Category Archives: Over the Transom

Tony the Retired Barber & Ron the Returned Barber

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I called my barber shop this morning, expecting to make an appointment with Tony the barber, who has cut my hair most of the time since I quit having it cut in downtown Chicago, which was in 2005, when I quit working downtown.

Most memorably, I took Ann to the shop when she was five, and she documented the scene.

“He’s retired,” another barber told me over the phone. I expressed my surprise. Since the end of last year, turns out.

But it isn’t really that surprising. Tony was 70 if he was a day. So I made an appointment with Ron the barber, who took Tony’s chair. Ron is also 70 if he’s a day, and came out of retirement after making a recovery from a fall that broke his hip and nearly killed him. From the look of his gait, I’d say his recovery’s been pretty solid.

I know that because he told me about it as he cut my hair. He’s a little more chatty than Tony, but after he told me about his health (and one other thing), he didn’t talk a lot more. Never been a fan of chatty barbers, maybe because of the redneck who cut my hair 40+ years ago who had some asinine opinions he liked sharing.

The other thing Ron the barber told me was about another barber who used to be in the shop — I didn’t remember him — who came down with Covid at some point. The disease seemed to evolve into long Covid, Ron said, but further testing revealed metastasized cancer of some kind. He implied, but didn’t say, that that fellow now has a barber chair in glory. I didn’t ask. Such are the social conventions around death.

Ron did say that the unfortunate fellow’s condition inspired Tony, who is still fairly healthy, to retire. Good for Tony. As for Ron, he’s as talented as Tony, and did an expert job, so I expect I’ll be back.

One more thing: he charged $20, same as Tony did for not sure how many years. For now anyway, the current round of inflation hasn’t hit my barber shop.

Actually, another thing: I saw from his barber license on the wall that Ron has an Italian surname. So did Tony, and so does the other barber still working in the shop besides Ron. And so did both barbers I went to downtown in the late ’90s and early ’00s and I think — not sure now — the barber I went to in the Andersonville neighborhood of Chicago in the late ’80s. A thing that makes me go hm.

Frog in the Snow & Other February Sights

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Here we are, partway through paradoxical February, which is the shortest and yet the longest month.

Much of the snow has melted, but it will be back. Out in the front yard, near the front door, our metal frog peeps further out of the snow cover.frog in the snow

Elsewhere in the northwest suburbs, machines stand ready to deal with more frozen precipitation.snow plow

I’ve seen flags to warn, or assure, passersby about the solidity of ice, usually green or red for go or no go. But I’ve never seen one that hedges its bets. Red = no ice use. Yellow = own risk.hoffman estates

It’s theoretical for me anyway. I’m not about to walk out on any ice.

Stray Quiz

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The other day I happened across an online geography quiz that was more challenging than most, since most seem to be aimed at grade schoolers (e.g., What’s the country north of the USA?). It was multiple choice, and included such questions as:

Which volcano is located astride the border between Bolivia and Chile?

Mat Ala
Pago
Surtla
Olca

Which valley is one of the richest cactus sites in the world?

Valley of Tehuacan
Valley of Baïgorry
Valley of Joux
Valley of Usines

Which village of Savoy is today famous for its devils carved in the wood?

Bramans
Bonneval
Bessans
Modane

Of those three, I only knew about the cacti-rich Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. But the quiz had the benefit of inspiring me to look up the ones I got wrong, and now I know where that Andean volcano is and those wooden devils are.

One question was oddly worded — a editorial slip, probably. It read:

How often is China’s area larger than Japan’s?

The correct answer, of course, is always.

Mother & Child, Adjusted

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Last week at the antique mall I came across a wad of mostly unlabeled photos, some probably as old as 100 years, but most looked like they were taken from the 1940s to the 1960s. I’d seen that kind of offering before, but always passed them up, often in favor of postcards.

The few with names or locations written on the back, I noticed, sometimes sold for as much as a dollar each, which is too much just for a picture of a long-ago stranger. But many of the anonymous photos were 25 cents each, so that encouraged me to buy a handful at that price.

Of those I bought, I like this one best. Hard to go wrong with a mother and child.

Of course, that’s just an assumption. Could be an aunt and niece, for example, or unrelated people, though that doesn’t seem likely. From the looks of them, I’d put the image sometime in the ’40s, perhaps the late ’40s.

An unidentified image of this kind makes me wonder. What were their names? Where did they live? How is it that their picture ended up in a for-sale bin in an antique mall in greater Chicago in the third decade of the 21st century?

If I’m right about the date, the child was on the cutting edge of the baby boom, assuming they are Americans. After all, the baby boom started about then with actual babies being born, and so there’s a fairly good chance the child is still alive, and even a very slender chance the woman is. But if so, why don’t they have their picture?

Unanswerable questions. All I really know is that I have the picture now, and ran it through my image-editing software, as I’ve done with more familiar images before. Add a little color, for instance.

Interesting how recognizable the figures are in the next one, even if you’d never seen the unretouched image, though I suppose we’re all primed to look for patterns that look like faces and bodies.

Kaleidoscope-style is next. It occurred to me I didn’t know who invented the kaleidoscope, so I looked it up. Though there were antecedents, it seems that Scottish inventor David Brewster devised its modern form in the mid-1810s, and coined the word. (Greek, beautiful + shape + look).

Much more abstract.

Yet we still see human figures, more or less, especially at a distance.

Spouting Off Thursday

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Compare and contrast, as my English teachers used to say.

Dusk on February 1.

Dusk on February 2.

For comparison, about the same framing — the view from my back door — but a whole lot of contrast. We caught the edge of the aforementioned winter storm on Wednesday morning. Not a huge amount of snow, just enough to be the usual pain in the ass.

Speaking of which, wankers are on the loose. They always are. Taken at a NW suburban gas station recently. No doubt posted by a true believer, unwittingly on behalf of the listed grifters.

One objection to the Covid-19 vaccine I find particularly irksome — one quasi-rational objection, that is, as opposed to the microchip ‘n’ such crackpot ones — is that it was developed too quickly.

True enough, it was developed much more quickly than any vaccine in history. Know what I’d call that? Progress. You’d be mistaken in believing Progress can cure all of mankind’s many ills, but it does a pretty good job in treating a lot of literal ills.

The other day I read about a woman who favored certain famous quack treatments for a relative dying of Covid-19, and who pestered his no doubt overburdened health care workers about it. One commentator on the situation said that the woman had attended the Dunning-Kruger School of Advanced Medicine.

Next, something a little lighter. Some time ago I was watching a video of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” sung in by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1986. At 2:53, the camera points toward a fellow in the audience, the one with dark curly hair — and instantly I recognized him.

That’s Dave, an old friend of mine I met in in the mid-80s Nashville, where he was from. Later we hung out in Chicago, since he went to graduate school there. These days he lives in Minnesota and teaches art. According to his Facebook page, he’s also a fellow at the Center for Residual Knowledge, Division of Other Things.

Bet I could get a fellowship there.

I didn’t realize the Winter Olympics were starting today until I saw it mentioned online. Upcoming events, according to the site, include figure skating, freestyle skiing, ice hockey, snowboarding, curling, bobsled and Uyghur internment, which is special to these Games.

Genocide aside, and that’s a big aside, I can’t muster much interest in the Games, except maybe for luge and skeleton, the events most likely to inspire spectacular accidents.

Modern Antiques

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The other part of Ann’s birthday present from her parents consisted of purchases at an antique mall in Arlington Heights, Illinois, on Saturday afternoon. It had been a while since we’d been there — the last time might have been when I spotted Billy Beer for sale — but we figured she might find some beads or bead-adjacent materials there. She did.antiques

“On the whole it’s a likable place stuffed to the gills with debris from across the decades. I like looking around, just to remind myself how much stuff there is in the manmade world,” I wrote five years ago. Still apt. I also mentioned that place used to discourage photography.

If that’s still the case, I didn’t see any signs to tell me so this time. Maybe the proprietors gave that rule up as hopeless, since every single person who wanders in will have a high-quality, very easy to use camera in pocket or purse. Besides, how is the place going to be on social media if it disallows pictures?

So I took a few pictures. Such as of the plentiful reading material, including good old Mad, font of juvenile wisdom as surely as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang before it.antiques antiques

Other objects. Many other objects.

Husman’s of Cincinnati is no more — as of only last year.

I didn’t take any kind of rigorous inventory, naturally, but I can’t shake the feeling that the mall’s stock is on a bell curve in terms of item-age, with the bulge being from the 1950s through the 1970s, and tapering off at each end. That is to say, nostalgia for people just about my age.

With some older items in the mix, of course.

Along with objects that look fairly new.
Bead World Palatine

The games entertained me most of all, without me having to play them.

Some standards: Operation, Scrabble, Twister, Yahtzee. Some tie-ins: Family Feud, Green Eggs and Ham, Cat in the Hat, Jeopardy. Others: Pass Out, Rummikub, Super Master Mind.

When I looked at that image today I also noticed the Talking, Feeling, And Doing Game, which I’d never heard of. “A psychotherapeutic game for children,” the box says. Copyright date 1973 by an outfit called Creative Therapeutics in New Jersey, and one groovy typeface for the name.

A relic of the much-maligned ’70s, I figured, a rep only slightly deserved, though that’s a discussion for another time. In any case, an echo of that half century ago, now forgotten, right?

Wrong, at least according to Amazon, which asserts that the game is “one of the most popular tools used in child psychotherapy.”

Turns out there’s an entire subspecies of board games that are used in child therapy, as I discovered looking at the Amazon page: Better Me, Emotional Roller Coaster, The Mindfulness Game and Together Point Family, to name just a few. I’m a little glad that I’d never heard of any of them before.

Of all the antique mall games, however, this one amused me most.
Barney Miller game

Could it be that the real prize among board game collectors, and there must be such, is finding a mint copy of the Fish board game, only a few hundred of which were ever sold?

Almost as good.

My family were clearly stick-in-the-muds when it came to tie-in board games. I don’t remember that we had a single one in our collection of a dozen or so games, and no one (including me) ever expressed any interest in them. I don’t even remember my friends having any. Did I miss out on a delightful childhood experience? Nah.

More Winter

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Kicked off February with a day above freezing. Two observations: The only thing good about February is that January is over. Also, winter hasn’t abated. It’s just lulling us with a temporary moment of ease.

The map below is lifted from the NWS, which of course puts it in the public domain. Looks like we’ll get at least a few inches tomorrow, while the real wintertime action is some distance away. Ann will probably experience some heavy snow. I’m glad that didn’t happen on Sunday. Rather, a bomb cyclone had just hit the Northeast. There’s a term I enjoy: bomb cyclone. But it’s not so much fun to be visited by one.weather map 2/1/22

Train of thought for the day, inspired by a Google doodle. Today’s doodle connects you to an page labeled Lunar Calendar, which is a discussion of that kind of calendar, not the specific Chinese calendar whose new year is always around now in the Georgian calendar. That might give people the idea that all lunar calendars begin around now.

Then again, there are vanishingly few people who care about the subject at all. There aren’t any ardent U.S. calendar factions, such as those pushing for a restoration of the Western lunar calendar, asserting that the pointy-headed solar calendar is just an interloper and Sosigenes of Alexandria was a con man, or communities of Julian calendar users in pockets of Appalachia who quarrel with the federal government every year about when Tax Day is. It’s just a fact that most people’s entire concern with the calendar is what day is it now, and how far in the future is this planned event?

Then again again, I don’t know much myself about the Chinese lunar calendar, except that it’s a lunar calendar, it’s Chinese, and new year comes around the beginning of February. And that each year has one of five elements and 12 animals, making for a cycle of 60 years, though that’s actually an aspect of Chinese astrology, which I hold in exactly the same regard as any other astrology.

What calendar knowledge I have is fairly Gregorian and Julian, and some about liturgical calendars, and a bit about the Jewish and Muslim calendars. So maybe I should learn myself some Chinese calendar facts. The remarkable thing is how easy that would be to do in our time, sitting right here at my desk.

Which can easily become a rabbit hole. When I was reading about calendars today, I found a page about Lunar Calendar and Standard Time, which as far as I can tell was made up by some Swedes because they perceived a lack of standard units of time to be used on the Moon.

Deep-Freeze Thursday Melange

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Today wasn’t actually that cold. About 30 degrees F. for an afternoon high, 20 degrees warmer than the day before, a brief interlude before a dive back down. A seamount in the trench of winter.

Actually, I don’t think seamounts rise in trenches, but that doesn’t have to be literally the case for the metaphor, rudimentary as it is, to work. Then again, maybe they do rise in trenches. My oceanographic knowledge itself is fairly rudimentary, though I am fascinated by those maps of the oceans that show the mountain ranges, abyssal plains and trenches.

“Seamounts — undersea mountains formed by volcanic activity — were once thought to be little more than hazards to submarine navigation. Today, scientists recognize these structures as biological hotspots that support a dazzling array of marine life,” NOAA says.

“New estimates suggest that, taken together, seamounts encompass about 28.8 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface. That’s larger than deserts, tundra, or any other single land-based global habitat on the planet.”

Guess that’s the thing I learned today. Unless, of course, NOAA is part of the conspiracy to keep knowledge of the merfolks’ vast underwater kingdoms a secret from the general public, and its facts are actually “facts.” Because that’s just the sort of thing that generally governments do.

Better create some memes tout suite to warm people about NOAA.

Pyramid tea.pyramid tea

I don’t actually remember the brand, since I took the picture a while ago. But I remember it being good tea.

An example of information-free travel writing can be found at a site I ran across recently that purports to offer information for family vacations, in this case its page about the “Best Things to Do in Rochester, Minn.” (I’m not going to link to it.)

The top “best thing” on the list is the Rochester Art Center, which might be a reasonable suggestion. But the site describes it this way: “This enchanting place is home to some of the most fascinating and creative contemporary art you will ever see today. Plus, it encourages people to understand and value art for what it is, making it a great place to visit if you have a soft spot for art.

“The art center boasts a gallery where you can stroll around and admire their lovely contemporary art.”

Gee, if you’re going to publish this kind of vacuousness, at least you can shorten it:
The Rochester Art Center’s got a lot of swell art. Like art? Go see it.

Tuesday Humor

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Up to balmy double-digit Fahrenheit numbers this afternoon, barely, as a brilliant sun reminded me that in January a sunny day usually means it’s cold as Swedish hell.

I didn’t know Dave Barry was still doing his annual humor piece, or even that he was still alive, but so he is on both counts. Found that out today.

In case the Washington Post is behind a paywall, here’s an essential nugget from Barry:

At this point these are the known facts about the pandemic in America:

Many Americans have been vaccinated but continue to act as though they have not.

Many other Americans have not been vaccinated but act as though they have.

Next, a joke that’s evidently begin kicking around a while. I spotted it this morning. I’ve put it, as they used to say in school, in my own words.

Just before he was appointed chancellor, Hitler — always with an interest in the occult — visited a fortune teller and asked her a number of questions, including what day he would die.

The fortune teller told him that he would die on a Jewish holiday.

“How do you know that?” an outraged Hitler demanded.

“Any day you die will be a Jewish holiday.”

Things in the Mail

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Got a circular in the mail recently — another bit of paper, in this supposed digital age — advertising live shows at a metro Chicago theater I’ve been to exactly once, maybe five or six years ago. The theater has never forgotten that, on the off chance that I’d be willing to put in the miles (and it’s quite a few) to see another show there.

Topmost act on the ad? Grand Funk Railroad. It’s a nostalgia-oriented theater, and that name does take me back to adolescent days, or rather nights, of listening to my cheap bedside radio.

The band itself doesn’t have a lot of nostalgia value for me, though. They were fine. Had a few hits. Such as a decent version of “The Loco-Motion,” of all things. They were part of the astonishing variety that was commercial radio in the 1970s, which wasn’t that astonishing until the radio business decided to silo itself in unimaginative ways in later decades.

I was curious enough to look at the band web site, learning the following (all caps sic):

“Grand Funk Railroad is extremely excited to be touring in 2022 marking a 53 year milestone. After playing to millions of fans on the band’s tours from 1996 to 2021, Grand Funk’s 2022 SOME KIND OF WONDERFUL TOUR will continue to reach both new and long-time fans.”

I didn’t know they were originally from Flint, Michigan. Learn something every day. Forget just as much every day as well, probably.

I checked the ticket prices at the theater web site. For seats far away from the stage, $60. Most seats are north of $100, and if you want a seat in the loge right or left, that will run you at least $248. This doesn’t encourage me to see Grand Funk Railroad.

Also in the mail lately.

My name, unusual as it is, is gender ambiguous. I’ve been getting things addressed to Miss and Ms (and maybe Mrs, not sure) for as long as I’ve been getting circulars and other solicitations. That and, of course, a variety of misspellings, including of my last name, which is perfectly phonetic.

Our gas bills, which come all too regularly in the mail, offer up data on the price of natural gas. This isn’t good.

December 2020: 29 cents/therm. December 2021: 68 cents/therm. Good thing the most recent December was warmer than a year earlier, but I’m afraid January isn’t turning out that way.

I had to refresh my memory that a therm = 100,000 Btu. I’ve always liked that name, the British thermal unit. A Btu is the quantity of heat required to raise the temperature of one pound of liquid water by 1 degree Fahrenheit at the temperature that water has its greatest density (at about 39 degrees Fahrenheit). If that’s not a legacy of Victorian scientists, I don’t know what is. Sure enough, it is.

I’d read that natural prices were on the rise, and sure enough, there it is in my bill. “What’s Up with Natural Gas Prices?” this American Petroleum Institute article asks, as if Andy Rooney were asking. The short answer: the market fluctuates, and be glad you aren’t in Europe, where prices are astronomical, rather than merely steep.