Wednesday Debris

Posted on July 21, 2021 by admin

Warm days and cicadas at dusk. Back to posting around August 1.

I saw this in my back yard yesterday.

Imagine my surprise. A lawn circle! The suburban version of crop circles. (In the UK, they’re called garden circles.) Clear evidence that space aliens visited.

Spotted in a northwest suburban parking lot the other day.

I ought to look that up, but I don’t want to.

Dear streaming service that I subscribe to: When you send me an email with links in it, the links should not take me to this.

This statue was just east of the commuter rail station in New Buffalo.

“Gakémadzëwen,” which is Potawatomi for “Enduring Spirit,” by Fritz Olsen, dedicated only in 2018. The plaque says it was erected by the city of New Buffalo “in recognition of the generous contributions to the city by the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi.”

“The 1833 Treaty of Chicago established the conditions for the removal of the Potawatomi from the Great Lakes area,” says the band’s web site. “When Michigan became a state in 1837, more pressure was put on the Potawatomi to move west. The hazardous trip killed one out of every ten people of the approximately 500 Potawatomi involved.

“As news of the terrible trip spread, some bands, consisting of small groups of families, fled to northern Michigan and Canada. Some also tried to hide in the forests and swamps of southwestern Michigan. The U.S. government sent soldiers to round up the Potawatomi they could find and move them at gunpoint to reservations in the west. This forced removal is now called the Potawatomi Trail of Death, similar to the more familiar Cherokee Trail of Tears.

“However, a small group of Neshnabék, with Leopold Pokagon as one of their leaders, earned the right to remain in their homeland, in part because they had demonstrated a strong attachment to Catholicism. It is the descendants of this small group who constitute the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi Indians.”

Even so, it wasn’t until 1994 that Congress reaffirmed the federally recognized status of the Pokagon Band of Potawatomi. The band now owns some Michigan casinos, including Four Winds New Buffalo, which features 3,000 slot machines, 70 table games, four restaurants, bars, retail venues, and a 415-room hotel.

Got a boring email from Amazon the other day. It said:

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped. We apologize for the inconvenience.

You can track your package at any time. If you no longer want these items, you may refuse delivery or return them after they arrive. You can visit Your Orders to start a return.

There’s no style to that. How about:

Unfortunately, we weren’t able to cancel the items you requested and these items will soon be shipped. No force in the universe can stop an Amazon order once it is past the FailSafe Point.®

Not even the mighty Jeff Bezos can stay your package from its appointed delivery, even from his perch in space. You may refuse delivery or return them after they arrive. You can visit Your Orders to start a return.

Also from Amazon: One of our updates involves how disputes are resolved between you and Amazon. Previously, our Conditions of Use set out an arbitration process for those disputes. Our updated Conditions of Use provides for dispute resolution by the courts.

Well, well, well. The Wall Street Journal reported in June: “Companies have spent more than a decade forcing employees and customers to resolve disputes outside the traditional court system, using secretive arbitration proceedings that typically don’t allow plaintiffs to team up and extract big-money payments akin to a class action.

“With no announcement, the company recently changed its terms of service to allow customers to file lawsuits… The retail giant made the change after plaintiffs’ lawyers flooded Amazon with more than 75,000 individual arbitration demands on behalf of Echo users.”

This is the flag of Greater London. The officially approved flag of that political entity, I’ve read. It looks like it was drawn by a ten-year-old.

One more thing: National Geographic now asserts there is a “Southern Ocean,” hugging Antarctica below 60 degrees South. That’s a term that I know Australians have long used — I heard it from Australians in the ’90s, and saw the term on a sign at Cape Leeuwin — though I believe they mean the “waters south of us.”

Speaking of ten-year-olds, I understand that part of Nat’l Geo’s mission is educational, but a headline asking whether I can name all the oceans, as if I were that age?

Galien River County Park

Posted on July 20, 2021 by admin

A waxing gibbous moon this evening for Moon Day. Looked light copper, a bit like a lunar eclipse moon, but not quite. The next lunar eclipse visible in these parts won’t be until November 19.

National and state parks are all very well, but there’s something to be said for more local units, such as Galien River County Park just outside of New Buffalo, Michigan. An 86-acre spot overseen by Barrien County, the park is upstream from the town and offers short walks to view the Galien’s meandering course through a marsh.

After lunch on Sunday, we drove the few miles to the park, which opened only in 2014.

That trail soon leads to a boardwalk.

Which takes you to a platform 60 feet above the marsh.

A sign warned visitors not to do certain stupid things, such as dangle over the edge, but also that the platform sways slightly, even when there is no wind. I felt it. That was a little unsettling, but the views were worth it.

The lower boardwalk crosses over the marsh, which we walked after leaving the platform. The boardwalk provides views of the marsh and the river, up close.

A pleasant way to spend an hour or so. Just as nice as a few hours in town or time spent eating a hamburger in Redamak’s, with one essential difference: almost no one else was at the county park.

New Buffalo

Posted on July 19, 2021 by admin

A Mediterranean pattern has set in, here on the brief plateau of high summer. I’m taking as many meals as possible out on my deck.

Not long ago, we went to Buffalo, so by my idiosyncratic lights, that meant we ought to visit New Buffalo too. So we did on Sunday. Good thing that town is only about two hours away, assuming good traffic, which in no safe assumption. Even so, it isn’t that far, with New Buffalo hugging the eastern shore of Lake Michigan just inside the state of Michigan, only about two miles north of the Indiana line.

New Buffalo has been a nearby vacation destination for metro Chicago for many years. I first visited in 1987, when I spent a short time at the vacation house of a Chicagoan I knew, and went back occasionally after that, though not in about 20 years.

A lot of people go for the public beach, but Waikiki crowded, it isn’t.

We didn’t spend long this time, since it was nearly 90 F, and our idea of a good beach is an almost empty one in the 70s F. It was nice to see the lake, though. And the marina.

A boat belonging to the Berrien County sheriff’s office, docking.

Not far inland from the marina is the town’s commuter rail station.

Not much to look at, but the station and the line facilitated New Buffalo’s growth in the early 20th century, providing easy access from Chicago in the days before the Interstate or major suburbs. Come to think of it, if I were planning to be in New Buffalo and nowhere else for more than a few hours, that would be the way to come, so as to avoid pain-in-the-ass traffic jams south of Lake Michigan.

We parked on a leafy residential street and walked a couple of blocks to the main tourist street. One of New Buffalo’s two main streets is Whittaker, which connects the shore with I-94. About three blocks of Whittaker is lined with retailers, restaurants and new-looking residential properties, such as these.

That told me that, except probably for recessionary downturns of a few years at most, the second home and residential rental business in New Buffalo has expanded over that last few decades, taking advantage of the fondness among well-to-do people for parking themselves close to water. Not an ambition I share, but water does have its allures.

The street wasn’t overly crowded on Sunday, a very warm summer weekend day, but busy enough. We wandered around and looked in some stores, and came away with a t-shirt, refrigerator magnet and some postcards, as one does.

Interesting mural.

I’ve been able to find out that it’s painted on the side of Michigan Mercantile Building, home to a recently opened Starbucks. At the end of a short alley under the mural is the New Buffalo Farmstand by Mick Klug Farm. As for the mural, it looks new as well, but that’s all I know. I didn’t check for a signature.

A detail.

One reason we spent the day in New Buffalo was to have lunch at Redamak’s.

Since 1946 is a telling detail, since the restaurant is on Buffalo Street, the town’s other major thoroughfare. It isn’t a pedestrian-friendly road and the train doesn’t go there, so for Redamak’s to prosper in its early years, it needed car traffic — which was booming about then.

Currently the place is owned only by the second family ever to own it, which makes for continuity. I had a good hamburger there more than 30 years ago, and we had good ones there on Sunday: one with bleu cheese for me, a barbecue burger for Yuriko.

The road out front is also U.S. 12. Ah, where does that go? I wondered as we waited on the porch for a table. My phone wasn’t connected to the Internet at that moment, so I had to wait to find out. Just like in the not-so-old days.

All the way from Detroit to Aberdeen, Washington, running almost 2,500 miles, it turns out. We had a table next to a window. There’s something satisfying about sitting in a storied burger joint that looks out on a 2,500-mile highway. Not a nostalgia-industry highway like the defunct U.S. 66, but a genuine active part of the U.S. highway system in the 21st century.

Paestum 1983

Posted on July 19, 2021 by admin

One more card, depicting Paestum, which I visited on July 20, 1983. The postcard dates from the early 1990s, sent to me by an Australian I knew. I’d recommended he visit the place, and he did.

“Paestum, also known by its original Greek name as Poseidonia, was a Greek colony founded on the west coast of Italy, some 80 km south of modern-day Naples,” says World History Encyclopedia.

“Prospering as a trade centre it was conquered first by the Lucanians and then, with the new Latin name of Paestum, the city became an important Roman colony in the 3rd century BCE. Today it is one of the most visited archaeological sites in the world due to its three excellently preserved large Greek temples.

“Paestum is most famous today for its three magnificent temples which are amongst the best surviving examples of ancient Greek architecture anywhere,” the encyclopedia continues. I’ll vouch for that. They were impressive indeed, and I also delighted in walking along such a well preserved Roman road.

A bonus thing to think about in that text: Lucanians, an Italic people who spoke Oscan. The Roman juggernaut eventually absorbed them, lock, stock and barrel, and I’d say they and their language are even more obscure than the Etruscans.

On the whole, it seems to be a well-written article, but I’m not sure about Paestum being a “most visited archaeological site.” It might not be entirely authoritative, but Travel & Leisure published a list in 2012 regarding the most-visited ancient ruins. Paestum doesn’t make the cut; the closest places are Pompeii and Herculaneum.

My own experience was that Steve and I had the place to ourselves on that summer afternoon — the same summer when we encountered a well-populated Pompeii. Of course, those recollections are decades old, but I suspect even now people don’t show up at Paestum in any great numbers, but rather go to Pompeii as always.

Clichéd the term might be, the beaten path is a very real phenomenon in mass travel, with its own discontents. The odd thing is that you don’t have to go very far or think that hard to find marvels away from the path.

Trotsky Postcard (Maybe)

Posted on July 15, 2021 by admin

Come on, fraudsters. You’ve got to try harder. These things need to be in perfect English.

Then again, maybe not. I have impossibly high standards when it comes to phishing.

Below is a more recent postcard, though maybe not actually a postcard, but a postcard-sized image of exiled Trotsky. There’s nothing printed on the other side. Maybe the revolutionary considered postcards to be bourgeois frivolity.

I don’t actually know that, just a hunch. Could be I need to read The Permanent Revolution and Results and Prospects more closely to ascertain his take on postal items. Somehow, I don’t think that would be worth the effort.

In any case, I picked it up at the gift shop of the Museo Casa de Leon Trotsky in Mexico City in late 2017, which I wrote soon after was “heavy on socialist books and portraits of Trotsky for sale and light on tourist gimcracks.”

’80s London Underground Postcard

Posted on July 14, 2021 by admin

A postcard I picked up in London in 1988 (probably). A postcard combined with a map. What could be better?

The tube as it was in 1985, according to the date on the card. The struggle to develop a useful diagram of the London Underground has a long and interesting history, something like London itself.

Most of an Empress Hotel Postcard

Posted on July 13, 2021 by admin

Postcards are sometimes educational, if you let them be. Another of the cards that I dug up this weekend depicts the Empress Hotel in Victoria, BC.

I picked it up during my only visit to that city (1985), though to judge by the image, the picture might have been taken ca. 1970. I filled the card with correspondence, even to the point of stamping it, but I never sent it. At some point I removed the stamp for other usage.

Curious about the property, vintage 1908, I looked it up and thus learned about an entire class of hotels — namely, Canada’s grand railway hotels, mostly built by Canadian railway companies in a style that evokes French châteaux: Canadian National Railway, Canadian Pacific Railway and Grand Trunk Railway.

Some of the properties don’t exist anymore, but many do, such as the recently mentioned Banff Springs Hotel. That there are such palatial hotels is a good thing to know about Canada, I think.

Route of Seeing

Posted on July 12, 2021 by admin

Digging around in my postcard agglomeration last weekend — a rainy weekend when I had a runny nose — and I came across the Route of Seeing postcard Ed gave to me a good many years ago.

Been more than five years now that he traveled to the undiscovered country. Continue to Rest in Peace, travelling man.

Alberta 2006

Posted on July 11, 2021 by admin

It’s been a year of getting near Canada — Buffalo and Detroit so far — without crossing the line, since the border remains stubbornly closed even now.

That wasn’t the case 15 years ago this month, when we drove from Illinois to Alberta by way of the Dakotas and other places. At the time I wrote: “So, to sum up: very long drives, a lousy exchange rate, high fuel costs. Was it worth it? Was it ever.”

What is it about mountains? Pre-modern generations considered them obstacles to their forward motion. Now that we have mountain roads and tunnels, we admire the view. Do people who live close to mountains take trips to see flatlands? That makes me think of busloads of Swiss out admiring Kansas, but I don’t think it works that way.

Anyway, it was a trip of wide horizons, long roads, lofty mountains, mighty waters (liquid and frozen), endless forests, vivid wildflowers, sweeping Canadian farms, campsites, elk and bears and bison, clouds of mosquitos, national parks, vistas and towns of the tourist and non-tourist variety.

Moraine Lake and the Valley of the Ten Peaks. Too good a vista not to post again.

This looks like a view from some remote spot, but actually I was standing in back of the Banff Springs Hotel in Banff, which was a sight all its own.

This view, on the other hand, is roadside on the Icefields Parkway, which remains one of the great drives of my life. A place called Moose Meadows.

More Alberta views.

I told Ed Henderson (d. 2016) I’d take the cap he sent me various places. I haven’t lately, but I did for a while.

The girls had a good trip.

Even if they don’t remember much, in the case of Lilly, or anything at all, in the case of Ann.

Further Considerations About Sock Monkeys (And Long Grove Community Church & Cemetery)

Posted on July 8, 2021 by admin

Rockford, Illinois, is generally credited with creating the modern sock monkey, and more recently fiberglass sock monkeys were put on display there. There are even sock monkeys at the Midway Village Museum in Rockford.

So how is it Long Grove is getting a sock monkey museum? I’ve only done cursory research, the kind the subject deserves, and I haven’t found a connection. I like to think the Long Grove museum will be run by a breakaway sock monkey faction, rivals of the sock monkey orthodoxy in Rockford, but that’s just me amusing myself.

A short distance from Long Grove’s historic downtown is Long Grove Community Church, which is historic in its own right, built by Evangelical German immigrants in the 1840s.

“With a new century, came many changes,” the church’s web site says, referring to the 20th century. “The church widened her circle of ministry to include local people who were not German-speaking. Two denominational mergers took the church away from her Evangelical roots.

“By 1950, the church had grown so small that the denomination recommended the doors be closed. But God gave the people a vision. Instead of closing their doors, they built Sunday School rooms for children. As people migrated from the city to the suburbs, the area grew and so did the church. By the late 1960s, we had transitioned from a small rural church into a suburban church.”

The Long Grove Cemetery is next to the church.

There isn’t much information on line about this cemetery, despite its clear historic aspects.

But I don’t need a web site to tell me it’s another of the many cemeteries in the Chicago area with immigrant German stones, many dating from the 19th century.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling

Monthly Archives: July 2021