Tannenbaum ’24

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The Christmas tree business is still mostly fragmented, with some 16,600 farms growing Christmas trees on nearly 300,000 acres in the United States, according to the 2022 USDA Census of Agriculture. Some farms are large – a wholesaler called Holiday Tree Farms in Oregon’s Willamette Valley asserts that it ships 1,000,000 trees a year, grown on 1,500 acres. But no single entity dominates.

Good thing, too. If an outfit called CTree Group controlled, say, 50 percent of the market, we’d have to buy an annual subscription to receive our trees in December.

The cash money I spent today at a Christmas tree lot with no name here in the northwest suburbs pretty much went straight into the pocket of the farmer. And I mean that literally. That’s where he put it.Christmas trees Christmas trees

He and his (I assume) wife, both of whom looked roughly my age, except more grizzled from spending much more time outside, were stationed at the small trailer, taking money, chain-sawing the stumps and netting the whole trees, for easier transport. These things they did for me. I asked whether theirs were Michigan trees. Over the years, some of our trees have been, including those from the UP. No, Wisconsin. Just as good, I told them.

The thought that the money goes directly to the owner makes it less annoying that the price was up again this year ($70), and that many trees in the lot were priced at over $100, a price I’m sure not to pay. But not completely un-annoying.

The lot, as many are, is set up on an underutilized section of parking in a nondescript strip center. But not completely nondescript. I was glad to see the record store is still there, though I’ve never been in.

I hadn’t noticed this before, also in the strip center.

An organization I’d never heard of. Even so, I have to admit the name Mountain of Fire & Miracles Ministries has a peel of thunder and a whiff of brimstone about it. Makes you sit up and pay attention.

Some detail.

I took it for an independent Protestant sect of the homegrown sort, but no. This location is an outpost of MFM, a Nigerian Protestant sect – at least, in the sense that it isn’t Catholic — founded in 1989. Here’s something from the church’s web site, under “Mission and Vision” as one of the objectives of the ministry:

To build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. MFM is an end-time church where we build an aggressive end-time army for the Lord. An end-time church is a church where a sinner enters with two options: he either repents or does not come back, contrary to the present day church where sinners are comfortable and find things so easy and convenient.

I don’t know much about the organization, not really, considering how ignorant I am about most things Nigerian. Still, its presence tells me that there must be more Nigerians here in the northwest suburbs than I realized. The world not only comes to Chicago, it comes to the Chicago suburbs.

I Only Need to Sell One

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For some reason, I thought of Music Row Joe the other day. It is an ’80s comic strip even more obscure, I believe, than Eyebeam, and not nearly as good, though it was occasionally worth a chuckle. I know that because I remember reading it in the Tennessean, which I subscribed to in the mid-80s. So I hadn’t thought of it much in nearly 40 years.

But the strip is not too obscure to be mentioned somewhere on line: a site called Stripper’s Guide, which “discusses the history of the American newspaper comic strip,” founded by one Allan Holtz. After a cursory look, the site seems fairly remarkable itself, a vast repository of the Music Row Joes of the world, though most of its content is older.

Stripper’s Guide says of the comic: “Music Row Joe was a local strip produced for the Nashville Tennessean. It ran at least 1983-87 based on my few samples and may have run much longer for all I know. The creators were Jim Oliver and Ron Hellard.

That’s the sum total of my knowledge of this feature – Holtz out!

EDIT 1/19/2020: This weekly strip ran 1/31/1982 – 3/27/1988. Based on a promo article it seems as if Jim Oliver was responsible for the art, and both contributed to gags.

The ne’er-do-well character Music Row Joe hangs out at the edge of the Nashville music industry, dressed part cowboy-like, part pimp-like, hat always covering his eyes in the style of Andy Capp. I’m pretty sure he was an aspiring musician – this was Nashville, after all – but I don’t remember whether he had some actual musical talent but couldn’t catch a break, or was merely a schlub with unwarranted dreams of fame. He was also (I think) involved in harebrained, though legal, moneymaking schemes that never panned out.

I only remember one of the strips. Music Row Joe is out on a street somewhere (16th Avenue South? Let’s hope so.) holding a few helium-filled balloons. He had a sign that said something like, “Balloons, $20,000 Each.” A old woman looking at his sign said to him, “Young man, you’ll never sell any balloons at that price.” In a thought balloon, Music Row Joe said, “I only need to sell one.”

In the spirit of Music Row Joe, I have this to offer. I’m not greedy: an authenticated jpg of this image, unique in all the world, can be yours for $5,000 (all rights otherwise reserved).

Back story, no extra charge. I tidied up the small mass of DVDs and CDs in the living room a few weeks ago. Not organized, just de-scattered. In that process, I came across Ann’s DVD copy of Mama Mia! The Movie, which she is very fond of, but which had gone missing. I put it on the dining room table to take a picture of it to send to Ann to let her know, noticing at once that it caught a reflection of the light fixture above. I took that image, but ultimately sent her another one without the reflection.

The disk had not been located for a good long time, maybe a year. Now there it was, demonstrating once again a household maxim we call all live by: you can’t find a thing by looking for it.

Trick of the Light

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When in doubt, post pictures of a cat.Minnie the Cat

Cat images are the road to virtual fame, I understand. No? That or posting selfies from dangerous places, and dying as a result. I don’t think that strategy is for me, though I like a good vista as much as anyone.

Municipal holiday lights are up.

Actually they have been since just before Thanksgiving, but I didn’t get around to visiting this particular park until the other day, just ahead of the numbing cold that moved into the area.

When pointing my cell phone camera at the light array below, I noticed something odd. Notice that the horizontal gray bands in these successive images, both unretouched, taken a fraction of a second apart – as fast as I could push the button.

As I looked through the phone, the horizontal gray bands appeared to be moving downward, but such apparent motion wasn’t visible to my eyes. Something like the distortions involved photographing an image of a video screen. The still images captured them as they seemed to travel.

I knew there must be a reason for this involving how light behaves, and sure enough, there is. I read this article about the phenomenon, and the one it links to, but don’t ask me to explain it. The best I can do is, light be weird.

Tech Mysteries

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Today was new wifi box day, a router that is, to coincide with a cheaper plan from the member of the communications oligopoly that I deal with. To facilitate such a thing, contacting the company by telephone is useless, and the web site worse than useless, the irony of which is probably lost on customer service management in the organization. They are not paid to be aware, only to obfuscate.

So I went to one of its retail stores, being fortunate enough to live in a major metro that has a location nearby. At such a place, it’s harder for company representatives to dodge my request, though the first alternate plan he suggested was only a little cheaper and not what I’d asked for. Just letting me know the options, he said. Of course.

Eventually I got more or less what I wanted, but it also involved me taking a new box home and setting it up myself. Ah, do I have to? Yes, or pay more for someone to do it. That wasn’t the case before. So I took the box home and let it sit around for a few days. Procrastination is part of my nature, especially when I suspect something will mysteriously go wrong in the process, because the system doesn’t respond for mysterious reasons, or the instructions tell me to do something that mysteriously doesn’t apply to my equipment, or is otherwise mysteriously impossible.

They say the cosmos is full of mystery. This isn’t the kind of potential mystery that’s awe-inspiring, just annoying.

Speaking of which: once upon a time, people imagined a time when robots would be our servants or, in darker imaginings, our enemies. But at any rate, robots would be commonplace. We have arrived at that time. We deal with robots every day. Every moment, you could argue; we call them automated phone systems, identity verification and algorithms. And what are they? Friendly? Menacing? Maybe, but often just annoying.

The oligopolist forced the issue today by shutting down the old equipment. So into the installation weeds I went. There were a few stumbles in the process, but I’ve been through worse and everything seems to be working. One minor mystery is that the box now requires two electrical connections, while the old one needed only one, which is slightly inconvenient.

Worth the trouble, though. The savings will add up. Maybe I’ll blow the first month’s savings on Malört. Been a year since I’ve had any.

No Snow. Also, “Snow”

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For a few hours on Sunday afternoon, it felt warm enough to build a fire in my back yard grill, so that’s what I did, successful grilling a pack of brats acquired at some optimistic moment this fall and stored since then at lower than 32° F. I expect that to be the last grilling of ’24, but who knows.

Tested the front yard lights as well, considering that it wasn’t so cold. I left them hanging on the bushes all year, and they seemed none the worse for this year. Lighting will be on Friday, in honor of the feast of St. Lucia. Pretty much everyone on the block who is going to light up already has. I suspect they won’t last long after the New Year. I plan to keep them going till maybe the second week of January.

Since no one around the house plays Christmas music, I haven’t heard much of that yet this year either. This suits me. Of course, when you’re in a store, there’s no avoiding it. And also of course, it’s the same songs in heavy rotation. Except when it isn’t. I was astonished to hear “Snow” from White Christmas at a store the other day.

Charming little song. Don’t think I’ve heard it outside the movie. Even then, I had to look it up. More public Christmas music ought to reach beyond those few dozen you always hear again and again.

State Street Windows, 2015

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A coinage for our moment in history: Chief execucide. I won’t claim it’s my invention, however, since I found an example from 1988, though for comic effect. Whatever else is going on with the most recent incident, it isn’t comedy.

We haven’t been downtown since the Open House event, and so haven’t seen this year’s State Street windows at the store formerly known as Marshall Field’s. It probably would be another disappointment. They were once known for their imaginative displays. No more. In recent years the company has been phoning it in.

That wasn’t the case in 2015. Actual designers were carrying on the tradition back then, and I should have taken more pictures. This was a favorite: a snowball fight between Uranus and Neptune.

The conceit was, as I wrote, a “space-flight-enthusiast young boy hitching a ride with Santa to various fantastic versions of the planets (except Pluto), including a return to Earth that seemed to feature a bizarro hybrid of New York and Chicago.”

I did take a few other pics. The first was, I believe, the boy’s room.State Street windows State Street windows

C’mon, Macy’s. You can do better windows if you try. If you hire the talent. I expect my nephew Robert, whose profession encompasses such work, would be glad to help for a healthy fee.

Cybertrucks on the Loose

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This was a first in Illinois. Spotted the other day in a northwest suburban parking lot after dark, but even so it stands out.

I’d seen a handful of them before, but not around where I live. Rather, I saw three of these oddities on the road this summer, one in Montana, another in Washington state, and yet another in Wyoming. As those vehicles were moving, and so were we, I didn’t snap any pictures. Tesla Cybertrucks, they are called.

They were all black. Is Tesla taking the Model T approach to color so famously commented on by Mr. Ford himself? (Which isn’t quite true.) If I wanted a pink Cybertruck, which would really stand one, would that be possible? Here’s one aftermarket gold one. Gold-plated, anyway, which seems something like having a gold toilet.

Some tens of thousands of Cybertrucks have been sold, but apparently not quite at the rate Tesla anticipated. Production has slowed for the moment.

MSRP: $82,235 to $102,235, according to Car and Driver. The magazine further has this to say: “Tesla’s otherworldly electric pickup is a mash-up of polarizing styling and bleeding-edge technology that results in surprisingly nice-to-drive hulk of a truck,” which also uses the terms “moonshot tech” and “unique look.”

Polarizing styling, eh? Otherworldly? Unique look, that’s for sure. The magazine is being polite. Even at the low end of the range, that price is madness, especially for a vehicle looking a lot like a car of the future, as drawn by an eight-year-old boy 50 years ago.

Late Fall Fabbrini

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Tonight’s weather, per the Weather Underground: Windy with partly cloudy skies. Low 11F. Winds NW at 20 to 30 mph. Winds could occasionally gust over 40 mph.

As early as 6 pm, we were getting gusts, but the temps weren’t as low as they would be later. Regardless of temperature, a good time to stay home and hope your 21st-century infrastructure – and I’m glad to say our heater is this century’s vintage – fails you not. Also, that your trees stand up to the gusts.

The weekend before Thanksgiving, when it wasn’t exactly warm, but warm enough for a stroll around a pond, we went to the always-pleasant Fabbrini Park. I also like that name. I picture one of those giant posters advertising the Great Fabbrini, whose giant face, a mustache a yard long, glares from the poster – a caped, top-hatted box-office draw for Vaudeville. He was in some movies and had a short career in early live TV.

Autumn was winding down that day.Fabbrini Park Fabbrini Park Fabbrini Park

Sustenance for the winter. For some animals, that is.Fabbrini Park

A new crop of small memorials at newly planted trees.Fabbrini Park Fabbrini Park Fabbrini Park

Also on the grounds, pickleball. With a pickleball flag?

Pickleballers?

Now it’s too cold for pickleball, or at least I assume that. Maybe nothing less than a blizzard will stop true p’ballers. More likely, the sport continues in warmer places. For all I know, Sopchoppy, Florida is even now evolving into a major pickleball hub.

Dog, Cat, Ferret, Other

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The cat came with some paperwork, including a rabies vaccination certificate. A good thing to have. Looking a little more closely, I noticed that it includes a box for species, which includes Dog, Cat, Ferret and Other. There are enough pet ferrets for them to have their own box?

Apparently so, at least according to the organization that created the form, the National Association of State Public Health Veterinarians (NASPHV), which “helps direct and develop uniform public health procedures involving zoonotic disease in the United States and its territories,” according to its web site.

That made me wonder whether there was an easy way to find a solid estimate of the number of pet ferrets nationwide. Soon that led me to the American Veterinary Medical Association’s page on U.S. pet ownership statistics, which is a short summary of a larger report, the 2024 AVMA Pet Ownership and Demographic Sourcebook. I stuck with the summary, since the report costs actual money I didn’t want to spend on an Internet whim.

Dogs and cats are the prime pets, naturally, with 59.8 million U.S. households owning a dog and 42.2 million owning a cat (45.5 percent and 32.1 percent of total households, respectively). Average annual spending on vet care per household is $580 for dogs and $433 for cats. Interesting.

Under other animals kept as pets, the summary notes that 3.9 million households keep fish, 2.3 million keep reptiles, 2.1 million keep birds and 1.3 million keep small mammals (gerbils, hamsters, etc.), but not counting rabbits, which get their own count: 900,000 households. Ferrets aren’t a separate category, so I assume they are part of that “etc.” The full report might have the numbers, but again, I’m not buying.

A paper dating from 1998 published by the State of California Resources Agency Department of Fish and Game cites an earlier AVMA survey (1996) that found that Americans kept 791,000 ferrets that year, up from 275,000 in 1991, so it looks like the animals were on an upswing in the 1990s in terms of getting free room and board from humans in our part of the world. Other sources say the trend started in the 1980s, which sounds plausible.

A fellow I knew who was still a student at VU the year after I had graduated (1984) kept a ferret in his dorm room, probably against university rules, but anyway he was the first person I ever knew who had one. A few years earlier, a girl I knew in high school snuck a baby Vietnamese pot-bellied pig to school in a box for her friends to see. That was surely was against the rules too, but also another story – and not a very interesting one, since she wasn’t caught and no sitcom-style high jinks were involved.

The Wiki page on ferrets cites the 1996 number, and includes all sorts of other information on the animals, some sourced, some not. Such as:

The name “ferret” is derived from the Latin furittus, meaning “little thief,” a likely reference to the common ferret penchant for secreting away small items.

A male ferret is called a hob; a female ferret is a jill. A spayed female is a sprite, a neutered male is a gib, and a vasectomised male is known as a hoblet… A group of ferrets is known as a “business” or historically as a “busyness.”

As with skunks, ferrets can release their anal gland secretions when startled or scared, but the smell is much less potent and dissipates rapidly. [Essentially a ferret fart, then]

According to phylogenetic studies, the ferret was domesticated from the European polecat (Mustela putorius), and likely descends from a North African lineage of the species… With their long, lean build and inquisitive nature, ferrets are very well equipped for getting down holes and chasing rodents, rabbits and moles out of their burrows.

One more: Ferret-legging. I’m not sure how seriously to take this.

Ferret-legging was an endurance test or stunt in which ferrets were trapped in trousers worn by a participant… it seems to have been popular among coal miners in Yorkshire, England.

That’s it for my not-at-all-comprehensive amount of ferret research, though. I’m content to assume that there are a few million out there, enough to get the attention of the folks at NASPHV. Other questions remain. Will ferret vaccination become a hot-button subject through some weird set of circumstances in our hyperconnected world? Does the (probable) incoming HHS Secretary have an opinion about ferrets? We shall see.

Minnie the Cat

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Something new in the house, as of late November 2024.

Ann’s new cat, Minnie, rescued from the mean streets of Normal by an organization that specializes in just that. At about 10 pounds, as quiet as Payton the dog was noisy, at least when the barking mood struck. She seems to like her new residence, spending much of the days doing what cats do.