Category Archives: Entertainment

Deputy Marshall Ronald Reagan

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Portillo’s is a (mostly) local chain specializing in hot dogs, Italian beef, burgers and the like, and across its various locations, thematic decorations from the ’20s to the ’60s. The food is good and the decorations interesting, so every few months we go to one of the locations, two of which are fairly close.

Last weekend Lilly and I visited the one on Illinois 83 in Elmhurst, a bit out of our usual orbit. Before ordering, I was waiting while Lilly was in the restroom, and taking a look at some of the items on the walls in that part of the restaurant. Off in one corner is a framed picture of Ronald Reagan in a western outfit, wearing a badge that says Deputy U.S. Marshall. My guess would be it’s a publicity shot from Law and Order (1953).

On closer inspection, I noticed that it’s autographed. I’m not familiar with Reagan’s handwriting, but I’ve no reason to think it isn’t his. “Dick” must be Dick Portillo, who founded and still owns the chain.

To Dick –

If I don’t make it acting, I’ll try the hot dog business.

Ron

Ten Years Later

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Big snow predicted for tomorrow. Not a blizzard, mind you, but six inches maybe. The weathermen try to act impressed by that, but it isn’t impressive. I haven’t checked to see if the Weather Channel is trying to stick a name on it. Last time it was a noted cartoon fish (or submariner). Maybe it’ll be Winter Storm Magilla.

Oddly enough, and apropos of nothing, I never watched The Magilla Gorilla Show, though I can’t say that about other awful output of the Hanna-Barbera cartoon factory. Or at least I have no memory of it. Not sure why. I was squarely in its demographic, at least by the end of the show’s run in 1967. But there must have been something else on at the same time that I, and probably more importantly, that my brothers wanted to watch. I never even heard of the show until much later, when I listened to the theme song on a TeeVee Toons collection.

Just out of curiosity, I counted up the number of posts between the day I first posted back at Blogger, February 21, 2003, and today. It’s only a milestone because we use base 10, but base 10 it is. The total is 2,435, or almost exactly two times every three days. Not so much across the span of 10 years. I couldn’t say how many words that is, but at 300 per entry — a seat-of-the-pants estimate — that puts it around 730,000.

Two hundred words a day. Eh, any fool can do that. Even if you count the for-pay words I’ve done in the last 10 years, that might only be 800 to 1,000 words a day. That doesn’t take one into the league of Asimovian compulsive writers.

But quantity isn’t everything. I’ve enjoyed blogging in particular about those few places I’ve been over the last decade. With any luck — because life is impermanent — I’ll record impressions of a few more places here over the next decade (or in a successor blog, because blogs are impermanent, too.)

“Stand when I speak to you, earthman.”

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There’s all kinds of interesting things at this blog, which I chanced across the other day, but which also seems to have been discontinued. I think I understand why. It looks like a lot of work: all the scanning, caption writing, linking and publishing.

I’ve only skimmed it, but I like the tone of the site. Not: look at all this junk from the past we can feel superior to, for moral or aesthetic reasons. And not: look at all this cool stuff that reminds me of my childhood, when the world was a better place. But rather, look at all this! The world’s got an inexhaustible supply of interesting things, for endless reasons. Enjoy!

I found it because I was trying to learn more about the cartoonist Charles Rodrigues. I have the paperback book Spitting on the Sheriff and Other Diversions (1966). I picked it up at my mother’s house at some point, where it had been kicking around for years. “the in crowd” has scanned a number of them here, some of the better ones in fact. One of my favorites is, “Stand when I speak to you, earthman.”

The Presidents Day Blackout

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At 5:10 p.m. the electricity flickered, went out, returned for a few seconds, then went out for about 50 more minutes.

Time to be dramatic: Blackout! NW Suburbs Without Power! Family of four plunged into uncertainty of powerless, dimly lit Monday evening! Forced to eat dinner and play a board game by candlelight!

But it wasn’t dramatic. It wasn’t that cold today, so the house didn’t even lose that much heat. There was no obvious reason for it — no windstorm or ice buildup on power lines. Just one of those things.

Only three of us were here, since Lilly was visiting a friend at the time. I checked the block and everyone else’s power was gone as well, though the lights outside the school behind our back yard were still glowing. Lilly reported later that Twitter had informed her that some undetermined local area was dark — her friends were tweeting about it, I guess, but it couldn’t have been too large an area, since her friend (about a half mile from us) didn’t lose power.

Our TV and Internet were gone, but how can that be a bad thing for a few minutes, especially that fine silence where the TV used to drone? We discovered that our camping lantern, which contains four D batteries, has actually been a container for dead batteries for a while now. But we have about a half-dozen candles, and so ate our Japanese curry-rice by their light. Good thing the rice had cooked by the time the juice went off, though we could have boiled pasta and had curry-pasta.

Ann wanted to play a game: Sorry! As we prepared the table to set it up, the power came on again. I told her we could still play, and she still wanted to play by candlelight, so we did, though her mother was watching TV in the same room, so it wasn’t quite the throwback experience it might have been. Her yellow men edged our a victory over my green ones, four home to three home.

The No Name Storm

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Heavy snow this evening, but it didn’t rise to the level of blizzard. For one thing, there was practically no wind. First rain, than big snow flakes fell almost straight down. Nothing like the promised blizzard in the Northeast, which the Weather Channel is trying to name after a fictional submarine captain or a spunky animated clown fish.

Name winter storms? No, if it’s a real corker, the likes of the “Great Blizzard of 1888” or the “Armistice Day Blizzard,” or the “Blizzard of 1978” will do. Trying to name a winter storm like a hurricane is just the Weather Channel drifting a little more toward infotainment. I’m with the National Weather Service on that score: no names for winter storms.

And speaking of which: no to the new cat Monopoly token. There’s a dog token, of course, but dogs are loyal creatures who will follow you around the board. Cats will lounge around Free Parking all day, waiting to be fed. I’m old enough to remember to man-on-horseback and cannon tokens, which shouldn’t have been retired either. When it comes to weather nomenclature and Monopoly, I’m a mossbacked reactionary.

More Bullwinkle

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Sometime in 1987, I bought a Bullwinkle clock at a clock shop in Water Tower Place. It’s one of only a few things I ever remember buying at that mall on Michigan Ave. It was an impulse purchase. When I saw it, I knew I had to have it.

Note that the numbers are in reverse order. The hands moved counterclockwise, and the clock kept good time, only backwards. I hung it in my apartment in Chicago from ’87 to ’90, and more than one person commented on how confusing the clock was.

Near Bullwinkle is a copyright mark, “1987 P.A.T. Ward,” so I hope the $20 or so I spend provided a bit of income to Jay Ward (d. 1989), who deserved to profit mightily from Bullwinkle. On the back is “H.I. Enterprises, Milwaukee.” Not Frostbite Falls, but not too far away.

At some point (I think), a battery leaked and damaged the movement, so it doesn’t run any more. But years ago I hung it on the wall in my office over the large bookcase all the same. Recently I took it down for dusting, and had Ann pose with it.

New Media Moose & Squirrel

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Not long ago, Ann wanted to see something on Hulu, and came to me for suggestions. I discovered that regular old Hulu, not the pay-extra Hulu, offers Rocky and Bullwinkle. I picked Season 2, Episode 1, the beginning of the shaggy-moose story about Upsidasium.

Upon further investigation, I discovered that as a story arc, “Upsidasium” has its own Wiki page. According to that source, it was the second-longest story arc for Moose & Squirrel, coming in at 36 episodes. The fictional metal also appears on this list.

Ann’s taken a liking to the show, and asks to watch it more often than I have time for, and we’re not done with the Upsidasium story yet. We have some Rocky and Bullwinkle on VHS (or, to be pedantic, The Adventures of Rocky and Bullwinkle and Friends), but it’s been years since she’s seen any of those.

She’s also been taking pictures of some of the characters. I thought the one she took of Mr. Know-It-All (above, in a sauna) turned out well, considering it’s a shot of a video in progress on a laptop. This is a Mr. Know-It-All I’m particularly fond of.

Thursday Salmagundi

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While working on an article the other day, I came across a press release that said in part: “Seminole Classic Casino, the first Native American Casino in the country, today celebrated its grand re-opening…. Seminole Gaming CEO Jim Allen provided welcoming remarks and historical background of the casino, while Good Times television personality Jimmie ‘J.J.’ Walker warmed-up the crowd with Tribal and 1970s trivia.”

Jimmie Walker. Now there’s a name I hadn’t heard in a long time. I hope the Seminoles paid him a reasonable amount. Even has-beens have to make some kind of living. 1970s trivia? Such as, “What was Jimmie Walker’s catchphrase?” I’m not going to repeat it here. If you know it, you know it. If not, leave it be.

Snippet of recent conversation:

Ann: “Lance Armstrong, he’s the one who went to the Moon?”

Me: “No, that was Neil Armstrong. He was a test pilot, astronaut and explorer. Lance Armstrong is a guy who can stand riding a bicycle for hours and hours.” (Link includes salty George Carlin language.) (And if you’re going to sit on a bike for that long, maybe you need the drugs.)

I was toying with the idea of reading only books that I already own this year. Got a fair number on the shelves that I haven’t gotten around to, after all. But I was at the library the other day and that notion flew out the window. I was looking for The River of Doubt: Theodore Roosevelt’s Darkest Journey  (Candice Millard), which is about TR’s expedition to one of the remotest of the Amazon’s tributaries in 1914, but it was checked out, so I checked out 1920: The Year of Six Presidents by David Pietrusza.

Not that there were six serving U.S. presidents in 1920, unlike the four emperors of AD 69. Just one: Wilson, a shadow of his former self by then. But the book promises to track TR (odd, since he was dead by 1920), Harding, Coolidge, Hoover and FDR and their involvement in the 1920 election. I’ve only read a few chapters. So far, not bad, but Pietrusza has a few annoying writing tics, and I’ve spotted a couple of small errors. The Armistice did not, for example, take place at 11:11 am.

I’m going to stick with it for now, because 1920 was a pretty interesting year in this country, besides for the election of Warren Harding and Calvin Coolidge: the last of the Palmer raids and the Red Scare, the beginning of Prohibition, the Wall Street bombing, the final push to secure women’s suffrage, and the first commercial radio station on the air, whose first broadcast concerned the results of the election. Among other things.

I just looked up salmagundi, long a favorite word. Never looked into its origin before. I’d have guessed it was one of those words the English language picked up in British India. Sounds like it, doesn’t it? “Sahib, the salmagundi is served.”

But no. My American Heritage New College Dictionary tells me it’s from French, salmigondis, and before that, origin obscure. Just another one of the French food words, then. Maybe next time I’ll call a jumble like this a gallimaufry, another good word that needs more use, also with a Frenchy origin.

More on Fibber

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After mentioning Fibber McGee yesterday, I found an episode of Fibber McGee & Molly online and listened to it in segments, between everything else that I had to do. It’s been a while, but I’ve heard the show before on WDCB’s old-time radio program. The particular episode I just heard, dating from early 1941, deals with Fibber erroneously believing he’s been drafted. It didn’t include his closet.

Most of the comedy stems from the disbelief of various characters to Fibber’s news. He had been, after all, “in the last war.” (Something about working in a kitchen the whole time; no one called it the Great War, but there was a mention of Gen. Pershing)  The show holds up better than some (much) radio comedy from the era. The oddest thing to modern ears is the way one of the characters lapses into talking about the sponsor, Johnson Wax.

And when did linoleum become so important as a flooring? The late 19th century, come to find out, so that few listeners in 1941 would have remembered a time without it. To hear Johnson Wax tell it, of course, keeping your linoleum floors clean and shiny is a top priority.

Fibber McGee’s Garage

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Winter warm through most of Friday and Saturday – in the 50s at times – and then freezing rain came on Saturday night, followed by normal January temps again plus ice. Not major ice, just enough to leave thin sheets underfoot here and there, which I coated with sand. Why isn’t sand more popular for dealing with icy patches? It doesn’t melt the ice, but it neutralizes the slip danger, which is what matters.

But I couldn’t deal with the ice sheet on the Sienna with sand. Lilly wanted to practice some driving on Sunday, so I made her chip parts of the ice off the windows with me. If you’re going to have a car in the North, and a two-car garage organized by Fibber McGee so that only one car goes in there, you’ll have to de-ice your car windows sometimes.

I wonder how long Fibber McGee’s closet will be a widely understood reference. Or has it already passed into obscurity, and I didn’t get the memo? It’s easy to ignore that kind of change. I do it all the time. Then again, you can’t ever know what’s going to die out in the age of YouTube. (This is cheating, since it isn’t the radio show, but it’s still worth a link.)