Category Archives: Over the Transom

RTW ’25 Leftovers

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Summertime, and the living’s not bad. Pretty good, really. But those aren’t as catchy as the actual lyric. Time to pause posting for the summer holiday string: Flag Day, Juneteenth, Canada Day, Independence Day and Nunavut Day. Come to think of it, that’s an exceptionally representative run of holidays for North America. Back around July 13.

The flight from Chicago to Tokyo took us far north, as that flight path usually does. There was more light than I thought there would be, looking down at this moment on the February snows of the Yukon or Alaska; I’ll never know which. I could have been eying the border, for all I know, which suggests that borders are a gossamer fiction at these latitudes.

Japan

It was a happy moment when we ate at Mos Burger. One of these days, I’m going to dig out my paper copy of an article I wrote for Kansai Time Out in 1993 about four varieties of Western-style fast food chains founded in Japan, and post it. Today isn’t that day. But I can say that Mos Burger was the best of them.

As good as I remember it from 25+ years ago, the last time I went to one.

In Enoshima, near the ocean, this fellow hawks soft serve ice cream. Goo goo g’joob. Look but don’t touch.

I am the Eggman

The handsome Osaka City Central Public Hall, completed in 1918. Amazing that it survived the war and urban renewal 20 years later, those forces that generally gave modern urban Japan the boxy concrete character it enjoys today.

India

A monumental monument in New Delhi: India Gate, which honors more than 74,100 soldiers of the Indian Army who died during the Great War, and a number more in the Third Afghan War a few years later. They did their part. One of the larger relics of the Raj, unless you count things better described as legacies, such as railroad lines, parliamentary government, and the bitter feud between India and Pakistan.

While we were looking at India Gate, a group of about a dozen uniformed schoolboys, who had detached themselves from a larger group, approached me and asked where I was from. They were gleeful to hear “America,” a reaction I didn’t know anyone would have anymore, but I suppose they’ve seen a lot of our movies. A middle-aged male chaperon appeared in short order and shooed them away, while giving me a sidelong glance with a hairy eyeball, though I hadn’t precipitated the encounter in any way. I was just a suspicious foreigner, I guess.

The Taj Mahal has a fair amount of parkland around it. That means a population of monkeys, too. I spotted more monkeys in urban India than I would have anticipated. These didn’t seem to be bothered by the men, the dogs or the motorcycle.

On display at the Ghandi Museum: a Marconigram. I don’t know that I’d ever seen one of those before. Or maybe there was one on display at the Titanic Museum in Branson. Anyway, that’s one good reason to go to museums: for things once common, now curiosities. Safia Zaghloul was an Egyptian political activist of the time.

United Arab Emirates

In Dubai it seemed like there were more men at work sweeping, mopping and other cleaning of floors and other flat places, per square meter, than anywhere else I’ve ever been. There are worse things to do with cheap labor.

Not sure exactly where this was, except somewhere out on Palm Jumeirah. Must have been a wall, or like a wall, in one of the posh retail corridors winding through one of the posh resort properties amid the poshness of the island.

Note: White on green is common indeed around the world.

Desert flowers. Of course, sprinklers water that bit of terrain at regular intervals.

Germany

What’s Berlin without currywurst? They say it came into style soon after the city was divided.

What would Germany be without Ritter Sport? A giant stack of them can be seen, in their great variety, at the Hauptbahnhof in Berlin. Later, I bought about 10 squares of RS at a discount price at a Netto grocery store near our hotel. Think Aldi or Lidl, but more cluttered.

Views of the Memorial to the Murdered Jews of Europe, Denkmal für die ermordeten Juden Europas, near the Tiergarten in Berlin. It wasn’t there in 1983.

Czech Republic

Not calling it Czechia. Or, if it ever comes to it, not calling India Bharat, either.

St. George’s Basilica. I admired the nearby St. Vitus Cathedral. That’s a grand edifice. But St. George’s has that human scale, and echoes of an even earlier time. It was completed during the time of Good King Wenceslaus.

Vladislav Hall. The site of centuries of Bohemian parties, banquets and balls, me boys. That and affairs of state.

The Dancing House. We rode a streetcar line out of our way to see it, though not that far. It wasn’t there in 1994.

A sidewalk golem in the old Jewish Quarter of Prague. The Sidewalk Golems was a relatively obscure band who sometimes toured with Irwin Hepplewhite and the Terrifying Papoose Jockeys.

This could have been over Spain or Portugal.

The last image of thousands that I took, a staggering number in any context except digital images that take practically no time or effort to make.

Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi

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The sign doesn’t say the winter accessories are ¥300, but rather that they start at ¥300. A critical detail, but even so the items aren’t pricey.Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka

We’d come across a curious shop deep in the heart of Osaka.Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka

Riding into Osaka on a Keihan regional line, we transferred to the city’s subway system, specifically the Midosuji line (御堂筋線, Midōsuji-sen), which runs under a grand avenue of that name, Midosuji Blvd., for a few miles. The Midosuji line proceeds from Umeda to Namba and beyond to places like Tennoji, names that might not mean much to the outside world, but which are old and familiar to me.

My first summer in Japan, I hung out briefly with Bernadette and Lyn, two Kiwis, and Sean, a Californian.

“I tell people at home I can speak Japanese,” Sean said one fine evening at Osaka Castle Park. He’d only been in the country a few weeks.

“Oh, yeah?” said the saucy Lyn.

“Yeah, Yodoyabashi. Hommachi. Daikokucho!”

That was a laugh. He’d rattled off some of the station names on the Midosuji line.

I digress. Yuriko and I went a few stations south, then emerged at ground level and headed east on foot, along another major avenue, though without the ginko trees or skyscrapers or wide bridges of Midosuji Blvd. I had to look up the new street’s name later: Chou-Dori, a literal translation of which would be, Middle Road.

Above Chou-Dori is a major expressway. Built under the expressway is a row of massive buildings, one after another, maybe 10 or more of them: Semba Center, the entire collection is called. Space is at a premium in urban Japan.

Each Semba Center building had entrances on either end, directly in the shadow of the expressway, and each building – at least the half-dozen or so we walked through – was packed with discount retailers, lining each side of a hall that ran the entire length of the building. You want discounters in Osaka, this is the place to come, Yuriko told me. Clothes, mostly, including more than one cloth merchant, but also household goods and decorative items.

At Semba Center Building No. 9, 3-3-110 Senbacho, Chuo-ku, Osaka (to give its full address) is Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi.

That is, the Railroad Forgotten Items Store. It’s a store that sells items left on JR trains – presumably Osaka-area JR trains, since I know there is an equivalent store in Tokyo. Many millions of people use those trains every day, so it stands to reason that there is a constant flow of many left items, all the time.

JR must have a deal with the store owner, the details of which hardly matter, though I suppose the railroad acts as a wholesaler of items left over a few months (some details are here). I’ll bet really valuable items aren’t sold that way, though. If somehow your Brasher Doubloon ended up in the JR lost and found, it would mean you were grossly careless, someone who found it had no idea what it was, and a JR-favored coin dealer would get to buy it.

Be that as it may, people leave behind a lot of umbrellas. In Osaka, there’s no excuse to pay full price for an umbrella.Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka

The place is well stocked with clothes, too.Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka

Many are the small items. Seems only reasonable.Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka

People lose some odd things.Tetsudo Wasuremono Ichi, Osaka

There’s enough readable text for me probably to figure out what this is, but somehow not knowing is more satisfying as a travel memory.

Ampelmann

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Spend enough time as a pedestrian in the former East Berlin – and it doesn’t actually take that long – and you begin to notice that the Walk/Don’t Walk signals aren’t like anywhere else. Green and red, respectively, like everywhere else, but otherwise unique cartoon men in hats.

This is the Walk sign.Ampelmann in situ

That probably would have remained a passing thought for us, but at the Berlin Hauptbahnhof we spotted a store selling goods and souvenirs based on the cartoon man, who has a name: Ampelmann, that is, Traffic Light Man. The postcards were a bit expensive, but I was so amused I bought one to send and one to keep.

I sent the Walk green Ampelmann and kept the card with the Don’t Walk red Ampelmann (see below), who stands in front of various noteworthy structures in Berlin, such as the Brandenburg Gate, the TV tower at Alexanderplatz, and the Victory Column in the Tiergarten. The Walk green Ampelmann card has the same structures, but he’s strolling past them.

We also picked up an fine intangible souvenir when we learned about Traffic Light Man and his robust gait and distinctive headwear. It’s hard to know when you’ll find those, but find them you do if you’re paying just a little attention. Also, he’s a bit of fun on the beaten path — what could be more literally a beaten path than a street crosswalk?

The woman behind the counter told me that the lights were created in East Berlin in the 1960s, and when reunified Berlin wanted to phase them out in the 1990s, Berliners east and west weren’t having it. By then he was no mere traffic accessory, but a small yet vivid cultural phenomenon, star of comic strips, games and radio spots. He was too popular to be erased from street crossings throughout the east. So he remains, a rare beloved relic of the DDR, though I understand his backlights are now thoroughly modern LEDs.

I got an additional souvenir in the form of a bag from the shop.Ampelmann bag Ampelmann bag

The story of Ampelmann, first drawn in 1961, is told by the web site of that name, including information about his creator, Berlin resident Karl Peglau (d. 2009), who is described as a traffic psychologist. I can’t ever remember hearing about that profession before, but I’d say that traffic in a lot of places could use professional help. Whatever your job, you could do a lot worse for a legacy than Ampelmann.

The main Ampelmann shop is on Unter den Linden. We must have walked right past it. But somehow we didn’t miss the DDR Museum a little further on, where the thoroughfare is called Karl-Liebknecht-Straße – another relic of East Berlin (before that, it was Kaiser-Wilhelm-Straße).

We didn’t feel like visiting the museum itself, but we did go to the gift shop.

As my wont, I got a few more postcards, while Jay got a refrigerator magnet. This one: Marx, Engels and Lenin. None of them, of course, lived long enough to encounter refrigerator magnets, but I’m pretty sure they would have denounced them as bourgeois frivolity. All the more reason to get some.

Have a Nice Trip, Sucker

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As scam text messages go, this one needs work. Mostly literate, but the tone is off.

I don’t think the tollway authority has a bit of girlishness in it. Or boyishness either, or any particle of human emotion. It functions as a machine: in its own small sphere, a calculating, persistent revenue-generating engine. Then again, I guess it’s fitting that the text message is likely machine produced.

That’s pretty heavy. Something a little lighter.

Floral studies by my father.

Algorithm Goo

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I could pay to ditch all the ads on YouTube, but for now I stop the them after five seconds – and leave pages that don’t offer that option, to teach the system not to do that. Sometimes I also marvel at just how wrong the algorithm seems to be in terms of pitching ads to me.

For some reason, for example, the bots are positive, completely positive (to anthropomorphize), that I’m going to open a restaurant soon. At least, that is my conclusion, since the same two ads for a restaurant supply store keep popping up again and again and again.

Also, some bot somewhere believes (to anthropomorphize again) that I’m in the market for a wife from one Slavic-language nation or another. Must be a guess based on the fact that I’m not young any more. But I’m not a fan of mail-order marriage, whatever the tech. Want a spouse from outside your cultural milieu? Go get her or him yourself, in person.

I haven’t seen an ad for this product, though I did see it on the shelf recently, which is about as random an appearance as many YouTube ads.

Another in the long list of things I will never buy.

Christmas Giants Roamed the Earth Once Upon a Time

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The trappings of the holiday season are disappearing, as they always do in the grim early days of January. A few of the seasonally lit houses on the block are no longer cheerfully glowing, and I’ve seen a few forlorn Christmas trees out on the curb. Ours still stands inside, fully adorned, but even it is a short-timer.

I saw this figure in Chicago before Christmas, and in fact that wasn’t the only giant skeleton I’d seen re-decorated for the holidays.Christmas Skeleton 2024

I figure that considering the cost of such a skeleton – and possibly the pain-in-the-ass effort that goes into setting it up and taking it down – keeping it up just for Halloween didn’t appeal to the homeowner. Put on a Santa hat and red scarf and ho-ho-ho, it says Christmas, eh?

But what next? Some Cupid-like garb for Valentine’s Day, I suppose. An Easter bonnet for that holiday, which I think would look pretty funny, even though how often do you see Easter bonnets any more? An Uncle Sam hat for July 4 and I’m not sure what for Labor Day, and we’re practically back to Halloween and Christmas again.

Christmas at Ollie’s

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Choose unwisely during this time of the year, and you end up in a crowded retail setting. Not the worst fate imaginable, but I can think of better things to do, such as visit less popular stores – or at least less crowded at any given moment – and look at things.

Christmas at Ollie’s, you could say.

I might be mistaken, but I believe agriculture in the polar regions is meager indeed. On the other hand, Santa surely controls land in temperate zones, including productive cropland of all sorts. His is an operation with a global reach. But doesn’t he have farmer elves to do the actual work?

Be the life of the party.

Put something under the tree for the small fry.

Yahtzee Jr.? Kids these days. We played the same Yahtzee as the adults when we were kids, as we liked it. Actually, I only remember playing Yahtzee a few times, mostly with my cousin, and not especially liking it. Now I’ve forgotten what it involves, except rolling dice a lot. Maybe I should look it up and re-acquaint myself with it. Nah.

Not a Christmas item particularly, but the thought of shooting dog treats just makes me smile. It might or might not really work, in the sense of getting the dog to play along. Of course, it is food, so dogs might be keen to chase down the treats from the get-go. Watching that would be the amusement for the human. I haven’t lived around a cat long, but my sense is that if you shot treats at a cat, the animal would make itself scarce.

Watch Out for Angel Number 000

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The other day, I wanted to know the place associated with an area code I didn’t know, so I put the numbers into the search engine and as soon as I typed the letter “a” – planning to put in “area code” – it immediately auto-suggested “angel number” and only second “area code.”

Angel number?

It’s a minor curse (sometimes) to be as curious as I am, since that represented the entrance to an enormous rabbit hole. Not only that, a fairly stupid one, too. In I went, until it got too stupid, which wasn’t long.

That authoritative source that is Cosmopolitan tells us: “Repeating numbers (like 111) or numbers that appear in a significant sequence (like 1234) do mean something, and they’re referred to as ‘angel numbers.’

“Whenever you spot an angel number at a crucial moment in time… you can be sure an angel just dropped you a wink and a kiss. Angel numbers are a sign from the divine (whatever you call it — God, a source, your higher self, the universe, etc.) that you’re on the right track.”

According to the writer of the Cosmo item, one Jaliessa Sipress (which I have to say is a wonderful name), angel numbers can show up anywhere as you wander your way through this uncertain world, such as on license plates, house numbers, even retail receipts.

Jaliessa helpfully explains what some of these numbers mean. Such as 111, which “signifies that things in your life are coming into divine alignment,” or 333, which is “associated with femininity, creativity, and intuition.”

That infamous number 666 apparently has a bad rap, being associated with the Antichrist and all. As an angel number, she says, it is more benign: “The spiritual meaning of 666 is an encouragement to refocus. Seeing 666 tells you to pay closer attention to any fixation you currently have on earthly problems and details,” she says in a separate, linked article about that specific number.

Her bio line says: “Jaliessa Sipress is an Astrologer, writer, and artist committed to making spirituality and self-care simple. Her focus is on life-purpose and cultivating mental and emotional clarity to create lasting change in all areas of life.”

Damn, is it too late in my life to become an Astrologer, with capital A? No! I can discover hidden truth with the best of them. After a spot of mediation under my aura, I even know what some other angel numbers mean. Such as:

2525 – this angel number should make you reflect on the big picture, such as whether man is still alive, or woman can survive. Other similar numbers are 3535, 4545, and on up to 9595, which should inspire you to reflect on how men take everything you give and don’t put back nothing.

5440 – this number means that the angels are telling you to fight for what is yours – or take what belongs to someone else, whatever.

31415 – the angels are telling you to eat more pie.

1234 – a wink from the angels that it’s OK not to set a new password.

Also, one doesn’t have to rely on mere wandering around to get an angel number. Google “Angel Number Generator” and see what I mean. Those many sites, which first ask for a name and birthdate, don’t seem to be asking phishy questions at all, no sir.

A twist to the angel number story: the woman who invented them – that is, tapped into a free-flowing vein of numerology to uncover their true significance – later said she made it up and discovered she could sell books about it, according to The Cut. One of the article’s comments sums things up nicely. Commenter sarah.kg noted: So you’re telling me this obviously made up thing… was made up?!