Tag Archives: television

Just Another Spring Break

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A pleasant string of warm days came to an end today with cool drizzle most of the time. But at least the snowy mess of February is just an unpleasant memory.

Back again around April 18. Call it a spring break. Who knows, I might have encountered a new thing or two by that time. Never know when you’ll see something interesting.

A recent Zoom. Two participants in Illinois, one in Tennessee, one in Washington state. All VU alumni.

If I were a Zoom stockholder, that is in San Jose-based Zoom Video Communications Inc., I might sell. I’m astonished by the number of people who hate Zoom, the platform, and will probably dump it as soon as they can. I know not to ask about half of my old friends on social Zooms anymore, because they will refuse. Politely, because they are old friends.

I don’t quite get it. Burning out on work Zooms is one thing. But the occasional social Zoom among old friends? On a couple of occasions, they’ve run three or four hours, to great delight of everyone. Sure, if we were obliged to meet electronically even with old friends three or so times a week, that would get old. But more occasionally among people with whom you share a past? Nothing better.

I made a point of watching the new short biographic series Hemingway this week as it was broadcast on PBS. I can’t remember the last time watched TV on a broadcast schedule. Mad Men?

It’s high-quality work on the part of Ken Burns and Lynn Novick, illustrating what a biography should illustrate, the life and times. I knew a fair amount of the material already, though did find out more — another mark of a good bio on a well-known subject — such as the relentlessness with which he suffered major, and mostly untreated concussions. The head injury from the second plane crash in Africa was the only serious one I knew about. Turns out it was one of a string.

That’ll do no good to a man who’s already an alcoholic from a family with a history of mental illness, and who probably had a touch of shell shock thrown into the mix, to use the straightforward Great War terminology. It’s a wonder he didn’t put himself on the wrong end of his shotgun before he finally did.

The Presidents Day Storm: We Called It Monday

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Another Presidents Day come and gone. The aftermath of the Presidents Day Storm of 2021 still lingers, especially down South. (I’d forgotten about the Presidents Day Storm of 2003, probably because it was NE and Mid-Atlantic.)

Around here we merely had more snow pile on top of our increasingly large drifts. About 6 inches in my neck of the suburbs, but other metro Chicago places got two or even three times as much. In any case, it’s accumulating. In some parts of my yard, the snow looks at three feet deep.

Indoors, I marked the day by taping a new postcard to the wall. It depicts FDR.

“During the autumn of 1944, Roosevelt received a letter from artist Douglas Chandor, proposing that a painting be created of Roosevelt, Winston Churchill, and Joseph Stalin, to document the allied efforts at the Yalta Conference in Russia,” the Smithsonian says about the painting.

“Chandor arranged a sitting for Roosevelt in early April, less than a month before the president’s passing. This portrait is a study for the larger painting, The Big Three at Yalta — a sketch of which appears at the lower left. Chandor also painted a life portrait of Churchill, which is owned by the National Portrait Gallery, but Stalin would not sit for his portrait. Thus, The Big Three at Yalta was never painted.

“Chandor believed that hands revealed as much of a person’s spirit as his or her face would, and therefore experimented with multiple configurations and gestures, scattered across the bottom of the canvas. Roosevelt, however, was dismayed by the attention Chandor paid to his hands, dismissing them as ‘unremarkable’ and likening them to ‘those of a farmer.’ ”

Interesting hands, but also an idealized face. I’ve seen photographs of President Roosevelt from around that time, and there was more than a hint of death in his face. The ravages of untreated hypertension, perhaps.

Speaking of presidents, one of our most recent Star Trek episodes was the one in which Abraham Lincoln gets a spear in the back. As Capt. Kirk said, it was a little hard to watch. So was the episode, though it wasn’t quite as bad as I remembered. Just mostly. I don’t feel like looking up the title. If you know it, you know it.

One interesting detail, though. Faux-Lincoln comes to the Enterprise bridge and, among other things, has a short interaction with Uhura. He uses a certain word and apologizes, afraid that he has offended her. To which, Uhura says:

“See, in our century, we’ve learned not to fear words.”

Of all the many optimistic things Star Trek ever expressed about the future, that has to be the most optimistic of all.

Verschiedene Artikel (Donnerstag)

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Still above freezing most of the time, and no snow or ice. My kind of winter. But rain is slated for the weekend, devolving into snow. Maybe. That might interfere with getting a Christmas tree.

Not long ago I visited a high floor of an office building here in the northwest suburbs, something I don’t do to much these days. The view included the roof of a major retail location.Not very green, that roof. Besides whatever sustainability might be achieved, a roof that includes plants is more interesting to look at. Such as can be seen here and here. I don’t get to visit green roofs that often — ones such as the Chicago City Hall are inaccessible — but I did see one in suburban Toronto during my green press tour in that metro area. Didn’t take any pics.

Just behind the retailer is the office building’s nigh-empty parking lot.

Parking takes up a lot of space, no doubt about it. This study only focuses on a few cities, however, not the endless suburbs.

I set the background of my laptop to change every minute, and to keep things interesting, and I change the collection of images the computer uses every few days, if I remember to. Yesterday I directed the computer to use the images in the file July 5, 2019, which was our first day in Pittsburgh last year.

This popped up as part of the cycle. I’d forgotten I’d taken it.
That was in the Andy Warhol Museum.

Ann and I are still watching Star Trek roughly once a week. I’d say she’s seen about half of the original series. The most recent ones were the “Immunity Syndrome” and “A Private Little War,” both of which hold up reasonably well, though in strict storytelling terms, “Immunity” is better, since the concept is simple and the execution fairly taut. It’s the crew of the Enterprise vs. a whopping big space amoeba.

Best of all, it doesn’t turn out that the whopping big space amoeba is actually a sophisticated intelligence that the heroes eventually learn to communicate with and peacefully coexist with, a la Roddenberry.

That can be an OK track for a story — such as in “Devil in the Dark” — but for sheer space pulp drama, what you want is a mindless menace that needs to be destroyed by the last act. Star Trek did an even better job of that in “The Doomsday Machine,” in which the Enterprise fights a massive bugle corn snack that shoots death rays.

At first I thought “A Private Little War” was the (stupid) episode with the Yangs and the Cohms, in which Capt. Kirk recites the Pledge of Allegiance, among other looniness. No, that’s “The Omega Glory,” which we haven’t gotten to.

“War” is a jerry-built metaphor for the Vietnam War, involving as it does war among alien rustics, a Klingon plot to arm the natives, Kirk’s “balance of power” response, etc. Also, there was a raven-haired femme fatale with a bare midriff that got the attention of the 13-year-old I once was, and a creature that looked like a man in an albino gorilla suit, because that’s what it surely was. Spock bled green from a gunshot wound and Nurse Chappell got to slap him around. Why didn’t we ever see more of Dr. M’Benga? (Seems he was in another episode briefly.) Here’s why: actors cost money, as much as showrunners might wish otherwise.

One more item for today. Not long ago we got takeout at Asian Noodle House, a wonderful storefront that seems to be surviving on the takeout trade. We go there every other month or so. Fortune cookies come with each order, one per entre. Each wrapped in its own little plastic bag.

Today we got three little bags. One of them had two cookies tightly packed within. Is that like getting a double yolk? Does it mean extra good fortune or extra bad chi? Maybe one cookie is ying, the other yang.

Thursday Dross

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After a cold second half of October, temps have trended warmer in early November. So much so that I had lunch on our deck today, and expect to tomorrow as well. It can’t last. But it’s nice to sit out there and forget about the national hubbub — which I can’t do during my working hours, as paying attention to it as part of my job.

Here’s an article about the House of Tomorrow at Indiana Dunes NP, which we saw last month. A good short read, except for one thing: no date on it, which is a pet peeve of mine. It’s obviously not that old, since it refers to the recent designation of the national park, but you shouldn’t have to rely on internal evidence to date an article.

When I posted about Pounds Hollow Recreation Area a while ago, I forgot to include the short falling leaves video. Here it is.

We’re past peak here in northern Illinois, but some of the trees are still ablaze, and some still wilted yellow-green. Sitting out on the deck was pleasant enough today, except when a leaf-blower kicked to life noisily not far away. Will future generations ponder that leaf blowers were ever a thing? Hope so. As far as leaves go, let ’em stay where they fall on your lawn. They’re nutrition for next year’s grass.

In Shawneetown, Illinois, the new town that is, you can see a memorial erected about 10 years ago. The wave of such memorials, I believe, will continue into the 21st century.
Shawneetown Illinois black family memorialIt’s a tribute to the original group of black families who moved from Shawneetown on the river to Shawneetown three miles inland, where they would start life anew, after the devastation caused by the 1937 flood.

It includes a map of the nearby neighborhood and all the names of the black residents who lived there. The other side has a more general black history of Shawneetown, noting that a segregation-era school stood on the site of the memorial, presumably for the black neighborhood’s children, but it doesn’t say that. The school closed in the 1950s.

Shawneetown Illinois black family memorialAll a little wordy, but not as prolix as the Norwegian Settlers State Memorial.

Near the memorial is a rectangular gazebo. Without corners. Or is it really a gazebo?
Shawneetown ILWhen Ann and I saw the abandoned Texaco station in Old Shawneetown, I asked her if she’d ever heard the Texaco jingle. I hadn’t thought about it in years, but the point of jungles is to bury themselves deep, so it’s coded in my synapses somewhere.

Most Americans my age would know what I meant, but considering that Men Who Wear Texaco Stars are long gone, I didn’t expect her to know. She didn’t.

Later, I showed it to her on YouTube, where it’s a standalone video (and also the grist for truly stupid local TV news).

That made me a little curious myself. When did that jingle first air? As it turns out, 1962, as a snappier tune compared with, for example, what the singing Men With Texaco Stars did for Milton Berle 10 years earlier. The jingle was also incorporated into later Texaco songs, such as this one sung by Ethel Merman.

As jingles go, “You Can Trust Your Car” is memorable indeed. The story of the copywriter (and composer) who came up with it, one Roy Eaton, is even more remarkable. Aside from being a talented concert pianist, he was the first black creative at a major ad agency, joining Young & Rubicam in 1955 and later working for many years at Benton & Bowles, before founding his own company. He’s still alive at 90.

So memorable that it was the basis for an anachronism in a 1977 episode of M*A*S*H (see the trivia section at the bottom of the page).

The Ricki Lee Jones song “Last Chance Texaco” (1979) includes an example of a reference — to the jingle — that was perfectly understandable when the work was new, and perfectly mystifying to later generations.

Your last chance
To trust the man with the star
You’ve found the last chance Texaco

One more Texaco fact: John W. “Bet A Million” Gates was an early investor in the ancestor company of Texaco.

Fall Break (Breaktober)

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A return to gloriously warm days, at least for now, after a cold snap early in the month. Yesterday and today I took breakfast and lunch on the deck. Also, when I could get away from work, I just sat around out there and let my skin manufacture vitamin D.

Back to posting on October 18 or so. No lengthy trips for this fall break; such is the circumstance of the times. I have some sweet memories of October trips of the past, such as last year in Virginia or Philadelphia in 2016 or, going back a lot further, Hida-Takayama in 1991 or New England in 1989.

Watch one thing on YouTube out of idle curiosity, such as a “10” list — the 10 Greatest European Elevators of All Time, for example — and the bots will offer you heaps of other eccentric, vaguely related videos. Such as 10 Shocking Secrets from Leave It To Beaver, which appeared as a suggestion not long ago. (I won’t link to it, but it is real, unlike my first example.)

How many shocking secrets from Leave It To Beaver do I need to know? One would be more than enough, I think. What’s shocking is that anyone would care to know more.

RIP, Eddie Van Halen. Not that I ever bought any of his records or was even much of a fan. Still, occasionally Van Halen was just the thing. A nostalgic portal back to 1978 in this case, and I’m surprised the drummer didn’t explode in that video. Certainly Van Halen the man had hair in his heyday. Also, he named his son Wolfgang. Makes me smile.

The obit cited above is at a site called u discovermusic. It’s run by a record company, so I suspect ulterior commercial motives, but even so it’s pretty interesting. Like this list: quite a compilation.

Late Summer Thursday Stew

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A package arrived in the mail for Lilly today from UIUC.

“Your high GPA has earned you the privilege of graduating Cum Laude…. This accomplishment, which is referred to as Latin Honors, is also recognized by a special bronze cord,” the enclosed letter said. “Because we were unable to have an on campus commencement ceremony in May, we will be mailing cords to the mailing address you have on file with campus.”

Sure enough, the package also included a bronze cord, looking something like a curtain accessory. Lilly’s already in the Pacific Northwest, so she’ll have to wait for one of us to deliver it in person, since I’m not planning on re-mailing it.

Never got a Latin Honor myself. Missed it by a whisker of GPA, I think. But I don’t really remember, and in nearly 40 years, that fact has never come up at any time for any reason.

I’m surprised some of these TV shows count as public domain. Then again, under the copyright rules before Disney put its imprint on the law, copyright holders had to renew after a certain number of years, and I expect many producers didn’t bother. The other day I watched the first episode of Car 54, Where Are You? It had its amusing moments.

Summer is ebbing away. I’m trying to spend as much time on my deck as possible. A refuge from work and word of the troubled world beyond my little spot.

A few days ago, after work but before dinner, I parked myself on the reclining deck chair on the deck and managed to take a nap. My family marveled at that, considering the heat and noise of the cicadas. But it wasn’t that hot that late in the day, and the sound of cicadas is something to drift off to sleep to, though not as soothing as cricketsong.

I’m about half way through The Unredeemed Captive by John Demos (1994), which Lilly and Ann gave to me last Christmas, on a tip (I believe) from one of Ann’s teachers.

“The setting for this haunting and encyclopedically researched work of history is colonial Massachusetts,” Penguin Random House says. “There, in February 1704, a French and Indian war party descended on the village of Deerfield, abducting a Puritan minister and his children. Although John Williams was eventually released, his daughter horrified the family by staying with her captors and marrying a Mohawk husband.”

It’s a good read about a time and place I’m not especially familiar with, early 18th-century New England. Interesting how in only 50 years or so, that place evolved into the more familiar (to me) mid-century and Revolutionary New England.

Wait, when did Random House and Penguin merge? In 2013, it turns out. I wasn’t paying attention because book publishing isn’t my sort of publishing. I’m used to thinking of Penguin as a solidly British operation, but these days it’s owned by shadowy German billionaires.

Thursday Bits & Bobs

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Some unusually cool days this week. I’m not sure whether that had anything to do with what happened at about 7:45 pm on Wednesday out on our deck. I was sitting out there, decompressing from a day of work and other tasks, when I saw a dark blob hit one of our deck loungers. Twack!
Two cicadas. Noiseless, though the cicadas have been doing their twilight bleating for a few weeks now. Crickets are also singing after dark, though maybe not as strongly as they will closer to their seasonal demise. By Thursday morning, when I next checked, the cicadas were gone.

Happy to report there’s a thin mosquito population this year, at least around here. Flies have taken up the slack. Seems like one gets in the house every day through the back door, including some of the metallic-colored ones that used to fascinate me as a kid.

Also in the back yard: blooming hibiscus. Could be Hibiscus syriacus. I can also call it rose of Sharon, though I understand that’s applied to other flowers as well.
At Starved Rock State Park recently, I spotted his plaque near the lodge. Looking its century-plus age, including countless touches of Lincoln’s nose.
GAR Ladies plaque Starved Rock State Park“Commemorating the deeds of the Union veterans of the Civil War,” it says. The Ladies of the Grand Army of the Republic erected it in 1914. Looks like the Ladies, who are still around, were trying to keep up with the Daughters.

Chronicling a lot of violence, but also a thing of great beauty.

Our most recent episode of Star Trek: “A Piece of the Action.” I suggested it as one of three options — an action/adventure story, or one of the show’s tendentious eps, or comedy. Ann picked comedy. I’d forgotten how much of a hoot “Action” is, with the high jinks gearing up especially after Kirk and Spock got into pseudo-gangster duds and Shatner hammed it up.

Oh, my, listen to that. My my my.

Thursday Mishmash

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Warm and dry lately. Very warm sometimes. Luckily, our deck has an umbrella for shade.

Spring on Jupiter or Mars? Never mind, here’s summer on Saturn. At least in its northern hemisphere. Seasons are long there are probably don’t involve relaxing moments on back yard decks. Anyway, a thing of great beauty.“This image is taken as part of the Outer Planets Atmospheres Legacy (OPAL) project,” the NASA text says. “OPAL is helping scientists understand the atmospheric dynamics and evolution of our solar system’s gas giant planets. In Saturn’s case, astronomers continue tracking shifting weather patterns and storms.”

For contrast, an older observation of Saturn. Another thing of beauty.
Plate X from The Trouvelot Astronomical Drawings 1881-1882, these days posted at Wikimedia.

Closer to home, at Schaumburg Town Square.
Schaumburg Town SquareRubber-Tipped CraneThe sculpture is “Rubber Tipped Crane,” by Christine Rojek. Installed in 2012. Lilly said she hadn’t remembered seeing it before, but I did. Rojek also did “Ecce Hora” not far away.

Our latest Star Trek episode — we’re still watching about one a week — was “Squire of Gothos,” an early example of kidnap Kirk (and maybe Spock and others) and make him (them) outfight or outwit some adversary. This was a particularly good example of that kind of plot, including a deus ex machina ending that actually worked pretty well.

Our latest movie: The Shining. I hadn’t seen it since it was new. I remember it drew in some crowds in the summer of ’80, because when we got to the theater, only front-row seats were available. So I got to experience the Overlook Hotel in all its surreal, horror-infused glory as an enormous wall of light towering over me.

Always good to watch Jack Nicholson do what he does, in this case descend into homicidal madness. I also thought Shelley Duvall’s parallel track — her increasing freaked-out-ness, you might say — was on target. Her character has been mocked as whiny and weak, but she and her son survived.

So the movie holds up fairly well (and I don’t care at all what Stephen King thought of it). Still, not Kubrick’s best. What could possibly top Dr. Strangelove or 2001? But worth watching again after 40 years.

Half-Assed Journey to Babel

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Our most recent Star Trek episode was “Journey to Babel,” in which the Enterprise ferries a number of Federation delegates to a meeting, with murder and other danger in the offing. How long had it been since I’d seen that particular episode? More than 40 years? Probably. In this case, it was worse than I remembered.

Sure, we’re talking about a weekly TV show slapped together and broadcast without a care about anything beyond a rerun or two. The wonder is that some of them are as good as they are.

Still, I feel like grousing. Sometimes you should run with that feeling.

How is it that Kirk didn’t know his first officer’s father was an important figure in the Vulcan government? What kind of personnel records does Starfleet keep?

There’s no kind of surveillance on the Enterprise. During this episode at least. Do I remember right that the ship’s computer can, on request, find the location of a specific person on the ship? So how come there’s no record of a murder committed in one of the corridors?

How could the suicide mission ship be fooled so easily by the Enterprise playing possum? Also: a suicide mission. Man, that’s Al-Qaeda-level devotion to a cause that really boils down to facilitating smuggling and arms dealing. Well, that’s alien psychology for you.

Why wasn’t the blue alien with faux antennae who attacked Kirk in shackles when they brought him to the bridge? Aside from his known murderous tendencies, as a rule aliens on the bridge have an unfortunate habit of taking over the ship or otherwise causing trouble.

What was the point of his attacking Kirk anyway? We got to see Kirk going mano-a-mano against a knife-carrying blue alien — guess that was the point.

In sick bay, Spock had something important to communicate to the captain, but McCoy rudely knocks him out instead of, you know, giving him a communicator —

Why didn’t Sarak seek treatment on Vulcan in the first place? Turns out it wasn’t a surprise medical condition (except to his wife) so he left on an important diplomatic mission knowing full well he could fall deathly ill in a place where treatment was no certain thing — where’s the logic in that?

When Spock has his dramatic confrontation with his mother, he goes on at length about needing to be in command right now, this very moment, something he’s manifestly not doing. Why wasn’t he on the bridge?

What’s the deal with Vulcan-human mating anyway? How could that possibly work, even within the not-very-consistent confines of the show?

I wanted to see more quarreling among the delegates. Kirk made a big deal about how they were at each other’s throats, but mostly they seemed pretty mellow at that cocktail party. The belligerent pig-men mixing it up with the gold-skinned dwarfs would have been a thing to see.

Thursday Slumgullion

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A while ago, I sent a message in a professional capacity to one of Ikea’s subsidiaries. It bounced back, with this message as a reply.

Det gick inte att leverera till följande mottagare eller grupper:
centrespr@ingka.com

Det gick inte att hitta den angivna e-postadressen. Kontrollera mottagarens e-postadress och skicka sedan meddelandet igen. Kontakta e-postadministratören om problemet kvarstår.

Recent movies seen here at home, as if they would be anywhere else, include The Stranger, an Orson Welles noir that I’d never gotten around to seeing; I’ll go along with Variety’s contemporary assessment, quoted in Wiki — it’s a “socko melodrama” — and it made me sorry Welles didn’t get to make that many pictures. Chicago, which was better on the second viewing; the first was when it was fairly new. For a Few Dollars More, which was as good as I remembered it. The pointlessly rejiggered version of Star Wars, which Ann hadn’t seen any version of. The Hundred-Foot Journey, a fair-to-middling foodie movie.

Star Trek watching continues: “The Gamesters of Triskelion,” “The Naked Time,” “Space Seed,” and — because I thought Ann should see some of the lesser lights of the original series, “The Way to Eden,” which is the episode that features space hippies. She continues to get a kick out of the series, especially the costumes, and double especially the space-hippie garb. Made me smile, too.

“The Way to Eden” was bad enough, but not quite as bad as I remember. With a few tweaks, such as making the hippies at least slightly sympathetic, it could have been a much better episode.

Speaking of TV, I had an encounter with the spanking-new HBO Max today. As in, something I wanted to watch on a service I already pay for suddenly disappeared into this latest scheme to tunnel into my wallet. FO, HBO Max. There’s nothing on TV I can’t live without. Nothing.

Last Saturday, which was part sunny and later rainy, I did a lot. A lot of the kind of things you do to keep life running more-or-less on track. I record it here because, if in some future time when the memory of the day has faded, I want to marvel — assuming I survive middle age to marvel — at how productive I was that May day during the pandemic. The rest of the family was likewise busy that day, going all Marie Kondo on the upstairs bedrooms, from which much debris has been removed. Call it spring cleaning.

Besides taking my meals and watching an episode of the remarkably good (if basic) Greatest Events of WWII, I mowed part of our lawn, repaired a windchime, did some of the laundry, cleaned the inside of my car, went to the bank, post office, and drug store (all drive through), walked the dog, helped Ann remove a lot of items from a high shelf in her room, did a first run-through of my taxes, helped Lilly fill out her taxes, vacuumed the living room, swept two rooms, fixed a leaky pipe under the kitchen sink, and washed a lot of dishes. I ended the day reading a bit of Moby-Dick, which I’m slowly working my way through.