Not Quite a Nap

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Finally, a day worthy of the name summer, at least in the North. Sunny and nearly 90 F.

But regardless of the outside temps, summer’s a fine time for afternoon naps, especially if you stay up late to finish something, but don’t finish it, and then get up early the next day to finally finish it. Because it must be done.

After the task is complete, you recline on your comfy couch, not even for a real nap, but to rest your eyeballs (a phrase I learned from Festus Haggen). As lethargy takes over, a certain dog shows up on the couch and burrows her way in. You’re too tired to shoo her off. Another resident of the house, one of your offspring, takes a picture of the scene.

The Unreliability of Comets

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Another gray day today, but at least not strangely autumn-like. Underneath the sheltering cloud cover, it was warm and humid.

Above the clouds—really far above them—is Comet ISON (and why can’t famed comets have real names?). Space.com tells me breathlessly, in the tradition of headlines, that “Space and Earth Telescopes to Track ‘Comet of the Century.’ ”

In the text, the article hedges its bets: “Comet ISON was discovered in September 2012, and is due to swoop in close to the sun in November. When it does, it may become as bright as the full moon, visible to the naked eye even in daylight. Or, it may not.”

Maybe the editors are old enough to remember Comet Kohoutek, a previous “comet of the century,” although the previous century, which failed to be aesthetically pleasing for us earthlings. Or maybe the equally disappointing 1986 return of Halley’s Comet.

Side note: Czech astronomer Luboš Kohoutek is still alive at age 78, at least according to Wiki, and probably still adding to the boatload of comets and asteroids he’s already discovered. An astronomer from the time when men were men and comets were named after their discoverers, not the machines that detected them.

Another aside: I’ve never heard of this comet (or maybe I’d forgotten about it).

Lost Words

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Strange day, outside and in. Not strange outside, exactly, but cooler than it ought to be in early August. Cool and wet.

By inside, I mean my computer — the one I mostly use for work. My Word program was corrupted, or elves came and messed up some of my Word documents, or something happened over the weekend. A handful of files I remember working on a saving on Friday and Saturday were not saved when I opened them on Monday. At least, not saved as of the last time I worked on them, but as of an earlier, less useful version. Some hours of work swallowed up — where? why? I don’t ever remember anything like this happening before.

And then, I was supposed to do an 11 Pacific/1 Central interview, which somehow I’d written down on my paper calender — I’m old-fashioned that way — as 12/2. I missed the interview. So much for old-fashioned paper being more reliable than, say, a Word program. GIGO doesn’t just apply to computers.

Grindelwald Graffiti

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In early August 1983, I made my way to Grindelwald, Switzerland. I could describe the majestic alpine scenery to be enjoyed there, or the memorable walk up to the Blue Cave, which is carved in a glacier, or the stunning cable-car ride. Instead, I’m going to relay the graffiti I found in the men’s room of the Grindelwald Youth Hostel all those years ago, which I recorded in my travel diary.

All of it was English, oddly enough. I bet it’s a unique array of information, even in the petabyte – exabyte? — realms of the Internet, even though I’ve seen a few of the lines elsewhere.

Time flies when you’re unconscious.

Sprio Agnew is an anagram for “Grow a penis.”

Spitoon rules the cosmos.

Stamp out quicksand.

Beware of limbo dancers.

Six months ago I couldn’t spell El Salvador. Now I’m going to die there.

Why does everyone scream when I say Waffen SS?

Toto, have we found the hostel yet?

The wall also featured a cartoon of the man in charge of the hostel, who was known as the “warden.” I knew it was the warden because the figure was labeled that. I never had any run-ins with the warden. I don’t even remember meeting him.

Speech balloons from his mouth said:

Bring up some f—king firewood!!! Or we’ll burn your f—king passports!!! If there’s not a s—tload of firewood up here by 12:00 we’ll kick everyone’s ass!!!

Under the cartoon were comments about the warden.

Who says Himmler’s dead?

He makes me vomit.

Nazis got to live, too.

This is the best hostel I’ve been in in 15 months, all due to the warden.

There was also a long rant that I didn’t record word-for-word, the gist of which was that the Australians should be glad that the Americans “saved them in WWII.” It concluded, “If it weren’t for us, you Aussies would be speaking Japanese.”

Under that, someone else had written: Then at least someone could understand them. 

The quality of bathroom graffiti, never very high, is probably down these days, and it might even be a fading phenomenon. Why write there when you can use web site comment sections?

Happy Birthday, Dom

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August began today warmer than the end of July, which saw a string of oddly cool days. The whole month was punctuated with cool days. Been that kind of Northern summer so far.

That was confirmed when the electric bill came the other day. Total kWh we used were higher in July than June (actually June 26 to July 26, compared with the preceding 30 days, but close enough): 873 kWh in July vs. 711 kWh in June. But we had a week or so of normal heat in July, so no surprise.

The difference in electric usage between this July and last July was a lot more: 873 kWh compared with 1601 kWh. Last year was hot and dry. Helpfully, the bill also includes average daily temps for the two months: 75 F this month, 81 F a year ago. That means the average for this July was lower than where I set the thermostat during a summer day, which is 76 F or 78 F when I can get away with it.

There’s a holiday near the beginning of June – Memorial Day – and one near the beginning of July — Independence Day – and one near the beginning of September – Labor Day. You can see the missing one in that pattern. What this country needs is a holiday near the beginning of August. Too bad George Washington and Martin Luther King Jr.  both happened to be born in the winter.

I took a quick look at notable Americans with August 1st birthdays whom we could honor with a national holiday, say on the first Monday of the month. Maria Mitchell had a Google doodle today, and strange to say, I knew who she was because I saw her telescope at the Smithsonian a couple of years ago. It’s good to remember pioneering female astronomers, for sure, but I doubt she rates an entire holiday. No more than other notable Americans born this day, including explorer William Clark, songwriter Francis Scott Key, Lt. Col. William Barret Travis (who died a Texan, of course), authors Richard Henry Dana and Herman Melville, presidential son Robert Todd Lincoln, and entertainers Jerry Garcia, Jim Carroll and Dom DeLuise.

Dom DeLuise Day? No. Maybe the holiday doesn’t need to honor anyone or anything. National Mental Health Day, or the Just Because Long Weekend.

Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen

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Today I know more about “Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen,” than I ever have before. I read the Wiki page, of course, but that isn’t very meaty. A page on a site devoted to aviator Walter Lees is better, including bits of primary source material, or at least reprinting some.

Yesterday I wrote a short item about a trio of volunteers who helped build bicycle-powered pedal planes for an aviation museum. Non-flying planes, that is, the kind that kids tool around in for amusement and edification. I needed a headline. That request went to my synaptic warehouse, that sprawling place with an idiosyncratic and often infuriating filing system, overflowing with jumbles of memories, images, and logical reconstructions — or is it big ideas, images, and distorted facts? — and out popped “Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen.”

Perfect. I’m rarely so good at headline writing. But where did that come from? I wasn’t in the Junior Birdmen demographic, considering it was aimed at boys of the 1930s.

Later it occurred to me. I might have heard about it earlier, but I definitely remember Tom Lehrer mentioning it as a gag on one of his records, before he sang “It Makes a Fellow Proud to be a Soldier.” The early 1960s audience clearly understood the reference, because it got a laugh.

“Some of you may recall the publicity a few years ago about the Army’s search for an official Army song to be the counterpart of the Navy’s ‘Anchors Away’ and the Air Force’s ‘Up in the Air, Junior Birdmen’ songs. I was in basic training at the time…”

So today I did a small amount of checking on line about the Junior Birdmen phenomenon. Added a bit of information to the otherwise incredibly minor Junior Birdmen file somewhere in my synaptic warehouse. And no visit to the Internet for useless information is complete without a stop at YouTube, in this case to hear the song itself – which I don’t think I’d ever heard before.

Well, I can’t say completely useless information. I got a headline for a paid piece of writing out of it – one that the editors kept.

The Dangers of Philosophy

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The DVD box for the movie The Clone Returns Home (2008) contains the following line, in red, and all capitals: WARNING: THIS MOVIE CONTAINS SIGNIFICANT AMOUNTS OF PHILOSOPHY.

I understand the danger. I knew some guys back in college who OD’d on philosophy. It’s easy enough to do. You start out with Greeks, maybe even some pre-Socratics, then move on to humanists and German idealists, and the next thing you know, you’re strung out on Heideggerianism.

We have to return the disk soon, so I’m not sure I’ll have time to watch The Clone Returns Home, a Japanese movie about an astronaut who dies, is reborn in his clone somehow, and bad things happen to him that allow the audience to philosophize. I don’t mean to snidely prejudge the movie, since I haven’t seen it, but that’s my takeaway from reading the back of the DVD box. It’s probably an interesting movie, if you can suspend your disbelief about certain things, such as Japan having a manned space program.

I rarely get to see whole movies these days anyway, at least at home. Too many distractions. Sometimes I manage to see representative slices, such as a bit of The Messenger: The Story of Joan of Arc (1999) the other day. It might not have been such a great movie all together, but 15 minutes worth of 15th-century French and English soldiers hacking at each other was worth watching.

Skeletons in the Big Box

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Yesterday I was wandering the aisles of a major warehouse store when I noticed a life-sized model of a human skeleton hanging at one of the endcaps. I had to investigate further. Turns out it was a bit of Halloween decoration for sale, along with some other items. Halloween?

I took a closer look. The quality was high, or so I imagined, not having spent much time with actual human bones, other than the ones hidden within our fleshy selves. Lilly was with me, and I said it was too good just to take out on Halloween. Better yet, we could get one and put it in a closet most of the year. That’s where skeletons should be, right?

— Or, I continued as we walked away, we can take one with us on our next road trip, and hang it in the motel closet. That should give the cleaning staff something to talk about.

— Are you really considering that? she asked.

— No, they might freak out and call the cops. Anyway, I forgot to check the price. But it’s probably too much just to spend on a joke. And we don’t have enough closet space.

Later I wondered, do other languages have a similar idiom to a skeleton in the closet, or is it peculiar to English? I was going to look into that, but I didn’t get any further than Skeletons in the Closet, the LA County Coroner’s Office Online Store. I found myself looking at it and thinking, is this for real? Does the LA County Coroner actually sell – or benefit from the sale of — clothing, cups, hats, key chains, magnets and the like? Looks like it.

 

Lombok

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Not long ago I saw the first 15 minutes or so of Hercules in New York, Arnold Schwarzenegger’s first movie. I soon decided that I didn’t need to see any more, for the usual reasons (life’s too short, who’s going to give me those 91 minutes back?, etc.) In the age of YouTube, watching all of a bad movie isn’t necessary anyway, because you can watch the likes of this.

If you’re interested in a fittingly puerile review of the movie, there’s always this.

According to the imdb, the movie was made in 1969, released in early 1970. I wonder if anyone watching the movie in the theater had any inkling that the muscleman on the screen would ever be, say, the governor of a major U.S. state. Of course they didn’t.

Lombok was an interesting place. Drier than Bali, but still fairly green. This view near the town of Kuta, on the south coast of the island, shows the greenery.

We arrived on July 31, 1994, and stayed a few days. One of the persistent clichés about the island was that it’s “not as spoiled” as Bali, which wasn’t remotely spoiled, as in ruined by its popularity. Bali shrugs her lovely shoulders and the visitors pass through.

Still, that sentiment was in guidebook print, and I heard people talk that way, including one woman who was persuaded that the further east you traveled in the Lesser Sunda – Lombok, Sumbawa, Flores, and so on. — the better. I couldn’t say for sure, since we didn’t make it any further east than Lombok. But maybe she was just romanticizing poverty.

The Steel Globe

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One thing this country needs more of: large, publicly placed globes. This stainless steel globe has been on Wacker Dr. in downtown Chicago, at the base of the Tower Formerly Known as Sears, since early 2010.

The Poblocki Sign Co. of Milwaukee fabricated the globe, which is 25 feet in diameter. The metal was polished by KMF Metals, also of Wisconsin, and the company is happy to show off its work (oddly, Poblocki’s web site doesn’t make such a big deal out of the globe).

Not as imposing as the 120-foot diameter Unisphere, nor as detailed, but still a nice bit of work.