Three Fourths

It's the fourth of July!  We had dinner and brought the boy home to sleep.  During the day I did yard work to get ready for having people over tomorrow.  Sitting listening to the fireworks going off outside I got to thinking about past Fourths.

It's really amazing to me how few previous fourths I remember.  I can recall going to fireworks at DHS and at the HPHS athletic field, even going to Lake Forest once or twice.  I can recall the years I worked at Gilson.  But considering how old I am there are fairly few that stick out.

Three that do come to mind:

When I was twelve July 4 found me and my dad in Estes Colorado.  We were doing a cross country drive back from California to Chicago after the whole family had spent some time in LA.  I remember we went to see Superman 2 at a local movie theatre.  My dad thought it was stupid and for the rest of the trip would burble: "Not God.  Zod."  At least it made an impact.  We watched fireworks from the theatre parking lot.

In what I think was the summer after high school graduation I got to go to the Fort Sheridan fireworks and sit with some of the higher ranking officers.  One of my friends dads was one of the five highest ranking officers on the base.  Their seats were very, very close.  That was the first time I think I saw a ground display.  They must not have done them at the other shows I went to.  Being close up really changes fireworks.

Maybe three summers later I got even closer.  The summer I worked at Northwestern we had a shop party on the 4th.  Evanston does their fireworks at the beach right next to the Performing Arts Center and at the appointed time we headed up to the roof of the proscenium theatre.  This time we weren't just close, but we were pretty much level with many of the shells.  Very cool.  On top of that, the vantage let us see up and down the lake and to a bunch of exhibitions inland.  We must have spent an hour trying to place a municipality with each display.

Of course as I'm typing other years are coming to mind: working a turnaround in Maine, going to fireworks at Desert Breeze in Las Vegas.  There's no big conclusion here, just three fourths.

T-Sweep

The "Clean Sweep" people say not to save old t-shirts for sentimental value. Clearly I haven't listened. Here's some shirts that have avoided many purges. Do any deserve to hang around longer.

Lets start with "Work":

From Tshirtpics

This is a fairly recent casualty. It went in the bin because I can't drive past a McDonald's without stopping. Curiously I don't think this one should go to Goodwill, as you have to be certified to get it. Maybe I shouldn't care.

From Tshirtpics

These are from Chicago Scenic, I think from the second time I worked there. The shirt celebrates their 15th anniversary. A quick check of the website says the company is now 30 years old. Maybe I should ask Bob for some new swag.

From Tshirtpics

I am fairly certain this shirt didn't fit when I got it and that the logo on the shirt was no longer used by the company at the time. Still my esprit de corps makes me just nuts about company logowear, so I had to have one.

From Tshirtpics

This isn't a work shirt, but it goes with the last one. I probably spent as much time in their bar as I did at my desk.

From Tshirtpics

This is the back of the "We're the kids who pulled the fire alarm" shirt from TEN. I didn't so much like the slogan, but it really did fit the company (but not so much me, which probably contributed to their letting me go). Makes an interesting shirt though.

From Tshirtpics

This is from when I worked at Hudson Scenic in NYC. Having a Local #1 shirt isn't the same as having a Local #1 card, but I liked being able to claim the association.

From Tshirtpics

Closing out the "work" round are a couple of shirts from the 1996 Democratic National Convention. Probably the largest project I ever worked on, so it gets two shirts.

There's only one work tee that I can think of that I did have that I wish I still had. I have a bunch of Apple Tree swag around someplace, but I don't have one of the original Traveling Troupe shirts from the Workshop. That would be a nice piece to hang on to.

Happy Birthday

to the Company Management braintrust. I miss you guys a lot!

Young, thin, and in charge! Nice to be 23 and know everything.

Suburban Renewal

So there's this space in downtown Highland Park. Ages ago it used to be a store called Chestnut Court that sold books, although I don't think I ever bought a book there. They also sold stickers and notebooks and other stuff that I was more likely to blow money on.

After that it was a GAP. I never spent any money at the GAP.

Now it's an Uncle Dan's; they moved up the street. I used to by secondhand 501's at the Uncle Dan's in Evanston. This store does not appear to have secondhand jeans. Recently Mrs. TANBI and I looked at what they did have. We go there inevitably each trip home to look and see if there's a jacket for her.

This time we tried on a hat.


I'm not sure it's her style.

Bummer

So George Carlin passed away. If you follow stories on the web then you have probably already seen like nine tributes. I thought about just letting it go at that, but really this is someone I am personally going to miss, so I am going to say more.

First, one of the right wingish radio stations here in town is running a promo featuring George Carlin and out of respect for him I think they really ought to pull it. They run a snippet of his piece on plastic, you know the one that ends "the planet will be fine" and they tag it with "Not saving the planet for 50 years" or some such thing as if they are clever. Nice little dig at who they perceive to be lefty tree-huggers. The problem is that the whole line is "the PEOPLE are fucked, but the planet will be fine." Folks at WPGB, Carlin wasn't saying environmentalism is wrong, he was saying the rhetoric of environmentalism is pompous. You should pull that promo.

I first heard George Carlin in the basement on a battleship of an industrial cassette player my father had liberated from Niles West at some time (we were probably just storing it). Dad had "AM&FM" and I think "Occupation Foole" maybe "Class Clown" too. "Occupation Foole" has Filthy Words on it and really that's all it took, I was hooked.

I think the first TV spot I saw was on Johnny Carson. I would have been sitting on the floor in my parents' room avoiding going to bed. Carlin did Baseball and Football. "In football the objective is to penetrate enemy territory using short pinpoint strikes and long bombs..." His kind of analysis and language use probably has as much to do with who I am today as many of my early teachers.

First time I saw a full show was at my Aunt's house in New York, they had cable, we didn't. My mom and I watched "Carlin on Campus." Baseball and Football was back, and this time I also got to hear A Place for My Stuff. This one also finishes with the omnibus edition of Filthy Words where he opines how there are many more terms for male acts than for female ("making soup" and "yodelling in the gully"). I remember thinking maybe my mother wasn't the right person to watch this with. But maybe it was fine afterall.

I saw George Carlin live a bunch of times. I think the first was with a bunch of high school friends at a theatre on the Northwestern Campus. This was at the begining of the People I can Do Without period - if comics have periods. Buried in a closet someplace there is probably a t-shirt from that show that will not fit. The last time I saw him live was with my family at Bally's in Las Vegas, must have been 1999ish. I can remember thinking then how little he seemed to be enjoying performing. The life had gone out of it and he really just seemed mad, real bitter about everything. There must be a very fine line between ascerbic and angry that he'd walked his entire life. Recently I'd noticed that the act wasn't quite as pointy even thought the edge was still sharp. I guess he'd managed whatever was bugging him and had gotten back to the fun part.

So all day we've been hearing about the seven words you can't say on television, and I admit that's a swell routine but it isn't the one that usually lives closest to my mind. While I've been thinking about this piece one joke keeps coming back to me, it's about the perfect crime, something like "What if one guy picked up a guy and murdered another guy with him? To the police it would look like a tragic pedestrian accident." Recently the bit I find myself quoting the most is from the I Used to be an Irish Catholic thing where he talks about how none of the kids in his neighborhood got polio because "we swam in raw sewage - you know, to cool off." At the Bally's show he'd worked that into a rant about parents being child worshipers and germaphobes. There's probably a lot of good insight there.

Thankfully the latest generation of comics spent the last decade thanking George Carlin, so hopefully he left us knowing the impression he'd made. And more still thankfully we can all continue to enjoy his wit from recordings of his performances. I am sure I will ruin some kids language with one of those albums soon (Debi, maybe best not to leave your kids with me).

I wonder, just before he went, did he hear in his head: (ping) Two minute warning. Get your shit together!

Tree Tragedy

Did anyone else hear this?

NPR did a story about an Asian beetle that is eating up all the Ash trees around certain cities in the upper Midwest. I wish I could have found the right pictures to go with this, but I struck out. Anyway, they found the Emerald Ash Borer in Wilmette, IL. I grew up driving down Lake Avenue in Wilmette day after day, and Lake Avenue is probably the prototypical "Tree Covered Lane." There are trees maybe every 30 feet or so and they all arch over the street making a perfect covered path. I always thought this was the coolest thing. Late in my high school career the Highland Park foresters planted trees on Summit Road, near my house, in the same manner. I always thought it was a shame that I would have moved away long before these trees looked like the ones in Wilmette.

I am really just hoping that neither the trees in Wilmette or the younger ones in Highland Park are ash.

That area already had a tree die off. Years ago they lost a whole slew of trees to Dutch Elm disease. They talk about that past in the NPR story. See it seems that after the Elms died many communities started aggressive replanting programs to build up their tree stock. Got any guesses as to the species they selected for the replacements?

Yup, Ash.

So everyone out there cross their fingers that we're able to solve this before they lose all their ash trees too.

Father's Day. Killer Bee

On the occasion of this Father's Day I thought I would share a memory. I don't know why this is the one I've picked.

When I was 12 my family took a California trip. My mother, sister, and I flew to LA and my father and a friend drove the car out so we could do the whole trip with our own transportation. We did Disneyland, Universal, then went North to San Francisco and Sequoia, then South to San Diego. My mother and sister flew home from there. Dad and I drove. We started with a high school student government conference in Tuscon and then over four weeks did the Grand Canyon, Las Vegas, Zion, Bryce, Capitol Reef, Gunnison, Continental Divide, Boulder, the US Air Force Academy, Fort Laramie, and the Strategic Air Command among other places.

One of the "other places" was a park called Natural Bridges. Arches was just too far out of the way, but we had the opportunity to see this kind of red rock formation so we took it. I don't know how much national park experience you have, but while all the scenery is impressive you have to get used to a few things. First, the top of the park is really quite a way from the park proper. I gather now at many of the parks this is actually as far as you are allowed to take your own car. At the time we were there this wasn't the case. So you get there, but really its still a while until you get there.

Secondly, at most of the parks - Grand Canyon and maybe Bryce as notable exceptions - you really don't get to see what the park is there for from the car. It's pretty and all, but really to see the sights you have to hike.

As you can tell from the list above, our pace didn't allow for much hiking. We spent a half day here, a half day there and then move on. Also, at the time, while I was a spry 12 year old my father really hadn't caught the work out bug yet and all things being equal was probably still in a long recovery from prior bypass surgery. Still we tried to get off the road, and at each park we looked for short excursions from parking overlooks.

All of the interesting formations at Natural Bridges are well off the road, but there was one you could at least see with only a short walk. In this particular case, that short walk almost killed us both.

At various places along any of these walks you would discover little information stations. At the time this consisted of a little wooden box you would open up and get a small flyer showing information about the area you were in. We'd parked the reliable Toyota Corolla wagon at the overlook and hiked what was probably only about a quarter mile to the end of the short trail to the viewing point. When we got to the end I excitedly opened up the info box and discovered not a pile of paper but something else entirely.

An angry bee.

I guess the bee had flown into the box the last time it was open and become trapped. Totally unlike a genie trapped in a bottle or a lion with a thorn in its paw this bee offered neither wishes or a lifetime friend ship. This bee was pissed, and it was going to take it out on us.

Naturally I take off like a shot back down the trail. Illinois public schools required PE every day and a quarter mile spring to me was achievable. Less so for my father. There is however a principle difference between Northern Illinois and Southern Utah, well several differences but the one I mean to speak to here would be altitude.

You know, there's a reason athletes train at altitude. We noticed it too when the ultimate team I played with in Vegas would play at tourney's in LA. If you practice at altitude and then play closer to sea level you get a freebie of better endurance. For the men of the Boevers family, running for their lives from an angry bee the reverse was true. Living closer to sea level and then exerting yourself at higher altitude just brings you that much closer to death.

Which is why two men found themselves back at the parking area bent over and gasping for air yelling at each other "Is it gone?"

Damn angry bee. But, I guess that which doesn't actually kill you makes you stronger - and closer.

Happy Father's Day Dad.

Photos From My Desk II

Once upon a time I did a post like this that gave me the opportunity to embarrass some other people. I guess this one is the turnabout post.

Today, while preparing a handout for my rigging class I set about looking for a drawing in a particular book. I couldn't find it right off and one thing lead to another and suddenly I was removing every single book from my bookcase. Upon removing one book that must have been unopened since I left my job in Chicago these photos dropped out. And now I share them with you.

If I recall correctly this was a surprise snap for the company newsletter. We all had little cubbies in this office, not so much offices but probably a little more privacy than you generally see from an office cubicle. I love how I would save the little post-it fax stickers for the next time I needed that number. There must be 16 of them there. That stack of files off to the right looks fairly intimidating, I wonder what that was.

I believe these are here because some of the people around the office thought it would be fun to bring in Prom pictures. So here are two pictures from my date Cami's dad's roll.

She'd selected quite the dress. We went to prom, downtown for dinner and a show, then to a friends house to watch movies over night and then to Great America the next day (we changed clothes in there somewhere - actually there was like a dead drop of my tux for my dad so he could return it). We had the big fun.

This next one is a photo someone took when we did a site survey at the Field Museum. I can't remember the woman's name, but she was the manager of the "mount shop" (maybe Katy will recognize her). I have no idea who the guy in the background is.

I kind of like this last picture: David working on something. I'm tricked out in my shop sweatshirt and what could be the geekiest of all possible baseball hats. It's logowear for Partspec, which is a CAD plugin. I got the hat at the National Industry Week convention.

The fax post-its are gone. I wonder if this is before and I hadn't done that yet or after and I'd cleaned them up. A mystery we'll just have to live with I guess.