Branson 2012

Posted on November 5, 2017 by admin

Has it been all of five years since I was last in Branson? Seems that way. Quite a spectacle, that town.

Branson in early November was already lighted for Christmas because the late Andy Williams, Mr. Christmas, had wanted things done up by November 1. So let it be written, so let it be done.

A few trees at Silver Dollar City.

There were other seasonal decorations elsewhere.
And fall foliage in the rolling hills of southern Missouri.
And of course, French millstones.

What’s a major tourist destination without a few of those lying around?

The Form Letter of Babel

Posted on November 2, 2017 by admin

It’s a formality, a throwaway bit of corporate bureaucratese, this paper I found on my desk today. Things tend to get buried. Got it a few months ago from an insurance company that I deal with.

Or is it just a formality? For me it is. But it might contain important information for other people who received the page. It’s a list of languages that the company says it will assist people in, if need be.

It includes one sentence in each language, presumably saying the same thing as the first sentence, which is in English: For language assistance in your language call the number listed on your ID card at no cost. All together, counting English, the sentences represent 66 languages.

Maybe this is a government mandate. Not just the letter, but the assistance. Maybe that’s onerous and adds to the cost of insurance. And maybe this kind of thing would upset the Know-Nothings who’ve been emerging from under rocks lately, as they do periodically.

Still, you could also argue that the list is a marvel of the age. A speaker of anyone of 66 languages can pick up the phone and get some kind of specialized assistance. Considering the state of customer service by phone, it might be as uneven as it is in English.

Even so — what a thing, this complex, real-time linguistic offering. Would that have even been possible at the beginning of this century? Certainly not before that.

The languages are, in order, English, Spanish, Chinese, French, Tagalog, Navajo, German, Albanian, Amharic, Arabic, Armenian, Bantu-Kirundi, Bisayan-Visayan, Bengali-Bangala, Burmese, Catalan, Charmorro, Cherokee, Choctaw, Cushite, Dutch, French Creole, Greek, Gujarati, Hawaiian, Hindi, Hmong, Ibo, Ilocano, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Karen, Korean, Kru-Bassa, Kurdish, Laotian, Marathi, Marshallese, Micronesian-Pohnpeian, Mon-Khmer/Cambodian, Nepali, Nilotic-Dinka, Norwegian, Pennsylvania Dutch, Persian, Polish, Portuguese, Punjabi, Romanian, Russian, Samoan, Serbo-Croatian, Sudanic-Fulfulde, Swahili, Syriac-Assyrian, Telugu, Thai, Tongan, Turkese [sic, I think Trukese is correct], Turkish, Ukrainian, Urdu, Vietnamese, Yiddish and Yoruba.

Overthinking a Coupon

Posted on November 1, 2017 by admin

Classic November to begin the month: overcast skies, drizzle, cold but not cold enough for anything to freeze.

Not long ago I found myself taking a close look at a coupon for a bagel shop we patronize sometimes. Though a chain, it has better bagels than most places I can get to easily.

They’ll do, in other words, till I can visit New York again. Say what you want about that city, I agree with the idea that its bagels are really good. I found that out back in 1983. Some days I’d buy a half dozen in the morning and they’d be gone by the end of the day — and I was staying by myself.

Anyway, here’s the coupon.

Look carefully at the expiration dates.

When I saw that, I started overthinking the thing. What does it mean that the coupon expires on a day that doesn’t exist by conventional Gregorian calculation, November 31, 2017?

1. The entire coupon is invalid.

2. Only the expiration date is invalid, so it never expires.

3. It actually expires on December 1, which is the day that actually exists after November 30.

4. It expires at the end of November, regardless of what it says.

5. It means whatever the employee at the bagel shop says it means, when asked.

6. The national chain has a SOP for these cases. Call the franchising headquarters.

7. Illinois state consumer law has a provision that kicks in these cases. Refer to the appropriate regulations.

8. The circular in which I found the coupon slipped into our universe from one that has a November 31, and I’d better watch for (or watch out for) other items from that reality.

9. It’s Russian disinformation, designed to destabilize America.

10. It doesn’t mean a damn thing. It’s just a misprint.

Though it’s the prosaic choice, I’ll have to go with 10 and, as a practical matter, 4. Within the perimeters in which I live my life, that’s the sanest choice.

Halloween ’17

Posted on October 31, 2017 by admin

A chilly Halloween. That might account for the seemingly low numbers of kids coming by for candy. As of about 8 p.m., a total of 22. Or maybe that’s about the same as every recent year. I haven’t been counting. This year I decided to, just on a whim.

Ann did not go out. As far as I can tell, no high school kids came by — unless a couple of those tall(ish) skinny kids in one party were in high school, but I took them for junior high.

This is a good development. When we first moved here in the 2000s, high school kids used to show up. But if you’re in high school, you’re too old to trick-or-treat. If it were true 40 years ago, it should still be true.

This year I sprang for a box a full-sized candy bars to give away. A bulk box of Mars products, acquired at a warehouse store: Snickers, Milky Way, M&Ms (plain and peanut) and Twix. A little more expensive, but the leftovers are better. We got an audible reaction sometimes: as two girls walked away, I heard them both squeal, “Full sized!”

A moderately interesting selection of costumes was on display among the kids who came to the door. I didn’t recognize all of them.

“What was that movie, set in Hawaii, with an alien and a girl?” I asked Ann.

I think I took Lilly to see it when she was four. Or maybe we saw it on tape. Anyway, I couldn’t remember the title, but I remembered what the character looked like. I assumed Ann had seen it at some point. I was right.

“Lilo and Stitch.”

“Right. That kid had a Stitch costume on, though the hood wasn’t up.”

The very first kid, a little boy of about three with his mother at the door, wore some kind of blue dinosaur outfit. At least the purple dinosaur seems to be dead and gone. (Or is he?) Years ago, 1998 or ’99 I think, a little kid in a strikingly full Teletubbies costume came to the door. I expect he’s a grown man now. I hope his parents took pictures of his foray into Teletubbie-ness to embarrass him occasionally.

Like I documented Lilly in her paper space armor, ca. 2001.

She didn’t actually wear that trick-or-treating, though she could have. If I remember right, it came folded up in a Japanese magazine. Unfold it and you have a cheap costume.

Later a somewhat older boy came by fully dressed as Flash. Other kids mostly wore head pieces for the desired effect: a pirate hat, mouse ears, a karate band, a flower crown and antlers — a nice array, but odd — and a girl in a zebra coat and… a pork pie hat?

I didn’t get a good look at it, but that was my impression. Maybe that’s just because I finished Breaking Bad not long ago. And I don’t remember any zebra coats in that show. Could be from a kid’s show I know nothing about. There’s an increasing number of those, and I don’t mind.

A Preview of Winter

Posted on October 30, 2017 by admin

Miserable windy and cold today. For October anyway. In January, this would be a break from the deep freeze. In any case, it’s been October cold since Friday, with temps just below freezing by night.

On Thursday, when it was merely cool, I mowed the grass, front and back. During late summer, the lush greens had given away to dry brown, which suited me. I thought mowing was over for the year. But then the rains came — one of the wettest Octobers on record, I read — and greened things up again.

I could have skipped it anyway. But I’m just a little too much of a grew-up-in-the-20th-century middle-class householder to let it pass. So I mowed the lawn on October 26, the latest in the year I can ever remember doing that.

Now I’ll have a dandy lawn underneath the snow. Except it will be covered with leaves, because I don’t discard lawn leaves any more. In that way, I’m going green: leaving your leaves to nurture next year’s grass will be the thing soon. It also helps that I don’t want to do it.

Hida-Takayama 1991

Posted on October 29, 2017 by admin

While my friend Steve stayed with me in Osaka in October 1991, we took a weekend trip to Takayama in Gifu Prefecture, in the Japanese Alps. (All the pictures below are dated October 26, 1991.) The small city is better known as Hida-Takayama (飛騨高山), since takayama simply means “tall mountain,” which describes a fair number of places in Japan. It used to be in Hida Province, in the pre-Meiji era way of dividing the country.

I’ve posted about the trip before. But nothing about the statues on the Kajibashi Bridge over the Miyagawa River in Takayama. Steve and I posed with different ones.

One source, clearly written in English by a Japanese writer — but not too bad a job, all sic — says: “Extremely long-arm goblin, Tenaga and long-leg goblin, Ashi-naga are displayed on the railing of Kaji-bashi bridge. Te-naga and Ashi-naga folklore is handed down in Japan, which represents the god of immortal.

“There is another folk tale about the creature. This creature was regarded as a hobgoblin, a ghostly apparition, Yokai in Japanese. The creatures with their weird long arms and long legs are said to do wrong to people.

“So, two different traditions about Te-naga and Ashi-naga. There is a shrine to dedicate the creatures in Nagano prefecture.”

We also spent some time at the Hida Folk Village (飛騨民俗村), which is an open-air museum with about 30 farmhouses from this part of Japan.

Complete with a bell to ring. Ring bells if you can.

“We saw a man and a woman fashioning hemp sandals from stacks of cord,” I wrote. Here’s the man.
I don’t believe this was in the Folk Village.
Rather, it’s a good example of an urban Japanese cemetery. Since cremation is the norm in Japan, burial space isn’t necessary. Rather, the memorial stones can be fit into a tight space. In a city, even a small one like Takayama, that’s often an irregular or otherwise hard to develop plot of land.

What’s the Use of Worrying? It Never was Worthwhile.

Posted on October 26, 2017 by admin

Odd, not many Christmas catalogs yet. But I did get a Coleman’s Military Surplus catalog this week. Why I’m on that list, I can’t say.

Air Force Base Guards: You sure gotta hand it to those commies… Gee, those trucks sure look like the real thing, don’t they?… I wonder where they got ’em from?… Probably bought them from the Army as war surplus… OK. Open up at 200 yards.

Name that movie.

Coleman’s offerings are international. Some random picks: a Bulgarian military officer’s sheepskin-lined wool coat, Czech border police parka, French military waterproof rain coat, British military thermal underwear, Swedish military universal bandana, Italian navy mechanics coverall, Turkish military combat backpack, Polish military attaché case, Russian sailor’s blanket, Greek military NATO sleeping bag, Swiss military ice pick, German military four-piece utensil and can opener set, and an East German military shovel.

Plenty from the USA as well: some GI cold weather gloves, GI wool boot liners, GI cold weather bibs, GI waist/butt pack, GI tactical shotgun shell/ammo pouch, GI mesh laundry bag, GI GP medic’s bag, GI improved combat shelter, and of course a GI duffel bag.

Everything for the GI. Am I wrong in thinking that term is pretty much historic, and not current? Everyone knows what it means — maybe I shouldn’t be too sure about the rising generation — but usually you only see it in a historic context.

Best of all in the catalog: a GI all-purpose rugged kit bag. A kit bag! Only $39.95 and you get something in which to pack up all your troubles.

Upon Saint Crispin’s Day

Posted on October 25, 2017 by admin

I’ve posted this before, but it was nine years ago, and besides, you can’t watch the St. Crispin’s Day speech often enough.

Laurence Olivier’s version is, of course, very accomplished, but somehow it doesn’t resonate with me like Kenneth Branagh’s.

As it happens, I’ve been reading about Agincourt in The Face of Battle by John Keegan (1976) these last few days. I’ve had the book a long time, though not 41 years, and only recently decided to get around to it. In Keegan’s capable hands, the historical Agincourt is every bit as interesting as Shakespeare’s.

St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral & The Holodomor Memorial

Posted on October 24, 2017 by admin

Last week I was near St. Andrew Ukrainian Orthodox Cathedral (of the Kyiv Patriarchate in the USA and Canada) in Bloomingdale, Ill., so I stopped by for a look. It wasn’t part of Open House Chicago, but I’d read about the place a while back and realized it’s fairly close to where I live.

Being the middle of the week, the church itself was closed, as suburban churches often are. Still, a committee of holy men greets you above the door. At least, that’s what it looks like to me.
It reminded me a little of the artwork depicting Vladimir’s baptism of the Kievan Rus over the entrance of Sts. Volodymyr and Olha Ukrainian Catholic Church in Chicago, which we saw a few years ago, and which is pictured below:

But only a little. It doesn’t much look like any baptism is going on at St. Andrew, so I assume it depicts something else.

More than the church, I came to see the memorial to the victims of the 1932-33 Ukrainian famine, which is on the church’s grounds, near its cemetery. The Holodomor, as it’s called, when Stalin starved untold millions of people to death.

The plaque’s a little worn — it’s been out in the elements since the memorial was erected in 1993 — but it says, in English: In memory of over seven million victims of the great famine artificially created in Ukraine by the Moscow-Communist regime.

Much too somber a note on which to end, so I looked around for some comic relief about Stalin, and found this, attributed to Romanian writer Panait Istrati, who visited the Soviet Union in the late 1920s, just as Stalin had consolidated his dictatorship: “All right, I can see the broken eggs. Now where’s this omelette of yours?”

The Pirates of Penzance

Posted on October 23, 2017 by admin

Not long ago Ann and I went to Evanston to see a production of The Pirates of Penzance by a troupe known as the Savoyaires, directed by Amy Uhl (choreography) and Timothy Semanik (music). I’d seen it advertised in the Iolanthe program last spring, and it occurred to me that I’d never seen it on stage. So I wanted to go.

I saw the Kevin Kline and Linda Ronstadt movie version sometime in the mid-80s at the Vanderbilt cinema. It was essentially a filming of the 1980 Broadway production. I’m not sure what it was, but I remember the movie being a little off. A little stiff.

Maybe it didn’t offer enough of that jolly good time that you should get from Gilbert & Sullivan. We got that from the Savoyaires, who didn’t need an elaborate venue to pull it off. The show was staged in a sizable but plain junior high school auditorium, complete with an orchestra.

Phillip Dothard played the Pirate King with gusto, and Sahara Glasener-Boles brought the right amount of sauciness to the part of Ruth. Of course what everyone was waiting for was the Major-General to show up and sing his signature song. An actor named Bill Chamberlain did that part.

“How did he learn to do that?” Ann asked later.

“Practice,” I said, though in fact, even if I had the voice, I doubt that I could ever do “I Am the Very Model of a Modern Major-General.”

And while Chamberlain was very good, he didn’t quite get all of the enunciation. Close enough, though. He was definitely part of the jolly good fun.

The program included “A Pirates of Penzance Glossary,” including the likes of Babylonic cuneiform, The Frogs of Aristophanes and Heliogabalus, whom it described as an “infamously depraved Roman emperor.”

“What was he depraved about?” Ann asked.

I couldn’t remember. It had been years since I’d read about him. A vague sense of perversion clings to him, but I wonder if there’s much to it. Ancient historians liked gossip and lurid invention as much as anyone else, and so did not-so-ancient historians.

“To confound the order of the season and climate, to sport with the passions and prejudices of his subjects, and to subvert every law of nature and decency, were in the number of his most delicious amusements,” Gibbon wrote of the boy-emperor.

He also wrote: “It may seem probable, the vices and follies of Elagabalus have been adorned by fancy, and blackened by prejudice.” In other words, dress as a woman a few times and people will make up all kinds of stories about you, especially if you’re emperor.

Ah, well. I will leave it to learned sages to argue over Heliogabalus. Next year’s production by the Savoyaires is Ruddigore, another G&S I’ve never seen staged. I’ll try to go.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling