Winter Preview

Posted on November 20, 2024 by admin

We’re at the front edge of the first winterish event since last spring. A pretty mild event, as November tends to dish out. Come to think of it, winterish is one of the kinds of days you get in November, with others including gray and damp, and ones that are more pleasant than expected. Sunday was one of those latter kind, an excellent day for a cemetery stroll.

Today and tomorrow (11/20-21) amounts to a mild winter preview. The graph to the right barely needs values, since it captures the downward slide well enough without them. Still, the straight blue line is freezing: 32° F., with the gray lines marking 10-degree differences. Red line: Temps. Green line: Dew point. Purple line: “Feels like.”

Dew point is one of those concepts that I need to look up whenever I think about it, which isn’t that often. It’s not as if anyone will ever say to you, “How about that dew point last night? Man!”

Still, it’s good to know things, but for whatever reason, some things have little traction for me when it comes to being remembered or understood; and dew point is one of those. Just another small reason I’m not a scientist.

This afternoon the wind was brisk and some light snow fell. Nothing serious enough to interfere with errands. One of those took me to the vicinity of the Schaumburg Township Library. There has been a vacant lot across the street from the library for as long as I’ve known about the spot – more than 20 years. Signs have come and gone, promising this or that development, then nothing.

Now something has appeared. Or is in the process of appearing, via new construction.

Hopscotch Beer, Bar and Kitchen. A little looking around makes me think it’s not part of a chain. Usually that’s easy enough to find out. This place doesn’t seem to be affiliated with HopScotch Beer and Whiskey Bar in Franklin Park, just south of O’Hare, which still has a Facebook page but seems otherwise to be defunct. Or related to a standalone place called Hopscotch Kitchen & Bar in Oklahoma City, which seems to be in business.

The Facebook page of Level Construction, which is building the site in Schaumburg, says the restaurant will feature “a vibrant gaming area , an energetic dance floor and indoor golfing and sports simulators .” It included exactly those emojis.

Emojis are no extra charge, I hope.

We Decide Who’s Naughty or Nice

Posted on November 17, 2024 by admin

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

Posted on November 14, 2024 by admin

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.

Ask St. Joseph

Posted on November 13, 2024 by admin

Cold rain, shorter daylight, still some green, since there hasn’t been a hard freeze yet. But it won’t be long. Mid-November has arrived all sullen and damp.

We’re not in the market to sell our house, but some things you can’t help noticing. I spotted this in the impulse-buy section near checkout at a hardware store I visit sometimes, an alternative to the big box DIY store not far away, where seeking a particular item can turn into a longish expedition.

I’d heard about burying a statue of St. Joseph to help along a residential sale – I think back around ’09, when that method was probably as good as any other. But I hadn’t thought about it since.

Ten minutes of looking around on line about the practice, and you find out at least two things: a number of sites offering instructions on burying your statue that may or may not endorse the practice, but certainly seem to say what the heck, might as well give it a go (such as here). On the other hand, there are also short essays about the superstitious nature of the practice (such as here), asserting that Catholics shouldn’t be burying saint statues upside down, or at all.

It made me wonder whether St. Joseph can help renters find an apartment that doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, which would be seriously useful assistance in the current market. He is the patron of housing, after all. Just another thing to think about waiting in line at the hardware store.

London Town

Posted on October 23, 2024 by admin

Things you can do in London: walk along the Thames; visit Covent Garden; and see St. Paul’s Cathedral. We did all of those things in the original London, once upon a time.

Earlier this month, we managed two out of three in London, Ontario. The cathedral was closed. Some other time, maybe, since you can drive from metro Chicago to the Canadian London in about six hours, provided traffic snarls on the highways just south of Lake Michigan aren’t any worse than usual and you don’t encounter a testy Canadian border guard, as I did on Canada Day all those years ago, for the most thorough border-crossing inspection I ever received, before or since.

The Thames as it passes through downtown London. The banks are mostly parkland.

Actually, that point is the meeting of the North Thames and the Thames, locally known as the Folks. The river is called as La Tranche in French and Deshkaan-ziibi in Ojibwe, Antler River.

The King Street pedestrian bridge connecting the banks.

Near the Folks is the HMCS-NCSM Prevost, flying these colors – the Canadian Naval Ensign, if I understand correctly.

All that is a fair amount to unpack: the ensign is flying on land because the Prevost is a stone frigate, a naval facility on land. HMCS is His Majesty’s Canadian Ship, of course, but this being Canada, it is also NCSM, Navire canadien de Sa Majesté. The site is a training and recruiting center for the Canadian Navy, and also home to the Battle of the Atlantic Memorial. Another sign is in French, but I only made a picture of the English.

The memorial is still under construction, according to the London Free Press, and it looked like it, with memorial stones being put into place on a small slope. Dedication will be next May, on the 80th anniversary of the end of that battle, which lasted until the Germans surrendered.

I decided to look up one of the ships memorialized: the HMCS Valleyfield.

Commissioned in December 1943. Torpedoed and sunk May 7, 1944, with the loss of 125 Canadian sailors in the gelid North Atlantic.

After the riverside, we took a short walk through downtown, especially Dundas St.

An unexpected mural on that street.

“Johnny and June” by Kevin Ledo, a Montreal artist, and completed only in 2023. (If you want to see a large Ledo mural depicting a young Alex Trebec, go to Sudbury, Ontario.)

The mural, on the side of London’s Budweiser Gardens sports-event venue, is impressively large, at 45 feet tall and 20 feet wide. Larger than life, certainly. A nearby sign says it commemorates the moment on February 22, 1968, when Johnny Cash proposed to June Carter on stage during a concert in London.

As for Covent Garden, that’s where we had lunch. Site of a public market since 1845, though I expect things have been cleaned up some since then.

Not quite as grand as the one in the larger London, but well worth the stroll to look at the shops, and find an eatery. We ate at a Brazilian place. Don’t see too many of those in food halls. Most satisfying.

Lots of goods. Is there a Canadian content requirement?

A few more London details, near Covent Garden. We didn’t see on foot the part of town I found more intriguing, which we drove through: the area around Western University (a.k.a., University of Western Ontario, enrollment more than 40,000). Might be a good place to look around if we ever take that trip to the Stratford Festival, which is practically down the road from London.

I have to like a place with a name like that.

Roadside Ontario

Posted on October 22, 2024 by admin

A few miles (hard measuring habit to break, and why should I?) south of Kincardine, Ontario, is Reid’s Corner Antiques. Now this is my kind of antique shop: not an ounce of froufrou.

I think Reid himself waived us into the building, which had no one else inside. He was a strong-looking fellow in the middle of middle age, and he had a noisy machine on a truck to attend in some way. So we went in.

It’s easy to feel at home in clutter. I know not everyone feels that way, but I also don’t care. All the many Reid’s Corners in the world are a place to revel in the quantity and quality, but especially the quantity, of the vast amount of stuff produced by people.

A place like this ought to be supported by a little cash money, at least. This was under consideration for purchase.

In the end I went with a newer plate, one not quite as old as I am, which joins plates from Texas, Tennessee, Illinois and a Washington state BIGFOOT gag plate in the garage.

Reid’s Corner happens to be on Ontario 21, the two lanes that parallel the Lake Huron shore. If you’re on the way to London, you head southeast from Goderich on Ontario 8 briefly, and then a slightly different direction on Ontario 4. The place where highways 8 and 4 meet is Clinton, Ontario, pop. 3,200.

Near the juncture I caught sight of a fine block of buildings – the Victoria Block (see no. 53), erected 1877. Erected by genuine Victorians, by gar.

Nice. Then there was a large radar antenna perched in a traffic island.

Double take. I have to see that, I told Yuriko as I parked the car on the side of the road. Traffic was fairly light in Clinton, so it was no complicated thing to take a closer look on foot.

Like Reid’s shop, the wider world has human clutter. Not just objects, but stories. Early in WWII, a secret site near Clinton became the first radar training school in North America, the plaques relate, set up by the Royal Air Force as a safe location. The Canadian armed forces kept the facility open long after the end of the war and wartime secrecy, through the mid-Cold War, but eventually closed it. The town got a really big memento on the occasion of the country’s centennial in 1967.

Sauble Beach & Goderich, Ontario

Posted on October 21, 2024 by admin

I was a little surprised the seagull allowed me to get this close.

On the other hand, he’s a resident, at least sometimes, of Sauble Beach on Lake Huron. He’s used to people, because people show up in large numbers at Sauble Beach when the sun is hot, and that birdbrain of his is enough of a brain to know that the beach apes are usually harmless. Even better, food always seems to be around them, and they’re pretty careless about dropping some of it.

We’d come to Sauble Beach – the unincorporated town of that name and the beach of that name in Ontario – after our easy walk around Sauble Falls PP a few miles (ah, km) to the north. We were looking for lunch. And there it was.

Note the distinct lack of a crowd. Out of frame are two high school boys eating, and they were all the other customers at that moment, toward the end of (2 pm) conventional lunchtime on the Thursday ahead of Canadian Thanksgiving weekend. Other places were already closed for the season, but Beach Burger soldiered on for the trickle of customers still around.

A beach feast.

The concoction on the right, of course, is poutine. It’s not just for Québécois any more. Nor even just for Canadians.

Beach towns have beach businesses.

Which would be pointless without the beach.

Further down the coast, Goderich bills itself as the Prettiest Town in Canada, at least on the postcards I bought there. I will say that the courthouse square has some fine vintage buildings.

The severe Huron County Courthouse itself, a 1950s replacement for a building that burned down.

Nicely placed color on the square.

We walked around the square, which was pretty much our entire experience with Goderich that day, except for popping into the just-off-the-square Goderich Branch of the Huron County Library to (1) admire the building and (2) find a restroom. Waiting for Yuriko, I had a short talk with one of the staff, and found out that the building was originally a Carnegie library. The robber baron financed libraries in Canada too. Who knew?

The square isn’t actually a square, but octagonal, with eight commercial blocks and roads radiating out in alignment with the eight points of a compass, according to Paul Ciufo, who wrote an audio guide to the square, as confirmed by Google Maps. Ciufo calls the design “unique in Canada.”

“The plan was chosen by John Galt, Superintendent of the Canada Company, and co-founder of Goderich in 1829,” Ciufo says. “Galt was a polymath — a businessman, world traveler, and friend of the Romantic poets. Galt wrote a biography of Lord Byron, and authored novels second in popularity only to Sir Walter Scott’s. Town planning fascinated Galt, and he yearned for more creative designs than the grid pattern favoured by the Royal Engineers.”

William “Tiger” Dunlop

Another founder of the town was an even more colorful Scotsman, William “Tiger” Dunlop (d. 1848). The 19th century was quite the time for ambitious men looking to be colorful.

After serving with distinction as a doctor in the War of 1812, “[Dunlop] went… to India where, as a journalist and editor in Calcutta, he took a hand in forcing the relaxation of press censorship,” the Dictionary of Canadian Biography tells us. “His unsuccessful attempt to clear tigers from Sagar Island in the Bay of Bengal, in an effort to turn the place into a tourist resort, provided him with his famous nickname…”

Eventually Dunlop went to Upper Canada, involving himself heavily in efforts to settle the area as an official with the Canada Company.

“The year 1832 saw publication of his guide for emigrants, Statistical sketches of Upper Canada, an event that… helped put him back on public view,” the dictionary continues. “This engaging book, written under the pseudonym A Backwoodsman, mixes some (small) practical advice with much tomfoolery and fully exploits the author’s humorous persona. In his chapter on climate, for example, Dunlop says that Upper Canada ‘may be pronounced the most healthy country under the sun, considering that whisky can be procured for about one shilling sterling per gallon…’

“During the rebellion in Upper Canada in 1837-38, Dunlop raised a militia unit, whose nickname, The Bloody Useless, gives a clue to the important role it played…

“Dunlop is said to have done everything on a grand scale, and this is nowhere more evident than in his drinking. He kept his liquor in a wheeled, wooden cabinet called “The Twelve Apostles.” One bottle he kept full of water: he called it, naturally, ‘Judas.’ His reputation as a maker of punch ‘and other antifogmaticks’ was legendary with the Blackwoodians.”

Antifogmatic. I knew I got out of bed this morning for something; to learn such a fine word.

Sarnia to Tobermory

Posted on October 14, 2024 by admin

Fairly early on the morning of October 8, this sign got my attention.

It’s hard to know whether that’s a gracious gesture on the part of the City of Sarnia, Ontario, or a mild example of Northern nanny state-ism — the difference between you’re welcome to scatter here vs. you can only scatter in permitted places. But it was also good to know that we had the option, if we happened to have any ashes with us.

For all I know, people are scattered here often, and it certainty would be harmless compared to a lot of chemicals that have gone into the St. Clair River around Sarnia over the years. After all, this the home of the Sarnia Blob, an example of industrial pollution so epic that it has its own name.

That morning, after a modest breakfast and checking out of our room only a few blocks away, we went to take a look at Point Lands, a Sarnia municipal park on the St. Clair. Beyond the cremation sign is a view of Port Huron, Michigan, U.S. industrial twin of the Canadian industrial town of Sarnia.

Almost 40 years ago, Dow Chemical managed to spill over 2,900 gallons of perchlorethylene, a dry-cleaning solvent, with more than 520 gallons of that oozing into the St. Clair. That combined with God knows what else to form a massive a tar blob. The river at this point is home to much of Canada’s chemical and petrochemical industry, and let’s say the attitude about chemicals in the water in most decades of the 20th century was a mite lax.

The dark mass settled, submerged on the riverbed. Before long it was found by divers, and eventually its high toxicity became a major environmental news story. Something like the burning of the Cuyahoga River, though with Canadian reserve compared to the brashness of the American fire. They say since then the St. Clair, like the Cuyahoga, has been remediated, but I’m not taking a dip.

If word of the chemical waste blob got to me in far-off Nashville in 1985, I’ve long forgotten. Later Dow Chemical bugged out of Sarna, but not before commissioning a model of the Great Lakes in concrete in this park.

Including a model of Niagara Falls.

Up the coast from Sarnia, we bought gasoline from the Kettle & Stony Point Gas & Convenience, which I assume is owned and operated by members of the Kettle & Stony Point First Nation. It was a full-service gas station, with a fellow asking how much I wanted and then pumping it in (fill ‘er up). I couldn’t tell you the last time I ran across that, but it’s been decades. Also, its prices were about 10 cents a liter cheaper than other stations around there, making for an all-around good retail experience.

Near the station, the tribal water tower.

At this point we were traveling on highway King’s Highway 21 (Ontario 21, as far as I’m concerned), a two-lane blacktop that mostly follows the Lake Huron shore. On that shore is Pinery Provincial Park, a 6,260-acre stretch of beach and oak savanna. For us, it meant easy hiking in the forest and walking on the beach, so we spent a few hours there.

That kind of exercise inspired a quest for a latish lunch, which we found at the Out of the Blue Seafood Market in the town of Bayfield, feasting on Lake Huron whitefish fish & chips in the nondescript shop. The road food ideal: delicious, local, inexpensive and found completely by chance.

Ontario 21 was often a pleasant drive, though passing through well-populated areas meant slow going sometimes. The road wasn’t exactly crowded, but busy enough to be a little tiring. Only a little. Mostly we crossed farmland. Grain fields, the likes of barley, sorghum and oats, I understand, eventually gave way to cattle fields and woods and wetlands.

The wind had kicked into high gear by later in the afternoon, when we got to Kincardine. Formerly illuminating the harbor is a lighthouse, a late 19th-century creation.

Another story I learned, facing the lake at Kincardine: one about a Canadian member of the First Special Service Force.

Later, we connected with Ontario 6, which is quite the road, and took it north on the Bruce Peninsula proper to Tobermony. Settlement got sparser and sparser the further north we went.

The northern section of Ontario 6 is connected to the southern section by a large ferry docking at Tobermory; we saw it loading the next morning, which naturally led to musings. On to Manitoulin Island? Up from there to connect on the mainland with the Trans-Canada Highway into Sault St. Marie?

Not this time. But you know how it goes: distant roads are calling me. Except that they’re not actually that distant.

Archie McPhee

Posted on September 25, 2024 by admin

Words to live by: No home is complete without a rubber chicken. I’m sure Archie McPhee would agree.

Except that he’s a commercial fiction, invented to sell rubber chickens and many other novelty items at a store named Archie McPhee. The place happens to be within walking distance of Lilly and Dan’s apartment in the Wallingford neighborhood of Seattle, so I walked over and took a look the last full day we were in town.

Archie McPhee is in a basic building, whimsically adorned, on N. 45th St., which is the commercial spine of Wallingford, at least part of its way.

As a novelty store, it’s chock-a-block with novelties.

A lot of Bigfoot items. This is the Pacific Northwest, after all.

The store web site lists the following categories to make your shopping easier: Rubber Chickens, Bigfoot, Unicorns, Cats, Hands, Birds, Squirrels, Bacon & Meat, Zombies & Monsters, Pickles, Underpants, J.P. Patches, Creepy Horse Head, Religion.

Hands? Yes. An oddity I had no idea existed.

J.P. Patches? “The J.P. Patches Show aired on KIRO-TV in Seattle from 1958-1981 and broadcast over 10,000 episodes in its 23-year run,” Archie McPhee tells those of us who grew up in other parts of the country.

“Just about every kid who grew up in the Northwest during that time tuned in as Julius Pierpont Patches, Mayor of the City Dump, entertained them with cartoons, sketches and special guests.”

Besides some postcards, I bought a Meditating Bigfoot. Only $4. A store like this needs support from the public.

I didn’t buy a rubber chicken. We have one already, and Lilly specifically asked me not to buy one to leave at her apartment, because she knows how I think.

The star of the shop is naturally rubber chickens, including (I think) what’s called the world’s largest.

Maybe so. But there might be bigger ones in Guangdong Province, what with its centuries of history as a rubber chicken hub. But never mind, Archie McPhee has a Rubber Chicken Museum.

A gimmick, for sure. But it does have rubber chickens of historic interest on display behind protective glass.

With explanatory notes.

So it is a museum of sorts. More than House on the Rock, I think.

“Our owner, Mark Pahlow, started the business selling rubber lizards and other crazy things out of his house in L.A.,” the store says. “He found that people couldn’t get enough of his collectible junk, but he needed space for his company to grow. Risking it all, he packed his entire inventory into a U-Haul truck and headed for Seattle. In 1983 he set up shop with two employees in Seattle’s Fremont district using the name ‘Archie McPhee.’ ”

Eventually, Pahlow needed more novelties than whoever makes them in (say) Guangdong Province could provide, so he started designing his own. Now the company produces as many as 200 new products a year, or at least he did about eight years ago, according to Atlas Obscura, an article worth reading for its tales of the weirdness involved in making and selling weird things.

One-of-a-Kind Montana Shops

Posted on September 18, 2024 by admin

US 287 north from Helena, Montana, is a little short on signs of human habitation.

Eventually, you come to the Census-designated place called Augusta, pop. 300 or so. Part of its Main Street is US 287, featuring the sort of things you expect in a small-town main street.

A main street in Montana, that is.

There are other ideas about what the flag should look like, and considering the wave of new state flags, it might be changed.

Then there was this house stuffed to the gills with stuff, offering that stuff for sale. A lot of stuff. A resale business dealing in stuff, let’s say. No formal name that I could see.

We couldn’t pass that by. The mind boggles at how this accumulation accumulated, and you should boggle your mind every now and then. The place was so jammed that I had to be conscious of every movement, lest I bush into something and cause of avalanche of stuff.

Lots of stuff outside, too.

Say, whatever happened to Lash LaRue?

Just curious. I’m not enough of a fan to buy a beat-up $20 comic book, though I bought a few postcards unrelated to LaRue or Westerns or even movies.

In fact, I didn’t know much about LaRue, so I later read one of his obituaries. He died only in 1996, with B Westerns having long passed him by. Even by the early ’70s that was the case, as reflected by the Statler Brothers’ catchy 1973 bug-in-amber song, “Whatever Happened to Randolph Scott?” (Who died in 1987.)

Just west of the western entrance of Glacier NP, on US 2 in the town of Columbia Falls, Montana, is Ten Commandment Park, a.k.a. God’s Ten Commandments Park. I hadn’t read that Roadside America article or heard about it in any way. But I saw it. Couldn’t pass that by either. Not retail, strictly speaking, but there were items for sale inside. Or, I suppose, available for a donation.

The welcome center is along a U-shaped driveway that sports many billboards.

Some exhorted one and all to follow a specific Commandment; others were pro-religious quotes from famed U.S. presidents; and yet others lauded Jesus.

I had to go in.

A fellow of about my age, large and gray bearded, was there to greet me. Frankly I expected a bit more witnessing from him. Instead, he told me to look around, let him know if I wanted to buy anything, and he offered license plate-sized Ten Commandments and Jesus magnets for free. Also, a few free snacks. That was it.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Category Archives: Retail