Hollywood Cemetery, Hot Springs

Posted on May 1, 2024 by admin

This morning, about 30 minutes into May, I was in bed but not asleep yet, with the bedroom window open a bit, since it was warm enough to make that comfortable. I remembered that I hadn’t checked any weather forecast for May 1, and wondered whether it was going to rain overnight or during the day.

Almost immediately – really, within seconds – I heard rain falling. Light, but definitely rain. It lasted a few minutes. The only reasonable conclusion from such an event is that I’ve learned how to make it rain with my mind. I hope I use my power wisely.

Fairly early on the morning of April 15, I made a doughnut run in Hot Springs, Arkansas, seeking out a Shipley Do-Nuts store. I associate that chain and its wonderful doughnuts (cream filled, especially) with Texas, but Shipley is in other, mostly Southern states. There happen to be two locations in Hot Springs.

It couldn’t just be a doughnut run, though. On the way I stopped at Hollywood Cemetery, said to the Hot Spring’s oldest cemetery, though a precise founding date seems to be lost to time. The oldest stone is reportedly from 1856.

The cemetery is on a large, wooded hill.

Many – most – of its stones are aged and unkempt. It’s that kind of cemetery. Aesthetic decay. Not only do the dead return to the earth, but so do their memorials.

Hollywood is quite large for a small town cemetery, and since important doughnut matters called, I didn’t explore that much of it, such as the Confederate section that’s on the National Register of Historic Places. Still, one large memorial stood out, at least in the part of the cemetery I visited. Davies, it said. Cornelia A. Davies, who died at 28 in 1884.

Looks like that statue has a bit of a lean. Was it that way originally, or does it have a tumble to take in the near future? Otherwise the memorial is in good shape.

A young mother, I assume. Jesus comforts her children, perhaps.

If this isn’t a Victorian sentiment, I don’t what would be.

The entirety of such a cemetery is a momento mori. You’d think any cemetery would be that, but not always.

It isn’t written anywhere, as famously it is in Rome, but feeling is in the air at such a place as Hot Springs’ Hollywood: “What you are now, we once were; what we are now, you shall be.”

Have You Ever Been to Nacogdoches?

Posted on April 25, 2024 by admin

When planning our most recent trip, devising its dumbbell structure of three days on the road, five in place, and four more on the road, it occurred to me that with a little southward jiggering from Dallas, we could visit Nacogdoches, Texas, one of the oldest towns in the state, rife with history: home to prehistoric Indian activity and the establishment of a Spanish mission in the 18th century, base of filibusters and other rebellions in the early 19th, mentioned famously in a late John Wayne movie, and much more.

All that would have been a reason to come, but mainly I wanted to visit my old friend Kirk, resident of the town for nearly 40 years. We hung out mostly in high school, but had known each other as far back as elementary school, ca. 1970.

In exchanging text messages ahead of the visit, we couldn’t remember the last time we’d seen each other, but finally decided, once Yuriko and I met Kirk and his wife Lisa at their home for lunch on April 13, that it was probably in April 1986 at the wedding of a mutual friend of ours in Austin.

That’s a long time. We had a good visit, a good reconnect – I find it good to reconnect – spending most of the afternoon with them, hearing about life in Nacogdoches, his medical practice there, their raising six children, all grown.

Later in the day, Yuriko and I spent a little time in downtown Nacogdoches, which offers a more sizable square than most towns, even in Texas, handsome on the whole, with a scattering of specialty retail in the area, but mostly still professional services, city government offices and other utilitarian activities.

Mural detail a block from the square, facing a parking lot.

We arrived during the 12th annual Nacogdoches Wine Swirl, just by raw chance. I’d never heard of a “wine swirl.” The brick streets around what I took to be the courthouse were closed to cars. People clustered here and there and lined up for wine.

The square doesn’t surround a courthouse, but rather a former federal building, now the Charles Bright Visitors Center. Nearby is “The Gateway,” depicting doughty American pioneers traveling the Old San Antonio Road into Texas, a fairly recent work (2013) of Michael Boyett.

“The ticketed wine event will showcase Texas wineries and local and regional food trucks and shopping vendors along the historic brick streets,” Visit Nacogdoches says regarding the event. More marketing at work, with the goal of furthering Nacogdoches as a day-trip town.

That Texas has wineries is not news. I went with Jay to visit one of the earlier ones in the Hill Country in the mid-70s. But did Central Texas wine makers come all the way to Nacogdoches to sell their wares? Further investigation tells me there’s an established wine-growing biz in East Texas.

“But, what if I were to tell you that East Texas has over 30 wineries and vineyards just waiting to be explored?!” Totally Texas Travel breathlessly says. Even if that isn’t the precise number, I’ll take even a paid travel site as a reasonable source the existence of wineries here.

Moreover, there’s a marketing invention called the Piney Woods Wine Trail.

The Piney Woods Wine Trail? In East Texas? That goes against stereotype, and I won’t have it. They make (and drink) either beer (domestic beer, closer to Texas-made the better) or hard liquor, the closer to homemade the better. That’s what I get for traveling into East Texas, a busted stereotype.

Clary’s Cafe ’22

Posted on March 3, 2024 by admin

Clary’s Cafe in Savannah is apparently an institution, boosted by a mention in both the book and movie versions of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. More than that, it serves up good food at popular prices.

“The stalwart Clary’s, which over the past century has evolved from a drugstore with a lunch counter into a knickknack-strewn café, serves a classic old-school breakfast,” says Garden & Gun.

We arrived for lunch on our first full day in Savannah, enjoying the warmth of an early March that Illinois had not been providing. We didn’t end up at Clary’s, eating lunch at one of the handful of outside tables at Clary’s, because it appeared on a list of the 10 best breakfasts in the South or 10 storied Southern diners or the 10 most creative eggmeisters of Southern nouvelle cuisine.

Instead, after our walking tour, and a quick look at Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church, I consulted Google Maps for places to eat, looking for something simple and filling. Clary’s was only a few blocks away and seemed to fit the bill.

Though we ate outside, I took a quick look around inside, en route to the bathroom.

I don’t know about knickknack-strewn, but I can say that the food was simple and filling, though I can’t remember exactly what I had. One of those breakfasts for lunch, but I forgot to do the modern thing and take a picture of the plate and send it to a dozen friends.

Valentine’s Day Helium

Posted on February 8, 2024 by admin

A slice of late March slipped into early February today, not quite warm but certainly not cold, windy and a scattering of rain. The atmosphere was charged enough to set of the waaah-waaah lightning warning gizmo installed in the park within sight of my back yard. Hadn’t heard its bleat in months. Didn’t see any actual lightning.

Went to a local chain grocery store this evening after work, a place I go maybe once a month, though it’s only about a five-minute drive. The local grocery market is saturated. Whatever the opposite of a food desert is, the northwestern suburbs are that.

The store isn’t really local, having been owned by Big Grocery for some years now. But it keeps its legacy name, known to Chicagoans far and wide. The aisles are, of course, fully ready for the next occasion on the North American calendar.

Wait – isn’t there a helium shortage? That’s one of those things I’ve half heard about, but never looked into much. Yes and no is the answer, at least according to an article, restricted to about four paragraphs for us non-subscribers of Gas World, about the prospects for the far-flung international helium market in 2024.

“Intelligas’ assessment of the worldwide supply of helium is about 5.9 billion cubic feet (Bcf) for 2023, up from about 5.7 Bcf in 2022 – back where we were in 2021.

“We forecast that worldwide supply will be short of demand until late 2024 if the large new sources of helium come onstream. The shortage that began in early 2022 when Amur suffered explosions at its first two LNG trains is still having an impact. And history has taught those of us in the helium business that large plants typically incur delays due to unexpected technical issues. Plenty of uncertainty remains.”

Amur explosions?

Again from Gas World, about two years ago: “New information about the explosion and fire that took place at Gazprom’s Amur natural gas processing facility on 5th January [2022] indicates that helium production will remain offline for at least the next six months.”

Maybe I heard about that at the time, but other news from Russia soon eclipsed anything as pedestrian as an industrial accident.

Good ol’ Gazprom. Its name, I believe, goes back to the late Soviet era. Say what you want about the commies, they came up with some boss names sometimes.

Joong Boo

Posted on February 7, 2024 by admin

When Toys R Us went under, I remember fans came out of the woodwork to tell the world how wonderful the chain was, and how it would live forever in a nostalgic corner of their hearts. Maybe you had to be a former child visitor to the stores to feel that way. Big places seem even bigger at that age, and big places stuffed with toys – what could be better?

The toy stores of my youth were standalones or in-line shops – small presences on long streets or in large malls. The closest I remember to a warehouse toy store was chain of mall toy stores whose name I’ve long forgotten, but which seemed to stack its merchandise floor to ceiling. Occasionally I bought model airplanes there. Forward 30 years and a Toys R Us location might hold 10 of those mall stores I remember from childhood. So I can see they might have been wowsers to the crop of children that came of age when Toys R Us was open.

First encountering Toys R Us as a parent of young children is another matter. When I wasn’t myself marveling at the profusion of entertainment options for small fry, because the stock was always an impressive array, I understood that visiting was a contest to hold spending to some reasonable level. Hold the line on spending like you might hold a squirming animal. A greased pig, maybe. It wasn’t easy.

So I didn’t mourn Toys R Us particularly. The location we visited closed with all the rest and the building stood vacant for a good many years afterward, which was unusual on this busy main thoroughfare in the northwest suburbs. Last year, a sign appeared in front of the former toy store explaining that a grocery store was coming soon.

Here it is.

Not just any grocery store, but Joong Boo, a Korean store. We visited last Friday, during the store’s first week of operation. The fourth location of a Chicago-based chain, it’s clearly a rising competitor to the larger Korean chain, H-Mart, which not long ago expanded its store within a mile or so of the new Joong Boo. So new that the location isn’t, as of today, listed on the Joong Boo web site.

Nice redesign inside, not a hint of its former use. Artful light bars overhead. Hope they’re energy efficient.

The place was crowded. In its first week anyway, it’s a hit.

One thing that H-Mart taught me is about the endless variety (I exaggerate: the impressive variety) of fresh seafood offered by a Korean supermarket, at least here in North America. Three samples from a much larger selection:

Something I didn’t expect.

I bought one. Not because I’m going to eat it soon, though I might sometime, but to help keep the Spam Museum open (which, I see, is in a newish location). Yuriko bought more healthful items to prepare for our table. For her, the store represents economy: many of the same or similar items than at the local Japanese supermarket, but at a better price. That doesn’t keep her away from the Japanese store completely – it is, after all, the Japanese store — just sometimes.

Another reason to wander a Korean grocery store – or any store, really – is to be on the lookout for brands that aren’t creatures of the U.S. food industry, but maybe some other country’s food conglomerates. Or just third-string or otherwise unusual brands, such as Argentine frosted flakes.

A South Korean beer, Terra.

That counts as the creature of the South Korean food industry, since it’s an export made by Hite Brewery Co., the largest beer maker in that country. Look at the bottle and you learn it’s a Czech-style Korean lager using Australian malt.

Speaking of creatures.

He seems to be the mascot of Jinro, which, as a unit of Hite since 2006, is the world’s largest maker of soju. In English, anyway, he’s referred to as a toad, and man, you can get a lot of Jinro merch.

Frozen K-Food

Posted on February 6, 2024 by admin

We’ve all heard of K-Pop, even if we pay it no mind. Go to a Korean grocery store here in the northwest suburbs, and you’ll be aware of K-Food. Frozen K-Food, too.

Convenient and delicious for any occasion, it seems. I didn’t do a comprehensive look-see at the Frozen K-Food aisles, but did notice a few things. Such as a version of K-corn dogs: mozzarella and fish cake on a stick.

The marvels of globalization never cease. People worry that globalization = homogenization, but I don’t think so.

Korean breakfast links, or anytime sausage? The taste you always wanted? In any case, true to the tradition of cartoon mascots gleeful about the human consumption of their own kind.

This is diversity.

But maybe not quite as much as at first glance, since the maker of Red Baron, Schwan’s, was acquired by South Korean food conglomerate CJ CheilJedang a few years ago. So there you have it: a popular North American convenience food named for a German flying ace owned by a South Korean operation. All there in a frozen food bin.

Durians and jackfruit!

Once only available in Southeast Asia, now in your frozen food aisle. Must be popular in Korea these days, too. Why not? For me, jackfruit brings back fond memories of Thailand. As for durian, that is a fond memory from Malaysia.

Not long after I wandered away from the frozen food, I encountered fresh jackfruit.

A Hindenburg-class fruit, it is. More than 20 lbs. of jackfruit for less than $20. I’ll assume that’s a good deal.

Robot on Aisle 7

Posted on February 5, 2024 by admin

When I took Ann back to Normal yesterday, I didn’t stop anywhere else in that town. But the last time I was there, we went to a grocery store just off I-55. And who should we meet in one of the aisles? I’d say it was strolling around, but I don’t think inventory robots stroll. Wheel along, maybe. It was puttering along.

That’s Tally, which isn’t precisely new tech, considering that you can easily find an article about the machine from 2016. Then again, maybe the one we saw is a more advanced version or, for all I know, it’s an older one still perfectly fine for its job. Never mind what the tech industry says, tech still has value as long as you find it useful.

“[Tally] can traverse a shop’s aisles for eight to 12 hours on a single charge, counting and checking up to 20,000 individual stock keeping units (SKUs) with greater than 96 percent accuracy,” the PC magazine article reported then.

A robot replacing a human. A human going up and down the aisles for hours holding a electronic wand of some kind. That sounds like the kind of really boring job that robots were going to take in the future, as it was once more optimistically imagined. Were supposed to take.

On the other hand, I asked the check-out clerk about the robot. How long had the store had the robot? She didn’t know, a while. We hate it anyway, she said, but didn’t elaborate.

Ann at 21

Posted on February 4, 2024 by admin

Turns out it wasn’t Dry February after all. On Saturday night, I had a shot glass of Soon Hari brand flavored soju, which is the Korean equivalent of nihonshu (sake). Ann came up for the weekend, on the (near) occasion of her birthday. We went to the same Korean barbecue place we’ve taken her to twice before for her birthday dinner, only this time she ordered alcohol. Mostly this was a matter of form, since she had turned 21 a few days earlier.

The flavor was grape. It was sweet and 12% alcohol by volume, so it could sneak up on you. She had enough to make her pink in the face (“Asian glow,” she calls it) and a little tipsy.

Later we had birthday pie at home.

Twenty-one: obligatory note here about the wingéd passage of time.

Pretty Sure It Will Be Dry February As Well

Posted on February 1, 2024 by admin

Not only are we rid of January today, it was the most pleasant weather I can ever remember on a February 1 in northern Illinois: sun out sometimes, temps touching about 50 F.

YouTube algorithms are getting better at their game. Or so it seems. Today they suggested a Mexican ska band, Mexican Nutty Stompers, who have just released an album. The song, “Souvenir.” I was the 83rd listener.

Never mind the delight in finding Mexican ska when you didn’t such a thing existed, whoever the lead singer is, she’s got some voice. I might look into finding out her name, but for now the voice is more than enough.

A snippet from a press release that came a few weeks ago:

Embrace the spirit of Dry January with Hotel ZaZa Memorial City. Dine in at Hotel ZAZA’s Tipping Point Restaurant and Terrace and indulge in exclusive mocktail specials, crafted to make your taste buds dance without the spirits. Throughout the month of January, enjoy a selection of zero-proof concoctions, each priced at just $8.

Closer to my wheelhouse, but not quite in it. Still, I learned a couple of things from the release. One, Hotel ZaZa Memorial City is in Houston. Zaza is a collection of boutique hotels in Texas, in fact, with locations in Austin and Dallas too. I wasn’t familiar with the brand, but it looks posh all right. Also, this is the essence of the luxury hotel business: serving drinks at what would be a very reasonable price, if they contained any alcohol.

Dry January. I had to look around for more information on that, and it turned out to be a thing. Not sure if it’s just a thing of the chattering classes, or has stronger purchase on the steep slopes of American culture, but anyway you can find mainstream articles about it. Never heard of any of that. I’m late to the party, as usual. Or the non-party, considering no alcohol is served. As we all know, alcohol is essential to any fun party. That’s true in song and story.

The concept is simple enough to be a thing: Dry January just means not drinking alcohol during January, presumably timed to come after personal bacchanals in December. The hotel is using the concept to sell mocktails, but people do seem to use the idea to improve their lives. Good for them. I found it a little hard to imagine, though. Every January is Dry January for me.

I did order, and drink, an Old Fashioned at the bar of the Nashville Italian restaurant where we had dinner on the last full night with my friends in November. We were waiting for a table, so we all sat at the bar, enjoying some lively conversation with each other.

We also spent a few minutes watching the bartender, a nattily dressed slip of an African-American young man, maybe 30, who seemed to be everywhere behind the bar doing everything all the time, but mostly assembling the various liquors for his cocktail creations. With an economy and grace to his movements that spoke of years of practice. He was an artist.

So I wanted to order something from him. But what? As I later explained to my friends, a little part of every man wants to be Don Draper, so the drink in front of me was my homage to the character, and a vehicle to provide a nice tip for the bartender.

A little more than 12 years before ordering the Old Fashioned in Nashville, I ordered one in Appleton, Wisconsin on a press trip because I recently heard of the drink on Mad Men and was curious.

But mixed drinks haven’t been how I’ve usually spent my money over the years. All those years later in Nashville, I nursed my Old Fashioned a while – I’m not a hard-drinking TV character, after all – and concluded that I hadn’t had a bar cocktail between those two times, only occasional beer and wine, most of which wasn’t at bars anyway. What’s the term for that? Not teetotaler. Quasi-totaler?

Bardstown Walkabout

Posted on January 7, 2024 by admin

For those who dreamed of a pink Christmas this year, there was this shop window in Bardstown, Kentucky.

Not only pink trees, but an entrance with a Fanny Brice sort of greeting.

For many years, the building on North Third Street housed Spalding & Sons, a dry goods store founded in the 1850s which later morphed into a small-town department store that finally closed for good only in 2013. A woman’s boutique, Peacock on Third, now occupies the space (the dark building on the right in the picture below).

These days a boutique of that kind fits right in on Third, which is Bardstown’s main street. Other nearby specialty shops include At Mary’s gift shop, the Tea Cozy, Shaq & Coco (furniture), Kaden Lake and Cactus Annie’s (both women’s clothes), and Pink Fine Consignments & Boutique and Gnarly Gnick Gnacks; eateries in the vicinity include Bardstown Burger, Cafe Primo, Pat’s Place and the Old Talbott Tavern.

We were out and about in Bardstown on December 29, the second day of our trip, an overcast and moderately chilly day, having driven the 30 miles or so from Louisville that morning. This part of Bardstown caters mostly to visitors, who were few that day, but the street wasn’t completely deserted.

The town has managed to preserve a nice collection of century-and-older buildings that are mostly still in use.

A few ghost signs.

A selection of pre-FDIC bank buildings.

The five-and-dime is also gone.

At the junction of Third and another major street, Stephen Foster Avenue – more about him later – is a roundabout, and in the roundabout is the imposing former courthouse, which these days houses the Bardstown Tourist & Convention Commission, the Nelson County Economic Development Agency and the Bardstown Nelson County C-of-C.

Another relic of the great age of courthouse building in the United States, designed by Mason Maury and completed in 1892. Most of Maury’s work was in Louisville, and in fact he designed Kentucky’s first skyscraper in that city, the Kenyon Building. Sadly, that structure didn’t survive the mid-century purge of old buildings.

At one corner Third and Stephen Foster is a building whose first floor is occupied by a drugstore: Hurst Discount Drugs.

We happened to be looking for lunch at that moment, and happened to notice that Hurst also includes a lunch counter. How many drugstores have lunch counters any more? How many did even 30 or 40 years ago? We instantly decided to eat there. I did, anyway, since I’m not sure Yuriko appreciated what a rara avis we’d found, but she was game.

We weren’t the only customers, though everyone else left before we did.

Speaking of rare birds: only one thing on the menu was more than $10, the double bacon cheese burger deluxe at $10.19. Order deluxe and you get mayo, ketchup, mustard, tomato, lettuce, pickle and grilled onions.

Besides burgers, other options included sandwiches and a few breakfast items. Even better, the flip side of the menu offered an array of ice cream products: scoops, shakes, malts, ice cream sodas, banana splits and sundaes, and floats — black cow (Coke), brown cow (root beer), and orange cow (orange sherbet and Sprite).

I had the more modest cheeseburger deluxe at $7.49, plus a chocolate shake for $6.29. Elevated compared to only a few years ago, certainly, but still reasonable, especially considering that the burger was good and the shake was really good.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Food & Beverage