberlucea 1256 in Buenos Aires. Both places one can aspire to see.

Tannenbaum ’24

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The Christmas tree business is still mostly fragmented, with some 16,600 farms growing Christmas trees on nearly 300,000 acres in the United States, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture. Some farms are large – a wholesaler called Holiday Tree Farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley asserts that it ships 1,000,000 trees a year, grown on 1,500 acres. But no single entity dominates.

Good thing, too. If an outfit called CTree Group controlled, say, 50 percent of the market, we’d have to buy an annual subscription to receive our trees in December.

The cash money I spent today at a Christmas tree lot with no name here in the northwest suburbs pretty much went straight into the pocket of the farmer. And I mean that literally. That’s where he put it.Christmas trees Christmas trees

He and his (I assume) wife, both of whom looked roughly my age, except more grizzled from spending much more time outside, were stationed at the small trailer, taking money, chain-sawing the stumps and netting the whole trees, for easier transport. These things they did for me. I asked whether theirs were Michigan trees. Over the years, some of our trees have been, including those from the UP. No, Wisconsin. Just as good, I told them.

The thought that the money goes directly to the owner makes it less annoying that the price was up again this year ($65), and that many trees in the lot were priced at over $100, a price I’m sure not to pay. But not completely un-annoying.

The lot, as many are, is set up on an underutilized section of parking in a nondescript strip center. But not completely nondescript. I was glad to see the record store is still there, though I’ve never been in.

I hadn’t noticed this before, also in the strip center.

An organization I’d never heard of. Even so, I have to admit the name Mountain of Fire & Miracles Ministries has a peel of thunder and a whiff of brimstone about it. Makes you sit up and pay attention.

Some detail.

I took it for an independent Protestant sect of the homegrown sort, but no. This location is an outpost of MFM, a Nigerian Protestant sect – at least, in the sense that it isn’t Catholic — founded in 1989. Here’s something from the church’s web site, under “Mission and Vision” as one of the objectives on the ministry:

To build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. MFM is an end-time church where we build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. An end-time church is a church where a sinner enters with two options: he either repents or does not come back, contrary to the present day church where sinners are comfortable and find things so easy and convenient.

I don’t know much about the organization, not really, considering how ignorant I am about most things Nigerian. Still, its presence tells me that there must be more Nigerians here in the northwest suburbs than I realized. The world not only comes to Chicago, it comes to the Chicago suburbs.

I Only Need to Sell One

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For some reason, I thought of Music Row Joe the other day. It is an ’80s comic strip even more obscure, I believe, than Eyebeam, and not nearly as good, though it was occasionally worth a chuckle. I know that because I remember reading it in the Tennessean, which I subscribed to in the mid-80s. So I hadn’t thought of it much in nearly 40 years.

But the strip is not too obscure to be mentioned somewhere on line: a site called Stripper’s Guide, which “discusses the history of the American newspaper comic strip,” founded by one Allan Holtz. After a cursory look, the site seems fairly remarkable itself, a vast repository of the Music Row Joes of the world, though most of its content is older.

Stripper’s Guide says of the comic: “Music Row Joe was a local strip produced for the Nashville Tennessean. It ran at least 1983-87 based on my few samples and may have run much longer for all I know. The creators were Jim Oliver and Ron Hellard.

That’s the sum total of my knowledge of this feature – Holtz out!

EDIT 1/19/2020: This weekly strip ran 1/31/1982 – 3/27/1988. Based on a promo article it seems as if Jim Oliver was responsible for the art, and both contributed to gags.

The ne’er-do-well character Music Row Joe hangs out at the edge of the Nashville music industry, dressed part cowboy-like, part pimp-like, hat always covering his eyes in the style of Andy Capp. I’m pretty sure he was an aspiring musician – this was Nashville, after all – but I don’t remember whether he had some actual musical talent but couldn’t catch a break, or was merely a schlub with unwarranted dreams of fame. He was also (I think) involved in harebrained, though legal, moneymaking schemes that never panned out.

I only remember one of the strips. Music Row Joe is out on a street somewhere (16th Avenue South? Let’s hope so.) holding a few helium-filled balloons. He had a sign that said something like, “Balloons, $20,000 Each.” A old woman looking at his sign said to him, “Young man, you’ll never sell any balloons at that price.” In a thought balloon, Music Row Joe said, “I only need to sell one.”

In the spirit of Music Row Joe, I have this to offer. I’m not greedy: an authenticated jpg of this image, unique in all the world, can be yours for $5,000 (all rights otherwise reserved).

Back story, no extra charge. I tidied up the small mass of DVDs and CDs in the living room a few weeks ago. Not organized, just de-scattered. In that process, I came across Ann’s DVD copy of Mama Mia! The Movie, which she is very fond of, but which had gone missing. I put it on the dining room table to take a picture of it to send to Ann to let her know, noticing at once that it caught a reflection of the light fixture above. I took that image, but ultimately sent her another one without the reflection.

The disk had not been located for a good long time, maybe a year. Now there it was, demonstrating once again a household maxim we call all live by: you can’t find a thing by looking for it.

Trick of the Light

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When in doubt, post pictures of a cat.Minnie the Cat

Cat images are the road to virtual fame, I understand. No? That or posting selfies from dangerous places, and dying as a result. I don’t think that strategy is for me, though I like a good vista as much as anyone.

Municipal holiday lights are up.

Actually they have been since just before Thanksgiving, but I didn’t get around to visiting this particular park until the other day, just ahead of the numbing cold that moved into the area.

When pointing my cell phone camera at the light array below, I noticed something odd. Notice that the horizontal gray bands in these successive images, both unretouched, taken a fraction of a second apart – as fast as I could push the button.

As I looked through the phone, the horizontal gray bands appeared to be moving downward, but such apparent motion wasn’t visible to my eyes. Something like the distortions involved photographing an image of a video screen. The still images captured them as they seemed to travel.

I knew there must be a reason for this involving how light behaves, and sure enough, there is. I read this article about the phenomenon, and the one it links to, but don’t ask me to explain it. The best I can do is, light be weird.

Tech Mysteries

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Today was new wifi box day, a router that is, to coincide with a cheaper plan from the member of the communications oligopoly that I deal with. To facilitate such a thing, contacting the company by telephone is useless, and the web site worse than useless, the irony of which is probably lost on customer service management in the organization. They are not paid to be aware, only to obfuscate.

So I went to one of its retail stores, being fortunate enough to live in a major metro that has a location nearby. At such a place, it’s harder for company representatives to dodge my request, though the first alternate plan he suggested was only a little cheaper and not what I’d asked for. Just letting me know the options, he said. Of course.

Eventually I got more or less what I wanted, but it also involved me taking a new box home and setting it up myself. Ah, do I have to? Yes, or pay more for someone to do it. That wasn’t the case before. So I took the box home and let it sit around for a few days. Procrastination is part of my nature, especially when I suspect something will mysteriously go wrong in the process, because the system doesn’t respond for mysterious reasons, or the instructions tell me to do something that mysteriously doesn’t apply to my equipment, or is otherwise mysteriously impossible.

They say the cosmos is full of mystery. This isn’t the kind of potential mystery that’s awe-inspiring, just annoying.

Speaking of which: once upon a time, people imagined a time when robots would be our servants or, in darker imaginings, our enemies. But at any rate, robots would be commonplace. We have arrived at that time. We deal with robots every day. Every moment, you could argue; we call them automated phone systems, identity verification and algorithms. And what are they? Friendly? Menacing? Maybe, but often just annoying.

The oligopolist forced the issue today by shutting down the old equipment. So into the installation weeds I went. There were a few stumbles in the process, but I’ve been through worse and everything seems to be working. One minor mystery is that the box now requires two electrical connections, while the old one needed only one, which is slightly inconvenient.

Worth the trouble, though. The savings will add up. Maybe I’ll blow the first month’s savings on Malört. Been a year since I’ve had any.

No Snow. Also, “Snow”

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For a few hours on Sunday afternoon, it felt warm enough to build a fire in my back yard grill, so that’s what I did, successful grilling a pack of brats acquired at some optimistic moment this fall and stored since then at lower than 32° F. I expect that to be the last grilling of ’24, but who knows.

Tested the front yard lights as well, considering that it wasn’t so cold. I left them hanging on the bushes all year, and they seemed none the worse for this year. Lighting will be on Friday, in honor of the feast of St. Lucia. Pretty much everyone on the block who is going to light up already has. I suspect they won’t last long after the New Year. I plan to keep them going till maybe the second week of January.

Since no one around the house plays Christmas music, I haven’t heard much of that yet this year either. This suits me. Of course, when you’re in a store, there’s no avoiding it. And also of course, it’s the same songs in heavy rotation. Except when it isn’t. I was astonished to hear “Snow” from White Christmas at a store the other day.

Charming little song. Don’t think I’ve heard it outside the movie. Even then, I had to look it up. More public Christmas music ought to reach beyond those few dozen you always hear again and again.

State Street Windows, 2015

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A coinage for our moment in history: Chief execucide. I won’t claim it’s my invention, however, since I found an example from 1988, though for comic effect. Whatever else is going on with the most recent incident, it isn’t comedy.

We haven’t been downtown since the Open House event, and so haven’t seen this year’s State Street windows at the store formerly known as Marshall Field’s. It probably would be another disappointment. They were once known for their imaginative displays. No more. In recent years the company has been phoning it in.

That wasn’t the case in 2015. Actual designers were carrying on the tradition back then, and I should have taken more pictures. This was a favorite: a snowball fight between Uranus and Neptune.

The conceit was, as I wrote, a “space-flight-enthusiast young boy hitching a ride with Santa to various fantastic versions of the planets (except Pluto), including a return to Earth that seemed to feature a bizarro hybrid of New York and Chicago.”

I did take a few other pics. The first was, I believe, the boy’s room.State Street windows State Street windows

C’mon, Macy’s. You can do better windows if you try. If you hire the talent. I expect my nephew Robert, whose profession encompasses such work, would be glad to help for a healthy fee.