Cement Mixer

Posted on June 22, 2022 by admin

Over 95 F. degrees here yesterday, on the occasion of the summer solstice — a near-record in metro Chicago for this day, the weather record-keepers say. That didn’t keep men hired by the village from further work on the street, including the appearance of a cement mixer. I didn’t take a picture, but I did think of the song of that name. Who wouldn’t?

I didn’t realize there were quite so many recordings until I looked into it. The always wonderful Slim Gaillard, of course, was first.

Then there’s the big band stylings — and perhaps more mainstream version — of Alvino Rey.

I’d heard those. But there’s also one by Liberace, of all people, who naturally had fun with it, and a hip early ’60s version by the Orlons. And more. (Mel Tormé? Well, I might listen to that sometime.)

Jerome Huppert Woods

Posted on June 21, 2022 by admin

As forecast, temps didn’t break 80 degrees F. on Saturday. A good day to hit the trail.

A trail, anyway. The one we hit happened to be the Des Plaines River Trail, which parallels the river of that name, on a short section through Jerome Huppert Woods. The place might be named for this man, a casualty of WWII. How many Jerome Hupperts have there been? He was from Wisconsin, so that would be a little unusual, but hardly impossible.

The woods are a small slice of undeveloped land along the river. My guess would be that the Cook County Forest Preserve District was able to acquire most of the land along the Des Plaines because it is prone to flooding. A little further from the forest preserve land at that point, the suburb of River Grove surrounds the area, and it’s fully developed.

The reach the trail proper, you go along a connecting trail from a parking lot and recreation field to a short, graffiti’d tunnel under a road.

There’s enough undeveloped land in the area to support some large fauna, looks like.

I don’t look at the creature and think Bambi. Rather, I think, deer ticks, vector of Lyme disease. Best to keep your distance. Still, it was nice to see.

Recent rains seem to have created, or at least enlarged, a stagnant pond that isn’t visibly connected to the river.

Otherwise, lots of green. Lots of flowers. Lots of trees.

With views of the Des Plaines from time to time.

Along with abandoned structures.

Eventually, we came to River Grove’s River Front Park, where we turned around. Not before resting a few minutes in the park gazebo, though.

As always, nice to find a gazebo. Obscure suburban parks are better for them.

Down in Galveston, Up in Yellowstone

Posted on June 16, 2022 by admin

Back to posting on Tuesday, since of course Juneteenth is a holiday. I just found out that since last year, there’s been a mural in Galveston commemorating the issuance of General Order No. 3 by (Brevet) Maj. Gen. Gordon Granger, who would be wholly obscure otherwise. The artist, Reginald C. Adams, is from Houston.

Something to see if I ever make it back to Galveston, which is more likely than, say, Timbuktu. But I don’t believe I’ll go to Galveston in the summer again.

I downloaded a National Park Service image (and thus public domain) today of the road near the north entrance of Yellowstone NP, showing the damage from the recent flooding. Damn.

Many more pictures of the flooding in the park and in Montana are here, along with a story about the curious absence of the governor of Montana.

“Aerial assessments conducted Monday, June 13, by Yellowstone National Park show major damage to multiple sections of road between the North Entrance (Gardiner, Montana), Mammoth Hot Springs, Lamar Valley and Cooke City, Montana, near the Northeast Entrance,” the NPS says. “Many sections of road in these areas are completely gone and will require substantial time and effort to reconstruct.”

No doubt. We entered the park at the north entrance back in ’05 and spent some time in that part of Yellowstone. The Gardiner River was much more peaceful then.

“Just south of the park’s north entrance, there’s a parking lot next to the Gardiner River. Just beyond the edge of the lot is a path that follows the edge of the river, under some shade trees,” I wrote at the time.

“The river is very shallow at that point, with a cold current pushing over piles of very smooth stones… piles of rock moderated the current a little, so that you could sit in the river and let it wash over you. It wasn’t exactly swimming, but it was refreshing.

“Along the road, just at the entrance to the parking lot, there were two signs: ENTERING WYOMING and 45TH PARALLEL of LATITUDE HALFWAY BETWEEN EQUATOR and NORTH POLE.”

Wonder if that sign is still standing.

Not Much of a Heat Wave

Posted on June 15, 2022 by admin

Heat wave! Plus rain in the wee hours tomorrow. The weathermen and women are no doubt excited. But it’s a small heat wave. It won’t even been 80 degrees F. by Saturday. Good timing, I’d say.

Workers showed up this morning and, as predicted, started making noise. Digging a hole in a modern street will do that.

The pipe went in when I had other things to do, so I didn’t watch it go in. Still, it was soon buried, though leaving a rough patch of gravel to be buried itself when the village gets around to repaving the street.

The good part is that it only took them about three hours to plant the pipe in the earth, which I hope will do what it’s suppose to do, such as keeping storm water away from my property.

(Very) Local Infrastructure

Posted on June 14, 2022 by admin

A sizable and fast-moving storm blew through Monday evening around 6, complete with strong wind, heavy rain and a municipal siren warning of a tornado that did not, fortunately, materialize. Second time for the sirens in the last few weeks. Is the village quicker to sound them than before? It certainly seems that way, but I have no data to prove it.

Clear and hot today. As in, above 90 F. But it’s a Northern summer: temps will drop toward the end of the week.

Usually I don’t mind working at home. Usually it’s pretty quiet, except when the dog gets excited. Summer bonus: I can repair to our deck from time to time. Even on days like today, our honey locust provides excellent shade.

Soon it isn’t going to be quiet. A major machine arrived across the street from my house today, and more to the point, across the street from the side of my house that includes my home office.

Those pipes will be installed, and eventually, the street will be resurfaced. I predict noisiness in the near future.

I’ve been warned. The village sent us a mailing at least a month ago. Still, it’s a mild surprise when the equipment actually shows up. Last week, a fellow came by and cut enigmatic (to me) lines in the street and some driveway entrances.

He only took a few minutes, but it was loud. A taste of things to come.

Bottles

Posted on June 13, 2022 by admin

Old friends visited on Saturday, as they have for a number of years now, and we ate and drank and talked on the deck. In honor of that stretch of years, I put some of the bottles from past gabfests on one of our deck tables. Every year, I keep examples of the beer and other drinks consumed at the event and tuck them away in my garage.

Looks like we drink a lot, but of course we don’t. Five or six bottles a year adds up after nearly a decade, but it only amounts to one bottle per person or so each year.

These are among this year’s bottles. I sampled them all, in a small glass. I can say that porter isn’t really to my taste, but I’m sure someone likes it. The others I found refreshing, in small samples. That’s the way I am with beer.

Voodoo Ranger is made by New Belgium Brewing, with breweries in Fort Collins, Colorado, and Asheville, North Carolina. “Our Voodoo Ranger family is brewed with trendsetting hop and malt varieties — and served with a side of sarcasm,” the New Belgium web site says. Does sarcasm need a dish, or can it be served in a paper cone?

The Great Lakes Brewing Co. is out of Cleveland. Naming a beer for the Edmund Fitzgerald seems a little odd, but it is a local reference — that was the ore carrier’s destination, at least according to the song:

Concluding some terms with a couple of steel firms
When they left fully loaded for Cleveland…

Other sources, perhaps more reliable, say she was headed for Detroit. In any case, that too is on the Great Lakes, and Great Lakes Brewing also makes Eliot Ness Lager, Commodore Perry IPA and Burning River Pale Ale, definitely a Cleveland reference.

Finally, Gumballhead is a brew of 3 Floyds of Munster, Indiana. Gumballhead the Cat is apparently a web comic. If I felt like reading more of them, and I can’t say that I do, I might find out why the cat is carrying a space helmet that says FFF (other pictures have it as a Soviet space helmet, complete with CCCP). Some minor mysteries are better left alone.

Uncle Walt’s Band, 1982

Posted on June 12, 2022 by admin

Nearly two years ago, media distribution company Orchard Enterprises provided 21 songs to YouTube, cuts on a collection called Uncle Walt’s Band Anthology. Subtitled — and it really captures the essence of that band — “Those Boys From Carolina, They Sure Enough Could Sing…”

Sure enough. The three-man band, Walter Hyatt, Champ Hood and David Ball, all originally from Spartanburg, SC, existed for a few years in the early 1970s and again in the late ’70s and early ’80s. They produced four original albums, did solo work, and played with a good number of other musicians in Austin and Nashville over the years. Those few reviews one can find about Uncle Walt’s Band tend to characterize them as Americana, and I supposed they were — a mix of American styles by South Carolina musicians who honed their skills in Nashville and Austin both.

Though fondly remembered by a few, especially other musicians, wider fame eluded Uncle Walt’s Band. I already knew that, but the point is hammered home by looking at the view count for some of their wonderful songs on Anthology — such as the fun “Seat of Logic” (only 533 views after two years, not 533,000 as by rights it ought to be); the winsome “Ruby” (only 569 views); and the sweetly melancholic “High Hill” (only 344 views); and on and on.

Forty years ago this evening I had the exceptionally good fortune of seeing Uncle Walt’s Band live in Nashville. “Crystalline sound,” I wrote in the diary I kept at the time, along with other unhelpful scraps when it comes to remembering it now. Still, the show was some of the best live music I saw in college, or ever really. A less fanciful way to characterize the gentlemen who played for us that evening would be near-perfect three-voice close harmony, with guitar, fiddle and bass.

I had taken a month-long trip not long before that evening, returning to Nashville less than a week earlier, with plans to attend summer school, but not take it all that seriously. That is exactly what I did and I don’t regret a moment of it. While I was away, my friend Dan had obtained the records Uncle Walt’s Band (a renaming and reissue of the 1974 Blame It On The Bossanova) and An American in Texas (1980, the same year the band appeared on Austin City Limits).

To put it in music biz terms, those records were in heavy rotation around the house where Dan and Rich lived, and where Mike, Steve and I were constant visitors that summer. As soon as I returned to Nashville, I heard it too. Then we got wind of the fact that Uncle Walt’s Band was playing live on Saturday the 12th at a place called The Sutler. We couldn’t believe our luck, and we weren’t about to miss that.

At time I called The Sutler “a tavern next to a bowling alley, a bakery and a restaurant,” which it was, though I didn’t record its address on 8th Ave. South in the Melrose neighborhood. That was further than we usually went, though (I know now), not that far from campus. Dive might not quite have been the word for the place, but it certainly wasn’t posh, and while I’m pretty sure I went there a few times in later years, I only remember seeing UWB there, and the joint’s last iteration closed only this year. It was standing room only for a while, but eventually we got a table. We stayed for the whole show. My mind’s eye can visualize it even now, and my mind’s ear can hear a crystalline echo of their sound.

UWB broke up for the last time the year after we saw them, but their musical presence that summer made an impression on me. Enough that in the late ’80s, when I was visiting Austin, I noticed a small poster somewhere advertising a show by Walter Hyatt at the famed Waterloo Ice House on on Congress Ave. We have to go to that, I told Tom Jones, whom I was visiting, and so we did.

During one of the breaks in that show, I asked Hyatt where I could buy copies of the two records that I remembered so fondly from the summer of ’82 — I think I even mentioned the show at The Sutler — since finding obscure music was more of a chore in those days. He gave me an address to send a check to, and soon after I did, I received an audio cassette of Uncle Walt’s Band and An American in Texas, which I listened to periodically over the years and own to this day.

Forty years is a long time, and time has taken its toll. Walter Hyatt died in the ValuJet Flight 592 crash in 1996 and Champ Hood died of cancer in 2001. David Ball has had a successful career as a country musician and is now pushing 70.

One more thing: I didn’t realize until the other day that the subtitle, “Those Boys From Carolina…” was no random pick. Lyle Lovett, Texan of distinct hair and winning ways with song, mentioned UWB in a song he recorded long after the band was gone, but before Walter Hyatt died, the amusing “That’s Right, You’re Not From Texas.”

Those boys from Carolina,
They sure enough could sing.
But when they came on down to Texas,
We all showed them how to swing.

Colorado Plateau ’22 Leftovers

Posted on June 9, 2022 by admin

I’ve changed the name of this trip. What, doesn’t everyone name their trips? No? Anyway, Colorado Plateau ’22 is better than the ridiculous NV-AZ-UT 22, which looks like a part number in a tool-and-die factory.

But not quite all on the Colorado Plateau. Just outside Las Vegas, maybe five or so miles from where that city finally peters out on I-15 toward Los Angeles, is Seven Magic Mountains.

Magic, maybe, mountains no, at least not in any literal sense. An art installation by Ugo Rondinone, a Swiss artist.

We only passed through Zion NP, stopping only for a few minutes on the side of the road.

Near the entrance.

At the entrance.

A different entrance: Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument. A small bit of the vastness of the place, more than 1.8 million acres.

I knew that was a road I wanted to drive a little ways at least, to check out the views. My instincts were right.

When we were nearly in Page, Arizona, we stopped for a few minutes at a viewpoint over Lake Powell. I was flabbergasted by how low the lake looks.

And so it is. The lowest level since the lake was built. Lake Mead is low as well, so much so that (possible) mob hit victims have been discovered. Apparently the idea of draining Lake Powell to fill Lake Mead is being entertained by officialdom, I read, though it’s hard to know how seriously.

The cookers at Big John’s Texas Barbecue in Page.

Man, Big John made some mean ‘cue in those cookers.

The Lake Powell Motel, also in Page, where we stayed. For the second time. We were there in 1997. A one-minute walk to Big John’s.

When we stayed there 25 years ago, the property was called Bashful Bob’s Motel. Sometime in the 2010s, new ownership changed the name and spent a fair amount renovating the interiors so that they are pretty nice two-bedroom apartments. Back in the late ’90s, the rooms were old, but pleasant. I wonder if I have the ’97 bill somewhere to compare rates. Maybe.

Also, it’s clear that the owners had to renovate to compete with the numerous chain hotels in the town. Bashful Bob didn’t a lot of that kind of competition in the old days, just smaller properties, a few of which linger still in Page.

The Red Rock started as housing for workers building Glen Canyon Dam, built in 1958 by the Bureau of Reclamation. Actually, I suspect Bashful Bob’s started out that way as well.

In Moab, Utah, we stayed at the Apache Motel. We found it a most pleasant place to stay, and with a touch of movie history to it.

Clean, comfortable, not particularly cheap or expensive, feeling very much like a ’50s motel, though with a few modifications. The motel doesn’t let you forget that the Duke stayed there when filming movies nearby. Other stars did too.

One more feature at Temple Square in Salt Lake City: the Handcart Pioneer Monument.

More Mormons in metal: The centerpiece of the This is the Place Heritage Park, which is on a hill at the edge of the city, where B. Young reportedly told his followers This is the Place, as in, to settle. We dropped by for a short look.

At the base of the memorial are six figures depicting important in the history of this part of Utah who weren’t Mormons, such as a couple of fur trappers, a chief of the Shoshone, plus adventurers and explorers.

Including this fellow, John C. Fremont.

That’s my presidential site for the trip. Ran for president in ’56, after all.

High Desert Flora

Posted on June 8, 2022 by admin

Not quite all the places we visited in May count as high desert, but mostly that’s what we saw, including a wide variety of plants. I looked at them mostly for aesthetic enjoyment, since I’m woefully ignorant about natural history, and when I try not to be, the information mostly isn’t retained by the sieve of my mind.

Still, I know a Joshua Tree when I see one. These were outside Las Vegas. The further east you go from there, the fewer you see.

Smaller than many of the yuccas at Joshua Tree NP, but Yuriko, who hasn’t visited that park, was suitably impressed.

Moving on, flora at Zion National Park.

Grand Staircase-Escalante National Monument.

Owl Canyon, near Page, Arizona. Amazing the places life can cling.

Also near Page.

National Bridges National Monument.

Arches National Park.

Canyonlands National Park.

Salt Lake City.

The flowers were at Temple Square, near the Assembly Hall. The second image doesn’t look much like a city view, but it was, in City Creek Natural Area. The ground gets pretty steep pretty fast as you move away from downtown.

A 180-degree turn at that point, and you see this.

A nice change from desert scrub, though desert flora has its fascinations.

The Utah State Capitol

Posted on June 7, 2022 by admin

Back in August 2011, I wrote: “Among the National Statuary Hall Collection — each state gets to place two, except Virginia, which gets an extra one for Washington — I spied Ronald Reagan, Jack Swigert, Caesar Rodney, Kamehameha I, Dwight Eisenhower, Ephraim McDowell, Huey Long, Hannibal Hamlin, Samuel Adams, Gerald Ford, William Jennings Bryan, Po’pay, John Burke (of North Dakota), James Garfield, Andrew Jackson, Sam Houston, Washington and Jefferson. I looked in vain for Philo T. Farnsworth, since who wouldn’t want to see him?”

Yet when I saw the lanky statue of boob-tube inventor Philo T. Farnsworth in the Utah State Capitol last month, I was sure I’d seen him at the U.S. Capitol more than 10 years earlier. Memory’s that kind of trickster.

Philo’s among a number of Utahans honored in the capitol, both as statues and in paintings. Curiously, I don’t remember seeing Brigham Young there, who is (unsurprisingly) the other statue in the U.S. Capitol from Utah. Must have missed him.

Utah being a late-blooming state (1896), its capitol is an early 20th-century edifice, designed by Richard K. A. Kletting, a local architect who did a lot of Utah projects.