Category Archives: News

Gettysburg

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Got a postcard from my nephew Dees last week, the nephew who’s the drummer for Sons of Fathers. It describes the 12th Bonnaroo Music & Arts Festival earlier this month, in which the band participated. The photo on the right depicts the only known first-name Deeses of the world, together about this time last year, when Sons of Fathers played at FitzGerald’s in Berwyn, Ill., and I went out to see them. He’s the hale fellow with facial hair.

A little further in the past – 1991 – I found myself driving from Boston to Chicago during this time of year, and I stopped at Gettysburg National Military Park. I missed the 128th anniversary of the battle by a few days, and presumably whatever commemoration events they had. I thought of that when I was reminded by the newspaper today that the 150th anniversary of the battle is upon us, beginning tomorrow, of course.

There were some other visitors when I was there, but not too many.  It was a hot day, fittingly, since it was a high-summer battle, which must have added to the misery. This image captures the summer conditions of the site pretty well, besides the 72nd Pennsylvania Infantry Monument, which has its own intricate history, and which was knocked over by high winds only last week.

Here’s another view of the Angle – the stone wall that Pickett’s men managed to reach (Lewis Addison Armistead’s men, but let’s not be too pedantic).

I haven’t seen one of these quarters yet, though I’ve been noticing a number of national park quarters in change lately.

Summer Ephemerals

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Late in the afternoon today, after a mostly sunny day, storm clouds rolled through, and for 15 minutes or so we had a heavy downpour. About 30 minutes later, the skies were clear.

Early this evening, I saw the flick of fireflies. Brief but luminous. Luminous but brief.

Another thing with a brief life: stands set up to capitalize on the Blackhawks’ victory. This one stood in Schiller Park, Ill., on Tuesday.

I have no intention of being among the madhouse crowds downtown tomorrow.  It’s enough that I got to see the Art Institute lions in headgear last time around.

Death Be Not Particular

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Dear Death,

This has to stop – people about my age, famous or not, dying. That means people who I went to high school with, or could have.

Regards,

Dees

I doubt that Death is listening. The trickle of deaths of people roughly my age – there’s always been a trickle – is only going to expand into a torrent in the coming decades until my cohort is no more. C’est la vie, c’est la mort.

I don’t expect to be among the last. You know how very elderly people are sometimes described as isolated because, among other things, they’ve “outlived all their friends”? I expect to be one of the friends.

The odd thing (to only me) about James Gandolfini’s death was that he born on September 18, 1961, exactly the same day as my high school friend Kevin, whom I posted about the other day.

One of these days, if I live long enough, I’ll get around to watching The Sopranos. I hear it’s good.

Evergreens and Anniversaries

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A headline I spotted today on Google News: FBI investigating tip to Hoffa burial site. This story’s an evergreen, in news biz jargon. Actually, no. When a magazine editor, at least of my generation, called a piece an “evergreen” that meant it didn’t have to run in a particular issue. If you waited an edition or two, it wouldn’t go stale.

But I’m expanding the definition: the Hoffa article is evergreen because it could have run 15 years ago, or 10 or five or last year, with only a few details changed. It could also run next year or five years from now, provided Mr. Hoffa’s remains aren’t found, and I wouldn’t bet any money that they will be. But you never know, maybe someday — how long did it take to find Richard III?

I also read that the 50th anniversary of zip codes is coming up. Years ago I remember thinking, zip codes weren’t around when I was born? (Lilly might someday feel the same odd feeling about Google.) Maybe that thought occurred to me in high school, when I heard a presentation by a Canadian mathematician (or maybe he was just a math teacher) about postal codes. He claimed that five- and six-number codes were the easiest to remember — the postal code systems that the United States and the Soviet Union, respectively, had adopted.

“The most difficult system to remember is a combination of arbitrary numbers and letters, which the British adopted,” he said. “The Canadian government, in its wisdom, decided to imitate the British system, which is the worst.”

Zip codes, they say, were developed to help the post office deal with too much mail. Bet the USPS wishes it had that problem about now.

April Mayhem

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I got to know Boylston St. fairly well in 1995. I didn’t walk there every day, but often enough. Part of the street features rows of small, upper-end shops and these days, an Apple Store, though I don’t think it was there then. And I think I remember walking by the Boston Public Library and noticing that the marathon finish line is painted permanently in the street.

We didn’t watch the marathon on Patriots’ Day that year, which is the Massachusetts (and Maine) state holiday to commemorate Lexington & Concord. Rather, we watched a parade on Mass. Ave. in Arlington. Two days later, while at work downtown, I heard about the mayhem in Oklahoma City on the radio. This time of year seems to inspire losers with bombs.

I hear about today’s mayhem on the radio as I drove along today, between errands, in the company of Ann. The only memorable one of these errands was to the pet store we visited last week, to return a brush the dog didn’t like, and buy a tag that could be engraved with contact information in case she runs off. I’d imagined that we’d buy it, and then send it somewhere for engraving.

That was me, thinking old-fashioned thoughts. The store had a laser-based machine that only does one thing: engrave animal tags you’ve just bought, no extra charge. Simple to use, fascinating to watch.

Sisters in Death

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I know how hard it can be to produce good copy on a regular basis, but you know a story with a head like the following – from the LA Times’ TV critic, which popped up on Google News today – is going to be as ridiculous as you’d think: “Margaret Thatcher, Annette Funicello and the spectrum of sisterhood.”

The first graph confirms the fatuousness: “… a strange day took from us two women who helped a generation redefine what it meant to be a woman… as disparate as their careers and legacies were, they each contributed to shifting ideals of femininity and a modern woman’s movement often as dismayed by its successes as its failure.”

Oh, yeah? I remember when Groucho Marx and Elvis Presley shuffled off this mortal coil at about the same time. And I thought, wow, they each contributed to the shifting ideas of what it means to be a man in the modern world.

This is just too easy to mock. The process of putting this story together seems to have been the following: two famous women just died. Let’s put them together in death! Because they were both women who were, you know, kinda different from each other. Compare but especially contrast. By golly, women aren’t all the same! You can destroy a lot of patriarchal privilege with that kind of heavy insight.

Not that Maggie and Annette had nothing in common. Both were female, both spoke English, both had once been in the public eye, and both happened to die at roughly the same time. But can you imagine Prime Minister Thatcher sporting mouse ears or in a beach movie? (Go ahead, try.) Or Mouseketeer Funicello busting a coal miners’ strike or ordering the Royal Navy to clean Argentina’s clock?

Another story popped up today that I found much more interesting: “Nervous Europe Drives Demand for Dollars,” which was in The Financial Times. It notes: “The amount of dollar cash in circulation has risen by 42 percent in the last five years, with a main reason being demand from Europe, according to a top U.S. Federal Reserve official… The surge in demand for U.S. cash suggests that the world is worried about the safety of its banks and the future of the euro — but has no fear of inflation or default in the U.S.”

A little bit nuts, when you think about it. The euro’s dodgy, for sure. So what do Russians et al. decide to hoard instead? U.S. paper. (A special linen-cotton blend, actually). $100 Federal Reserve notes, to be exact. I guess it really is all about the Benjamins. Talk about talismanic power. I’m hardly a gold-standard crank, but last time I heard, Federal Reserve notes offer zero percent return, which is even lousier than a savings account, meaning that their value is slowly eroding.

Bang, Zoom! Straight to Pluto!

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Comet? What comet? Can’t see no stinkin’ comet. Of course, it’s been overcast for a while hereabouts, but maybe when things clear up, I’ll go look for it. Trouble is, suburban lights have a way of washing out the sky, including stray comets, unless they’re really bright. I was amazed to be able to see Hale-Bopp, but it managed to be visible even on the North Side of Chicago.

What’s up with that name, Pan-STARRS (which I’ve also seen as PANSTARRS)? I checked, and it was discovered using a telescope of that name. I was under the impression that comets are named after their discoverers, but perhaps an automated system uncovered this one, though you’d think whoever was directing the research would be honored with the name. Then again, if the scan were really automated, you could call the telescope a sort of discoverer.

Today’s odd bit of information (space related, because checking on Pan-STARRS took me on some tangents): the New Horizons spacecraft, now much closer to the planet Pluto than Earth — 6.76 AU v. 26 AU — carries a visible and infrared imager/spectrometer called Ralph, and an ultraviolent imaging spectrometer called Alice.

Give Me That Old-Time Papacy

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Miserable cold, windy day, the kind of day that has you chase your trash cans down the street early in the morning, after crossing parts of your driveway that threaten to slip you up. While groggy, because recent days have been such an intense combination of rain, snow, and meltage that your trusty sump pump works very hard to remove water from the lower reaches of your house — and decides to noisily kick in just after midnight. Keeping you (me) awake long past the point at which you (I) wanted to be awake.

But at least I heard about an historic event today, something that hasn’t happened in almost 600 years; rarer than a Transit of Venus, though the resignation of a pope could be more common if the popes wanted it to be. Naturally, that sent me to reference works to look up the likes of Gregory XII, the last pontiff to voluntarily kick off the shoes of the fisherman. That was during the Great Schism, something you don’t hear much about in the news (it’s old news, after all).

The fine Historical Atlas of the World (Barnes & Noble Everyday Handbooks, 1970) has a map called the Great Schism 1378-1417 on half a page, and it’s instructive in the way maps can be. Some areas are purple: “Adherents to the pope in Rome,” such as England, all the Scandinavian kingdoms, Hungary, Poland, and the Italian states. In green, “Adherents of the pope in Avignon,” including Castile, Aragon, France, Scotland, and the Kingdom of Naples. The sprawling, non-centralized Holy Roman Empire is in gold, listed as a region of “Undecided Allegiance.” No surprise there, but Portugal is also undecided. I don’t remember the reason for that, but maybe they were trying to annoy their fellow Iberians in Castile and Aragon.

So who’s to be the next pope? Does Benedict XVI want to be alive to influence the choice? Perhaps to push for a “nephew” for the job? No, papal intrigue isn’t quite what it used to be. What about the next papal name? I still think Sixtus the Sixth would be a good choice.

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.

Seem a Saint, When Most I Play the Devil

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I read today that Richard III’s bones have been located. I didn’t know they were missing. But then again, the story of Richard III pretty much always ends with, “A horse, a horse, my kingdom for a horse! Arrrrrrgh!” as some fearsome halberd makes contact with the king’s skull. After that, who cares?

Naturally, there are those who would rehabilitate the monarch’s evil reputation. The NYT article notes: “Among those who found his remains, there is a passionate belief that new attention drawn to Richard by the discovery will inspire a reappraisal that could rehabilitate the medieval king and show him to be a man with a strong sympathy for the rights of the common man, who was deeply wronged by his vengeful Tudor successors. Far from the villainous character memorialized in English histories, films and novels, far from Shakespeare’s damning representation of him as the limping, withered, haunted murderer of his two princely nephews, Richard III can become the subject of a new age of scholarship and popular reappraisal, these enthusiasts believe.”

Naaah.

I was also interested to learn that the king will probably be reinterred in Leicester Cathedral, against the wishes of those who would put him in Westminster Abbey or some such. Not that anyone’s asked me, but I’d go along with Leicester Cathedral. In London, he’d be just another king – albeit a hunchbacked, villainous one – among many. In Leicester, he’d be a star attraction. He’s served his country for centuries as an infamous villain of lore and literature, time now for him to promote tourism to the Midlands. If I’m ever anywhere nearby, I’ll go pay a visit.