Later this spring we’ll be taking the whole family on a 3-week trip to the U.K. and Europe. About all we know right now are our departure and return dates and times and that London’s Gatwick airport will be our portal coming and going (I moved quickly to take advantage of a short-term offer that leveraged my frequent flyer miles). Plus we’re timing our trip so that we’ll be in the vicinity if Uncle Ben needs to be bailed out of jail.

Beyond that we don’t have a firm, or even gelatinous, itinerary. Negotiations are ongoing. I thought all along that what we’ve been talking about is a trip to England and Scotland, but now the girls want to see Ireland too, and the Reverend Mother is saying since we’re that “close” she wants to see the Champs de Elyse, the Eiffel Tower and Greece, and she’s heard that Geneva is really nice, too. I will admit to a desire to visit the Normandy beaches and surrounding area. My deepest desire, however, is to not have to set a pace that takes us to 42 cities in 20 days. Pray for me.

I spent a semester in England back in ’79 with stays in Falkirk, Scotland and Paris so I have a comfort level with getting around and we have a couple of good guide books, but I’m open to travel tips and suggestions from folks who have more recent experience. What are your thoughts on 3 1/2 Britrail/Eurail passes vs. renting a vehicle big enough to haul the Mall Diva’s luggage and paying the cost of “petrol”? Know any nice cottages or B&Bs slightly off the beaten path but still conveniently located to attractions? Is airfare on the Continent as reasonable as we’ve heard? What is the prevalence of wi-fi? (I’d like to bring my laptop and blog our trip, but I don’t want to carry the extra 5 pounds around if I can only log-on twice.) Do you think we’ll get to Paris before they burn it down?

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Emily at Portia Rediscovered says she was epically disappointed that I didn’t have a St. Patrick’s Day post. Since Emily was one of the first to add me to her blogroll, and is single-handedly responsible for me being on two or three other blogrolls, I don’t dare disappoint her — epically or otherwise, even though I’m not Irish. Since my posts this week have tended toward the reminiscent I might as well go back into the vaults once more.

I don’t think there will ever be a St. Patrick’s Day when I don’t think about my first semester of college when I enrolled in the Spring term at the University of Missouri-Rolla campus. UMR is mainly an engineering college but it was close to where I lived at the time and a convenient way for me to knock out some general liberal arts credits before transferring to the main Mizzou campus in Columbia.

St. Patrick’s “Day” was actually a 10-day party at UMR. The campus was about 90% male then, almost all in grueling engineering classes that seemed to require binge drinking in order to cope. The reason St. Pat is such a big deal at UMR is because he is deemed to be the patron saint of engineers for having driven the snakes from Ireland and thereby creating the first worm drive (engineering humor). The rites and festivities of the season were under the auspices of the St. Pat’s Board: upper classmen (some I think were in their 30s) elected by their fraternities, eating clubs and campus organizations. For most of the year their duties seemed to be based around regular “meetings” marked by drinking and carousing. Come March, however, they were especially prominent in their filthy green coats (part of their semi-secret initiation rites) as they enforced the rules and protocols of the holiday (for those familiar with the St. Paul Winter Carnival – especially in the older days – think green Vulcans).

Part of the tradition was that all freshmen males were to have beards in the week or so leading up to St. Pat’s, and were to carry shillelaghs (an Irish cudgel). Most people think of shillelaghs as being a bit like walking sticks, but at UMR there were specific requirements: the shillelagh had to be at least two-thirds the height of the student and at least one-third his weight, and it had to be cut from a whole tree with at least some of the roots showing. The punishment for being caught beardless by a Board Member (and they usually traveled in packs of two or more) was to have your face painted green. The penalty for being without your shillelagh was to be thrown into Frisco Pond. Frisco Pond was actually the town’s sewage lagoon, but was called Frisco Pond because the St. Pat’s Board of 1927 rerouted the Frisco railroad into the pond after one of their meetings. I’m sure it seemed like a good idea to them at the time.

Fortunately I was able to cultivate my first beard, red and wispy as it was, and I cut myself a suitable cudgel. Carrying books and a shillelagh of the stated dimensions was a challenge, and even more so when certain professors wouldn’t allow them into class, meaning they had to be stacked in the hallways and guarded because Board members liked nothing better than to snatch unattended shillelaghs and then wait for their rightful owners to appear — followed by a honking procession to Frisco Pond. (I did mention the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, right? During St. Pat’s week the campus looked like No Name City from “Paint Your Wagon.”)

The reason we carried cudgels was in case a Board member approached you with a rubber snake and demanded that you “kill” it. This generally meant pounding on the snake with your cudgel until the Board member (not you) got tired. I weighed about 170 then; you do the math as to what my shillelagh weighed, minimum. I was fortunate to go largely unnoticed (as unnoticed as a guy carrying a tree can be) through most of this period. This was especially remarkable given that one of my friends from my hometown was on the Board. Toward the end of the week, however, he came up to me in the dining hall. “Red,” (for my beard) he said, “I think I see a snake.” With chants of “snake! snake! snake!” I was led outside and my “friend” tossed said snake on the ground. It landed, however, in a flower bed. “Freshman! Kill!” was the command. Hoisting my club over my head (and somehow not tipping over backwards) I brought it crashing down onto the hapless rubber creature — and even more hapless plants in the soft earth.

“Hit it again, it’s not dead,” was the order. I looked down once, then again. “Oh, it’s dead, alright,” I said. Actually, it would be more accurate to say, “Missing, presumed dead” because the rubber snake was nowhere to be found in the newly-created crater. Rather than wait around for CSI, or the gardener, the small group repaired to the dining hall to toast the success of the mission and I survived the week, the highlight of which was the St. Pat’s Parade.

In those days the St. Pat’s Board would be out early in the morning with mops and barrels of green paint, painting Pine Street in advance of the parade. High school bands from around the area would march, car dealers would drive demo models with pretty girls in them and various and sundry other parade standards would be present. In particular, however, I remember the Precision Pony Team: a group of students scooting along on empty pony kegs strapped to skateboards with rudimentary heads and yarn tails attached to the kegs. They wove patterns and formations down the street, stopping periodically to lift the tails of their “mounts” and drop handfuls of malted milk balls.

Much like the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade, the event culminated in St. Pat (not St. Nick) appearing on the route, riding a manure spreader and attended by his Guard. The duties of the Guard were largely to keep St. Pat vertical (he’d probably been drinking for four days straight) and to bring any fetching lasses from the crowd to St. Pat for a good luck kiss. (I did say the campus was 90% male and fueled by alcohol, didn’t I?).

After this particular St. Patrick’s Day all the other ones I’ve experienced have just kind of faded from my memory.

Note: the annual UMR St. Pat’s parade and related festivities still go on, but in a much more muted manner. A couple of alchohol-poisoning deaths were a factor (sad and true) to be sure, but I also think it was because some of those Board members finally graduated.

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Kevin earlier posted a helpful reminder that today is International Eat a Tasty Animal for PETA (aka EATAPETA) Day where human carnivores are urged to eat additional portions of meat to take up the slack for vegetarians, vegans, PETA-types and their sympathizers who are boycotting meat for the day. This is the type of social activism I can get behind – even more so than International Talk Like A Pirate Day (mark your calendars).

On EATAPETA Day I can release the guilt of my animal (blood)lust. When I see a well-proportioned cow in a field I can’t help but undress it mentally as if it were a piece of meat – steaks, chops, ribs, roasts and all. A big reason for that is because back in my copywriting days I once got to work on the Omaha Steaks account, writing ads, promotional materials and — yeah, baby — a catalogue. Through the course of this assignment I learned the differences between chateaubriand, filet mignon, rib-eye, New York and Kansas City strips, t-bones and porterhouses and the miracle process of dry-aging. I would spend the mornings writing succulent words about marbling, tenderness and corn-fed flavor. By lunch time I’d be drooling for the Silver-Butter Knife experience; unfortunately the limit of my budget was strictly Quarter-Pounder with Cheese. After throwing myself at one (or two) of these I’d go back to work; it was akin to Uncle Ben dreaming of Melissa Theuriau — and watching Cyndy Brucato. The pent-up longing and desire I felt no-doubt reflected itself in the descriptions I wrote (we really moved some meat, let me tell you).

This was not to go unrequited, however. The time came to do the photo-shoot for the ads and catalog. Omaha Steaks sent up large quantities of their products. Of course, because it was for advertising purposes, they sent the thickest, juiciest versions available. (Spoiler alert: if you’re getting hungry right now and thinking sizzling thoughts you might want to look away from the next couple of sentences and rejoin this post in the next paragraph.) I learned, however, that food photography is a very difficult and demanding art. No matter how good the quality of the original item, it just doesn’t look good on camera (an important lesson for local restaurants to learn when shooting their commercials). Professional food techs make big bucks to come in and turn so much meat into those gleaming, “eat-me-now” images on slick paper. Trust me, though, no matter how good it looks after the techs have used their sprays, ointments and “make-up” on the meat, it’s not something you want to get your mouth anywhere near.

Ah, but because food spoils quickly under hot lights you have to have lots of product on hand to refresh the shoot if it runs too long. Fortunately our team had some real pros involved and, as much as it hurt to see the “models” unceremoniously scraped into the dumpster when we were done, we still had 30 pounds or so of 3″ thick filets, 2 1/2″ strips, perfectly marbled rib-eyes and the like. What to do? What to do? Well, we simply had one of the best cook-outs in which I’ve ever participated.

Hmmm. This would have been about 1986 or ’87. Wasn’t that about the time when PETA started to get things cooking on their own account. Do you think these might be related?

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“I had a frame of reference,
I set it on the fence,
Along came relativity,
ain’t seen the damn thing since.”

From “Einstein the Genius,” by the Cranberry Lake Jug Band.

Today is Albert Einstein’s birthday (he would have been 127). It took just about all of the math skills I have to calculate that number so it might seem strange for me to be pointing out this occasion. I like Albert well enough, but what I really appreciate about this day is the chance to flog one of my all-time favorite books, Einstein’s Dreams.

The book, written by MIT physics and writing professor Alan Lightman, is a collection of 30 short, beautifully written vignettes (plus a couple of interludes) describing a series of imagined dreams Einstein had leading up to publishing his theory of relativity. Each dream describes a different mind-stretching world in which time operates – or is perceived – in a different manner. In one world, for example, people living at higher altitudes age more slowly than those closer to sea level; in another world all possible consequences from any decision are lived out regardless of the original decision; in a third the passing of time naturally brings order rather than chaos and degeneration. Each vignette is written in language that is both as ornate as a Swiss cuckoo clock — and every bit as functional and tightly crafted. Here’s an excerpt from the book’s prologue:

In some distant arcade, a clock tower calls out six times and then stops. The young man slumps at his desk. He has come to the office at dawn, after another upheaval. His hair is uncombed and his trousers are too big. In his hand he holds twenty crumpled pages, his new theory of time, which he will mail today to the German journal of physics. Tiny sounds from the city drift through the room. A milk bottle clinks on a stone. An awning is cranked in a shop on Marktgasse. A vegetable cart moves slowly through a street. A man and woman talk in hushed tones in an apartment nearby… … In the long, narrow office on Speichergasse, the room full of practical ideas, the young patent clerk still sprawls in his chair, head down on his desk. For the past several months, since the middle of April, he has dreamed many dreams about time. His dreams have taken hold of his research. His dreams have worn him out, exhausted him so that he sometimes cannot tell whether he is awake or asleep. But the dreaming is finished. Out of many possible natures of time, imagined in as many nights, one seems compelling. Not that others are impossible. The others might exist in other worlds. The young man shifts in his chair, waiting for the typist to come, and softly hums from Beethoven’s Moonlight Sonata.

Most of the dreams are described in no more than two or three pages, yet this isn’t a book to rip through at lunch time. I suggest reading no more than one dream per day, and taking the time not only to revel in the quality of the writing and story-telling but to imagine yourself in each world as it’s described and to picture the effect that that version of time would have on your life.

In addition to the enjoyment and inspiration I’ve received from reading this book (and re-reading sections at random from time to time), it was also the basis of a very interesting creative writing program I put my oldest daughter through as part of her home-education. Finally, while the book is not “Christian” or obviously spiritual, it did help me get a deeper understanding of how God inhabits my past, present and future. Make time to read this book and I can guarantee that you won’t ever look at time the same way again.

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I’m working on a couple of longer posts on weightier topics, but couldn’t resist weighing in on Lileks’ old logo nostalgia that Ben picked up on. It got me to thinking about some of the signs and logos I saw growing up in Indiana and Missouri. It can be kind of hard to pull these out of the dusty trunk of boyhood memories because the advertising signs were so ubiquitous as to fade almost into wallpaper — and I can’t remember any of the wallpaper we may or may not have had when I was a youth except for the horrible red, flocked stuff on the walls of one house we moved into.

The easiest thing to remember are oil company logos. My grandfather had worked for Shell Oil and my father owned a Shell service station, so we saw that logo in our sleep, and recognized the competition:

Loyal as I was, I still had to admit that the Sinclair dinosaur was pretty cool:

When my dad came home from work he like to have a beer. Wiedemann’s (“It’s Registered!”) was a favorite, but I also remember the old Falstaff logo.

When we moved to Missouri Dad liked to drink a now defunct regional brew: Stag. That reminds me of another obscure Missouri beer that is no longer with us, Griesedieck Brothers. (Yes, the correct pronunciation was about the most unappealing you can imagine, which may be one reason it’s no longer around. A fun slogan, however, would have been, “Reach for another!” and just think of the product placement opportunities with Brokeback Mountain.)

If we went out to eat when we still lived in Indiana it was most likely to Burger Chef, an erstwhile competitor of McDonalds, or to a nearby Big Boy. (Whoa, strange flashback. I can remember being at the Big Boy one time when my father tried to explain to me why we were in Viet Nam.)

When I was in high school I would often meet my friends at the local Farrell’s Ice Cream Parlor, where if you ordered “The Zoo” (an exotic concoction featuring about 3 pounds of ice cream) the staff would flash lights, blow sirens and race your dessert around the restaurant on a special stretcher in a way that would have made Pannekoeken waitresses seem bashful.

Now that we’ve got some logos out of the way, anyone up for a game of name that jingle?

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Here at the villa of the Night we like cordless phones with a base unit and extra handsets because when you’ve got two daughters and three floors of living space it’s handy to not be tied to the wall when you talk on the phone. It’s also good exercise for me to run around the house trying to locate what pillow or piece of furniture the handset is under when the phone rings. Cordless phones are convenient, loaded with features and let us roam our home.

Around our house they also have about the same life expectancy as a pan of warm brownies.

Over the years we’ve had many, many cordless phone sets. Some were made by big brand name companies, others made by company names that appear to have been written by a dyslexic Korean. Regardless of name, each one seems to last only about 12 to 18 months. This was a great source of annoyance to me for awhile and then I actually started to pay attention to the kid working the cash register at Best Buy when he tried to sell me the “extended product replacement contract.” The standard deal is for that magic $9.99 number you can get whatever you purchased replaced free if it stops working in the next two years. (Note: very few things are fixable anymore, at least where electronics are concerned. It’s usually more cost effective to throw something away and replace it than to repair it).

Yeah, my grandfather (“use it up, wear it out, make it do or do without”) would have a fit if he knew this is what things have come to, but that’s progress. For some time now when the kid at the counter goes into his warranty spiel when I’m buying a phone I no longer think to myself, “Blah, blah, blah, whatever and no, thank you.” Now I think “Bwa-ha-ha! You’re mine!” At least the last three cordless phone sets we’ve owned have had this extra protection and the result is that for my original $100 investment and a couple of $9.99 “insurance premiums” I’ve had multiple new phones. So last week when the basement handset started dying regularly halfway through “Hello,” it may have made people calling us think I was swearing but I was really pretty mellow. I gathered up the entire set and headed back to the Return counter at Best Buy.

I did not realize at the time that this happened to be a particularly hardy telephone; it had outlived the replacement agreement by 36 days. While such an achievement might otherwise have caused me to organize a celebratory parade and to buy stock in the maker’s company, I instead felt betrayed. Oh well, I can afford another phone and just chalk this up to being one of those times where life gets the last laugh, except that I also had another phone mission in mind with this particular trip to the Big Blue Box.

My wife and I have had cell phones for the last 8 or 9 years with one of the big wireless network providers. The original contract was cheap, cheap, cheap and we’ve done pretty well by renewing it whenever we needed new phones and the provider had an enticing promotion. The result is that we now pay barely $30 a month for our two lines and a “puny” 300 minutes, which suits our needs fine because I think we’ve exceeded our minutes maybe once in all this time. Our current phones are now more than four years old however, and mine no longer connects properly with the battery charger. We have to charge the battery in my wife’s phone, switch it my phone and put my battery back into her phone to recharge. Not overly inconvenient but, you know, why not look at getting a new phone? Especially one of those new camera phones because, as a blogger, I never know when I might run into a situation with great blog fodder such as, say, a car loaded with Wellstone bumper stickers gets booted right before my eyes.

Equipped with the Best Buy gift certificate I received at Christmas, I wandered over to the cell phone counter where several phones supported by my provider were being advertised with little signs saying, “Free” or “Just $25.99” and similar. I knew I’d have to sign a new 2-year contract, go through the rebate hoo-doo and maybe have to pay a little more for the monthly service but I thought it was worth checking it out. The knowledgeable and helpful young man waiting on me helped me find a couple of phones that would fit my admittedly low-demand cell phone lifestyle and then entered my account into his computer.

“Dude,” he said, “how long have you had that phone?”

It turns out that he can’t sell me any of the phones he had unless I upgraded my contract. Ok, again, not unexpected. Smiling dismissively I said, “Yeah, yeah, so what’s the damage? What’s the cheapest monthly family rate to have the network behind me?”

$80.

Have I ever mentioned that I’m Scottish, or even at that, that my wife is the really frugal one in the family?

Of course, for that I’d get an extra 100 minutes a month that I wouldn’t use; at least not as much as I’d use the extra $50 they wanted to charge me. I guess I’m keeping my current cell phone a bit longer as I ponder the lessons of this night’s technological transactions: being cordless doesn’t mean there aren’t strings attached.

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I missed seeing this announcement over the weekend, but Sunday would have been the 100th birthday of writer Robert E. Howard, creator of Conan the Barbarian, Solomon Kane, Sailor Steve Costigan, King Kull of Atlantis and others — and instigator of countless flights of fantasy in his readers.

His characters and stories were perfect for the pulp fiction era of the 1920s and 30s, yet timeless enough to still be incredibly popular today. When a friend lent me my first Conan book in college back in 1976 I had no idea that Howard had already been dead 40 years. Often credited (and/or dismissed) as the father of the Sword and Sorcery genre, Howard had a vivid imagination perfectly harnessed to his story-telling ability (believe me, these don’t always go together). He brought a brawny, blood-thirsty virility to heroic fiction that was new to his era but every bit in the tradition of Beowulf. His heroes had red helms, not white hats, got the girl (be she queen, priestess, goddess or demon) and broke more than a few laws and skulls in the process.

Some might denigrate the genre and therefore his skills but that is because so many of his imitators have been so poor. A contemporary of Louis L’Amour, had Howard lived (he committed suicide at age 30) I’m sure he would have been as prolific and celebrated as his range-riding counterpart. In fact, his later letters and outlines showed he was branching into Western, or Texian (Howard was a native Texan) stories. I enjoyed his stories, and had no difficulty fitting them into my skull with more prosaic authors.

As a blogger, I also respect Howard’s drive and discipline. His output was prolific and prodigious, writing in his own name and under pseudonyms, and populating the pages of then-thriving publications such as Weird Tales, Argosy, Strange Detective and more. The pulp fiction of the day, and the people who wrote for it, strike me as a similar type of community to today’s blogosphere. In both eras creative people threw themselves into the new media of the day, not necessarily expecting the words to last but reveling in the joy of creation and the chance to tell a story that a few others might appreciate. They wrote fiction, we’re more into facts, but we both communicate a vision of the world. And sometimes, it’s pretty fantastic. Happy birthday, REH.

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From “The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy”:

Pan Galactic Gargle Blaster

A potent drink invented by Zaphod Beeblebrox. The effects have been likened to having your brains smashed out with a slice of lemon wrapped round a large gold brick.

How long have I been out?

Either somebody slipped one of these combustive potions into my morning mouthwash yesterday, or I’ve mysteriously experienced the effects of the drink without any of the fun of meeting the Z-man.

Don’t worry (or should I say, “don’t panic”), I’m feeling better. Blogging will resume. WHAT is that unholy, pounding racket?!

Stupid keyboard.

Oooooo – look at the pretty lights!

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I’m in the middle of a hectic week at work which will be topped off by a couple of significant ceremonies on Sunday at church. During the regular service my wife, aka Night Visions, will be ordained — an interesting story in and of itself, but for another time. Following service we’re having a graduation ceremony for the Mall Diva to commemorate both her home school high school graduation and her completion of her cosmetology program and imminent licensing. This latter event will require a little speechifying from me so I’m distracted with what I’ll say and how I’ll keep my composure, not to mention working out sundry details in bringing these events off smoothly.

I say all that just to say that this means tonight’s blog entry is not going to be a deeply thought and highly polished gem of reason, but a few random thoughts about winter.

1. Charlie Brown and me. I know I already touched a little on the Charlie Brown Christmas special recently, but watching it always brings back memories. This was the 40th anniversary broadcast of this classic, and I was there for number one as well. Yeah, it’s weird to realize I’ve been around long enough for the 40th anniversary of anything, but it’s a good biblical number. I know I saw the first broadcast because my mother made kind of a big deal about it at the time and, because my brother and sister and I didn’t know Peanuts from the Katzenjammer kids, telling us about the comic strip and even buying us a paperback Peanuts collection. Once we saw the show we loved it, of course (we watched it at my grandparent’s house because they had color tv).

   Now, whenever I watch the show I always think about how much Charlie Brown’s neighborhood reminds me of my own neighborhood from back then, and I also remember that I had a corduroy hat with a bill and ear flaps just like the one Charlie Brown wears. Watching the show with my kids gives me the opportunity to ask Tiger Lilly what she wants for Christmas and have her say, “Real estate.” Of course, I’ll never forget the true meaning of Christmas.

2. Colder than a well-digger’s monkey. That’s right, I’m not from Minnesota, so cut me some slack, Andy. Now, I don’t mind weather that’s “bracing”, “brisk”, “nippy” — or even “Minnesota-like.” It’s that Canadian weather that rushes across the border like it’s in a hurry to get to Florida that I can’t stand. Mr. President, defend these borders!

   I have a winter coat that weighs about 35 pounds. It zips up past my face and extends below my knees. It’s not very rakish, but it’s lined with down, thinsulate and a layer of cashmere and I swear it’s almost bullet-proof. And sometimes I wear it and still feel like a streaker. I left the house the other day and it was like getting busted across the face with a frozen codfish. It was the kind of cold that makes your nose hair stand at attention while the wind goes through your pockets looking for loose change; the kind of cold that gives you goosebumps the size of Volkswagons on your flannel-clad bottom. It was so cold (how cold was it?) that the legislature was keeping its hands in its own pockets.

3. Northern Lights. It also gets dark around 4:00 o’clock in the afternoon this time of year. That would be almost unbearably depressing when it’s this cold except for one saving grace. When I leave my office each evening I stand under a large, lighted portico and look up the Nicollet Mall. The lights of the city glowing in the darkness turn the sky a rich purple-blue that is nearly as mesmerizing for me as the ocean. Often I’’ll linger a bit, just taking it in — until I get hit in the face with a codfish.

Four more months til golf season.

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