For the birds

They will be able to jump on their bicycles and peddle their asses off to Michigan any time they want.

I hope this was a Freudian Slip and you meant pedal Mr. Beagles.  No need for me to speculate on the ass peddling going on around here, or so I've read.

That trail sounds excellent and I didn't know that I could ride a bike to the Indiana border right now.  Years ago the furthest I rode a bike south was to the South Shore Country Club, around 71st Street, I think.  A very nice ride along the lake with very few joggers, skaters, or other annoying pests.  Beautiful view, too.  The only downside was that I picked up a nail on my rear tire and had to walk the bike home, a long way back to the Wrigley Field area with plenty of time to ponder the foolishness of not having my tools and tire kit with me.  Didn't think I'd need them; famous last words, eh?

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How 'bout them bears?  I like living in a world where we have big predators roaming around, breaking into homes and shops and stealing cookies.  Keeps us humble, I think, to know that humans aren't always going to end up on top when dealing with other life forms on this ball of dirt.

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This past spring I went on a spiel about cold brew coffee and how great it was.  It still is, but now I found something better: the French Press.  My niece had one that was too big for her use so she very kindly gave it to me.  The Folger's has never tasted better and it's not too much of a pain to clean up after.  The elegant simplicity is a big plus in my mind, and I've been curious about that kind of coffee maker ever since I saw one used in the film The Ipress File more than fifty years ago.  If it's good enough for Harry Palmer it's good enough for me.

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To get back to Nature for a bit, there are some things that I think are simply miraculous, like this bird.  How can a bird fly thousands of miles without stopping?  What about food and water, or sleep?  The reality of this hurts my brain, it's like I could be able to run up to Beaglesonia, non-stop, and maybe do a loop around Lake Michigan for the run home.

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With the passing of Jerry Lee Lewis I think that the founders of Rock&Roll are all gone now; Little Richard, Elvis, The Everly Brothers, Chuck Berry, and one of my favorites, Bo Diddley.  There are many more whose names elude me right now but I can't forget Carl Perkins, a true giant of the genre.  I only have one of his albums, a CD with more recent artists on it and it's called Go Cat Go.  Lots of good stuff on it and worth a listen.

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Curious tale about body disposal, Mr. Beagles, with some aspects I haven't considered, like moisture content.  And here's a fun fact about what the folks in India also do about bodies besides burn them: they let the vultures eat them.  There's a regular ceremony involved and it doesn't take the birds long to pick the bodies clean.  Chinese tourists love to watch this and take pictures, which pisses off the locals.  I read this online so it must be true.

GREATEST CITY INNA WORLD!!!

 Well I suppose there are worse things than living under the wise leadership of Gutsy Gretch.  

As a child I had occasion to visit the wolverine state.  My youngest aunt lived in Grand Rapids.  It was a long road trip but those tiny wooden shoes we bought in Holland kept the peace in the backseat.  One year the Michiganders moved into a new development and it was the oddest thing I ever saw in my life.  The houses were tiny by bungalow standards, and far apart, and the streets were curvy, and the only trees to speak of were tiny saplings not much taller than I was.  Who lives like that?

Many years later when I went down to Champaign I was amazed that all the houses along a block were different, and many of them were built of wood instead of obviously superior brick.  Also if you didn't count the dorm towers there was nothing taller than three or four stories, what a hick town.

But after a few years of hanging around with my beer drinking hippie friends I never wanted to go back to Chicago again.  People were too cold and rude, all that hurly burly, and that awful racism of Gage Park, who needed it?  Not me.

Later down the road I did a couple years in southern Illinois, and there was definitely no hurly burly down there.  Maybe a little too sleepy for me and I was glad to get back to the moderate hurly burly of Champaign.  But in the middle of the eighties the hurly burly had died down so much that I could not get a job and I was off to Austin.

Not only did it have all those hills and all that music and all that Mexican and bbq food, after Champaign it was like a big city, half a million people then.  But going back to Chicago to visit the folks I noticed that it was not that big compared to Chicago.  Not that that mattered because I was never going back there.  

Except when hard times hit Texas and I was broke and without prospects.  I really didn't want to go back to Chicago, I wanted to see the world.  All those years in Champaign I had been thinking that life was pretty much the same no matter where you were, but Austin had opened my mind to how different things were in different places. 

But like I said, I had no money.  I had to depend on the folks and it seemed awfully rude to ask them for dough to say, move to Seattle when that big old attic was just sitting there.

All those years that I had been away I had been reading Chicago newspapers and I thought it was a land of unbridled mayhem, and my thought when I moved back was would I ever get out of there alive?

Last night I was sitting on the balcony of an Italian restaurant eating artisan sausages and sauteed peppers while my sister had some kind of risotto.  Below us the hurly burly of State Street burlied along.  The nighttime lights of the building twinkled and way down on the other side of the river was the marquee of the Chicago Theater.

I will not ever get out of here alive.

I rode a bike everywhere in Champaign, often back from the bar which, well, I am lucky to have gotten out of Champaign alive.  Austin though was too damn hilly to be riding a bike, and in Chicago the ride would not be the peaceful glide like in Champaign.

State Street is about a half mile from the Chicago part of that Marquette trail.  I've walked it as far as maybe 31street.  I don't think I will ever go much further, even if there are tiny wooden shoes at the end.

The Last Person to Leave Chicago Please Turn Out the Lights

I spent many a happy day in New Buffalo during my youth.  Indeed, it was on a drive back to Chicago from there that I first resolved to live in Michigan when I grew up.  I was seven years old at the time, and my father told me that I should get that idea out of my head right now.  "You can't live in Michigan," he pontificated, "nobody lives in Michigan."  "Grandma lives in Michigan," I retorted.  "Grandmas don't count, " he shot back, "nobody else lives in Michigan."  I could read pretty well by then, and I reminded him of the sign that said, "New Buffalo High School - Home of the Bisons" and expressed doubt that the student body consisted entirely of grandmas.  At this point my mother intervened because my father and I were both getting angry at each other about it.  I closed with, "Very well, I won't mention it again, but mark my words, I will be living in Michigan when I'm 21." And I was.

If this new trail is completed, Chicago kids won't have to wait to grow up before leaving the city for a better life. They will be able to jump on their bicycles and peddle their asses off to Michigan any time they want.  Good for them!

 https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/us/58-mile-trail-connecting-southwest-michigan-to-chicago-could-be-done-by-2026/ar-AA13HQ5Q?ocid=winpstoreapp&cvid=8ab38fd1374a4ac4b77c0b08240266a0&infiniteIframe=4&infiniteReadingLastFrame=true

motherless bears have a hard time when their mother is gone

 The DNR is looking for locations of denned bears in the northern Lower Peninsula to grow the surrogate sow program, which places orphaned bear cubs with mother bears.

So what's the deal here?  Are bears an integral part of the ecosystem, or do people just like to have them around?  Maybe it's to make sure that there are enough of them around for big spending out of state hunters to come up and hunt them?

What kind of asshole goes hunting bears?  I have no fault with deerslayers like Beagles who fill their freezer, but coming all that way just to kill some poor creature shitting in the woods, I don't know.  

That thing about orphaned bears sounds nice though.  Is Mama a big ol loveable ball of fur whose heart goes out to the motherless, or is she just not remember how many cubs she had when she wakes up in the spring?

Bear Follow-up

 This came in my e-mail today from the Michigan DNR.  It pertains to what I posted the other day about the DNR checking out bear dens.  It appears that they do sedate the mama bears, but it didn't say if they find them awake or just want to make sure that they stay asleep while they work on them.  

See a bear den in northern Lower Peninsula? Let us know (govdelivery.com)

The Killer

 Roughly ten years before the British invasion was the hillbilly invasion, or if you like you may call it the birth of rock and roll.

Sam Phillips, Sun studios, Elvis, Carl Perkins, Roy Orbison, Johnny Cash, all gone now, and the last one Jerry Lee Lewis now also gone.

I guess I first saw him on Ed Sullivan because that's the way things went back in the fifties.  Who was this guy playing his piano with his feet, his butt, banging away?  Well my sisters were all into Elvis and this rock and roll thing so of course I had to be against it, so maybe I didn't quite approve of him right then.  Then quick as he burst onto the scene there was that marriage to his fourteen year old, cousin, was it?  Maybe not a big deal in the south, particularly Louisiana, the wildest of the forty eight (at the time) states.  When I was in Texas, even the Texans, who were pretty damn wild themselves, clucked their tongues at the state to the east.  But kind of alarming to the rest of the country.

Anyway his career was gone.  Well not quite, he got into country music, and I kind of did too, and there he was.  Saw him maybe in the late seventies, a roadside inn twenty miles west of Champaign, not like a stage or anything just a piano in the middle of the room, maybe thirty tables around him, that was it.  He sang his sad songs, and then he was down the road.

We used to bring tapes into the watercolor class, music to paint by.  I brought in my Jerry Lee Lewis tapes once and some young girl was not impressed.  He sounds like some hillbilly trying to sound like Elvis she opined, and I guess she was not that far off.

With the fullness of time his reputation got restored some what, but he was still a wild man, sort of like James Brown, I remember reading in the papers about how he caused some late night fuss drunk at the gates of Graceland, bemoaning that this should all of been his.

I'll close with this: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=j4NquCaWIQI

How Not to Cremate a Body

 When we lived in Indian River, back in the 1970s, I used to burn our trash every day because we were using disposable diapers on our daughter and didn't want to keep them around until dump day.  We used to put the non-burnable stuff in a separate can, the dogs got the bones and food scraps, and everything else went into the burn barrel.  To help the used diapers burn, I would dump a pint or two of fuel oil on them before I lit the fire.  Fuel oil works better than gasoline as a fire starter because it burns hotter and slower.  It's safer too, I never even got my eyebrows singed using fuel oil. 

One of my dogs died in midwinter, when the frozen ground would have made it difficult to give it a proper burial, so I decided to cremate it instead.  I placed the body on top of the day's garbage, soaked the whole pile with a larger than usual amount of fuel oil, and lit the fire.  The dog's hair burned off right away, but the rest of the dog just charred a bit.  More fuel oil didn't help much, so I repeated the process every day for what seemed like a long time.  The charred carcass eventually disappeared, but my wife refused to go anywhere near the burn barrel for the rest of the winter.  This was probably for the best because it didn't smell good around there and my wife, being a non-smoker always did have a more sensitive nose than I did.

I found out later that a human, and I suppose a dog body, is about 90% water.  Before it will burn, all that water has to be cooked out of it.  What they do in India is build a big pile of carefully stacked firewood and put the body on top.  The firewood burns all night, and they sweep the ashes into the river the next morning.  They use natural gas in the US, and the only thing left is the human ashes, which go into an urn that you can put on your mantel piece or wherever you want.  

I read somewhere that, before Hitler committed suicide, he left instructions for his body to be cremated.  His staff tried to do it by just dumping gasoline on the body and touching it off, which didn't work any better than my experiment with the dog.  They didn't have time to repeat the process for days, so they buried the remains of the remains in the courtyard.  The Russians found it, but they didn't tell anybody for decades and accused the US of keeping Hitler alive in some secret location.  They finally came clean about it after the Cold War officially ended, but nobody believes anything the Russians say even unto this day.