Magic Places

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First thing to do today is Remember the Alamo.

There’s been a recent uptick in bogus comments here, which I almost always delete, along the lines of (this example, verbatim): Thanks for a marvelous posting! I genuinely enjoyed reading it, you could be a great author. I will be sure to bookmark your blog and will eventually come back later in life. I want to encourage continue your great writing, have a nice day!

The “author” is usually listed as some service- or product-oriented operation, occasionally lewd but more often personal accessories of some kind, with a gmail address. To recall Buck Turgidson, I’m beginning to smell a big, fat AI rat.

I hung up the last 2024 wall calendar the other day, fourth of four in the house. One might think that illustrates my procrastinating ways, since we’ve burned through a sixth of the year already (the crummiest sixth, I should add). But no, I hung an accurate calendar there around New Year’s. The 2018 Metropolitan Water Reclamation District of Greater Chicago calendar.

The year’s different, but so what? The first two months were the same as this year, but that changed on February 29, so I needed another calendar to avoid confusion, a year in which March 1 is a Friday. The most recent leap year to fit the bill (besides this year) would be 1996, but I didn’t seem to have one of those around or, oddly, any other calendar that qualified. No worries, I saw a wad of ’24 calendars at Ollie’s not long ago and picked one of the lot for $4, compared with a list price of $17. Nice discount, and I get 10 months at 40 cents each, instead of 12 months at about $1.40 each. Not much you can buy for 40 cents these days.

It’s a Plato calendar, an imprint of BrownTrout Publishers, which asserts that it is The Calendar Company. I had to look that up: headquartered in El Sugundo, California, BrownTrout published 1,500 unique titles as of 2020, according to the latest press release boilerplate issued by the company (recommendation, put a few newer releases on your site, BrownTrout). The site also says the company is the largest calendar publisher in the world, and it may be so, if that means calendars sold. Or does it mean days put on paper?

The one I bought at Ollie’s is called Magic Places. Handsome Rocky Places might be more like it. Mostly it pictures extraordinary rock features, natural and partly man-made, the kind of flawless and painterly pics you get from this kind of calendar, including sites in Scotland (three), England, Turkey, Greenland, Russia, and more. The likes of the Old Man of Storr, Cappadocia, Machu Picchu and Hegra in Saudi Arabia. One month wasn’t rocky but a monumental tree in Epping Forest in Essex, which I vaguely had heard of, but didn’t really know.

Just shows that Greater London is so vast, not even a month there is enough to hear of everything, especially in the days before the Internet. Once a royal forest, these days Epping is owned by the City of London Corp., even since – this isn’t hard to guess – the Victorian period.

Magic Places is a good-looking trilingual calendar, including Spanish and French as well to cover North America, and it has most of the standard holidays: U.S., Canada and Mexico civic, Christian, Jewish and Muslim, along with those days peculiar to American calendar-making tradition, such as Ground Hog Day, April Fool’s Day and Grandparents Day. There are also Low Countries holidays, which I suppose is a good market for the calendar maker.

It made my day to learn that besides being Cinco de Mayo, May 5 is Bevrijdingsdag in the Netherlands, Liberation Day. A holiday to celebrate ousting Nazis is one we can all get behind.

Wendy at Cary’s

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Heavy rain and thunder last night, big puddles today and cool air, though no freeze. The first crocus is out. It actually bloomed just ahead of the rain.

My goal on Sunday was to make it to Cary’s, a bar on Devon Avenue on the northwest side of Chicago. I made it. As bar neon goes, this one’s the top, put it in the Cole Porter song.

Mask décor inside. Pixar: there’s a movie in bar masks that talk while the bar is empty. Cary's

Mostly, though, it’s a Chicago bar.Cary's Cary's

The bar stands out in the area, because much of the surrounding neighborhood is South Asian in character and it isn’t. Nearby establishments include Lahore Food & Grill, Hyderabad House, Pak Sweets, New Bombay Hair & Beauty Salon, Devon Gurdwara Sahib of Chicago, Musk & Oud (gift shop), Amar Carpet, Chandni Exclusive (bridal shop), Mehrab Supermarket, and many more.

Back when we lived in Chicago, in both the late ’80s and mid-90s, we’d seek out Indian food in the area, but I hadn’t been there recently. Not much seems different these days, despite the sizable expansion of the South Asian population here in the suburbs: on an unusually warm March evening, Devon and the nearby streets were alive, a constant churn in and out of the shops, along the sidewalks and out into the streets, where cars had a tight fit. I’d have wandered around Devon on foot more on Sunday, but I arrived only in time for the beginning of the show at Cary’s, because of the aforementioned detour en route, and the fact that parking is near impossible on Devon, and almost so on the streets around it, whose spaces are restricted mostly to residents.

I went not because I go to bars that much, but to see my old friend Wendy (even when this picture was taken in ’87, I’d already known her about five years), who was slated to play guitar and sing. On stage, she’s Jenn. I also got to see the opening act. He and his band — a bass player and a drummer — were also quite good, though Dylanesque isn’t quite how I’d describe him musically, though he’s got that the Dylan in Greenwich Village look on the poster, at least.

Wendy only plays in public occasionally, and I’d never heard her more than noodle on the guitar. I’m glad to report she plays guitar very well, and has a fine singing voice, though her lyrics were sometimes hard to hear over bar noise. Still, she was especially lilting in holding long notes seasoned by her Nashville background: that cut through the noise.

I told her these things afterward. I was glad I didn’t feel compelled to politely lie to her about her talent because, fortunately, she had some.

Years ago, in the summer of ’82 in fact, other friends and I went to a Nashville bar, I forget which one, to see a fellow one of us knew slightly, an aspiring musician, who had invited us for an open mike night. He was, I think, a waiter or bartender, but of course, every other waiter or bartender in Nashville aspires to musical success.

He must have aspired more specifically to be like Glenn Fry or Don Henley, but was a failure. Just didn’t have enough in the way of musical chops; even we could hear that. We were polite about it, though. I wonder whether that was doing him a disservice, but I expect in the fullness of time, he found out.

Queen of All Saints Basilica

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The latest run of warm days is now ending, with rain moving through northern Illinois. In its wake, more seasonable temps for early March. Sunday wasn’t seasonable at all, with the air heated to a pleasant low 70s F.

On Sunday afternoon I headed for the the northwest side of Chicago. You’d think that would be straightforward, considering that I was coming from the northwest suburbs, but no: O’Hare takes up a sizable chunk of real estate between those two areas, and there’s no going under it like in Los Angeles. One goes around.

I was sure I didn’t need to consult a map, either. Go more-or-less east on a major road (Irving Park) that curls along the southern edge of the airport; go north on another major road that is just east of the airport (Mannheim); and then connect with the east-west road (Devon) that would take me to the part of the city I wanted to visit.

Easy, especially since I knew the first part of the route well. I often take those first two roads to the airport entrance. True, I had to go a little further north on Mannheim into less familiar territory to connect with Devon, but all I’d have to do is watch for Devon. So I did.

No, that wasn’t it, but it’ll be soon. No, that’s not it either, maybe the next major light. No, not that one. Maybe one more. No. We’ve all done this: expect something while driving, sure that it will come up soon, and it doesn’t. So I pulled over to check my map, finally, and I was some distance north of where I want to be. Mannheim doesn’t actually connect to Devon. The next major north-south street east of Mannheim, which is River Road, does. Oops.

Use the GPS, you say. I still say no. I wasn’t going to be late for anything that needed my punctuality, for one thing, but more important, I passed through a stretch of relatively unfamiliar and interesting territory as I navigated my way southeast to Devon. Metro Chicago is so large that that’s possible even after living here for decades.

Had I not been “lost” I would never have noticed this along the road.Queen of All Saints Basilica Queen of All Saints Basilica

I’d happened across Queen of All Saints Basilica in the Sauganash neighborhood of Chicago, one of the three minor basilicas in the city. I might have seen it on a list of local Catholic sights some time, but I didn’t remember it and didn’t set out to see it. But see it I did, though it was already closed. The exterior had to do.Queen of All Saints Basilica Queen of All Saints Basilica

Completed in 1960, so I’m surprised it isn’t more modernist. But I suppose the diocese wanted neo-Gothic, and that’s what architects Meyer & Cook provided. That firm seems to be better known for the art deco Laramie State Bank Building, also on the western edge of Chicago. While Queen of All Saints is certainly impressive, what if the diocese had asked for an art deco church?

Clary’s Cafe ’22

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Clary’s Cafe in Savannah is apparently an institution, boosted by a mention in both the book and movie versions of Midnight in the Garden of Good and Evil. More than that, it serves up good food at popular prices.

“The stalwart Clary’s, which over the past century has evolved from a drugstore with a lunch counter into a knickknack-strewn café, serves a
classic old-school breakfast,” says Garden & Gun.

We arrived for lunch on our first full day in Savannah, enjoying the warmth of an early March that Illinois had not been providing. We didn’t end up at Clary’s, eating lunch at one of the handful of outside tables at Clary’s, because it appeared on a list of the 10 best breakfasts in the South or 10 storied Southern diners or the 10 most creative eggmeisters of Southern nouvelle cuisine.Clary's Cafe Savannah

Instead, after our walking tour, and a quick look at Wesley Monumental United Methodist Church, I consulted Google Maps for places to eat, looking for something simple and filling. Clary’s was only a few blocks away and seemed to fit the bill.

Though we ate outside, I took a quick look around inside, en route to the bathroom.Clary's Cafe Savannah

I don’t know about knickknack-strewn, but I can say that the food was simple and filling, though I can’t remember exactly what I had. One of those breakfasts for lunch, but I forgot to do the modern thing and take a picture of the plate and send it to a dozen friends.

21st-Century Leaps

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Another February 29. If I counted right, my 16th. That got me to thinking, just how many February 29ths have there been? As in, ever? Not as simple a question as all that, first of all because the day Caesar inserted into the calendar was an extra one after the equivalent of our February 24, a situation that persisted for a long time. So a different question might be how many intercalary days have there been since the Julian calendar’s first (let’s say first one after the extra days tacked on 46 BC, the longest year in history).

I feel like I’m staring into a pretty extensive rabbit hole. So, I’m backing away.

2020

Last time around on February 29, no entry. I attended an exceptionally pleasant dinner party at an exurban San Antonio ranch house, on flat land in the direction of the Hill Country. Six of us, I think, eating and drinking a few glasses of wine and conversing. People wonder whether the art of conversation is dying, and I doubt it. But it might go underground.

Also, that was the last social gathering I attended until April ’21 counting ones with family members, and June that year that for groups of friends.

2016

“The saying represents something exceptionally easy, of course, but even so I’m not sure it would be.” I wrote. ”Let’s assume the barrel is full of water as well as fish. Unless we’re talking about really large carp or some such, you might disturb the water and scare the fish, but I’m not sure how many small fish would actually be hit. Also, you’d think that shooting would soon destroy a wooden barrel and cause a dangerous amount of flying debris. Or if it were a metal barrel, such as a steel oil drum, the danger of ricochets might be high.

“This is something for the Mythbusters fellows to investigate, but I suspect that shooting fish in a barrel never was anything but a metaphor, and by now a hackneyed one at that. So I’m reluctant to say that making fun of a press release I received recently — especially the first line — is like shooting fish in a barrel. But it cries out to be mocked.”

2012

“I’m sure that I learned about Leap Year at an early age, like most people. But I never knew the details — Caesar and Sosigenes, the longest year in history (46 BC), Julian and Gregorian calendars, etc. — until I read The Clock We Live On. [I forgot to mention that Isaac Asimov wrote it? I’m rectifying that now.]

“The inside cover has an example of my father’s handwriting, something I don’t have too much of, so I wanted to save that too. Apparently he bought it in 1963, the year before he died.” [Sixty years and a day ago. RIP, dad]

“I first read it in 1977. Besides the story of the western calendar, there was plenty of other interesting topics — why days have 24 hours and hours 60 minutes, the development of clocks and chronometers, the establishment of meridians and time zones, and so on. The calendar chapter formed the basis of an oral report I did in high school Latin class.”

2008

“Battlefield gore is a necessary ingredient in any war movie of our time, as well as soldiers’ profanity, and understandably so. My own preference in historical fiction runs to verisimilitude, but that isn’t to say that I didn’t like The Sands of Iwo Jima.

“The most effective horror-of-war scene in Flags involved off-screen gore. At one point, one of the men (Iggy) goes mysteriously missing from the hillside. Later, his comrades discover that the Japanese pulled him into one of their caves and killed him in a way the American soldier who found him would only describe as, ‘look what they did to the poor son of a bitch.’ At that point one of the characters is looking at whatever remains of Iggy, but we don’t see it, and it’s much more horrible that way.”

2004

“Leap Year brings to mind the lore of King Numa reforming the early Roman calendar, Julius Caesar (and Sosigenes) replacing lunar with solar, Caligula trying to name a month after Germanicus (at least according to Robert Graves), Pope Gregory ordering his change but the Protestant parts of Europe ignoring it, and so on.

“When I was a kid I was fascinated by calendars, and would draw my own sometimes. In high school, I read about the history of the calendar on my own time, because it wasn’t part of any class. Even now I have some interest, though not as much as a fellow I know who spent time calculating the dates of Easter in the far distant future — thousands of years further than the standard Easter tables. I think he even wrote a computer program to do that for him.”

Bob Link Arboretum

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Bob Link died just over 20 years ago, and I never met him. But I’ve walked in his arboretum.Bob Link Arboretum

Scant information about Bob Link is readily online: an obituary and a mention at a local history web site, the local in that case being Schaumburg Township. But I can surmise that he started planting woody plants on his family’s property in the township, as a hobby. Later the park district acquired the site, incorporating it into Spring Valley – off in a corner, near a major road, only accessible by footpath.

We arrived on Sunday afternoon. Not many other people were around, though there was a young woman in a bright blue coat who had climbed a sizable tree away from the arboretum and was resting where a large branch parted from the main trunk. Didn’t look that comfortable to me, but she looked relaxed, at least at a distance. She’s not in my pics.Bob Link Arboretum Bob Link Arboretum

Most first-page search engine hits about the arboretum are limited to detailing its short trail and location in a corner of Spring Valley. An obscure place, and better for it. Winter, and not bad for that. A brown-gray-yellow mix, thick with plants who haven’t been fooled by faux spring this year. Signs identify species at Bob Link. A selection: Purple-leaved Sand Cherry, Dwarf Bush Honeysuckle, Hackberry, White Pine, Gingko, Wahoo.

The gingko in silhouette.Bob Link Arboretum

The species has seen ’em, and seen ’em go, at least according to the sign. Fossil gingko leaves 150 million years old are known to science.

Evergreens.Bob Link Arboretum Bob Link Arboretum

The White Pine and Colorado Spruce, respectively. The spruce is native to Arizona, Colorado, Idaho, New Mexico, Utah and Wyoming, notes Wiki, and has wider fame as Christmas trees. My impulse was to put a few decorations on this tree, but not cut it down or anything. No go. I hadn’t brought any Christmas ornaments with me for some reason.

Spring Valley Farm Oddities

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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.Spring Valley

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.Spring Valley Spring Valley

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.Spring Valley

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?

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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

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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

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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.Schaumburg Time Capsule

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.