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.

A Day at the Office, 1987

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As expected, a wicked cold weekend – at least for November. Was positively Januaryish, without piles of snow. Authoritative prediction says it’ll be around freezing hereabouts through Thanksgiving at least.

One compensation: the evening skies have been very clear. Venus, which is the Evening Star right now, hangs brilliantly in the west after sunset. More subtle minds than mine have pondered Venus lighting up the west. A little Blake:

Thou fair-hair’d angel of the evening

Now, whilst the sun rests on the mountains, light

Thy bright torch of love; thy radiant crown

Put on, and smile upon our evening bed!

I just look up and think, Wow, look at Venus.

Twenty-six years ago toward the end of November, for reasons I don’t remember, the entire staff of the magazine I worked for at the time got together for a group photo. I’ve had a copy since then.
There was a time, and it extended until past 1987, when men went to the office wearing a tie. No one had to put on a tie to pose for this picture. The term might have been around at the time, somewhere, but I’m sure we hadn’t heard of “casual Friday” or any other casual day when we posed there in our Chicago office.

Top from left: Howard (RIP), Sandy, Mike, me, Kevin, John. Bottom from left: Lisa, Linda, Harriet (RIP), Maryann, Lori (RIP) and Winnie. I think I’ve marked all the RIPs correctly. I haven’t kept touch with quite everyone.

The Memory Be Not Quite So Green

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Turning cold. It’ll be colder, they say, over the weekend, like full-blown winter without snow cover.

Why am I hearing so much about Kennedy? Lilly asked the other day. She’d heard something on TV, or something at school, or somewhere. I told her it was the 50th anniversary of his death on Friday. After that, you won’t hear so much, unless you take a special interest.

Will there be much interest in 2063? I doubt it, but I’ll also never know. President Kennedy won’t be completely forgotten, of course, even as his life and unfortunate death slip from living memory (I’m on the leading edge of people who don’t remember him – the majority of the world now).

I suspect his memory will shrink, just as it has, say, for President McKinley. Who has his place in the collective memory, and a physical memorial, too. Just not a very well known one. One of these days, I need to take a look at it, but I seldom make it over to Ohio.

Showing Unwanted Guests the Door

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Gray and then more rain today, though not as intense as the storm of a few days ago. In fact I didn’t realize it was raining until I opened the back door to let the dog out late in the evening. Such is the isolation from the elements possible when you’re at your keyboard, the shades are closed, and various other electronic noisemakers are on in other parts of the house.

This is a good collection of sketches. I hadn’t seen some of them in many years, especially the Dirty Fork sketch. But I can’t take it seriously as a “Best of” Monty Python list if it leaves out the Spanish Inquisition and Spam.

Today’s main achievement was destroying a vexatious program that somehow or other installed itself recently on the machine I use to make my living — a program that apparently inserts ad hyperlinks on various words on various web sites I visit (including BTST). That by itself wasn’t so bad, but in the last day or two, the thing morphed into a monster, opening pages when I didn’t want them opened and (I figured out later) slowing the machine down intolerably.

Who, exactly, believes this kind of shenanigan is going to lead to higher sales of anything? Or is it simply an automated way of running up clickthrough totals? I don’t care, I’m just glad it’s gone.