ToreOre Chicken & Joy

Posted on February 16, 2022 by admin

“Rain in the evening will transition to a wintry mix overnight,” the weather savants say. It’s already pretty wet out there already, more of a late March rain than mid-February. But not to worry: it will devolve into snow and ice by tomorrow.

I’ve read a number of PJ O’Rourke books over the years, as well as other writings of his, such as the highly amusing (unless you’re a pearl-clutcher) “Foreigners Around the World.” I even remember recommending Parliament of Whores to an Australian friend of mine to help him understand American politics. RIP, Mr. O’Rourke. You were a humorist who was actually funny. No mean feat.

We had some Korean-style chicken not long ago, acquired in a bright yellow box that says it includes joy, too.

ToreOre is a brand of Korean fast-food chicken, available in metro Chicago at the small mall attached to Super H Mart in Niles, a suburb that functions as the region’s Koreatown these days.

“Thanks to patented mixed-grains crust and fryers bubbling with 100% vegetable oil, the finished product is trans fat–free and nearly greaseless, but far from tasteless,” Time Out Chicago notes about ToreOre.

I agree. We got one of the spiciest selections this time around, and may tone it down a notch next time. But it made for a satisfying meal all the same.

In South Korea, the brand is much bigger than a mere suburban outpost. Nonghyup Moguchon is the food-processing arm of South Korea’s state-run National Agricultural Cooperative Federation (Nonghyup), and oversaw the rapid growth of ToreOre beginning in the early 2000s.

“ToreOre, Nonghyup Moguchon’s main restaurant franchise business, opened the first outlet in 2003 and had grown exponentially with the number of outlets reaching 1,000 in just five years,” Korean outlet Pulse News reported in 2018. “But it was forced to reduce the number of its restaurants to 700 amid intensifying competition in the country’s fried chicken business and has remained at a standstill for several years.”

Charlestowne Mall Residuum

Posted on February 15, 2022 by admin

One reason I forgot the Super Bowl on Sunday was our excursion to St. Charles, Illinois. More specifically, we went to the Charlestowne Mall in the eastern part of that far suburb. I couldn’t remember how long it had been since we’d been there. A decade or more, probably.

So we were surprised to find the mall closed.

In the greater scheme of retail things, that’s not a surprise. A lot of malls have closed in recent years. I’ve written about that trend any number of times, but never had any reason to cover the Charlestowne Mall in particular, so I didn’t know its fate.

The mall opened in 1991, just ahead of the long slide for department stores, and when the notion of online commerce was still in the realm of speculative fiction. In other words, at an inauspicious moment for regional malls, but no one knew it at the time.

Most of the mall closed in 2017. Three of the four anchor department stores had gone dark by then, leaving only Von Maur open. As it still is.

The other open business at the mall is an 18-plex movie theater, which is where we were going. We had to circle around most of the mall to find it. The entrance was tucked away in a bleak alley-like passage, though marked by flags.

Word is that redevelopment of the site is in the works. The plan will retain the movie theater and Von Maur, but the rest of the site will be given over to residential properties and (possibly) a hotel, along with some green space. That too isn’t a surprise.

Just the 2nd Sunday in February for Me

Posted on February 14, 2022 by admin

Shucks, I forgot to miss the Super Bowl on purpose. I just forgot about it, period. Outside at dusk on Sunday I caught a nice view of the near-full moon over bare trees, though.

Pleasant to see, not so pleasant to stand around outside to see it. But the days are getting longer, the very first harbinger of spring. Otherwise, no hint of that season yet. We’re in winter stasis.

Am I right in thinking that this year’s Super Bowl is later than usual? I couldn’t let a question like that go unanswered, not when the uber-almanac that is the Internet is available.

This year is in fact the latest ever, and a major jump further into the new year from last year’s February 7. In fact, any game in February is historically late. Back in the early days of the contest, mid-January was more likely, and January was the norm for the 20th-century games. The earliest the Super Bowl has ever been was January 9, 1977.

According to this handy table from ESPN, the first February Super Bowl was only in 2002, when it was on the 3rd.

That season the league’s schedule was pushed back a week by the September 11, 2001 attacks. Wiki puts it this way: “Rescheduling Super Bowl XXXVI from January 27 to February 3 [2002] proved extraordinarily difficult. In addition to rescheduling the game itself, all related events and activities had to be accommodated.

“This marked the first time in NFL history that the Super Bowl was played in February; all subsequent Super Bowls (excluding Super Bowl XXXVII in 2003) after that have been played in February.”

The games from 2004 to 2021 were played on the first Sunday in February, after which the NFL expanded its season from 16 to 17 regular season games. So this year’s became the first to be played on the second Sunday of the month, which looks to be the schedule for the foreseeable future.

Nice to know, I guess. Maybe someday it’ll drift into early spring. I don’t think I’ll be watching, whatever day it is.

Noises Off ’99 & ’20

Posted on February 13, 2022 by admin

It’s been two years since I’ve been to the theater. In February 2020, just before I went to California late that month, I took Ann to see Noises Off at the Metropolis Performing Arts Centre in Arlington Heights, where we go periodically. Logistically, it’s more convenient than theaters in Chicago, though of course that didn’t stop us from going into the city in ’19 a number of times.

Noises Off is a British farce first staged in London in 1982. It was at the Savoy until 1987, but I wasn’t fortunate enough to see it during my ’83 visit. Rather, my friends and I went to see The Real Thing at the Strand, a Tom Stoppard play also from 1982, which I remember being amusing.

Noises Off is really amusing. I didn’t see it until ca. 1999 in Chicago, and it was the funniest thing I’d ever seen on stage. Actually, it still is. Laugh out loud funny, along with the rest of the audience.

The 2020 staging was also funny, but not quite as much as the first time around. Maybe because I was older; or the cast wasn’t quite as good (though they were good); or that I knew what to expect. Still, Ann seemed to enjoy it, and I certainly did, even if it didn’t quite have the same punch as my memory of it.

It occurs to me now that I need to start going to the theater again. Health concerns haven’t been stopping me for a while now. It’s just that I got out of the habit. So I’ll soon do my bit to support regional theater, as part of that pent-up demand.

Frog in the Snow & Other February Sights

Posted on February 10, 2022 by admin

Here we are, partway through paradoxical February, which is the shortest and yet the longest month.

Much of the snow has melted, but it will be back. Out in the front yard, near the front door, our metal frog peeps further out of the snow cover.

Elsewhere in the northwest suburbs, machines stand ready to deal with more frozen precipitation.

I’ve seen flags to warn, or assure, passersby about the solidity of ice, usually green or red for go or no go. But I’ve never seen one that hedges its bets. Red = no ice use. Yellow = own risk.

It’s theoretical for me anyway. I’m not about to walk out on any ice.

Stray Quiz

Posted on February 9, 2022 by admin

The other day I happened across an online geography quiz that was more challenging than most, since most seem to be aimed at grade schoolers (e.g., What’s the country north of the USA?). It was multiple choice, and included such questions as:

Which volcano is located astride the border between Bolivia and Chile?

Mat Ala
Pago
Surtla
Olca

Which valley is one of the richest cactus sites in the world?

Valley of Tehuacan
Valley of Baïgorry
Valley of Joux
Valley of Usines

Which village of Savoy is today famous for its devils carved in the wood?

Bramans
Bonneval
Bessans
Modane

Of those three, I only knew about the cacti-rich Tehuacan Valley in Mexico. But the quiz had the benefit of inspiring me to look up the ones I got wrong, and now I know where that Andean volcano is and those wooden devils are.

One question was oddly worded — a editorial slip, probably. It read:

How often is China’s area larger than Japan’s?

The correct answer, of course, is always.

Mother & Child, Adjusted

Posted on February 8, 2022 by admin

Last week at the antique mall I came across a wad of mostly unlabeled photos, some probably as old as 100 years, but most looked like they were taken from the 1940s to the 1960s. I’d seen that kind of offering before, but always passed them up, often in favor of postcards.

The few with names or locations written on the back, I noticed, sometimes sold for as much as a dollar each, which is too much just for a picture of a long-ago stranger. But many of the anonymous photos were 25 cents each, so that encouraged me to buy a handful at that price.

Of those I bought, I like this one best. Hard to go wrong with a mother and child.

Of course, that’s just an assumption. Could be an aunt and niece, for example, or unrelated people, though that doesn’t seem likely. From the looks of them, I’d put the image sometime in the ’40s, perhaps the late ’40s.

An unidentified image of this kind makes me wonder. What were their names? Where did they live? How is it that their picture ended up in a for-sale bin in an antique mall in greater Chicago in the third decade of the 21st century?

If I’m right about the date, the child was on the cutting edge of the baby boom, assuming they are Americans. After all, the baby boom started about then with actual babies being born, and so there’s a fairly good chance the child is still alive, and even a very slender chance the woman is. But if so, why don’t they have their picture?

Unanswerable questions. All I really know is that I have the picture now, and ran it through my image-editing software, as I’ve done with more familiar images before. Add a little color, for instance.

Interesting how recognizable the figures are in the next one, even if you’d never seen the unretouched image, though I suppose we’re all primed to look for patterns that look like faces and bodies.

Kaleidoscope-style is next. It occurred to me I didn’t know who invented the kaleidoscope, so I looked it up. Though there were antecedents, it seems that Scottish inventor David Brewster devised its modern form in the mid-1810s, and coined the word. (Greek, beautiful + shape + look).

Much more abstract.

Yet we still see human figures, more or less, especially at a distance.

February Stroll

Posted on February 7, 2022 by admin

Sunday afternoon temps were just a little below freezing, so the snow cover didn’t melt. There wasn’t much ice underfoot either. We went to the partly trod trail behind the Robert O. Atcher Municipal Center.

Dog included.

The path runs through an open field to a small patch of wooded land.

The path also meanders through the Chicago Athenaeum International Sculpture Park, which Google Maps simply calls The Sculpture Park.

The park’s most recent bit of work, Thiruvalluvar, has been adorned recently.

Not a bad day for a walk, but the conditions that made it so lasted only a few hours. The Romans had a right idea about February: make it the shortest month.

Sledding of Yore

Posted on February 6, 2022 by admin

Today would have been a good day for sledding down small hills here in the suburbs: a coating of snow is on the ground, with temps up, just around freezing. Also, the sun was out.

We didn’t do any sledding. On a similar day in February 2013 — except from the look of the pictures, it was overcast — the I took Lilly (15) and Ann (10) out to go sledding at a slope that’s part of a unnamed patch of land that’s part of a catchment.

Off to the slope, through a small playground familiar to both of them.

Up the slope.

Getting ready.

Even though they both had sleds, cheapo plastic ones that are still hanging in the garage, apparently they wanted to slide down together sometimes. An action shot, somewhat blurry.

I don’t remember for absolute sure, but I’d say they had a good time. The stuff of youth without being attached to a particular exact month and year, unless dad was around trying to get his mind off the cold by taking pictures.

Spouting Off Thursday

Posted on February 3, 2022 by admin

Compare and contrast, as my English teachers used to say.

Dusk on February 1.

Dusk on February 2.

For comparison, about the same framing — the view from my back door — but a whole lot of contrast. We caught the edge of the aforementioned winter storm on Wednesday morning. Not a huge amount of snow, just enough to be the usual pain in the ass.

Speaking of which, wankers are on the loose. They always are. Taken at a NW suburban gas station recently. No doubt posted by a true believer, unwittingly on behalf of the listed grifters.

One objection to the Covid-19 vaccine I find particularly irksome — one quasi-rational objection, that is, as opposed to the microchip ‘n’ such crackpot ones — is that it was developed too quickly.

True enough, it was developed much more quickly than any vaccine in history. Know what I’d call that? Progress. You’d be mistaken in believing Progress can cure all of mankind’s many ills, but it does a pretty good job in treating a lot of literal ills.

The other day I read about a woman who favored certain famous quack treatments for a relative dying of Covid-19, and who pestered his no doubt overburdened health care workers about it. One commentator on the situation said that the woman had attended the Dunning-Kruger School of Advanced Medicine.

Next, something a little lighter. Some time ago I was watching a video of “Puff the Magic Dragon,” sung in by Peter, Paul and Mary in 1986. At 2:53, the camera points toward a fellow in the audience, the one with dark curly hair — and instantly I recognized him.

That’s Dave, an old friend of mine I met in in the mid-80s Nashville, where he was from. Later we hung out in Chicago, since he went to graduate school there. These days he lives in Minnesota and teaches art. According to his Facebook page, he’s also a fellow at the Center for Residual Knowledge, Division of Other Things.

Bet I could get a fellowship there.

I didn’t realize the Winter Olympics were starting today until I saw it mentioned online. Upcoming events, according to the site, include figure skating, freestyle skiing, ice hockey, snowboarding, curling, bobsled and Uyghur internment, which is special to these Games.

Genocide aside, and that’s a big aside, I can’t muster much interest in the Games, except maybe for luge and skeleton, the events most likely to inspire spectacular accidents.

Been There, Seen That

By Dees Stribling