Fourth Friday of November Fire

Posted on November 28, 2022 by admin

The day after Thanksgiving — Stay Out of the Stores Day, let’s call it, though I also avoided e-commerce — I decided to burn some of the wooden debris left by the flying trampoline incident. Not to grill anything, just for the pleasure of it. Daytime temps were relatively mild, much warmer than early in the week, and while there was some wind, not enough to pose a hazard.

Pretty soon I got it going nicely.

That might look like I added some accelerant, but no. I put paper and about a half load of charcoal in the chimney starter and fired it up. Later, after pouring the red charcoal out of the chimney, I added sticks. That was all it took.

What’s the fascination with a robust fire?

I kept the fire going through dusk, having started it just before sunset. Eventually, the fire consumed most of the debris wood, though there are some other small piles out in the yard that I can burn if the urge strikes again.

When did humanity finally master the art of making fire? A long damn time ago, but the exact sequence of events, like much else about our remote past, is vague indeed. Still, the fascination remains, right down to the present day, in my back yard.

Thanksgiving Bird

Posted on November 27, 2022 by admin

At Ann’s request, and our agreement, turkey was the meat for Thanksgiving dinner this year. I can’t remember the last time it was. More recently than this bird, however. Maybe this one? If so, it’s been quite a while.

How it looked on the table.

Not an overly large bird, since there were only three of us. Also, it came already smoked, so all I had to do was unwrap it and heat it for a couple of hours at a fairly low heat. Pretty tasty. Even at its size, much leftover meat remains in the refrigerator.

How it looked on the plate.

My plate, illustrating my longstanding preference for dark meat, with rolls, stuffing, olives and some mac & cheese artfully created by Ann. It’s now a Thanksgiving and Christmas specialty of hers.

Thanksgiving Break

Posted on November 17, 2022 by admin

Back to posting around November 27. We’ll be home for Thanksgiving, as will Ann. Except for food preparation (and cleanup, which is mostly mine), best not to do too much next week, though I will work the three-day week. A good Thanksgiving to all.

I never get tired of taking back yard pictures, especially when some kind of weather event is visible.

Just a few moments of heavy snow this afternoon that didn’t stick for long. There will be a warming trend next week. Not warm, just warmer than now. A more seasonable chill.

While in the online thickets today, I came across a bill introduced to the U.S. House of Representatives earlier this year.

H.R. 6869 – To authorize the President of the United States to issue letters of marque and reprisal for the purpose of seizing the assets of certain Russian citizens, and for other purposes.

Rep. Lance Gooden (R.-Texas) introduced it, presumably as a novel way to help seize oligarch megayachts. I guess that would count as Congress delegating that function, since if I understand correctly, Article I, Section 8 of the Constitution specifically gives that power to the national Congress. Section 10 bans states from issuing letters of marque and reprisal.

Mr. Gooden’s bill has gone nowhere. Of course, he’s a backbencher (first elected in 2018) in the minority, so Nowheresville is going to be the destination of his proposals, especially ones considered eccentric. Come next year, he’ll be in the majority, but still a backbencher, so I’m not expecting any further action on the matter.

Still, can you imagine? Who would apply to be a privateer against Russian vessels? Maybe Somali pirates, who have been in something of a slump in recent years and who’d like the color of law for a change.

Victory Over Moths

Posted on November 16, 2022 by admin

Is it too soon to declare victory over moths? I have a superstitious feeling that after I do so, I’ll see a moth flit by here inside our house, as soon as a day or two later. Our victory will prove to be illusory.

Never mind all that. I’m declaring victory over moths — noiseless, shadowy, harmless moths that still represented an insect invasion of my dwelling space. One to be suppressed, which was the consensus of everyone here. Harmless, but annoying all the same.

At no point in your ownership of a house have you seen it all, since there’s always the possibility of another novel expense or pain-in-the-ass nuisance you haven’t experienced before, lurking in unexpected places. In the case of the moths, lurking on walls, if moths can rightly be said to lurk.

That implies a presence of mind I’m not sure moths actually have, but anyway there they were, clinging to higher parts of living room and kitchen walls. Small gray moths had starting making their appearance sometime in the summer. Originally we took them for outdoor moths accidently in the house, but pretty soon their increasing numbers made us re-think that assumption. They were setting up colonies. That meant we had to start some aggressive measures.

I became the main moth assassin. Yuriko swatted some, and so did Ann when she was here, but mostly it fell to me, fly swatter or thick paper weapon in hand (we still have a few paper magazines around, ready to roll). There’s one! Twack! Wait, another — thup! Damn, missed that last one.

Sometimes it would take a few moments to identify them; there are spots on the walls I took for moths and vice versa, especially in the early days of moth suppression.

An aside: our fly swatter goes back to 2008, a souvenir of the Bluegrass Inn in Frankfort, Kentucky. Sturdy blue plastic, it had seen only intermittent use since then, but now its hour had come, and soon started collecting faint grey stains.

I hadn’t swatted so many insects since that day in Ulaanbaatar when I cleared our hotel room of a rich bounty of flies, or the (seemingly) all-night mosquito hunt in my low-rent digs in Pusan.

As house-invading insects go, individual moths are fairly easy to kill. Mosquitoes, and flies that aren’t in their terminal moments bumping up against window glass, are much faster and seem to be paying attention. Moths wait obligingly as you spy their position and prepare the swat. As long as you aim correctly that first time — because if you miss, it will take flight — the moth will immediately become an ex-moth.

Of course, containing an insect infestation with a swatter is a fool’s errand. I soon advanced to a chemical weapon. Raid, in this case, applied to what I believed were strategic locations, and away from where the dog might go. The moth population dropped for a while, and we experienced optimism that the bugs would be vanquished.

The moths had other ideas. Localized infestations were discovered in boxes of dry cereal and one particularly vile node was in a bag of dry dog food. These packages were tossed, contents and all, and replacement boxes and bags were more carefully re-sealed. For a while, fewer moths were seen. But they returned.

With the help of my research assistant Google, I looked into moth infestations. I determined that we had pantry moths, not closet moths. Our bugs didn’t seem interested in our clothes. Naturally, there were suggestions of products to try to deal with them.

So soon I turned to a biological weapon. A successful, inexpensive and easy-to-use biological weapon, one I am happy to mention by name, so successful was it: Maxguard Pantry Moth Traps. Put one together and you’re got a tent-shaped bit of thick paper. On the inside surface, Maxguard provides a sticky surface infused with “extra strength pheromones,” the box promises.

A glue trap for male moths, other words. Or rather (projecting a little more), honey traps. They come, attracted at the prospect of moth nooky, stick and die, forever unable to do their biologic jobs when it comes to reproduction, thus setting the stage for a localized population collapse. That was my hope, anyway, when I set up the four traps that came in the box at various parts of the house in late September, before my latest trip.

Since I’ve been back, a month now, I haven’t seen any moths — except for those many stuck to the glue traps. Dozens of them. Snuffed out of whatever it means to be a moth, by human trickery. We’re pretty good at that. So long, moths. You are not missed.

Glazed Morning

Posted on November 15, 2022 by admin

Early this morning, not long after dawn, I woke for the usual reason and from the bathroom window I spotted a thin carpet of snow on the ground. First one of the season.

I took the obligatory picture a couple of hours later, complete with dog.

One of those snows in temps hovering at freezing or just above. A lot melted later, but not quite all of it. Hardly the picture of woods on a snowy evening, but we’ll get to that before long.

Last Thursday, knowing that the warm days were running out this year, I stood at about the same spot and captured the yard about an hour before sunset.

Gentle winds blew, with more than a hint of summer.

On the Ballot (Last Time)

Posted on November 14, 2022 by admin

While musing on political matters the other day, I found an image I’d made two years ago. I don’t remember why, except maybe I wanted to look up the minor parties in the presidential contest later, but forgot to do so. Until now.

For the record, the Greens got more than 407,000 votes nationwide and nearly 30,500 in Illinois, which was a few thousand less than in Texas. Go figure. But Texas is vast, and contains multitudes.

The Libertarians got a respectable 1.86 million or so votes nationwide, but only about 66,500 of those were from Illinois. The biggest state for Libertarians? California. It too is vast and multitudinous.

I had to look up the Party for Socialism and Liberation, so I didn’t confuse it with (say) the Party for Liberation and Socialism. It’s a 21st-century communist party, which split from the Workers World Party in 2004. The Workers World Party split from the Socialist Workers Party in 1958. The Socialist Workers Party split from the Socialist Party of America in 1938 (wonder what that was about) and I probably could go on, but at least the Party for Socialism and Liberation has a genuine red pedigree — redigree?

Moreover, the party platform is frankly revolutionary. That much is spelled out on its web site.

“In order to guarantee the interests of working and poor people who make up the vast majority of the United States, a new revolutionary government run by and for the workers and poor will be established. The present capitalist government — the role of which has been to defend the big-business system of exploitation by a web of hundreds of measures, legal and illegal, and has been accessible only to the super-rich elite — will be abolished.”

These particular reds garnered a little more than 85,000 votes nationwide, and about 8,000 in Illinois. The revolution won’t be televised, because the ratings would be just awful.

The American Solidarity Party, which says it is inspired by Christian democratic parties in Europe, got about 40,300 votes in 2020, some 9,500 or so from Illinois — more than any other state, so I guess we’re a ASP hotbed, for what that’s worth.

Not on the ballot for president in ’20 in Illinois: the Alliance Party (Rocky De La Fuente), the Constitution Party or the independent candidacy of Brock Pierce, known as a “cryptocurrency entrepreneur” and for being a child actor in the likes of The Mighty Ducks. Ye and his Birthday Party — I’m not making that up — weren’t on the ballot in Illinois either. Maybe next time.

The Natural Law Party, founded on “the principles of Transcendental Meditation,” was nowhere to be seen — because it seems to be defunct — nor were the New Whigs nor the Rent Is 2 Damn High Party.

All the News That Fits

Posted on November 13, 2022 by admin

Two passings to note.

RIP, Margot Paulos, whose son Dan has been Lilly’s boyfriend for more than two years now. I never met Ms. Paulos, who lived on Long Island, and I’m sorry I won’t have that opportunity.

RIP, Norris Hickerson, whom I knew in Nashville ca. 1983, because we had some friends in common (especially Mike). One weekend in particular, sometime in my post-graduation haze that fall, about a half dozen of us hung out with Norris at his family’s suburban townhouse.

Soon he would return to Hong Kong, where, owing to a career move on the part of his father, Norris had spend many of his formative years. We lost touch until linking nominally on Facebook some years ago. He seems to have made a life for himself in Hong Kong, until passing suddenly of heart disease at roughly my age.

As expected, chilly air blew our way late last week. Not fully winter, but definitely a prelude. A few snowflakes fell Saturday night, but never amounted to much accumulation. And as long as the wind is low, walking the dog is still pleasant.

Spent a few minutes today ridding our dining table of junk mail, including the last of the vote-for-me postcards. Plus a faux newspaper, one of the odder direct mail political efforts I’ve seen lately, and one of the funnier ones since Phil Crane got the boot, which involved a series of amusing anti-Crane postcards.

One difference: the Crane cards were supposed to be funny. I don’t think that’s the case for the faux newspaper.

It looks like a physical newspaper, maybe one laid out by a college newsroom (something I know first hand). It calls itself the North Cook News, and comes in at a slender eight pages. It is a newspaper only in the most technical sense, produced by an entity called Local Government Information Services in the staff box, which lists no staff by name. North Cook News is actually campaign literature of the anti-candidate sort. In this case, against Gov. J.B. Pritzker.

Here is a sampling of headlines:

Maybe Gov. Pritzker should resign too;” [sic] former governor slams current one

Why hasn’t Gov. J.B. Pritzker been prosecuted for dodging property taxes?

— and my own favorite, for sheer entertainment value:

Report says Pritzker-family foundation funding ‘overnight camp’ for cross-dressing eight year olds.

Guess NCN was angling for some O tempora! O mores! sort of outrage, but these arguments apparently didn’t persuade enough voters to neutralize the governor’s 53.8% statewide vote percentage last week, or more specifically his 65.4% in suburban Cook County.

Armistice Day 2022

Posted on November 11, 2022 by admin

It occurred to me not long ago, though it’s been true for a good many years, that every bit of writing, photography, film and other work created during the Great War is in the public domain. So I went looking for images of the first Armistice Day or thereabouts.

At the front. Really something to celebrate.

Paris.

London.

New York.

Actually, there’s some hint that the NYC pics are from November 7, when the AP erroneously reported that an armistice had been signed. No matter. The celebratory spirit is there.

Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park

Posted on November 10, 2022 by admin

Today was probably the last warm day of the year. For the next week and then some, at least, the chill will be on. Lunch and dinner were on our deck.

On the morning of October 15, a warm, clear Saturday in Atlanta, I got up early (for me) and walked from my short-term rental apartment in the Mechanicsville neighborhood to Garnett Station (on Marta’s Red and Gold Lines), mostly via Windsor Street, which was quiet and largely devoid of people.

From the station, I took the train to Peachtree Center, after which I spent time in Centennial Olympic Park.

The CNN Center is adjacent to the park, so I went there for a look too. Also, to find a bathroom, since the management of Centennial Olympic Park, in a gesture I take as hostile to the public at large, hasn’t bothered to re-open the park’s public bathrooms that closed during the pandemic emergency.

CNN employees can ride that tall escalator through a model Earth.

Soon after, I went to catch a streetcar — called a tram on the maps — which stops just outside the park. But I had a little time before the next arrival, so I looked around. In the vicinity of the park, you can see this building, whose name or address I didn’t bother with. Its Pac-Man-ish features, which appear to be the profile of a bold bird, move.

Then it changes its pattern, and they move some more.

The Ferris wheel Skyview Atlanta, another feature of that part of downtown, wasn’t moving yet.

After a short ride, I arrived at the streetcar stop near the Martin Luther King, Jr. National Historical Park and Preservation District.

I have the MLK park service publication in front of me. Don’t let anyone tell you that QR codes are better, NPS. The paper pamphlet unfolds in a way a smart phone image cannot, and it allows things to jump out at you in a way they can’t.

As soon as I unfolded it completely, the beginning of a sentence jumped out at me.

“In the twelve or so years that Martin Luther King, Jr. led the American Civil Rights Movement…”

Twelve years. Making Martin Luther King Jr. a bright meteor in American history, an illumination of the better angels of our nature, that’s over and done all too soon. Except that his legacy, his ethical bequest to the nation and the world, is hardly over and done.

The park captures the geography of Dr. King’s early life: a line from his birthplace and boyhood home on Auburn Avenue to his church — the church of his father and grandfather — also on Auburn, only blocks away.

When the King family led Ebenezer Baptist Church, it met here, a building now known as Historic Ebenezer Baptist Church, Heritage Sanctuary. It was completed in the 1920s and restored in recent years to look like it did in the 1960s.

Not open. Some kind of maintenance going on, I think. I’d liked to have seen the inside.

This is the Horizon Sanctuary, a 1999 structure, where the church gathers now.

It isn’t part of the park, but on its border, next to the main visitor center and museum devoted to Dr. King and his times. The church isn’t a relic of the past either, its congregation robust these days. Its pastor, Sen. Raphael Warnock, is in the thick of trying to win a full term in the U.S. Senate.

Close to the historic church and also on Auburn, Dr. and Mrs. King repose in a tomb perched on a circular island, the focus of a deep blue reflecting pool running the length of a brick plaza. Promenade might be a better way to put it, considering that people were strolling the length of it.

An eternal flame on the grounds.

I spent some time in the museum. A fair amount to read and view, but the most poignant artifact was the wagon that carried his coffin.

Outside the museum, there’s a garden with a mouthful of a name: The Martin Luther King, Jr. “I Have A Dream” World Peace Rose Garden.

Also on Auburn, his birth house.

It’s on the left. On the right is a book store and the museum shop. Tours of the birth house were already booked for the day.

“Auburn Avenue was the commercial, cultural, and spiritual center of African American life in Atlanta prior to the civil rights movement,” says the New Georgia Encyclopedia. ” ‘Sweet Auburn’ boasted a concentration of Black-owned businesses, entertainment venues, and churches that was unrivaled elsewhere in the South.”

The street had been renamed Auburn in 1893; originally it had been Wheat Street.

“During the next two decades, as restrictive Jim Crow legislation was codified into law, the city’s African American population became confined to the area between downtown and Atlanta University and to neighborhoods on the city’s east side, known today as the Old Fourth Ward,” the encyclopedia notes.

“It was during this period that Auburn Avenue first achieved prominence as a commercial corridor and became home to the city’s emerging Black middle class.

“Ironically, Auburn’s civic activism led to its undoing. As the NAACP and local voting-rights organizations, from their Sweet Auburn offices, lobbied state and local governments for an end to segregation, and as native son Martin Luther King Jr… led the crusade for civil rights before a national audience, the street began its steep decline. With the legal barriers to integration removed, many Auburn shopkeepers moved their businesses to other areas of the city, and residents began migrating to Atlanta’s west side.”

Historic No. 6 Fire Station, which is part of the park.

The NPS says: Built in 1894 in Romanesque Revival style, the fire station stood guard over the city for nearly 100 years. In the 1960s, it became one of Atlanta’s first racially integrated firehouses. It closed in 1991.

So before the ’60s, Atlanta firehouses were segregated. How nuts is that?

Besides sites associated with Dr. King, Auburn still features some shotgun houses, which mostly aren’t part of the park.

Plus some larger houses. This one is home to the Historic District Development Corp.

Eventually, I wandered beyond Auburn to a parallel street, Edgewood Avenue. It’s an active commercial street in our time, with various establishments.

Plus murals.

I had a late lunch of breakfast food at Thumbs Up, a diner. Its outside wall.

Eggs and pancakes, done up right. Worth the half-hour wait sitting outside.

Centennial Olympic Park, Atlanta

Posted on November 9, 2022 by admin

Remarkably, the election seems to have been anticlimactic. So far, anyway. Probably the best outcome to be hoped for, two sumo wrestlers huffing noisily to a draw. I did my little part, voting about two hours before the polls closed, because it had been a busy day at work, and every time I considered voting early during the last few weeks, I thought, nah.

Even more remarkably, we had lunch on the deck today. This evening at about 8, I sat out there in a light jacket under the waning moon and Jupiter high in the sky, and comfortably drank tea and ate a banana-flavored Choco Pie.

For anyone who’s interested, the International Olympic Committee created a report called “Over 125 years of Olympic venues: post-Games Use.” I can’t speak to the organization’s exact motives in producing such a document, but it seems to be a way to assert that most host cities weren’t stuck with too many white elephants after the Games.

Maybe so. The report notes that of the permanent venues used in both Summer and Winter Games from 1896 to 2018 — there were 817 all together — 85 percent are still in use. Many of those, if not most, already existed when the Games came to town, however.

Those 15 percent of unused venues are what tend to get attention. Or rather, a fraction of them.

“Of the 15 per cent of permanent venues not in use (124 venues), the majority (88 venues) were unbuilt or demolished for a variety of reasons,” the report says, using that charming British style for spelling out % and unbuilt as a verb.

“Some had reached the end of their life, some were destroyed during war periods or in accidents, while others were replaced by new urban development projects or were removed for lack of a business model. The remaining venues not in use are closed or abandoned (36 venues).”

Those last ones would be fodder for urban explorers and editorialists who want to discuss the deleterious impact of the Games on urban spaces. Tellingly, the report notes that Los Angeles isn’t going to build any new venues for ’28.

“The ‘radical reuse’ concept also applies to the training facilities and the Athletes’ Village,” it says.

Guess the IOC is going to have to live with the fact that cities are now hesitant to build spiffy new facilities that mostly benefit the IOC.

Here are photos of some of those abandoned sites. The ones that surprise me are the abandoned swimming pool and amphitheater from the ’36 Games. Sure, those were the Nazi Olympics, but the main stadium has been maintained by a more benevolent German government, why not the pool?

I took a look at that stadium — Olympiastadion — during a walkabout in West Berlin in 1983. That’s only one of two former Olympic sites that I can remember visiting. The other was a facility for the 1976 Montreal Games, the Centre Aquatique, where we went swimming in 2002.

I had these places in mind when I strolled through Centennial Olympic Park in downtown Atlanta. Its origins are on display.

The 21-acre park actually isn’t listed in the IOC report, because no sporting activity took place there. Rather, it was intended to be a gathering spot for visitors and spectators, and then a city park once the Games were over, and so it is. A pleasant place to wander on a warm weekend morning.

The park includes green space.

Water features and plazas.

Some structures left over from ’96.

Sculpture from that same year.

“Tribute” by Greek artist Peter Calaboyias, depicting (right to left) an ancient Olympic athlete, a participant in the first modern Games in Athens in 1896, and an Atlanta Games participant.

Poor old Richard Jewell has a memorial too.

Dedicated only in 2021. About time, I’d say.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling