Magic Places

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.

Not Yet, I Haven’t

Not long ago I came across the blog of a fellow – Everywhereman.me — who aspired to visit everywhere mentioned in the U.S. version of the song “I’ve Been Everywhere.” He then did just that, mostly by motorcycle. I don’t think I’ll do that exactly, but that’s the kind of meshuga I like, since I’m a bit touched myself.

Though others have recorded it, including Johnny Cash no less, I associate the U.S. version with Hank Snow. As well I should.

The original version was Australian, written by Geoff Mack and a hit for Lucky Starr. I have to give it its due. Australia is full of lots of weird and gorgeous place names, after all.

You need a written list to keep up with Lucky, as posted in Wiki. Or a very detailed knowledge of Australia.

Other versions for other places exist. None other than Stompin’ Tom Connors starts off in the United States, but naturally gravitates to Canada, with an entire verse about the Maritimes.

Canada’s fine, but Texas place names are just as good.

By one Brian Burns, who managed to work in some of my favorites, ever since my days of poring over Texas road maps: Pflugerville, Dime Box, and Cut and Shoot.

Long Grove in Winter

Heavy rain through much of the wee hours Monday morning, as forecast. Not as pleasant as sleep-time rain on a Friday or Saturday night, or in rental property when the risk of sump pump failure isn’t your concern, but not bad.

Also nice to know that February is just about over. Always good to get the bastard behind you, even if March isn’t that much better. The longer days promise warmer air, and eventually will deliver it.

That said, Sunday was warm (over 50 F.) and sunny enough to inspire us to visit Long Grove, Illinois, whose short and genteel shopping streets can make for a good stroll. The last time I was there, I was promised a sock monkey museum. And there it was!Long Grove, Illinois

Please use front door, the sign said. So we went to around to the front door. No dice. Closed on Sunday. What’s up with that? I could have sworn that most sock monkeys were Seventh-day Sabbatarians, but maybe I’ve been misinformed.

So I spent some time examining the nearby bricks, and least until Yuriko and the dog wanted me to come along with them. Long Grove has extensive brickwork at one’s feet.Long Grove, Illinois

Including named bricks.Long Grove, Illinois Long Grove, Illinois

Such as “Carlyle Sciotoville,” presumably a product of Carlyle Brick of Sciotoville, Ohio; and “Barr” bricks, probably associated with a factory that used to operate in Austin, Minnesota; and “Poston Pavers,” which must have been the product of Poston Brick & Concrete Co. of Sangamon County, Illinois.

Zounds, I’ve discovered one obscure rabbit hole: brick collecting, as discussed in blogs and articles and facilitated by the fact that brickmaking used to be a highly fragmented industry, with countless local brickmakers advertising their wares on the products themselves, so that there are hundreds (thousands?) of distinct varieties.

There’s also the International Brick Collectors Association, whose web site looks like it was set up in 1997 and not modified since, but why does it need to be? It does me good to know such an organization exists, even though I’m not planning to collect bricks like whoever set up BrickCollecting.com.

I like this Tumblr site, That Was Our Work, which is partly about bricks. “Bricks, manhole covers and sidewalks are cogs that help the great machine of the world run. They have stories to tell, histories and trends hidden in their design, their materials and their installation,” the site says.

No archives or index, though, which makes it of limited use for looking things up. But it is good for browsing. I’ve been known to take a look underfoot, too. It’s part of my style as a granular tourist.

Thursday Dust in the Wind

Much work these days. Lots going on. Will post again on January 19. The more holidays the better, and I’ll bet — considering the inclinations of the incoming administration — Juneteenth will be a federal holiday before long. Or at least the closest Monday.

Ice crystals on our deck. They didn’t last long. Later came snow, which mostly melted.
To follow Sink the Bismarck!, a taut 1960 British war movie, for contrast I recently watched Portrait of a Lady on Fire (Portrait de la jeune fille en feu, 2019), an engaging French love story set just before the Revolution. I haven’t seen many movies as painterly Portrait of a Lady on Fire.

A few weeks ago, before the violent national scrum, we started watching the short series The People vs. OJ Simpson. Top-quality historical fiction. Doesn’t feel historic, just like a good while ago. An increasingly long time ago, more in feeling than strict chronology. When the trial was actually happening, I remember thinking, do I have to hear about that again? Enough time has now passed for the subject to be of some interest.

That said, do I ever feel nostalgic for the ’90s? No. The underappreciated ’70s is more my flavor, and for the exact same uninteresting reason as most people. Nostalgia for one’s youth.

I didn’t know until I read about it a little while ago, but The Great Gatsby is in the public domain now. I could publish 100 words from that book, in order, or maybe reverse order, until I’d gone through the entire book, with the time needed to put the text in my only real cost. I don’t think I’ll do that, but it’s nice to know I could.

The immortal Ella.

A much later version. Recent, in fact, by the highly talented Hot Sardines.

The Hot Sardines’ singing is top notch, but I’m really taken with the animation in the video.

Another recent version by the Speakeasy Three.

Fine harmonies. The video is so stylized that it approaches parody, but doesn’t quite get there. Somehow, that works. Also, am I right in thinking there are celebrity lookalikes in this video? Recent celebrities, not swing-era ones. I don’t care enough about celebrities to find out, but I get that sense.

A site that visit every few months: The Comics Curmudgeon. On Jan 13, he mocks the comic strip Crock, which isn’t hard, but it is hard to be funny while doing it. The writer of the site, Joshua Fruhlinger, pulls it off.

One the characters says to another one, “I can’t wait to meet the blind date you got me. When can I call her?”

“Anytime but the weekends,” the other character says. “That’s the busiest time for blacksmiths.”

Fruhlinger comments: “I was going to go all in on ‘Why is it funny that this woman is a blacksmith,’ but we all know the reason why it’s supposed to be funny: blacksmithery is not a traditional feminine job so can you even imagine going on a date with a woman who would engage in it? What would you even call her? A blacksmithrix? Haw haw! Anyway, that’s stupid, so instead I’m going to focus on something actually puzzling: the assertion that weekends are ‘the busiest time for blacksmiths.’ I guess that’s when most Renn Faires are? Are we dealing with a universe where blacksmiths are a vital part of the everyday economy, making horseshoes and tools and such, or are we in a more modern environment where mass manufactured goods are omnipresent and easy to get, and the only people who go to blacksmiths are weirdos who are obsessed with swords? This is the Crock worldbuilding background that I have a million times more in interest in than I do in Poulet’s love life.”

I’ve started reading American Slavery, American Freedom, subtitled “The Ordeal of Colonial Virginia,” by Edmund S. Morgan (1975). I’m not far along, but enough to know he’s a good writer. The first chapter is unexpectedly about of Sir Francis Drake in Panama in 1572, but I think I can see where he seems to be going with the narrative, which will get to colonial Virginia before long.

The Comics Curmudgeon

During my free moments recently, scant free moments on some days, I’ve been reading the Comics Curmudgeon. It’s a standard blog of long-standing. A fellow named Joshua Fruhlinger posts a selection of daily newspaper comics — to use the quaint old term — and adds commentary. Generally mocking commentary, but unlike so much writing in that vein, he writes well. Some of it is very funny, or at least highly amusing, and often enough thoughtful too.

The range of targeted comics is broad, including what could be called funnies, except they aren’t funny all that much, such as B.C., Beetle Bailey, Crankshaft, Family Circus, Hagar the Horrible, Lockhorns, Marvin, Pluggers, Shoe, Six Chix (one of the few I’d never heard of) and many others. But not, I see from the archives, Broom-Hilda. I guess some things are so bad, yet have so much inexplicable longevity, that mocking them is pointless.

Also lampooned are the few soap-opera or adventure comics that are still around, such as Mary Worth, Mark Trail, The Phantom and Rex Morgan M.D. From the blog I learned that Apartment 3-G expired a few years ago, an event that had completely escaped my notice. Say, whatever happened to Dondi?

Some samples:

Crock, Jan. 3, 2019, has one of the men talking to the fort’s cook: “Psst… the men are planning a coup for Crock.” As the soldier walks away in the second panel, the cook says, “Will they need any snacks or finger food?” (Shouldn’t that be a coup against Crock? Never mind.)

Comics Curmudgeon says: “Crock’s Foreign Legion detachment is based in an isolated fort surrounded by a hostile, barely subjugated colonial population, and so it probably relies on supplies from the metropole to avoid starvation. A violent overthrow of the fort’s commanding officer, no matter how cruel and incompetent he might be, will certainly be seen as an act of rebellion against the French Republic, and so our heroes are likely to be cut off from any outside support, at least until they can successfully negotiate an amnesty. Thus, the coup plotters need to ensure that the fort’s cook and his staff are on their side and prepared for the hardship to come! But they’re being kind of half-assed about it, in my opinion.”

Beetle Bailey, Oct. 10, 2016, has two panels. First, Sarge (in the lead) and Beetle are climbing a steep slope. “Keep going, Beetle! We’re almost to the top!” Sarge says. Beetle simply says, “Groan!”

Next, at a cliff’s edge, Sarge says, “Wow, Beetle! We made it! Congrats!” and slaps Beetle on the back. Beetle is shown flying off the cliff.

CC says: “Welp, looks like Sarge finally just straight-up murdered Beetle! I guess this strip is over now. Looking forward to seeing what new comic they replace it with, or maybe just enjoying the soothing blank space left over when they don’t bother!”

A single panel Heathcliff, July 15, 2013, shows the cat hitting a baseball, using a fish as a bat. The caption says, “He switched to a lighter flounder.”

CC says: “Today’s panel provides something more in line with the profound weirdness bubbling below the surface of this feature’s modern iteration. Cats like fish, and I suppose cats like “playing with their food,” when their food is alive, but instead here the tenuous conceptual cat-fish connection produced a scenario where Heathcliff has a collection of fish of varying densities that he uses as athletic equipment. How dead are these fish, anyway? Are they still floppy? Do they hit the ball with a meaty smack, or have they started to rot, with contact with any projectile producing a cloud of scattered fish-flesh?

On July 22, 2007, he astutely compared Shoe and Get Fuzzy on politics.

“… while usually I go on about just about everything at great length, the most important thing I can say here is that Get Fuzzy is funny, while Shoe isn’t. Shoe falls into the typical toothless trap of just saying “THE POLITICS AREN’T THEY ANNOYING?”, literally allowing the discussion to be replaced by meaningless placeholder syllables. Get Fuzzy works with established character traits — Bucky and Satchel’s party affiliations have been frequently noted, whereas I don’t believe Shoe and the Perfesser had political beliefs until they became necessary for this cartoon. Plus Get Fuzzy contains actual political jokes that are funny. I love the third-party punchline, but I love “Well, with the proper funding…” even more.

Old Town Ramble

Been going to the city more than usual lately. One destination for a recent walkabout was Old Town, a near North Side Chicago neighborhood that I’ve passed by at the edges countless times. Walked through it, not so much. On a warm day this month, when I did finally take a walk in the neighborhood along such streets as Cleveland, Hudson, Sedgwick, Orleans, and Menomenee, all north of North Ave., I had the strange feeling that I wasn’t quite in Chicago any more.

“There is a scale to Old Town, a closeness of building to street and street to cross street and curb to curb that you simply don’t find anywhere else in the city,” one Vince Michael wrote in the limited but informative blog Renown Old Town.

“It is not so much about the rope mouldings above the windows or the paired brackets and dentils at the eave or even those Furnessian ornaments on Adler & Sullivan’s Halstead Houses. It is about a premodern relationship of buildings and streets and narrow alleyways – something not unusual in Rome or the old part of Edinburgh but exceedingly rare in Chicago.”

I didn’t think of Rome during my Old Town walk, and I’ve never wandered Edinburgh, but even so something about the alignment of the neighborhood is atypical for Chicago. It doesn’t really come through in pictures, though you can get a sense of some of the area’s handsome buildings that way.

Old Town, Chicago

Old Town, ChicagoOld Town, ChicagoOld Town, ChicagoEvery interesting neighborhood worthy of that adjective has its spots of whimsy. So too with Old Town.

Old Town, ChicagoOld Town, ChicagoThen there was this charming building, Schmidt Metzgerei. Butcher’s shop, though the it looks like Mitzgerei, except there’s no dot over the first i. (Vince Michael posits that Mitzgerei is an older variant spelling; I couldn’t say).
Schmidt Mitzgerei, Old Town, ChicagoIt stands out now, but probably didn’t when it was new, as a butcher’s shop with dwelling space on the second floor for the butcher and his family. “The mitzgerei, built in the classic German fachwerk style, utilizing heavy timber framing, was established in 1903,” writes Vince Michael. “Today it is the home of the Sullivan Law firm. It is a fine example of the early German immigrant construction that at one time was quite common throughout the Old Town Neighborhood.”

There’s a broader context, of course. The AIA Guide to Chicago tells us that Old Town “was settled by German produce farmers, who were numerous enough to establish St. Michael’s parish in 1852. After the devastation of the Fire of 1871, wooden cottages sprang up to house the homeless. Most of the ‘relief shanties’ are long gone… The area remained heavily German throughout the following decades, and by 1900, North Ave. as far west as Halstead St. was known as German Broadway.”

Maunday Thursday Misc.

A good Easter to all. Back on Easter Monday, which is a holiday in a fair number of countries, so why not here? Or at least something like in Buffalo, which seems to celebrate a thing called Dyngus Day.

The other day I noticed that I’ve nearly made 1,000 postings here. Not quite, but getting there. WordPress helpfully tells me the Top 10 Categories (out of 15, not counting Uncategorized) among all those posts.

Been There (526)
History (227)
Entertainment (160)
Over the Transom (152)
Public Art (105)
Food & Beverage (102)
Weather (100)
Family (83)
Holidays (66)
News (65)

I guess it’s fitting that Been There is first. It’s in the title, after all. Over the Transom is a little tricky: that’s any fool thing that comes my way without any plan, so it covers a lot of ground. Otherwise, I won’t put much stock in the ranking. For instance, I’ve posted more about weather than my family, but that hardly means I care more about the weather than them.

This made me laugh. Jonah Goldberg on the Trump administration: “I feel like I’m watching a Fellini movie without subtitles: I have no idea what’s going on.”

Here are some things young women get up to in Brooklyn. Or did in 2011.

Something to see in Denver. For the colorful art work, of course.

And maybe there is something new under the sun.

Improve Your Manroot

This morning I started getting a large volume of unwanted, unsolicited email in the account I use most. I’ve always gotten some, but for some reason the count swelled suddenly – and all of it promised to help me swell myself. Why now? Can’t say. And who is it that answers email like that, much less spends money because it? I especially can’t fathom that mystery.

I would use the conventional term for this kind of mail, which is the same as a famed canned meat product well-loved in Polynesia. But immediately after I used that word in a posting in 2012, the previous BTST started to go haywire. Probably a coincidence, but I’m not going to press my luck.

So I set the s-filter for the first time, though I’ve had the address for years. I’ve been reluctant to do that because I don’t want useful correspondence caught in the filter. But the latest deluge is ridiculous. The settings didn’t give me the option of blocking anything with certain words in the subject line, such as “penis.” No useful email is going to have that in the subject line, I think.

A Bit of Random Mencken

Most of the snow is gone, as expected, though pockets remain in shady spots. Temps are supposed to be as high as 60 F over the weekend, though, and that’ll return us completely to November brown.

Books are being re-arranged downstairs in a major way, and today I opened my copy of The American Language (Fourth Edition, 1936) at random, which is a good way to approach that work. Picked at random, page 211:

“The majority of the numerous Spanish loan-words in American came in before the Civil War, but the Spanish-American War added insurrecto, trocha, junta, ladrone, incommunicado, ley fuga, machete, mañana, and rurale, some of which are already obsolete; and the popularity of Western movies and fiction has brought in a few more, e.g., rodeo, hoosegow (from juzgado, the past participle of juzgar, to judge) and wrangler (from caballerango, a horse-groom), and greatly increased the use of others,” Mencken writes. “Chile con carne did not enter into the general American dietary until after 1900. The suffix –ista came in during the troubles in Mexico, following the downfall of Porfirio Díaz in 1911.”

Barista, in fact, is borrowed from Italian, but fashionista is patterned after Sandinista. Mencken wasn’t referring to that, however, and he doesn’t say what -ista word he’s thinking of from the 1910s, rather than the 1980s, when (I think) fashionista was coined, as Clintonista was in the 1990s.

One more language-related item. I didn’t know that some Germans were so touchy about Anglicisms in German. Golly, you’d think they were French.

Mommy SEO! Our Limited Supply is Very Nearly Gone

More rain through the night. It’s a good to be in a dry bed, drifting off to sleep, at times like that. The day was classic November gray.

The following arrived in the in box of an email system one of my clients lets me use. I dislike getting anything in that in box not related to the work I do for them, because the incoming volume’s high and it’s all too easy to lose track of something useful. So this is pretty much the definition of useless clutter, as far as I’m concerned:

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Most of the men who went off to the goldfields in California or the Yukon or Australia or wherever didn’t make much, if any, money. The fellow who got rich sold them equipment and provisions.