Category Archives: Over the Transom

I Went And I Believe

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Still green, still summerish. I even saw people practicing baseball in the park over the weekend, though most evenings it’s now peewee footballers. Goldenrod has made its appearance in vast thick waves in some places, but only as a few sprigs in my back yard. Even so, that’s the first time I remember seeing goldenrod in the back yard.

Spotted in a big box retail store parking lot recently: a Jetta with a license plate frame that said on the bottom, “I WENT AND I BELIEVE.” From a normal standing position, the top part of the frame wasn’t visible, so I bent down to see just what the first part of that terse declaration might be. “Delphi” seemed unlikely.

Digression: According to Paths from Ancient Greece by Carol Thomas (1988), the last Delphic oracle was given to Julian the Apostate in 362. Wonder what that could have been. Maybe, “Dude, you’re hosed.”

The top of the plate frame said, CREATION MUSEUM. Must be the place in Petersburg, Ky., that also recently opened an interpretation of Noah’s Ark elsewhere in the state. I had to look into that a little further, and the owner of the car paid $30 to get in, or $60 for the “museum” and the Ark combo ticket, and who knows how much for the license plate frame.

I was a little surprised to discover that the Creation Museum also includes a planetarium. The CM web site says, “Sit back and be amazed as the planetarium projector displays vividly realistic images upon a 30-foot-diameter dome, allowing stargazers to travel anywhere in the universe. Enjoy learning from scientists and astronomers who affirm young-earth creation and explain how what we see in the night sky confirms God’s Word in Genesis.”

I can’t be civil about this any more. Morons. Does God in His wisdom want wide human variety? Including morons? I have to wonder.

Spotted in the Suburbs Lately

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A lot of stealth rain recently, including last night. By that, I mean when I woke up in the morning, the grass and the sidewalks and streets were wet and puddled. At no point in the night did thunder, or even heavy rain, wake me up.

While walking the dog recently, I saw a fellow riding a recumbent bicycle down a wide sidewalk next to one of the larger streets. I can’t remember the last time I saw one of those. Not here in the suburbs; probably along Lake Shore Drive’s bicycle trail. He was going down a slope, so it looked fun. Not sure how much fun it would be going uphill.

Also on a suburban sidewalk: a old black banana peel. Does anyone actually slip on them? I might have, if I hadn’t seen it. But it stood out against the light-colored walk.

Not long ago, I went to buy gas at a station I sometimes go to, only because it’s close, since its prices are mysteriously higher than most other stations in the area. Occasionally you see those yellow signs letting you know that one pump is out of order. At the station I saw one, and then another and another and another. All of the pumps were labeled out of order. That was a first for that place. The old Soviet approach to gas stations, or maybe the more recent Venezuelan approach.

Postcards from politicos are arriving in numbers now. Large ones, 8.5 by 11 inches. It took me a moment to realize why that might be a good size. As standard letter size, cheaper to print. Also, more space to say (about your opponent) that you could carve a better man out of a banana.

Graduate Names, Abdulaahi to Zell

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Lately I’ve been able to look at the commencement program from Lilly’s graduation at some leisure. Most of it, of course, lists the names of the graduates. Interesting thing, a list of names. This one goes, in terms of last names, from Abdulaahi to Zell.

It’s a fine example of the American salad bowl of ethnicity. Some examples at random, though alphabetical: Admundsen, Bagaybagayan, Bjorkman, Campbell, De Ocampo, Fritz, Gonzalez, Hyc, Khan, Kopielski, McCoy, Muhammad, Patel, Son, Stribling, Stepanian, Uy.

Patel is the number-one most common name on the list, hands down: no fewer than 12 graduates have it as their family name. It’s the Indian equivalent of Smith, I said to Ann. Then she noted that there was only a single Smith on a graduate list. Hm. The list doesn’t represent the nation as a whole, after all. The Census Bureau still puts Smith as most common: more than 880 per 100,000 people. Then come Johnson, Williams, Brown, Jones, Miller, Davis, Garcia, Rodriguez and Wilson.

I’m glad to report at least one other Lilly on the list, spelled that way, and a scattering of Anns, though more often than not it functions as a middle name, or a part of a combination first name. Wouldn’t want them to be too common.

A glance at the list tells me that not only are girls’ names of earlier generations gone, as you’d expect — the Berthas and Ethels and Ednas and Myrtles and Zeldas — so are perfectly fine girl names popular when I was born — the Barbaras, Cynthias, Deborahs, Lindas, Lisas, Karens, and Patricias of the world, and even the Marys are fairly scarce. A couple of years ago, during a conversation on names, Lilly characterized “Barbara” (for example) as an “old lady name.” Tempus fugit.

Boys’ names are more stable across the decades, but even so there seem to be fewer Johns, Michaels, and Roberts. Or Toms, Dicks and Harrys. I’m glad to see a Lars and a Homer and an Omar.

First names are a little harder to sort through, but I did pick out some interesting ones: Atyab, Breon, Da-Eun, Destinee (a friend of Lilly’s), Dwji, Heaven, Jax, Nuh, Yash.

Dayton ’16

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Not long before Memorial Day weekend this year, my professional duties took me to AAA’s web site, and a press release there told me that among American travelers, “the top destinations this Memorial Day weekend, based on AAA.com and AAA travel agency sales, are: Orlando, Myrtle Beach, Washington, DC, New York, Miami, San Francisco, Boston, Honolulu, Los Angeles and South Padre Island.”

We didn’t go to any of those destinations last weekend, as interesting as they all are. (I’ll bet Myrtle Beach has its charms; it’s the only one on the list I’ve never been to.) Instead, we went to Dayton as the primary destination, with shorter stops in Wapakoneta, also in Ohio, along with Indianapolis and Fort Wayne — the last two for meals. So it was a western Ohio trip.

Ohio, land of the curious swallowtail flag. The Ohio Burgee, it’s called.
Ohio BurgeeOr maybe we took an aerospace-themed trip, since we spent the better part of Saturday at the sprawling, extraordinary National Museum of the U.S. Air Force just outside of Dayton, on the grounds of the Wright-Patterson Air Force Base. It has a reputation as one of the best aviation museums in the country, often mentioned in the company of the Smithsonian Air & Space Museum. Now that I’ve been there, I can see why.

The Wright brothers were from Dayton, and the Wright sister too. Four boys and a girl survived to adulthood, and all but the eldest brother were ultimately involved in the business of flying machines. These days, the city features the Dayton Aviation Heritage National Historical Park. Part of the park includes a museum dedicated to the Wrights — and, curiously enough, to Ohioan poet Paul Laurence Dunbar, who did have a remarkable life. After lunch on Saturday, we took in the Wright-Dunbar exhibits, despite our tired feet.

On Sunday morning, as my family lolled in our room, I went to the Woodland Cemetery and Arboretum in Dayton. Covering 200 hilly, wooded acres, Woodland is a fitting name and most aesthetic burying ground I’ve seen since Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn.

We came by way of I-65 to Indianapolis and then I-70 to Dayton. I didn’t want to return the same way, so we headed north on I-75 to Wapakoneta, boyhood home of Neil Armstrong, and current location of a spaceflight museum. From there, US 27/33 took us to Fort Wayne, a city I’d never visited, despite its relative proximity.

I also wanted to drive US 30 from Ft. Wayne across Indiana. It turned out to be a fairly fast way to traverse the state, something like the Trans-Canada Highway out in Saskatchewan or Manitoba; that is, as a divided highway, but not limited access one.

Maxine’s Chicken & Waffles in Indianapolis offered the best meal of the trip, so good and filling that we barely needed to eat the rest of the day after stopping there at about 4 EDT on Friday (but still 3 CDT according to our stomachs). Chicken and pancakes were on the menu, which I had this time around.

When we came out of Maxine’s, I saw something I’d only ever heard about: a Megabus.Megabus, Indianapolis 2016The bus on the Chicago-Indianapolis run. I suppose there on N. East St., toward the eastern edge of downtown, is where it picks up its budget-minded passengers. According to the web site, the price for Chicago-Indianapolis is “from $25.” I’m not sure how much that really would be, but at least the bus offers wifi. They know their market.

Wednesday Leftovers

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Fine warm day today, the latest in a string of them. Rain ahead. Back again on May 31, after Memorial Day and Decoration Day, one in the same this year. It’s possible I’ll see a few things between now and then.

Some evenings, lights illuminate the baseball field behind our back yard.

Nighttime baseball 2016If the lights suddenly looked like that to our eyes, we’d be alarmed. One of these days, maybe I’ll read the instruction manual for the camera on the subject of nighttime picture-taking. Or maybe not.

This one-panel Bliss from May 2009 was hanging on my office wall until recently. Now it’s in a file. I’ve taken a few things down.

I like a comic that assumes you know “The Rime of Ancient Mariner.” Bliss is still in the Tribune, and still amusing. Not long ago a panel showed a woman opening up blinds to reveal the sun, while a tired-looking man in bed under a blanket says, “Must you press the issue?”

I’m reminded of “When Potato Salad Goes Bad.” Has it been over 20 years since Larson discontinued The Far Side? Apparently it has.

Speaking of a writer that assumes his readers have a certain amount of knowledge, what follows is a passage from Ninety-Two Days (1934) by Evelyn Waugh, which I recently finished. The book’s a highly readable account of his journey through the British Guianan bush and across the border into Brazil, where he comes to the town of Boa Vista.

“Already, in the few hours of my sojourn there, the Boa Vista of my imagination had come to grief. Gone; engulfed in an earthquake, uprooted by a tornado and tossed sky-high like chaff in the wind, scorched up with brimstone like Gomorrah, toppled over with trumpets like Jericho, ploughed like Carthage, brought, demolished and transported brick by brick to another continent as though it had taken the fancy of Mr. Hearst; tall Troy was down.”

Bird update: the young robins seem to have left the nest. That was fast. I’m pretty sure I saw one of them flapping its wings yesterday, getting ready to go. Haven’t seen it since.
Both the duck and the drake were on the garage roof yesterday afternoon, when it was quite warm — mid-80s, which must be warm enough for the duck to leave the eggs a while.

Lately Mars has been in the southern sky, and the nights have been warm enough to spend a few moments looking at the red-orange planet. A small delight. I take them where I can get them.

Lawn Biodiversity

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Today’s l’esprit de l’escalier. A fellow from Real Green Green Lawns or True True Green Grass or whatever the franchised lawn-care service calls itself came by recently and I opened the door. I should know better than to answer the door. Could be a land shark for all I know.

Actually, the dog was making a fuss, so I didn’t really talk to him. I could hear him start his pitch, but I waved him off. No thanks, no thanks.

“But you have so many weeds!” he said. That I heard. Dandelions in particular had returned after the last mowing, though not quite as thickly as before: their season is just about over. One more no thanks and I closed the door.

Instantly I realized what I should have said: “I call it biodiversity, buster.”

Duck in Residence

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Last week I noticed a duck nesting in our back yard, near the wall of the garage in a thicket of tall grass that doesn’t seem to be coming back as robustly this year as usual. I was moving a plastic sandbox toward the garage door, with a mind toward taking it out and leaving it for the garbage collector, or someone like the fellow who recently took our plastic kid pool before the garbageman could get to it. I looked down and there was the duck, fairly well camouflaged.

A few weeks ago, a duck and a drake spent time in the back yard sometimes, especially when the heavy rains left large puddles. Could be this is the same duck.

Nesting duck, SchaumburgI left the frog-shaped sandbox near the nest — the green curve in the picture, though it looks closer to the nest than it actually is — and then put a couple of other sizable objects nearby to make a perimeter around the nest. My thinking was to discourage the dog from approaching the mother duck or her eggs.

That might not have been necessary, though. I’ve been watching the dog as she’s been in the vicinity of the duck, and she seems leery, very unlike her reaction to, say, a squirrel or a mouse. Maybe, in whatever way they have, snarling dog and hissing duck have reached a truce. That would be good. I figure an enraged duck, who can carry out air strikes and other attacks, might be able to do the dog some harm.

Occasionally during the warm afternoons, the duck isn’t on the nest, and I see she’s warming several eggs. I’m not sure why, but it’s been a good year for fecund birds in my back yard.

Leninade

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At $1.99 for a 12 oz. bottle, Leninade brand soda is overpriced. It also has 150 calories and 38 grams of sugar, which is like eating nine and a half four-gram sugar cubes. And I can’t quite place the taste, beyond it being sweet and mildly fruity (the color is orange, but it’s not an orange soda or lemonade). The vague “natural and artificial flavor” gives it whatever taste it has. I drank it, but not all at once. I did it roughly in thirds over three days, and the girls sampled some too.

Yet I couldn’t resist the bottle when I saw it in a hardware store recently, though that was before I knew all that detail.
Leninade Soda BottleIn case that’s hard to read, under the star on the bottle’s neck it says, Join the Party! Over the hammer and sickle, Get hammered & sickled. And under the name, A taste worth standing in line for!

Not really. But amusing.

The back is a little harder to see when the bottle’s empty. That’s a Lenin-like figure quaffing a bottle of Leninade, presumably.
LeninadeMore verbiage on the busy back, not counting the Cyrillic:

A PARTY IN EVERY BOTTLE!

Surprisingly Satisfying Simple Soviet Style Soda

Beware the repressed Communist party animal who is really a proletarian in denial masquerading as a bourgeois Cold War monger!

Our 5-year plan: drink a bottle a day for five years and become a Hero of Socialist Flavor.

Misha, chill down this bottle & chill out!

Drink comrade! Drink! It’s this or the gulag!

I can’t say I didn’t get a few chuckles from the over-the-top copy. You can go all sour on the idea, noting that Lenin founded a totalitarian nightmare, and asking why there’s no cola having sport with a certain other totalitarian nightmare founded by an Austrian corporal, but that doesn’t take away from the amusement value of Leninade. Maybe it shouldn’t be that way, but historical reputations, like life, are unfair.

Also worth noting: I don’t believe this cola is furthering the cause of socialism one iota. The manufacturer, Real Soda in Real Bottles Ltd., is clearly a capitalist success story of the most American kind.

Bargain Books

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Bargain Books arrived in my mailbox the other day. It’s a paper catalog produced by the Edward R. Hamilton Bookseller Co. of Falls Village, Conn. How much longer will there be paper catalogs?

A while yet, probably, but I’ll still show this bit of ephemera to one or the other of my children and say, remember these, they’re on their way out. A few of them, such as the Sears Catalog, were once as big as phone books, even in the 1970s. You know, phone books. One or the other of my children will not be impressed. Youth looks forward.

The catalog is essentially a remainder table. Guess some mailing list algorithm somewhere detected that I’m fond of remainder tables — which is true, I always take a look — and so I took a look into Bargain Books. It promises books in the following categories: Arts & Entertainment, History, Home & Garden, Cookbooks, Military History, Biography, Healthy Living, Fiction, Crafts/Needlecrafts, Science & Nature, and Children’s Books, plus Bargain DVDs.

It seems like a fine selection, but some of those categories are a bit stretched, let’s say. In History, for instance, I found Secret Journey to Planet Serpo: A True Story of Interplanetary Travel. By Len Kasten. “On July 16, 1965, a massive alien spacecraft from the Zeta Reticuli star system, piloted by alien visitors known as Ebens, welcomed 12 astronaut trained military personnel aboard their craft. This volume exposes the truth of the human-alien interaction, revealing that our government continues to have an ongoing relationship with the Ebens to this day.”

Hatchlings on the Hoop

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Warm and cold weekends have been alternating, and this weekend was one of the cold ones. A radio report I heard on Friday spoke of frost coming to places like the Dakotas, an unusual May event even for those chilly climes. No frost here but it was still unpleasant much of the time, though by today I could sit on my deck for lunch in temps just high enough to be pleasant.

The nearby hatchings were having lunch, too. This year a pair of robins has taken up bird-making duty in a nest they built on top of the basketball hoop hanging from our garage. It’s an old and weatherbeaten basketball hoop, unused for a few years now. No bird has ever ventured to build a nest there before that I know of.

I noticed the nest a few weeks ago, but today I noticed the baby birds. From my vantage on the deck, I could see the hatchlings pop their heads up as the adult bird approached, worm in beak — it looked exactly like it does in photos and illustrations, with the outline of the tiny beaks visible, pointing upward to get their meal, and the adult bird lowering the worm toward them. With all the rain we’ve gotten lately, there must be good worm hunting nearby.

Funny that Audubon came up yesterday, even indirectly. I’m no Audubon, but I don’t mind watching birds now and then, as long as I don’t have to go out of my way to do so.