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Christmas 1973

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We bought a Christmas tree the day before yesterday. I’m not inclined to do so as much as I used to be, but the girls insisted, and took charge of the decorations.

For some reason, I documented our 1973 Christmas tree with the Instamatic 104 camera my mother had bought sometime in the 1960s. At least, I’m pretty sure this is what we had, along with millions of other people. It broke in 1976.

Xmas73.3Not a particularly good image, even for that camera. But it captures most of our indoor decorations. The tree, which always looked more-or-less like that; stockings, hanging from a small sled acquired in Germany; a hard-to-see nativity scene on the table next to the tree (under the lamp); and a poinsettia.

I also documented my presents for the year. The flash cube activated for this shot.

Xmas73.2There’s some kind of Revell model kit under there, but I don’t remember what it was (the company’s still around). That was probably among the last kits that I had, since I lost interest in models around this time.

On top of that are gloves, a bicycle pump, an envelope with some money tucked inside it, and a 1974 Wretched Mess Calendar. There isn’t much easily accessible information online about that publication, but there is a little evidence, besides my fractured memory and an overexposed print from late ’73, that such a thing existed. This is an article mentioning a ’69 version of the calender.

Finally, speaking of models, this shot. Not a Christmas image, but something I was doing at the time.

SaturnV.73My Saturn V model. My mother had acquired it for me some years before — at a trading stamp redemption center — but I was too young for it for a while. In late ’73, I took up the task and finished it. And a fine model it was, too.

An Early Three-Cent Card

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The U.S. domestic postcard rate went up to 3 cents on August 1, 1958. The postmark on the following card clearly says August 1958, but the exact date is impossible to suss out. Its message is also short and to the point — from the West Coast back to the East Coast, an image of Grauman’s. Lots of people have been there before and since. Graumans1958.1Gaumans1958.2I didn’t forget! We stopped here on our tour of Hollywood and Beverly Hills! We are having a wonderful trip.

Emily Loeser

It’s addressed to Robby’s Beauty Salon (originally “shop,” but it’s crossed out) in Elizabeth, New Jersey. Note the staple holes in upper-right corner. I like to think that the recipients at Robby’s stapled the card to a bulletin board or the like for a while.

Another Two-Cent Card

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On July 13, 1958, a fellow named Ned mailed a hotel card – one depicting the Radisson Minneapolis surrounded by what I take to some Minneapolis sights. A busy design, but the Radisson has had a long history in the city.

Raddison1958.1Raddison1958.2Dear Mother & Dad

Here is where I stay in Minneapolis. Heading home Tuesday. Hope you are OK.

Love, Ned

Ned could have put that in a tweet, I think.

Two-Cent Card from California

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Another card among those I bought recently has a postmark date of June 6, 1958, and an image of Mt. Sopris in western Colorado, but it was mailed from Richmond, Calif. Postcards are now 2 cents — but not for much longer — and the postmark says in big block letters, PRAY FOR PEACE.

Sopris1958.1 Sopris1958.2Monday

Hi Folks!

Well we finally made it to California Saturday P.M. Sure glad to get here kind of tired of riding. Think I’ll go to San Francisco tomorrow. I’m in San Pablo, Calif.

Love, Wanda

One of the Last Penny Postcards

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Not long ago I bought a box of old postcards for what worked out to be 10 cents each. I haven’t done a complete survey, but most seem to be from 30 to 60 years old. Many are old hotel and motel cards; many others are destination cards. Some present an interesting subject artfully, others clearly fall into the Boring Postcards genre.

A few of them were mailed. Someone, decades ago, spent a few minutes composing a few lines to someone else far distant, stamped the thing, and dropped it in a mailbox or letter slot. The recipient presumably read it, looked at the image, and maybe even told the sender – when they met again in person – about getting the card. And that was probably that. Off to a shoebox or a drawer or somewhere and left to the vicissitudes of time.

Somehow, they were eventually among the cards that I acquired, even though none were originally sent to this part of the country. I’ve scanned four cards, all mailed in the 1950s. The first is dated and postmarked December 18, 1951, and sent it from Harlingen, Texas, addressed to Mr. & Mrs. C.L. Cahoon of Brockton, Mass.

ValleyCard1951.1

Valley1951.2All text sic.

12/18/51

We are already to leave Harlingen now and the car is packed to the top. As usual we brought more than we needed, but it has been fun. It has been cold here, but now is hot again. We went to Mexico Monday and thru the market district. It won’t be long now before you will see what we have purchased. Looking forward to X-mas and seeing you all and all our wedding gifts. Coming home thru the South to Sea Island Georgia, Florida, South Carolina, etc. Too much snow + ice up North for safety.  Love, Mary + Warren. See you in a week.

Young newlyweds maybe? Hope they made it back for Christmas. Postage, incidentally, was 1 cent. Two weeks later, on January 1, 1952, the penny postcard would be no more, with a 100 percent rate increase to 2 cents.

Windsor Castle ’94

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Twenty years ago we visited Windsor Castle and the nearby grounds of Eton. Wish I could say that I remembered more about it, but memory fails. Maybe I’d seen too many palaces and other monumental edifices in the weeks and months before.

That December was relatively warm, which might help account for the greenness of the lawn.Windsor94.2

But it wasn’t so warm that we didn’t need coats.Windsor94.1 The ducks and geese in the Thames. Windsor94.3

I do remember looking into one of the rooms of the castle that had been completely blackened by the fire in 1992 (renovations wouldn’t be finished until later in the decade). But I don’t remember whether we were looking across a roped off area from the inside, or looking in through a window from the outside. Or maybe it was both. The fire had clearly done a lot of damage.

Ecuadorian Choco

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Those jokesters at Trader Joe’s, or at least their hired copywriters, are still coming up with too-clever-by-half product names. We were at one of the stores recently, and noticed Moral Fiber brand bran muffins. What’s the subtext of that? These muffins promote ethical digestion?

We didn’t buy any of the muffins, but we did buy Inner Peas – a bag of green pea-based snacks. Or, to quote the bag, “Trader Joe’s Contemplates Inner Peas.” Maybe they’ve been visualizing whorled peas, too.

It doesn’t have a twee name, but we also bought 65% Cacao Dark Chocolate-Single Origin-Ecuador. I don’t ever remembering trying any Ecuadorian chocolate, so that was just about enough to make me part with $2 for the opportunity. The verbiage on the box promises that it’s made only from “Arriba cocoa beans that are native to Ecuador. The bean are grown exclusively in the cocoa plantations located along the Guayas River…”

Turns out that Ecuadoran choco is making a comeback. According to the BBC: “Over the last decade, as the demand for more flavourful cocoa has risen, Ecuador has emerged as the pre-eminent exporter of fine beans.

“It is a favourite destination for globetrotting chocolatiers in search of the best, and cocoa production has also become a sustainable source of income for Ecuador’s farmers.”

The Globetrotting Chocolatiers. There’s a band name or a title of something in that somewhere. Anyway, we’ve tried the Ecuadorian chocolate, and it’s high-quality stuff.

Etymology for the Day

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December has started off cold, which isn’t unusual, but dry, which is. A little. No predictions of much snow in the week ahead, either. I remember a lot of early Decembers around here with heavy snow to kick things off, a few times on December 1 exactly.

The subject of the mint julep came up today. The drink’s mentioned in The Great Gatsby, which Lilly is reading, and she asked me what it was in it. Besides the mint, I forgot for a moment, but then I remembered: bourbon. At least that’s what I sampled at the Kentucky Derby those many years ago, as one does. I didn’t cotton to it particularly.

Naturally, that led me to various web sites, mainly because I didn’t know the origin of the word julep. Bon Appétit tells me – and I’ll assume they do their food and beverage word homework – that “in the beginning (and likely a very early beginning, at that), the word was gul-ab, and the drink was Persian rosewater (gul = rose, ab = water). Gul-ab then moved through the normal channels (Arabic>Italian>French), until finally ‘julep’ shows up in English, around 1400, in a surgical textbook called Lanfranc’s Chirurgie (the old-timey word for ‘surgery’).

“There, it’s described as a ‘sirup maad oonly of water & of sugre,’ mixed with more medicinal ingredients to make them easier to swallow. So by the 15th century, ‘julep’ had lost its floral notes, and had moved into meaning any kind of soothing, sweet drink.

“By the late 1700s, though, the Atlantic seems to have split the julep into two camps. In Europe, it was still a general term for a sweet drink, including something with medicinal properties, but hard-drinking Americans had codified it into a cold cocktail, served with sugar, ice, and some kind of aromatic herb. Speed up to 1804, when an American writer credited his love of whiskey to ‘mixing and tasting my young master’s juleps.’ So we know that whiskey was a major component, but in the 19th century, juleps were also made with brandy and (surprisingly) gin.”

One more thing about the julep, from Wiki. No footnote, but I believe it: “Since 2006, Churchill Downs has also served extra-premium custom-made mint juleps at a cost of $1000 each at the Kentucky Derby. These mint juleps were served in gold-plated cups with silver straws, and were made from Woodford Reserve bourbon, mint imported from Ireland, spring water ice cubes from the Bavarian Alps, and sugar from Australia. [Why Australia?] The proceeds were used to support charitable causes dedicated to retired race horses.”

Orion Rising

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Am I going to get up early on Thursday to watch the Orion launch? The launch window opens up at 6 am Central. So probably not. I can watch a replay a few hours later. Hope it goes well.

The Weather Channel – which seemed very interested in the launch, which I suppose depends on the weather – called Orion the “first deep space mission” since Apollo 17, and I wondered about that. What about all of the missions to various planets? Turns out they were abbreviating things to the point of inaccuracy, as TV often does.

This from Jason Davis at the Planetary Society (italics added): “Exploration Flight Test 1 (EFT-1) is a two-orbit shakedown cruise designed to test out Orion’s critical components — specifically, how the vehicle responds to radiation in the Van Allen belts, and how the heat shield fares under a fast reentry from beyond low-Earth orbit. While Orion’s eventual ride to space is the Space Launch System, EFT-1 will use a United Launch Alliance Delta IV Heavy rocket. The Delta IV Heavy will fly out of Launch Complex 37 at the Cape Canaveral Air Force Station.

“Orion will be dropped into a preliminary, 185 by 888 kilometer orbit for a lap around the Earth. Then, the Delta IV’s second stage will re-ignite, kicking the spacecraft up to an altitude of 5,800 kilometers—higher than any human-rated spacecraft has been in more than 40 years. The unusual orbit will send Orion hurtling back into Earth’s atmosphere at speeds up to 32,000 kilometers per hour. Splashdown will take place off the coast of Baja California in the Pacific Ocean, where NASA and the US Navy will haul the capsule into the flooded well deck of the USS Anchorage.”

Early Winter Sky

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After a brief not-cold spell on Saturday and Sunday – I can’t call it warm, but still not bad – it’s winter cold again. Diligent neighbors used the interlude to sting lights on their houses or finishing removing leaves from their lawns. I did no such things.

The sunset on Saturday was shot with pink and gold.

Northern Illinois, Nov 29, 2014

I did manage to read Fahrenheit 451 over the long weekend. Or rather re-read, because I read it when – 40 years ago? Does that even count as re-reading? I picked it up because Lilly read it for school not long ago, and asked me about the story sometimes, but I had to confess to remembering very little about it, besides colorful scenes of book burning and the idea of becoming a living book.

I understand that it’s an important work. But I’m not particularly taken with Bradbury’s writing style. Not sure what it is. Also, Bradbury was clearly afraid of the pernicious effects of dumbing down society, especially as expedited by television, and I’m not entirely persuaded. Maybe the level of stupidity is always about constant, just manifesting itself in different ways across the decades.