This joke in one form or another must go back to vaudeville at least.
What’s that bee doing in my orange juice?
The breaststroke.
Category Archives: Over the Transom
Incident in the Suburbs
My primitive camera really wasn’t up to the task, but I took pictures anyway. The thing to do here in the 21st century. This image was taken at about 7 pm this evening, September 23, in the twilight not long after the equinox sun had set.
A chaos of lights. Tail lights, street lights, fire truck lights, police car lights and ambulance lights. There had been a traffic accident at a major intersection here in the northwest suburbs. One we travel through often. Fortunately for us, we had no part in the incident — weren’t even inconvenienced by it, since we turned into a strip-center parking lot adjacent to the intersection, without having to pass through the intersection.
We’d come to have dinner at a fast-casual restaurant near the strip center that we rarely go to, but which we were inspired to visit this evening. I left the restaurant for a moment and walked to the sidewalk on one of the major streets near the intersection, to see what all the hubbub was about.
A rare chance to rubberneck (figuratively, anyway) without being in a car or annoying the drivers behind you. Not that I could really tell what the hubbub was about, other than one metal device on wheels had hit another one in the recent past, and first responders were responding.
A Motley Thursday Assortment
Congratulations to Geof Huth, who will be a grandfather come 2020. The latest of my contemporaries to do so, but hardly the last, I bet. Who are my contemporaries? People who could have gone to high school with me. An idiosyncratic definition, but I’m sticking with it.
News items pop up on my phone — misnamed, isn’t it? — my communications-information-time sucker gizmo, the work of bots and algorithms that are as mysterious as the Sibylline Books. Usually, it offers nothing I want to read, since the ways of bots and algorithms may be mysterious, but they’re still pretty dimwitted.
Sometimes, though, the offering is just downright bizarre. Recently the phone told me that one Susan Kristofferson had died. Given the name, I thought she was some relation of the singer of that name. I was just curious enough to check (on my laptop), and no — nothing to do with the singer. Nothing to do with me, either. Neither friend nor relative nor even nodding acquaintance.
So why did the phone tell me about her? Only the bots and algorithms know, and they aren’t telling.
Looks like Tom’s Diner in Denver, whose 1973 atmosphere I enjoyed in 2017, will soon be no more. Too bad to see a good diner go, Googie or not.
Late last year, I groused about a Chicago joint that serves $8 slices of pie, a price that compares unfavorably even to Manhattan. In Lansing, Michigan, recently, I paid about $8 for creme pie — but for that price we got two slices that we shared.
Tasty pie. Served by the Grand Traverse Pie Co., with 15 locations, all of which are in Michigan, except for an oddball in Terra Heute, Indiana. Sure, it’s cheaper to operate in a small city, but that alone can’t account for the difference between $4 and $8 slices.
Until recently, I hadn’t heard “Step Right Up” by Tom Waits in years. You might call it advert-scat. It’s funny.
I first heard it in college, because my friend Dan had some Tom Waits records, most memorably Small Change. Listening to it now, it occurs to me that some of the phrases have mostly passed from common use in the advertising world, such as please allow 30 days for delivery or the heartbreak of psoriasis or no salesman will visit your home.
So in 100 years, will the song mostly be 20th-century gibberish? Maybe. Still, with a light beat, steady bass and driving sax, I’d listen to Tom Waits sing gibberish.
See All the Hip New Joints!
If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think that Lonely Planet is straying away from its backpacker roots into travel articles infused with that wan emotion felt by wan people, fear of missing out.
Take this article about the Scott’s Addition neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Not long ago, I wrote about an apartment development in the area, and in the course of my research discovered that the district is hip, up-and-coming, the haunt of millennials who have more adventuresome tastes than all previous generations, etc. That wasn’t something I’d known. On the whole, that’s probably good: economic and real estate development for the area, new businesses, people walking around, maybe even a few older buildings saved.
Still, the tone of the article is offputting. Here’s how it starts: “Passionate entrepreneurs have muscled onto the scene: hot art-themed hotels are wowing guests, bold chefs are shaking up the culinary landscape and brewers offer sours and saisons in brand-new tasting rooms.”
A sentence that could be published in precisely any travel guide about anywhere thought to be hip. There’s nothing distinctive about it. Remember in Masada, when one of the other Romans was committing a particularly heinous act, Peter O’Toole’s character stopped him while yelling, This is not Rome! My urge here is to declare, This is not Lonely Planet!
Lonely Planet cares not for art-themed hotels or bold chefs or brand-new tasting rooms. Lonely Planet might take a look in the hotel lobby, but then it finds a cheap lunch and eats it on a bench as life on the streets goes by, which Lonely Planet watches with delight. Lonely Planet smiles at the thought of bold chefs who create must-have creations. How do we know that they are must have? Everybody says so. Guaranteed to be expensive too, and Lonely Planets cares not for that.
That’s not my only beef with this particular article. It’s called “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot.” It should be called, “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot, while well and truly drunk.”
The following is an outline of the article’s suggestions: First, go to a distillery and drink. Then drink cider made from apples so rare only one secret tree in Serendip grows them. Then have dinner, with “craft beer and adult milkshakes” at a “postmodern diner.”
See some art, because art is good, then resume drinking — Chinese food with craft beer. Then more beer. And some more after that, at very arty places. Or maybe saisons or farmhouse ales. Then stagger to another brewery. Don’t forget to eat after that, because the food’s special around here, but also finish things off with more beer!
It’s definitely the tone that bothers me. No doubt all of the recommended places are quite good, if that’s what you want. Some of my old friends have epicurean and gourmand tendencies, after all. The tone of the article, on the other hand, is Hit! All! The! Special! Places! or your trip will be crap, your time wasted and your soul unnourished.
Une Impitoyable Savate Japonaise
Ah, marketing blarney. The other day I noticed a big plastic bottle of body wash on a shelf. Let’s leave aside for the moment the fundamental question of how that’s different from soap, other than a higher price per oz., and look at the text on the back of the bottle. Hogwash for body wash.
I won’t give the brand any free advertising, however microscopic. Enough to say that it’s a well-known and longstanding brand of personal care products, owned by a conglomerate. Almost everyone my age with access to American TV in the latter years of the 20th century, and probably a good many people older and younger, could whistle its jingle, so catchy and ubiquitous it was.
Also know that the brand has long been aimed at men, encouraging them to be manly men who do manly things, and in no way ironically. Still seems to, as you will see.
Anyway, the body wash bottle has text in English and French, since I suppose Canadians buy it too. As follows:
Doesn’t leave you feeling dry or rob you of your dignity.
Hm.
Like wearing an armor of man-scent.
Armor’s an interesting choice. More manly than residue, I guess. But the last line was my favorite. It made me laugh. Out loud. Chuckle, that is.
Drop-kicks dirt, then slams odor with a folding chair.
French isn’t my language, but the French text seems to hew pretty close to the English, until that last line:
Lutte contre la salete et les odeurs et le envoice au tapis pour le compte grace a une impitoyable savate japonaise.
I won’t vouch for its accuracy, but I did find one online translation for the last part of that sentence that seems plausible: “Sends [odor] to the mat with a devastating Japanese roundkick.”
Maybe that’s what the French call a roundhouse kick, for reasons best known to them. Maybe not. I’m amused all the same.
Bugs Burger Night
Thirty-six years ago I worked for a few months at an upscale restaurant in Nashville. If I remember right, it wasn’t open on Mondays, and one Sunday when I hadn’t been there long, word came down that we had to get the place ready for Bugs Burger Night, which would happen after the restaurant closed that evening.
Before long I understood that meant exterminators were coming to give the restaurant a top-to-bottom treatment, and we had to put away the food and dishes and so on. It was a pretty big deal, this Bugs Burger Night, and the phrase was curious enough to pique my interest. The treatment of course was a regular thing, every few months, so I assumed that “bugs burger” was just restaurant-specific slang passing along from more experienced employees to the likes of me. Fun in the way slang can be. Maybe the exterminators were feeding the bugs a burger of death.
It even inspired me to dream up a title that was never attached to any story: The Long Bugs Burger Night of the Soul. Or The Dark Bugs Burger Night of the Soul.
That oddity was duly tucked away in the part-organized, part-chaotic filing cabinets of my memory. Files that have a way of popping into conscious thought without warning, which I suppose is a function of the chaotic side. That’s all a long way of saying that “Bugs Burger Night” popped into my head the other day. Then I did what we do in modern times: Googled it.
Bugs Burger was part of a brand name. That shouldn’t have surprised me, but it did. Pest Management Professional told me about Alvin “Bugs” Burger (d. 2015), founder of Bugs Burger Bug Killers, a Miami-based national exterminator. So professionals from BBBK were coming to the restaurant that night. Though Alvin “Bugs” is gone, the name lives on.
Small pleasures aren’t just the likes of enjoying a favorite old food or a spying a colorful cloud formation or a reading a postcard from an old friend. They can also be intangible, like a small thought from your remote past reappearing for a reinvention in the present.
High Summer Hiatus
Saw a few fireflies the other day, a certain sign of that nebulous period, high summer. The days might be getting shorter, but you don’t notice that yet — like the long moment at the top of ballistic trajectory. Back to posting around July 7.
Usually I rely on rain to wash my car or, if absolutely necessary, a hosing down on a warm day. But after our recent summertime jaunt to central Illinois-Indiana, enough bugs had met their insectoid maker against the leading edge of my car that I ponied up for an automated car wash. Half price ($5), though, since I had a coupon.
I find the journey through the car wash, at less than two minutes, visually and sonically interesting. I get that for my money, besides the removal of bug splatter.
So I held my camera as steady as possible during the splashing and blooping and hissing and flapping, along with elements of a minor light show.
The dog spent some time this morning trading insults with a resident squirrel. At least that’s how I want to think of it. The dog spotted a squirrel in the major back yard tree around 9 and immediately started looking up and whining at it, as she often does. Soon the squirrel was making its own noise, something like a duck with laryngitis.
Age has slowed her (the dog) down a little, but not yet when it comes to guarding the back yard against other creatures. Earlier this year, she spent time trying to scratch through the deck to reach what I suspect was a brood of possums. They seem to be gone now, since that dog behavior has stopped for now.
Chanced on a site called Yarn the other day that purports to offer a search “by word or phrase for TV, movies, and music clips.” So I decided to test it.
Why that phrase? Just popped into my head like the Stay-Puft Marshmallow Man.
Nihil Aeternum Est, Shoe Edition
Rain and more rain. Lush grass. But at least the temps now seem to be 70 F or higher all the time, as befitting summer. Not that this weekend was “the beginning of summer.” Just the solstice.
Saturday was clear and warm, and I picked out these shoes for the day.
I’d acquired them in March at a resale shop, where they looked only a bit worn, but had forgotten about them until I was looking through a pile of shoes on Saturday, finding them in a small bag with the receipt still inside (the only reason I knew when I bought them). Most of the shoes in this house — the vast majority — are not mine. If I could acquire two pairs of shoes, one formal, one for comfortable walks, that would last the rest of my life, I would do that.
Of course, I can’t do that because shoes wear out. Sometimes I buy new, sometimes at resale, though that’s tricky, since my size is a little large. Anyway, I wore the pictured shoes during a drive to another suburb and for a little walking around. Not far at all — maybe half an hour walking all together, if that, plus time sitting.
As I drove home, the bottom of one of the shoes felt a little odd. Since I was driving, I couldn’t inspect them closely. When I got home, I did.
The sole of one had almost completely separated from the rest of the shoe.
Just like that. I didn’t kick anything violently or bang the shoe on a table Khrushchev style or do anything else that might account for a sudden separation.
I neglected to check the brand, but I did note that the shoes were made in Portugal. Make what you will of that. For all I know, Portugal has a reputation for the worst shoes in the EU. Or maybe it just exports the weaker product out of the euro-zone.
The person who owned the shoes before me probably wore them exactly to their natural limit and then, luckless me, I bought the one-hoss shay the day before it fell apart. Then again, I think I spent all of $4, so the loss wasn’t vast.
Lake Mills and Its Pyramidal Oddity
In late May, I benefited from a bit of service journalism offered by the Chicago Tribune, which told me that the state of Wisconsin wasn’t charging entry fees to state parks on the first weekend in June.
So on June 2, we sought to take advantage of the situation by driving up to Wisconsin for the day — and probably proving the marketing arm of the state right when it calculated that such an offering would attract some out-of-state visitors, especially from Illinois.
Before we went to any state park, however, we stopped in the pleasant town of Lake Mills, which is in Jefferson County in the southern part of the state, between Madison and Milwaukee. We had a satisfying lunch at a diner called Cafe on the Park, which is on Main St. across the street from Commons Park. Then we took a stroll over to the park.
Visible from the park are some interesting buildings, such as the former Odd Fellows Hall and local opera house. Now it’s occupied by an antique mall.
The charming Lake Mills Public Library. Closed on Sunday, or I would have gone in.
There’s a bandstand in the park. Wouldn’t be a proper small-town park without one. With patriotic bunting. Nice touch. Formally it’s the Franklin Else Memorial Bandstand, though you (I) could argue it’s a large gazebo.
The Veterans Monument in the park is a little odd. It’s respectful and all, but has some unusual design elements.
It has a triangular shape, for one thing, with three triangular columns rising from a triangular base to support a triangular top. Triangles are also etched into the design in various places.
Besides all that, a black stone pyramid is the centerpiece of the memorial. Why? Or, if you’re feeling more surprised, WTF?
No marker on or near the monument explains. I didn’t know what to make of that local oddity until I got home and looked around some.
Twenty years ago, the Tribune published an article about Lake Mills and its adjacent body of water, Rock Lake.
“There’s something in Rock Lake.
“What, exactly, lies at the bottom of this placid fishing hole east of Madison is the stuff of local legend, the obsession of scores of divers and the spark of an unlikely controversy that has raged among locals for decades.
“Believers, including many old-timers and diving enthusiasts, say that ancient pyramids, ruins and even a serpent-like, 200-foot-long rock figure lay beneath these algae-filled waters. They say pre-Columbian dwellers built the structures on dry land before the area was flooded by geological upheavals and a dam built in the 1800s.
“Skeptics… say there’s nothing but natural piles of rocks below the 40-foot depths…. the otherwise unremarkable town of Lake Mills, which abuts Rock Lake, [calls] itself ‘City of the Pyramids.’ “
City of Pyramids, eh? Sounds like something a ’30s newspaperman made up and a ’50s chamber of commerce ran with. A little whimsical to incorporate into a veterans memorial, no? Then again, do such memorials need to be somber to the point of sameness, ignoring local lore?
That’s hardly the end of online descriptions of the supposed structures at the bottom of Rock Lake. Grazing through some of them, you come up with lines like:
“You can’t mistake certain things. There’s a city down there. There’s no question about it.”
“There are remarkable, artificial underwater structures beneath the waters of Rock Lake, Wisconsin but unfortunately for many years these prehistoric ruins have been ignored by researchers.”
“Much like Judge Hyer before him, Taylor believed that the three to four pyramids (the number changed with each reporting) was [sic] Aztec in origin and were built during a drought when the lake was completely drained and they were sacrificial altars to the rain god to bring the rains back.”
“Aerial photos, side boat sonar scans, and underwater divers eventually charted a complex of at least nine different stone structures, including: two rectangular pyramids, several stacked-rock walls, two ‘Stone Cone’ areas, a conical pyramid, and a large ‘Delta Triangle’ structure.”
“Former state archaeologist Bob Birmingham told the Wisconsin State Journal in 2015 that the tales were ‘a bunch of baloney.’ ”
Bob Birmingham chalks up the shapes to piles of rock left by receding glaciers, and notes that such piles are found in other Wisconsin lakes. My, that’s boring. Tales of ancient peoples building mysterious structures are awfully romantic.
Somehow, I’m inclined to agree with Bob.
A Festival of Music, 1973
I found this bit of ephemera at my mother’s house last year. She had saved it, tucked away in a envelope. I’d forgotten about the event, but it jogged my memory.
Jog might be too strong a verb. I still don’t remember much about the event, including why I participated. I was in the sixth grade, toward the very end of that year, and didn’t usually participate in choruses. Mainly, I think, because I can’t sing. But somehow or other I decided to do it, and there I am along with scores of other kids.
At the time, Alamo Heights had four elementary schools that fed into a single junior high and high school. Among the names of the kids at the three other elementary schools that I didn’t attend, I recognize a lot of people I didn’t know in 1973, but whom I would know by the time I finished high school six years later.
Considering the structure of the district’s schools, and the passage of time, and the way social interaction goes, that isn’t really so strange, and yet it feels strange when I think about it.
Another irrational feeling that comes to me when looking at the list is how normal most of the first names sound. Especially the girls’ names, like Amy, Barbara, Caroline, Laura, Lisa, Lynn, Mary, Melissa, Patricia, Sharon, Susan and variations on Deborah, Julia, Rebecca and Sandra.
The evening’s program.
Three of the four songs by the elementary chorus were from Up With People. I didn’t know that until reading the program recently. Guess they produced the kind of anodyne songs considered good for elementary school children in the early ’70s.
I’ve read a little about that organization, though I can’t say that I know much about it. But I can’t shake the lingering idea that if Ned Flanders founded a cult, it would be something like that.