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Sorry, Ocker, the Fokker’s Chocker

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Australia Day has rolled around again, and what better way to take note than with a little Oz slang?

In November 2000, my brother Jay forwarded me the word of the day from Wordsmith: ocker.

ocker (OK-uhr), noun
1. An uncultured Australian male.
2. An uncouth, offensive male chauvinist.
adjective
3. Of or pertaining to such a person.
4. Typically Australian.
[After Ocker, a character in an Australian television series.]

“While Australian sports teams and individuals continue to soak up success everywhere you look, the average ocker is getting lazier and putting on the beef.” Daniel Gilhooly, Aussies with gold in laziness, Daily News, Sep 11, 2000.

Also in the email: the following comment from A Word A Day Mail Issue 20 (feedback on recent word of the day columns). Apocryphal or not, I like it:

From: Monica Clements
Subject: ocker

Seeing the word ocker reminds me of a story told by a friend. It took place during the Australian air traffic controllers’ strike of the 1980s, when interstate travellers were desperate for any form of airborne transport and all the light planes were full.

My friend’s father was one of the people who tried to hitch a ride on a light plane. He rushed up to the steward — about to close the plane doors — and asked breathlessly whether there was any room, only to be answered with the immortal line: “Sorry, ocker, the Fokker’s chocker.”

Spring Valley Winter

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On Friday, I went for a walk in a place I don’t usually visit in the winter, because I happened to be driving by: Spring Valley Nature Sanctuary, though sometimes I go as northern Illinois is emerging from winter.

The recent snows have been modest, but enough to cover the trails and the ground.

Spring Valley Nature PreserveSpring Valley SchaumburgIn about four months, this same view of thick bushes along the trail will be a mass of green as dense as any in more torrid zones.
Spring Valley Nature SchaumburgIt was also time to document Doc Baker’s stone, also along the trail, put there in 2002. One of his life’s achievements was the founding of the Rotary Club of Schaumburg and Hoffman Estates. I have nothing bad to say about the Rotarians. The fellow who hired me for my first job in Chicago in ’87 was a Rotarian, and occasionally we had lunch at Rotary Club 1, which was on Michigan Ave. at the time.
Howard Doc Baker - Rotary Club Schaumburg Hoffman EstatesDoc Baker seems to have been well liked. Good for him.

Midwinter Entertainment: Hop on Pop

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Cold but not too cold over the weekend. A dusting of snow for us as the major North American storm of the month blew through the South and headed for the East. On Saturday at about 6 pm, the full moon off to the east peeked out from behind a rack of thin clouds. In the foreground, at least from my front yard, stood the dark outline of a bare tree. Very Caspar David Friedrich.

A fragment from a letter from about 15 years ago.

January 16, 2001

Had yesterday off. That’s the first time anyone’s ever given me MLK Day off, and I spent most of it at home, entertaining Lilly, or being entertained. She is easily amused. For instance, spinning coins on a flat surface is a great entertainment for her. Lately she’s learned to do this herself.

Also, often when I find myself horizontal in some way — on the couch, say — she finds me too, and conducts a physics experiment to see what happens when her mass, about 16 kilos these days, acquires enough kinetic energy to wallop into my stomach, which has a considerable mass of its own.

Here in the present, there are no more toddlers in the house, but the dog, whose mass is about 18 kilos, often hops onto my stomach as I lie on the couch. This is only an issue when I’m dozing soundly enough not to hear the tell-tale jingle of her dog tags as she approaches the couch.

Another Round of Thursday Bagatelle

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I saw Travels With My Aunt (1972) not long ago. Like a fair number of movies, I’d have to say that the book is better, though the movie wasn’t bad. Then again, I’ve forgotten most of the book, since I read it at least 25 years ago.

I was startled to see Cindy Williams as the young American on the Orient Express. She was merely a young actress at the time, but even so I kept expecting to see Penny Marshall show up. Such is the conditioning effect, even after 40 years, of mediocre sitcoms; you just can’t get rid of them. Yet even that show had a few charms, which are best watched in the form of a YouTube video collections of Lenny & Squiggy entrances. Or if you like, the setups and then their entrances. The two were the butt of essentially the same joke for years.

Apparently Teen Spirit deodorant is a real thing. I saw some at a dollar store a while ago. I had no idea is was an actual product. Entertainment lore has it that the product inspired the song name, not the other way around. On its label it promised a “girly” smell.

Naturally the Greek exhibit at the Field Museum ended with a gift shop. We poked around and I found a small owl statue for Yuriko, who’s fond of owls, but I didn’t find any postcards. I asked the clerk about it, and she posited that note cards, which the shop carried, would sell better. Nuts to that.

Someone will be the new President of the United States a year from now, so I took a look at the oddsmakers at Paddypower. That outfit calls itself “Ireland’s biggest, most successful, security conscious and innovative bookmaker.”

Hillary Clinton remains the favorite, according to Irish bookies: 5/6. Much more astonishingly, at least in historical terms, Donald Trump is next at 7/2. Marco Rubio and Bernie Sanders are at 6/1. Ted Cruz, 11/1. Jeb Bush’s many donors must be steamed that he’s 22/1. Chris Christie, 33/1. Somehow Mitt Romney is 100/1, same as Paul Ryan. Guess the scenario there is a brokered convention with either of those jamokes selected. In the can’t-get-anyone-to-notice them category are John Kasich, 125/1, and Martin O’Malley, 150/1.

I won’t bother with the others, except Rocky De La Fuente, at 300/1. Most Americans don’t know him, but I do, though I hadn’t realized he was in the race. He’s a real estate developer from San Diego, so I suppose that makes him the lesser-known real estate mogul running for president (the anti-Trump, and as a Democrat, in point of fact). I don’t know anything about his politics, but I will say he’s got a fun presidential name.

Not Too Cheap to Meter

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On Saturday I got one of ComEd’s periodic notices about our household electricity consumption. “You used 14% less electricity than your efficient neighbors” (the company’s bold), the letter tells me, during the period from November 20 to December 22, 2015. By golly, that’s awfully green of us, but I can’t think what we did any differently last month than any other time.

For the year, however, “You used 7% more electricity than your efficient neighbors. This costs you about $46 extra per year.” Dang.

My neighbors, at least according to ComEd for the purpose of its comparison, are about 100 households whose dwellings are about the same size as ours. Those annoying efficient neighbors are the “most efficient 20 percent” of that group, though at least for last month, we were efficient neighbors for other people, without even trying.

One more datum: From January to November 2015, we used 5,351 kWh, down from 6,125 kWh during the same 11 months in 2014. Also how this happened, I couldn’t say. According to the trove of weather data that’s the Weather Underground, there were 799 cooling degree days in 2014 and 806 in 2015 (as measured at O’Hare, which is close enough).

That means ’15 was a little warmer, but not much, which is an important consideration, since running the AC is the main contributor to high household electric usage over a year. I know that because the handy ComEd graph of our electric usage throughout 2015 (also in the letter) spikes like the Matterhorn in July-August-September.

Never mind flying cars and all that imagined future hooey. The future (that is, now) should have included that business about “too cheap to meter.”

Mr. Grouchy at the Hootenanny Hut

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America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop (see yesterday) isn’t the only retailer I’ve visited recently, though it’s the most interesting by far in recent months. Not long before that I went to a much more conventional place — let’s call it the Hootenanny Hut, not because the place deserves such a fun name, but just because it’s a fun name. And if you decided to throw — hold? stage? — a hootenanny, you might be able to find temporary decor and other supplies for it at a place like this.

Anyway, Ann and I were there, and I had a few moments to look around. There was a whole rack of faux facial hair available, including an Old Man Set, Afro Beard, Hippie Mustache, Fearsome Beard, and a Hungover Beard, among others. The simply named Black Mustache looked like the kind of vigorous growth you once saw on one or another of the Village People’s upper lips.

One hair offering in particular caught my eye: the “Mr. Grouchy” set, which included a thick black faux moustache and two thick black faux eyebrows. A helpful photograph of a man wearing the Mr. Grouchy set showed what it was supposed to look like: an imitation Groucho Marx, complete with a large cigar. No cigar, not even a faux cigar, came with the set, however.

What percentage of Mr. Grouchy buyers, or even people who see it casually, know the source material? Just idle curiosity. Fewer and fewer as time goes by, I figure.

America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop

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As expected, today was frigid, near zero to begin with, and not much warmer as the day ground on. As the Monday holiday for the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr., it’s the sort of day on which school is closed and the mail doesn’t come, but otherwise there was work to be done.

There aren’t many stores like America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop in Itasca, Illinois, any more. It’s an independent hobby shop, largely but not completely devoted to model trains, with its merchandise stacked floor-almost-to-ceiling along a number of narrow aisles. Tight enough to put off the claustrophobic, no matter how much they like model trains or train toys. The store has new and used model train cars, track, and accessories of all kinds and in various scales, a room devoted to Thomas the Tank Engine toys, Playmobil, Chuggington Station — I’d never heard of that — Lego sets, plastic model kits, and a lot more.

The store has a Maplewood Drive address, but it’s visible from Irving Park Road. I’d driven by it countless times over the years, occasionally thinking, I should take a look. But I never did until Saturday. Lilly, Ann, and I had gone to a music store in Itasca to get some sheet music that Lilly needed, but the store didn’t have it. That was annoying, so I decided to make the best of it by visiting America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop, which happened to be across the street.

I like model trains — I had an HO scale model at one time, a fairly simple layout — but I was more taken with the shop’s stacks and stacks of plastic model kits. I built some of those as a lad, mostly airplanes, but also a Saturn V. (We also had a kit for the Mayflower than was entirely beyond my talents.) I didn’t spend a lot of time looking at America’s Best Train, Toy & Hobby Shop’s model kits, but my impression is that most were airplanes of one kind or another. I didn’t see an Apollo or Gemini or Mercury or even a Space Shuttle.

There were a few fictional spaceships, such as an original series Enterprise. No surprise there. A original series or remake Galactica would have been cool, but I didn’t see those. I did see an Eagle. As in the Space: 1999 spaceships. The kit looked like it dated from the 1970s and had never been opened, and the price was high. Can there be a collectors’ market for unbuilt models? That would be strange if so.

I asked the fellow behind the counter, who probably knows everything about model trains, whether the shop had any railroad postcards. He looked puzzled. For a moment, I might as well have said, “It’s crackers to slip a rozzer the dropsy in snide.” Guess no one had ever asked about that. Thinking on it, he then directed me to one of the aisles and said there might be some cards somewhere around there. One box tucked away on the aisle had a collection of unmarked black-and-white photos of trains — mid-20th century from the looks of them — and several more boxes contained old model RR hobbyist magazines.

But no postcards that I could find. I can’t fault the store for that; it’s too tangential. Even so, it was popular subject for postcards.

Pit of Winter, and No Place to Toboggan

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According to online sources, the temperature outside as I post is zero degrees Fahrenheit, with small negative numbers expected in the near future. Tomorrow will see highs in the positive single digits. So here we are, in the pit of winter.

Twenty-eight Januaries ago I was tramping around at one of the Du Page County Forest Preserves, maybe Blackwell Forest Preserve in Warrenville. I used drive out from the city periodically to visit a friend in Warrenville, usually on a Saturday. During the warm months, I’d help him tend his large garden, receiving a share of the produce.

In the winter, I forget what we did, besides watch videos and — on January 23, 1988 — visit a snow-covered forest preserve as the snow fell. I had my camera, and it was during a period when I was taking black-and-white pictures. We happened across a closed toboggan run.

Du Page County Jan 1988I can’t pin it down now, or rather don’t want to spend much time at it, but I’m fairly certain that the local forest preserves closed their handful of toboggan runs sometime not long before I took the picture. Probably it was the expense, or the liability, or both.

Africa-Dzonga 5c

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One of my small-change-of-the-world coins has words in the Khoisan language on it. That, I’ve discovered, is a modern umbrella term for the peoples once known as the Bushmen and the Hottentots, and their languages. The words on the coin are rendered ǃKE E: ǀXARRA ǁKE, but don’t ask me how that’s pronounced. The English translation is, “diverse people unite.”

That’s the motto found on the South African coat of arms, which happens to be on the observe of the 2003 South African 5-cent piece that I have. A lot of recent SA coinage features the coat of arms, which was adopted by the post-Apartheid government in 2000.

The coat of arms also includes ears of wheat, elephant tusks, a shield, two human figures, a spear and a knobkierie. Over all that is a secretary bird and a rising sun. Around the coat of arms is Africa-Dzonga, which is “South Africa” in Tsonga, one of the 11 official languages of the country.
SAfrica5cOBVApparently the languages take turns each year on the coinage, beginning in 2002. Tsonga’s turn happened to come the next year, at least on the 5-cent pieces (it seems to be different on other denominations).

The reverse of the coin is simpler: a blue crane and the value.
SAfrica5cREVMinting of the copper-plated steel 5-cent piece stopped in 2012, a victim of inflation, but the coins weren’t demonetized, so it’s still technically worth about three-tenths of US cent. The 1- and 2-cent pieces were discontinued ten years earlier.

Manto Mavrogenous, Face on the 2-Drachma Coin

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Among many other things, coinage is (or can be) educational. Take Manto Mavrogenous (Μαντώ Μαυρογένους), for instance. Until recently I didn’t know who that was. Then I acquired a demonetized 2-drachma piece, which has her portrait on it, so I had to find out more. I still don’t know that much — it would take more digging than I want to spend on the matter right now — but I learned some some basics, from the likes of this site and this one.

Such as that she participated in an important way in the Greek War of Independence, especially by outfitting rebel forces at her own expense, and encouraging other wealthy Europeans to support the cause. Apparently she was the subject of a Greek movie in 1971, but her story cries out for a big-budget biopic in our time, with a few changes, of course. It’s one thing for her to be Demetrios Ypsilantis’ lover, but the script can also spice things up with a love triangle that involves Lord Byron as well, played by some handsome English actor. Did she ever really meet Lord Byron? Details, details.

The Hellenic Republic thought enough of her to put her on the 2 drachma coin from 1988 to 2001, which was retired when the country traded for euros (and a peck o’ trouble).
2 drachma2 drachmaIt’s a nice little coin, and unlike many copper-plated coins of recent vintage, such as the U.S. cent since 1982, it’s actually copper. The nautical design on the obverse (at least, I think it’s the observe) makes sense in the context of Manto Mavrogenous’ contributions to kicking Ottoman butt, a good bit of which involved raising and paying for ships to fight near Mykonos.