An Excellent Story for Earth Day, Mrs. Maisel

Posted on April 13, 2022 by admin

It’s about time, backyard croci.

Today was warm, cloudy and windy, until the clouds let go a lot of water, and then another -y adjective came into play, rainy. Tomorrow will be rainy, windy and chilly, and it won’t get warm again till after Easter, I hear.

Got an email pitch the other day, one of very many. There was a fair amount of verbiage to it, but the heart of the matter was this line: Are you interested in speaking to XY, a holistic health expert, about the sharp rise in the use of anti-anxiety drugs and why taking hemp extract is better for your health?

The short answer is, no. A longer answer would also be no. And I feel not a jot of anxiety about my decision.

And another pitch, at about the same time:

We think this is an excellent story for Earth Day that your audiences will love. The nationally acclaimed eco-feminist artist XX is celebrated as the real-life Marvelous Mrs. Maisel of the art world.

Is she now? Got into art one drunken night when she was on the outs with her husband? I know that show has won some Emmys, and I’m enjoying episodes of the recently dropped fourth season (once a week), but it’s still interesting that the publicist believed it would be a widely enough known reference to make such a statement, silly as it is.

Crossing the Bar

Posted on April 12, 2022 by admin

Warmish day, though I didn’t have a lot of time to spend out in it, other than walking the dog just before sunset. Windy but not especially cold then, but even better was the mid-day, when the sun came out and temps nearly hit 70 degrees F.

An editorial cartoon that assumed many, or at least some of its readers would know some Tennyson. Probably a reasonable assumption in 1945.

That came over the transom today in wandering around the online labyrinth. It is April 12, after all.

An Urban Ruin Explorer

Posted on April 11, 2022 by admin

Almost a warm day. Certainly not a cold one, which felt like a relief. I didn’t have as much time outside as I wanted, though we had a good dog walk at dusk and I spent time after dark on the deck, drinking tea. Much cooler by then, but no wind at all. With a coat and cap, not bad for half an hour.

Just discovered Chris Luckhardt. A talented photographer and videographer with a specialty in urban ruins. At least, that’s my estimation of him after watching his video about looking around the abandoned City Methodist Church in Gary, Indiana. Quite a wander. I plan to watch some more of his work.

Trepidation would probably keep me from going to exactly the sort of places he goes, but I understand the impulse. A healthy sense of exploration that involves the near as much as the far.

Doesn’t Play Well With Other Dogs

Posted on April 10, 2022 by admin

It’s been nine years now since the dog joined us. Not sure how many dog years that’s supposed to be, or whether that concept has any real meaning, but in any case she’s gone from young dog (though not a pup) to old dog. Yet she still has considerable pep.

Not long ago I found a picture of her I didn’t remember taking. Not a surprise, since there are a lot of pics of her.

That’s from the spring of 2015. That year our town opened up a dog park, the sort of place where you can unleash your animal and let it wander around and interact with other animals. That’s where she was in the image, along with another dog. You had to buy an annual membership, after which the park district would send you an electronic gizmo to open the dog park gate.

So we were charter members. And yet this is the first time I’ve ever mentioned it. We visited a few times, and soon discovered that our dog liked roaming around the place well enough: the trails, the grass, the shore of the water feature. But what I really think she wanted was the place to herself. Or at least, her and us. Other dogs, not so much.

Of course, we’d been warned. One of the things noted in the paperwork from the animal rescue org was that it would be better if we didn’t get any more dogs. Which we never have. But we figured there would be more than enough room at a dog park.

No. She’s never attacked another dog. She has, however, snarled at a fair number, since in the close presence of other dogs, she can be a mite prickly. I don’t remember for sure, but it’s more than likely that right after I took that shot pictured above — which looks so cute and all — she snarled and maybe barked at the other dog, and we had to pull her away. You never know how another dog is going to react, and a dog fight represents a potential knot of problems I do not need.

So we let the membership lapse. Just one of those things. We’ve still as fond of her as you should be of your dog. Member-of-the-family fond, though not to be mistaken for being a person. “Fur baby” is a term I’ll never use except to ridicule it.

Thursday Grab Bag

Posted on April 7, 2022 by admin

Sluggish progress toward spring here. But some progress. Plants in a nearby park.

The croci in my own yard have been very slow this year — no blooms even now. I don’t keep an exact track every year, but that seems a couple of weeks late. Some years, I remember seeing their very first green sprouts at the end of February. And of course, croci don’t mind a little snow.

On a bench in the same park. What is that thing?

A Soofa sign. The company web site says it makes electronics for advertising or as part of “smart city” communications. This doesn’t look like that, and it also looks inactive. Since I’d never noticed it before, it could be that it isn’t operational yet.

Or is it? According to a park district web site I couldn’t access fully — but could see a bit of, from my Google search — you can charge devices there. Solar-powered, and the top does resemble a solar panel. Wonder how much juice it has these many cloudy days.

The latest snack food to enter the house: Calbee brand Takoyaki Ball-flavored corn snacks. Though Calbee is Japanese, not a product of Japan, but rather Thailand, where ingredients and labor are no doubt cheaper.

No octopus, which is the main ingredient of actual takoyaki, is listed among the ingredients. Still, it’s flavored to taste like takoyaki, which it does, though the simulation isn’t quite spot-on. A little too sweet, Yuriko said, and I agree. Sweetened for North American tastes? Just how many North Americans are going to buy takoyaki-flavored snacks? But not bad.

Calbee, incidentally, began as a candy company in postwar Japan (1949) and acquired its name in the mid-50s, a portmanteau of “Calcium” and “Vitamin B1.” Soon the company found its way into crispy snack foods, especially wheat crackers. I suppose that was something of a novelty in Japan at the time, compared with rice crackers, which go way back. Calbee’s early confections caught on, and so the food technologists there have been working hard to make new varieties of snacks since then.

I see that the fifth season of Better Call Saul has appeared on Netflix. That’s good. I’ll watch it. Once a week or so, that is. That’s how new TV should be, according to Leviticus, I think, though it doesn’t apply to shows that might have been watched every day after school.

Ruth Macintyre Conservation Area

Posted on April 6, 2022 by admin

Fell asleep to light rain last night. I could open the window a crack to listen to it, for the first time this year. Today was merely cloudy, and yesterday’s warmth has mostly ebbed away.

Walked another northwest suburban conservation area recently, which is called the Ruth Macintyre Neighborhood Conservation Center on the entry sign.

In the park district materials, the place is known as the Ruth Macintyre Conservation Area. That matches the nomenclature of the other three such areas in the district, so I’ll go with it. This area is less wooded than Kay Wojcik, but worth the walk all the same.

Hard to believe these tall grasses and cattails will be green in a matter of weeks, certainly by May. Plenty of birdsong about now, but we didn’t hear any throaty frogs looking to mate, as we have in some other wetlands lately.

The trail was muddy in places. I hadn’t worn my best shoes for that, so it slowed me down. Good thing we weren’t in a hurry.

Ruth Macintyre is a total of 36 acres, the park district says, including a five-acre pond.

“Named for the longtime 8th grade science teacher at Frost Junior High who was active in environmental and conservation concerns and created a 13-acre sanctuary adjacent to the school that ballooned to the 36-acre conservation area,” according to the History of Schaumburg Township blog. “She taught in District 54 schools from 1956-1979. Rededicated on September 24, 1994 from Munao Park to the above-named conservation area.”

Kay Wojcik Conservation Area

Posted on April 5, 2022 by admin

Not every recent day has been wet and chilly here in the northwest suburbs. A few have been dry and chilly. But not so cold that we can’t take walks in places like the Kay Wojcik Conservation Area.

In full, it’s the Kay Wojcik Conservation Area at Oak Hollow, which sounds like a compromise renaming to avoid getting rid of the old name (it was just Oak Hollow CA before 2009). Whatever the name, it’s a pleasant place for a stroll, and one of those parks tucked deep in the suburban fabric, so that few outside the immediate area probably know about it.

Part of the conservation area is a pond.

The park is a 17½-acre remnant of the pre-settlement oak grove, marked by a small network of trails. How it didn’t become farm land and then suburban housing, the park district doesn’t say, but perhaps it was a bit marshy for either of those uses.

After getting home from our walk, I looked up Kathleen “Kay” Wojcik. Now retired, she was a Schaumburg Township clerk and later a member of the Illinois House of Representatives, from 1983 to 2003, and in the Illinois Senate from 2003 to 2005. Hope she’s able to stroll in her namesake park from time to time.

April Snow

Posted on April 4, 2022 by admin

Not long after noon on Saturday, snow came pouring down. Large, fluffy flakes. That went on for a good while, though sometimes it was more like sleet, other times borderline cold drizzle.

It took a while to stick.

But eventually it did.

Been a cold spring most of the time so far this year, with lots of cold precipitation, chilly winds, overcast skies and mud underfoot. But I don’t want to be churlish about what our life-sustaining atmosphere is up to, at least if it isn’t a violent storm. Warmer or warmish spring will come. Saturday’s snow was gone by the end of the day Sunday.

Obscure Texas Memorials

Posted on April 3, 2022 by admin

In April 2014, I visited Texas, and among other things drove south from Dallas with my brother Jay, not by way of the congested I-35, a road I’ve driven too many times to count, but by I-45 in the direction of Houston. We diverted from that highway to College Station, home of Texas A&M, and spent a little while at Washington-on-the-Brazos State Historic Site, before heading to San Antonio.

Among other memorials at Washington-on-the-Brazos was a fairly new one. At the time, only five years old.

Ron Stone (1936-2008) was a highly regarded local news anchorman in Houston who also wrote books about Texas history.

A tribute to Ron Stone

Ron loved Texas history and delighted in teaching others about our great Lone Star legacy. An award-winning TV anchorman, “Eyes of Texas” reporter and Sons of the Republic honoree, Ron served as master of ceremonies of Texas Independence Day for over two decades.

Fittingly, the stone says it was dedicated on Texas Independence Day in 2009.

What fascinates me about obscure memorials? Most people don’t share that interest. Otherwise, they wouldn’t be obscure. The feeling goes back a long way, too. I might have taken this picture with our Instamatic 104 in the early ’70s, during a short family trip through the Hill Country; but even if my brother Jay took it, I found the image intriguing.

It’s a memorial to one Oscar J. Fox (1879-1961), just off the road on U.S. 281 near Marble Falls, Texas, with a view of the Colorado River. In pre-Internet days, finding out its story would have taken more research expertise that I could have mustered as a child or even an adolescent, so it remained an enigma for years, there with the more recognizable subjects in our family photo album.

“The Hills of Home”
Memorial to Oscar J. Fox
Composer of this song
1879-1961
This is the view which gave
inspiration for this beautiful song.

These days, it’s no trick to find out more about Oscar J. Fox (here and here), who was known as a composer of cowboy songs, or at least an arranger of traditional cowboy songs. It’s also not hard to find recordings of “The Hills of Home,” though I have to say Nelson Eddy’s recording doesn’t do anything for me. Must have been a sentimental favorite for some people long ago, though.

Chicago Avenue Stroll: Buildings & Murals

Posted on March 31, 2022 by admin

No chance to see the aurora borealis here in northern Illinois last night, even if it was there to be seen. Yesterday was overcast all day, producing light but steady rain late in the evening and throughout the night, as far as I could tell.

Today was overcast as well, with light snow in the morning and again in the evening. So much for March going out like a lamb.

On Sunday, which was chilly but sunny, I took a stroll down Chicago Avenue for a few blocks. Chicago is a major east-west street, crossing the city and into the suburbs and running more than 12 miles, according to a Google Maps estimate. The eastern terminus is at Lake Shore Drive, but not before you pass such notable places as Michigan Avenue, the Chicago Water Tower and the Museum of Contemporary Art.

Where I walked, roughly 2300 W. to 2000 W. Chicago — about four miles west of Lake Michigan — the street is the commercial hub of Ukrainian Village, though not everything on the street has anything to do with Ukraine or its diaspora. Such as Fatso’s Last Stand. That’s very Chicago; it could be just about anywhere in the city.

One of two locations of this name in Chicago, owned by an entity that has other restaurants and bars in the city, but also in New York and Charleston. I ought to try it sometime. I like a hot dog stand that has its own mural.

It’s on the wall facing Oakley Blvd., which crosses Chicago Avenue at that point. The artist, one Felipe Solorzano, has some images on Instagram. It didn’t occur to me until I looked at them that people pose in front of the wings. I’ve seen that before, but not in Chicago.

The wings form the center panel in a triptych of paintings, if that term is correct for murals. Anyway, there are three distinct paintings on the Fatso’s wall. I didn’t take a picture of all of them, but Google did.

The new mural is dated 2019. That synchs with the always-useful Street View, which tells me that the current mural appeared between June 2018 and August 2019. Before that, there was a different mural.

How to describe that? A Ukrainian-Custer-hot dog stand vibe. Perhaps the owners felt obliged to cancel Custer, though I doubt most passersby gave it much thought. In any case, the earlier mural appeared some time after October 2015. Before that, just a red wall.

Across Chicago Avenue from Fatso’s is another mural. I don’t have any information about its creator, but he or she has some talent.

This one appeared between August 2019 and July 2021. I believe the mural vogue that seems to be under way in Chicago is a good thing. Spices up the city.

Elsewhere on the street, I took a look at some smaller commercial buildings, which are sinews of an urban neighborhood like Ukrainian Village: a shop on the first floor, an apartment or two or more above, perhaps where a shopkeeper used to live, and might still live in some cases. These buildings usually don’t command much attention, and maybe they don’t need to, but they can actually be fairly aesthetic.

I like that small one, tucked in the middle.

Another mural. Little information on this one either, but that’s hardy necessary to enjoy it.

I see on Street View that the mural appeared between August 2019 and August 2021, the same span when the first floor of the building went from being occupied by a hair salon — knocked off by the pandemic, probably — to being a vintage clothing store called the Stoop.

Not on Chicago Avenue, but a block to the north on Rice St. I wandered by it as well.

This is home to St. Nicholas School of the Arts, which is affiliated with the St. Nicholas Ukrainian Catholic Cathedral. A cornerstone gives the building date as 1935, but that’s all I know. Handsome structure, though.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling