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Speakers’ Corner

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There was a speaker at Speakers’ Corner in December 1994, but I don’t remember what he was speaking about. He’d drawn a crowd, though.speakers-corner 1994

Considering that a pre-1991 Iraqi flag seems to be flying in the background, and probably a Palestinian flag behind that, Middle Eastern politics seems the likely subject. Lots of grist for impassioned public speaking there, at least in places, mostly outside the Middle East, where there’s little risk of official punishment.

I also remember an anti-Ba’athist, or at least anti-Saddam Hussein, parade in London, but that was in 1988 on one of the streets near Harrod’s. It was a thin line of people marching along, and a thin line of people watching, and (I think) some argument between some of the participants, but no fighting. There were some police around, probably wishing they could be anywhere else.

As for Speakers’ Corner, I’d made a point of going to see it one day we were in Hyde Park. Not sure how I’d heard of it, but heard of it I had. Maybe it was the lyrics in the peppy yet pessimistic song “Industrial Disease” (1982).

I go down to Speakers’ Corner, I’m thunderstruck

They got free speech, tourists, police in trucks

Two men say they’re Jesus, one of them must be wrong

There’s a protest singer, he’s singing a protest song…

The Royal Parks web site says that “the origins of Speakers’ Corner as it is known today stem from 1866, when a meeting of the Reform League demanding the extension of the franchise, was suppressed by the Government. Marches and protests had long convened or terminated their routes in Hyde Park, often at Speakers’ Corner itself. Finding the park locked, demonstrators tore up hundreds of yards of railings to gain access, and three days of rioting followed.

“The next year, when a crowd of 150,000 defied another government ban and marched to Hyde Park, police and troops did not intervene. Spencer Walpole, the Home Secretary, resigned the next day. In the 1872 Parks Regulation Act, the right to meet and speak freely in Hyde Park was established through a series of regulations governing the conduct of meetings.”

Godspeed, John Glenn

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project_mercury_astronauts_-_gpn-2000-000651Occasionally, a public domain picture from NASA is just the thing. I opened up Google News at about 3 this afternoon to take a look at the latest outrages worldwide, and the page informed me of John Glenn’s passing. I knew he was still alive, but I wasn’t sure whether any of the other Mercury 7 astronauts were, so I checked.

The answer is no. He was the last one.

I don’t remember any of their flights, of course. I barely remember any of the Gemini missions. It wasn’t until Apollo that I started paying attention, but when I did, I made a point of learning about Mercury and Gemini too. I well remember my excitement at finding the July 1962 edition of National Geographic, which covered Glenn’s flight, about 10 years after it came out (because we saved them, like everyone). I read every word of the article. Early space flight was covered in other editions, too, and I read them as well.

Like all editions of NG, it was well illustrated. One in particular stuck with me: how John Glenn might have died in 1962 and not 2016. Reading that also meant that I knew how the dramatization of his flight in The Right Stuff movie would turn out (also, I’d read the book). Astronaut not incinerated.

The news set me wondering about how many of the Moon walkers are still around. Seven of 12, as it turns out, but every jack man of them are in their 80s. Buzz Aldrin’s the oldest, nearly 87, while Charles Duke is the youngest, at 81. Wonder if Aldrin would even have the energy these days to offer up a punch to a Moon landing denier who clearly deserved one (officialdom agreed; Aldrin wasn’t charged).

The Global Fastener News Calendar (Or, More Calendar Oddities)

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Strangely enough, this morning another calendar crossed my desk, but not a cheapo publication. Rather, it’s the four-color, glossy-paper Global Fastener News Calendar for 2017. Published by Global Fastener News, or to be exact, Global Fastener News.com, based in Portland, Ore. If you want to know nuts and bolts, that’s your place.

Not to mock such a trade publication, as people sometimes do. I remember, for example, seeing clueless amusement in print that fire chiefs had their own magazine, as if managing a fire service operation weren’t a complicated task best done by informed management. Besides, I’ve made my living largely among trade publications. If there’s a trade, there’s a publication, because there are people who care deeply about their trade.

As for fasteners, you could almost say, literally, that the world would fall apart without them.

The Global Fastener News Calendar is an excellent calendar. It includes many standard religious and secular holidays — and not just American ones — as well as dates for fastener industry events, major sporting events, and dates you might not otherwise expect.

For instance: Save the Eagles Day (Jan. 10), National Freedom Day (Feb. 1), Candlemas (Feb. 2), World Cancer Day (Feb. 4), Pi Day (March 14), National Health Care Decision Day (April 16), Earth Day (April 22), World Press Freedom Day (May 3), National Day of Prayer (May 4), National Defense Transportation Day and then Armed Forces Day (May 19 and 20), National Donut Day (June 2), World Environment Day (June 5), World Accreditation Day (June 9), Juneteenth (June 19), Take Your Dog to Work Day (June 23), Stonewall Rebellion (June 28), World Population Day (July 11), System Administrators’ Appreciation Day (July 29), Friendship Day (Aug. 6), Left Hander’s Day (Aug. 13), UN International Day of Peace (Sept. 21), World Heart Day (Sept. 29), National Manufacturing Day (Oct.6), World Standards Day (Oct. 14), American Indian Heritage Day (Nov. 24), AIDS Awareness Day (Dec. 1), and Pan American Aviation Day and Wright Brothers Day (Dec. 17).

A few of these I hadn’t heard of and couldn’t quite guess by context. National Health Care Decision Day is for “emphasizing the spotlight on the importance of advance directives,” and World Accreditation Day as a “global initiative, jointly established by the International Accreditation Forum (IAF) and the International Laboratory Accreditation Cooperation (ILAC), to raise awareness of the importance of accreditation,” according to the IAF itself.

National Defense Transportation Day goes back further than you’d think. According to timeanddate.com: “On May 16, 1957, Congress approved for the third Friday of May each year to be designated as National Defense Transportation Day. In 1962 Congress updated their request to include the whole week within which the Friday falls as National Transportation Week.”

So I guess if you want to honor half-tracks or troop carriers or the original jeeps, that would be your day.

You’d think American Indian Heritage Day (aka Native American Heritage Day) would take the place of Columbus Day, but apparently not. That’s Indigenous Peoples’ Day, which isn’t on this particular calendar. To complicate matters, according to Wiki, “[Besides Berkeley], several other California cities, including Richmond, Santa Cruz, and Sebastopol, now celebrate Indigenous Peoples’ Day.

“At least four states do not celebrate Columbus Day (Alaska, Hawaii, Oregon, and South Dakota); South Dakota officially celebrates Native American Day instead. Various tribal governments in Oklahoma designate the day as “Native American Day,” or have renamed the day after their own tribes. In 2013, the California state legislature considered a bill, AB55, to formally replace Columbus Day with Native American Day but did not pass it.” Ah, well. People’s Front of Judea, Judean People’s Front.

I’m also amused by, but not mocking, some of the industry events on the calendar. Such as Comedy Night, North Coast Fastener Association; Hydrogen Embrittlement in Fasteners, FTI, Detroit; Fastener Fair India, Mumbai; Xmas in July, North Coast Fastener Association; ASME B1 Committee on Screw Threads, Scottsdale, AZ; Wire Russia, Moscow; Indo Fastener, Jakarta; Young Fastener Professionals, Las Vegas; and Screw Open, North Coast Fastener Association (sounds like a fun bunch of guys, that North Coast).

Dec. 6 — just missed it — is the anniversary of the implementation of the U.S. Fastener Quality Act of 1999, a fact that’s duly noted on the calendar. A signal achievement of the Clinton administration, no doubt, but I’m not going to do anything more than glance at “10 of the Most Frequently Asked Questions About the Final FQA.”

Such as: Are inch hex socket products really exempt from the FQA?

Answer: Yes. Even though all inch alloy steel socket products are through hardened as required by consensus standards, they are not required by those same standards to be grade marked and are therefore, NOT COVERED.

The next day, a year from today, is called Pearl Harbor Day and not some other formulation. Fitting.

One more thing, a fine detail. Phases of the moon are marked, new and full, as on many calendars, though not halves. But there are also two special symbols for the annular eclipse of Feb. 26, 2017 and the full eclipse of Aug. 21, 2017. Cool.

Calendar Oddities Are Back

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A cheap calendar crossed my desk the other day, and I thought, that looks familiar. For a good reason: it’s the 2017 version of a cheap calendar I got four years ago. I don’t remember getting one last year or the year before that. I didn’t keep the ’14 version because, after all, it’s a cheap calendar. I expect I’ll throw away the new one soon enough. Got enough stuff around here without it.

I did check, and the parade of U.S. presidential birthdays is exactly the same oddball procession as on the earlier calendar: McKinley, FDR, Lincoln, Washington, Jackson, Madison, Jefferson, Grant, Kennedy, J.Q. Adams, Hoover, Benjamin Harrison, Eisenhower, TR, and Wilson.

Perhaps the other birthdays are the same, too, but I didn’t take notes on them: Alexander Hamilton, MLK, Ben Franklin, Stonewall Jackson, Henry Wadsworth Longfellow, and Jefferson Davis. Interesting selection, that. The other events noted on the calendar are exactly the same as before.

One thing that might be different this time, besides the normal shifting of dates, is that Memorial Day is marked twice. Once, May 29, is simply marked Memorial Day; May 30 is marked Memorial Day (True). Also, Columbus Day is likewise two different days, one True (Oct. 12) and the other presumably false. Or fake. Or bogus. (Oct. 9 next year, as it happens.)

An aside: the day the President Benjamin Harrison proclaimed to be the 400th anniversary of Columbus’ landing in the Americas was Oct. 21, 1892. He had his reasons. Oct. 12, 1492 was reckoned using the Julian calendar. To correct for the Gregorian, nine days were added. Presumably now we’d need to add 10 — or 11, I’m not sure how the fact that 2000 was a leap year affects things — to be mathematically correct. So arguably, if you really wanted to argue such a ridiculous thing, neither Oct. 9th or 12th would be the true Columbus Day.

Anyway, Memorial Day and Decoration Day might be worth distinguishing, but Columbus Day? The day we barely honor a sea captain from Genoa in the pay of Spain traveling to the Bahamas half a millennium ago. I might not live to see the change, but I suspect that holiday isn’t long for the calendar.

Ordinary Snow

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Sunday’s snow would have been an unremarkable event, a few inches quickly brushed from streets and walking paths, and partly melted by Monday anyway. But it was the season’s first. Winter doesn’t wait for the solstice. Winter is here.
 Dec 4, 2016 SnowNot the prettiest snow, but it does make the bushes and trees look better.

Dog in Snow Dec 5, 2016The dog doesn’t mind taking a romp in the snow. In fact she positively seems to enjoy it.

Christmas Card Photo Shoot ’98

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Eighteen years ago, I got a notion to send out personalized Christmas cards, the kind using a picture of your own that’s printed by a professional service. I’m sure I didn’t do it online, since I had no Internet connection at my house until 2000. I must have taken the negative to a photo shop, but I don’t remember the details.

Of course Lilly, then not quite a year old, was going to be the star of the card. There were a lot of existing pictures of her — first children tend to be the subject of a lot of pictures — but nothing I really wanted to use. I wanted something with a holiday theme. So I took her to the front yard, along with the gold-colored plastic star that we topped the Christmas tree with (still do), for a photo shoot.

I didn’t get anything I liked for the card that way, either. They tended to be fuzzy. But not completely without charm. They’ve been tucked away these years while she grew into a college student.
img335A few days later, without planning to, I took the picture we did use, a longstanding favorite image of toddler Lilly.

The Full Griswold

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Someone’s already thought of the Full Griswold. Maybe I’d heard of it before, but I don’t know where. I thought of it this evening driving along, noting the proliferation of Christmas lights in this part of the suburbs. Some displays, of course, are more elaborate than others, but I haven’t seen any Full Griswolds just yet.

Once the concept of the Full Griswold comes to mind, one’s mind naturally turns to gradations of it. That’s what I think about, anyway. The Half Griswold, the Quarter Griswold, that sort of thing. I believe fractional Griswolds would have more charms than decimal Griswolds, such as 0.5 Griswolds or 0.1 Griswolds or the like. Too metric for such a nebulous concept.

Then again, the millihelen’s a metric sort of nebulous measurement, so what do I know?

I’d say that I’ve seen a fair number of Eighth Griswolds and a few Quarters and maybe something approaching a Half this year. But the season’s early. My own house decoration would be somewhere in the hundredths of Griswolds.

The odd thing is, I’ve never actually seen National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation all the way through, not when it was new (1989) and not since then. I’ve seen bits and pieces over the years. Probably because Chevy Chase is best taken in small doses (which can be quite funny).

Christmas Lights, Mañana

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A foot of snow isn’t expected tomorrow — as we got on December 1, 2006 — but we are experiencing sliding temps. Feels about like winter now.

Also, the Christmas-industrial complex has revved into high gear, as usual. I was going to do my little (very little) part by stringing lights on one of the bushes in the front yard, though not lighting them for a week or more. On Monday, it rained all today, so I didn’t do it. Yesterday was relatively warm, but I forgot to do it. Today, I thought about it, but temps just above freezing put me off.

Tomorrow? Well, maybe. Depends on whether I feel like doing it tomorrow, or whether I feel like doing it mañana.

A Wad of Paper Circulars

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We still get a paper newspaper some days of the week, and last Wednesday’s newspaper was the heaviest I’d lifted off the driveway in years. It was a regularly sized mid-week paper supplemented by a weighty array of circulars, mostly from retailers fighting the battle against stagnant physical-store sales, though of course most have online sales as well.

They included (no special order): Macy’s, World Market, Sprint, Carson’s, The Dump, Best Buy, Abt, Duluth Trading, La-Z-Boy Furniture Gallery, AT&T, JC Penney, Kohl’s, Guitar Center, Mattress Firm, Bed Bath & Beyond, The Tile Store, Home Depot, Fannie May, Verizon, Sears, Art Van Furniture, Ulta Beauty, JoAnn, Staples, Office Depot/Office Max, Ashley Homestore, Value City Furniture, Walgreen’s, Sleep Number, Kmart, Walmart, HOBO (Home Owners Bargain Outlet), Bose, Toys R Us, Lowe’s, CVS and Target.

Some of these retailers aren’t just fighting to keep their physical stores busy, but against ending up in the dustbin of retail history. If you know even a little about retail, you can guess which ones those are.

The only one on the list I’d never heard of was The Dump. It calls itself “America’s Furniture Outlet.” As far as I can tell, there’s only one in the Chicago area, in west suburban Lombard. The brand is in nine other markets around the country and, strangely enough, notes its web site: “Regular stores open every day of the week and you pay for. [sic] We are only open Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, which keeps our cost of doing business down.”

Rasputin in America

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Early in the morning on Thanksgiving, I dreamed about a TV sitcom, Rasputin in America, that I either was watching or had created. Considering that it was my dream, both are fitting. The Mad Monk, updated to the 21st century but with the same wild eyes and hair (but no beard, oddly), runs afoul of the authorities in Putin’s Russia and comes to America to live with relatives. Namely, Valerie Bertinelli. Hilarity ensues.

It was only a dream, but no worse than a lot of sitcom conceits. Ms. Bertinelli was either Rasputin’s aunt or his niece. The thing about her is that while the actress might be in her 50s now, she’s also always in her teens, at least in the sitcom universe.

I was also reminded of Ivan the Terrible. Not the tsar or the Eisenstein movie, but a TV show I expect almost no one remembers. It came to mind after the dream. I hadn’t thought of it in many years, but I did see it.

The show was a summertime replacement that didn’t catch on. Here’s part of the Wiki description of it: “Ivan the Terrible is an American sitcom that aired on CBS for five episodes during 1976… Set in Moscow, the sitcom starred Lou Jacobi as a Russian hotel waiter named Ivan Petrovsky, and the day-to-day misadventures of Ivan’s family and their Cuban exchange student boarder, all of whom live in a cramped, one-bedroom apartment… Harvey Korman appeared as a Soviet bureaucrat in an uncredited cameo at the close of each episode.”