Diversions

History Weekend: Elsie the Cow and the Alamo

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Elsie the Contented Cow was created in 1936 first as a cartoon corporate logo for the Borden food products line; a little brown Jersey cow with a daisy-chain necklace and a charming anthropomorphic smile. Three years later, a live cow was purchased from a dairy farm in Connecticut to demonstrate (along with several other likely heifers) the Borden Dairy Company-invented rotary milking parlor the dairy barn of the future! in the Borden exhibit at the 1939 World’s Fair. The live Elsie, originally named You’ll Do Lobelia (no, I did not make up this bit) came about because an overwhelming number of visitors to the exhibit kept asking which of the demo-cows was Elsie. Of the cows in the show, You’ll Do Lobelia was, the keeper and administrator of the dairy barn agreed the most charming and personable of the demonstration cows, especially for a generation of Americans who had moved on from a life of rural agriculture and likely never laid eyes on a real, live cow. So, Lobelia/Elsie was drafted into service for commercial interest (much as young American males were being drafted at about the same time for military service). Elsie, her assorted offspring, spouse (Elmer the Bull the corporate face of Elmer’s Glue) and her successors continued as the public face, as it were for the Borden Dairy Company, appearing in a movie, even and the Macy’s department store window, where she gave birth to one of her calves. Her countenance adorns the labels of Eagle Brand condensed milk to this day.

But what one might reasonably ask has Elsie the Cow have to do with the Alamo?

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Bike Ride

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Chicagoboyz are getting into shape and enjoying the fresh air and wide open spaces.


Sunday Diversion: Back Yard Chicken Melodrama

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(The following is provided as a small, light-hearted diversion from the deeply serious social and political commentary normally provided. We need such small, light-hearted thing in serious times, which is why my daughter and I started writing the Luna City Chronicle series.)

No, it’s not that anything bad has happened to our chickens, or the ‘Whup-whups’ as my daughter calls them, for the contented and low-voiced clucking that they make when all is good and happy in their world, especially when I bring out something savory from the house, like slivered-up potato or apple peelings, or a handful of cracked corn, which the chickens love to the point of distraction. They love it so much that we call cracked corn ‘chicken crack’. Although they are also very partial to the slivered peelings; spoiled birds I do have to slice it up for them This world of theirs is a limited one; the tiny back yard of a tiny suburban house with a population of five; three Barred Plymouth Rocks, and a pair of bantam Wyandotte hens. (Barred rocks are those pretty speckled black and white chickens with brilliant red combs and wattles.) Wyandottes are also pretty tending to be white or pale, with darker edges to their feathers which gives an overall lacy effect. They come in many colors; the smallest of the Wyandottes, Dottie (pale with caramel-color lacings), is lowest in the pecking order, and subject to mild bullying on the part of the next-smallest, Winona (white with grey lacings) and in turn, the two of them are bullied by the Barred Rock hens, Maureen and Carly, who chase them away from the two shallow pans where we put their food daily.

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A Christmas Eve Story: Father Christmas and the Provost

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(This is a short-story version of an episode in Adelsverein: The Sowing, which I reworked as a free-standing Christmas story a good few years ago, for a collection of short stories. The scene; the Texas Hill country during the Civil War – a war in which many residents of the Hill Country were reluctant to participate, as they had abolitionist leanings, had not supported secession … and had quite enough to do with defending themselves against raiding Indians anyway.)

It was Vati’s idea to have a splendid Christmas Eve and he broached it to his family in November. Christian Friedrich Steinmetz to everyone else but always Vati to his family; once the clockmaker of Ulm in Bavaria, Vati had come to Texas with the Verein nearly twenty years before with his sons and his three daughters. “For the children, of course,” he said, polishing his glasses and looking most particularly like an earnest and kindly gnome, “This year past has been so dreadful, such tragedies all around but it is within our capabilities to give them a single good memory of 1862! I shall arrange for Father Christmas to make a visit, and we shall have as fine a feast as we ever did, back in Germany. Can we not do this, my dears?”
“How splendid, Vati! Oh, we shall, we shall!” his youngest daughter Rosalie kissed her father’s cheek with her usual degree of happy exuberance, “With the house full of children even the babies will have a wonderful memory, I am sure!” Her older sisters, Magda and Liesel exchanged fond but exasperated glances; dear, vague well-meaning Vati!

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Overdrawn

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I was kind of intrigued by last week’s Buzzfeed article, attempting to whip up the internet mob for the purpose of going after Chip and Joanna Gaines, who have a hugely popular home renovation show on the HGTV channel, and cannily have never said a word on the show regarding their more or less mainstream Christian beliefs, or their attendance at a mega-church where the pastor apparently is on the record as having expressed disapproval of the concept of the institution of formal marriage being anything other than that of a man and a woman. (Note: I’ve never watched the show myself, although my daughter has. Blondie avers that Joanna Gaines is a one-note designer; her thing is shabby chic. All to the good, since that is my own preference, well-mixed with Laura Ashley comfortable country antique seasoned with a splash of William Morris/Craftsman. And … well, most people have items of décor and large furniture of which they are fond … who the heck clears the deck and redecorates every year or so, in response to the fashion of the moment? Only the very wealthy and socially insecure, I surmise.)

More power to them the Gainses and their redecorating business; not the internet lynch mob, always ready to be whipped up to a fine frothing frenzy. Really, this early 21st century is increasingly resembling the 16th, in the ruthless search for the ritual burning at stake by officials or by the annoyingly self-appointed for individuals who refuse to give lip-service to the prevailing social/political orthodoxies.

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