Arches National Park

When you visit a place like southern Utah, you run through all the superlatives. In the moment, the wordless feeling as you stand in awe is enough. Later, you turn the bucket over, hoping that one extra-special word that fits what you’ve just seen will tumble out. But even the jewel cave that is English — to shift the metaphor — sometimes comes up short.

What would a Spanish speaker, whose linguistic predecessors have come here for centuries, say? Magnífico, espléndido, maravilloso? What do Germans, so many of whom seek out the desert Southwest in our time, use in such a situation? Großartig, herrlich, prachtig? What of the native tongues of the region? I’m mostly ignorant of those European languages, but vastly ignorant of those spoken on the Colorado Plateau for millennia, so I do not know.

All that is a long-winded intro to the vista we saw at Fiery Furnace in Arches National Park, where we spent most of the day on May 19.

“The Fiery Furnace is a natural labyrinth of narrow passages between towering sandstone walls called fins,” says a postcard I bought in the park. “The La Sal Mountains rise in the distance to nearly 13,000 feet…” Fiery Furnace Arches National Park

That isn’t a bad image, but it barely conveys the sweeping grandeur of the vista. Though different in most details — color, formation shape, vegetation — I instantly thought of Polychrome Pass in Alaska.

“The view toward the Alaska Range at Polychrome Pass is, I believe, the grandest vista I’ve ever seen,” I wrote last year.

At Fiery Furnace, I found its equal. Just like that. All the time, money and effort to reach this point seemed, all at once, entirely worth it, just to see what we saw. Of course, I had no doubt of that before, and not a vast amount of resources actually went into the trip, since travel is easy in our time, but still.

The marvels of Arches are many. By U.S. national park standards, it isn’t a large one, at about 76,600 acres (44th largest out of 63), but somehow more than 2,000 natural sandstone arches are packed into park. We saw a tiny but impressive fraction of these, and a lot else besides.Arches National Park

Perhaps the best known feature in the park is Delicate Arch, which is depicted on Utah license plates and a postage stamp commemorating the centennial of Utah statehood.

We didn’t get that close. We didn’t care to spend the energy to get there (increasingly with age, I’m learning to ration my energy). An easier trail takes you to a good if long-distance view of the arch, however.Arches National Park Arches National Park

I’ve centered the arch in this picture. If you look carefully, you’ll see people who did make the hike up to it.Arches National Park
Arches National Park

Broken Arch, on the other hand, we were willing to make the mile or so round trip on foot to see. But first, we popped in for a look at Sand Dune Arch. It’s in a slot canyon just off the way to Broken Arch.Arches National Park
Arches National Park

Which eventually tightens up considerably.Arches National Park

The arch itself is off in a wider place in the canyon.
Arches National Park

Note the sand. The color of Mars, but the exact texture of warm beach sand on Earth. My shoes had to come off for a while.
Arches National Park

But they were back on for the hike to Broken Arch, along this path.Arches National Park Arches National Park Arches National Park Arches National Park

Eventually, you arrive at the arch, which is cracked if not broken.
Arches National Park Broken Arch

I looked at that view of the arch, and I couldn’t help thinking that it was going to say: A question. Since before your sun burned hot in space and before your race was born, I have awaited a question. That only goes to show the absurd conditioning I’ve submitted myself to in the form of entertainment, but never mind.

Another view.Arches National Park Broken Arch

Under the arch. Erosion didn’t take its ultimate toll while we were there, fortunately.
Arches National Park Broken Arch

Elsewhere in the park: long views of the La Sal Mountains and other vistas.Arches National Park La Sal Mountains Arches National Park La Sal Mountains Arches National Park La Sal Mountains
Arches National Park La Sal Mountains

Except for lizards, wildlife was a little hard to spot, but not impossible.
Arches National Park

Balanced Rock. Apt name, I’d say.Arches National Park Balanced Rock Arches National Park Balanced Rock Arches National Park Balanced Rock

Mushroom cloud rock, I’d say about that view. The rock stayed balanced while we were there. One of these days, though — tomorrow, 100 years from now — down it will come. Our still images and even our eyes deceive us: the landscape is always in motion.

Kyiv

Until the other day, I thought of Kyiv as merely an alternate transliteration of the capital of Ukraine, but I am willing to revise my opinion. Apparently the Ukrainians insist that it is the correct one, as opposed to the Russian-inspired Kiev, and as the bombs fall on that city, it only seems fair to write it Kyiv.

“This rush to Ukrainianize spellings is not only a response to Kyiv’s sudden newsworthiness,” says an article posted by the Atlantic Council in 2019. “It represents the latest chapter in a long-running campaign to secure recognition for the Ukrainian-language versions of Ukrainian place names, and is part of a much broader post-Soviet drive to assert an independent Ukrainian identity.”

As I recall, the Ukrainians also insisted that “the” be expunged from the nation’s name in English 30 years ago, as an affront to their nationhood. Most English-language publications went along with that. That’s OK, but it still rings a little funny without the “the.” That’s only because I grew up in the days of the Ukrainian SSR and old language habits die hard.

Further down the Atlantic Council article is this useful nugget about the political history of the region:

“For hundreds of years, successive Russian leaders sought to absorb Ukraine into their country’s national heartlands, exploiting the cultural closeness between the two nations to overwhelm and incorporate the historically Ukrainian lands to the south.”

Old Soviet apparatchik he may be, but clearly Mr. Putin’s a traditionalist when it comes to classic Russian expansionism.

The Fascination of Holidays

This fascinating bit of ephemera came into the house not long ago. Fascinating to me, anyway: a list of holidays in various countries. The front.

The back.

It isn’t very large — about 5¼ x 4¼ inches — and is a page in a 2022 calendar produced by an international logistics firm. Holidays of 28 nations and the Hong Kong SAR. Why those? Maybe those are the countries in which the company does business.
Anyway, it’s good for browsing, a sort of mini version of endlessly interesting The American Book of Days or (more accurately) The International Book of Days.

So I browsed some February holidays. Shaheed Day, for example, two days past now for this year. I’d never heard of it. There’s quite a back story.

“This major public holiday in Bangladesh is always celebrated on February 21st,” notes Office Holidays.

“Known as Shaheed Day, ‘Ekushe’ (21st), Language Movement Day, Martyrs’ Day and ‘Shôhid Dibôs’ in Bengali, this day commemorates those who lost their lives in the struggle for the Bengali language in 1952.”

Eh? The holiday’s origin goes back to the old East Pakistan days, it seems. Soon after independence from the UK, the Urdu-speaking bosses in Karachi (Islamabad didn’t exist yet) went about trying to suppress the Bengali language in East Pakistan.

Naturally, the Bengalis resisted, and things came to a head on February 21, 1952, when police killed a number of students at a pro-Bengali language protest. That was like pouring gasoline on the situation, and eventually (a few stubborn years later), West Pakistan threw in the towel when it came to Bengali language suppression.

Also, much more recently, UNESCO made February 21 International Mother Language Day, for what that’s worth. A lot of mother languages are dying out. Recently, the last known native speaker of Yaghan, one of Chile’s indigenous languages, died at 93.

Scopes Don’t Match

Temps not much higher than 10 degrees F. this afternoon, but not only that, wind gusts to drive home the point that it’s early January, with relief a long time coming. This is the back yard wind chime, moving and clattering.wind chimes. Jan 5, 2022

Clattering because it’s a wooden wind chime, which I acquired as an omiyagi, a gift-souvenir from a trip for someone at home, in San Diego way back in 1999. It is intensely weathered, and the strings holding the chimes have broken and been replaced more than I can count. In fact, a fourth clime needs to be rehung even now, but I haven’t gotten around to it.

The new year isn’t very far along, but the bots are back to annoying me. I have in my possession a gift card — it was gift — from a major retailer. I went online to check the balance. I’m absolutely sure I put in the numbers correctly (but whited out in my screen grab), and I get this.

Scopes don’t match. What the hell does that mean? Was any human being involved at any point in determining that that would be a response to a customer? If so, was it a software engineer who didn’t give a moment’s thought to the fact that no one but software engineers know that term? Or is it random term never originated by the mind of a human?

In logic, I have read, a “scope” is “the range of a logical operator: a string in predicate calculus that is governed by a quantifier,” which really doesn’t clear up things.

That was all the time I needed to spend thinking about this nonsense. I called the 800 number and found out the balance without further ado.

Fortune Cookie Wisdom

I ate a fortune cookie not long ago, as I do when offered them by restaurants and takeout places that offer them. Also, I read the fortune, as a form of very low-grade entertainment.

Something I knew about fortune cookies: their origin seems to trace from Japan, Kyoto in fact, a place that’s long been inventive when it comes to confections. I’ve sampled some of the traditional products in the small, wonderfully colorful shops of that city.

“The idea that fortune cookies come from Japan is counterintuitive, to say the least,” wrote Jennifer 8. Lee in the New York Times some years ago, an article I remember seeing before. Maybe so, but ideas and inventions travel and morph, in this case to California for an association with Chinese food by the 20th century.

“The Japanese may have invented the fortune cookie,” she quotes Derrick Wong, the vice president of the largest fortune cookie manufacturer in the world, Wonton Food, based in Brooklyn. “But the Chinese people really explored the potential of the fortune cookie. It’s Chinese-American culture. It only happens here, not in China.”

Which brings me to the wisdom in my most recent fortune cookie, from a bakery in Chicago. Seven words, entirely sic:

Being an able man. There are always.

Glad to see that fortune-cookie writing, in this case, has been outsourced to someone whose native language isn’t English. Entirely possible in polyglot Chicago. I can’t say what language they do speak, but I’m certain of that.

Thursday Crumbs

Warm and windy today. The wind died down some in the evening, and I had a pleasant time sitting on the deck drinking tea and reading. At advanced middle age, these are pleasures you appreciate.

Speaking of an advanced age, I’m glad to see Elvis Costello is still recording catchy tunes. He released an album in October — his 31st — called Hey Clockface, with the title track, “Hey Clockface / How Can You Face Me?” The video is as charming as the song.

He shares writing credit for the song with Fats Waller and Andy Razaf, since it incorporates part of “How Can You Face Me?” Not the sort of music Elvis Costello did 40 years ago when I saw him at VU, but I wouldn’t have appreciated it then anyway.

I left YouTube on autoplay after Waller’s “How Can You Face Me?” and left the room for a few minutes. When I came back, the Bratislava Hot Serenaders were playing, a band I hadn’t heard of before.

A word I hadn’t heard of before.

Clearly a commercial coinage in our time. But who knows? It might evolve over the decades or centuries into something unimaginably perverse.

The U.S. birth rate might be declining, but there are some births. I knew that the Social Security Administration keeps track of baby names, but I didn’t know until recently that the agency maintains a web page devoted to them, new and old.

Not a bad list in 2020, mostly traditional names, such as Olivia, Charlotte, Sophia, Elijah, William and James, rather than some of the trendy names of recent decades, none of which I’ll cite. I’m mossbacked when it comes to a few things, and baby names is one of them.

Thursday Dribs

Shouldn’t there be drabs as well? Maybe, but I did that not too many Thursdays ago.

“Drib is known in some English, Irish and Scottish dialects from at least the eighteenth century, meaning an inconsiderable quantity or a drop and most probably is a variant form of drip or drop,” says the always interesting World Wide Words.

“The experts are undecided whether the second half is a mere echo of the first, as in reduplicated compounds like helter-skelter, see-saw and hurly-burly, or if drab is a real word in its own right.”

It is a word, but in the sense of dull. The Thursday Drabs would suggest that I passed the day listlessly, but that wasn’t the case at all. For one thing, going out for a walk is now pretty easy and, except when the wind kicks up, not too bad. All the ice has vanished from almost all of the sidewalks. Walking the dog is mostly a pleasure again.

These February scenes are gone as well. Some snow still endures, forming snow archipelagos on lawns, especially in shady northern exposures, but there’s a little less of it every day.

Also good to see: croci emerging from the earth. Some in our back yard, and some especially vigorous patches on the grounds of Quincy Adams Wagstaff Elementary, where we sometimes walk the dog.

Not long ago, I found a 12 oz. jar of preserves tucked away deep in our canned (and jarred) goods pantry: cherry raspberry preserves, product of Brownwood Farms of Williamsburg, Michigan. That sounded familiar, but I couldn’t place it for a moment.

The lid, though tight, sported a light coating of dust. That doesn’t bode well for the edibility of the edibles inside.

Then it occurred to me. We’d bought these preserves way up in Grand Traverse County in the summer of 2007 during a visit. Naturally, this made me a little leery of even opening the thing, much less eating it. But I got it open and didn’t see (or more importantly) smell anything amiss.

Been eating my 2000s-vintage preserves on various kinds of bread since then, here in the 2020s, and it’s delicious. After all, Grand Traverse is justly known for its cherries and raspberries and other berries. I’m glad the preserve was literally true in the case of these preserves.

Forgotten Cherihews

Too cold and rainy this weekend for walks in the woods. Too pandemicky for entertainment outside the home, or even casual shopping. So what did I do on Saturday? Another social Zoom. Summer was a good time for them, then I let it slack off, but the holidays seem like a good time to organize them again.

This one was far flung. One participant in New York, one in California, one in Tennessee and one in Illinois.
I’ve left the names on this time, since our participation has been documented already by one or more of the other participants on social media. Also, so I can quote some of the clerihews we discussed.

I’ve been acquainted with the members of this particular group since the early ’80s, when we all contributed in some capacity to the Vanderbilt student magazine of the time, Versus. It came up in conversation somehow that Geof wrote clerihews back then about people we all knew.

He did? I had no memory of them. Time flies, memory disappears. Writing cherihews would have been in character for him, though, so I’m sure it happened.

Steve Freitag,
Always the shytag,
Hid in the tunnel
To drink from a funnel.

Geof Huth
Ensconced in his booth
When asked if he cometh or goeth
Replied “boeth”

Dees Stribling,
Always dribbling,
Said it didn’t matter
That he would splatter.

They couldn’t remember one for Pete, so Geof wrote one on Facebook the next day:

Pete the Wilson
Only ate stilton.
When he ran out of cheese,
We felt a warm breeze.

Dolce Far Niente and All That

Here’s an interesting list of words, if accurate, or even if not, and I suspect that’s the case for some of them (but I can’t know). Dolce far niente is a worthwhile concept: pleasant idleness, or the joy of doing nothing.

Such lists now appear periodically on line, and I believe they hark back to a pre-Internet book called They Have a Word For It: A Lighthearted Lexicon of Untranslatable Words & Phrases by Howard Rheingold (1988).

I have a copy of it around somewhere, bought fairly new. I don’t remember any of the words in it, except the concept of a ponte day. “Bridge” day in Italian, meaning a day off between the weekend and a holiday, an especially useful concept in that country since Italy doesn’t have a version of the Uniform Monday Holiday Act, and holidays can fall mid-week.

I also remember the author appearing on the radio show Whad’ya Know? Maybe in 1989. I didn’t listen to it every week in those days, but fairly often. I understand that it ran as a radio show until 2016, and now exists as a podcast.

Just before Christmas 1989, I went to a broadcast of the show when it was in Chicago, at the Blackstone Theatre (these days, the Merle Reskin Theatre). Remarkably, I can listen to it again if I want. So far, I haven’t.

Today I was near the Robert O. Atcher Municipal Center, not far from where we were yesterday. Atcher, besides being mayor of Schaumburg from 1959 to 1975, was a successful country musician.

The trees are just beginning to turn.

Schaumburg in the fall

Schaumburg in the fallClose to the Atcher Center are flowers. We’re in the narrow window when the trees are coloring up, yet some flowers are still blooming.
Schaumburg in the fall While on the grounds, I noticed a memorial I’d never noticed before. According to various news reports, it’s been there some years — how did I miss it? A plaque for a Schaumburg resident, René LeBeau, who died awfully young.
René LeBeau memorialI must have heard about the crash of United 232 when it happened, but I had to read about it to remember. Quite a harrowing story. It’s a wonder anyone survived.

404 Fehler

The other day I was nosing around a web site of a German company — though the part of the site I visited was in English — and came across a 404, which I guess has the same meaning in every language now.

404 FEHLER
Seite konnte nicht gefunden werden
Die von Ihnen gewünschte Seite ist leider nicht verfügbar.
Möglicherweise ist die angeforderte URL falsch oder veraltet beziehungsweise wurde die betreffende Seite von uns archiviert oder umbenannt.
Gehen Sie zurück zur Startseite, um Ihren gewünschten Inhalt zu finden.

Lots of fun words in that text, such as verfügbar, umbenannt und möglicherweise.