Party Like It’s 1984

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Been a while – can’t remember how long – since I was on a good literary bender, so I decided recently that Orwell would be just the thing. I was inspired by George Orwell: A Life in Pictures, which is superb firm. It isn’t a documentary in the purist form – and “docudrama” doesn’t really fit either – but it’s well worth the trouble of watching all the parts as they’ve been posted on YouTube, starting with this one. (No embedding, or I’d do that.)

George Orwell: A Life in Pictures, a BBC production, originally aired more than 10 years ago. Which goes to show how easy it is to miss things. As the film points out, no moving pictures of Orwell himself are known to exist, so an actor stands in for Orwell, looking like him, and saying things Orwell wrote (e.g., “all writers are vain, selfish, and lazy.” Hear, hear.) The actor, Chris Langham, nailed the part. I wasn’t familiar with him; apparently not too long after playing George Orwell, he completely disgraced himself.

I took a look the other day, and among Orwell’s fiction the Schaumburg Township Library only has Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm. That’s an awful lapse for such a good library. I was looking for the two novels I haven’t read, Burmese Days and A Clergyman’s Daughter. Later, I checked the shelves at B&N, and found all of his non-essay collection works except those two. Of course they’re available on Amazon, but that’s a last resort.

Right now I’m most of the way through Down and Out in Paris and London, a copy of which I own, and which I’ve read at least twice, but not in good many years. Later, I’ll re-read some or all of the others that I have, also unread for years: Coming Up for Air, Homage to Catalonia, The Road to Wigan Pier, Keep the Aspidistra Flying. Strangely enough, I bought my copy Keep the Aspidistra Flying at the Aspidistra Bookshop on Clark St. in Chicago about 25 years ago (a fine store, closed since the late ’90s).

A Billion Seconds Here, A Billion Seconds There

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This evening just after dark, a bright full moon was visible – which has since been clouded over. It’s an apogee moon, which I learned from the ever-useful timeanddate.com. It didn’t look particularly small, but when I saw it, it was still near the horizon.

I also learned from that site that I’m getting fairly close to being 20,000 days old – one of the timeanddate.com calculators will tell you how long it’s been in weeks, days, hours, minutes, or seconds between two dates, such as your birth and right now. I have a little more than two years to go before that curious milestone. With any luck I’ll make it. Thirty thousand is no sure thing, though.

In my case, I’m also more than 1.6 billion seconds old, or roughly 27.6 million minutes. As the surfers say, tempus fugit, dude.

Quantill’s Graves

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Odd discovery for the day: the remains of William Quantrill seem to be buried in two different places. I was looking at the Wiki page devoted to the notorious raider and noticed, without apparent explanation, pictures of two gravestones for the man, one in Ohio, another in Missouri.

I looked into the subject a little further and this article has some explanation of it. Through a series of convoluted acts of skullduggery on the part of his mother and others, parts of Quantrill ended up in two different places, one close to where he grew up, the other close to where he made his name.

Reminds me of the two gravesites for Daniel Boone, but in that case there’s a dispute about where all of his mortal remain are – Kentucky or Missouri. In Quantrill’s case, the two states seem to have divvied up the distinction of having his final resting place.

Snack Food for Quetzalcoatl

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Spotted at a warehouse store the other day: large bags of chia seeds. It’s apparently the same seed (salvia hispanica) that makes Chia objects the items of fascination that we all know, but now they’re touted as a food. A superfood, no less. According to one of the tag lines on the box that held the bags of chia seeds, they’re the ANCIENT SUPERFOOD OF THE AZTECS.

That made me laugh out loud, in the real sense, not in some shorthand way. Superfood of the Aztecs, eh? Gave them the strength they needed to get up and do what needed to be done, namely conquer their neighbors and sacrifice countless captives to their angry gods.

Reminds me of the commercials I saw long ago, touting the ingredients of Roman Meal bread as a superfood of ancient Rome — surely the food that powered Scipio’s victory over Hannibal at Zama. Well, maybe the commercials weren’t quite that detailed, but they did try to link Roman vigor with their product.

Bear With Me

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“What kind of vegetarian are you, Eyebeam?”

 “I do my best to steer clear of bear meat.”

 Jan. 12, 1994

Today I sat down for a dinner of bear chili. This was my idea. I made it this morning, went off to teach in the afternoon, and came home to it a little while ago. Yuriko’s not home yet, since this is her night class night. The bear meat came in a can – no, came from a bear – anyway, the meat has lately been in a can, sitting on our kitchen shelf since I bought it at Chitose Airport in Hokkaido in October.

Am I contributing to the demise of Hokkaido bears? I don’t know. I do know that there are enough of them to frighten hikers in Hokkaido’s national parks.

2014 Postscript: This article, for one, talks of a lower population of Hokkaido bears because of “hunting and loss of habitat.” I faintly remember the bear meat chili being like chili with beef, only a little greasier.

Maneki Neko

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Japan2013-14 019One more image taken in Japan recently by either Yuriko or Ann: some maneki neko at a gift shop not far from the base of Mt. Fuji. They’re the good luck cats that are nearly ubiquitous in Japanese retail establishments and are found in a lot of other places as well. We have one in our house on the same shelf as a few iterations of Spongebob, a pair of salt ‘n’ pepper penguins, a few painted eggshells, and the Ilanaaq figure I got in Canada, among other figurines.

The origins of maneki neko are obscure. As this article by California antique dealer Alan Pate puts it, “Considering how accepted the cat has become, and how dear the image is to the Japanese, few people seem to know much about it. How has a seated cat become a symbol of good fortune and prosperity? What are its roots? Why do some have the left paw raised and others the right? Why are some white, some black, gold, or even red?

“Given the nature of folk traditions, evolving over time, absorbing elements of local beliefs and customs, we may never know the exact evolution of the maneki neko… A casual survey of antique dealers in Tokyo and Kyoto reveals many curious interpretations and theories: They originated in Osaka. No, they originated in Edo (old Tokyo). They originated in the 17th century. No, they most definitely originated in the early 16th century. The left paw is for wealth and the right for luck. No, the left is for a drinking establishment and the right for merchants. No, the left is for business and the right for home…”

I can’t shed any light on the subject. I just know I saw them a lot in Japan, and I asked some Japanese about it, and the best answer I got was that the cat grabs good luck for you and brings it in, as it might a fish or a bird.

That Old Shitamachi Spirit

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When I hear of something like the Tokyo Skytree, I react with a completely irrational thought: how could they wait to build it until it’s inconvenient for me to see it?

Tokyo Skytree Dec 2013During Yuriko and Ann’s recent trip to Japan, they visited the Skytree, which is now the tallest structure in Japan, and the tallest TV/radio tower on Earth, completed only in 2012 and coming in at more than 2,000 feet. The Skytree itself is a broadcast tower and tourist attraction, but it’s also part of a mixed-use development that includes office space, convention and meeting facilities, a theater, parking garages and more. The Tobu Railroad and a consortium of broadcasters developed it.

The tower also gives Japanese web site designers a chance to describe the place in English: “The ‘town with a tower’ promises a lifestyle that is not uniform. The facilities are developed with the aim of producing a community brand transmitting new local values to the world by generously introducing facilities and functions that will manifest the charm of the shitamachi spirit and produce a synergy effect.

“Note: Shitamachi means traditional old town area with Edo atmosphere.”

The observation deck’s got quite a view, my wife and daughter tell me. And what do you see?

Tokyo, Dec 2013A slice of the vastness of greater Tokyo.

How Many Watts Was Byron?

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Not so cold today. By that, I mean just above zero F. The garage door opener started working again — luckily it had been stuck open — and the dog spent a little more time outside. By the weekend, I understand, temps will be above freezing. Which means meltage and then ice hazards when the refreeze comes. Winter’s a gas, that’s for sure.

Before the snow started to fall on New Year’s Eve — the snow that’s the bottom layer of our two feet or so now — I was out buying a few things and acquired a pack of 60W incandescent bulbs. Just to have some around for those few fixtures left in which we use them.

I read about the phase-out of 40W and 60W bulbs in PCMag, and the article assured readers that, “For now, though, just understand that no one will be taking away your light bulbs, only that you’ll see fewer incandescent ones in stores through the next year.”

That’s no fun. Time to start Internet rumors about squads of government hit men going around smashing incandescent bulbs. People believe less plausible things about the government, after all. (I Googled “Byron the Bulb” and the bit I wrote nearly seven years ago is on the first page.)

Subzero

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The National Weather Service and its ilk weren’t kidding about how cold it would be today. According to the NWS itself in its all-cap style (a leftover from teleprinter style?):

* A PROLONGED PERIOD OF DANGEROUSLY COLD AND POTENTIALLY LIFE THREATENING WIND CHILLS WILL OCCUR THROUGH TUESDAY MORNING.

* TEMPERATURES…‌LOWS 15 BELOW TO 20 BELOW ZERO THIS EVENING THROUGH TUESDAY MORNING.

* WIND CHILLS…‌35 BELOW ZERO TO 45 BELOW ZERO THROUGH MIDDAY TUESDAY. THESE FORECAST WIND CHILLS ARE THE LOWEST IN NEARLY 20 YEARS.

* FROST BITE AND HYPOTHERMIA CAN OCCUR IN A MATTER OF MINUTES.

All day, despite abundant sunshine, the cold seemed like it was pressing on the walls of the house, reaching its icy fingers into the small crevices under the doors, frosting some of the windows, impairing the glow of the compact florescent bulb on the back porch, interfering with the operation of the garage door opener, causing problems with our broadband service, and inspiring the furnace to switch on constantly. The good old gas furnace, boon of modernity.

As expected, no one had to go to school, and we got calls in the afternoon confirming that no one would on Tuesday, either. The mailman made it, though I wouldn’t have been upset if he’d skipped the day. The garbageman and recycle truck driver didn’t make it. It was too cold even for the dog. She’d dash outside for a minute, do her business in her favorite patch of back yard – buried pretty deep now – and hurry back.

The Snows of Yesteryear Are Still Around

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On New Year’s Eve 2013, snow started to fall in northern Illinois. Nothing dramatic, just steady snow that kept coming down, well into the new year. Good thing I didn’t have anywhere in particular to go around the turn of the year. For her part, the dog had to be content to bound around the drifts in the back yard.

Payton Jan 2, 2014It’s been snowing on and off since then, like a slow-motion blizzard. Word is that temps will be significantly subzero tomorrow, as low as it’s been here in 10? 20 years? Both schools have called off classes.

I’ve read that it was down to −27 °F in January 1985, the record low. We’re not expected to break that record tomorrow, but it’ll be unpleasantly close enough. Glad I wasn’t here for that low. Someone who lived through it once told me that when the temperature got back to zero, it felt almost warm.