Yesterday I visited one of the major drug store chains for reasons unrelated to chocolate, but also took a look at the discounted Valentine’s Day candies. Among the supply, mostly Russell Stover, I found The Perfect Man.
Not something I’d ever seen before. There was one left, so I bought it for the reasonable price of 34 cents. It’s one ounce of milk chocolate made by an outfit called Treat Street.
The About Us page on Treat Street’s web site is one of those long on marketing and short on actual facts, but there seems to be an affiliate (parent company? subsidiary?) called My Favorite Company, which is based in Los Angeles. Anyway, the two entities’ specialty is novelty chocolate and other confections.
The Perfect Man, as you can see from this 9.5-oz. version, is wearing only boxers with hearts on them. (What, no version wearing gold briefs?) The package also says Made in Germany, but I have my suspicions that the real makers are a breakaway faction of Oompa-Loompas tired of working for that slavedriver Wonka.
A few above-freezing days lately melted our snow cover. That’ll never do, Old Man Winter mutters, and so this morning we had a fresh few inches. At least it’s light snow this time, and proved fairly easy to remove from the driveway and sidewalk.
This was fun to write. Since then, a reader suggested Lex Luthor as a real estate villain. In Superman (1978), he hatched a scheme to sink most of California so his desert land would be the new West Coast, and thus instantly worth a fortune. Not a bad suggestion for a villain.
Still, Luthor’s plot is comic-book logic for you. I’d think the destruction of California would set off a deep economic panic worldwide, and so it might be years before much is developed anywhere. Also, people might be a mite skittish about repopulating the “new” West Coast, even after the economy recovered.
Not long ago, we got the first political robo-call of the year. From an unexpected source. I quote in full:
“Hi, this is Jessica with Mike Bloomberg 2020. We have brand-new yard signs. Will you show your support with a yard sign at your home? Go to w-w-w Mike Bloomberg dotcom slash 2020 slash yard hyphen signs to request one now. Thank you and have a great day. Paid for by Mike Bloomberg 2020.”
Ann brought this to my attention earlier this month, at a crafts superstore I rarely go to, but from which she wanted something. On display was an item that seemed to be sold for Christmas, but which by January was at a deep discount.
One of the stranger holiday items I saw this season, or any holiday season, really. A reindeer figure. Build it! Watch it melt! Watch it melt? Watch it melt?
Walmart’s marketing text about the item is positively demented, which I guess is fitting: “Build the reindeer and watch it melt magically! Fun for days. Completely reusable. Keep building and watch it melt over and over! Perfect stocking stuffer! Miracle Melters! Reindeer! Build it and Watch it Melt!”
Sure enough, someone has made a video about this — toy. I can’t say that I watched all of it, skipping around some, but the point of the item still eludes me. Do reindeer melt in dark Sámi folktales?
Winter hasn’t been very bitter so far. Yet. All of last week’s light snow has melted. But the polar vortex hammer could still drop. Hard.
Back to posting on January 21. I take holidays where I can get ’em, even in the stony bleak mid-winter.
The following is an example of a small item, a throw-away item — literally, though I’m going to put it in the blue recycle bin — with a long story trailing behind it. Today in the mail I received a high-quality pamphlet, 16 glossy pages, rich bright colors, advertising the Shen Yun dance show in the Chicago area this spring. It’s merely the latest example of advertising created by what must be a deep marketing budget for that show.
Mostly I’ve been ignoring the marketing. Maybe it’s the oversell. “A Life-Changing Experience,” the cover proclaims. Gee, I hope not. Inside: “A Gift from the Heavens,” “Watch 5,000 years unfold before your eyes,” “the Divine Origin of a Glorious Civilization.” Sure, whatever you say.
It’s probably a corker of a show, if you like that kind of spectacle, though I doubt — as the pamphlet implies visually — that any of the dancers can actually fly. Then again, I suppose a fantasy counterpart culture of imperial China has some appeal. Just not for me. Well, I might go if I didn’t have to pay.
More interesting to me is text box on the last page. It says, in bold letters: CANNOT BE SEEN IN COMMUNIST CHINA.
“Traditional Chinese culture — with its deep spiritual roots and profound worldview — was displaced by communism in China. While Shen Yun cannot perform in mainland China today, we are reviving this precious heritage and sharing it with the world.”
Hm. I looked a little further. The return address for the pamphlet, for it did come in the mail, cites the Mid-USA Falun Dafa Association as the sender.
Ah. Falun Dafa (Gong), whom the Chinese government hates so much. Seems like the show, then, is a way for the religion, persecuted as it is in China, to poke the Chinese government in the eye. That’s a sentiment we can all get behind, but I’m still not paying to see the show.
I always take many more pictures than I post in any given year. Here are some from this year to close out the decade. Back to posting around January 5, 2020. That year sounds so far in the future, at least for those of us who vaguely remember Sealab 2020 — and yet here it is.
Near North Side Chicago, January 2019
San Antonio, February 2019
Downtown Chicago, March 2019
Elmhurst, Illinois, April 2019
New Orleans, May 2019
Arcola, Illinois, June 2019
Pittsburgh, July 2019
Oak Park, Illinois, August 2019
Midland, Michigan, September 2019
Charlottesville, Virginia, October 2019
Schaumburg, Illinois, November 2019
Millennium Park, Chicago, December 2019Good Christmas and New Year to all.
I avoid major retail properties this time of the year if I can. To borrow a phrase my mother used to use, it’s mob city at those places. But I still go to smaller shops and grocery stores. Business as usual there. Such as at the place selling this coffee.
Promises to be the “world’s strongest coffee,” a marketing slogan that’s the right blend of boasting and meaninglessness, so I’ll give them that. I looked up the company, which means that their ads will certainly follow me across the web for a while. Didn’t learn that much, except that its HQ is in upstate New York. More novel than Seattle or Brooklyn or the like, and that part of the state probably does need the jobs.
I pinned this to the wall behind the front door today. It’ll be there until I will be obliged to take it down. Why there? Just a passing whim. I was tired of it lying around my office. It’s a plastic bag and a relic of the 1970s or the ’80s at the latest. Not only that, a souvenir from San Antonio. At one time, Record Hole was a local chain of record stores in that city. Or so I believe.
The brand is long gone, and so far I’ve found only one trace of it online — a passing mention in an article about a different and surviving record store, as of 2016. Not that I’ve looked very hard. But Record Hole is so obscure that it didn’t even make in on this list of defunct retailers, which includes Record Bar, Record Town and Record World.
Some time ago, I picked up the bag at my mother’s house — again on a whim — and brought it back home. She’d been using it to store odds and ends. I might well have bought a record at a Record Hole and left it with her 40-odd years ago. I didn’t buy many records, but I did buy a few. Or maybe my brother Jim bought something there.
At one time, Record Hole was established enough to air local TV ads. I vaguely remember them, because they featured a primitive animated version of ’70s-record-listening dude.
Who was sitting on a record on a turntable. Trippy, man. The store’s motto, which is also on the bag but upsidedown and backwards in my picture: Whatever music plays in your head, we can put in your hand.
Plastic bags, though they may last for centuries in landfills, are notoriously ephemeral when it comes to being saved elsewhere. Sure, it’s still worthless now, but some happy descendant of mine might make a fortune off the bag in, say, the 23rd century, when the notion of plastic bags and records are historic curiosities that excite collector interest.
Winter temps have kicked in, but at least Monday’s drizzle and mist didn’t become ice. Now we have dry subfreezing conditions. Tolerable.
Meandering around online recently — often the best way to find anything interesting — I came across “Put a Light in Every Country Window.” A song about rural electrification in Australia. Can’t say I’ve ever heard one of those before.
Put a light in every country window, High-speed pumps where now the windmills stand. Get in and lay the cable so that one day we’ll be able To have electricity all over this wide land.
Catchy tune. Wasn’t long before I found the liner notes of Folk Songs & Ballads of Australia, recorded in 1964 by Gary Shearston, a star of the Australian folk revival (another thing I didn’t know about).
“A song from the pen of Don Henderson, one of Australia’s best and most prolific contemporary songwriters, who has travelled and written throughout the Eastern States,” the notes say. “This song was written three years ago after a journey through the area of the giant Snowy Hydro-Electric Scheme.”
Of course it isn’t the only song about rural electrification. Surely Woody Gutherie’s “Roll on Columbia” counts as one, and maybe “Grand Coulee Dam” does indirectly. Considering how many songs Gutherie wrote, there are probably others too.
There’s also this recent oddity about Rural Electric Cooperatives, to the tune of “The Battle of New Orleans.” It’s interesting, but a little hard to listen to.
Not bad weather for December so far. Above freezing and sunny today and yesterday. This can’t last.
This week I noticed the first installation of solar rooftop panels on my street, though not in my part of town. A good thing to do, I suppose. But my on-the-fly, rough calculations go like this: Cost to install: x. Savings on energy each year: a small, maybe minuscule fraction of x. Tax-credit support for the project: you’ll find out after considerable paperwork and wandering through the fun house that is the tax code. So another fraction of x. Years to recoup investment: many.
Maybe I’m wrong. Maybe that’s changed or was never right. Could be that Greta will come to my front door someday and personally shame me about my non-solar house. I know the cost of solar panels is way down, but that’s only one cost component, and I also know that any home improvement project costs more than published estimates, or the contractor’s estimates, or more than you think it should, or just more period.
Schaumburg Town Square here in the northwest suburbs is decked out pretty nicely with lights this year. Here are trees along the square’s square pond.
The clocktower and its plaza are gold and silver.
The first time, I think, I’ve seen the clocktower itself arrayed in sparkling gold.
Closer to home — at home, in fact — I recently made a clip of the dog perched in one of her favorite places, the stairs. Lights feature in this clip as well. Strange, eerie lights… either an easily explainable reflection from the dog’s tapetum lucidum inside her eyes, or the animal is sending me telepathic beams to relay one simple message, Feed me more.
On a more somber note, two deaths have come to my attention recently. Both of people hardly old.
RIP, Craig Bloomfield, PR man and commercial real estate writer, and professional acquaintance of mine. Also, roughly my age. I don’t remember the last time I spoke to him, though it’s been a number of years. I have some pleasant memories of PR lunches with him back in the early 2000s, especially at the Russian Tea Time in the Loop.
RIP, Debbie Gregg, eldest sister of a very old friend of mine. I spent a lot of time with her brother Tom in the early ’70s, and Debbie was around sometimes. She was about the same age as my eldest brother. Tom and I haven’t been in touch much as adults, and I probably haven’t seen Debbie in 30+ years, since Tom got married, but it’s still a sad thing to hear.
Most of yesterday’s snow is gone. If winter were like that all the way through around here, that would suit me. Then again, that would also probably mean Texas-like summers and the melting of the Greenland ice sheet for starters, so never mind.
Christmas lights and decorations are sprouting rapidly in our neighborhood, some modest, some modestly gaudy. No one here goes for the full Griswold, or even a half or quarter Griswold.
As for Christmas in the stores, all that sprouted weeks ago. Still, sometimes I see new things. New to me, anyway. Like a Neon Santa.
Available at a warehouse store I visit sometimes. Could have been mine for about $30, but I passed on it. I also noticed that it isn’t actually neon. In our time, it’s an LED Santa.
Not something I’d ever seen before. There was one left, so I bought it for the reasonable price of 34 cents. It’s one ounce of milk chocolate made by an outfit called Treat Street.
Good Christmas and New Year to all.
