Spring Valley Farm Oddities

Posted on February 27, 2024 by admin

Sunday wasn’t quite as warm as yesterday, or today, whose unseasonably high temps came to a crashing end amid thunder and lightning and wind. The condition at about 7:30 pm. Sirens wailed from before then till 7:45.

A very spring-like event. Glad it’s over.

But it was warm enough Sunday to stroll a while at one of our default walking places, Spring Valley. We made it to the former farm, where no animals were to be seen. Pigs, cows, chickens, nowhere, though the barnyard odor lingered. No oinks or moos or the flapping of chickens. On vacation? I mused out loud. Off to a meat processing facility? I mused to myself. Kidding, but best not vocalized.

But my quest to see new things, even in very familiar places, and on a granular level, kept me busy. Or if not new things, a new look a them. Such as the wagons.

These look like work wagons. That can lead to a number of musings, such as, what a damn lot of work was involved in running a 19th-century farm. The vehicles are labor-saving devices in their own way, of course, but only so much labor.

It’s not so remarkable that the elderly in our time are in better shape than previous generations, a fact noted from AARP to ZDNET. Nutrition and healthcare are decidedly better now, but the long and short of it is that much work wore people out.

I’m sure I’d seen this bit of farm equipment before. But I’m not sure I’d looked at it. The more I looked, the odder it got.

Someone knows what that is. Locally, maybe someone at the park district. Further away, farmers. Or maybe it’s obvious, and I’m dense. Maybe, but it’s still a puzzler.

I fed the image into TinEye, a reserve image search engine. The results: TinEye searched over 65.7 billion images but didn’t find any matches for your search image. That’s probably because we have yet to crawl any pages where this image appears.

I also took a look at the windmill. Their artistry underappreciated, I believe.

Something was different. Whatever you call that part – the blades? They’d vanished. I was sure of it, and sure enough, when I looked at the picture I took of it in 2012, the difference was clear.

Out for repairs? Stolen for scrap or by a slightly demented collector? Blown down on windy day and wrecked beyond repair? We get those gusts sometimes, see above.

This is February?

Posted on February 26, 2024 by admin

This doesn’t happen often, at least at the tail end of February.

That was the local temp today at 3 pm. Alas, it is also a Monday, meaning I couldn’t sit outside as much as I wanted during the warm hours, though I was able to sip tea on the deck for a few warmth-on-my-face minutes. Out of idle curiosity, I checked the temps at about the same time in Miami.

Huh. What about Fairbanks?

Well, at least that’s seasonal.

Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage No. 66

Posted on February 25, 2024 by admin

More from the physical files: something I’d forgotten I’d participated in, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, which Geof Huth used to publish. It’s on a slip of paper – one of 100 copies – that I received in 1993 while in Osaka, publication date February 28. Looks pretty good for paper that’s now over 30 years old.

The actual size of the slip is about 8.5 x 3.5 inches, and the back is blank. Geof sent me more than one. I gave a few away, but I still have perhaps three or four.

I also don’t remember exactly how I came to create the words. Geof must have asked me to contribute some words; asked by letter or postcard, since this was pre-email, and I never spoke to him over the phone in those days. Then I must have sat down one day, whipped up the neologisms, and then put them in the mail.

The goal, as I vaguely remember, was to come up with words that could have some conventional meaning, but did not. Also, they had to evoke Japan somehow or other. I’m not sure whether the latter was my idea or not, but I believe I succeeded.

Japanease = Japan, ease (easy enough; easy days in Japan).

Tofun = tofu, fun. I knew about tofu long before living in Japan, since the food’s North American popularity had come of age in the 1980s. The very first time I heard of it, maybe, was at the New Guild Coop in Austin in the UT summer of ’81, where a health food enthusiast posted his verse in the communal kitchen:

Tofu/

is good/

for you.

Salarymaniac = Salaryman, maniac. Not too many actual maniacs among salarymen, I bet, but there must have been a few. We gaijin had a term for the vomit one would sometimes see on the sidewalks of Osaka, which looked like the result of a sudden projection straight down from a few feet up, if that. The sort of mess you’d expect from a salaryman who’d drank too much too fast with colleagues, and who managed to make it outside in time. The pattern somehow always included diced carrots. Anyway, that was a salaryman’s hanko.

Yenen = Yen, en. Yen is what we call the currency. En is what the Japanese call it.

Tokyosaka = Tokyo and Osaka, of course. The foreign press, at least in the those days, tended to be in Tokyo, and seemed not to get out of town much, so Tokyo = Japan in a lot of coverage, which was off-putting for those of us in Osaka. Or maybe I felt that way because I’ve long had an affinity for second cities.

Barely Winter Thursday Assortment

Posted on February 22, 2024 by admin

Another warmish day and a not-so-cold evening. We walked the usual path around Lake V. well after dark, taking in the Moon in the cloudless sky now and then. It’s nearly full. Then I remembered that an unmanned American spaceship was due to land near its south pole; Odysseus, which might not be the most auspicious name for a traveler, but at least a noble one from classical antiquity. Maybe the next one will be Penelope or Telemachus.

When I got home, I learned that the landing was successful. Good to know.

A leftover image from “Presidents Day.”

Recently Jay sent me two of those buttons: McGovern and Carter. The others have been hanging there a while.

The Hoover button was created for a Halloween party that a company down the hall from us in the Civic Opera Building used to throw many moons ago. The event wasn’t in that building, but rather the Rookery, whose common areas are excellent for a corporate events. The Harding one I picked up at the Harding Museum in Ohio last year, and the Grillmaster button has nothing to do with U.S. presidents. It was a souvenir of St. Petersburg, Russia.

Spotted at the Schaumburg Township Library not long ago.

It used to say 2023.

“On Saturday, Sept. 23 [2023], more than 850 people gathered at our Central Library (with another 300 joining us online) to watch as we unveiled the contents of a time capsule that was placed in the cornerstone of our Library when it was built in 1998,” the library’s web site says.

I wasn’t one of them. I went to Milwaukee that day instead for Doors Open. The contents of the ’98 capsule are mildly interesting, but one of the Westinghouse Time Capsules, it isn’t. (And no horny toads or cartoon frogs.)

Still, I like the idea of time capsules, enough to bury a few myself once upon a time, including one late in the summer of 1974 in our back yard, which I wasn’t able to retrieve five years later as planned. I dug a few holes in an effort to do so, damaging some grass, which annoyed my mother, if I remember right.

Blue Marble, Green Shoots

Posted on February 21, 2024 by admin

When I had a few moments today, which weren’t that many, I sat under the blue-marble skies out on the deck.

In some comfort, since temps nearly, or did, reach 60° F., and the air was still. Another oddly mild day in this oddly mild February.

In a few places, spots of green underfoot.

The dog sat outside with me for a while as well. That must have been a tonic for her weakness, since her appetite, gone for about a day, returned shortly afterward. That might count as post hoc ergo propter hoc, but I doubt the dog knows anything about logic.

Jack, Ray & Lewis

Posted on February 20, 2024 by admin

At the corner of N. Genesee Street and W. Clayton Street in Waukegan, catercornered across the intersection from the Genesee Theatre, stands a man and his violin in bronze.

It took me a while to figure out the alligators. Nice touch.

Jack Benny, favorite son of Waukegan, has stood there waiting to regale an audience since 2002, in a work by Illinois artist Erik Blome.

People my age only caught the tail end of Benny’s career, and it was years before I realized he could actually play the violin. Or maybe my mother told me that, and I forgot. The radio clips I heard de-emphasized his skill in favor of comedy. Now, of course, it’s easy enough to find clips showing just how talented he was.

A block west of Benny is a newer work, one depicting another Waukegan favorite son: Ray Bradbury, in a work called “Fantastical Traveler” by Zachary Oxman. It’s newer than Benny, erected in front of the Waukegan Public Library only in 2019, on Bradbury’s 99th birthday (he didn’t live to see it, having died in 2012).

I’d come to town to see Lewis Black, playing at the Genesee on Sunday evening, who channels profane rants into comedy that makes me laugh, which is all I ask of comedy. A lot of people feel the same way about him. But he’s an acquired taste, and not for the easily offended: during the show, I saw at least two couples leaving. One person might just be going to the bathroom, but when two leave together in the middle of the act, I guess they feel offended.

Some of his rants are political, but you could hardly call him partisan. I saw two audience members leave soon after he had the temerity to point out that the 2020 presidential election was not, in fact, stolen. Because, he said, no one as disorganized as the Democrats could pull off such a thing.

I wonder how those people didn’t know what they were going to see. A large number of Lewis Black clips are available on YouTube and, indeed, that’s how I heard of him at all. Even better, they’re old man rants, which he has aged into (he’s 75). Seeing him rant as a younger man – a few of those are on YouTube as well – just isn’t the same.

Before the show, and before sunset, I got a look at the Genesee, another former movie palace, dating from 1927, that survived the perils of the later 20th century and is now live theater.

Many nostalgia acts come there. Peter Frampton, for instance, is scheduled to play the Genesee on March 30. I know that because he was prominently advertised in the lobby. Man, he’s lost almost all of his hair since 1976.

Some years ago, I saw Al Stewart at the theater, as the opening act – the only time I’ve ever seen him as an opener – for the band America. That time I spoke with Al’s sometime sideman Dave Nachmanoff, who was in the lobby, and told him that America was fine, but I’d come to see Al. I hope he relayed that to Al.

After Lewis Black, I was able to look around the interior.

Not as unbelievably posh as the Rialto Square – few are – but a fine space.

Waukegan Ramble

Posted on February 19, 2024 by admin

I spent part of Sunday afternoon in Waukegan, a sizable far north Chicago suburb and in fact county seat of Lake County, Illinois. Not my first visit, but a bit out my usual orbit, halfway through that county on the way to Wisconsin and along the shore of Lake Michigan. The day was chilly, but not bad for February, so I set out on foot downtown for a few minutes.

The Lake County Courthouse & Administrative Building isn’t from the classic period of courthouse development, which would be more than 100 years ago now. It’s from the classic period of brutalism (1969), at least in this country.

The Civil War memorial in front (?) is an echo from an earlier time.

I took a drive too, looking for steeples. I knew most any church would be closed already, so I went looking for beautiful or interesting exteriors, and I found one tucked away in a neighborhood not far from downtown. While beauty isn’t quite the word for it, it certainly caught and held my attention.

Completed in 1964 as St. Anastasia Church, since 2020 the building has been home to St. Anastasia and St. Dismas Church, which combined are known as Little Flower Catholic Parish – part of the wave of ecclesiastical consolidation in our time.

The unusual design – at least, I’d never see the likes of it – was by mid-century modernist I.W. Colburn (d. 1992).

“This church… is a simple brick rectangle with arch motifs embracing in a succession of domed tiers on the corners and sides of the building,” reported the Chicago Tribune in 2016. “There are two larger versions of this form extended above the flat roof, which appear as towers. The rear domed tier rises over the main alter and carries an enormous cross on its crown.

“The walls of the building have a patterned surface due to the fact that some of the bricks protrude one half of their length from the flat wall. A portion of the wall is constructed of multicolored glass bricks and is most noticeable from the interior when the sun’s light shines through them filling the church with radiant color. The light thus becomes part of the service.”

Closed, as I thought, but maybe during a future Waukegan Tour of Homes, it will be open. Here’s a picture of the interior, decked out for Christmas.

“The interior repeats the motif of the exterior arches,” according to the Tribune. “The red brick, slate floor, glass and wood, mosaics representing the Stations of the Cross, illuminating skylight, and bronze crucifix over the altar give the worshipper the feeling of having entered a medieval monastery.”

My wanderings took me to a few other Waukegan churches, such as an older Catholic church on the edge of downtown. It says Church of the Immaculate Conception, carved over the entrance in stone, but these days it’s Most Blessed Trinity Catholic Church, the creation of a consolidation of six historic parishes.

Christ Episcopal Church, completed in 1888 and designed by Willoughby Edbrooke and Franklin Burnham of Chicago, who also did the Georgia State Capitol and the Milwaukee Federal Building.

Redeemer Lutheran Church.

The was enough churches for the day. The sun was going down, for one thing, but also once you’ve seen the Alpha and Omega, that’s enough for any day.

First in War, First in Peace, and First in the Heart of Generative AI

Posted on February 18, 2024 by admin

The “Presidents Day” weekend has rolled around again, but it’s an ordinary weekend for some of us followed by an ordinary Monday. Including me. Still, I can’t let it pass without a mention. If it were up to me, it would still be widely known as Washington’s Birthday, as it was when I was young.

The state of Illinois, for its part, calls it Washington’s Birthday, and has separate holidays for Lincoln and MLK. It has not, as yet, changed Columbus Day to anything else, which surprises me a little, but I’ll chalk it up to legislative inertia and a still distinct Italian-American population.

With Washington on my mind, I went to the first free AI image generator I could find and had it spit out some images of the Father of Our Country in various art styles. Such as – and these are my exact prompts – “George Washington Manga.”

“George Washington Cubist”

“George Washington Dadaist”

That last one has a tinge of nightmare to it. Come to think of it, they all do. Still, while I’m not art expert, I don’t think these quite fit the bill.

Whatever You Do, Don’t Land in 1348

Posted on February 15, 2024 by admin

An online ad today made me laugh. For an airline offering service to Dubrovnik. The tag line:

The mind boggles. What does United have, a fleet of Tardises? I think you’d be at some risk of landing smack dab in the Black Death, but if not that, a generally unhealthy destination for us moderns, even with all our shots. That’s not all. This might be a direct flight, but does another route offer a stopover at the Enlightenment, or maybe the Belle Époque?

I get it. The copywriter – he, she or it – is trading on the romance of Dubrovnik, which by all accounts is a picturesque yet modern place. But still I laugh. What currency did they use in 14th-century Dubrovnik anyway, which would more properly be the Republic of Ragusa? Surely they don’t want dollars, so maybe you’d have to take silver or gold specie. And good luck finding anyone that speaks English there or even decent wifi.

I had to look it up. The currency would have been the tallero, one new to me, but from the right period. Numisma also gives the following table:

Figuring out the purchasing power of any of these would be a real chore, so I’ll pass. But be careful that you don’t get hundreds of follari in change.

WWOZ’s Shrove Tuesday

Posted on February 14, 2024 by admin

Woke up this morning and for a few moments thought it was Thursday. Went downstairs (my commute), fired up the laptop (odd phrasing, when you think about it) and soon realized it was Wednesday. Fridays are still the best workdays, naturally, but Thursdays aren’t bad either. You still have Friday to look forward to. So I must have wanted it to be Thursday.

Still, that’s odd, since I was fully aware of it being Shrove Tuesday the day before. As time allowed during the day, I listened online to WWOZ, nonprofit radio out of New Orleans that broadcasts New Orleans and Louisiana music. I’m sure it’s a local treasure. It should be a national treasure. It was one of the first online radio stations I ever encountered, by happy chance back in the early 2000s, when maintaining a connection consistently was no sure thing, especially if you used an iMac. I don’t listen to it enough.

But I did on Tuesday, for obvious reasons, and the celebration was on all day. The guys behind the mike got especially giddy as the evening wore on, maybe even rowdy, though I didn’t hear anything breaking. Just the kind of happy DJs – and those with some personality on display – that radio consolidation and rote programming have mostly banished from the airwaves.

Except maybe for morons in the morning? You know, drivetime voices, often a man and a woman, who yuk it up between songs and commercials and news snips, without regard to good sense or good taste. Is that still a thing? My commute, as you’d think, doesn’t involve radio.

Such duos were so much a part of radio programming 20 years ago that another of first radio stations I heard online, one from Sydney, as in Australia, was being hosted by a man and a woman – who yukked it up without regard to sense or taste. But with such fun Australian accents that I didn’t mind listening a while.

Now I seem to have further evidence that the algorithms are getting better. Better at drawing conclusions from their spying. Today those opaque entities suggested a version of “St. James Infirmary Blues” that I didn’t know.

Wow, that’s good. Tom Jones and the talented Rhiannon Giddens, once of the Carolina Chocolate Drops.

The song is associated with New Orleans jazzmen, of course, especially Louie Armstrong, and I spent a lot of yesterday with Carnival in the background. So was that the connection the machine made? Or is it that I’ve listened to many other versions of the song, or a clip from the same show, or all that other jazz (and I mean that literally and figuratively)? The bots ain’t telling.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling