Category Archives: Over the Transom

Christmas Giants Roamed the Earth Once Upon a Time

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The trappings of the holiday season are disappearing, as they always do in the grim early days of January. A few of the seasonally lit houses on the block are no longer cheerfully glowing, and I’ve seen a few forlorn Christmas trees out on the curb. Ours still stands inside, fully adorned, but even it is a short-timer.

I saw this figure in Chicago before Christmas, and in fact that wasn’t the only giant skeleton I’d seen re-decorated for the holidays.Christmas Skeleton 2024

I figure that considering the cost of such a skeleton – and possibly the pain-in-the-ass effort that goes into setting it up and taking it down – keeping it up just for Halloween didn’t appeal to the homeowner. Put on a Santa hat and red scarf and ho-ho-ho, it says Christmas, eh?

But what next? Some Cupid-like garb for Valentine’s Day, I suppose. An Easter bonnet for that holiday, which I think would look pretty funny, even though how often do you see Easter bonnets any more? An Uncle Sam hat for July 4 and I’m not sure what for Labor Day, and we’re practically back to Halloween and Christmas again.

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 uncover 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?!

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.

Cybertrucks on the Loose

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This was a first in Illinois. Spotted the other day in a northwest suburban parking lot after dark, but even so it stands out.

I’d seen a handful of them before, but not around where I live. Rather, I saw three of these oddities on the road this summer, one in Montana, another in Washington state, and yet another in Wyoming. As those vehicles were moving, and so were we, I didn’t snap any pictures. Tesla Cybertrucks, they are called.

They were all black. Is Tesla taking the Model T approach to color so famously commented on by Mr. Ford himself? (Which isn’t quite true.) If I wanted a pink Cybertruck, which would really stand one, would that be possible? Here’s one aftermarket gold one. Gold-plated, anyway, which seems something like having a gold toilet.

Some tens of thousands of Cybertrucks have been sold, but apparently not quite at the rate Tesla anticipated. Production has slowed for the moment.

MSRP: $82,235 to $102,235, according to Car and Driver. The magazine further has this to say: “Tesla’s otherworldly electric pickup is a mash-up of polarizing styling and bleeding-edge technology that results in surprisingly nice-to-drive hulk of a truck,” which also uses the terms “moonshot tech” and “unique look.”

Polarizing styling, eh? Otherworldly? Unique look, that’s for sure. The magazine is being polite. Even at the low end of the range, that price is madness, especially for a vehicle looking a lot like a car of the future, as drawn by an eight-year-old boy 50 years ago.

Dog, Cat, Ferret, Other

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The cat came with some paperwork, including a rabies vaccination certificate. A good thing to have. Looking a little more closely, I noticed that it includes a box for species, which includes Dog, Cat, Ferret and Other. There are enough pet ferrets for them to have their own box?

Apparently so, at least according to the organization that created the form, the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians (NASPHV), which “helps direct and develop uniform public health procedures involving zoonotic disease in the United States and its territories,” according to its web site.

That made me wonder whether there was an easy way to find a solid estimate of the number of pet ferrets nationwide. Soon that led me to the American Veterinary Medical Association’s page on U.S. pet ownership statistics, which is a short summary of a larger report, the 2024 AVMA Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook. I stuck with the summary, since the report costs actual money I didn’t want to spend on an Internet whim.

Dogs and cats are the prime pets, naturally, with 59.8 million U.S. households owning a dog and 42.2 million owning a cat (45.5 percent and 32.1 percent of total households, respectively). Average annual spending on vet care per household is $580 for dogs and $433 for cats. Interesting.

Under other animals kept as pets, the summary notes that 3.9 million households keep fish, 2.3 million keep reptiles, 2.1 million keep birds and 1.3 million keep small mammals (gerbils, hamsters, etc.), but not counting rabbits, which get their own count: 900,000 households. Ferrets aren’t a separate category, so I assume they are part of that “etc.” The full report might have the numbers, but again, I’m not buying.

A paper dating from 1998 published by the State of California Resources Agency Department of Fish and Game cites an earlier AVMA survey (1996) that found that Americans kept 791,000 ferrets that year, up from 275,000 in 1991, so it looks like the animals were on an upswing in the 1990s in terms of getting free room and board from humans in our part of the world. Other sources say the trend started in the 1980s, which sounds plausible.

A fellow I knew who was still a student at VU the year after I had graduated (1984) kept a ferret in his dorm room, probably against university rules, but anyway he was the first person I ever knew who had one. A few years earlier, a girl I knew in high school snuck a baby Vietnamese pot-bellied pig to school in a box for her friends to see. That was surely was against the rules too, but also another story – and not a very interesting one, since she wasn’t caught and no sitcom-style high jinks were involved.

The Wiki page on ferrets cites the 1996 number, and includes all sorts of other information on the animals, some sourced, some not. Such as:

The name “ferret” is derived from the Latin furittus, meaning “little thief,” a likely reference to the common ferret penchant for secreting away small items.

A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet… A group of ferrets is known as a “business” or historically as a “busyness.”

As with skunks, ferrets can release their anal gland secretions when startled or scared, but the smell is much less potent and dissipates rapidly. [Essentially a ferret fart, then]

According to phylogenetic studies, the ferret was domesticated from the European polecat (Mustela putorius), and likely descends from a North African lineage of the species… With their long, lean build and inquisitive nature, ferrets are very well equipped for getting down holes and chasing rodents, rabbits and moles out of their burrows.

One more: Ferret-legging. I’m not sure how seriously to take this.

Ferret-legging was an endurance test or stunt in which ferrets were trapped in trousers worn by a participant… it seems to have been popular among coal miners in Yorkshire, England.

That’s it for my not-at-all-comprehensive amount of ferret research, though. I’m content to assume that there are a few million out there, enough to get the attention of the folks at NASPHV. Other questions remain. Will ferret vaccination become a hot-button subject through some weird set of circumstances in our hyperconnected world? Does the (probable) incoming HHS Secretary have an opinion about ferrets? We shall see.

We Decide Who’s Naughty or Nice

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Saw some houses in our neighborhood this week with lighted Christmas lights. To that I say, no. Sure, put them up when it’s still fairly warm – as it was today, touching 60° F. But don’t light them. How about waiting until the feast of St. Lucia on December 13? That’s a festival of light, after all.

I’m sure that idea would go nowhere. The response to anyone suggesting it, at least here in North America, would be, eh? Who’s that?

Never mind, Christmas is on its way. Some places light up even earlier, and retailers have been at it for a while now. Sometimes that means oddities.

Spotted the other day on a retail shelf. Careful, though: Not intended for highway use, unless you want to scatter elf limbs on the Interstate.

I’d heard of Elf on the Shelf, which makes the joke (mildly) funny, but didn’t actually know that much about it. Turns out the Elf isn’t that old, invented less than 20 years ago. To look at the thing, you’d think it was devised by ad men of the 1920s, as so much consumer culture was.

It also turns out that they are spies for Santa. Ho ho ho. That’s awfully granular of Old St. Nick. Of course, he has a big job to do, making that list. Here’s another idea: Stasi on the Shelf.

Thursday Products

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During my junior year in college, my roommate Rich and I thumbtacked empty, flattened product packages to the wall of our two-bedroom dorm – inside the hallway closet, that is, which we didn’t use for much else. There on the 12th floor of – what was the name of that building again? – we called it the Package Art Gallery.

After 40+ years, I don’t remember the contents of the gallery, except for a flattened box that had held a muffin mix. Specifically blueberry muffins, and one of the tag lines amused us: “The most very blueberry anythings you ever ate.”

Why did we do this? As far as I can remember, collegiate whimsy. Or maybe to make a statement on art and consumerism. Why not? We never did whip up any art-speak for such a statement, but we could have. Nowadays, you don’t even have to do that, you just find a machine to do it for you, such as the amusingly named Artybollocks.

I’ve long put away collegiate things, but I could start an online package art gallery. Maybe based on things I see at discounter Ollie’s, which can indicate a less-than-stellar future for the products. Or not.

A good idea? I can’t deny having ever eaten a Ding Dong, but I’m sure I’ve never drunk any. Some postings about it when it was rolled out in 2020. Since then, less so.

Interesting idea, I guess. 

Could be entertaining. Aimed at kids. But it looks like the concept was, Let’s do Risk, in Space! But without any of those annoying geographical names. No, it wouldn’t do to have kids not know something and maybe have to ask about it. Or look it up. Or have an older kid make something up about Kamchatka.