No shortage of odd press releases lately. The first few lines of one that came recently read:
Bonjour à tous,
Voici notre catalogue Le Luxe Artisan pour ceux qui n’ont pas pu venir à Paris.
15 artisans d’art français venant des 4 coins de France étaient présents pour expliquer leur savoir-faire. Une très belle aventure humaine et un travail d’équipe. Scénographie de la talentueuse Julia Bancilhon, créatrice de papiers peints – studio Made of Matter.
I couldn’t let that go untranslated, since the machine now offers that service. So by machine translation, I got:
Hello everyone,
Here is our Le Luxe Artisan catalog for those who were unable to come to Paris.
15 French artisans from all over France were present to explain their know-how. A great human adventure and teamwork. Scenography by the talented Julia Bancilhon, wallpaper designer – Made of Matter studio.
Interesting that savoir-faire is translated know-how, which suggests a more workaday meaning in French for a term that acquired some social graces when it drifted into English.
Most of the January snow is gone, melted by rain late last week and temps above freezing most of the time since then. More above-freezing temps are forecast for the forecastable future, or another week or so. An odd thing for winter stasis, which is usually a run of days consistently below freezing, but I’m not complaining — and will be glad to be rid of January, as usual.
Another press release that isn’t in my wheelhouse came today, not even within shouting distance of my wheelhouse, unless you count the very occasional times I’ve written about stadium development. Namely, it’s about sports. Rarefied sports: The Super Bowl.
I extracted the following table from it, which reports info from a company that tracks secondary sports ticket sales. These are average ticket prices (so far) for the upcoming Super Bowl and the final averages five games before it.
2024 (49ers vs. Chiefs): $10,408
2023 (Eagles vs. Chiefs): $7,672
2022 (Rams vs. Bengals): $8,347
2021 (Bucs vs. Chiefs): $7,738
2020 (49ers vs. Chiefs): $6,705
2019 (Rams vs. Patriots): $5,629
Italics added, though I could have added them to each and every price listed, to denote how nuts I believe the figures are. Of course, ten grand isn’t what it used to be – can’t even get half of a new car for that, nor (maybe) a decent cruise to Antarctica.
Still, it’s no small sum to devote to parking yourself at football game that only occasionally lives up to its hype. At least, that’s what I hear. Somehow over the years I’ve forgotten to watch the game on TV. That might happen again if I’m not careful.
Another press release that isn’t for me came today. Actually, I get a fair number of those, but in this case I took a look. Its first two paragraphs were as follows:
Miffy, the internationally loved bunny created by Dutch artist Dick Bruna, enters the new season of fashion with an exciting update. Miffy is partnering for the first time with Dumbgood – the legendary pop-culture-inspired clothing brand. The new collection is available at Dumbgood/Miffy for Miffy fans located in the US.
Born of a beloved bedtime story tradition between Bruna and his son, Miffy has been a child-favorite character for 68 years for her positivity, adventurous nature, and innocence. Dumbgood blends 90s-2000s nostalgia and iconic pop culture brands to create apparel collections that feel new and relevant for today’s streetwear customer….
90s-2000s nostalgia? Really? No, let’s leave that aside. When Happy Days premiered 50 years ago this month, it was cast successfully as nostalgia, for no more than 20 years earlier.
I was pretty sure I’d never heard of Miffy, 68 years of positivity notwithstanding (or Dumbgood either, legend notwithstanding). Miffy didn’t happen to be in the mix when I was a child reader, or at any other time. But then I did an image search.
I do know Miffy, by sight anyway. I saw Miffy a lot in Japan. Miffy is very popular there. I showed the pictures to Yuriko, who knew the bunny instantly, and by name.
Somehow I never got around to thinking much about the character I’d seen in Japan, and until today would have assumed – had I simply been shown the pictures – that it was a Japanese character. But no, a Dutch artist created it, perhaps with a keen unconscious notion of what would be big in Japan. Odd the things you learn, even from misdirected press releases.
Rumor has it that a glowing orb might appear in the sky tomorrow. If so, almost the first time in this odd-weather start of the year. Still, whatever else has happened, overcast skies have been the norm. Last Thursday, according to the NWS, it was fog from here to the Gulf Coast.
Australia Day has come and gone. For the occasion, I wanted to scan a 1989 uncirculated set of Australian coins, but the coins themselves, encased in plastic, don’t lend themselves to it. Details are indistinct and the lighting of coins seems weird no matter what angle, though not when you’re looking at them with your eyes. In that case, they have the shiny look of uncirculated coins.
Pretty to look at, but not especially valuable. That’s what you should expect, since there’s not a lick of silver in the whole set. I bought it a few years ago, as a kind of retroactive souvenir, since those were the kinds of coins in circulation when I was there.
The envelope theme: ‘roos in the hot sun.
In early January 1992, I sent a card to my brother Jim and mother from Perth.
“Plenty of strange plants & birds to see,” I wrote, becoming the nth person in history to notice that about Australia, a very high number. Still, that’s a marvel of the place. All you have to do is look around. The flora gets weirder the longer you look at it, and helps you appreciate just how far you’ve come to see their oddities. Damn, I’m at the other end of the Earth, you think.
Vast, empty spaces were indeed ahead on the road from Perth to Adelaide to Sydney. My only regret on that bus epic across the continent was that it was dark when we crossed the Nullarbor Plain.
Then again, aside from the species that make up the scrub brush, a ride across Nullarbor doesn’t look that different from a ride across West Texas, and I’ve done that in the daylight.
Many of my postcard agglomeration are blank, of course. Couldn’t say a percentage, but it would be substantial. I add to it regularly, so I expect the agglomeration will outlast me, if only by a little.
One of the places we went on our last full day in Louisville recently was a flea market. Not just any flea market, but the Kentucky Flea Market New Year’s Spectacular at the Kentucky Expo Center. A sea of tables in a vast structure and – wait, there’s another sea of tables in another, connected vast structure. Safe to say it was big.
One of the first tables we encountered offered postcards for sale, which didn’t turn out to be that common at the Spectacular. I spotted what turned out to be promotional cards for a radio show called Breakfast in Hollywood, hosted by one Tom Breneman. I wasn’t familiar with it.
The man at the table made me feel a youthful spring in my step by comparison: gnarled, he was, as they used to call old men. Full head of white hair and a shaggy white beard and wrinkles that often come from a lifetime of hard work just to get by.
“Do you know that show?” I asked.
“No, it was a long time ago.”
The old man was right – a long time ago, longer even than his lifetime, or possibly he was a small child when the show was on, and it was nothing a child would listen to. Fifty cents each, that’s not bad. Not particularly rare or valuable as a collectible, as far as I can tell. I bought a handful.
Breneman pictured with the famous.
And the less famous. They weren’t even in the same room, these two.
Uncle Corny, huh? I’d look further into him, but for now I’d rather wonder about him. A character brought to the show by its actor from years of honing in vaudeville?
Breakfast in Hollywood wasa chat show, with host Breneman an experienced radio hand by the time he started the show in 1941. In the waning days of World War II he opened a restaurant in Hollywood from which to broadcast. The show had a large and loyal following among listeners, but in 1948 Breneman died suddenly.
Later I read about the show, its high fame long evaporated. Got me into a mild counterfactual frame of mind. Breneman wasn’t that old when he dropped, only 46. Wife and youngish children. Television wasn’t far off – would he have made the transition successfully (many did), hosted a show or run of shows into the ’60s or even a little later, and be remembered among my cohort for some last semi-retirement gig like a regular square in the Peter Marshall Hollywood Squares?
It wasn’t to be. Sure, that isn’t one of the ponderous issues that counterfactuals usually spend their time with: What if Lincoln had lived longer, what if Germany won the Great War, what if Ronald Reagan had played Rick Blaine, that sort of thing. So what?
A man calling himself Korla Pandit (d. 1998) appeared regularly on Breakfast in Hollywood. If this article is even half accurate, he was one of the hardest working men in U.S. show business in the mid-century and later, and a lot else surprising besides. He’s had a documentary made about him. You can listen to his organ recordings, right now. There’s a biopic about this guy just waiting to be made.
Geof Huth has been a most prolific postcard sender to me over the years, and I like to think I’ve returned the favor. He asserted once that I send him a card every four days or so, but I don’t believe it has been quite that often, though there have been occasions when I send him a card each day from some trip or other. That’s something that usually lasts only a week or less.
I got a card from Geof yesterday. For the moment, it is the newest in a very long line.
Nice. Made from found cardboard, hand drawn, imparting some information, and most likely unique in the history of humanity. Some of his cards have much more elaborate drawings, which he calls glyphs — if I remember right — though I’ve never asked for a precise definition of the term, and probably don’t need to. Some things exist beyond the boundaries of precision, and are no worse for it.
One of these days, maybe, I will post a collection of Huthian postcard glyphs, since they are quite remarkable graphic expressions. I’ve posted cards sporting a few over the years, including a particularly colorful, messy, exact, crayoned, inked & impressed one with a collection of letters and letter-like entities, but I don’t have the energy for kind of project right now. Sorting postcards is it.
During my postcard sorting, I came across what may be the first card he ever sent me. Geof’s father was in the Foreign Service, so he (Geof) would spend time in far-off locations during our college years, at least during the summers, and this came to me from Switzerland during the fantastic plastic summer of ’82.
I checked, pulling at the edge of one of the stickers, and after more than 40 years it would still be possible to remove them and stick them on something else. An example of Swiss adhesive prowess, I suppose. But I have no intention of doing so.
It’s possible I received something from him earlier, but I’m not sure how likely. I wouldn’t have known him well enough, or at all, the previous summer, since we probably met at some point that year (ca. 1981, let’s say) because of our mutual loose affiliation with the VU student magazine Versus.
I was in summer school at VU in ’82. I made no note of receiving the card in the diary I kept that summer, which presumably would have been toward the end of the month. I didn’t make many specific entries attached to specific days that month anyway – I was out to smash the diary paradigm or something. So that summer mostly exists beyond the boundaries of precision, but that doesn’t keep me from smiling when I think about it.
Probably the best reason to sort my postcards is I get to look at them again, and be reminded of the sender and the places depicted, and whatever was going on when that person thought of me for a moment, took the time to write something down, and entrust the object to a worldwide system that moves such objects from one place to another. That can be a lot to pleasantly unpack. I don’t know why people have mostly given up on postcards (except for the price, see below).
The cards Ed sent were particularly varied in all those regards. Just leafing through the stack, I find cards from Alaska – a lot of those – Hawaii, American Samoa and other parts of the United States and the Pacific, Canada, Iceland, the UK, various other European countries, Jordan, Turkey, Mongolia, South Korea, parts of Africa and so on.
Also the British Antarctic Territory, where he went in ’07 to be pecked at by a penguin. The postcard itself isn’t that great – an unimaginative picture of the cruise ship and some penguins, and probably the only one available to him – but the stamp is the real treasure, along with the postmark.
I like these Jordanian stamps too, found on a 2003 card depicting Petra.
From Iceland in 2002, before everyone and his moose discovered the place (not that that would keep me away). Ed and Lynn were early adopters when it came to visiting Iceland.
Better than any of the stamps is a domestic postmark from 2010. One I’ve noted before.
From the incredibly remote Pribilof Islands for only 28 cents (and why is it 53 cents only 14 years later? Explain that one, Mr. Joy).
“One card depicts Saint Paul Island, one of the group, and the other card sports Wrangell, which is on the mainland,” I wrote at the time. “Both postmarks depict Saint Paul Island, home of Aleuts, seals and sea birds.”
Nearly above freezing today, and icy rain this evening. A slushy week is ahead, more like late February or early March than late January, but each winter has its own rhythms. A relatively warm week this time of year is entirely welcome, except for the possibility of ice patches.
I’ve undertaken to sort my postcards, sometimes on the weekends, sometimes in the evenings, in short bursts. Note the choice of verb. Not organize. My goal isn’t so grand. I just want to separate the cards by who sent them, and store them in roughly chronological order, but not down to the granularity of an exact order – even if such a thing were possible, since not everyone dates every card, and USPS postmarks are often a smear of ink daring you to make sense of them.
Why bother? They’ll all be lost to time, of course. So what? It’s one of those things you do for your own satisfaction.
I’ve made my way through the first box out of 10 or so, but some other cards are stashed in folders and I’m not sure where else, down in the laundry room. This is going to take a while.
Most cards in this particular box are from the early to mid-2010s, though some as early as 2003 and as late as 2019. The tallest pile so far is from Ed Henderson, but I expect him to be overtaken eventually by cards from my brother Jay and Geof Huth, both of whom have known me longer, and both of whom have the advantage of being alive.
One from Jay, dated July 3, 2011.
No printed text on the reverse. “I can’t say that I have any idea what this card is about,” Jay wrote. Me either.
The near-zero and subzero days eased off late last week, enough that I completed the task that no one else wants, storing Christmas decorations in the garage. Also, moving snow out of the way on our sidewalks and driveway, though Yuriko did some of that as well. Deep chill was back on Saturday and some today, or at least it felt that way when I rolled the garbage cans out to the curb this evening.
Overcast skies meant there wasn’t even the consolation of constellations, bright in the clear winter night. Some other time, Orion.
Haven’t bothered taking many pictures lately. The bleak mid-winter doesn’t inspire camera-in-hand forays near or far. The back yard pretty much looks like this image from January 2015, except the dog isn’t nearly as vigorous in crossing the powdery flats as she used to be. In fact, just getting her out the door is a process that can take a few minutes, as is getting her back in.
Back even further, she romps through the snow of January 2014. As if there were that much difference.
On Saturday especially we cleaned house, especially in the kitchen the adjacent spaces – the food handling zones of the house. Always needs some attention. January has a way of pressing in on the walls of the house, focusing one’s attention on immediate surroundings. At least, that’s how I feel it.
I did such a January cleaning in 2014 – does that year really correspond to 10 years ago? There goes time, flying again, flapping its wings just a little louder every year. Ten years ago, ours was a house with children. Who spent a fair amount of time on the living room couch.
One day I moved the couch to clean behind it.
For some reason I decided to document it. Was I mad at my daughters? I don’t think I was, but I did show it to them. What with prying the couch from its position, this was a job for Dad.
In January 2006, we visited a showing of snow sculptures in the northwest suburbs.
Nice, but I don’t think I’ve had the urge to seek out any more snow sculpture events since then.
Not something you see that much, not put quite that way. Maybe that’s an unconscious acknowledgment that nowhere in Scripture is Jesus’ exact birthday ever mentioned. It reminded me of a scene from Full Metal Jacket.
The message was in lights, and there was a good reason for that. It was part of Lights Under Louisville, an annual display of Christmas lights by Mega Cavern. A lot of lights: at 7 million, said to be the largest such light display in the world.
Mega Cavern is an attraction south of downtown Louisville, and a fairly recent one at that, opening for tourists only in 2009. In the mid-20th century, miners extracted limestone from under the area’s hills, eventually creating 4 million square feet of space. In comparison, the Sears Tower totals 4.4 million square feet, so nearly a Sears Tower worth of space was excavated under a section of I-264 and the Louisville Zoo and a major city park. By the early ’90s, mining had ceased, and the voids were developed into warehouse space.
In that, the place naturally reminded me of SubTropolis in Kansas City, Mo., which I visited in ’99. Unlike that man-made cave, which is still all business, Mega Cavern started adding activities for visitors, at first tours through the cave. There is still underground warehouse space, and tenants for it.
But now the facility also has underground zip lines, an aerial ropes course, and walking and tram tours most of the year. Mega Cavern used to have an enormous dirt bike course, at 320,000 square feet said to the the world’s largest underground off-road bike facility, but that didn’t last (I suspect insurance issues).
Around Christmas, you can either drive through Mega Cavern to see the millions of lights, or pay a little more and ride on a wagon pulled by a Jeep, which is what we did on December 30. It was the only activity on this trip that I had to book in advance.
The public entrance to the cave doesn’t even hint at what’s below.
At the end of a short hall is a large room used to turn vehicles around, and as a waiting area for those riding trams.
Beyond that is a room with the service desk, a small snack shop, a gift shop and a view of some climbing equipment.
We’d come for the Christmas Express.
Of we went, exactly as scheduled. I was expecting the lights to be arrayed in tree-oriented abstractions. Or just to be artful strings of lights.
There was a lot of that. At the risk of sounding churlish, since we enjoyed riding through the lights thoroughly, the ride could have used more displays like these. Most of the displays had themes. Such as local themes. They were artful, too, just not quite as spectacular.
Patriotic themes. Many more than this.
Christian themes.
Movie franchises. More than pictured here, but I don’t remember all of them now. Many geared to children. I’d heard of almost all of them.
I remember a few omissions. Star Wars – more than one display, I think. But no Star Trek. Also, Barbie. Were pink Christmas trees in vogue over the holidays? Experts say yes. But what, no Oppenheimer? C’mon, they were peas in the same summer blockbuster pod.
I’m pretty sure a Manhattan Project display would have harshed everyone’s holiday buzz, so no go. But can you imagine? The centerpiece of the Oppenheimer display would, of course, be a mushroom cloud in holiday lights.
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