Waning Summer Tidbits

Posted on September 1, 2021 by admin

As if on cue, we had a cooler afternoon and evening to start September. Not much cooler, but noticeable. Warmth will be back soon, but the air is slowly leaking out of that balloon as the days grow shorter. Back to posting around September 7.

There’s a nice bloom of goldenrod out by the back fence.

I realize that it isn’t causing our intermittent runny noses, which have been worse this year than last, but not as bad as the worst ever. That would be 1987, the first late summer/early fall I spent in northern Illinois, maybe without much experience with the pollen in question. Ragweed causes that unpleasantness, I understand.

“About Hay Fever,” says American Meadows. “In short, it’s an old wives’ tale. Goldenrod does not cause hay fever. It simply got that bum rap since it blooms at the same time as the real culprit — ragweed.”

Today I started reading When In Rome by Robert J. Hutchinson (1998), subtitled “A Journal of Life in Vatican City,” which is part travel book, part memoir, part popular history, and all very readable and amusing.

Something I found out today: Lyle Waggoner (d. 2020) founded a successful company that provides trailers to movie and TV studios, Star Waggons. After The Carol Burnett Show and Wonder Woman, that’s what he turned his attention to. One of his sons runs it even now, though it has been acquired by a REIT.

One more thing I found out today, early this morning: even at my age, dreams about missing class, or being unprepared for a test, do not disappear completely. Also, the sense of relief is still there when you wake up — ah, I haven’t had to go to a class in nearly 40 years, much less be prepared for one.

Bundaberg Ginger Beer

Posted on August 31, 2021 by admin

Last day of August, spent some time on the deck. A workday, so not a lot of time out there, but I did take the opportunity to finish the last of a six-pack curiosity we acquired from somewhere or other early in the summer.

Ginger beer. Bundaberg brand non-alcoholic diet ginger beer, whose bottle says twice — front and back — that it’s brewed in Australia. That fits. The only place I remember having ginger beer before was in that country, where I found it interesting, though not especially tasty. For its part, Bundaberg isn’t bad, but I’m not going to be a regular consumer.

Or be a drinker of the company’s rum, which it is better known for, at least in Australia. Rum production began there in Queensland in the late 19th century to take advantage of the local sugar industry to produce something Australians really wanted.

Odd thing about the bottle: though the ginger beer is brewed in Australia, and presumably in Bundaberg itself, another bit of text says: Bottled in the UK.

What’s that about? Vats of ginger beer go by container ship from Australia to the UK because… bottles are cheaper in the UK? Most of the export market is there, with a trifle making its way here? Something about EU regs, pre-Brexit? The ways of international logistics, now so tied in knots, are strange even in normal times.

Ida

Posted on August 30, 2021 by admin

Grabbed from NASA. Hurricane Ida yesterday, from space.

A forecast map snipped from NOAA.

Looks like some folks I know in Middle Tennessee, and later New York, are going to get major wind and rain soon. Meanwhile, we’ll see some heat and some humidity, as we have these last couple of weeks.

Turns out Atlantic hurricanes beginning with the letter “i” have been particularly vicious over the years. Eleven have been retired so far, a mark of their severity: Ione, Inez, Iris, Isidore, Isabel, Ivan, Ike, Igor, Irene, Ingrid, Irma. No other letter has so many retired names.

Fuzzy Jungle Pictures

Posted on August 29, 2021 by admin

We spent late August and early September 1994 at Taman Negara, the sizable national park on the middle of the Malay Peninsula. It’s a place of jungle walks.

We stayed where many people do, at Kuala Tahan on the Tembeling River. I’ve read that a road runs to that settlement now, but that wasn’t the case 25+ years ago — you took a boat much of the way.

Had a basic snapshot camera in those days, so I got basic snapshots of the Tembeling. Fuzzy pics to go with fuzzy memories.

Remarkably, whoever took the Wiki picture of the Tembeling River did so from the exact same vantage as I did a few years earlier, including what looks like the same tree in the foreground. Must be a rise on a path near the river, but I don’t remember specifically.

Globes on the Move

Posted on August 26, 2021 by admin

My globes migrated upstairs the other day. Five in all, acquired over the years.

Even the newest of them isn’t so new anymore, ca. 2000, missing features such as South Sudan and East Timor. The oldest globe dates from the late 1950s, including as it does a divided Germany, independent Ghana, but also French West Africa.

Another is ca. 1970, featuring most of the newly independent states of Africa, but also the Afars and the Issas and, elsewhere, East Pakistan. Yet another is from that brief window after the reunification of Germany but before the dissolution of the Soviet Union.

The Moon globe is special, acquired for me during the Apollo era. Many of the craters and other features are unnamed, but some craters have names informally given to them by Apollo astronauts, such as two honoring Charles Bassett and Elliot See. The International Astronomical Union Working Group for Planetary System Nomenclature did not, alas, retain those two, at least according to the Gazetteer of Planetary Nomenclature.

Summer Storm

Posted on August 25, 2021 by admin

Yesterday, a quick storm just before dark. Today, the same.

The gathering August 25 storm here in the northwest suburbs, not long before sunset.

The storm breaks.

After about 20 minutes, rain is still falling and the western sky lights up a pastel yellow that my photo hardly conveys.

Ten more minutes, it slacks off, with thunder rumbles continuing and occasional bursts of rain. The bright yellow to the west devolves into gray and then black.

RIP, Charlie Watts

Posted on August 24, 2021 by admin

I heard about Charlie Watts’ passing on the radio today, appropriately, as I was driving my car, in between men telling me more and more useless information that’s supposed to fire my imagination.

Actually, I would have been hard-pressed to name the drummer of the Rolling Stones, in their heyday or their more recent geriatric selves. Which turned out to be Watts the whole time. Not that I dislike the band, just that those kinds of details never captivated me.

“The news comes weeks after it was announced that Watts would miss the band’s U.S. tour dates to recover from an unspecified medical procedure,” the BBC reports. “Watts was previously treated for throat cancer in 2004.”

U.S. tour dates? This far along in the 21st century? Another thing I didn’t know about the Stones. They’ve got staying power, that’s for certain. I expect no one would have predicted such a thing in 1965.

RIP, Mr. Watts.

August Twilight & Pink Flamingo

Posted on August 23, 2021 by admin

That sounds like a lesser-known Faulkner story or the code name for a NATO Cold War exercise just on our side of the Fulda Gap — August Twilight.

But it’s what I see most evenings out in the back yard.

Sometimes I turn on the fence lights, installed this summer for my June event.

Install might be too involved a verb; I draped them over the fence. The only hard part was making sure the extension cord didn’t become an underfoot hazard in the garage, a setup I facilitated with duct tape.

One more addition this year.

My dollar-store pink flamingo. It occurred to me recently that no suburban back yard is complete without one.

Arlington National Cemetery, 2011

Posted on August 22, 2021 by admin

Ten years ago this month we went to Washington, DC, which was the entire focus of the week-long trip. That had some advantages, especially since DC has a decent network of subway lines. We went everywhere by subway, including Arlington National Cemetery. Once there, shuttle buses run a loop around the grounds. Good thing, since the cemetery covers 639 acres.

President Kennedy drew a crowd.

Robert Kennedy isn’t far away, marked with a small stone and a cross.

President Taft, the other U.S. chief executive buried in the cemetery, did not draw a crowd.

The memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Columbia. An elegant design.

The memorial to the crew of the Space Shuttle Challenger. Not an elegant design.