Southeast Loop ’26

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Just before the election, as I spent time driving through the populous Charleston, SC, and the less populous parts of the Low Country in that state, I heard the same radio ad time and again – a dead-serious male voice warning South Carolinians about the perils of voting for the Democratic candidate, Annie Andrews. The first time I heard it, I’d swear he said that a vote for her represented a vote for joining a “socialist dinner party.”

Say what? That actually sounds interesting, at least as an evening event. You know, yuck it up with Emma Goldman and Eugene V. Debs and maybe some lesser-known residents of Forest Home Cemetery. During other hearings of the commercial, I thought he might be making a lame pun, “socialist demo-party,” but I wasn’t sure. Then it dawned on me that the voice was likely automated. For all the robotic robustness of the voice, that phrase wasn’t clear, which is a tell. Anyway, I’m sticking with “socialist dinner party,” since it’s way more fun. Take humor where you can from the current political climate.

I wouldn’t have thought the U.S. Senate race in South Carolina this year was competitive enough to support much advertising, but that only shows what I knew about it: bupkis. Dr. Andrews won, as part of the thumping election day enjoyed by the National Democracy. It should be noted however that, unlike in Texas, a Republican won the governorship in South Carolina, and the GOP majority is still pretty firm in the SC House of Representatives, though their supermajority has vanished.

I happened to be in South Carolina in October as part of a longer drive, because of course I was. After a long-trip hiatus from May to September – a wholly good time to be in northern Illinois, enjoying life on my deck – I hit the road again, high gas prices be damned, driving 4,148 miles driveway-to-driveway. I left on October 7.

The dark green spots are where I visited friends, the red other stopovers, and the yellow travels with Yuriko, who flew to Charleston, SC, to meet me.

I ought to send a bill to the White House for the extra charge for gas, due to ill-considered policy, but I know the current occupant would stiff me, as his wont. But at least I’m not driving an RV or paying for diesel. Speaking of which, here are an overfamiliar figure and a lesser-known one, pointing at pump prices, seen in North Carolina.

We know this is inaccurate, since the president would never share credit for anything. Anyway, political ads were pretty thick on the ground in North Carolina and, in this case, on the pump. Michael Whatley, erstwhile chairman of the Republican National Committee, was this year’s Republican nominee for Senate in NC. He was trounced.

My drive first took me through the thick of Indiana, a vanishingly small slice of Ohio, and a lot of Kentucky, eventually to eastern Middle Tennessee, where I visited Margaret and Dave in their holler during the second weekend in October. I attended another of their Barn Parties, and was asked to document it. I took regular pics and made some enhancements to them.

After crossing East Tennessee, I tarried in the mountainous southwest Virginia and then made my way into flatter eastern North Carolina, where I first met the coast – at New Bern, where I visited Dan and Pam the next weekend. From there I followed the coast, more or less, down through the Carolinas. After I stopped in Wilmington, NC, for a while, Yuriko joined me for a long weekend of stomping around the historic parts of Charleston, SC, and its suburbs.

After she returned home, I headed solo again south, including a stopover in Brunswick, Georgia, but ultimately to Jacksonville and St. Augustine, Florida. The deciduous golds and reds of Virginia and North Carolina morphed into the still-greens and evergreens of the sandy soils along the South Carolina and Georgia coasts, complete with trees heavily bearded with Spanish moss.

In Jacksonville, I visited Catherine and Jae for a spell that included Halloween, which was just as suburban an event as it would have been at home. I spent the first few days of November heading north through Georgia and Tennessee and back to the colors of fall, arriving in Nashville as news of the election filled the radio. I’d voted by mail somewhat earlier. I visited Stephanie and Wendall in Nashville.

The last leg of the trip took me through Land Between the Lakes (Between the Rivers) and Evansville, Indiana. That city was a counterpoint to Lexington, Kentucky, by my eccentric lights. Both were places I’d never been, so I spent the first and last days of the trip rectifying those omissions. I got home November 6.

I drove the usual spectrum of North American roads, including highly congested highways and twisty two-lane jobs through the rural South which either were or were not congested, and did or did not cut through still-undeveloped patches, depending on their proximity to coastal gathering places for retirees, transplants and vacationers. I drove part of the Crooked Road in southwestern Virginia, and it was true to the nickname, though it’s more prosaically known as US 58. I drove through the famed live oak-Spanish moss tunnel at Boone Hall in suburban Charleston, which was not crooked at all, and known for its appearances in movies and TV dramas. I drove surprisingly busy small roads on some of the Sea Islands, which retirees, transplants and vacationers seem to have discovered. I drove US 41 north from Evansville to Hammond, Indiana.

We crossed the highly aesthetic Arthur Ravenel Jr. Bridge between Charleston and Mount Pleasant a number of times. In Brunswick, Georgia, I crossed the remarkably steep and equally aesthetic Sidney Lanier Bridge across the Brunswick River. Good to know that such a major bridge is named after a poet. And there were other cool bridges along the way, since rivers and streams and estuaries mark coastal Southeast with a singular intensity, and are bridged with a similar intensity in our time.

I made a point of passing through cities and towns previously unfamiliar to me – because what kind of trip would it be otherwise? I scheduled things so that I would have time (for the first time) for the likes of Lexington, Kentucky; Saltville and Damascus, Virginia; Kinston and Beaufort, NC; Beaufort and Brunswick and Sullivan’s Island, SC; Waycross and Albany and Americus and Plains, Georgia; and Evansville, Indiana. I returned to places like Wilmington, NC and St. Augustine, Florida, for closer looks. I visited only a handful of cemeteries this trip, but they were good ones, as well as a few churches (likewise good), and a single and impressive state capitol: North Carolina.

Green: interior visits to the state or provincial capitol. Orange: exterior visit only. Gold: uncertain. White: more boxes to check. Canada, your parliament buildings are calling.

I saw bizarre stuff at the Museum of the Bizarre in Wilmington, beautiful stuff at the beautiful Cummings Museum in Jacksonville, especially its garden along the St. Johns River, and historic and other stuff of interest in a number of museums and spots along my route: a famed first lady’s home; two presidential graves; the site of a salt works in Virginia destroyed by war; a crumbled tobacco shed on a rural Tennessee track destroyed by time; the sweeping views from the Appalachian Trail near Mt. Rogers, Virginia; the room where Lee surrendered to Grant; views from on a sailboat on the Nuese River estuary and later, a look at wreck of the CSS Neuse, a luckless Confederate warship; a closer look at the battleship grays of the USS North Carolina; some one-night only experimental theater at the New Bern Civic Theatre; a large patch of Venus flytraps and pitcher plants; the room in which South Carolina ratified the Constitution and another building in that state that housed the first school for the newly liberated black population of the coast in 1862; Boone Hall’s well-preserved slave cabins; more than one former coastal fort, including one that witnessed important action in both the Revolution and the Civil War; an inland fort important in the western theater of the war; a tea farm near the end of a Low Country highway; flooded streets in Jacksonville; a small wonder of a Greek orthodox shrine on a northern Florida tourist street; the gem that is the former Ponce de Leon Hotel in St. Augustine; a couple of listless alligators in the Okefenokee – and really, the only reasons I needed to go there was liking the name and Pogo – and a giant smiling Jimmy Carter peanut among the peanut farms of Sumter County, Georgia. Quite a trip, it was.

“Once Upon a Time”

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Fall is well under way, even though this evening, a youth baseball game was played in the park next to the school behind my house. It’s warm enough for it, but not summertime warm. It might be the last game of the year for that particular neighborhood diamond. I mowed my yard today under a warm sun, which I’m sure will be the last time this year.

With the coming of fall is the end of the Summer of Here. Back to posting when autumn is much further along, around November 11.

Wikipedia asserts that this image, from 1961, is in the public domain. Probably so. A publicity still published without any kind of copyright notice, it seems.

The other day I saw, by chance, an episode of The Twilight Zone that I’d never seen, or even heard about before. I saw a moment of it in passing and thought, wait, that’s Buster Keaton. What’s he doing in The Twilight Zone? Turns out he starred in an episode in late 1961, “Once Upon a Time.” Using the marvel that is streaming, I rewound the ep at the touch of a button and watched the whole thing.

As a story, the episode isn’t that good. In fact, it’s pretty dopey. But it is an unusual example of a comic episode of the series and worth some chuckles. Mainly, it’s worth watching for the aging star. Keaton was roughly 40 years past his prime, but he still had those Buster Keaton moves.

No point in going into too much detail about the story, but it involves Keaton’s character, who dislikes all the hubbub associated with living in 1890, traveling in time to ca. 1960 – which he hates even more. Interestingly, the sequences set in 1890 play like a silent movie, complete with title cards, a musical score and lots of physical comedy (of course). The 1960 sequences have sound and also a fair amount of pratfalls. Buster’s going to be Buster.

Two of the supporting characters evoke, “Hey, it’s that guy.” Namely Stanley Adams, best known as a dealer in tribbles a few years (or a few centuries) later, and Jesse White, who plays a repairman in the episode – a few years before he became the lonely Maytag repairman for my generation. Always fun to see familiar faces in unusual settings.

The 39th Annual Elgin Bluff City Cemetery Walk

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In September, during the Elgin House Walk, I found out that the 39th Annual Elgin Bluff City Cemetery Walk was coming up on the last weekend of the month. That sounded good. For me. Yuriko wasn’t interested, so on Sunday the 27th, I made my way solo to Bluff City Cemetery in Elgin.

I’d missed the previous 38 walks, but I had visited the cemetery before – 12 years ago. Long enough that another visit would not go amiss. It’s a good-looking cemetery.

I remember liking the sloping contour of parts of the cemetery. I still do.

As well as the scattering of mausoleums.

The cemetery was founded in 1889, in time to receive a good many old soldiers who did their part of the Union.

Along with veterans of other wars, even the one with Spain.

Bluff City is still active, with newer arrivals too.

The tour took groups of about 15 people to the graves of notable Elgin residents, where a volunteer actor, dressed in period costume, played the person. Such as William D. Nichols (d. 1891).

Note that under his name is “Frontier Guards.” The actor, David Santori, told us about the guards, who were an impromptu armed group assembled in the spring of 1861 in the dicey first weeks of the war to protect President Lincoln, before a more formal guard of actual Union soldiers could be dispatched for that purpose. Nichols was an engineer and inventor, but his membership in the guard is what he wanted to be remembered for.

Here is Miland Gieske (d. 1984), who as a young man in 1920 survived a building falling on him when a tornado struck Elgin. A fellow named Thomas Rieser played him, and a harrowing tale it was, too. Gieske spent most of his career working in a funeral home, and the actor said his near-death experience gave him considerable empathy with the bereaved.

Other permanent residents of the cemetery evoked by the tour included Louise Logan (d. 1972), who organized relief during the Depression (played by Bernadette May or Tameron Keeffe); Trygve Rovelstad (d. 1990), a noted Elgin artist who designed, among other things, the U.S. Bronze Star medal, the 1936 Elgin Centennial half dollar, and the Pioneer Family Memorial on the Fox River (Steve Delaney); Nora Wagner (d. 1923), who, along with other young women, repaired a washed-out major Elgin road in 1908, as officialdom dilly-dallied at the task (Thea Delaney); and Jessie Sauceda (d. 2001), who arrived in Elgin as a child when she and her family fled the chaos of the Mexican Revolution in the 1910s (Estela Macias-Bonner), who all had to work out how to thrive despite the not-so-benign neglect of the rest of the community for some decades, and did.

My own favorite was Dr. Alban Mann (d. 1943), city physician and a force for public health (played by Don Gingold). In 1916, he figured out the source of a typhoid outbreak that killed 26 residents: the Elgin National Watch factory.

“The source of the contamination was traced by Dr. Mann to a leaky valve, which separated water from the watch factory’s reservoir on Watch Street and water taken from the river,” the Elgin Historical Society notes. “The leaky valve allowed river water seepage to contaminate water pumped to drinking fountains throughout the watch factory building.”

That incident came up during the talk about his life, as you’d expect. “Dr. Mann” also expressed astonishment that people are still skeptical about vaccines, which I’d say is a reasonable assumption about how the good doctor would react, were he magically aware of goings-on in our time. As has been pointed out, Dr. Mann, there’s still no vaccine for stupidity.

AGSL Once More

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I’m glad to report that more people seemed to be visiting the American Geographical Society Library this year (Saturday before last) than during our previous visits, in 2018 and 2023, when it was also open for the Doors Open Milwaukee event. The library is in the Golda Meir Library of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee.

I didn’t take too many pictures of other visitors, but here is one.

Mostly, I took pics of globes.

Globes, globes, globes.

The other day I discovered a place in Salt Lake City called Dolcetti Gelato that seems to include a lot of globes in its décor. This is a design we can all applaud. Hope the gelato is good. Even coming close to Florentine gelato would be a pretty tall order, though.

An oddity among the globes.

A nearby sign tells us:

Dymaxion map globe structure. This globe was one of 100 produced by Levi Strauss & Co. as a promotional artifact. Inscription on the globe: This is a Dymaxion globe designed by Buckminster Fuller, best known as the inventor of the geodesic dome. The word Dymaxion and the Fuller projection Dymaxion map design are trademarks of the Buckminster Fuller Institute, 2040 Alameda Padre Sierra, Suite 224, Santa Barbara, California 93103. Copyright 1938, 1967 and 1992. All rights reserved.

By golly, it occurs to me that I’ve accidentally done more Bucky tourism than most people, probably, including a walk by the geodesic dome house in Carbondale, Illinois, and a look at the only existing Dymaxion vehicle, which happens to be in Reno, Nevada. I live a charmed life, clearly. But dang, I missed his grave this year at Mount Auburn Cemetery in Massachusetts.

I expect the library has a lot more maps than globes – they take up less space – and a fair number were on display for the event. Including some non-geographic maps, such as one using song titles for place names. A detail.

Details from a map called Isle of Pleasure, all of whose place names relate to alcohol. A late Prohibition-era publication. The main entity is called State of Inebriation.

An entire table was given over to Latin America.

This kind of thing gets me all itchy. I checked, and for an investment of $1,200 or so (round trip) and at least 14 hours each way, one can buzz down to Buenos Aires from Chicago. Alas, not today. And yet – the establishing shots for the series Envidiosa on Netflix, which I have been unaccountably watching for a while now (once a month or so) — are quite the advertisement for the Argentine capital.

Bee Boun in Silver City

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Rain to end September and begin October. Generally not heavy, just persistent for two days. As if on cue for the first of the month, a handful of trees here and there suddenly displayed streaks of yellow. Every day there will be more of that, until there isn’t any.

After visiting a run of Milwaukee churches last Saturday morning under a warm early fall sky, we were inspired to find a Laotian restaurant. The place, Vientiane Noodle Shop, calls itself Laotian-Thai on its menu, probably because everyone knows about Thailand, while far fewer about Laos, such being the dismal state of geographic knowledge. A lot of the menu was also Thai, but it included Laotian specialties. Such as this.

Bee Boun. Also transliterated Bie Boun, apparently, but anyway a rice vermicelli-based dish that’s majorly delicious.

It was good to support the restaurant in general, but also because there is major construction on its street, National Avenue, that might be interfering with its trade volume.

Naturally we’d parked on a side street (Shea Avenue) and walked to Vientiane Noodle Shop. At the intersection of National and Shea – which meet at a 45-degree angle – is a triangular pocket park featuring plantings and a bench, along with some artwork fixed in the ground, dated 2007, and seeming to reflect the neighborhood population during its history through “welcome to our community” in various languages, if the German is any indication.

The neighborhood is known as Silver City. As many times as I’ve visited Milwaukee, that was a new one to me. It’s largely Hispanic these days, with Hmong and other groups also living there, and seems to have followed a common evolution in that regard, beginning with various European ethnic groups more than 150 years ago giving way to other groups as the decades passed.

Why Silver City? A site called Neighborhoods in Milwaukee (and others) offers an explanation. Sounds like folk etymology to me, but never mind:

Silver City got its name in the mid-1890s when area laborers working in the developing Menomonee Valley factories were paid in silver coin. When the workers circulated the silver among the area’s 24 taverns, the name “Silver City” began to appear in Milwaukee newspapers.

Silver was circulated everywhere in the 1890s, so that doesn’t really cut it. Old newspapers using the name might hint at a nickname for the area created by anonymous newspapermen for some lost reason – who can say? That kind of uncertainty adds interest to a neighborhood, if you ask me.

St. Vincent de Paul Parish & Ascension Lutheran Church, Milwaukee

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The church participants in Doors Open Milwaukee typically provided visitors written descriptions of the church and the church’s history, on actual sheets of paper. Good for them, in this over-digital age. I picked them up for future reference – as in, right now – and the one for St. Vincent de Paul Parish was rather long on the various priests associated with the parish (and two Congressmen who went to church there), with less about the church building, though it does say that the current one was completed in 1900 in a Renaissance Revival style by architect Bernard Kolpacki (d. 1900, so this was probably his last project among a number in Milwaukee).

This church, too, was originally for a Polish congregation.

The sheet offers information about Rev. Wincenty Lewandowski (d. 1900), who founded St. Vincent de Paul Parish. He had felt it expedient to leave the German Empire in the 1870s due to Kulturkampf and all that jazz, making his way to Ohio at first. When he got there, he got to work. The sheet notes the following glimpse of something that could use a little more detail:

Bishop Richard Gilmore sent him to Toledo, Ohio, where he would found St. Hedwig Parish in October 1875, and St. Anthony Parish in 1882. For reasons unclear in the surviving records, many were opposed to Lewandowski at Saint Hedwig, his multiple reassignment requests to the bishop were denied, and the situation devolved in June 1885 into a bomb being discovered under the rectory and a riot breaking out between parishioners. Lewandowski resigned and departed for Milwaukee.

Other sources mention the 1885 church riot in Toledo, and the fact that St. Hedwig in that city was torched the next year. Religious-inspired violence is one thing, but church riots are considerably rarer on these shores. Yet Toledo isn’t the only one I’ve encountered while visiting churches – there’s also the story of the former Cathedral of All Saints of the Polish National Catholic Church in Chicago, which not only involved an ecclesiastical riot, but schism thrown in mix for that extra volatility.

Impressive stained glass.

For the items below, I had my AI program remove the glare. This is one of the genuinely useful things that it can do, but I have to be careful to tell it not to change anything else in the image, because it has a tendency to “improve” things. Sometimes it does so even if I tell it not to, but for these two, nothing was changed.

Next door. Probably the rectory. An ivy-covered rectory.

The last church of the day was Ascension Lutheran Church.

Services in English and Spanish, as you’d except. And that third one? Hmong, it turns out.

On the door.

I don’t know that DHS goons would specifically be looking for Hmong – which would be an act of base ingratitude, among other things. Probably just the usual brown folk. Raiding churches: what a good way to win hearts and minds.

Ascension Lutheran dates back to the 1850s, in this case founded by Norwegians. The current sanctuary dates from 1923.

The church sports a number of memorials, as churches often do, but this pair was a little unusual.

Good to see a presidential site, however minor. United Spanish War Veterans: not an organization one hears much about anymore, but it lasted until 1998, a few years after the last veteran member passed, namely Nathan Cook, U.S. Navy, who died in 1992 at 106. A successor org, Sons of Spanish American War Veterans, is still around.

St. Anthony Parish & St. Hyacinth Parish, Milwaukee

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Rain coming tonight, then a cooling trend, as they say in the weather biz. For me, that meant lingering on the deck in the upper 60s F. early this evening, while I can, eating dinner outside, drinking tea. In the background, blending with the sound of crickets, were the pleasant sounds of a youth-league baseball game, which also happened to be visible in the park behind my back yard. All sensations that will disappear with oncoming fall.

On Saturday, a nice warm early fall day, we first made our way to St. Anthony Parish in Milwaukee as part of the Doors Open event. Once upon a time, a German congregation.

Wonder how many buildings are still around whose development was delayed by the Panic of 1873? There must be some. St. Anthony at least is one, not being consecrated until 1882, and even then the interior wasn’t completed until around the end of that decade.

The Germans built something suitably German, a Gothic Revival Hallenkirche, whose nave and side aisle ceilings are roughly the same height.

The last mass in German must have been sometime. These days, one Sunday mass is in English and two are in Spanish.

Not far away at all is St. Hyacinth Parish.

In this case, a legacy of a Polish congregation, an Italian Renaissance style done in Milwaukee’s Cream City brick, and another development of the 1880s.

Henry Messmer [d. 1899], a Swiss immigrant, did the design.

These days, three masses are in Spanish, one in English, none in Polish. Time flies, neighborhoods change.

St. Joseph Chapel, Milwaukee

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For a mid-sized city, Milwaukee has a remarkable number of historic churches. Every late 19th- and early 20th-century ethnic group of any size supported a number of churches, in the case of Catholics and Protestants both. Germans, for instance, built both Catholic and Lutheran edifices in quantity, as did Poles, without that Lutheran component. Many of their Catholic parishes are now majority Hispanic, and it these that we largely focused on during our visit to Milwaukee.

We managed to visit five such churches on Saturday during the most recent Doors Open Milwaukee.

As fine as all of these churches were, one stood out: the recently restored St. Joseph Chapel, a Romanesque Revival structure on the grounds of St. Joseph Center, a convent that’s the international motherhouse of the School Sisters of St. Francis, which was founded in the 1890s. The chapel is tucked away in the convent complex, which itself is tucked away in a Milwaukee neighborhood.

All those churches built ca. 100 years ago or more needed to be designed, and in the case of St. Joseph Chapel, the sisters tasked Peter Brust and Richard Philipp, two of the busiest architects in Milwaukee at the time, to do the job. And what a job they did.

st joseph chapel

Of course, any building of this kind is more than the work of talented architects. Unnamed artisans in Austria contributed the mosaics on the walls, such as Christ Giving Peter the Keys, which is behind the altar, or the Parable of the Ten Virgins, one of the side mosaics. My photos do them little justice to their intricacies and especially the artful use of the color gold for flourishes that enliven the images. I haven’t seen mosaics of this caliber since the Cathedral Basilica of St. Louis, though these aren’t neo-Byzantine.

The floor mosaics are also worth a good look.

Behind the main altar is the Chapel of Perpetual Adoration. A chapel within a chapel, I suppose. It is every bit as sumptuous as the nave.

Depicted under the angels surrounding the monstrance are notable Franciscans, I understand, including Sts. Francis and Clare kneeling. Yuriko asked about the fellow in red, and it took a while to work it out, but that seems to be St. Bonaventure, who was a cardinal too, and a writer of considerable energy, which might account for the book in his hand.

Return to Mars

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I’ve now been to Mars Cheese Castle about n times. I pass its way often, and while I don’t always stop there, visits over 40 years have added up to n. Like Wisconsin itself, or Milwaukee, or a healthy number of other places.

After much of a day in Milwaukee, for the latest Doors Open Milwaukee event, we stopped at Mars, mere miles north of the Wisconsin-Illinois line on I-94. First thing, I decided to document the sticker situation at the base of the highway sign.

I don’t see you-know-who from a much larger chain of retail establishments whose mascot is known to dam streams and sue alleged lookalikes. There are no locations yet in Wisconsin, but he is waiting, biding his time.

At 80 feet, the sign is a story unto itself, with the Wisconsin legislature specially allowing the store to keep it when the whole complex had to be moved in 2011 to accommodate the expansion of the highway. By that time, 80 feet was too tall for a modern roadside sign, but Mars was grandfathered in. Could be that Wisconsin respects its ’50s roadside heritage.

Inside, the mouse is still around. I don’t know that he has a name. Maybe Mario Mouse, after the original owner of Mars Cheese Castle, one Mario Ventura Sr., a gas station owner who pivoted into cheese in 1957 after his gas station burned down. Pivoting into cheese is a thing you can do in Wisconsin. Eat Cheese or Die.

Tom recently sent me by email — out of the blue, coincidence or synchronicity? — a picture of us with the mouse from our ’22 trip around Lake Michigan. A favorite photo of us, he explained, and it is a good one.

Of course, I’d been there before, such as in ’15. The mouse seems to have moved since then.

Cheese hats and other extruded yellow shapes are for sale, along with edible cheese, sausage and other meat, candy, beer and many other comestibles, plus knickknacks, gimcracks and gewgaws galore.

Mars apparently has its own line of wine.

Lore associates mice with cheese – who’ll eat pretty much anything in your pantry – so why not wine? Another version of the mascot could be sprawled nearby, a wine bottle in his hand.