We’re hitting the books once again. Perusing the periodicals. Reading the rag. Making our way through the magazines. Digging the Digest …
This being my grandfather’s book. I have a stash of them. It’s not much, but it’s one window into his world that I don’t otherwise see a lot. I have a lot of his old books, and we’re slowly making our way through them here. Mostly just to make fun of the things we see inside. So click the cover above to see the latest installments. If you’re not at all familiar with what we’ve added from the April 1969 issue of the Reader’s Digest, you can see the selected pieces right here.
Next week we’ll wrap up the last of this book, and then we’ll move into something that isn’t a Reader’s Digest. Oh, the decisions I’ll have to make. These aren’t difficult decisions, of course. I’ll get to each of them in time. But, still, there’s an entire plastic tub of magazines to consider. And then a few boxes and bookshelves more after that. Which will be next.
It’s something to wrestle with. Speaking of which …
We think they’re brother and sister. Sometimes they act like it. Most of the time they do not, but now that they are recently curling up with one another it’s a cute moment. It probably has to do with colder nights. But whatever it is, it is cute.
And then Phoebe put Poseidon in a dream-induced headlock:
She’s really cinched it on, as you can see, and he’s starting to fade:
The referee is going to call this at any moment:
Not really. They were both calmly dozing. And the refs, us, kind of want her to stick up for herself anyway. So even if this was cute and a sleep thing and no one minded, The Yankee and I took this as a positive sign. She’s giving him the what for!
And then someone moved and there was a repositioning:
He somehow reversed the hold.
That’s the action around here on a Friday night. I hope yours is suitably outrageous, as well.
I’m flipping through a 50-year-old periodical. My grandparents leafed through this same book. That’s how I came to have it. It sat in storage for decades and then I got to go through a bunch of things and sometimes that’s how things of no real value are inherited. Some night in an Alabama spring, perhaps, my grandfather read some of these articles, whichever ones might have interested him. I’m taking pictures of the ads with the supercomputer I carry in my pocket. (I wonder what he’d think of that.) So, you know, the same experience.
Anyway, you can check out some of these images too. We’re about halfway through this last copy of Reader’s Digest. Click the book below if you’ve been following along.
To see all of the parts of this issue I’ve photographed, click here. To see all of my grandfathers books that are, so far, on the site, start here.
Sometimes red lights aren’t a bad thing. I had just enough time at this one to see this, decide it would be a good idea to capture the moment, and then make it happen.
That’s just a thing we do now. The technology isn’t terribly impressive at this point. That we can do it is a minor modern miracle, really, but we seldom even acknowledge that these days. What’s impressive is that we sit there thinking Should I? Is it worth it? What’s impressive is how quickly we’ve adjusted and adapted to do that.
Sort of like electricity. Sure, that’s my great-grandparents wonder, and your birthright, but you only think that because it is there every day, all day. We lost power on campus today, and the hard-working electricians from the power company didn’t get the entire outage restored until late in the evening.
I was watching a group prepare a television program when everything went off. They ended up doing it with field equipment and lots of batteries. I checked in on a handful of students who were about to record some podcasts, but they were out of luck. I visited with an instructor who was set to deliver a big social media lecture with videos and slides and, oops. She did the whole thing in the dark, students looking for examples on their laptops, eyes occasionally darting up to the power icon. I gave a tour of the radio station to a high school student, using flashlights. I sat in the dark at the end of the day and caught up on a few emails, also with my eyes darting up to the laptop’s battery icon. Welcome to Indiana University, in the 19th century. Except it is nothing like that.
A view from the parking deck this morning:
That tree is pretty incredible, but I bet it will be hardly recognizable by the next time I have a chance to check on it again.
I’m proud of this tree. The leaves show up early in the spring and they’re staying for as long as possible. Not like those maples, quitters that they are.
The still-novel-to-me parking deck foreground shot:
I just looked up at this one and thought the lights and colors made for good lines:
Speaking of maples, this Red maple is probably the last one still trying. But the green is gone, the yellow is giving ground. The seasons must grind to a halt.
The Red maple, then, is nature’s traffic light. And next week, winter will be here. Until April.
Probably the next time I show you the River Jordan, it’ll be frozen.
It’s diminutive for a river, I grant you. I prefer the previous name anyway: Spanker’s Branch. Maybe there was someone named Spanker, maybe parents spanked their kids for getting in the creek. No one knows why it had that name. But from such harmless mystery good lore can emerge. As it is we have to say: Jordan was a 19th century president who didn’t think a building should be named after him, so he said just name the creek after me and by the 1920s people were calling it the Jordan River casually, and it was formally renamed in the 1990s.
Spanker’s Branch is the better name, then.
But what’s even better is the weekend. And I hope you have a great one!
Took the day for myself … and I vacuumed, because thats self-soothing. Also I slept in, and had a big lunch, and petted cats and took a few things off the DVR. So it was fine. I could do more, I could always do more, but I did enough to enjoy a casual day off.
We had a bike ride this evening. It was cold and I need shoe covers. It is also the time to wear wool socks. You only need to learn that lesson once a year. But a light windjacket and gloves kept the rest of me warm. And many people were out enjoying the first sunshine we’ve seen this week. Here’s my shadow selfie, near the end of the ride:
And here’s a little video, also near the end of the ride, cruising through a pleasant little neighborhood.
It would have been better if I’d taken this video the first time through, the sun was behind me and perfect, but I would have had to get to my phone, take off a glove and so on. Somehow that seemed easier the second time through.
We return to the books! Regular readers know this feature is an examination of my grandfather’s books. Presently, we are leafing through the April 1969 Reader’s Digest. I have four of his Reader’s Digests — which means a few weeks from now we’ll have to move to some Popular Science or some encyclopedias or something. Anyway, click the book below to see the latest.
If you want to see all of the ads I’ve digitized from this issue, click here. To see all of the books — including some early-mid 20th century elementary and middle school books — click here.
And to you, I say, happy weekend! We are going to a football game and the theater this weekend. Patrons of the arts and athletics, we are. Looks like I will need that extra hour of sleep. What are you going to do with that extra hour?
Today is Fall Break. The university gives the students the day off. Just the day, not a full week like you see in the spring. And since it was today, that means it really began in earnest on Wednesday or so. By yesterday afternoon the building had a Night of the Comet feel.
Fewer teens, yesterday and no zombies yesterday, though. Thankfully. We’re not really built or kitted out for zombies. And it would give the safety people fits.
The zombies were today.
We’ve got a new book today. This is a Reader’s Digest from 1969, and it is the last one Reader’s Digest from my grandfather’s collection that I’ve inexplicably saved and will have to do something with. Like take photographs of the ads and make fun of them. They’re dusty and moldy and I’ve realized you have to wear a mask even to deal with them. The cover on this one is pretty rough …
But some of the stuff inside is worth seeing, and in much better shape. If you click the cover you can see the first six samples from this issue. We’ll probably get about five or six weeks out of this book before we move on to some other piece. If you click here, you can see all of the books I’ve put on the site so far. There are eight textbooks, notebooks and magazines so far, and there’s a huge stack still to go.
So, anyway, the April 1969 issue has ominous titles like “Is Congress Destroying Itself?” Still? Again? “Our Son is a Campus Radical.” Get in line. “Man vs. Virus,” Now you’re just trying to scare the parents of campus radicals.
Another selection is “Can Baseball Be Saved?” Yes, Cal Ripken did it just 26 years later. I was watching at my grandparents house, where this book lived all those years, in fact the night he broke Lou Gehrig’s streak and did his lap around Camden Yard. It seems baseball is always in need of saving. Someone probably has to do it again these days. But we won’t read about it in Reader’s Digest, I bet.
“NATO: An Alliance in Search of a Future.” I think we could all argue that’s a good thing. And a weird thing, given we were still at a high part of the Cold War when this was being written. “Frenzy on the Freeways,” but mass transit will save us all, I’m sure. “From the Brink of Extinction,” some themes stick around, what can I say?
But you want something a bit more contemporaneous, I hear you say. That’s fine. Here’s some sports television the Award-Winning TM sports crew produced last night:
It’s a brief show, but they did it in one take, which I think was a first.
What’s your weekend like? We’ll have some beautiful weather, and we have to find ways to enjoy it all, while it lasts. I hope yours is incredibly long lasting.
books / Friday — Comments Off on The wind is rising; the air will soon be wild with leaves 11 Oct 19
The wind changed and Canada sent a telegram: We’ll be coming to visit soon. The note was delivered on the back of an intermittent series of rain showers this morning. You could see it in the sky and see it on the ground and you could feel the season’s first cool temperatures in the air. Fall finally showed up. It was nice that it waited this long to arrive, I suppose, because it somehow would seem greedy to ask for more summer.
Even still, no matter how much you love summer, there comes a time with hitting 90 degrees seems tiresome. These days that occurs in late September for me. Whereas fall, you want that to stick around. The air smells fine and things are crisp and all the parts of the offerings of fall seem appropriate. The leaves and some of the dishes and how every day is allowed to be different, these are the best things about autumn.
Once you get used to the idea of bracing yourself for something different every time you open a door, you fit right into fall. And about that time the whole thing changes again. But not too soon. You waited long enough to arrive, do us one more solid and forestall winter. How’s January sound to you? And of course we’ll be waiting for the early arrival of spring. Because the weather patterns here owe me, and I’d like to cash in next year in the form of spring arriving in mid-March, and thank you.
That’s really the problem. Winter is such a thing it sort of ruins the rest of the seasons. Spring arrives too late, and goes too soon. The summer is rather nice, but it’s July before you get over the shell shock of winter in April. And then from July on you are just dreading the inevitability of … that … again.
We are wrapping up the last of the fun advertisements from my grandfather’s Reader’s Digest. I’ve been slowly putting interesting things from his old books on my site. His books being one of the best ties I have to the man, it seemed like a nice exercise. Plus some of this stuff is just fun. If you click this link you can see all the books that are online so far, including some of his elementary and junior high text books. If you click this one you can see all of the images I’ve uploaded from this particular Digest, which was from October 1966. If you are all caught up, however, just click the image below to see the last four ads, from 53 years ago.
And next week we’ll start working our way through another book. I believe there’s one more Reader’s Digest in the stash, and after that we’ll dive into some other dusty and ancient tome.
I slept the day away, quite literally. But I did manage to … let’s see, I caught up on some stuff on the DVR. I was only two months behind, so this is viewed as progress. I cleaned out a part of the refrigerator and did some dishes. I admired the sink which I repaired earlier in the week. And there’s the book thing here and … really, it the day was dominated by that cold and rainy vibe.
(The title, above, is a slight adaption of a line from Humbert Wolfe, an early 20th century British poet. He was a famous author in his own time, though slightly read today. He published about 40 books in his free time, as he was also a civil servant, which seems the appropriate speed for a poet. I imagine him surrounded by a lot of tweed and smoke.)
