sounds and smells

I had never heard of the Deagan Building.  What a good story.  How nice to think of the chimes ringing throughout the neighborhood and telling the time in addition.  I reckon it knitted the neighborhood together like a village inside the city.  I looked up that link and that is the exact melody that the chimes in Altgeld Hall, the castlelike Math building in Urbana used to play complete with the set of four strokes marking the quarter hour.  I had a friend who through some colossal  bad judgement ended up in the city hoosegow for a few weeks.and late in the quiet night lying in their beds they could hear the chimes reminding them that time was passing around them while they were stuck in their cells.

The nearest thing we had to that in our bungalow belt neighborhood was the Nabisco bakery two miles down south, and if the wind was just right the neighborhood was toasted with the smell of fresh baked cookies.  Downtown is blessed with the Blommer chocolate factory on its northwest edge and maybe once a week the vats are percolating and the wind whispers from the northwest with the sweet smell of chocolate that puts a little spring in the step of the maddening crowd.

Lasagna sounds nice for Christmas.  I guess maybe then you avoid the plethora of plates of potatoes and peas and stringbeans and rolls and some kind of meat and passing butter and salt and pepper and frankly it is just a lot of bother when all you want to do is eat and have some conversation with people you see only a few times a year.  If you've got little kids then they are going to want to play with their toys all afternoon.  (I remember the Christmas when the whole neighborhood got burp guns and spent the whole afternoon and early evening shooting each other.), but maybe if you are older and you are just your family who sees each other everyday the movies are a good idea.

When NPR started in on the Christmas Crapola I went to CNN and there was Trump, purportedly wishing the troops (who he has yet to visit, because of, you know, bone spurs) a merry Christmas, but really just running through insults of his enemies.  When I got to my sister's and my Trumpist nephew was out of the room, the conversation went immediately to Trump, but as soon as we realized what we were doing we changed the subject.  Not only is Trump ruining the country he is ruining the art of conversation.

Last I heard the Syrians were rejecting the Kurds.  Did you know that Saladin who retook the holy land from the crusaders was a Kurd.  Technically the guys in Syria are not just the Kurds, but the YPG, an interesting group that you may read about here.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/People%27s_Protection_Units   .