Category Archives: Over the Transom

Thursday Debris, Online Edition

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As part of my work, I spend a fair amount of research time on sites devoted to news in specific cities, and besides the items I’m looking for, I see a lot else besides. It doesn’t take long to realize that murders and traffic accidents and fires still lead, even in the age of digital media. Pop any major city name in Google News and that much is clear.

Sometimes the headlines, or the lead paragraphs, are a little lighter. Even if violence is involved.

Wanted Akron Pimp Shot through the Ear in Cleveland

Painful, I bet, but with time and maybe plastic surgery, the Akron pimp might recover. He’ll also have a story to tell at the pimp conventions.

Then there’s news about things I’m only vaguely aware of. I don’t mind it if they stay that way.

Sharknado 6 is set to be released on July 25, 2018… the film will feature time travel, Nazis, dinosaurs, knights, and Noah’s Ark.

Six? Anyway, the movie will be full of things any 12-year-old boy might want. Left out were cowboys, astronauts, UFOs, and the Bermuda Triangle, though I guess boys aren’t quite as interested in those things as they once were. There’s always Sharknado 7.

News about thrill seekers. Type T people, I’ve heard them called. Nuts, that is.

Your Facebook and Instagram feeds are full of it: People on vacation pushing themselves to extremes by diving off rocks, skiing dizzying backcountry drops, walking rickety paths above death-assuring canyons.

My Facebook feed is full of no such things. But I do remember interviewing a real estate executive well over a decade ago, and the most interesting part was off the record — and not directly related to commercial real estate anyway. It was about him rafting on some river in Mongolia. Off the record because he didn’t want the other investors in his projects to think he was doing anything they’d consider dangerous.

And other oddities.

Saint Louis University is seeking a name for a Midtown district that straddles part of its north and south campuses and includes the Foundry and Armory projects. Voters can choose from Prospect Yards, The GRID, The Circuit, The 1818, or write in their own name.

I don’t much care for any of those, except maybe 1818. I suggest “Bob.”

Still in Old Assenisipia

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I was looking in a seldom-looked at file of images the other day and found a scan I’d made of a page from a collection of Thomas Jefferson’s writings. I’d forgotten I’d made ir. Here it is.

Nearly 15 years ago, I wrote: “Some years ago, I read a curious little document by Thomas Jefferson, who in 1784 made a report to Congress — the Congress under the Articles of Confederation — about how to create states from the Northwest Territory and what to call them.

“Jefferson suggested 10 states for the area that now contains six (Illinois, Indiana, Kentucky, Michigan, Ohio and Wisconsin). It was an exercise in hyper-rationality and hyperliteracy, though if his suggestions had been used, they would be normal and even venerated names — such is the power of custom.

“Hyper-rational because, instead of paying attention to natural features, Jefferson cut the district into rectangles measuring two degrees of latitude north-to-south and roughly four degrees of longitude east-to-west (‘roughly’ because the irregular Mississippi River forms the western boundary of the territory).

“Besides the Mississippi, geographic form did intrude in what we call lower Michigan — even Jefferson wasn’t going to ignore lakes Michigan and Huron in drawing lines — as well as a few other places on his map, but he was doing his best to apply Longitude and Latitude to the new states’ boundaries. It was as if Colorado- and Wyoming-shaped states were to be created in the Midwest.”

Naturally, other sites discuss this odd collection of non-realized states, such as (of course) Strange Maps.

Folderol for March 1

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In the wee first hours of March this year, I woke up to light rain. After I went back to sleep, weird and unsettling dreams came. I don’t know if that was connected with the rain, but I was surprised in the morning to see that a lot of rain fell as I slept, more than I would have thought. Rain that forms large puddles near the back fence.

In Andersonville last weekend, we saw a shop called Cowboys & Astronauts, just off Clark St. I liked the sign advertising the place.
Its web site says: “Cowboys and Astronauts, Chicago’s newest men’s lifestyle and supplies destination, is proud to announce that we have opened our storefront in the heart of Andersonville. We hope that you will swing by and check out our curated blend of apparel, accessories, grooming, travel supplies, home goods, and gifts.”

Curated men’s lifestyle and supplies, eh? I’m resisting the urge to mock that idea. We didn’t go in, so I can’t comment on the goods. But we could see that the store did have a faux space suit on display. I’ll give them that.

Next: eggs. Occasionally, I write on my eggs. Just for grins.

How often do you see a truckload of portable toilets? Of the plastic-molded outdoor cubicle type, loaded and ready go wherever they need to go?

Not often. I think the truck was delivering a few to the park behind the house. Maybe that’s an early sign of spring.

A Warm February Day on the Peabody Campus

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I can’t remember the last time I looked at my 1980-81 diary, but I did the other day, just a few samplings. I don’t have any memory of the following day, though it sounds like a good one, except for the bomb scare (you’d think I’d remember that, but no). It would have been a good week anyway, since even though classes were in session and tests still being taken, it was the week ahead of spring break. Pretty soon I was off to North Carolina with Neal and Stuart.

In early 1981 I lived, with many other VU sophomores, in a dorm on the Peabody campus. George Peabody College for Teachers had been a longstanding independent institution, but in 1979 Vanderbilt absorbed it. A couple of well-known alumna of that school, though I didn’t know it then: Bettie Page and Tipper Gore.

Wednesday, February 25, 1981

The day started at 8, roused from a near-conscious dream about trying to remember the license plate number of a truck, though I can’t say why. Shower. Class. To Sarratt [Student Center] afterward, read some Herodotus, napped in the chair. At around noon some kind of bomb scare was going on over at Stevenson [Science Center], but my early afternoon class wasn’t affected.

Later in the afternoon, returned to Peabody, sat outside on the lawn in near summer-like conditions, with Neal and Cynthia at first. By and by, Jim, Kathy, Julie, Layne, Mary and Donna wandered by and all sat on the lawn with us. Best part of the day.

About an hour before sunset, we went out separate ways. Neal and I took a walk around Peabody, and ended up on the far end of campus, at the Mayborn Building. By means of various prohibited fire escapes, climbed to the roof. Nice view from up there. Returning to East Hall, we stopped for a while at the Social-Religious Building, where we crawled through and around enough small holes to get under the dome on top of the building, but we couldn’t get outside on top.

Returned to room, chicken dinner later at the cafeteria, studied Latin for a while. Late in the evening, hung out with Neal and Stuart and ate some small pizzas. Stuart asked me all kinds of questions on post-WWII U.S. foreign policy, as if I were an expert. He has a test on it tomorrow. Before I left, he lent me Night by Elie Wiesel, which I spent time reading before bed. Not a happy book. Bed 1:30.

Gatsby Moving Rubber

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So far I haven’t bothered much with grocery store snapshots, as amusing as the labels can be. But not long ago I was in a small, mostly Japanese grocery store in the northwest suburbs of Chicago, and I saw something I’d never heard of before.

That’s a great example of a Japanese product’s English name. You think about it for a while, asking yourself, why did the makers pick that name? You think some more and ah ha! No… it made some kind of sense for a moment, and then it didn’t.

According to the product’s English-version web site, “Gatsby” is explicitly after the fictional character. Hair oil for wistfully dreaming of lost loves, I guess.

Mid-February Natterings

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Remarkably foggy day Thursday.
Above freezing, too, reducing the snow cover and making random puddles.

Reading a book about Lincoln’s assassination puts me in a counterfactural frame of mind. Not so much What If Lincoln Lived — a lot of consideration has been given to that — but what would have happened to Booth had he capped his murderous impulse that day, and not gone through with it? What would have happened to him?

I picture him living into the early 20th century, since he was only in his mid-20s in 1865, a star of the American and European stage in the pre-movie years, so he was mostly forgotten by later generations. He did have a small part as an elderly wise man at the court of Cyrus the Great in D.W. Griffith’s Intolerance (but nothing in The Birth of a Nation, which was never made). Also, one of Booth’s sons founded Booth Studios in the early 1900s, which was later acquired by MGM.

In his memoir, published in 1899, Booth confessed that he had a strong impulse to murder Lincoln right at the end of the war, and was glad he never acted on it.

Got a form letter from the chancellor of the University of Illinois the other day. Let’s call it a worrywart letter. It seems that the public houses in old Champaign-Urbana are encouraging students, perhaps tacitly, to celebrate St. Patrick’s Day in a blotto state of mind. The university frowns on such goings-on and wants me to know it will do what it can to educate the students about the perils of demon rum. Or more likely in this context, whisky.

Not that alcohol isn’t a form of poison, with risks. I expect that a handful of students manage to off themselves across the years under its influence, mostly via reckless driving. But do I need a form letter about this?

Versus 1981-82

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Today was faux spring. That happens occasionally even in darkest winters. The aspects of spring we got today were non-freezing temps, drizzle and mud. The dog at least is happy. And it is better than a subzero day.

Last year, when looking up William F. Hagerty, a VU alum who eventually became the current U.S. ambassador to Japan — succeeding such notables as Caroline Kennedy, Walter Mondale, Douglas MacArthur II, Joseph Grew, Townsend Harris and arguably Commodore Perry — I also came across this photo in the 1982 Vanderbilt Commodore yearbook.

Pictured are staff members of Versus magazine, the student magazine, 1981-82. Actually only about half of the staff; the editor for that year is not even pictured. I’m third from the left, top row. Or third from the right, come to think of it. These days I’m on Facebook with four of the people pictured, including Dan, bottom row right. I correspond by postcard and email with another person in the picture who doesn’t do Facebook.

The present generation of VU student journalists will not know the joys and irritations of producing a paper magazine. At least not Versus, nor a paper version of the student newspaper, The Hustler. At some point in the current century, those were unceremoniously dumped, as was the terrestrial radio station, WRVU, though that was sold for a mess of pottage.

Mid-January Debris

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Never mind what the Rossetti poem says, the bleak midwinter is about now, in mid-January, which is bleak, and which is smack in the middle of meteorological winter.

Dogs don’t mind, though. They’re already wearing coats.

One more pic from Mexico, a statue on Paseo de la Reforma.

“El Angel de la Seguridad Social,” a bronze by Jorge Marin, erected in 2013.

As gob.mx says, “Como parte de las actividades conmemorativas por el 70 Aniversario de la fundación del Instituto Mexicano del Seguro Social (IMSS),” the Mexican Social Security Institute. That’s the branch of the Mexican government in charge of public pensions and public health, established in 1943.

My brother Jay got me a Suprematist tea cup and saucer for Christmas.

On the bottom, something unusual: Imperial Porcelain – 1744 – St. Petersburg – Made in Russia. I’d probably have to look high and low around my house to find anything else made in Russia, and even then there might not be anything else.

Campaign Cards Are Coming

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There’s no official moment when it happens, but I think it’s happened all the same. We’ve passed into the Pit of Winter. All days in the pit are cold, as in well below freezing, but they come in varieties: cold sunny days, cold overcast days, cold snowy days. With the potential for a blizzard thrown in for grins.

We can only fondly recall High Summer days, or imagine ones to come, at the remote opposite end of the calendar. They looked like this, at least from my deck.
The first political postcard of ’18 came in the mail a few days ago, sent by a candidate for a relatively minor local office. Not particularly creative: a touch of “next to of course god america i,” a dash of tough on crime, a serving of motherhood (in this case, the candidate is a woman. For a male candidate, a serving of loving family man.)

It’s easy to be cynical about that sort of advertising, as you can see, but it’s the formula that inspires contempt. I don’t really know anything about the candidate. In any case, I expect I’ll be seeing more soon, since the primary is March 20.

YouTube ads for Illinois governor have already started appearing. But at least we won’t hear campaign trucks making noise with loudspeakers, as you do before parliamentary elections in Japan.

Pre-Christmas Christmas Items

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Got a card from old friends Wendy and Ted today.

They do amusing handmade cards every year. I like this year’s, but my favorite, which I don’t have handy, was about Santa having to enter the Witness Protection Program.

Earlier this year, when Christmas wasn’t dead ahead, I acquired this card among a mass of old postcards that I bought from a resale shop that was going out of business. I was sorry to see it go, because the resale cartel — Goodwill, Salvation Army — doesn’t seem to deal in postcards.

Sent in Chicago in 1938.

From Dorothy to Violet May — at least I think that’s Violet, not Violit.

The 2300 block of West Montrose, and I assume the sender meant West Montrose, since east would be in the lake, probably doesn’t look so different nearly 80 years later.

One more thing, not related to Christmas, except this is the time of year when new calendars enter the house.

A desk calendar: The JAL Fleet Calendar 2018. It takes a different approach than yesterday’s fastener-oriented calendar, which was full of verbiage to mark the days. Except for making Sundays red, none of the days on the JAL calendar are distinct from any other — no holidays, nothing.

At 3¼ by 6¼ inches, it’s an unusual size, but I think I’ll use the months as they go by for postcards.