Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Keep reading ’til the part about biscuits and ducks

One of our god-nieces will soon celebrate her birthday. Her big sister — and I think they have the dynamic where they work and play well together, while also each delighting in pushing the other’s buttons, but if one of them gets picked on by someone else there will be H- E- double-hockey-sticks to pay — asked us to make a video. It was a sweet thought by an older sister, and so we made a little video.

We would have made the video anyway, because the kid can’t have a proper birthday party under stay-at-home orders, but mostly I want to point out how awesome the pre-teen is in all of this. They’re both swell, really. Cool kids, except for the pushing-each-others-buttons part, but I understand that’s part of the sibling deal.

Anyway, all of that to say there were multiple takes of this video. And there were outtakes. Here is one clip, and to honor the motif of multiple takes, I have uploaded and deleted and re-uploaded several different versions of this, which is brilliant in a meta-sort of way.

Right after this The Yankee says “I didn’t know which key to start in.”

Kazoos, y’all.

And then she asks if I want to start the video over again, because she’s considerate like that. I got to use one of my most recent trusty throwaway lines. I can handle it; I’m a professional.

It was funny and we’re still giggling about it and I could watch her laugh all day.

Besides, if you don’t emerge from their stay-at-home orders without at least a half-dozen new stories and three traditions and 15 new inside jokes then you’re just not enjoying your time.

Let’s look at the paper. We’re falling through a rift in the Internet’s space-time continuum, which intersects with so many rabbit holes, and we’re falling out, oddly enough, in this same town, on this same date, 111 years ago, 1909.

Yes, friends, people read the newspaper, even when it looked like this. And, for 1909, and for a very basic rag such as the Evening World, this has a lot of design elements on the front page. And front page ads! ¡Qué horror!

People were starved for information, as you’ll see, or they just wanted to take a break from whatever else they had to do, so they pored over every word. Like … the only sports story, and one of the few news pieces in the whole paper.

It goes on like that for a while. Coach Roach didn’t say the victors, in-state rival Purdue, were better at baseball. His players were just distracted, see. Wommins. Perfume. Fluffy clothes. Have you seen their corseted figures? And also the fans, including the “girls,” which are fine enough for a university, should have been there to cheer his men on the diamond. His lovestruck, distracted men.

Skel Roach played professional baseball for 10 years, including one game in the bigs, for the Chicago Orphans, which was three years prior to a newspaper re-nicknamed them the Cubs. And, you know, baseball is wild about statistics … let’s see if we can take a quick detour … Orphans beat the Washington Senators 6-3 in his one game. Roach was the winning pitcher. He threw a complete game, which didn’t even merit mention back then, he allowed three runs on 13 hits and was never seen again. Couldn’t agree on a salary with the club. He got shipped to the Orphans because their star pitcher was hurt. He was 27 at the time, and he played for six more years, but that was his high water mark as a player, a career that tallied 133 wins in the minors and across the prairie leagues. He coached throughout the midwest, studied the law and practiced in Chicago.

He got married just two months after this story about lovey dovey players not being hardened enough for matters of sport was published. It was his first year on campus, and he’d stay for three seasons, practicing law in Chicago around the demands of baseball. Apparently his time at IU marked the Hoosiers’ first success on the diamond, this criticism notwithstanding. He’d go on to practice law for 35 years and serve several terms as a judge in Illinois. He died in 1958.

Edwin Shelmadine was fighting for himself, and everyone like him. And he wasn’t going to give up.

Congress approved the increase for Shelmadine the previous March alongside a host of other veterans and widows. He was upgraded to $30 a month. His obituary talks about how he was hanging on to sign that first pension check, taking medicine he didn’t like to live for that happy moment, and he did, but only just. He went out for a buggy ride that same day with a friend and died.

His unit, the 48th Regiment of the Indiana Infantry, fought at Vicksburg, Chattanooga, Missionary Ridge, was a part of Sherman’s March to the Sea and the Carolinas Campaign. I wonder how many of those he was a part of.

Curious thing: the roster for the unit lists an Edward Shishmadine, who mustered in as a private in December 1861 and left as a sergeant in 1865. His obit, where he’s Edwin Shilmade, (just like the paper and the Congressional record) says he mustered into the service in October 1861. What’s a few months and a completely different name at a remove of 58 years?

Shelmadine was a shoemaker. His obit tells us he had three wives. His first died during the war, then came a separation and his last wife survived him. Apparently he met all three in the same house. Presumably not at the same time.

I wonder what people from 1909 would think about the steps you have to undertake to offload a house these days:

Here’s that spot in the summer of 2014:

I wonder if it is any of those houses. Probably not.

Anyway, more from this paper after an advertisement from … the same paper …

Royal merged with Fleischmann’s and a few others to create the giant Standard Brands on the way to becoming the modern version of Nabisco in 1981. Royal is still marketed today.

Those are the most interesting things on the front page. Told you it was a rag. Well, there was a criminal conviction. A gentleman found his wife and another man in a hotel, which probably means a rough shack just off the road in 1909. He killed the other guy and pleaded insanity. Six of the jurors agreed, but the other three weren’t buying it and manslaughter was listed as a compromise conviction. His name was Good, even if neither he nor his wife particularly were at the fateful moment. But I don’t know what happened to him after his conviction and his wife isn’t name. No story, no clipping. And, really, that completes the interesting portion of the front page.

Let’s go inside!

Page two is a serial part of a feature following Theodore Roosevelt’s African safari. It’s literally history in the sense that, if you’ve read Roosevelt, or about him, you know that material. (If you haven’t, I recommend Edmund Morris’ Roosevelt trilogy. There aren’t many people, even presidents, who deserve that much copy from one author, but Roosevelt may, and Morris is the man for the job. Terrific work.) Moving on!

Page two also had a piece about a princess of Prussia who had to soon decide on a husband. Her family was going to be out of power soon anyway and she spent the rest of her days making socialite-style appearances and I’m sure it was all very lovely and worthwhile to the people in this area as there were a fair amount of German immigrants, but it seems a bit odd and gossipy, today, to speculate on a 16-year-old girl’s marital ambitions.

But this … There must have been some story here.

There’s just something so precise about this little brief. Not just the chairs, but the 114 of them. And there’s something so declaratively stern about that. It’s almost like the paper is saying “We’re too chuffed to bring it up again, but you know what happened, dear reader.” Surely people read about this in a previous issue.

It’d be a fool’s errand to try to figure out what happened, or whatever became of the chairs.

I’m not that foolish.

Page three had a serial installment of a book that was published in 1902. Why people are reading about it here, in the paper, in 1909 escapes me. They could just as easily order it from Amazon. The chapter in this edition of the paper is about a guy loading up a board of directors. And the book is called The Minority, so I just assume it goes on and on for pages about proxy votes and what not. None of the dialog is particularly interesting, so I won’t quote it. But, if you’re intrigued by my description …

The back page of the paper has a lot of those society listings which just seem to grow more odd to our modern eyes with every passing year. This note was one of them.

No idea what became of St. John, but I am sure she was a proud mother. Regester graduated from law school in 1905, ran for judge a few times and finally sat on the bench late in his career. He was also a state lawmaker and just had the look of an important man.

I wonder if you had to pay extra for all of that stuff around your ad:

Several new stores had recently opened. Most of the proprietors only shelled out for the brief text mentions. Not these guys.

No idea how long their store lasted. They had a great spot though, two blocks from the courthouse at the center of it all. There’s an auto parts place there now.

Did someone say biscuits?

If that illustration makes you uncomfortable, welcome to the precursor of General Mills! Gold Brand started after they won some big flour awards in 1880, so the label still had a meaning, perhaps. So grand is General Mills’ reach that on Wikipedia the subhead “Aeronautical Research Division and Electronics Division” comes before the diversification subhead.

All of it started with a guy who was a soldier and a businessman and a politician and had a great name, Cadwallader Colden Washburn, who worked alongside a businessman with a very regular-sounding name, John Crosby. They built something big. One of their successors, a Minnesota man named James Ford Bell, got the job the old-fashioned way, nepotism. Bell started working there in 1901. When his old man died in 1915 he became the vice president. In 1928 Bell started General Mills. He’d also play a part in Herbert Hoover’s European Hunger Relief Mission in 1918, worked in the FDA and perfected the look of a gangster. There’s a library and a museum at his university named after him. Big duck hunter too.

You know what sounds like a duck call, if you work at it a great deal? Kazoos.

photo / Tuesday — Comments Off
05
May 20

This weather

These are highly variable days, if the variation you seek is gray and damp and cold, then this is the time for you. The time for this, alas, is not May.

… 7, 8, 9, 10 …

There. All better now. Anyway, as I so often say, now apparently a full six months out of the year, Michigan has one job: Keep Canada in Canada.

And for six months of the year Michigan is lousy at its job.

For the record, the first snowfall this past year was on Halloween. I’m still running an electric blanket 186 days later just to knock down the chill in the bedroom at night. Such that, when my lovely bride retires to the bedroom before me she asks if I would like it if she turned on the blanket on my side of the bed. “No, but thank you,” I say. While thinking “It is, after all, May.”

And then I retire to the bedroom later, after working on this or that or typing away at this or that or just staring at the wall and discover it is cold bordering on silly in the bedroom and I go to sleep with the blanket on the third highest setting.

In, once again, May.

We said in March, “Ya know, if you have to stay at home and stay inside, at least this is the time of year to do it.” Sitting at home calculating the scant few hours of gray not-night probably would summon ill spirits. We lost out on the end of the school year, saying goodbye to a crop of students, and we’re losing spring because ‘Thanks, Michigan’ and a lot of the early long days because of the weather. And those senses of loss, big and small, will somehow compound upon themselves. These aren’t the really important things we’re losing, loses which will be a burr in the psyche for the entire age, I fear.

Forty degrees in May is plenty enough, thanks, is what I’m saying.

Not enough degrees. You know what I mean.

Anyway, we went on a walk, and I wore a jacket in May. Here are three photos.

It rained this morning:

And these raindrops are marching off to … somewhere else in the cycle of life, I’m sure. They’ll be absorbed by the plant and turned into something a blade will come along and cut down sooner or later.

Or an animal will come along and knock the droplets into the soil where it will eventually seep in ever smaller bits and drips until it joins the water table and follows the natural path to a nearby stream.

Or it will evaporate.

Do you think raindrops — the ones you assign personality to, I mean — have any thoughts on that when they’re up in the clouds? I bet it’s a lot of “I’m excited to see where I land this time!” It’d be better than worrying about it. “I’m going to land in a dog bowl again, I just know it.”

Sometimes I see a raindrop on a leaf or a flower and I wonder. It’s a childlike thing, I suppose. Intellectually, I know the whole system is basically devoted to capture, but when you see it like this the engineer in you has to wonder about efficiency.

There’s going to be more seasonal inappropriate wardrobe choices over much of the next two weeks. And then, of course, suddenly it will be summer.

Monday / photo — Comments Off
04
May 20

Hindsight and forethought

So, just getting it out of the way, it’s May and dreary and cold. And it’s going to be that way for days. So that’s something to look forward to, wearing jackets and turning on electric blankets in May.

The cats are doing just fine. Phoebe enjoyed the sun on Friday. Discovering the west-facing windows has been a big boon in our house:

Poseidon found a nice evening perch recently and he would like you to know that space above kitchen cabinets is definitely a preferred design treatment:

We found a really lovely flowering dogwood on today’s walk. It sits in a lot of shade, which may be why it’s a little late to the party, but that just makes the blooming party last longer:

Now that I look at this photograph, here, I think I should have paid more attention to this tree out there:

That’s the way of it, isn’t it? Hindsight and forethought.

cycling / Friday / photo / podcast / video — Comments Off
01
May 20

It’s gonna be …

Time for a bike ride, and since we went in the late afternoon and we headed generally north and east that means it’s time for a shadooooooow sellllllfie …

It was also the day for me to go the wrong way because I got the roads confused and The Yankee had to chase me down which was no easy feat today because I had good legs and yet she managed to eventually do it anyway because I looked over my shoulder and saw the look on her face and then sat up and, yes, run-on sentences do happen a lot in cycling. It has something to do with the breathing, I think.

So we turned around and went the right direction, determined to not speak of this again. It only added on one extra mile, so she didn’t have to chase me far, because she is a strong rider, but my legs held up throughout the day. This is what’s important, look at that water:

There were people fishing on the causeway as we went through. Everyone is ready to enjoy some nice weather, which we’ve only had it intermittently here. That’s a crime against humanity, I’m pretty sure.

Anyway, that’s just after the big downhill, which one app tracked me at 134.4 miles per hour. I was not going 134.4 miles per hour. That’d be very fast, indeed, and I think the app is wrong in a lot of ways, begging the question: Why?

So you go down the descent then you take a hard left and you find yourself on a road that you can somehow hit 25-27 miles per hour without even pedaling. Then there’s the water and that’s when she caught me:

And then the climb out. This is where our barn by bike feature of the day comes in, and, yes, that is an uphill and not a camera tilt trick:

Is there a video? There is a video. On this particular route the video is from the last smooth, easy part before the hard part, and before the water.

It would be tempting to rush through here and attack the long series of rollers that turn into an uphill before the long downhill and the next eventual climb. It’d be fun to turn this into a bunch of big sweeping sines, as Bill Strickland called them:

I was riding in long, gradual curves that stretched nearly from the right shoulder of the road out to and sometimes past the yellow line on the left, then back and out and again the same.

[…]

The sine curve to me is more of an undulation, an expression of the natural beauty of movement, and the beauty of natural movement: a lover’s body in moments of passion beyond thought, for instance.

Or a bicycle rider in one of those rare interludes when the pure sheer pleasure of being a bicycle rider can be expressed only through an extended series of line-to-line swoops. The road sine is one of the most spontaneous and unsophisticated acts of cycling, and it begins and occurs and continues in some kind of complete state of unexamined and unself-conscious motion.

Bill Strickland is a brilliant writer and I love that description. I do it all the time on the bike. I always think of that passage when I do.

But never right here; never at the fence.

Somehow, I always find myself doing that other ultimate sign of freedom. I get to just the right spot on that road, just ahead of us here, and let it go and coast. I’ll float almost as far as momentum and enthusiasm will take me. And then start working my way uphill.

Talked with Tom Duszynski again, because the world needs to hear from epidemiologists and I’m part of the world and I want to give learned and thoughtful people a place to speak to people who want to hear real things and not bombast.

Wash your hands. And if you’re out on a bike or out on a trail or just in the backyard, have a great weekend.

photo / Thursday — Comments Off
30
Apr 20

Putting April behind us

And we’re wrapping up this month with a few more leftover photos from the big camera. Because it’s been that kind of week, and we’re ready to move on through it to the next week which will, no doubt, feel decidedly better for reasons that have nothing to do with any discernible, tangible reason, but nevertheless.

Today marks the beginning of my eighth week of work-from-home. And I’m very fortunate, lucky, privileged and blessed. All of those descriptors apply. But the last few days, nevertheless, have brought on a certain gauzy meh. Tomorrow I’m going to change it up, apply a shock to the system, create some momentum and power through. It’ll be great!

I just had to work through this little bit, and a lot of us did. A lot of people also didn’t have the luxury of it that I’ve had and I’m more than aware of all of that. Grace and patience were my two words at the beginning. I hope I’ve practiced that as it pertains to others, and this week I’m applying it to myself. Next week, all systems go.

Anyway, a few photos. This one is definitely getting used again, probably:

I took this one, and re-sized it and put it here, just because I love what a proper camera can do with the depth of field. My phone’s camera won’t do that. Yet.

Flower budding from a tree? Have to take a picture of that. It’s the rule.

And I will see you all tomorrow, next month, May.