Here’s the aftermath of SnowOMGpalooza 2011. Bad to the north of us, just a coating of ice here.
The power stayed on, but the roads are a little slippery.
Monday
3
Jan 11
I like the vanilla ones the best
What do these jelly beans have to be joyous about? Have they been misled? Did someone at the factory tell them of the vacation home to which they would be sent?
Oh yes, there’s a beach. Lovely place. Clear, blue water. And some green. And it alternates with all the other colors. Kind of like you guys!
If you were a jelly bean this would be great news. “Home! Maybe there would be more like you, and fewer of these guys, the bums you’re having to share the box with. Tell me more about that ocean. I’d like to know the exact moment it goes from blue to aquamarine. It just sets my coloring a-glow.”
These were a Christmas gift, these jelly beans. A stocking stuffer. I’m sitting in the library trying to study and the beans are calling to me. “We’re joyous! If only you’d open this box you could hear the sound! And, also, where’s that ocean?”
They are of a Christmas theme. Sorry. Holiday theme.
I don’t take offense at the difference between Christmas and holiday as far as the marketing word choice goes. It is your product, you want to appeal to a great many customers without alienating them. That’s a sound strategy. Lately, though, there’s a bit of intellectual laziness — and a wink to the perceived intelligence of the customer base. Have a great … holiday, and enjoy the Christmas imagery.
Christmas and the celebrants thereof don’t hold the adjective jolly to themselves, but I bet you can guess who they’re hinting at here. Red and green are more of a Christmas theme. Hanukkah Harry, you’ll recall, wore blue. And the jelly beans aren’t alone. This ad campaign is still running:
The really nice thing about the jelly beans though, aside from that little bit of joy escaping in the opened box of the second picture, is that they are both delicious and kosher. The certifying rabbi’s name is on the label. It is this gentleman. I am eating kosher Irish jelly beans, approved of by a man in Liverpool, England, distributed from a company in California, purchased for me by my mother-in-law in Connecticut, hauled back to Alabama on a Delta flight. The fumaric acid — the most ominous sounding thing listed in the ingredients, and intended to add a hint of sourness, according to Wikipedia — is exhausted just thinking about it.
Sadly, they’ve yet to find the beach.
I ordered a hotel room today. This will be for a future trip, of course. Ordering a room has never been easier, except when there are ways to save money. Scope out the place I want, do one last check to make sure no one else is sneaking in with a better price under the gun. Nope, this place is still $15 a night better than the rest. It has Internet and the pictures look clean. Also there is a mini-fridge. Done and done.
So I book the room. But I find that the Best Available Rate option in the drop down box is the Fisher-Price button. It looks nice, and makes sense in that particular spot, but doesn’t do anything. The AAA rate is, in fact, six bucks cheaper a night, still. My AAA membership has lapsed.
A search ensues for the paperwork. The price looks manageable. And, since they just saved my bacon a few days ago in a cold, lonely parking deck it seems a reasonable investment. For the two of us that’s $71. The calculus kicks in for everyone here. You start subtracting from that total and vow to use AAA discounts where you can. I’ve already saved $14 bucks from that membership fee. And just wait until I actually use the AAA app on my phone!
Now I have a room. But there is no pool. This is doubly sad because it is January and suddenly I want to swim. The neighborhood association website says our pools reopen April 15th. Today is January 3rd. That’s a long way off to nurture the need to float.
All of the above is done electronically, of course. The paperless society has just led to stacks of paper categorized in more arbitrary ways, but at least the random check stub isn’t falling out of the collection. That’s one aspect of the modern economy that has perks and disadvantages. I only write approximately six checks a year now. I will still be writing 2010 in the upper right corner next October.
Seen another way, the changing of months and years hampers me on the website. I have a very complicated system for archiving the pictures like you see above. The directories are uploaded and organized on a monthly basis and each individual file is numbered sequentially. This. I believe, will mystify anyone that would like to grab an authorized jelly bean snapshot. If that technical difficulty doesn’t dissuade the unscrupulous, I can always call into action Plan B: sending in the local toughs who want to make sure no one gets wise with my pictures. They’re pricey — why do you think I’m saving AAA cash on a hotel room? — but worth it.
Anyway. I was just wondering, with the jelly bean pictures, what number they would be for December when I realized … oh yes. The flipping of the calendar.
Earlier today The Yankee said she didn’t even know what day it was. I’m not even convinced of the month. All I know is it isn’t April 15th. The pool is closed.
Lots of studying today. A lot more to come. My boss called to check on my progress. Swell guy, really.
“How is it coming? Anything I can do?”
Overwhelmed. Feeling behind. Help me shake this head cold?
I’d only recently woken up and sounded and felt miserable and didn’t mind if anyone knew it. The last several days I’ve been battling sinus troubles. There’s nothing to speak of here, this is as routine as it gets. It is frustrating and then it passes.
The last two days I’ve been feeling better. I can breathe and everything, and that puts you right back at 95 percent efficiency. That’s under the influence of Sudafed, however. You can’t take them during the overnight hours, though, so the first few steps from the bed to the pills to the steamy shower are rough.
I’m now tired of coughing, so I’m mentally prepared to feel better. And I’m tired of taking pills, so my improvement is all but assured. The Sudafed, I believe, are getting larger. They are now the size of jelly beans. They aren’t very joyous.
27
Dec 10
Roadside hypothesis and a bridge to history
This was my yesterday evening. Made it back home by around 9 p.m. thinking “There’s no place like home from the holidays.”
Though I wish I could have stayed longer, there is work to be done. And, also, the vain hope that moving 170 miles to the south will improve the temperature. It is cold in north Alabama, where the snow still looks abnormal, but the bitter chill is setting into the bones.
So that’s looking west. I headed east, and then south, and then east again. And in all of that driving I began to tinker with an hypothesis about what you can learn about a reason by the tall things you see during your travels. Here’s a partial list of last night’s sites:
Neon catfish. They like their fried fish around here.
A giant cross. It is the Bible belt.
Vulcan, the god of the forge belongs in a steel city.
The big peach, in the fruit tree region.
Then, of course, that regrettable Confederate flag.
And on the last leg of the trip the dog track’s giant triple sevens.
You could write books from just those starting blocks.
Anyway, back to the above picture. If you look east, you’d see this:
I took that particular picture four years ago after it closed. Yesterday, when I drove by it was still covered in snow.
The bridge was built in 1924 and opened in 1925. My grandmother, at Thanksgiving, showed me a newspaper clipping of the first car that went over the bridge. There was an addition made in 1959, making it one of the last truss bridges built in the state.
When they closed the narrow little bridge it was supporting something like 15,000 cars a day. Now there’s a nice, wide six-lane expanse sitting nearby.
And we’re going to call that History Monday, because the rest of the day was indoors, trying to stay warm and reading. I did make it to the mailbox. We got a card from family in New England. The theme was “Let it snow.” I bet they’d like to take that back just now.
Very cold here in Auburn still. There was a wintry mix late on Christmas day. Snowmen were made. I saw photographs.
Later this week it’ll be in the 60s.
20
Dec 10
America runs on tennis shoes
“This is a good system,” The Yankee said.
We’ve been doing our mileage at the park near her childhood home. This is the park where, two years ago in nine feet of snow and a 17-degree atmosphere that we took our engagement pictures. It was the only day I’ve ever noticed that the wind chill was warmer than the actual temperature. Apparently strange things can happen in a nor’easter.
And it was too nine feet of snow.
There was a picture where we sat on a snow covered bench. We suffered for that particular piece of art. The photograph has never surfaced. I reminded her of all of this today.
Anyway, the system is the park and then down to the nearby Dunkin Donuts.
“On the other hand” I said, “we would go broke if we followed this system every day.”
How you know I don’t have a lot of Dunkin experience. I thought “Holiddays” cup was merely a typo. Apparently it is a code meant to entice a Pavlovian response to all the regular customers that they must run to the store for another coffee. I was unaware.
We spent much of last night working in Photoshop. Such is the chore for creating the modern gag gift. We have a friend who has a particularly morbid Facebook gimmick and we’re going to bring it to life. We printed the finished product today. I’m not saying it will win Present of the Year honors, but I will say I came up with this idea last Christmas.
The great thing is that we can recycle this gag every year.
We had prime rib and Kenny-Christmas tonight, since I won’t be here later this week. I got nice clothes, a cool book and a lot of fun stuff. The best gift was when my mother-in-law donated shoes to a nine-year-old boy for me. That’s the perfect age, really. Little boys are tough on sneakers.
I grew up in that time when sneaker prices were exploding to obscene levels. Simultaneously this was a period that your peers would judge you based on your footwear. Sure, they’d judge you for most everything, but shoes were important.
I never had good shoes. I had Walmart or Payless shoes. The imitations seldom fooled anyone, and they were less than durable. At the time, it mattered; maybe it still does. Perhaps that’s why I wear shoes today — the cheapest New Balance or reasonable loafers or boats I can find — until my feet finally reject them. Shoes, I feel, have to last. That’s probably the only way I can pay my mother back for all the shoes I ran through as a kid. (Once we bought shoes on a Friday and they were destroyed before school on Monday. I still feel pretty bad about that.)
So I hope that little boy gets a nice pair this Christmas. I hope they help make a great Christmas for him and that they mean something to him. I hope he takes care of them — as much as a nine-year-old can — because that’s a great gift.
My mother-in-law, in addition to her many other charms, is a wonderful shopper. She also buys me too many presents. I like this one most of all.
13
Dec 10
Today’s history
Just the sporadic Monday history feature today. Everything else was spent up in uninteresting things like studying and laundry.
Dean E. Hallmark was an avid athlete, adventure seeker and U.S. Army Air Corps pilot. He was born in 1914 in the small west Texas town of Robert Lee. He was a standout football player, ultimately making his way to Auburn University on a football scholarship. He played there only one year, quitting school in 1936 to take flying lessons before becoming a civilian pilot.
In November of 1940, Dean was recruited by the Army and he enlisted in the U.S. Army Air Corps. After training he reported for duty with the 95th Bomb Squadron, 17th Bombardment Group stationed at Pendleton Field, Oregon. One of the first men to fly the North American B-25B Mitchell medium bomber, he caught Col. Jimmy Doolittle’s eye and ultimately flew with him on his raid of Japan in April of 1942.
This was the first offensive strike at the Japanese mainland, meant to shake the Japanese faith in their leadership and a morale boost back home after the surprise of Pearl Harbor and bad outcomes elsewhere in the Pacific.
Doolittle and his raiders had to launch from their aircraft carrier early after being detected by a Japanese ship. (The launch was actually the first time a B-25 had ever used a carrier deck. All of the practice runs had been on land.) Hallmark was the command pilot of the sixth B-25 off the aircraft carrier. He was 28-years-old.
He flew to Tokyo with the rest of the raiders, dropped his bombs and made his way to China. Dean’s bomber ran out of fuel and he ditched his plane about three miles from the coast. The two enlisted crew members on board drown. Dean and his two fellow officers were hurt, but survived the crash. Dean was catapulted through the windshield, the pilot’s seat still strapped to his body.
The officers made their way to shore, linked up the next morning and evaded the Japanese for eight days. Finally they were captured, and along with five captured crew members from another bomber, were tried by the Japanese on what are now considered phony charges of killing innocent civilians.
They were tortured and malnourished. Dean came down with beriberi and dysentery. All eight were sentenced to death. Five of those sentences were commuted. Hallmark and two officers from the other bomber — 1st Lt. William Farrow and Sgt. Harold Spatz were not so lucky. On October 15, 1942 Hallmark, Farrow and Spatz were executed by firing squad.
The bodies were cremated and located by American officials after the war. Today, Hallmark’s remains are at Arlington National Cemetery where he was interred in 1949.
Dean’s military awards and decorations include:
USAAF Aviator wings
Distinguished Flying Cross (awarded posthumously)
Purple Heart Medal (awarded posthumously)
Prisoner of War Medal (awarded posthumously)
American Defense Medal
American Campaign Medal w/ bronze star
Asiatic-Pacific Campaign Medal w/ bronze star (awarded posthumously)
WWII Victory Medal (awarded posthumously)
Breast Order of Pao Ting (awarded posthumously by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China)
China War Memorial Medal (awarded posthumously by Chiang Kai-shek’s Republic of China)
Other memorial honors include:
Greenville, Texas celebrated Dean Hallmark Day on April 28, 1943 in conjunction with the Second War Bond Drive
The Veterans of Foreign Wars Post 4011 in Greenville, Texas, named their lodge after Hallmark
Auburn University dedicated a plaque to Dean’s memory in the Letterman’s Lounge in Jordan-Hare Stadium
Study carrel 4431P inside the Auburn University library was named in Dean’s honor.
Six decades later he was front page news once again.
I’m going to write a little piece on Hallmark next month, for his birthday, this is just the beginning of the notes.
