firery furnaces and easy wooden chairs

 One of my jobs as a janitor at Herrin Hospital was collecting the bags of trash from each floor and hauling them out to the incinerator and tossing them into its flaming gaping maw.  There was some kind of rope or chain that you pulled down on which would lift a metal plate and the flames greedily licked out at you as you quickly shoved bag after bag into its hungry mouth and then you would lower the plate back in place feeling lucky because you still had both arms and all of your fingers.  It was not fun like the wire basket in the alley of my childhood home.

But it did get you out of the building which was always desirable (In the winter I prayed for snow so that I could go outside and shovel it.), and to express my joy I would roar out one of the poems I had been forced to memorize in college.  Turning and turning in the widening gyre the falcon cannot hear the falconer, was a big favorite of mine.

The other janitors noticed and sought out an orderly who was a friend of mine and asked, What's with that guy?  And he would reply. Well, he's from Chicago, and they would nod their heads, and say Ohhhh, and that would take care of that.

That chair is not only a nice place to plunk your butt, it is also a work of fine craftsmanship. I look forward to hearing if it is also a pretty good ride.  Looks like it might be, but then it might be like that electric train that you finally get for Christmas after bugging your folks all year and then on the first day realizing that all it does is go around and around in an oval.  Is the motion soothing or does it become annoying after a little while?

My dad had a big wooden swivel chair in the back room by the desk which held our important papers whatever they were.  When I returned to my childhood home after going broke in Texas it was still there and I was thinking that it would be a nice thing to have in my apartment after my folks were gone.  It wasn't a big deal, but it was in my thoughts.  After my dad died and my mother gave up the house to live in that retirement home on Ashland Avenue on the north side, I was on one of my trips to the old hood, and there it was in the alley behind our house, just feet away from where I once burned the paper garbage in the wire basket.  

It looked so sad awaiting the garbage truck, and maybe I could rescue it, take it back to my apartment and give it a place of honor.  But I was a couple miles from the el station, and how would I get it into the train, and then it would be another mile after the train.  I left it in the alley.

Get off my lawn!

The recent bit of trash talk is something I can get behind; I am not without experience in the matter.  Way back when, in the summers of '66 and '67, I was a janitor (Chicago Flat Janitors Local #1!) at a high rise apartment building on Lake Shore Drive at Addison.  It was one of those glass box twin-tower types, 28 stories with about 7 hundred units in total.  As the guy at the bottom of the totem pole one of my main duties was to empty and burn the trash, this being before EPA restrictions on garbage incineration.

Just as Uncle Ken noted, each tower had a garbage chute, and at the bottom was a big steel container, like a lidless Dumpster (TM).  These were the days before the ubiquitous plastic bags; garbage was wrapped in newspaper or in a paper bag.  Not a tidy system and it could get messy especially when the chute got backed up.  You would swing the bin out of the way and a bin's worth of garbage could be piled up on the floor.  That's why God made shovels, I think.  Before you put an empty bin under the chute you had to hit a switch that ran hot water from the top of the chute above the 28th floor.  When the water ran clear you shoveled up any crap, squeegeed the floor and you were good to go...to the other tower's garbage chute.

The fun part came next when you pushed the bin over to the gas-fired incinerator and burned all that stuff up.  Exploding aerosol cans were always fun, had one whistle past my ear one time.  When everything was burned up the incinerator had to be cleaned and emptied; easy enough but coat hangers would get hung up in the grates so you had to crawl halfway into the thing to get them out.  All of the ashes were shoveled into a different dumpster, this one with a lid.  Incinerators are marvelously efficient at reducing the bulk of trash but not so good for air quality, but that's enough trash talk for today.

-----

I think I mentioned that my sister and her hubby have moved into a new house.  They are still getting organized and unpacking and I inherited another family treasure (to me), the kind of thing that if you buy it in a store it's an antique but if it's been in the family for years it's just more old crap.  I didn't know it existed but here I am, officially an old fart with my great-grandfather's rocking chair.

There are no markings or names on it, so it could have been made by anyone, most likely some local guy but whoever made it knew what they were doing.  This is a very comfortable chair, perfect for watching the TV; too bad I don't have a porch to sit on and yell at kids.  Get off my lawn!

 

Halloween

 At last.  Not that I am planning on kicking out the jams or going out trick or treating.  It's that the month of October was just too jam-packed for an old gent such as myself.  A trip to DC, a trip to Nap Town including a side trip past Columbus to Newark Ohio, cataract surgery, and the seventh or eighth annual Punkin Palooza.  

Cataract surgery was on my other eye and I was expecting to have super duper vision.  It's better than with the single super eye, but not all that much better, and now I have to carry around reading glasses wherever I go.  It was my habit before to take off my glasses when I wanted to read something, now I have to remember to put them on.  Hopefully it will become second nature over time, and while not super duper my current long vision is still more super than it was before.

The trip to DC was okay, but I am not much for monuments and the city part of DC was quite disappointing.  Indy was ok, and it was great to see a Sullivan bank restored, but it was only the exterior, still the whole town seemed to be on the rise from a fading industrial city  to more of a cheery tourist town, and a night in a motel bar where strangers from all over join together in a conversation, priceless.  

I am an early riser and I woke up at 4 AM both in DC and Columbus, and of course I had to get a newspaper.  There is nothing like walking down empty streets of a dark city you do not know at all at 4AM.  Exhilarating.  In Columbus the newspaper was in a gas station down the hill on the other side of a river over a poorly lit bridge, a good place to get mugged, but even that was a bit of a cheap thrill, the kind that I like.

The Palooza was exciting also in that my former punkin connection pulled out with only a week's advance notice.  It's not easy getting forty punkins delivered to your building, but the little store came through and everybody had a good time.

Saturday I went to the memorial of a good friend of about ten years.  He had medical problems and they got worse and his doctors seemed to be fiddle faddling around, and when he finally had surgery I was relieved.  The surgery came through more or less okay, but then he was stuck in the hospital and there were complications and then a slow slide and he never did make it back to his cozy apartment in Humboldt Park.

He was born to religious fanatics in Flint Michigan and had early success playing the French horn, but he took glory in that and not in The Lord and he got kicked out of the family.  He scrambled around, got into U Michigan, and then a year in Stockholm studying Chinese, then in Chicago driving a cab and working with some researchers, and then Burkino Faso for the Peace Corps and falling in love with a woman there and marrying her but she had a heart defect that they couldn't cure in Africa and the USA wouldn't let her in unless he had a job and health insurance and he got a job teaching school for mean nuns who he dared not piss off because if he did his wife would die.  Had a kid with her and she divorced him.  Met him when he came to my Saturday watercolor class and we both rode the Red Line back from it and got to talking, and then we saw each other regularly.  The last five years meeting at a corner bakery and exchanging opinions of shade tree philosophers deep into the day.

The memorial was a nice.  His daughter and the wife who divorced him set it all up, nice gallery, nice food, many of his art works displayed, and you are walking around thinking what an extraordinary guy and leaving with a glow and walking out in the sunset and realizing you will never see him again.

Well happy Halloween Gentlemen.

My calendar is now clean clear to Thanksgiving.

more dumps and bears

That sounds like the wild wild west, everybody driving their garbage down to the dump.  I imagine they waited until they had a full truckbed's worth, and that must have been paradise for the local critters.

I just saw a movie, Sweet and Lowdown where the star, a jazz guitarist, liked to go down to the dump and shoot rats, and seems to me that I have heard of this in more than one movie so I guess that is where the no shooting comes in.  I dunno isn't shooting rats a lot like shooting kangaroos in that Australian movie?  Can't say that I approve.

Those big old smelly garbage trucks still lumber down the alleys of Chicago.  Come to think of it they are not that smelly anymore, and nor are the alleys.  I think that's because now we have these huge hard rubber (or something) garbage cans which hold a lot of garbage I guess so that it does not fall out of the can.  At night they look like burly sentinels keeping watch on what goes on in the back of the backyard.

In Champaign the city didn't pick up the garbage, you had to pay somebody to come by and get it and if you didn't pay they didn't come, and I remember more than once waiting till dark and gathering all the garbage together and running down the alley and dumping it into a neighbor's dumpster.  Exciting times.

Speaking of exciting times back when I was in high school we would throw all our wet garbage in one can and all the paper stuff in another and then I would get to take all the paper garbage and put it in a big wire can and burn it.  Good times for a boy in his early teens.

Hibernation, you wonder where that comes from.  Well, nothing much going on foodwise in the wintertime, better to conserve your resources. But all those physical changes, but Mother Nature plays the long game and in all those years there is plenty of time to tweak anything into fine working order.

But I am struck by Mama bear.  Waking up to little ones suckling on what little sustenance she has after a long winter's nap, and taking them out into the wild, showing them all these bear things that they will have to know, displaying that wild protectiveness which has probably taken the lives of many hunters and innocent trekkers wanting nothing more than to see the glory of nature, and then just letting them go and they never phone her late on a Sunday or send her a Mother's day card full of hearts and gooey prose.  She just goes on to make more baby bears.

And Papa bear, what a louse huh, find em, fuck em, forget em, and he's off to do something stupid like stick his big fat nose into a beehive, or something shooting rats stupid like killing his own cubs.  I think his thinking there is that who knows really who is the daddy of those cubs and with them out of the way perhaps Mama will see him in a more tender way.  I dunno, why doesn't he try chocolates and roses?

Garbage In, Garbage Out

 In the olden days, there were no garbage trucks around here.  Each township and the City of Cheboygan had their own dump, and it was the responsibility of the residents and even businesses to bring their own garbage to the dump and throw it into the hole.  When the hole was almost full, somebody would come with a bulldozer, dig a new hole, and use some of the dirt to cap off the old hole.  Periodically, the garbage would catch fire, either accidently or on purpose, which would reduce its volume and make the hole last longer.  Furniture and appliances were usually not thrown into the hole, they were set aside, and people were free to salvage them for spare parts or whatever.  It was said that some guys brought more stuff home from the dump than they brought to it.  

Sometime in the 1970s, a couple of guys with pickup trucks started hauling people's garbage to the dump for money.  About that time, the state passed a number of burdensome dump regulations like no shooting, no burning, no salvaging, and the garbage must be buried at the end of each day.  It got so that going to the dump was no fun anymore.  The two guys bought more and bigger trucks and eventually sold their business to a conglomerate chain that periodically raised their prices, which led to the rise of several competing firms.  The townships finally found it cheaper to pay the professionals to park large roll off dumpsters at the dumps and haul them away when full than to operate the dumps the old- fashioned way.  The dumps were now renamed "transfer stations", and the final resting place of the garbage was called a "landfill". 

It is my understanding that mama bears give birth during hibernation.  Maybe they wake up for the blessed event, but they soon drift back off to sleep leaving the cubs to nurse at will.  By the time spring breaks forth, the cubs are strong enough to leave the den and follow Mama around.  Bears mate in the spring or early summer, but they have a thing called "delayed implantation" which stalls the gestation and birth process till they are back in their dens for the winter.  A mama bear with cubs will usually not mate during the cubs' first season.  After the second hibernation, the cubs strike out on their own and Mama starts working on another family.  Daddy bears are not very nice, they will kill young cubs if they can, to induce Mama to mate again.  That's why mama bears are so protective of their cubs.  

dumps and bears

 I have to inquire about this dump thing.  To me and to others in the google universe a landfill is a dump, and vice versa.  There was a ton of information about landfills in the google world, more than I want to get into this morning, the last morning of Indian Summer.

So what is a dump in upper Michigan?  Is it a place where the local garbage trucks end their route? I am guessing it was just a big pile of garbage open to god's eyes and to bears' also, and a transfer station would be a dump protected from god's eyes and bears' also.  And when that gets filled up it goes to a landfill.

Chicago has four landfills each over a hundred miles from the city, some recycle and some incinerate and not sure what the others do because there is a ton of information and Indian summer is fast fading away, into the dump of history.

I collect my garbage in plastic grocery bags inserted into plastic pails, not the height of house beautiful but the garbage does not complain.  When the bag is full I take it down the hallway and toss it down a chute.  I can hear it bounce a couple times as I make my way back home and then two doors down, I wait for it, there is that distant thud.  The garbage is out of my hands.

I have heard, but have not gone to the effort of seeing it, that there is a big, oh I guess we call them dumpsters, at the end of the fall, and at some point it must become full and some garbage truck empties it and hauls it away 100 miles to one of our landfills.  I should know more about this, but I don't know when I will get around to it.

 They visit them in late winter and check out the cubs while Mama is asleep.  

Wait a minute, what are the cubs doing with mama in late winter?  Don't they give birth in the spring and the cubs by fall are on their own?  Its says it takes them four to eight years to mature so maybe the cubs hibernate with Mom?

Then there is this Female bears give birth during the hibernation period, and are roused when doing so.

Whoa mama, so she is wakened by giving birth?  Wow, so she has to not only make up for her loss over the winter, she must provide fodder for her cubs to grow strong and healthy too.  Oh she must be ravenous.

Female bears generally spend either 1.5 or 2.5 years with their young. In many ways, the pressures of bear life favor the shorter option — a mother with cubs cannot mate, so the more time she spends with each litter, the fewer offspring she'll have over her lifetime.

Well very well then, I have learned a lot about bears this morning.

Ain't No Bears in Beaglesonia

 At least not lately.  There were lots of them around here back in the '70s because they hadn't been hunted in a while and they had learned to feed at the township dump.  These are black bears, not the grizzlies that are found out west.  They mostly avoid people, but they can become habituated just like coons and coyotes.  "Habituated" is what they call it when wildlife gets used to being around people but does not become tame or domesticated.  This is not considered good for them, or for the people either.  About the time I moved up here, the DNR opened a limited bear hunting season just to teach the critters some respect and, sometime later, all the township dumps in Michigan were ordered closed and replaced with "transfer stations".  Garbage is deposited in a steel container, and a truck comes to haul it away when full to a licensed certified landfill.  A landfill is like a dump, but it's farther away and more expensive to use.  I think there are still a few bears in the area, but they stay out of town.  I haven't seen a bears, bear tracks, or bear poop in decades.

Other parts of Michigan, especially in the UP, have more bears than we do.  There are no natural caves to speak of, so hibernating bears have to dig their own dens.  They would have a hard time doing that in Beaglesonia because of the high water table.  Our DNR asks that they be informed of any dens people find.  They visit them in late winter and check out the cubs while Mama is asleep.  She will be hungry when she wakes up in the spring and will travel long distances in search of breakfast.  Bears will eat anything that doesn't eat them first so, if you don't want bears around your house, don't leave anything remotely edible nearby.

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/crime/woman-escapes-bear-attack-by-punching-it-in-the-face/ar-AA13irBM?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

We didn't get any snow out of this last round, but I understand that some places in the UP got a foot or more.  We did get some blowing, though, and lost our power for about three hours one morning.  It could have been worse, though, some areas were still without power all the next day.

I'm not surprised that the Trumpists are coming down on the wrong side of this Ukraine thing.  Trump has expressed admiration for Putin and his ilk in the past.  What an asshole!

Bears?

 Bears?  Are there bears pooping in the swamp?  I remember asking you about pumas and maybe wolves, but not bears.  I reckon that they are not the kind that pull hikers off the trail for a snack, but probably the kind that are a nuisance and maybe a danger to small pets, though you often see cats chasing them away on youtube and fb.

Bird feeders.  Doesn't sound too dignified for the king of the woods to be shaking some wooden box for some seeds, but I guess when you are hongrey after a long winter's nap you don't worry too much about dignity. 

And what about hibernation?  Are there enough caves for all the bears in he world?  Do they hibernate elsewhere?  Do people ever come across hibernating bears?  Never seem to hear about that.

How about that snow?  I guess it stopped just east of the UP and northern Wisconsin.  Didn't hear of any of your local metro areas buried deep in snow.

How about those Trumpies wanting to cut down on stuff for the Ukrainians?  I guess that Putin charm spreads a long way from Mar A Lago.

Took the liberty of trimming a couple pages of blank space from the end of your last post.

I guess that is all I have this morning.

Covid is Alive and Well in Red China

Remember a couple years ago when Covid was new, and the Red Chinese were bragging that they were the only country in the world that had a handle on it?  Well, it seems they still have a handle on it, or it might be more accurate to say that Covid still has a handle on them.

"The world has largely moved on from Covid - except for China, where towns and cities are still shut down overnight."

"Driven by Mr. Xi's approval, China's lockdowns have been incessant, unpredictable and hellish by most accounts. They have sparked food shortages, crippled healthcare access, hit the economy hard and even spurred rare signs of protest."

https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/world/the-politics-driving-china-s-hellish-lockdowns/ar-AA13clHe?rt=0&ocid=Win10NewsApp&referrerID=InAppShare

I read with interest Uncle Ken's account of how his hippie friends dealt with the racoon in their house.  My parents in Palos Park once had their crawlspace attic infested with a whole family of the critters.  They didn't get into the living quarters, however, except for the time that one of them fell through a hole in the ceiling and ended up inside a cupboard.  I don't remember how they got it out of there, maybe my mother's screaming and slamming the cupboard door caused it to scurry back up from whence it came.  Anyway, my dad consulted with an expert from the Cook County Forest Preserve who advised him to find out how they got in, and when he was sure they were out on night patrol, nail a board over the hole.  Then, for Heaven's sake, stop feeding them!  Our own DNR puts out a notice every spring that people should make sure their garbage cans are securely covered and even take down their bird feeders for a few weeks until the recently awakened bears have moved on and found another food source.

As for those assholes in Australia, what can I say?  Death is not pretty under the best of circumstances, but some people can make it really ugly.  I would never watch a movie like that.  If I want to see death, destruction and cruelty, all I've got to do is tune into the evening news on TV.  

                  

murder one three

 Saw an Australian movie Wake in Fright a couple months ago.  Out in the outback is this city slicker teacher fella who was kind of Shanghaied into the gig and it will cost him a pretty penny to get out of it and away from the company of the outback oafs.  It's summer vacation when we see him and he is on his way back to Sydney and his very attractive blonde girlfriend, but somewhere along the line he gets into a coin flipping gambling game and makes enough dough to buy himself out of his fiscal slavery.  But then of course he goes back for more and losing everything he has.

To his surprise the oafs take him in.  They are a rough bunch and drink a ton, but they have a friendly nature.  To his surprise he rather likes them, they are kind of cool with their not giving a fuck about anything and getting drunk a lot and who doesn't like to drink a lot, and by the time he goes back to his schoolhouse he has become one of them and is happier in his skin.  

There is a big kangaroo hunt in the movie where maybe twenty kangaroos are slaughtered, the outback oafs drive out into the outback and freeze the poor creatures in their headlights and kill them until they get bored or run out of bullets and drive off leaving the dead animals on the ground.

The movie was made in 1971 before cgi and before there were rules about harming animals in movies.  The killing is real.  The filmmakers teamed up with a kangaroo hunting crew and got them a big spotlight to freeze the animals.  The idea being that these animals would be killed anyway so it's not like they are guilty of killing them, just taking advantage of the mayhem by filming it.

Things got out of hand, the hunters got drunk, they shot too many, shot them uncleanly, eventually the filmmakers had to pretend there was an electrical short in the spotlight just to get it to end.  https://the-take.com/read/in-awake-in-frighta-how-was-the-kangaroo-scene-filmed

It's a terrible thing but I watched it, and then since I watch my movies twice I watched it again.

So why am I even bringing it up?  Well in telling my story I was afraid people would get the idea that I was coming down on hunting, which I am not.  Beagles puts his deer in the freezer.  I love my Italian beefs and I know where it comes from.  It's in our human nature, which is something I want to get around to discussing later.

This story has been on my mind since I saw the movie and it's kind of illustrative of what Beagles-style hunting is not and I wanted to make that point, and I have the time and I love to write.

murder one two

 So I have been thinking about that story about the guy with the crossbow. It was about fifty years ago and there is nobody around to corroborate details.  I didn't live in that house, nor did I witness the incident, but I heard about it second hand before and after.

We were all more or less peace and love hippie types.  We had no acquaintance with guns. and it was surely illegal to shoot a varmint in the city.  Coming to think of it likely a crossbow would have been illegal too, but guns were a weapon of war, and crossbows were kind of a sporting thing, and weren't there zen archers, almost organic even.

It seemed like a good idea to me at the time.  Something had to be done about the critter and this seemed nice and clean and almost sporting.  I remember the guy talking about it beforehand, and like I said I didn't voice any objections, and later I heard that the mission had been accomplished, and I expected there would be a buzz for a week or two, but nobody, even the shooter, wanted to talk about it.

I did not see the racoon lying on the table amid the cereal that had seemed like such a boon before the bow snapped, blood seeping out of the wound into the soft clean fur, that surprised look frozen on his face, his little hand-like paws curled back.

What did it seem like to the gentle folk who had calmly discussed the matter in prior days, who had thought that this was a practical solution to their problem, but had never expected so much blood, the little paws curled up, and realizing their complicity, the horror.

Well I am surmising all this.  I only witnessed this second hand and that was fifty years ago, so who knows.  Probably it would work better as a short story.  Well I'll get back to you on all this.

murder one

 

Well how is that for humongous?  Not quite the fashion plate that I imagined Old Dog was after his op.  But like him mine was gone the next day and yes, now I have a tough regimen of eye drops to take for like a month.

Before the op the bad eye though dark and increasingly blurry still had the ability to read newspapers and books if I held them right up to my eye.  But now the closer I hold the reading material up to my eye it just gets blurrier.

I have entered the world of reading glasses.  Anywhere I go I have to carry them with me in case I need to read anything.  A new habit to learn for an old dog, and note that I say an old dog rather than the old dog.

I vaguely remember putting that little notch against the string and trying to hold it there while I pulled it back, and the rubber tipped arrows went approximately where I wanted them to, which is pretty good I guess, but I was more a Captain Video guy than a Cowboy and Indian guy and I was more into ray guns.

Way back in Champaign days I knew some people who lived in a house along with a raccoon or possum or suchlike critter who was an unwelcome guest.  One of the guys had been a crossbow guy before he became a hippie, and he volunteered, to take care of the situation and camped out in the kitchen with a box of tasty cereal spread across the table.  

I am sure that he was most likely doing this to impress the chicks because why else do we guys do anything.  And he waited there maybe a couple hours, maybe camouflaged or hidden and then the critter made his entrance and the archer's aim was true and the critter was dead, and he was ready to bathe in the glory of a successful hunter.

But when the chicks saw it with the bolt in its belly, they were all eeewww, and many of the guys were too.  There was the blood and the body which was gross, but also well, it seemed like murder.  Stalking the prey was one thing, but putting out bait and waiting there was something awfully premeditated which makes it murder one.

He did not win the hearts of any ladies, or the admiration of his aim from the guys.  The dead critter's body was removed unceremoniously and the whole affair was never spoken again.

How Hard Can It Be?

A bow is certainly more difficult to shoot accurately than a rifle, and a crossbow is somewhere in between.  The main reason archery hunting is allowed where firearm hunting is not allowed is that the range of an arrow is limited to about a hundred yards.  A rifle bullet can travel a mile or more beyond its intended target if it doesn't hit something before that.  Okay, that's the maximum range, not the maximum effective range.  Most reasonably competent bow hunters try to get within 30 yards of a deer before shooting at it.  A seasoned expert with state-of-the- art-equipment might stretch it to 50 yards, but that's about it.  A crossbow might be more accurate than a regular bow, but its range is about the same.  Medieval archers used to shoot much farther than modern hunters, but they were only trying to put an arrow over the castle wall, not in the lung area of a deer.  Like Uncle Ken once said, "When you're shooting fish in a barrel, all you've got to hit is the barrel."

Modern muzzle loaders can be accurate up to 200 yards, or so I have been told.  There is no place on my property where I can see over a hundred yards, and most of my shots at deer have averaged about 50 yards over the years.  The challenge of a muzzle loader is that you only have one shot, which is usually all you need.  My regular rifle is also a single shot, with the difference being that I can reload it in a matter of seconds, while the muzzle loader takes several minutes.  I have read that some frontiersmen in days of yore got it down to a minute or less, but they had a lot more practice than I will ever have.  

I'm not sure when the cap lock was invented, but I'm pretty sure it wasn't before the 19th Century, so Hawkeye most likely carried a flintlock.  I understand that, with those babies, there is a second or two delay between the time you pull the trigger and the ignition of the powder charge, which means you have to hold rock steady the whole time.  That's if the gun fires at all, which it often fails to do.  The cap lock was more reliable, and the modern firing pin primer is more reliable than that.  

Mid October already?

How was your week?

Fine and dandy (thanks for asking) and pretty much like the all weeks have been this year.  No drama to speak of and there is plenty of stuff to keep me busy, if I choose to do so.  I seem to have much more time on my hands than my esteemed colleagues; if I don't have time for something I make the time, one way or the other.  It seems to be working out okay but I'm also making an extra effort to avoid stress in all of it's many guises.

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Mr. Beagles posted a recent link about electric vehicles (EVs) and it is on target.  There are unintended consequences of EVs that are going to bite businesses and governments in their collective asses.  I'll let others dive down that rabbit hole while I enjoy the show.

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Too much funny stuff in the news for me to comment on except to mention that it's like watching a train wreck as political careers implode; it's hard to look away.

But I thought of something as I was going through my archives.  Quite a few of my old drawings have faded dramatically, almost to the point of invisibility.  They were drawn with Sharpies, the supposed permanent markers just like some clowns like to use to sign documents.  Sure, the drawings are more than fifty years old but they were stored properly, out of direct sunlight.  Permanent, they ain't.

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There must be different protocols for cataract surgery these days.  Uncle Ken mentions a humongous bandage whereas I had a clear plastic eye shield that was taped in place and removed the next day.  I had a lot of eye drops to use prior to and after the surgery, up to four times a day with multiple medications.  More than a month's worth, I think, and I wonder if Uncle Ken had the same thing to deal with.  Anyway, an easy procedure with no discomfort.

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When Uncle Ken mentioned the guy who was hunting deer with a crossbow I immediately thought of The Deerslayer and The Last of the Mohicans.  I should have made the association with Mr. Beagles and his muzzle loader much earlier; Hawkeye sounds better than Mr. Beagles, don't you think?

It is a bow and arrow but how difficult could that be to learn?

Easy to learn, and like many other things, difficult to master.  I'm beginning to think that either Uncle Ken has never picked up a bow and arrow or he just likes to troll.

Da bank

 It's been a week now since the last post.  I thought that that post about deer slaying right in the city limits would have roused Beagles (I picture him in a shirt with lacy sleeves like Claude Strawberry in Hee Haw) to chime in, but nothing from him this whole exciting week.

Did I say exciting week?  As serious scholars of Uncle Ken will know, when I first went in for cataracts I only had one eye done, because, though faulty, I could see up close with the other eye and I didn't want to lose that ability to see with my nose pressed up against the paper.  I didn't want to be like so many of my friends who whenever they want to read a menu have to whip out their reading glasses.

But that other eye kept getting worse, not only was sight blurry, but it was also dark, something had to be done.  I suppose I could have gone for making it my reading eye, but I remember the thrill I got just looking at things through my super eye after the first operation and I wanted to have that thrill again.  

Well Old Dog knows the drill, they wrap you up like you are about to have your appendix out or maybe they are going to go exploring, and then they just fiddle with your eye a little bit, uncomfortable but no big deal, but no happy juice, no nothing, bam, they are done and you are crawling back into your Earth clothes with a humongous bandage on your eye.  The next day you come back in and they take off the humongous bandage and bam, now I had two super eyes.  It was pretty cool, but not as much of a thrill as getting the first one, and now when I bring the paper close to my eyes the writing never becomes clear, and I have to drag out those stoopid reading glasses, then remember to take them off when I am done, on, off.  I am hoping this soon becomes one of those habits that you just do without having to think about it.

That was Friday and Saturday.  Monday at sunrise I was getting on that old grey dog for the four hour trip down to Nap Town.  Rolling out of the city and into that beautiful midwestern landscape with the sun peering over the horizon was quite the adventure of with two super eyes.

After many beers Monday night Tuesday found us driving east into the odd state of Ohio in search of  Newark Ohio and its Sullivan bank.  I had seen this bank maybe ten years ago and it was a wreck then, it's proud visage marred by neglect and ugly alterations during the times it hosted a jewelry store, and soda fountain, and a butcher shop.  But civic pride and a big grant from the feds to clean up their sewage problem which maybe had money left over they have been able to restore the outside, and are about to begin on the inside.

And improvements seemed to be going on all over the town.  These towns where Sullivan built his banks were all set on becoming the next new metropolis and they had a big courthouse building surrounded by brand spanking new two or three story buildings in that ornate 1920's style.  But growth never came so they were never replaced with glass and steel towers.  They look pretty crappy when they go to hell, but when they are restored they have a charm that these modern buildings can't touch with a ten foot pole.  And the latter is what is going on in Newark, which ten years ago looked like an industrial city on the skids with hard eyed citizens just waiting for you to duck into an alleyway so they could slip in the shiv.  Last week it looked like a place where you could get a fancy latte and sit down with a well-dressed crowd and discuss Spinoza while bright young folks brought authentic color swatches into the shining new bank.

And that is all folks.  How was your week?

slaying deer in the windy city

 Just yesterday I mentioned the possibility of Beagles returning to the city of his birth and then this appeared in the Sun-Times.  It is a bow and arrow but how difficult could that be to learn?

https://chicago.suntimes.com/2022/10/5/23389008/hunter-chicago-first-deer-legally-harvested-modern-time

RIP Loretta

 I saw that moon. This is what it looked like downtown at an earlier time in the evening with a much inferior android camera.

Almost a beautiful summer.  It was quite a sweatbox for a week or two in early June when I had my opening.  Quite a different city from when you are watching a movie on the roof with the cool breezes of the evening and when you are death marching down State in the early afternoon with the sun beating down and the trucks honking and that casual stink that can arise from the city at that time of day.

But yeah, better than Florida.  Not only hurricanes and DeSantis but also the bugs never die.  Drain flies, yes that is what they are, never knew what to call them before.  Never heard of no-see-ums either.  I am familiar with the clouds of gnats you walk through on an otherwise fine summer evening, but I don't know what comes indoors.

And, though I style myself as The Tomato Whisperer, I have no idea why the plum tomatoes would come up purplish.  And I don't know about their sexes, and why some plants need the mixture of pollen to bear fruit while some don't, is another thing I don't know and I would go to the wiki but I hear it is complicated and I want to do more things with my morning.  Like the skyline in the background.

I've written before that in the early seventies after the bar I would take my little transistor radio up from my basement apartment to the front porch of the big house and at that hour I could pull in a station from faraway Texas and listen to that good old country music I had never heard before,  In those days a country station didn't just play the current hits but also a lot of hits from like twenty years before and I heard the songs of Ernest Tubbs and Ferlin Husky that I had never heard  before.  It was a whole nother world.

I don't know most of the names listed by Dollar Country but listening to a few of the songs they sound like the country stars of the 50s who I heard between Transtar Rose hawking motor honey.  And yeah, country music on the radio has been in the toilet since around the early eighties.

Loretta Lynn was one of my favorites in those days and she has finally passed.  Well I haven't listened to her CDs in quite awhile, and I was not surprised when the obits talked about how she broke barriers with talking about divorce and not being treated right by her man, which is what they say whenever a girl singer dies, and which is all true except for the part about breaking barriers because country singers have been singing about that since before the Grand Ole Opry, and contrary to what the lame stream media would have you believe there have also been girl singers.  Just a lazy condescending attitude which pisses me off which is why I brought it up.

RIP Loretta

A nice evening in October

Seems like only a couple of weeks ago that us city slickers were enjoying beautiful summer weather with temps in the 70s and 80s and then BAM!  The Weather Gods hit the switch and suddenly it cooled down, big time, with the temps in the 50s and 60s.  No complaints, though, since it's great sleeping weather with clear skies but the transition was a bit sudden.

But who am I to make a critical observation about the weather since it's been nearly perfect all summer long?  I think of those poor folks in Florida with the fury of Ian turning their lives (and homes) upside down.  A lot of retirees from the northern states are wondering what happened, and what comes next.  Cold winters and snow don't seem so bad to me, all things considered.

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At one time I think Uncle Ken mentioned he had some tomatoes growing in his Hanging Garden of Marina City, and now I have a question for him.  My first attempt at growing Roma tomatoes from seed failed; seems I didn't know about removing that gooey coating from the seeds.  That coating retards germination and the seeds won't sprout until it's removed.  Fair deal, the second attempt worked much better.  A low yield of seedlings this time which is better than no yield.  But some seedling stalks are green and others are a reddish-purple, and I don't know why.  Are some male plants and others female?  These plants were re-potted today and I hope they succeed; you never know.

With all my plants I've been hit with an invasion of No-See-Ums, or whatever those pesky little gnats are called in your neighborhood.  Maybe I had them last year but didn't notice because of my cataracts.  They're not those little drain flies; I had them in my old place but these guys are smaller, no problem for them to sneak in through the window screen.  They live in the potting soil, munching on mold, or so I've read.  I've been keeping them in check with the old stand-by: flypaper.  You may remember it from years gone by or from old cartoons; you can still buy it, and it still works.  Great stuff.

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I know Mr. Beagles has a fondness for authentic folk music and I suspect he may enjoy some country music.  Not the contemporary "Hollywood" type but the real deal and very obscure.  I found this site today and the music is very refreshing, in my opinion, and may be worth a listen.  You can find it here: http://www.dollarcountry.org/

Nice pictures of the sun and moon.

Glad you liked them.  Here's a half-moon I shot the other night through a window screen.  Turned out well, I think.

fine dining on the mag mile

 Cooper’s Hawk has created a modern, casual dining experience with warm hospitality in an inviting upscale setting. Our culinary team has designed a contemporary American menu infused with flavors from around the world. Each dish is made fresh in our scratch kitchen, incorporating peak-of-season ingredients, and listed with a bin number to guide you to your selection’s perfect wine match.

Not the sort of place I would expect to see Beagles park his Ford truck in front of and go in and ask to see the yellow beer list.  You know all these places have some kind of cheeseburger all dressed fancy-like in case the Missus drags the old man in because it's their anniversary or something, so that the old man has something he knows what it is to order.  Let's see.

classic cheeseburger* BIN 95 Lettuce, Tomato, Choice of Cheese, Seasoned Mayo, Crispy Onion Strings 15.99

Well that is not too bad a price for fancy digs, and look at this yellow beer list:

domestic bottles 5.00 Miller Lite · Coors Light · Budweiser, Bud Light · Michelob Ultra premium bottles 5.75 

Not bad at all.  And a winery right on the Magnificent Mile, about a mile from my casa.  If  Beagles has ever occasion to return to the city of his birth we could each have a classic cheeseburger and he could down a Budweiser while I would choose something more suitable for my sophisticated taste from their surprisingly meager craft beer list.

And for just over twenty bucks we could accept their invitation  to join us for an experience filled with memorable moments built upon food, wine, and friendship. Cheers!

I trust Beagles would not mind picking up the tab with his new card.

I think I saw a Cooper's hawk in a park in St Louis once, or that's what I think the person I was with said it was.  I reckon the little birds around him knew exactly who he was and what he did because they were making such a racket, while he was trying to look inconspicuous.  For Chrissake, I imagined he was telling them, I'm just getting a little rest and I am not even hungry, especially for the likes of little squirts like youse.  

But they kept it up and he flew away and maybe he saw a shiny rectangular object in the grass and flew to the Winery and had a classic cheeseburger and  maybe something from the craft beer list because who drinks yellow beer these days when there are so many fine choices for just a few dollars more.  

The Quest For Cooper's Hawk

 The machine at Walmart refused my debit card the other day, so I went to the Credit Union today to determine the problem.  I was given the phone number of the Fraud Department and instructed to ask them about it.  It seems there is a program in the system that detects suspicious activity that is inconsistent with your usual buying habits and locks your card when any is detected. 

After listening to the recorded instructions, I pressed "3" and got through to a real person.  He was polite enough, but I had trouble understanding him because of his accent.  It wasn't Asian, Hispanic, Black, Slavic, or Southern.  I am guessing something from the East Coast, possibly New York City.  He asked me if I had bought any "Cooper's Hot Wine" lately, at least that's what I thought he said, and I told him I had never heard of the stuff, which was the truth.  After asking him to repeat himself several times, I determined that what he really was saying was "Cooper's Hawk Wine".  What threw me off was that he pronounced "Hawk" like "Hock".  I told him that I had never heard of that stuff either, which was also the truth.  He then announced that my card had been compromised so he was permanently disabling it.  He told me to go back to my credit union and apply for a new card, which I will.

Thinking about it afterward, I remembered that I know what a Coopper's hawk is.  We see one around here from time to time, and I looked it up once in my bird book.  I've got a nice photo of one somewhere, and I'll see if I can find it later.  I supposed that someone had named a brand of wine after it and resolved to look it up this evening.  A short search revealed that it's not a brand of wine but a whole chain of winery/restaurants, several of which are in the Chicago area.  If you go there, tell them I sent you.  Just kidding, those people are likely as unaware of my existence as I had been of theirs.  It's kind of spooky, though, that some computer program that I didn't even know about knows all about me, including the fact that I have never been to a Cooper's Hawk restaurant.  I suppose, if that card hacker had just bought a case of beer at the Walmart, he would have gotten away with it. 

 

 

What wise men are saying these days

  A wise man once said, "If a communist calls you a fascist, you must be doing something right."

What I was referring to was surely over the long course of WW  II many commies called Hitler a fascist, but contrary to this wise man I do not believe Hitler was doing something right.  And that phrasing.  Instead of saying that you thought something you invent a wise man who said it, not unlike a certain politician who often couched his statements by saying "Many smart people are saying..."

As for that Meloni lady, one source says one thing and another source says the opposite.  

When that Ford truck starts making funny noises and one mechanic thinks the trouble is the transmission and another thinks that problem is the color it is painted, the wise man does not shrug his shoulders and flip a coin.  He looks into the matter and figures out which source is more likely telling the truth.

Not that long ago on the Sunday talk shows you would have liberals disagreeing with other liberals and conservatives disagreeing with other conservatives, and even liberals and conservatives politely disagreeing and even agreeing with each other. 

Fox News ended that.  At first Fox had several liberals on their shows.  Does anybody remember Hannity and Colmes?  Maybe that was a remnant of the fairness doctrine which never should have been done away with.  But in every case the liberals were outnumbered by conservatives in the panels, and then disagreement became interrupting and yelling over your appointment, like a nasty bunch of third graders.  

And then they took their bad manners over to the talk shows on the more civil networks and then the liberals joined them in their bad habits at first just to defend themselves, but then I think they got to like it and so they did it all the time too, and all that yelling made for bad feelings so that there is less talk about what is good or bad about the policy and mostly it is just what is bad about the other party and it's all pretty boring and my Sunday mornings are not as much fun as they used to be.

And that was before Trump.  When the Trumpers learned the only way Trump would listen to anything had to say was to go on the talk shows they lined up.  And of course they weren't interested in what any of the moderators or other guests had to say, so they just praised Trump and demonized his opponents, and knowing that Trump liked people who were rude to the press they strove to be ruder than their fellow Trumpers.  They got kicked off the shows a few times, and it was a relief like when the obnoxious drunk gets the bum's rush out of genteel tavern.

Thankfully they are all gone now.  There is the occasional republican who is in the bag for Trump, but they don't yell as much as they used to.  But they are still just one party line against the other party line and not very interesting.

I subscribed to The Atlantic for several years.  I suppose it was more lefty than righty, but pretty close to the middle.

I was kind of fired about to tell about my trip to the nation's capital, but the morning is getting late.  And anyway I am not much of a monuments man, and downtown DC is the most boring downtown I have ever been to.

What's in a Name?

 "So, was Hitler doing something right during WW2?"

Hitler wasn't a Fascist he was a Nazi.  Mussolini was a Fascist, and the one thing he did right was make the Italian trains run on time, which no other Italian leader has been able to do before or since.  Or so I have been told.  Hitler might have had his good side too.  I understand he was kind to his nieces and nephews.  As for that Meloni lady, one source says one thing and another source says the opposite.  So, what else is new?

As for that Atlantic article, I found it interesting that a liberal was able to intelligently disagree with other liberals on an issue near and dear to their hearts, which is something my conservative ilk seems to have forgotten how to do.