More Fun With ChatGPT

Question (entered January 16, 2023): What does Dees Stribling write?

Generative AI Answer (all sic):

Dees Stribling is a journalist and author who writes about real estate and related topics. He is known for his work as a reporter, editor, and commentator on the commercial real estate industry, covering a wide range of subjects including real estate finance, property markets, and commercial property development.

[So far, so good.]

He writes primarily for Bisnow, where he covers commercial real estate news and trends, including office leasing, retail, industrial and multifamily markets, commercial real estate finance, and investment trends.

[Correct.]

In addition to his journalism, Stribling has also written several books, including “The Rise of the Creative Class” and “The New Urban Crisis” which look at the economic, social and cultural changes that shape the nation’s cities.

[Books? Books? Where on Earth did — never mind, I’ve never written any books. In this paragraph, AI has gone off the rails, confusing its facts in a way no human would, except on purpose. The Rise of the Creative Class, incidentally, is a 2002 book by Richard Florida. I don’t think I’ve ever been mistaken for him before. Or will be again. The New Urban Crisis is a newer work (2017) by Florida.]

Overall, Dees Stribling writes about commercial real estate and related topics, including property markets, real estate finance, and commercial property development, for various publications and also authored books on the topic of urban development and real estate.

Correct, until it isn’t.

Also note, no mention of any of the many other pubs I wrote for as a freelancer for a dozen years, or my writing before that — much it is probably still online somewhere. Or BTST for that matter, which may be nonprofessional, but it’s had my name on it for nigh on 20 years, or since the Internet bronze age, I think. And nothing about my many postcards. Of course, that would be hard to know unless you know me well. AI would have to contact me, or some of my friends, to ascertain that, but how would it know to do that?

Daily Leader Mosaics, Pontiac

At the corner of West Howard and North Main Street in Pontiac, Illinois, is an unassuming building.Daily Leader, Pontiac, Illinois

The building itself didn’t catch my attention on Saturday morning before I ducked out of the numbing cold into the Route 66 museum across the street, nor did the glad fact that Pontiac still appeared to have a newspaper.

Rather, there seemed to be small murals on the walls. I went to take a closer look. Turns out they aren’t murals, but mosaics. Five all together.

They are part of the Daily Leader building, to go by the name on the wall. Except I have reason to believe that the paper, which is a Gannett asset, moved a few blocks away recently and a furniture retailer bought the building. That is what this item published by the Illinois Press Association says.

“For the first time since 1968, the Daily Leader has a new home,” the association reports. “As of Wednesday morning, July 13, the Leader office moved approximately four blocks to the northeast, to 512 N. Locust St. The Leader building on North Main Street was put up for sale earlier this year and purchased by Wright’s Furniture on May 13.

“The Pontiac Sentinel was begun as a weekly newspaper in 1857 and the Pontiac Weekly Leader arrived on the scene in 1880. In 1896, the weekly became a daily and the Daily Leader was born.”

One nit to pick: there’s no date on the item. You’d think that would be an important thing for an organization like the association to include, so I’ll assume it’s just an oversight. Happens to everyone.

But I do know it’s from this year, since July 13 was a Wednesday this year, and the story mentions 2019 as being in the past. Still, you shouldn’t have to rely on internal evidence to date a news story.

The mosaics taken together have a theme, the history of the graphic arts. This is the first of the mosaics as they proceed chronologically around the building’s two street-facing walls, beginning with cave dwellers and their art.Daily Leader mosaics, Pontiac, Illinois

Ceramic tiles (tesserae) were put in fully regular x-y grids form the images, though within many of the squares, irregular shapes are cut to fit each other, as long as it serves the purpose of creating the overall image. The more I look at the mosaics here in the warmth of my office, the more I like them.

Next, the scribes of ancient Egypt.Daily Leader mosaics, Pontiac, Illinois

Each mosaic has a caption at the bottom. This one, for example, says:

Graphic Arts 2000 B.C.
Egyptian Hieroglyphics

Next, a medieval scribe.Daily Leader mosaics, Pontiac, Illinois

Notice the detail. Seems simple, until you spend time looking at it. A lamp with candles hangs overhead; shadows lie more-or-less believably around the room; his hair is short but unkempt; the sandals are well depicted; the quill has a pleasing wave; the base of the desk and the bench are in matching dark colors; the top of the desk and paper, along with the contents of the box the right — scrolls? — are in matching light colors; the door is an oddly large part of the image, until you realize it leads the viewer past bushes and a tree to a building with a pointed window, like the room’s window. I can’t help but think that’s a church window.

Next, Gutenberg is making printing by hand obsolete.Daily Leader mosaics, Pontiac, Illinois

The end mosaic, which is on the north face of the building, is longer than the others. This is a detail. It depicts the modern newspaper office. Modern, as in 1970.Daily Leader mosaics, Pontiac, Illinois

I assume that date can stand in for the year the art was created. Let’s say ca. 1970, since I didn’t see a date or an artist’s name, though I didn’t inspect every inch of the mosaics as the wind blew the only direction it blows in winter — in my face.

I never worked for a newspaper professionally, but the characters remind me of the first jobs I had working for paper magazine publishers. To the right, a reporter making notes and another taking photos. Yet another reporter makes a phone call.

The news is thus gathered and then prepared for the press. I like to think the woman at the typewriter is a reporter too — women were entering the ranks of journalism in numbers by 1970, like in other professions — but she might have been intended as a typist.

From there, the text goes to a human typesetter. At my first writing job in Nashville in the mid-80s, we had two typesetters, youngish women back in their own room, though the editors consulted with them often enough about the text. They could be fun, smoking their cigarettes and accumulating coffee cups on nearby flat surfaces and bantering with the staff when they weren’t otherwise fixated on their jobs, which involved screen concentration and flying fingers.

At my next job, the typesetting job was automated by a typesetting program simple enough even for me to use, and I never again worked with human typesetters.

After the typesetter, who had created long strips of glossy paper with text — galleys — the layout man took over, waxing the backs of the galleys and placing them on thin cardboard sheets to create mocked-up pages, which in turn would be photographed for the presses. Man, I haven’t thought about the process in years.

At my second job, the layout man was old, opinionated, and sometimes prickly, having seen and (more likely) heard enough working with Chicago journalists to harden his character. There was a hint of cynicism in everything he said, and often enough much more than a hint. He was probably smarter than he let on. He didn’t smoke and had contempt for those who did. I suspect he drank and had contempt for those who didn’t. After my time, I understand he took retirement, and was replaced by computer programs.

All in all, the mosaics were quite a find on a casual walk. But that’s why I take them.

Modern Antiques

The other part of Ann’s birthday present from her parents consisted of purchases at an antique mall in Arlington Heights, Illinois, on Saturday afternoon. It had been a while since we’d been there — the last time might have been when I spotted Billy Beer for sale — but we figured she might find some beads or bead-adjacent materials there. She did.antiques

“On the whole it’s a likable place stuffed to the gills with debris from across the decades. I like looking around, just to remind myself how much stuff there is in the manmade world,” I wrote five years ago. Still apt. I also mentioned that place used to discourage photography.

If that’s still the case, I didn’t see any signs to tell me so this time. Maybe the proprietors gave that rule up as hopeless, since every single person who wanders in will have a high-quality, very easy to use camera in pocket or purse. Besides, how is the place going to be on social media if it disallows pictures?

So I took a few pictures. Such as of the plentiful reading material, including good old Mad, font of juvenile wisdom as surely as Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang before it.antiques antiques

Other objects. Many other objects.

Husman’s of Cincinnati is no more — as of only last year.

I didn’t take any kind of rigorous inventory, naturally, but I can’t shake the feeling that the mall’s stock is on a bell curve in terms of item-age, with the bulge being from the 1950s through the 1970s, and tapering off at each end. That is to say, nostalgia for people just about my age.

With some older items in the mix, of course.

Along with objects that look fairly new.
Bead World Palatine

The games entertained me most of all, without me having to play them.

Some standards: Operation, Scrabble, Twister, Yahtzee. Some tie-ins: Family Feud, Green Eggs and Ham, Cat in the Hat, Jeopardy. Others: Pass Out, Rummikub, Super Master Mind.

When I looked at that image today I also noticed the Talking, Feeling, And Doing Game, which I’d never heard of. “A psychotherapeutic game for children,” the box says. Copyright date 1973 by an outfit called Creative Therapeutics in New Jersey, and one groovy typeface for the name.

A relic of the much-maligned ’70s, I figured, a rep only slightly deserved, though that’s a discussion for another time. In any case, an echo of that half century ago, now forgotten, right?

Wrong, at least according to Amazon, which asserts that the game is “one of the most popular tools used in child psychotherapy.”

Turns out there’s an entire subspecies of board games that are used in child therapy, as I discovered looking at the Amazon page: Better Me, Emotional Roller Coaster, The Mindfulness Game and Together Point Family, to name just a few. I’m a little glad that I’d never heard of any of them before.

Of all the antique mall games, however, this one amused me most.
Barney Miller game

Could it be that the real prize among board game collectors, and there must be such, is finding a mint copy of the Fish board game, only a few hundred of which were ever sold?

Almost as good.

My family were clearly stick-in-the-muds when it came to tie-in board games. I don’t remember that we had a single one in our collection of a dozen or so games, and no one (including me) ever expressed any interest in them. I don’t even remember my friends having any. Did I miss out on a delightful childhood experience? Nah.

Deep-Freeze Thursday Melange

Today wasn’t actually that cold. About 30 degrees F. for an afternoon high, 20 degrees warmer than the day before, a brief interlude before a dive back down. A seamount in the trench of winter.

Actually, I don’t think seamounts rise in trenches, but that doesn’t have to be literally the case for the metaphor, rudimentary as it is, to work. Then again, maybe they do rise in trenches. My oceanographic knowledge itself is fairly rudimentary, though I am fascinated by those maps of the oceans that show the mountain ranges, abyssal plains and trenches.

“Seamounts — undersea mountains formed by volcanic activity — were once thought to be little more than hazards to submarine navigation. Today, scientists recognize these structures as biological hotspots that support a dazzling array of marine life,” NOAA says.

“New estimates suggest that, taken together, seamounts encompass about 28.8 million square kilometers of the Earth’s surface. That’s larger than deserts, tundra, or any other single land-based global habitat on the planet.”

Guess that’s the thing I learned today. Unless, of course, NOAA is part of the conspiracy to keep knowledge of the merfolks’ vast underwater kingdoms a secret from the general public, and its facts are actually “facts.” Because that’s just the sort of thing that generally governments do.

Better create some memes tout suite to warm people about NOAA.

Pyramid tea.pyramid tea

I don’t actually remember the brand, since I took the picture a while ago. But I remember it being good tea.

An example of information-free travel writing can be found at a site I ran across recently that purports to offer information for family vacations, in this case its page about the “Best Things to Do in Rochester, Minn.” (I’m not going to link to it.)

The top “best thing” on the list is the Rochester Art Center, which might be a reasonable suggestion. But the site describes it this way: “This enchanting place is home to some of the most fascinating and creative contemporary art you will ever see today. Plus, it encourages people to understand and value art for what it is, making it a great place to visit if you have a soft spot for art.

“The art center boasts a gallery where you can stroll around and admire their lovely contemporary art.”

Gee, if you’re going to publish this kind of vacuousness, at least you can shorten it:
The Rochester Art Center’s got a lot of swell art. Like art? Go see it.

Late Summer Thursday Stew

A package arrived in the mail for Lilly today from UIUC.

“Your high GPA has earned you the privilege of graduating Cum Laude…. This accomplishment, which is referred to as Latin Honors, is also recognized by a special bronze cord,” the enclosed letter said. “Because we were unable to have an on campus commencement ceremony in May, we will be mailing cords to the mailing address you have on file with campus.”

Sure enough, the package also included a bronze cord, looking something like a curtain accessory. Lilly’s already in the Pacific Northwest, so she’ll have to wait for one of us to deliver it in person, since I’m not planning on re-mailing it.

Never got a Latin Honor myself. Missed it by a whisker of GPA, I think. But I don’t really remember, and in nearly 40 years, that fact has never come up at any time for any reason.

I’m surprised some of these TV shows count as public domain. Then again, under the copyright rules before Disney put its imprint on the law, copyright holders had to renew after a certain number of years, and I expect many producers didn’t bother. The other day I watched the first episode of Car 54, Where Are You? It had its amusing moments.

Summer is ebbing away. I’m trying to spend as much time on my deck as possible. A refuge from work and word of the troubled world beyond my little spot.

A few days ago, after work but before dinner, I parked myself on the reclining deck chair on the deck and managed to take a nap. My family marveled at that, considering the heat and noise of the cicadas. But it wasn’t that hot that late in the day, and the sound of cicadas is something to drift off to sleep to, though not as soothing as cricketsong.

I’m about half way through The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos (1994), which Lilly and Ann gave to me last Christmas, on a tip (I believe) from one of Ann’s teachers.

“The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts,” Penguin Random House says. “There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.”

It’s a good read about a time and place I’m not especially familiar with, early 18th-century New England. Interesting how in only 50 years or so, that place evolved into the more familiar (to me) mid-century and Revolutionary New England.

Wait, when did Random House and Penguin merge? In 2013, it turns out. I wasn’t paying attention because book publishing isn’t my sort of publishing. I’m used to thinking of Penguin as a solidly British operation, but these days it’s owned by shadowy German billionaires.

Thursday Clouds &c

Warm day with plenty of cumulus clouds.

Wet spring has transitioned to a dryish summer so far, though we’ve had a few rainy moments lately. The day we were at Devil’s Lake SP, scattered thunderstorms were predicted, and maybe somebody got some, but we only experienced a little rain driving home that afternoon.

Made an unusual find at Devil’s Lake last week: a visitor guide that’s actually worth a damn. Though no writer names are given, Capital Newspapers in Baraboo published it for the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources, so it might have been a staff effort. That is, people who have some skill in writing.

So it has practical information — such as how to rent a boat or picnic shelter, activity schedules (clearly published before the pandemic), safety tips, and some well-done maps — but also readable information about the park, such as about the effigy mounds in the park (we didn’t see those), the threat of the dread emerald ash borer, a history of rock quarries in the area, and plans for a new interpretive center.

Also, a short item about the name of the lake. The Winnebago (Ho-Chunk) name is rendered as Ta-wa-cun-chuk-dah or Da-wa-kah-char-gra, which “was translated in its most sensational form (for that era) as Devil’s Lake,” the article notes. It could have been Spirit Lake, Sacred Lake or Holy Lake.

That era being the 19th century, when “reporters produced superlative accounts of Devil’s Lake and reproduced legends (sometimes manufactured) to match… By 1872… the Green County Republican newspaper reported, ‘Had the lake been christened by any other name, it would not have attracted so many people.’ ”

Just another example of Victorian marketing, in other words.

Nothing if not variety: the movies we’ve watched lately have included a selection of musicals, all so different in form and content that I wonder at the elasticity of the term musical. They include Chicago, The Rocky Horror Picture Show, Rocketman, and High School Musical 2.

As a sort of fictionalized musical biopic, the colorfully entertaining Rocketman at least made me appreciate just how ubiquitous Elton John was on the radio of my youth. I already knew that, of course, but hadn’t given it any thought in a long time. Also, it inspired me to look up a few clips of the musician himself, illustrating his piano virtuosity.

As for High School Musical 2, the girls are fond of that 2007 movie as part of their relatively recent childhood. I agreed to watch it all the way through, which I never had. The Mouse clearly put time and money into the thing, and the tunes and choreography were accomplished enough, so I didn’t mind watching. But without a sentimental attachment, its resemblance to a fully realized musical is that of a taxidermied animal to a living one.

The Bears’ Cookbook

The pit of winter hasn’t been very deep this year, but on Wednesday night, snow fell and today temps have been sliding all day. As of this evening, it’s about 5 degrees F. above, with subzero expected by dawn tomorrow. That’s the classic harsh winter pattern we’ve mostly avoided so far this year, when temps have actually risen after snowfall, enough to melt most of it each time.

Then again, forecasts call for above-freezing air by Sunday. The pit still seems pretty shallow. Suits me.

One more unusual book around the house: The Bears’ Cookbook. In this case, I didn’t nab it from my mother’s house. Rather the authors, Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau, gave it to Yuriko and me as a gift in 1998. I knew Steve back at VU; in fact, I was a senior staff member at Versus magazine when he was editor in ’82-’83.

The Bears’ Cookbook was a spiral-bound, privately published effort by Steve and Jack, who produced about 100 copies. As they explain in the book:
“What could be a better Christmas gift for our loved ones, our friends and family, than a cookbook of our favorite recipes? Welcome to our table. Sit, eat, enjoy.”

And so we have over the years. Yuriko and I have used the book, especially her, but so have Lilly and Ann, as soon as they’ve gotten old enough. Just a few weeks ago, Ann made chocolate chip cookies using the recipe on p. 97.

Besides cookies, subjects include breakfast, appetizers, soup, salads, breads, pasta, chicken, other meat, seafood, vegetables, condiments, and cakes and pies. Sources — one given for each recipe — are as diverse as “Ivan, a friend from New Brunswick who now lives in Vermont,” Alice’s Brady Bunch Cookbook, “Mayflower Restaurant in Albany, NY,” “Some men’s magazine Steve read long ago,” Julia Child, and “lost in the mists of time.”

The book actually has three covers. Flip over the first one, and you encounter this amusing, all-text cover.

A note inside the book explains: “We wound up with several covers, each with different titles, and we couldn’t decide which one to use. So we decided to use them all! Well, actually, just a few of them…

“Pick the cover you like best for a cookbook that may very well grace your coffee table, bookshelf or nightstand for years to come. Fold back the other covers (one of the few advantages if spiral binding), so that the excess covers become mere interior pages. Voila! The cover you prefer graces this lovely book.”

The third cover.

The inside cover of each of the covers includes biographical notes about Steve and Jack, such as under a cartoon of them:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau are not cartoon characters by a real flesh-and-blood couple who live high above San Francisco in an 18th-floor apartment they never call the ‘Treehouse of Justice.’ 

They’ve since moved to Palm Springs. Under a photo of them decked out in Western duds:

Steve Freitag and Jack Garceau — known far & wide as two of the orneriest, grizzliest old hashslingers in the West! — started out as mama’s-boy East Coast fops…

Under another cartoon of them with oversized heads:

Enormous heads like these require plenty of food! So it’s no surprise that Steve and Jack like to cook. Like to eat and like to read — and now, write — cookbooks.

I’m no judge of cookbooks, but I know this one is fun to use and fun to read.

Hush, Here Comes A Whiz Bang

Been a while since I visited Archive.org, which I remember from the early days of the Internet. Or at least my early days on the Internet, back in 199-something. According to the site, the archive now holds 330 billion web pages, 20 million books and other texts, 4.5 million audio recordings, 4 million videos, 3 million images and 200,000 software programs.

Maybe not the Library of Babel, or even the Library of Alexandria — or the existing Library of Congress, with its 168 million items — but impressive all the same. A fine place to wander around. When I did so the other day, I came across digitized versions of Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang, the juvenile humor mag whose heyday was nearly 100 years ago.

I downloaded a cover. It’s public domain now. The explosion of pedigreed bunk belongs to all humanity.

Naturally I spent some time reading some of the jokes. They were anachronistically mentioned by Prof. Harold Hill, after all: “Is there a nicotine stain on his index finger? A dime novel hidden in the corncrib? Is he starting to memorize jokes from Captain Billy’s Whiz Bang?”

This is what I have to say about it: juvenile humor has a short shelf life. Also worth noting: 25 cents wasn’t exactly cheap in the 1920s for a kid. A quarter in 1922 had the purchasing power of about $3.80 now.

Speaking of juvenile humor, I ran across this article the other day. Interesting that the writer, or maybe the editor, expects readers to get the visual reference to Alfred E. Neuman. So, apparently, do the editors of Der Spiegel, at least their English-speaking audience.

See All the Hip New Joints!

If I didn’t know better, and I don’t, I’d think that Lonely Planet is straying away from its backpacker roots into travel articles infused with that wan emotion felt by wan people, fear of missing out.

Take this article about the Scott’s Addition neighborhood of Richmond, Virginia. Not long ago, I wrote about an apartment development in the area, and in the course of my research discovered that the district is hip, up-and-coming, the haunt of millennials who have more adventuresome tastes than all previous generations, etc. That wasn’t something I’d known. On the whole, that’s probably good: economic and real estate development for the area, new businesses, people walking around, maybe even a few older buildings saved.

Still, the tone of the article is offputting. Here’s how it starts: “Passionate entrepreneurs have muscled onto the scene: hot art-themed hotels are wowing guests, bold chefs are shaking up the culinary landscape and brewers offer sours and saisons in brand-new tasting rooms.”

A sentence that could be published in precisely any travel guide about anywhere thought to be hip. There’s nothing distinctive about it. Remember in Masada, when one of the other Romans was committing a particularly heinous act, Peter O’Toole’s character stopped him while yelling, This is not Rome! My urge here is to declare, This is not Lonely Planet!

Lonely Planet cares not for art-themed hotels or bold chefs or brand-new tasting rooms. Lonely Planet might take a look in the hotel lobby, but then it finds a cheap lunch and eats it on a bench as life on the streets goes by, which Lonely Planet watches with delight. Lonely Planet smiles at the thought of bold chefs who create must-have creations. How do we know that they are must have? Everybody says so. Guaranteed to be expensive too, and Lonely Planets cares not for that.

That’s not my only beef with this particular article. It’s called “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot.” It should be called, “36 hours in Scott’s Addition, Richmond’s new hotspot, while well and truly drunk.”

The following is an outline of the article’s suggestions: First, go to a distillery and drink. Then drink cider made from apples so rare only one secret tree in Serendip grows them. Then have dinner, with “craft beer and adult milkshakes” at a “postmodern diner.”

See some art, because art is good, then resume drinking — Chinese food with craft beer. Then more beer. And some more after that, at very arty places. Or maybe saisons or farmhouse ales. Then stagger to another brewery. Don’t forget to eat after that, because the food’s special around here, but also finish things off with more beer!

It’s definitely the tone that bothers me. No doubt all of the recommended places are quite good, if that’s what you want. Some of my old friends have epicurean and gourmand tendencies, after all. The tone of the article, on the other hand, is Hit! All! The! Special! Places! or your trip will be crap, your time wasted and your soul unnourished.

The Chicago Main Newsstand

Early on Saturday afternoon, I saw that the Chicago Main Newsstand is open for business at the intersection of Chicago Ave. and Main St. in north suburban Evanston. (Various sources style it Chicago-Main, but not the wall outside the store.) I hadn’t been that way in a long time, or thought about the place. So if I’d had to guess beforehand, I would have said wrongly that the Internet killed it off.

The business originally dated from the 1930s. In the early ’90s, the CTA, which owned the property at the time, jacked up the rent so much that the newsstand closed. Later I read, or maybe heard, that the agency believed it could find a tenant to pay more. That was a public-be-damned sort of move, since the newsstand was popular in pre-Internet days as a source of national and international newspapers and a vast number of magazines.

Also, not only that, the move was a blunder, since for eight years, no one else wanted to be at that location at the rent the agency wanted to charge. The City of Evanston eventually bought the site and the owner of a different newsstand in Chicago had the place renovated and re-opened as a newsstand. A 2001 article in the Tribune tells the story.

I remember patronizing the former iteration occasionally in the late 1980s, when I visited Evanston often. In those days, the newsstand featured a mix of out-of-town newspapers and many, many magazines. These days I can report fewer newspapers — an effect of the Internet, certainly — but the same inexhaustible variety of magazines. The market for paper magazines is still alive.