Category Archives: Over the Transom

The Summer of Zoom

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If you’d asked me a year ago — six months ago — whether video conferencing would be a good way for old friends to meet, I wouldn’t have believed it. Now I do. Over the weekend, I participated in two Zoom conferences, all involving people I’ve known for nearly 40 years.

Besides me in Illinois, the other participants were in Tennessee and Washington state.

Again, besides Illinois, the participants were in Alabama, Michigan, Massachusetts and Peru.

Most enjoyable, both of them. That makes three social Zooms so far, with no more scheduled right now, but I have another few groups in mind for the not-so-distant future.

Cherry Pickers for Rent

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While walking the dog yesterday, we noticed a cherry picker parked on a neighboring street. A rental cherry picker. Big letters on the side said RENT ME, and provided an 800 number to call.

If I’d thought about it beforehand, I would have realized that rental cherry pickers existed. Of course they do. All kinds of equipment is for rent. Still, I thought it was a little funny. I’d only ever seen them in official use, such as by a city or town for needful repairs or tree-trimming along roads.

How about renting a cherry picker, not to do anything useful with it, but just to ride up and down and get a look around from treetop level? I mused out loud. Have your cousin Bob drive you around while you’re up top.

Lilly suggested that might be illegal. I allowed that it probably would be, besides being exceptionally dangerous. Something Florida Man might do, I continued, while good and drunk. And naked.

Thursday Bits

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I’ve heard of other large models of the Solar System, but not about the one in Sweden. There’s one much closer at hand, whose Sun and inner planets are in Peoria, but I’ve never gotten around to seeing it.

A recommended YouTube series: Lessons from the Screenplay. Ann introduced me to it by suggesting one comparing the character arcs of Parasite and Sunset Boulevard, something I would never have thought of. The narrator, who introduces himself as Michael, makes a novel and compelling case for the comparison.

I watched a couple more over the last few days, one about The Shinning — which I haven’t seen in about 30 years, and probably should again, same as Sunset Boulevard — and another about No Country for Old Men. Both videos were thoughtful and interesting, and not too long, which all I ask from YouTube movie criticism.

Looks like SOB lowlifes have co-opted a perfectly good nonsense word that’s been around for years and years. That’s the vagaries of language for you.

It’s time. I’m a little surprised it’s going to happen so soon, but not sorry to see it go. With any luck, the striking Belle Époque pedestal will be repurposed, rather than torn down.

Logistics on Our Street

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Remember generic products? I do. They showed up in grocery stores in the 1980s. I bought some only occasionally. A lot of people probably could say that, so those black-and-white boxes didn’t endure.

Today, a generic truck showed up on our street to deliver something to a nearby house.

I didn’t see anything large taken out of it to justify the truck as a delivery vehicle. But maybe it carries large and small items. Anyway, it’s fittingly named: a unit of a vast, always-moving, always-changing logistics network stretching from here to China, literally.

Five-Card Day

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Five postcards came in the mail today. I can’t ever remember getting that many at once, except maybe political cards ahead of an election. Actually only four were from human beings I know; the fifth was from the state, reminding me to renew my vehicle registration. Even so, the mailman must think it odd that so many trickle to my address.

Even more remarkably, two of today’s cards depicted places to stay: the Mallory Hotel in Portland, Oregon, which has a different name now, and the Blood Mountain Cabins of Blairsville, Georgia. What accommodations create postcards to sell or give away anymore, besides the Munger Moss Motel? Then again, these particular cards, while not yellow with age, could easily be 20 or 30 years old.

Another was an old tourist card of Rome, and the fourth was a restaurant card, depicting 317@Montgomery Street, a place in Syracuse, NY. Looks pretty nice.

Thursday Slumgullion

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A while ago, I sent a message in a professional capacity to one of Ikea’s subsidiaries. It bounced back, with this message as a reply.

Det gick inte att leverera till följande mottagare eller grupper:
centrespr@ingka.com

Det gick inte att hitta den angivna e-postadressen. Kontrollera mottagarens e-postadress och skicka sedan meddelandet igen. Kontakta e-postadministratören om problemet kvarstår.

Recent movies seen here at home, as if they would be anywhere else, include The Stranger, an Orson Welles noir that I’d never gotten around to seeing; I’ll go along with Variety’s contemporary assessment, quoted in Wiki — it’s a “socko melodrama” — and it made me sorry Welles didn’t get to make that many pictures. Chicago, which was better on the second viewing; the first was when it was fairly new. For a Few Dollars More, which was as good as I remembered it. The pointlessly rejiggered version of Star Wars, which Ann hadn’t seen any version of. The Hundred-Foot Journey, a fair-to-middling foodie movie.

Star Trek watching continues: “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “The Naked Time,” “Space Seed,” and — because I thought Ann should see some of the lesser lights of the original series, “The Way to Eden,” which is the episode that features space hippies. She continues to get a kick out of the series, especially the costumes, and double especially the space-hippie garb. Made me smile, too.

“The Way to Eden” was bad enough, but not quite as bad as I remember. With a few tweaks, such as making the hippies at least slightly sympathetic, it could have been a much better episode.

Speaking of TV, I had an encounter with the spanking-new HBO Max today. As in, something I wanted to watch on a service I already pay for suddenly disappeared into this latest scheme to tunnel into my wallet. FO, HBO Max. There’s nothing on TV I can’t live without. Nothing.

Last Saturday, which was part sunny and later rainy, I did a lot. A lot of the kind of things you do to keep life running more-or-less on track. I record it here because, if in some future time when the memory of the day has faded, I want to marvel — assuming I survive middle age to marvel — at how productive I was that May day during the pandemic. The rest of the family was likewise busy that day, going all Marie Kondo on the upstairs bedrooms, from which much debris has been removed. Call it spring cleaning.

Besides taking my meals and watching an episode of the remarkably good (if basic) Greatest Events of WWII, I mowed part of our lawn, repaired a windchime, did some of the laundry, cleaned the inside of my car, went to the bank, post office, and drug store (all drive through), walked the dog, helped Ann remove a lot of items from a high shelf in her room, did a first run-through of my taxes, helped Lilly fill out her taxes, vacuumed the living room, swept two rooms, fixed a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink, and washed a lot of dishes. I ended the day reading a bit of Moby-Dick, which I’m slowly working my way through.

Wednesday Water & Fire

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Back to posting again on Tuesday. It’s an early Memorial Day this year, five days removed from Decoration Day, and in fact May 25 is as early as it can be under the Uniform Monday Holiday Act. Next year the holiday swings to the latest possible position, May 31, and then in 2022, it’s square on Decoration Day.

Warmish day today, this Wednesday, a relief from a too cool Tuesday. Pleasant enough to have lunch on the deck. The grass is still squishy underfoot.

Many places in this part of the country have had a lot of rain. Too much in some places. I read today that downtown Midland, Mich., flooded because the rain-swollen Tittabawassee breached a dam not far away. Of course, rain was only the immediate cause. Looks like a whole lot of negligence on someone’s part. Boatloads of litigation, dead ahead.

The story caught my attention mainly because we visited Midland only last year, on September 1, taking a stroll in places that are now underwater.

This evening I went outside to take a few things to the garage. Returning, I noticed a bright object in the sky off to the northwest. It looked like a fire balloon. A single one, drifting along. I was astonished. I’m pretty sure I’ve only ever seen pictures of them before, not the thing itself.

Who launched it? Why? Who thought that was a good idea in a suburban area, with rooftops to catch fire? The risk is probably fairly small, but still — that’s not something I want landing near me. On the other hand, the balloon made a pretty sight as it wandered along. I watched it as it went from being a small flickering light to a very small flickering light in the sky, finally disappearing in the distance.

Nori

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Usually I do my own scanning, but in this case, I figured — what’s the point? A fellow named John Lodder posted this image on Flickr under a Creative Commons 2.0 license, meaning I need to give him credit and link to the original site — which I just did. It’s a close-up of nori.We always have nori around the house. It’s used for wrapping edibles, especially to make homemade sushi, which we do fairly often. Not as artful as prepared sushi, but a lot cheaper and just about as good. More finely shredded nori is a garnish.

Nori is seaweed pressed into sheets. That much I’ve long known. I decided to look into it a little further, and discovered something I never knew, which always makes my day: the story of the reinvention of nori and, indirectly, sushi.

Seaweed has been harvested and processed into nori in Japan for centuries, but right after WWII, the industry was in dire straits.

“Despite becoming a staple food of the Japanese, the basic biology of edible seaweed species remained almost completely unknown until [the late 1940s], when pioneering British scientist Kathleen Drew-Baker saved the country’s nori farming industry,” Gastropod says.

“In 1948, a series of typhoons combined with increased pollution in coastal waters had led to a complete collapse in Japanese nori production. And because almost nothing was known about its life cycle, no one could figure out how to grow new plants from scratch to repopulate the depleted seaweed beds. The country’s nori industry ground to a halt, and many farmers lost their livelihoods.

“Meanwhile, back in Manchester, Dr. Drew-Baker was studying laver, the Welsh equivalent to nori. In 1949, she published a paper in Nature outlining her discovery that a tiny algae known as Conchocelis was actually a baby nori or laver, rather than an entirely separate species, as had previously been thought.

“After reading her research, Japanese scientists quickly developed methods to artificially seed these tiny spores onto strings, and they rebuilt the entire nori industry along the lines under which it still operates today. Although she’s almost unknown in the UK, Dr. Drew-Baker is known as the ‘Mother of the Sea’ in Japan, and a special ‘Drew’ festival is still held in her honor in Osaka every April 14.”

I’m not so sure about that last line. I might have missed such a festival when I lived there — Osaka’s a large place — but other sources, such as a longer University of Manchester article about about Dr. Drew-Baker and nori, tell me the festival is in Uto, Kumamoto.

There’s a memorial to her in Uto, seemingly at a place called Konose Sumiyoshi shrine, which could be confused with Sumiyoshi Taisha (Grand Shrine) in Osaka — within walking distance of where I used to live.

One more thing about nori, at least around here. Our dog likes it. Loves it. One of her favorite things to eat. That has some practical uses, too: any pills the vet prescribes go down a lot easier when wrapped in wet nori.

Jidori Chicken

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Jidori chicken apparently isn’t new, but I miss things. In 2004, the Wall Street Journal said: “Jidori is exactly the same thing as free-range chicken — but it sounds more impressive in Japanese. ‘Free range is a word that if you put on the menu, it’s out of style,’ Johan Svensson, chef of Riingo in New York.

Today I spotted “jidori” on a package that Yuriko acquired at the northwest suburbs’ main Japanese grocery store. Helpfully, it also said “free range,” as well as offering the kanji for the term: 地鶏. Literally, “ground or earth chicken.”

Nice to learn. Even better, the package contained chicken hearts. That conjured up an image of carefree, happy chicken hearts lolling around the lone prairie.

Been a long time since I’d had any chicken hearts. Usually, or at least in my limited experience, a few are packed along with gizzards, which we don’t eat all that often because they tend to be overly chewy. Hearts, on the other hand, are only a little chewy, and with a good sauce, good to eat.

Landscaping Notes

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Warmish today, tomorrow and the next day even better. A pandemic might be on, but at least it’s spring. Except for those few crummy May days — and by that I don’t mean rain. Rain is usually good. What’s better than falling asleep to light rain? I mean any day cold enough to wear a jacket.

Saw a truck driving down the street the other day with “Lares Landscaping” painted on it. Landscaping is still ongoing. I don’t mention that to make a comment on business conditions or restrictions, just to say that the first thing I thought of was, what about Lares & Penates Landscaping? You know, trim your lawn to be on the good side of your household deities.

I have Mrs. Quarles to thank for that train of thought. Henna-haired, eccentric, garrulous — my high school Latin teacher. Or maybe my Latin professor at Vanderbilt, the bald, eccentric, garrulous Dr. Nabers.

We have a fine crop this year.

I refuse to put poison on my lawn just to prevent the annual sprouting of ephemeral dandelions. That’s a tenet of my landscaping. That and no more leaf raking. All through winter, leaves lay on my lawn. By May, they’re gone. So the point of raking leaves is… what?

The dog doesn’t mind the dandelions either (or brown leaves in season).
In a few days, when the lawn is dry enough, I will cut the dandelions down. They’ll be back before long.
Happy to report that once gasoline was put in the tank, the machine woke from its long nap — though not as long as some years, since I remember mowing last just before Halloween.