Cold Tuesday, Clutch, Dog ‘n’ Tree

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This from today’s Chicago Tribune: “The temperature [this morning] dipped below zero overnight at O’Hare International Airport, the earliest that has happened here since 1995… The temperature fell to one degree below zero around 12:55 a.m., according to the National Weather Service. That’s the earliest subzero readings here since a low of minus 4 on Dec. 9, 1995.”

Those are two-fisted Fahrenheit readings, not any namby-pamby Celsius, either. Remember last winter, when it didn’t seem to get cold at all, with little snow? Not this time. So far. More snow is supposed to fall in the wee hours tomorrow.

Open questions: Is Clutch Cargo enjoying some kind of vogue among hipsters? Otherwise why is the Music Box Theatre, a fine revival and arts house on the North Side of Chicago, screening five episodes of the show on Friday?

Yesterday, girls decorating the Christmas tree. Today, a snap of dog and tree.

Payton+Tree

She hasn’t shown much interest in the tree, unlike certain other trees during her walks. I figure dogs have their own holidays, which somehow have something to do with epic events in the history of smell.

Tannenbaum ’13

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I’ve turned most of the tree decorating over to the next generation. I did put the tree in the stand and string on the lights, though. Lilly and Ann didn’t quite get all of the ornaments on the first or second day, but they’re mostly done.

Christmas Tree 2013Icicles will go on tonight, and a star on top. I put on the star.

This is the first time the tree’s been in the lower level of the house, for various reasons. One is to complement the new walls and floor. The dog showed some interest in the smell of the thing, for a while, but the novelty wore off, and she hasn’t destroyed any of the ornaments yet.

Calendar Oddities

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Snow today, beginning in the morning, finally enough to obscure the grass. At about noon, Lilly asked her device – which has a male-voice version of Siri – Is it going to snow a lot today? Male-Siri said, “It appears to be snowing.” Guess it knows how to look out the window.

On Saturday a cheap 2014 calendar arrived from a company we do scant business with. I like it for its completely eccentric choice of special dates.

It’s got some presidential birthdays, of course. In order: McKinley, FDR, Lincoln, Washington, Jackson, Madison, Jefferson, Grant, Kennedy, J.Q. Adams, Hoover, Benjamin Harrison, Eisenhower, TR, and Wilson. Not a bad selection, but Benjamin Harrison? Well, he did ink the bills for six new states. And… even I have to look up the details of his administration. Maybe the calendar maker is a fan of the Sherman Silver Purchase Act.

Other calendar oddities include mentioning the first national election (Jan. 7, 1789), Alexander Hamilton’s birthday (Jan. 11, 1757), “Edison’s Incandescent Lamp Patent” (Jan. 27, 1880), Henry Longfellow’s birthday (Feb. 27, 1807), “Peary Discovered the North Pole” (April 6, 1909), “Dewey’s Victory at Manila Bay” (May 1, 1898), Col. Lindbergh’s NY to Paris Flight” (May 21, 1927), “Hawaii Annexed” (July 7, 1898), “Panama Canal Opened” (Aug. 15, 1914), “Monroe Doctrine Announced” (Dec. 2, 1823), “South Pole Discovered” (Dec. 14, 1911), and “Wilbur Wright’s 1st Aeroplane Flight (Dec. 17, 1903).” That’s right, aeroplane. It’s good to be up on to-day’s latest technical marvels.

Standard federal holidays, as well as an assortment of popular days (Ground Hog Day, Valentine’s Day, etc.) and Jewish holidays are noted. V-J Day is noted on Sept. 2, but V-E Day isn’t mentioned. (I learned elsewhere that “Victory Day” on Sept. 2 is actually a state holiday in Rhode Island; see “A Few Interesting Facts…” ) The Wright Bros. (one, anyway) and Lindbergh made the cut, but no space flight of any kind did, manned or unmanned, Soviet or American. You’d think they’d be space for the first Moon landing at least. Hawaii annexed but why not the purchase of Alaska? Longfellow but not, say, Walt Whitman?

Ah, well. We each live according to an eccentric calendar.

Christmas Light Failures

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Cold, as predicted. Well below freezing, but no snow or ice.

Seasonal decorations came out of storage today. Eleven-twelfths of the year, they’re packed away. We plan to buy a tree tomorrow. I tested our light strings, both indoor and out, and found that most of them to be non- or partly functional. But at least the eight-function string still works.

Just another thing to buy. Are light stings of the present shoddy compared to those made when I was young, or am I romanticizing the light strings of old?

Old but not too old. After all, I remember one goes out, all go out. That kind of string was considered old-fashioned when I decorated Christmas trees as a lad, but they were still around. Some of the strings I tested today showed a different kind of failure: half or a third of the string was dark, but the rest glowed. Go figure.

Eddies in the Data Stream

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Gray, misty day. But not that cold. Not yet. But it will be soon.

And when is the age of individually tailored on line advertising going to arrive? I hear about that, but haven’t seen it much on my computer yet. Over the last few days, for instance, banner ads have been appearing on one of my email accounts to persuade me to attend — well, let’s just say a Vegas concert by a has-been singer I never liked or followed or cared about in any way. I’ve never been to any concert of hers, bought any of her records, or watched her on TV.

This is the best data mining can do? Maybe it’s just an old-fashioned, everybody-gets-to-see-it ad.

On the other hand, I’ve occasionally done comparison shopping for motel rooms, and later seen ads appear on unrelated web sites for those very brands. The thing to do, then, is searches involving sites you have no real interest in, and see what happens. Mix it up some. Guns & Ammo one day, the Socialist Worker the next, and maybe High Times thrown in for grins.

Man Bites Shark

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Today was of the foggiest days I’ve seen in years. Not enough to make driving impossible, but enough to erase detail in the mid-distance and everything further away. At least it wasn’t cold. They say cold air is massing in the Dakotas and Minnesota for an assault on us soon.

On the menu tonight: shark steak and fruitcake, among other things. Some months ago, I bought the shark at Valli, a fine store I trust not to sell me too much extra mercury with my shark, and it’s been frozen since then. Recently I decided it was about time to eat it, so I thawed it and faced the task of cooking it. But how?

I could have looked it up. In the Joy of Cooking, maybe. Or on YouTube, where a half-dozen Cook Your Shark videos probably await. But no. I wanted to go without expert advice. So I salted the meat a little, heated a bit of olive oil, and cooked it slowly in that. Simple, but effective. It was good.

No one else wanted any. We had other fish on the table, and everyone else ate that. I finally persuaded Lilly to take a bite and she said she liked it, but didn’t eat any more. Maybe I shouldn’t have used that loaded word “shark.” But it isn’t loaded for me. I remember buying shark at a grocery store in California more than 30 years ago, and I’ve eaten it sporadically ever since.

As for the fruitcake, which was my dessert, our Collin Street Bakery fruitcake had arrived over the long weekend. Sometimes around Christmas we buy one, sometimes not.

Not sure why people joke about fruitcakes, but maybe we can blame that on the otherwise admirable Johnny Carson. A bad fruitcake is a bad thing – like anything else – but a good fruitcake is really good. Collin Street fruitcakes, made in Corsicana, Texas, and shipped all over the world, are really good.

Front-Yard Biomass

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December got off to a mild start. Warm enough to spend time outside yesterday raking leaves without complaining about the cold. But I did think about the suburban leaf-removal custom with increasing skepticism.

“When we remove the leaves from our yards, we’re actually interrupting the natural process that allows the return of beneficial nutrients to the soil,” writes one Matt Higgs in the Peterborough Examiner, which is published in Ontario. “When the process is continues on its own, worms, bacteria and a host of other tiny organisms feast on the leaf matter, outputting rich organic material lawns thrive on.”

Ah, my sentiment exactly. But then he goes on to recommend mulching the damn things. Or worse (in terms of effort), composting. The goal here is to rationalize doing nothing, and those suggestions don’t help.

In the end, we compromised. “We” because I had Lilly help me. “Compromise,” because we did a crummy job. The front lawn clearly isn’t carpeted with leaves any more, but there’s a sizable residue.

Canterbury, 1994

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I took lousy notes during our four weeks in London in December 1994, so I can’t remember exactly when it was we took a day trip to Canterbury. It wasn’t December 1, because that day I saw a revival of The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie somewhere in the West End, and after the show the lead actress made an appeal for donations to fund AIDS research, since it was World AIDS Day.

We went to Canterbury sometime early in the month, and we had a pleasant walk around the town and a long look at the cathedral, which is off in the distance in this picture — one of the few I took there.

I think the closer ruins are what’s left of St. Augustine’s Abbey, which Henry VIII put on the road to ruin. The grass looks strangely green for December, but I remember that December in southern England wasn’t very cold at all, to the wonder of people who lived there year-round.

Better pictures of the cathedral and the ruins and other places nearby can be found at the fine Saints and Stones web site.

Turn 16, Eat Fish

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Back again around December 1. There are things to do and things to eat between now and then. This year we might not bother with a separate Thanksgiving dessert, because a fair amount of Lilly’s birthday cake is still around. I can’t resist a half sheet when the time comes, so it always takes a while to get through it all.

As for the main ingredients of the feast — or really, just a large meal, since it won’t be boisterous enough to rise to the level of a feast — it’ll be some variety of large bird. It will not be expertly prepared raw fish. We had that for Lilly’s birthday meal.

I’m pretty sure that isn’t what I ate when I turned 16. But those were slightly different times.

Im Cabaret, Au Cabaret, To Cabaret

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What’s winter up North without a spot of snow? Last winter, that’s what. So far this winter — which seems to be under way, despite what people say about the solstice marking the beginning — has more snow than last. At least, we got some today.

The dog likes to run around in it.

On Saturday, Lilly and I watched Cabaret on DVD. That movie and I go back a long way. In fact, I was taken to see it with the rest of my family when it was new, though I was too young to understand much of it. Since then, I’ve seen it — four? five times? It’s one of my favorite musicals, though technically I suppose it isn’t a musical, but a drama with a sort of Greek Chorus. We had the soundtrack on LP and later I got it on CD.

Some time ago I saw Cabaret on the stage, and more recently read The Berlin Stories, which count as the source material, though it’s remarkable how different all the iterations are. For instance, I remember working my way through Christopher Isherwood’s stories and thinking, when is Sally Bowles going to show up? She does, in one story. In the greater scheme of the narrative, she’s one of a number of passing characters. Well drawn and with some the elements of the later Sally, but not the main character she’d ultimately become. If I were a completist, I’d look into the ’50s movie I Am a Camera, but I don’t have a particularly strong urge to do so.

Lilly had something of a 16-year-old girl reaction to the film. Which is only reasonable. She didn’t like the fact that by the end of the movie, Sally and Brian weren’t together any more. But they weren’t right for each other, I said. No matter, that isn’t the ending she wanted. She reported greater satisfaction from Catching Fire, which she saw on Saturday night with her friends and assorted millions of others. Wonder which entertainment will stick with her longer.