Thursday Cha-Chings

Ann came home for spring break today. I offered to subsidize her expenses on a romp somewhere, even a mild sort of romp like my spring breaks of yore, such as to cloudy St. Petersburg, Florida, where we stayed at the condo belonging to the grandmother of one of our party (she wasn’t there) and found one of Vaughn Meader’s Kennedy records stashed away in her record collection. But Ann preferred to come here.

Remarkably, the fellow who produced The First Family in 1962, one Bob Booker, is still alive at 92, at least according to Wiki. Of course, he was only 31 then.

Saw this phrase at a supermarket recently, on banners hanging from the ceiling. Cha- ching!

The point in this case was to persuade shoppers that the store offers low, low prices. Save some cha-ching here or some such. I think most people understand that the phrase refers to cash register noise, and thus hard cold cash in one way or another, but it made me wonder how many people any more have even heard a cash register make a sound like that?

Because I am of a certain age, I have. I’m pretty sure the dime store I patronized ca. 1970 still had mechanical registers. But that was long ago, and even then the sound was a little old-timey. Now even the smallest stores in the nation’s remote backwaters use electronic registers, whose signature sound is a muffed beep-beep-beep that’s weak tea when it comes up to conjuring up images of drawers full of money. And yet cha-ching! lives on. Just another shiny bit in the jewel cave of English.

One more pic from Devon Ave. in Chicago on Sunday.

The mural is just outside the entrance to Cary’s, the bar I went to. As far as I saw, this was the only reference to Alice in Wonderland around. Why is it there? Why not?

Street View tells me that this small mural is a recent addition, too. It wasn’t there the last time the All-Seeing Eye passed by in November 2022. The bar’s wonderful neon sign has been there longer, appearing sometime between August 2007 (the first image available) and May 2009. That was a period of economic disruption, so maybe the bar did well enough to spring for the sign.

This from the NYT today: “President Biden has selected his education secretary, Miguel Cardona, to be the so-called designated survivor during Thursday night’s State of the Union address, a grim moniker meant to ensure at least one decision maker survives if a calamity were to wipe out the nation’s leadership assembled at the Capitol for the speech.”

Grim moniker, huh? Journalism might be a sickly industry, but journalese turns of phrase live on. Hard to imagine anyone actually saying that.

As for the office, the Secretary of Education is 15th in line to become president (vice president being first), which means that “designated survivor” is probably the only ghost of a chance of succeeding to the top spot, without the usual rarefied politicking of a presidential run, that the Secretary of Education has.

How long has that been a cabinet-level position? Right, the first one was during the Carter administration. Carving Education out of Health, Education and Welfare was, in fact, a campaign promise that he was able to keep, for what that was worth.

Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage No. 66

More from the physical files: something I’d forgotten I’d participated in, The Subtle Journal of Raw Coinage, which Geof Huth used to publish. It’s on a slip of paper – one of 100 copies – that I received in 1993 while in Osaka, publication date February 28. Looks pretty good for paper that’s now over 30 years old.

The actual size of the slip is about 8.5 x 3.5 inches, and the back is blank. Geof sent me more than one. I gave a few away, but I still have perhaps three or four.

I also don’t remember exactly how I came to create the words. Geof must have asked me to contribute some words; asked by letter or postcard, since this was pre-email, and I never spoke to him over the phone in those days. Then I must have sat down one day, whipped up the neologisms, and then put them in the mail.

The goal, as I vaguely remember, was to come up with words that could have some conventional meaning, but did not. Also, they had to evoke Japan somehow or other. I’m not sure whether the latter was my idea or not, but I believe I succeeded.

Japanease = Japan, ease (easy enough; easy days in Japan).

Tofun = tofu, fun. I knew about tofu long before living in Japan, since the food’s North American popularity had come of age in the 1980s. The very first time I heard of it, maybe, was at the New Guild Coop in Austin in the UT summer of ’81, where a health food enthusiast posted his verse in the communal kitchen:

Tofu/

is good/

for you.

Salarymaniac = Salaryman, maniac. Not too many actual maniacs among salarymen, I bet, but there must have been a few. We gaijin had a term for the vomit one would sometimes see on the sidewalks of Osaka, which looked like the result of a sudden projection straight down from a few feet up, if that. The sort of mess you’d expect from a salaryman who’d drank too much too fast with colleagues, and who managed to make it outside in time. The pattern somehow always included diced carrots. Anyway, that was a salaryman’s hanko.

Yenen = Yen, en. Yen is what we call the currency. En is what the Japanese call it.

Tokyosaka = Tokyo and Osaka, of course. The foreign press, at least in the those days, tended to be in Tokyo, and seemed not to get out of town much, so Tokyo = Japan in a lot of coverage, which was off-putting for those of us in Osaka. Or maybe I felt that way because I’ve long had an affinity for second cities.

Good Old French Know-How

No shortage of odd press releases lately. The first few lines of one that came recently read:

Bonjour à tous,

Voici notre catalogue Le Luxe Artisan pour ceux qui n’ont pas pu venir à Paris.

15 artisans d’art français venant des 4 coins de France étaient présents pour expliquer leur savoir-faire. Une très belle aventure humaine et un travail d’équipe. Scénographie de la talentueuse Julia Bancilhon, créatrice de papiers peints – studio Made of Matter.

I couldn’t let that go untranslated, since the machine now offers that service. So by machine translation, I got:

Hello everyone,

Here is our Le Luxe Artisan catalog for those who were unable to come to Paris.

15 French artisans from all over France were present to explain their know-how. A great human adventure and teamwork. Scenography by the talented Julia Bancilhon, wallpaper designer – Made of Matter studio.

Interesting that savoir-faire is translated know-how, which suggests a more workaday meaning in French for a term that acquired some social graces when it drifted into English.

Pre-Thanksgiving Assortment

Regards for Thanksgiving, back to posting November 27 or so. In the meantime, eat, drink and be indolent.

I woke up this morning from some sort of dream, trying to remember these three kinds of to-dos: shindigs, hullabaloos and hootenannies. I’m pretty sure I could call Full Moon Bluegrass a hootenanny. Otherwise, my experience with them is thin. Also, I forgot about hoedowns. The unconscious is a funny place.

Gentle rain last night, and all through the early morning. I cracked the window very slightly to listen as I drifted off. Still raining when I went to the bathroom not long before dawn. Maybe that put me to mind of folk music parties.

A couple of recent flags, including one that I saw in full flutter after I entered Tennessee just north of Nashville.

A distinctive design. The three stars represent, of course, the Grand Divisions of Tennessee, a thing unique to the state. Distinct legal entities, but also acknowledging historical and cultural distinctions.

I remember when Tennessee Gov. Lamar Alexander joined Garrison Keillor on stage during the pre-broadcast warmup for A Prairie Home Companion when the show came to Nashville in 1985. The governor played a little on the piano – he was really good, as I recall – and bantered with Keillor.

When it came up that Alexander had grown up in East Tennessee, Keillor said, “You guys were on our side during the war, weren’t you?”

In Texas, I saw a Space Force flag on a pole. First time ever.

That arrowhead design looks suspiciously familiar. Can’t quite put my finger on it.

Heard some blatherskite on the radio recently about planning one’s “celebration of life.” There’s that absurd euphemism again, standing in for funeral. Apparently it’s caught on. I suspect that undertakers and their marketing people are behind this.

I insist that my survivors, if they want to have some kind of formal event to mark my shuffling off this mortal coil, call it a funeral. It doesn’t need to have any of the trappings of a conventional funeral here in North America, just the term.

That got me to thinking, “mortal coil”? Sure, it’s Shakespeare, Hamlet in particular, but why coil? First place to look: my copy of Onions, which I haven’t opened in entirely too long. That is, a volume called A Shakespeare Glossary by C.T. Onions. I have a revised edition published in 1986.

Coil, n.

1. Noisy disturbance, tumult. Comedy of Errors: What a coil is there, Dromio?

2. Fuss, ado. Much Ado About Nothing: yonder’s old coil at home. Hamlet: When we have shuffled off this mortal coil.

So a coil’s a noisy bit of business. An Elizabethan meaning worth bringing back, but I doubt that’s going to happen. Thus your mortal coil would be the fuss of being alive, of which there’s a fair amount, including sound and fury and signifying… a different play, one that I won’t name.

Face to Face With a Short Snorter for the First Time

After our walk in the forest on Sunday, we dropped by an antique mall that we visit occasionally, and I saw something I’d read about years earlier, but had never actually seen. And I mean many years ago – maybe as long ago as junior high in the mid-70s, when I was browsing through one of the dictionaries we had at home, as one did before the Internet. I did, anyway.

By chance one day, I happened across the term short snorter. Occasionally afterward I’d mention it to someone else, and no one had ever heard of it. But I didn’t forget. That’s the kind of obscurity worth treasuring. In more recent years, I found mention of them online.

There under glass on Sunday – which accounts for the glare – was a short snorter.

Evidently, this silver certificate began its career as a short snorter on July 11, 1944 at Crumlin, near Lough Neagh, in County Antrim, Northern Ireland.

In our time, naturally, there are web sites devoted to short snorters. Even so, I’m sure that most people still haven’t heard of them, since they seem to have faded after WWII, as lost to time time as A cards.

“A short snorter is a banknote which was signed by various persons traveling together or meeting up at different events and records who was met,” the Short Snorter Project says. “The tradition was started by bush pilots in Alaska in the 1920s and subsequently spread through the growth of military and commercial aviation. If you signed a short snorter and that person could not produce it upon request, they owed you a dollar or a drink.”

Not only was it a real thing, there are short snorters with names, as the page details, such as the General Hoyt Vandenberg Snorter, the Harry Hopkins Snorter and the Yalta Snorter, among others.

The page also claims that “short snorters come to light at coins shops and coin shows where most dealers pay very little for them as they are heavily worn and ‘not very collectible.’ ”

Tell that to the antique dealer offering the note I saw. The asking price: $95. Obscurity worth treasuring, maybe, but I wasn’t inclined to pay that much.

Windy Chill

As forecast, full-throated winter came barreling into northern Illinois last night as erratic gusts. The edge of same system that spawned tornadoes in the South? Our wind was brisk but, I’m glad to say, not deadly, unless you passed out naked and drunk outside in some hard-to-spot location, as visiting Florida Man might.

At least it will be a dry cold for the next week or more, weather scientists predict. Any winter day without ice underfoot isn’t half bad.

Late November dusk in these climes.

RIP, Christine McVie. I was much surprised to learn that her maiden name was actually Perfect. I heard years ago that that was her name before marrying John McVie but, in as much as I gave it any thought, believed it was a stage name. Dropping a stage name upon marriage might be a little unusual, but not inconceivable.

Who’s named Perfect? Christine’s father, Cyril Percy Absell Perfect, a concert violinist and music lecturer from near Birmingham, UK, for one. And I assume some generations of his paternal ancestors before him.

“This… name is an example of the common medieval practice of creating a surname from a nickname, in this instance one that originally denoted an apprentice who had completed his period of training,” notes the Internet Surname Database.

“The derivation is from the Middle English ‘parfit,’ meaning ‘fully trained’ or ‘well versed’, from the Old French ‘parfit(e),’ meaning ‘completed,’ ‘perfect,’ ultimately from the Latin ‘perfectus,’ a derivative of ‘perficere’ to finish, accomplish.”

Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

Heavy rains started around daybreak on Sunday, continuing through until mid-afternoon, at least around here. Some parts of Chicago suffered flooding.

Just before sunset the same day, we walked the dog and noticed very little in the way of puddles, even in the low ground of the park behind our house. Odd, I thought, considering the heavy volume of water, but then it occurred to me that it’s been a warm two weeks since the last rain. The ground just soaked it up.

Saturday was one of those warm, sunny days. About an hour before sunset that day, we went back to Wood Dale, but this time walked around Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

The water is visibly the haunt of birds, including some herons, and probably fish that can’t be seen. The level looked low, which is reasonable, considering there hadn’t been any rain lately.

The trail goes more than a mile all the way around, not always with views of the water.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

O’Hare isn’t that far away.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

As the name says, the point of the basin is to catch floodwater, rather than have it damage the surrounding suburbs. The facility was completed in 2002.

“Floodwater enters the pump evacuated reservoir through a diversion weir made up of series of four sluice gates located at the end of School Street in Wood Dale,” says Du Page County.

“During flood events the sluice gates are opened, allowing stormwater to flow down the spillway into the reservoir. The stormwater is temporarily stored until flood levels along Salt Creek have receded. Stormwater is then pumped back to Salt Creek through a pump station and discharge channel.”

There’s a short bridge over the spillway.Wood Dale-Itasca Flood Control Reservoir

That got me thinking about the origin of “sluice,” which I didn’t know. So I looked it up later. Mirriam Webster: “Middle English sluse, alteration of scluse, from Anglo-French escluse, from Late Latin exclusa, from Latin, feminine of exclusus, past participle of excludere to exclude.”

Mackinac Island Walkabout, Part 2

Open up the Fibber McGee’s closet of Mackinac Island, and countless turtles come tumbling out.

By “open up,” I mean Google the term “Mackinac Island turtle” and the references come fast and thick: Lore of the Great Turtle, a book published by Mackinac State Historic Parks; Great Turtle Park; Great Turtle Kayak Tours; Great Turtle Toys of Mackinac Island; the Great Turtle Drop, which happens on New Year’s Eve; the Great Turtle Half Marathon & 5.7 Run/Walk; Great Turtle Brewery & Distillery; Great Turtle Creations of Mackinac Island; Heart of the Great Turtle Island – Gchi Mshiikenh Deh Minising Project; Turtle Fudge; the Great Turtle Sunset Voyage; and Great Turtle Lodge.

The association with turtles goes a long ways back, long before the appearance of Europeans in this part of the world.

“Mackinac Island is a shortened version of the Native American name pronounced Michilimackinac,” says the island’s web site. “The Anishinaabek people named this area and Mackinac Island Michilimackinac, meaning place of the great turtle.

“Why great turtle? They thought that Mackinac Island, with its limestone bluffs, looked like a giant turtle rising out of the water.”

Dig around a little more, and more emerges.

Writing in 1896 in a book called Mackinac, formerly Michilimackinac (isn’t the Internet Archive a fine thing?), one John R. Bailey had this to say:

“Michilimackinac is claimed to be derived from the Indian words Michi, ‘great,’ and Mackinac, ‘turtle,’ from a fancied resemblance to a large mud turtle; also from the Chippewa Mi-chi-ne Mau-ki-nouk, the two meaning ‘the place of giant fairies.’ [Henry] Schoolcraft says there is another meaning besides ‘great turtle.’ It also means ‘spirits,’ or ‘fairy spirits.’ The spirits were want to take the form of a turtle and become ‘turtle spirits.’ ”

All that goes to explain this sight, at the Gate House restaurant on Cadotte Ave. on the island.Mackinac Island

While wandering around on the hilly territory of central Mackinac Island, we contacted Gate House by phone for reservations. They offered us a slot for an hour later, or about enough time for us to walk there after a detour through one of the historic cemeteries. Such is scheduling in non-motorized Mackinac.

We wanted to avoid Main Street, so after descending from the highlands, we walked along Market Street instead, just a block inland from Main. A lot of people were on that street, but not as many as the mob on Main.Market Street Mackinac Island

The street is lined with many fine structures, originating during the great age of private development on the island in the late 19th and early 20th centuries.Market Street Mackinac Island Market Street Mackinac Island Market Street Mackinac Island

Traffic wandered along. Pedestrians and bicyclists, of course, but also no small number of horse-drawn carriages. Including something none of us had ever seen before: a horse-drawn UPS wagon.
Market Street Mackinac Island

As we had our lunch — really an early dinner — al fresco at Gate House, I couldn’t help but notice the difference in aural texture of a busy non-motorized road compared with what we are used to, here in the lingering age of the gasoline-powered internal combustion engine. The intermittent clop-clop-clop was actually pleasant, though of course the horses sometimes leave less pleasant mementos of their passing by.Market Street Mackinac Island

Late lunch-early dinner was pleasant as well, though at island prices. I had the walleye.

Almost across the street from Gate House is the Little Stone Church. We took a look after our meal was done. It isn’t that big, definitely made of stone, and looks like a church (as it is; Congregational). Unfortunately, it was closed.
Little Stone Church Mackinac Island

Within sight of the church is the much more famous Grand Hotel. We took a stroll in that direction.Grand Hotel Mackinac Island

Grand indeed.Grand Hotel Mackinac Island

And trolling for social media mentions.
Grand Hotel Mackinac Island

The porch is said to be the world’s longest, and a special enough place that it charges admission. We would have paid, but as it turned out we’d arrived just as a dress code went into force on the porch, and none of us were dressed for it. So we went for ice cream at the shop under one end of the porch. A good treat, at island prices.

A sign memorializing a lesser-known conference that happened here. It wasn’t Bretton Woods, but the hotel will take what it can get, historically speaking.Grand Hotel Mackinac Island

The hotel dates from 1887, back when railroads built hotels. In this case, a joint development Grand Rapids and Indiana and the Michigan Central RRs, as well as the Detroit & Cleveland Navigation Co., a Great Lakes steamship company of yore. These days, the Grand Hotel is owned by KSL Capital Partners, a private equity investor.

Though the porch was off limits, we hoi polloi could take a walk on the street below. Up close, one notices that the hotel paint is peeling, and in places needed more than a little touch up. Could be that, like the Golden Gate Bridge, the structure is always being painted, at least in the warmer months.Grand Hotel Mackinac Island

From the hotel, we followed a street lined with fine old houses — the summer “cottages” of the wealthy of 100-plus years ago. Of course, if you owned one now, you’d be wealthy, at least on paper. Mackinac Island  Mackinac Island  Mackinac Island

Soon the street changes into a bluff-side path, with good views. We followed it a while. Mackinac Island
 Mackinac Island

Eventually, wooden stairs led down to the road that circles the island, and we walked back to Main Street via that road to catch the ferry back to the mainland. We made occasional stops on the rocky shore of Lake Huron. Mackinac Island

If there’s a next time, maybe I’ll rent a bicycle. But Mackinac Island is a perfectly fine walking destination.

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.