zukes and cukes

 Tried to doctor Beagles's images, there was just not enough information to do a better job, but I do love those glowing eyes.  

This time of winter my lunches consist of a couple different kinds of vegetables chopped up with garlic, soy sauce, black pepper, and butter.  For the last couple weeks it had been Brussels sprouts and turnips.  But Sunday when I went shopping I didn't like the looks of the turnips so I bought ten zucchinis instead.

I generally do the chopping to the tune of America's Favorite Home Videos.  I don't care at all for the cutesy stuff, but somebody falling flat on their ass (and bouncing a few times to boot) when they are at the peak of their glory, well now Son, that is humor.  So maybe I was distracted while I was doing the zukes because as I was slicing the fourth I noticed something peculiar about it.  It was like way too juicy, and it had this odd slightly sweet smell to it, almost as if it were a cucumber.  Which of course turned out to be because it was a cucumber.  

I love pickles, but I have nothing for untreated cucumbers.  I hate to throw anything away, especially food, so I called my neighbor, and yes, she would be glad to take the cukes off my hands. She would be glad to take three and she thought a friend of hers who lived down the hall would take three.  Well fine.

Then the next morning there was a bag attached to my doorknob, obviously from the friend of my neighbor, there were three of those little oranges they call cuties and three zucchinis.  WTF?  Had she somehow misunderstood?  I called my neighbor who also thought that this was peculiar, so peculiar that she called up her friend, and then she called me back.  Those weren't cucumbers in the bag with the cuties, they were zucchinis. 

A last parting shot at the Trumpsters who will be parting us in twenty days, hopefully under guard from the White House to the big house.  If you have been reading the papers lately you will have noted that the distribution of the vaccines is like 90 percent behind what the Trumpsters had promised.  Their spokesman, Gustav Perna, says this is because of the two holidays and the three snowstorms that we have had in the last two months.  Well how could they have known that this year Thanksgiving would fall in November and Christmas would fall in December, and that it might snow the winter?

Happy new year

Bobcats Rule, Coyotes Drool

I finally got all my trailcam photos sorted.  I ended up with 47 keepers from the 12 days the camera was posted overlooking the deer scrap pile.  I selected these five because they appear to tell a story.  In the first one, a coyote seems to be running away from the site.  In the second one, the coyote seems to be trying to return, but somebody else is already there.  That's the last coyote photo in this series, the rest of them are all bobcats.

 

days of old

 When you click on New Post before you can make a new post you get to a screen that offers the option of Comments and clicking on that you are shown all the comments that have been made on the blog.  I click on it every time to see if there is anything new, but there is nothing except those November comments by Free Tim.  I wonder whatever became of him.  Tim, if you are still out there, we would be glad to hear from you.

But for now there are just the three of us old soldiers.  I am almost afraid to enter the electronics section of Target lest one of those swaggering young whippersnappers says "Hey Old Timer what are you doing here?  Did you get lost on your way to the buggy whip section?" and  the room would erupt with laughter.  

Well buggy whip is what I would have said back in the day when I was a swaggering young whippersnapper.  Anymore I guess they would ask, "Hey Old Timer, are you looking for the tv tube tester?"

Remember tv repairmen?  How they would turn your tv around and remove the back and fiddle with crap that you were warned never to do because you would immediately be electrocuted, even if the tv was not even plugged in.  Remember color tv's, and those little knobs you could twist to get it just so?  Remember knobs that listed all the channels VHF and UHF, and how they would click at each little twist, and one of them, the UHF I think, had numbers that went almost to a 100, and you would think like what kind of world would have that many channels?  And what a paradise it would be if you had like thirty or forty channels, why surely there would be something worth seeing every hour of every day.

Sorry I misspelled Cheboygan.  I knew better, but sometimes my typing fingers slip.  I know people who go up to Sheboygan for, well I don't know, whatever people find charming about woods and stuff in the middle of winter.  

Sorry to hear about those kidney stones Old Dog  I've never had them myself, but I have seen victims writhe in pain,  I hope that this too  will pass.

Cancelled Because of COVID

 Our little family did not get together for Christmas, or Thanksgiving either, this year.  My daughter, who usually hosts these events, was worried about my wife and I catching COVID because we are so old.  She has been meeting periodically with our grand daughter, who is a health care worker, but usually outdoors and socially distanced.  Our grand daughter came by today to drop off our Christmas presents.  She didn't stay long and wore her mask the whole time she was here.  She reported that the latest surge in cases has dropped off considerably, at least at the big hospital in Petoskey where she works.  She has gotten her first vaccine shot but hasn't gotten her second one yet.

Although my grand daughter lives in Petoskey now, my daughter lives in Charlevoix, which is about 10 miles down the coast of Lake Michigan from Petoskey.  If you want to look up Cheboygan, Michigan you have to spell it correctly.  If you spell it "Sheboygan" you will find it in Wisconsin.  Although the spelling is different, the pronunciation is the same, which is about the only thing those two cities have in common.

I don't mind winter except that it has gotten too short over the years.  Not because of that fake climate change, just because time goes by faster as we age.  Summer always did go by too fast, but I knew I was over the hill when winter started doing the same.

The new TV is working well.  The online manual was a big help once I was able to sort the things I needed to know from the things I will never use.  The DVD player is okay, but I wish I could get more sound out of it.  I turn the TV volume up to 100 per cent, but the DVD player is barely loud enough to hear.  There is also a volume control on the DVD remote, but it doesn't seem to do anything.  The DVD player allegedly has an online manual, but I can't find it.  According to their website, the model I have doesn't exist. 

Passing through

Mr. Beagles almost sounds like an antique collector with his old CRT television.  Ah, those were the days, when you could look at the back of the TV and figure out what connections were needed with none of this "smart TV" nonsense.  I don't think the new TVs will let you use a wire coat hanger as an antenna.

For a little historical perspective, according to the 1952 Sears Christmas catalog, a 17" black and white television would set you back the princely sum of $200.  I say "princely" because in 2020 dollars it works out to a whopping $1,963.99.  So, for the cost of a small black and white TV in 1952, today you can buy a 65" Samsung flat screen, full color of course.  Two of them, in fact, with enough left over for a couple of DVD players.  The march of technology is wonderful, isn't it?

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I've read about that Zoom thing and it's impressive, reminds me of a scene in one of the old James Bond movies where all the bad guys around the world (Spectre?) are having a meeting to decide the fate of the world.  I didn't expect the tech to show up so quickly and it's nice that one of the Beaglesonians has embraced it so fully.  Kudos, Uncle Ken!

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Cutting it a little short today.  It's been many years since I've had to deal with kidney stones and I think they're back for a rematch.  It can be tough to concentrate, but I think it will pass.

just around the corner

 Christmas now in the rearview mirror.  I assume Beagles hauled butt over the river and through the woods to Petosky I think it is.  Seems to be the big burg in the area.  Every now and then I read some item which mentions Petosky, but Sheboygan, not as yet.  And Old Dog, I like to think of him riding some north side bus with a just baked, still warm, pecan pie sitting primly in his lap.  I'd never heard of pecan pie until I moved to Austin and lived a couple blocks away from a chain called Bill's barbecue. Not much of a dessert man myself, but it was part of a full meal deal so I slipped it onto my plate and I have not looked back since.  For me it was a zoom Christmas.  I have become a zoomer, improv, water color class, holidays.

The zoom experience I have come to characterize as nowhere near as good as the real thing, but a whole lot better than nothing.  The real thing, which means real life I guess.  Crowded restaurants, crowded bars, movie theaters, zumba classes, stuff that we thought nothing at all about just nine months ago.

Ramping up for a Dick Clark rocking new years eve in just a few days.  Oh wait he's dead, well whoever.  Dating back to the many years that I felt it obligatory to get crazy drunk on New Years like all the cool people around me, I have always felt that I should do something on New Years.  Lately it has been a sandwich and two or three cold ones, stop off in a couple bars for a quick one, kind of kill time sipping at home and then just before midnight stepping out on the balcony for a really good fireworks show.  Nothing like that this year.

I guess if you are a football fan New Years day is a big deal, but I am not.  It is a day when you step outside your house reeking of figgy pudding, Auld Lang Syne ringing in your ears, and put your foot down into the first frosty day of January.  It stretches out as far as your eye can see white, featureless, and flat. After maybe three weeks that pass like molasses. you may be able to glimpse just a bit of February, a ground hog peering out of his hole, past that the lacy fragile edifice of Valentine's day.

But the days will be getting longer, the vaccines will be shooting into arms, Trump will still be carrying on from the dustbin, but hopefully nobody will be paying much attention to that.  

Like those nature shows that begin in the carefree summer, and phase into the seed gathering fall, and the long hard winter and then there is that shot of the icicles melting, spring will be arriving.

Speaking of Things That Drive People Crazy

 I bought one of those new fangled flat screen TVs the other day.  All I really needed was a new DVD player.  My old one was a combination DVD/VHS player, but they don't make those any more.  The kid who sold it to me expressed doubt that it would work with my old TV, but he thought it might work if I also bought a couple of adapters that cost more than the DVD player itself.  We have been considering buying a new TV for some time anyway because our old one chops off the edges of the picture display.  Did I mention that our old TV was probably older than the kid who sold me the new one?  Indeed, he looked at me quizzically when I told him it had a CRT screen.  Long story short, I finally got the new TV and DVD player up and running today.  They are sitting on top of the old TV for now, but I also bought a cabinet for them (some assembly required) which is still in the box waiting for me to recover from my experience with the new equipment before tackling a whole nother project. 

Here are some trailcam photos that were taken in front of my deer blind before the deer hunting season opened.

the booby hatch

 Ah, the booby hatch.  Reminds me of that pop song of my youth, They're Coming to take me away (Ha Ha).  Then there was Ms Hradec of our sophomore geometry class who constantly complained that we were going to end up putting her in Manteno.  

After I switched my major from Chemistry which was too hard, to Math which also became too hard, I switched it to Psychology.  You would think that psychology would be interesting because it was about people, but not at the U of I at the time it wasn't.  The followers of Skinner held sway of the curriculum and it was all about rats.  One button experiments, two button, three.  Stimulus/Response, in between was a black box and only an infidel would inquire as to what was going on inside it.  

Abnormal psychology was the only course that had people in it.  There were maybe seven varieties of psychosis discussed and as I read them late at night in my tiny room all I could think of was, hey that sounds like me, and so does this, oh and this one is really me.

There were counselors in the Student Services building and I started seeing one once a week.  While I was studying psychology I had an image of my future as working out of some dingy office likely some gummint program (see I was a commie even then), where I would see a different nut every hour, eight hours a day, five days a week, and they would tell me their story, and at the end of the harrowing, more likely boring, details, they would look up at me, and I would stroke my beard, and say, "Don't worry, you'll be fine."

And so it went with my counselor in the Student Services Building.  It was kind of nice, I could shoot my mouth off about myself for an hour and nobody would interrupt me to talk about themselves, and the counselor guy would at least look like he was interested.  And at the end of every session he would say, "Don't worry, you'll be fine."

My problems at the time were flunking out of school (which I did twice, but managed to get back in both times) and the draft, which I eventually got my CO for, and I did manage to graduate on the third try, and I remember seeing him one more time before I headed down to Herrin to start my CO and I told him, well I guess I came through this just fine didn't I, and he said, "I wouldn't be so sure."

Meanwhile consider what is going on at the White House, though I would by no means consider Trump as having gone crazy.  He is the same guy he was when he rode down that escalator, when he was on that stupid show, when he was a rich kid growing up among sycophants.  I don't see how anybody could not see this coming down the pike.  And now even those who watched him prance around in his new clothes and praised them until they got hoarse, agreed with every lie he told, and enhanced those lies by praising him to the high heavens as he took the proud ship of the Republican party and smashed it into that iceberg, backed it up and smashed it again, and again, and even now about half of them still pretend that he has won the election.

And now he is deep into the bunker surrounded by the crowd that the guys in the booby hatch would say belong in a booby hatch, and he has the atomic codes.  

I haven't talked about the guy for weeks.   It is forty days since I breathed that deep sigh of relief, but now it looks like there will be thirty more days until I can tell myself, "Don't worry, you'll be fine."  But even then I will hear the voice of that counselor fifty years ago, "I wouldn't be so sure."

Eccentric?

I always thought that only rich people were eccentric, poor people are just crazy.  I have been called a lot of names in my life, but I don't remember ever being called eccentric.  I am reminded of the time one of my paper mill colleagues introduced me to one of his friends as "one of the most oddball people I know".  I responded, "Well you're not exactly Mr. Conformity yourself."  He explained, "Ah, but there's a difference.  You are an oddball, I am unique."

Back in the day, when somebody was doing something goofy, people would say, "You keep that up and the men in the white coats gonna come take you away."  Nowadays I suppose they would say, "You keep that up and you're going to have to see a counselor."  Judging from my experience with school aged children, I don't think it has the same impact.  Indeed, as one of my bus passengers told me, "Counselors, ha!  I've seen lots of counselors.  They were never able to do anything with me and you won't be able to either."  Ironically, somebody did eventually come and take him away, but they weren't wearing white coats, they were policemen.  The kid hadn't rode my bus for a few days, and then one day I saw a couple of cops loading him into a squad car by his house.  I don't know what the kid did to deserve that, but I never saw him again.  

As for astronomy, I never developed an interest in it.  I mean, you can't do everything.  If I did want to go stargazing, Beaglesonia would not be the best place to do it.  The "fields" that Uncle Ken mentioned consist of the clearing around the house, maybe an acre or two of marsh land, and a 1/3 acre food plot in front of my deer blind.  The marsh would probably offer the best view of the night sky, but it's under water most of the year except for July and August when the mosquitoes would eat you alive.

I've got lots of wildlife photos, and I will post some of them if anybody's interested. 

wildlife and wild Hetty

 Verrry interesting, the way those deer remnants calls to the animals of the wild.  Sort of like a Burger King popping up in the wild.  As bleeding as my heart is for sweet Bambi's mother, I almost want to ask Beagles to shoot another, just to get a new round of photos.  Once I am gone I want my ashes sprinkled in Wrigley Field and the Chicago River, but I wouldn't mind at all lying out there in the swamp and giving up my bounty to the woodland creatures.

Surely not all Beaglestonia is under a canopy of leafy boughs.  What about those fields where Beagles used to grow grain to entice the deer?  Another nice gift for Beagles would be a telescope.  I remember long evenings of looking at the moon, the nearer planets, and star clusters with my cheap cardboard telescope in the backyard of my house.  Late yesterday afternoon I had hopes to see that Christmas star but then the clouds rolled in, just like they did some years ago when I was in St Joe Missouri to see the solar eclipse.

Old Dog has gone down more rat holes than I did in search of Hettie Green.  I first came across her in a book called The Chicago Bungalow.  Traveling east on 55th there is a rather sudden demarcation when you cross Western and the solid chock-a-block bungalows give way to the older styles of brownstones and greystones.  I had always wondered why that was and the reason  was Hetty Green.  I read the wiki article but I didn't know about things like her eccentric son.  Well if you're rich you can jolly well be eccentric.  I'm sure all of us Fellows of the Institute can remember countless times our moms yelling at us, "Don't be so eccentric.  How do you ever expect to hold down a job and marry a nice girl if you go on acting so darned eccentric?" 

Animals! Animals!

My trailcam was a Christmas present from my daughter two years ago.  It has a motion sensor that triggers it, but I think it can be set to take random photos at intervals.  As with most of my electronic gadgets, there are settings on there that I will probably never use.  Pictures with no animals in them are not uncommon because a tree branch bobbing in the wind can set it off.  I sorted those out of this batch, but I've still got to go through and pick out the best ones to save to my files.  As I do that, I run them through my photo shop program to see if they can be enhanced.  I can usually improve the clarity and adjust the lighting but, other than that, I seldom tinker with them.  

We have been seeing two kitties around the house this year, one is orange and the other is black.  I think they belong to one of our neighbors, as much as a cat can belong to anyone.  I doubt that a truly feral cat could survive one of our winters.  Numbering from top to bottom, these are the animals seen in the photos:

1. orange kitty                                                                                                                              2. crow and hawk, probably a Cooper's hawk                                                                          3. coyote                                                                                                                                      4. probably a grey fox (identified by the black tip on its tail, red foxes have a white tip)        5. coyote                                                                                                                                      6. probably a bobcat  (note the short tail)                                                                                  7. coyote                                                                                                                                       8. hawk, probably the same one in photo 2.   

We don't do a lot of sky watching.  I suppose the stars would be impressive if we got away from the house lights, although the surrounding trees obscure the horizon.                                                                                                                               

Happy Humbug

Quite a full day today; not only is it the solstice, complete with a dandy juxtaposition of planets, it's also National Humbug Day in the U.S.  Who can ask for more?

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That wildlife camera looks like it was a good investment, Mr. Beagles.  It almost mimics the human eye in that it loses color sensitivity in low light conditions; all cats are gray in the dark.  It might be fun to play with those images to make it look like all the critters are in the same image, showing Feeding Time in Beaglesonia.

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I remember Uncle Ken mentioning Hetty Green quite a while ago but it wasn't until a few days ago that I jumped down into that rabbit hole to see what I could find.  One link leads to another and I can't help but wonder why such a fascinating story has not gotten more attention.  At one time she was the richest woman in the world, yet she took frugality to an extreme level.  She could have also been the world's biggest tightwad but that was mainly regarding her personal life and housing.  She would eat dry oatmeal but she fed her pet dog beefsteak.

The moniker "Witch of Wall Street" has to do more with her worn out black dress than any evil intent.  She was tough, but fair, and was much more financially astute than any of her male peers.  Anyone who can bail out New York City three times knows their way around an accounting ledger, that's for sure.  And looking at the photos of her later years you would never know that she was a debutante from a moneyed family and considered to be quite the charming beauty.

There must have been a few screws loose, though.  She was too cheap to get her fourteen year-old son proper medical treatment when he injured his knee and his leg had to be amputated.  He did okay, though.  Consider this:

Following a 1910 interview in Paris where he expressed a desire to find a wife, Ned received 5,000 written marriage proposals. But he claimed that women were only interested in his money. This six-foot-four, 300 pound eccentric, who lavished millions on racing cars, yachts, planes, coins, stamps, politics and pornography, didn’t marry until age 48, a year after his mother died.  His 47-year-old bride, his “housekeeper” for 15 years, was a former prostitute.

I'd call that a happy ending.

critters under the big sky

 These photos are outstanding.  Are the photos motion-triggered or do they just take a photo every, say, five minutes?  I made out a couple vulture-esque birds, maybe three foxes, a coyote, and a feral cat.  Did I get them right?  

Naturally I am curious about the cat.  Do you have feral cats or do you just have a neighbor with a cat that wanders far afield?

The solstice passed just before I got up this morning.  Days will be getting longer from now until sweet June,  Actually they don't exactly get longer right away, there is some kind of stutter step where the sun rises later, but also sets later for a few days.  I think I read somewhere why that is, but it was complicated and I have forgotten.  Anyway we are on our way.

That Christmas star should be visible early this evening in the southwestern sky.  Had a bit of an urge to see it, but it looks like it will be cloudy all day and night.  Well no big deal, just Saturn and Jupiter in a line from the sun through the earth.  Jupiter is pretty bright, Saturn not so much, but together they probably would be no brighter than Venus, and Venus is fine, but it does not knock your socks off.

It looks like it will be cloudy in Cheboygan also.  Having that big dark sky to himself I wonder if Beagles has ever taken up a little astronomy.  Can he see the milky way?

And the vaccines are out.  Due to my advanced age I am eligible right after the medical people.  Seems a bit unfair why should I, who has basically rode this one out on my duff, get the vaccine before oh, say the poor 7-11 people who have to face idiots without masks all day long?  

A Christmas zoom coming up.  Nowhere near as good as the real thing, but a lot better than nothing.  I do like to kick my heels on New Years just for Auld Lang Syne, have a nice restaurant meal with a few beers, a few more at some bar, stand on the balcony at midnight to watch the fireworks.  I wonder if they just might have fireworks.  Haven't heard anything yet.

Speaking of Wildlife

I set my trail camera overlooking the pile of scraps from that big fat doe and left it there for 12 days.  I got over a hundred photos and I haven't sorted through all of them yet, but here are the good ones I have found so far.

spiders and snakes

 Nothing sends Uncle Ken hunting for his bible faster than the chance to prove Beagles wrong.  But it turns out that I did a rearrangement of my books maybe a year ago and I could not find my bible, so I went to the google machine and it turns out that Beagles was not wrong.

I had some dim memory of looking up the story of the apple (which I know was not an apple, likely a pomegranate I've heard) and not finding Eve all that complicit, but I must have been thinking of something else.  I was surprised however that nowhere in the third chapter is it revealed that the serpent is satan.  Maybe that is later in the bible, but I didn't have all morning.

I dimly remember hearing this story in the basement of Elsdon Methodist Church, and I guess Beagles had to be there too because we are the same age, and kind of nodding my head along, but then when she said that therefore, because of that little slip of judgment, everybody in the room, the church, the city, the world, was doomed to hell unless Jesus saves them, I popped right up, wait a minute, I didn't do it, I wasn't there, it was some ancestor a million begats away from me.  Why should I have to take the rap?

Tough titties, or words to that effect, repliethed the Sunday School teacher.  I believe I left the church not too long after that,

People in general don't like spiders and snakes.  Men may be less afraid of them than women, but in general we don't like them either and tend to kill them when we come across them.  I read somewhere long ago that it's because so many of them are poisonous, that we have inherited a fear of them from way back in our inheritance.  Okay I admit that sounds a little dubious.  One of those things that you read long ago and it seemed to make sense at the time so you incorporated it into your body of knowledge, but then years later when you pull it out to make some kind of statement, you think wait a minute, why did I ever believe that?

End of the week, the solstice cropping up first thing next week, Christmas at the end, and then that little blip of New Years, like that last dinner dance aboard the Titanic while we slip deep into the pitiless depths of January and feb.  There is the bright light of the fumigation of the White House on the 20th.  

Dogs Run, Cats Hide

 When my daughter was living in Petoskey there was a fire in her apartment.  Nobody was home at the time except for a dog and a cat.  A neighbor saw the smoke and called the firefighters, who were there in a matter of minutes and quickly extinguished the blaze.  After they left, the neighbor saw the dog wandering around outside looking confused.  They managed to catch the dog and keep it safe until my daughter got home.  The cat was an inside cat, I don't think it had ever been outdoors in its life.  My daughter stayed someplace else that night and came back to assess the damage the next day.  She found the cat, alive and unharmed, hiding in the closet that had been its sanctuary whenever the dog was being a pain in the ass.  The firemen had busted the door, so the cat could have gotten out as easily as the dog, but it had stayed in that closet through all the commotion and even unto the next day.  A veterinarian once told me that, when a cat is sick or injured, it will typically go off by itself to either recover or die alone.  Dogs, on the other hand will usually seek human contact when they are in distress.  If they can't find their owner, any other human will do in a pinch.  

There were garter snakes in our neighborhood too.  We would catch them, handle them, and scare the girls with them, but we didn't keep them captive for any length of time. Fun fact: According to the Bible, the reason girls are afraid of snakes is because Satan appeared to Eve in the form of a serpent when he persuaded her to eat the forbidden fruit and share it with Adam. 

I found the article about Hetty Green to be interesting but I forgot to mention it in my last post.  

the seven hills, rabbits and snakes, dogs and cats

 I guess how seven swamps got its name is lost in the midst of time, passed down from kid to kid, likely from when this was all farmland and undeveloped and owned by Hetty Green as some kind of investment.  I am surprised that the story of Hetty has not moved Beagles.  I found it fascinating, and was surprised when I first heard of it twenty years ago in a book about bungalows.

What interested me was that the seven swamps is kind of like the seven hills of Rome.  Way back when I think kids learned more about the classical age than they do now, and I can imagine some farm kid maybe 170 years ago wandering to the edge of plowed field and first setting eyes on them and naming them the seven swamps even if there were maybe only five because of that Roman thing, and maybe dreaming that some day a mighty train would run the route taking people back and forth to the tall towers at the mouth of the great river.

I don't remember any rabbits in the prairie east of the tracks either,  As a matter of fact I don't remember any rabbits at all growing up, but now they seem to be everywhere especially on lawns.  I only get back to the southwest side once a year, and have missed it the last couple so I can't say about that, but walking through the neighborhoods around the Ten Cat I see one on every other block, just sitting there, not looking particularly scared but not asking me, "Hey you gotta carrot Doc?" either.

But speaking of wild life I remember snakes.  Garter snakes, hundreds of them in the prairie east of the tracks.  They were there all along but one day we suddenly noticed one and looking around they were everywhere, and looking further afield even our front and back yards were full of them,  We caught handfuls of them and stuffed them into coffee cans and tossed some grass in there and of course they all died.  At the end of that summer we lost interest in them and never paid attention to them again.

When I read Beagles' story about the unleashed dogs taking off it reminded me of something a friend pointed out many years ago.  He was a cat man and he married a dog woman.  Everyone got along well including the animals, who did not curl up with each other like in those photos all over facebook, but eyed each other warily, but there were no incidents.

He was talking about animals sneaking out when you opened the door.  The dog would dash out like a rocket, its tongue flapping in the wind and was likely to end up in the street run over by a car.  The cat on the other hand would dash straight to nearest clump of vegetation and hide and peer out with those strange cat eyes.  You'll note that dogs took to hanging around with us back when we were living in caves, while cats waited until we had built some pretty good houses before they became our companions.  

Maybe deep down in the hind brain of the dog even after twenty thousand years of domestication there still remains the memory of the wolf pack running bold and free and that is triggered by the release of the leash, the scent of the great outdoors and off they go,  Cats on the other hand have never been all that domesticated and even when they were wild and free they spent most of their time skulking in some shrubbery waiting for something to come along and eat,

How Seven Swamps Got Its Name

 Like I said, it looked like the whole site had been a swamp at one time, and somebody had started filling it in but never completed the project.  There were some unfilled potholes scattered around the site, which I suppose looked like swamps to the city kids who hung out there.  There might have been seven of them originally, but we only found five.  

I seem to remember taking my dogs to that big prairie near 55th Street one time.  Somebody had told me about it and we went to check it out.  The cover was pretty sparse, we didn't run any rabbits, and my dogs picked up a bunch of ticks while we were there.  As Ann Landers used to say, "The sample was ample."

I'm sure I told you guys about this before, but there was a big field on the corner of 51st and California where kids used to play ball.  There were two diamonds, one for softball and one for league ball, with regular backstops but no bleachers.  It wasn't really a prairie because the grass was kept mowed and there was a tall cyclone fence around it.  There was no sign or anything, but everybody called it Farmer's Field.  This is where my two beagles got their obedience training before I could trust them off the leash.  We would go there early in the morning when we had the place to ourselves.  I would close the gate before I loosed the hounds, so there was no trouble they could get themselves into.  

The only thing they had to learn was to come to me when I called them.  The first time I tried the old rope trick, you call them and then pull them in on a rope.  That didn't work, the rope got all tangled and it just confused the dogs.  Then I let them run loose for awhile while I sat on the ground untangling the rope.  Soon the dogs got tired of chasing each other around and came over to see what I was doing.  As soon as they turned my way I started blowing on a police whistle, and I kept blowing it until the dogs were in my lap.  Then I gave each of them a small Milk Bone dog biscuit. The trick is to blow the whistle more softly the closer the dogs get to you because dogs have sensitive ears and you don't want the experience to be unpleasant for them.  Dogs learn by repetition, so we practiced that drill over and over again until those guys would drop whatever they were doing and run straight to me whenever I blew that whistle.  

This came in handy when we were hunting for real with my father and his friends.  I had previously seen other guys bring dogs out there that had never been off a leash outside of their house or back yard.  All that open space must have overwhelmed them because they would just run and run, impervious to the commands of their owner, who now had to spend the rest of the day trying to catch his dog instead of the rabbits and pheasants they came there for in the first place.  

the end of the free range

 Wait a minute, I never did hear why it was called seven swamps.  Or maybe that is just what kids called it and nobody else will ever know why.  

The vastest prairie in my neck of Gage Park was the area east of the Grand Trunk tracks and west of St Louis from 55th to 57th, two blocks long and about one block wide.  Once we graduated from the kids' game of corner baseball with the 16th inch pillow to games with a real baseball, (we called it League in that cool way kids have; the ball was called a league ball, and when you played the game with it you were playing league.) we played it in the prairie by the tracks.

There were no actual diamonds, you just scoured the area for large pieces of junk and those became the bases.  We had more kids than when we were playing corner baseball, so we actually filled the real positions, though we may have skipped the shortstop and an outfielder, and the catcher was generally of the other team.  The field itself was kind of lumpy with a big rock here and there,

I remember one time some adult walked up to the ballfield and he was talking about how we could do some rudimentary landscaping, pulling rocks and mowing and maybe some kind of evening of the ground and make a better ballfield out of it.  That sounded like a pretty good idea and we stood around like kids in a movie saying, "Golly, that sounds swell, Mister," and nodding our heads,  But after he walked away we got to thinking that that sounded like an awful lot of work and nobody ever spoke of it again.

Not only would it have been a lot of work, but we would have to use tools, and adults had the tools so we would be dependent on them, and we knew how they were.  If they saw us having a duel with a couple shovels they would yell at us.  It wouldn't be long before they were supervising us,  It would be like school.  It would be like Little League.

There was no Little League in Gage Park at the time.  We'd heard of it, real ballfields with stands and uniforms.  Sounded pretty cool, but we knew it was going to involve a lot of rules,  They would give you a cool cap but then they would tell you how to wear it,

It was things like little leagues that brought the end of the free range kids.  Adults just started to be interested in what their kids were doing and they thought they could improve it, I remember visiting a friend of mine who had kids and they were driving them hither and yon for various activities.  I can imagine the blank stare I would have gotten from my folks if I asked to be driven somewhere to play baseball.

I have a vague idea of where Old Dog grew up  (maybe four blocks west and a couple south of the Ten Cat?) and it is older and more densely populated than Gage Park,  Vast swaths of Gage Park were owned by mean Hetty Green the witch of Wall Street, and held back from development until after she died in 1916, just before the bungalow became the rage,  Read it, fascinating story.

 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hetty_Green 

Prairies

I used to think that Chicago was the only place in the world where a vacant lot was called a prairie until I read a newspaper article about Detroit that was written during the time it was going through its bankruptcy.  The article talked about all the vacant property in the city that had been abandoned by its owners, saying that, as derelict buildings were being demolished, much of the land was reverting to "urban prairie". 

I tried that Indian gum a couple of times, but I never developed a taste for it, probably because, as Uncle Ken said, it had no taste.  I seemed to remember that the plant it came from was called "giant ragweed", so I just looked it up to be sure.  The article mentions that Native Americans used it for medicinal purposes, but it didn't say anything about them chewing it like gum.  

Ambrosia trifida - Wikipedia

More playing around

But there is a whole field of study of kids' games passed down from kid to kid with no adult supervision.

Oooh, another rabbit hole!  As I think about games we used to play, it occurs to me that children of that era may have been the last of the "free range" kids, especially during the summertime.  No supervision, just making stuff up as we went along.  There were some rules, like don't cross "that" street or go over "there" and don't go hanging out with "that group."  But rules are often meant to be broken and once in a while you even got away with it.

Before air conditioning closed all the windows and folks no longer sat on their porches or stoops it never occurred to us kids how loud we were.  You could hear kids playing a half a block away, and so could the adults, but we never thought of that.  They could keep track of us without even trying, always having a good idea of where we were and what we were doing.

You fellows from the South Side had a much richer environment than us poor north side urchins.  Train yards, swamps, and prairies, Oh my!  I didn't see any prairies until we ventured out to the suburbs where they were plentiful.  But in reality, they were just empty lots, overgrown with weeds or grass but good enough for a kid to play in.  There was something rewarding about crawling in the overgrowth but I can't define it.  Maybe it's a throwback to our hunter/gatherer heritage.
 
As the prairies gave way to suburban housing developments there were new avenues of adventure: homes under construction.  Big piles of dirt (King of the Hill!), big holes in the ground, and the wooden skeletons of new houses.  Climbing in the rafters was great sport, dangerous as hell but we did it anyway despite the many parental warnings.  Good way to break an arm or leg, we were told, and one of my pals did just that.  Broke his arm when he fell from the rafters but I wasn't there at the time.  I never asked him about it but I bet he thought it was worth it.  Dangerous activities are a lot of fun for some people.

 

 

the games kids play

 Seven swamps kind of sounds like John Prine's song, Paradise.  Mr Budweiser Distributer done took it away. There is still some brush along the south side of the Orange Line, and sometimes you can spot mattresses and beat up old chairs.  I wonder where it got that name.

Farther west at 56th and St Louis was a prairie that we used to call the Saint Louis Laundry.  The story among us kids was that it had blown up in some explosion some undefined time ago.  I don't know where the story came from, I think it was just passed down from kid to kid.  I never heard an adult speaking of the St Louis Laundry.  Something had been there, there was what seemed to be a foundation of concrete overgrown with vegetation and there was a big puddle in the middle where the basement had probably been. 

It was pretty cool, we could build a rudimentary fort out of pieces of scrap, you could have a little campfire, you could toss bottles into the puddle and throw rocks at them.  And there was Indian gum, which was just some kind of dried sap inside a dried branch that didn't have any taste and didn't last very long, but it was Indian gum Man,

I guess that was another of those things that was just passed on from kid to kid, like Monopoly.  Monopoly was big around 56th and Homan.  Nobody ever read any rules, they were just passed on fro kid to kid.  Games would go on all day, like those baseball games on a corner with a 16" softball as soft as a pillow.  The four sewer lids at the angles of the corner were the bases.  Since the teams usually had only two or three players we used invisible men when we had to leave a base to hit.  Homan Avenue which was right field was an automatic out and pitcher's hands got you out if you didn't get to first base on time.  Kids would come and kids would go as the game went on from breakfast to supper, the score would be like 103 to 97.

In the summer evenings there were the games, Red Light, Paddy Cake, Statue.  There was some game where It ran off and hid somewhere and nobody was supposed to look.  And then the whole group went in the direction where IT was hiding chanting, "One o'clock and the fox ain't here, two o'clock and the fox ain't here," and so on until the fox would suddenly appear and try to tag somebody before they got back to guul (pronounced like ghoul, probably a corruption of goal, but who knows).  And foxes, what did us city kids know of foxes?

I just discovered that google knows nothing of "One o'clock and the fox ain't here."  But there is a whole field of study of kids' games passed down from kid to kid with no adult supervision.

Speaking of adult supervision, how about that Trump?  Well not so much him, he is just defective, but all those republicans who, even after he has clearly lost the election, are still storming on at his every word with any manner of debunked argument.

When that bus was sitting there just off Kedzie while the bitter crowd on the corner was freezing their keisters one of the suspicions was that the driver was taking a hammer to the cashbox where the passengers deposited their coins.  It was a thing, you could read about it in the papers.  

This seems to me to be what the republicans are doing.  Wiser heads are saying, Oh don't worry about it, there is no legal basis to what they are doing, nothing will come of this.  Those cashboxes were pretty damned sturdy so I don't know if anybody was able to actually extract cash from them so I don't know if anybody ever got money out of them.  But just because the guys with the hammers were not successful, that didn't make what they were doing ok, same with those spineless republicans.

I have been staying away from politics, but he lost the election over a month ago and he still is not gone, and probably won't be until January 20th when they drag him out kicking and screaming and crying like a baby. 

From Midway to Seven Swamps

 The trackage where the Orange Line now runs used to be one of my old stomping grounds.  No passenger trains ran on it then, and there was very little freight activity.  There were several side tracks between Pulaski and California, a couple of them were used to store empty box cars, and the rest of them were all rusty from lack of use.  Vegetation had grown wild for years around those unused tracks, and the rabbits had taken it over.  We weren't allowed to hunt them with guns, but I did manage to shoot a rabbit there once with a bow and arrow, and it was where my two beagles got most of their training before hunting for real out in the country with my father.  

We followed the tracks all the way out to Midway a few times, but there was better rabbit cover closer to home, so we mostly ranged between Pulaski and Seven Swamps, which was located just across California.  Despite its name, there were only five swamps, and they were more like potholes than swamps.  It looked like the whole thing was one big swamp at one time and somebody had started to fill it in with dirt and busted up concrete but never completed the project.  It must have been a long time ago because fair sized trees had grown up on the site, which was unusual for Chicago prairies in those days.  We had the place to ourselves during the daytime, but rumor had it that Seven Swamps got pretty lively at night.  I don't think that large parties were held there, though, because there wasn't much litter on the ground, just the occasional used rubber or wad of tissue.

When I came home on leave from the army I discovered that Seven Swamps had been replaced by a big warehouse for Budweiser beer, and that no trace of the original site remained.  It was then I knew that I was going to have to find someplace else to live after I was discharged because the Old Neighborhood was going to Hell.    

The end of the Archer Express

 Earlier I mentioned how the city had major arteries every mile west from State Street.  Also midway between those major arteries were minor arteries, Canal, Racine, Damen, and then between Kedzie, the shortchanged artery, and Pulaski what?  Central Park, which despite its imposing name, like the proverbial ne'er do well son, never amounted to anything.  Certainly not in Gage Park where its route was supplanted by the Grand Trunk Railroad.  The railroad of my childhood, though callow youth that I was I never much noticed it except to sled down its raised sides in the winter.  In Urbana there was a train yard a few blocks north and I could hear the cars go bump in the night.

When I went to Austin I did it by train, St Louis at midnight, Little Rock at dawn, Dallas at noontime, and then miles and miles of miles and miles before arriving that night in Austin.  After Austin the next stop was San Antonio, and as it happened my apartment was right at the bend where the train turned southwest on its way out of town.  This would take place about seven in the evening, and crossing a minor busy street it would blow its horn, which was so loud that if I was on the phone with someone they would hear it and ask what it was, and I would say, "That Son, is the train to old San Antone."  I always liked trains.

Of course those are big trains and they have little in common with the CTA trains, but I like them too.  As a kid the only train I knew was the main north/south train now known as the Red Line.  Once or twice a year my mom and maybe some other neighbor lady would gather a passel of the neighborhood kids and take us all to Wrigley Field on Lady's Day.  This was for my sake, all my friends were Sox fans, but any kid will go to any game any time.  We had to take the bus downtown of course, but once there we would go underground to the strange exciting world of the subway station, then we would woosh through the dark a few stops and then we would emerge into the daylight.  Not only the daylight, but into the air.  Wasn't all that high, but it seemed like that to us kids, cars looked like toys, people looked like ants.

When I came back to Chicago in 1987 I was mad to ride the trains, the Green Line to Oak Park, the Blue Line to O'Hare, the Brown Line which I now take to the Ten Cat.  On a day off I would just ride trains, partly to see the city and partly just to be riding a train.  After I moved downtown I would still be taking the Archer Express to  visit my parents in their bungalow.

But then in 1993 the Orange Line opened up going from downtown to Midway Airport, crossing Kedzie just north of 51st Street, a short walk to my old neighborhood which I visit every summer to tip my hat to the old bungalow, so there is no reason to bother with the Kedzie bus.

Archer is not as busy as it was before the Orange Line and there is no reason to have an Archer Express.  There is still just the plain old Archer bus. that sometimes in the old days you would take if you had just missed an Express and the plain Archer bus was right there.  For twenty seven years now I have been telling myself I would take it again just for old times sake but I never have.

That One's a Keeper

 I'm not a great fan of poems that don't rhyme, but "Paper Warriors" is definitely a keeper.  (For the benefit of the city slickers, a keeper is a fish that you don't have to throw back because it's legally big enough to take home and eat.)  The introduction was every bit as good as the poem.  Indeed, without the introduction, I would have had a hard time understanding the poem, but that's just because I have little background in the genre.  

I never was a great fan of buses back in the day, sluggish lumbering beasts that slowed down all the other traffic on the road.  I liked trains, though, even the El, except when it went underground and there was no passing scene to watch.  Planes were cool back in the 60s but, by the 80s, they were making the planes twice as large and packing four times as many people into them, so air travel was no fun anymore.  

I kept my bicycle even after I got my driver's license because it was still the fastest way to get around the city during rush hour.  I always wondered why it was called rush hour because there was no rushing involved.  Traffic would back up from one stop light to the next, and you often had to wait for the same light two or three times.  With my bike I could ride right up to the light between the waiting cars and the curb and be off and running as soon as the light changed.  

They didn't let us bring our bikes to school, so I walked.  It was about a mile to Gage Park High, and any bus that I could have taken would have only covered half the distance.  In the time it would have taken me to walk to the bus stop, wait for the bus, and then walk from the bus stop to the school I was further ahead to just walk the whole distance.  It took me between 15 and 20 minutes, which is why I knew that I could easily walk three or four miles an hour in those days.  It wasn't until I got into the army that I found out I was no good at running, never had any reason to run before that.  Running any more than a mile made me breathless and dizzy, but I could walk all day as fast as the other guys could run.  Now I get breathless and dizzy walking a hundred yards to our mailbox, but I am no spring chicken anymore.  

(I just noticed that there is no white space at the end of this post, and I didn't do anything different.)

paper warriors on the Archer Express

 Of course I remember the Archer Express.  If Archer Avenue was El Camino Real of the southwest side, the Archer Express was the king's coach.  I don't remember it going on California but then there were several variations on the main route and I would never take a bus that didn't go all the way to Kedzie.

In the morning, in the mid-eighties, Kedzie and Archer was the place to be, funneling the hard working denizens of the southwest side into their offices piled high one atop each other, pushing pencils, tapping keys, putting their fingers to the gigantic wheel that is the American economy.  On the way in I noticed that all us oldsters were kind of bright and eager, going to solve some work problem, land that big contract, ask the boss for that much deserved raise.  The youngsters, generally on the lowest rungs of the employment ladder, were dead-eyed and snoozing, spent from last night's revelries.

On the way out at the end of the day, the youngsters were all bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, having regained their pep during the long slog of their boring jobs and now were eagerly anticipating another night of revelry, eager to get home and eat a bite and fly into the night with their dancing duds and dance the night away.  It was the oldsters who were spent sagging in their office duds, their mouths a little open, drooling, snoring softly.  The work problem had not been solved, the big contract had not been landed, and the boss had not given them that raise, their only anticipation was for a bit of grub a couple hours of tv and off at last to that comfy bed.

These were drear days for me, having come back from Austin dead broke and living in my parents' attic.  The job paid pretty well, but I had no interest in it.  The closest thing I had to friends was the people I worked with who I didn't like very much.  I didn't see any future.  I wrote a poem.  

                Paper Warriors

    Red skies at morning sailors take warning

    While the dawn is still grey we take our places

    Like pins lined up along the streets

    Waiting for our busses.

    Big fat busses that pause at the corners and kiss us

    With warm open mouths and take us inside

    Where we sit, straight and straight-faced, shoulder to shoulder

    With the Mexican girls going to Catholic High School

    War-painted, hair-piled, pink knees bob from their short plaid skirts

    We do not notice

    Downtown the Sun is burning the clouds from the face of the Lake

    Filling the east-west streets with fire.

    We look down, our eyes shielded by the brims of our hats

    We look down at our shoes which will soon be marching forward

    We are a mighty army

    Downtown the busses kiss us off and we begin our march to our tower

    From the realm of the sky, stone eyes look down upon us

    Big cats and dragons look down at us

    Unblinking eyes from lands of air that never were

    In the office is the paper

    Like worms it goes in and it goes out

    Like worms it eats our guts right out

    All day we fight the paper wars.  We are paper warriors

    This is the stuff of our days, between bus rides, between kisses

    In our stone towers, behind glass, we move papers

    At sunset we assemble in quiet squads at the corners

    Under darkening skies, between towers, bent and tired

    The bus creaks and rocks us, our cradle

    Droops us, and sends us drifting off past swollen red lids

    On tinder ships with paper sails on a rocking pounding nighttime sea

    Bold broadsworded pirates sailing alone and free

    Red skies at night sailor's delight. 

 

          

The Archer Express and Other CTA Stories

Judging from Uncle Ken's last post, he didn't know about the Archer Express.  I didn't know about it myself until I took a part time job downtown during my last semester at Gage Park High.  The Archer Express originated somewhere south of Gage Park and ran north on California until it turned right on Archer and went straight to the Loop, whereupon it turned around and retraced its route.  It only stopped at major intersections, which is what made it an express.  I don't think it ran at night, which must have been why I came home a different way after work.  Then I would take the Lake Street El to Kedzie and the Kedzie bus back to 51st Street.  

Kedzie was really slow in the daytime, but traffic was light after 6:00 PM and the Kedzie bus moved right along.  It was kind of spooky, though, waiting for the bus in the shadow of the El after dark.  I never explored the neighborhood around the bus stop, just stood there minding my own business like my mother taught me to do when I found myself in a "questionable" neighborhood.  The only real scare I had was once when this cute little colored boy came up to me and started asking questions about my ROTC uniform.  This made me nervous because they would sometimes use a little kid like that as a decoy to set you up for an ambush, or so I had been told.  Sure enough, pretty soon four or five Black dudes, who looked to be about my age, came sauntering across the street towards us.  "Come onnn bus!" I said to myself, but the bus was nowhere in sight.  When they were upon us, one of the dudes asked the little kid if everything was all right.  The kid assured him that it was, and the dudes sauntered away down the street without acknowledging my presence.

A year or two before that, when I was still working part time at my dad's store, Kedzie was gridlocked for a month or more because they were doing some work on the bridges that crossed the three channels of a canal.  I left home plenty early because I knew it was going to be a long three mile bus ride that day.  I also had to walk a few blocks from Whipple to Kedzie to catch the bus and then a few more blocks down 27th Street to get to the store on the corner of 27th and Millard.  like I said, Kedzie was grid locked and there was no bus in sight.  I could walk three or four miles an hour without breaking a sweat in those days, so I decided to start walking until a bus caught up with me.  I actually caught up with a bus before a bus caught up with me.  The driver opened the door, but I waved him on and kept walking past him.  He passed me after the light changed, but I passed him again while he was waiting for the next light.  This scene was repeated at each light between 51st and 27th.  I smiled and waved to the driver each time I passed him, but he never did the same when he passed me.  Indeed, he had this mean look on his face the whole time, but the passengers were so cheerful that they were laughing out loud.  Go figure!  

How You Figure?

 I was intrigued by Old Dog's estimate of the total value of a deer.  At first I thought his numbers were a bit high, but then I figured they were talking about the value of the finished product, not the value of the raw material.  Looking up all those numbers would be a major project, so I am going to discuss the general principles of what is called "value added".  When you buy something at the supermarket, probably less than five percent of what you pay for it represents profit for the store owners.  The rest of it is called "overhead", what it costs the store to put that item on it's shelves.  Everybody who handles the product from its production to its retail sale adds value to the original raw material, and the final customer is paying them all to do it.  

Speaking economically and disregarding aesthetics, a deer running around in the forest is practically worthless because you can't do anything with it until it's harvested, transported, and processed.  If you do all this yourself it's almost pure profit, if you don't count the cost of your own transportation to the woods, your gun and other gear, any other expenses like overnight accommodations if you need them, and your own time if you place any value on that. You have to enjoy it because, like I said before, I wouldn't work this hard for mere money.  

Last I heard the going price for a professional butcher to process a deer was $165, and that's after you deliver it to his shop and pick it up yourself when its done.  Depending on how bad it's shot up, you might be lucky to get 30 pounds of pure deboned meat from the average deer in this neighborhood.  Depending on what cuts you buy and where you buy them, you might pay $100 to $300 for an equivalent amount of beef in a store.  The other parts like the head, hide, bones, and feet go relatively cheap, if you can find a buyer for them.  They are worth considerably more after the taxidermist gets done with them, but that's money in his pocket not yours.  Slaughterhouses make some money off these by-products because they produce enough of them to justify sending a truck to transport them to a tannery or rendering plant, but the hunters in Cheboygan do not.

Another way to look at it is, if you weren't out hunting, you would be doing something else with your free time that would probably cost you money.  The meat in your freezer represents a partial rebate on the cost of your recreation.  

First Monday in December

"Depending on who you want to believe, one deer has a dollar value somewhere between $1,250 and $2,500."

I read this on the internet so it must be true.  I don't know the value of the carcass but it must add up, the meat (I'm guessing) having the greatest value, followed by the hide.  The tallow must be worth something, it doesn't seem the kind of thing that you would throw away.  As I pictured Mr. Beagles breaking the deer down into manageable cuts of meat (Mmm...tenderloins!) I remembered this taxidermist in my old neighborhood.  He had a shop that I used to walk by with a delightfully creepy display window that had a heavy Norman Bates vibe.  I never went into the place, though.  A single mounted animal or bird doesn't bother me but a bunch of them were too much for my childhood sensibilities.  The stuffed critters of my rural kinfolk were simply part of the decor; the moose head always made me smile.  I wonder if people still use deer feet to make table legs, a popular craft of days gone by when nothing went to waste.  Sadly, I found nothing online about the taxidermist but I never forgot his name: Otto Wanke.

-----

I'm not an expert on rabbit holes, Uncle Ken, but it seems to me that you can never go down the same rabbit hole twice.  There are twists, turns, bifurcations, and dead ends all over the place.  I was curious about the BLM demonstrations and, to me, they were nothing like a riot.  Now, the '68 Democratic Convention in Chicago; that was a riot!  So was the Grant Park riot in '70 when Sly and the Family Stone didn't show up.  A buddy of mine and I left the park about ten minutes before it began and heard about it on the radio during our ride north on the Outer Drive.  Sometimes you just know when a situation is going to turn very wrong, it's like there is something in the air, a strange energy field.  Maybe it's instinct, I don't know, but when something doesn't feel right it's time to get the hell out of there.

Oh, almost forgot the original point I was going to make about crowds and riots.  I did a Google on "BLM international demonstrations" and looked at photos showing the crowd sizes.  Some were huge, much larger than any in the U.S. and no violence, no broken windows, just a bunch of folks showing solidarity.  I'm still working on my theories about why American crowd behavior can become unhinged so easily.

-----

Near as I can tell there haven't been any posts from the new guy yet.  I wonder if it's weather related, I think he's in the path of a genuine nor'easter, as those folks call it.  But looking at his profile it seems that he also has his own blog, Baker Hill.  It only has one post, from last January, when he started it.  I wonder what's up with that but the picture of the turkeys is nice.

 

 

La Pasionaria by the White Castle

 I have spoken previously about taking the 55th Street bus downtown.  Its path was basically a right angle, which to those of us familiar with the Pythagorean theorem is not the shortest path between downtown and say 55th and Kedzie.  Archer Avenue does not cross Kedzie at 55th but rather between 43rd and 44th streets, but still obviously a shorter route.  The downside was that you didn't get to keep your seat all the way like on the 55th Street bus, you had to disembark at Kedzie.

Every mile going westward from State is a major artery with 4 lanes, Halsted (800w), Ashland(1600w), Western(2400w), Pulaski (4000w), Cicero(4800w), Central(5600w).  But wait, what is 3200w?  That is Kedzie, for some reason the city fathers, in their farsighted wisdom saw to give Kedzie only two lanes.  One has to think that this was before the bus was invented,

On a four lane street, busses can leapfrog and share the load, but on a two lane street they can only follow one another which leads to bunching where there is maybe no bus for half an hour and then bam three, one after another, with the first jammed and the second not so much and the third hardly at all.

So while the Archer busses fairly flew down Archer Avenue, El Camino Real of the southwest side, once you got off at Kedzie it was sort of a crapshoot, not so bad in the summer with the waft from the nearby White Castle washing across you, but quite unpleasant in the dead of winter.

But owing to this bunching phenomena the CTA had provided another bus that originated just north of Archer and Kedzie, but these busses would not, upon seeing a shivering crowd just down the block, just pull out and pick them up.  There was probably some kind of schedule, but in the minds of the frozen horde they were up there in their toasty busses taking swigs from a half pint, shooting a little dice, having their way with some party dolls.

It wasn't right.  And one evening a woman spoke up.  This was something new.  Normally one just huddled and muttered to oneself about how wrong it was that we had to wait like that.  We were thinking of our own frozen toes and how dinner was getting cold, but this was our own personal injustice we never thought of ourselves being a group.

But then the woman spoke up. I don't recall her age or her appearance or anything about her, but she spoke up.  And then there was some muttered agreement from the crowd, then more.  And then people began to speak up, and then she was making some improvised speech, voicing what was in our hearts, and we were one with her, pointing at the bright lights of that bus just down the street that was just sitting there.  Just fucking sitting there.  Accusing fingers were raised, there was some stomping of feet, we were a mighty army and we were going to, going to what?

Well nothing it became crystal clear as a chill wind blew away the warmth from our waving arms, our stomping feet.  Our leader, our spokeswoman, our La Pasionaria, suddenly became just some batty crazy lady.  We shook our heads ruefully and looked down the street towards the bus that was still not moving.

Just a little story.  I was going to use it eventually to lead into stoicism vs utilitarianism, but maybe next post.

The Psychology of a Riot

Like many words in the English language, "hysteria" has more than one definition.  For the purposes of this discussion, I define hysteria as a state of temporary insanity which causes people to exhibit bizarre behaviors that are inconsistent with their usual conduct.  Mass hysteria is just a bunch of people becoming hysterical at once.  Once initiated, hysteria sweeps through the crowd like wildfire.  Of course all crowds do not become hysterical so, in the ones that do, something must happen that sets them off.  It is not necessary for all the participants to be aware of this triggering event, once mass hysteria gets started it takes on a life of its own.  It is possible for someone who knows how to deliberately work a crowd up to the point of hysteria.  This is called "inciting a riot", and is illegal in most jurisdictions in the civilized world.  I think these inciters are the "instigators" to which Uncle Ken referred.  They may be trying to advance an agenda or they might just get a kick out of causing trouble.  

Mass hysteria is only one of the factors that may be at work when a peaceful demonstration turns violent.  There are the "hijackers", people who see the gathering as an opportunity to advance an agenda of their own, be it political or personal.  I think most of  the looters fall into this category.  Then there are the thrill seekers, people who are drawn to the gathering the same way that "firebugs" are drawn to a fire.  Throw in some curiosity seekers and/or counter protesters, and you have a recipe for disaster.  The more people you have in a crowd, the harder it becomes for the original organizers to maintain control.  This is why I previously said that I would not attend a protest demonstration if Jesus Christ Himself was leading it.