Humor
Around Milwaukee October 2011
Recently I traveled up north to Milwaukee. You can see the Miller Brewery Tour highlights here. The inside joke among me and my friends is that Milwaukee’s motto should be
It’s better than you think
Because that’s the truth.
Upper left – I was impressed with their conversion of older industrial buildings into condominiums as well as new construction. But I think that the sign for “The Point on the River” that said “It Reminds me of Amsterdam” was pushing it a bit too far… Upper middle – great buildings being renovated downtown. Upper middle – near where a friend of mine lives someone put some yard sculpture together with what appears to be buried cars in their front lawn. Upper right – a cool brand new building in the arts section of town. Lower left – a Ford Falcon used to deliver Jimmy John’s. They built this car from 1960-1970 so someone has kept this guy running a long time. Lower middle – the famous city hall. Lower right – The Fonz! We were in our high end hotel and someone came right up to us to see if we had directions to the Fonz statue, and we were able to accommodate. Apparently he is a real tourist attraction.
Cross posted at LITGM
A bunch of random comments….
1. I have just spent the past hour leaving various comments on favorite blogs. I have a self-imposed moratorium on ChicagoBoyz commenting because I tend to get sucked into the “time loss” vortex around here.
2. With regard to my internet commenting, it appears that I am an internet know-it-all. Note to self: humility is a fine quality. And stay away from Twitter.
3. Whit Stillman has a new movie out*, Damsels in Distress. Joy and happiness.
4. Say, how do you minimize open windows on a Mac so that I can go back and forth between windows quickly and do the command-C and command-V thing? What’s that? But I don’t wanna go to the Apple Store (Macphobia/Mac-for-Dummies didn’t work for me). The Apple Store is so crowded and I don’t fit in with the “must have latest gadgets” crowd. No disrespect intended but the frantic and excited look in many an eye reminds me of the Nordstrom shoe department on sale day.
5. I love that shoe department.
6. Here are a list of books in a random corner of my home:
Neal Stephenson’s latest (I was at his recent book reading here in ChicagoLand), a book about the Soviets in Afghanistan, True Grit by Charles Portis, Mildred Pierce (yes, there is a book and not just a movie), a book of Salman Rushdie essays, Reagan In His Own Hand, The Long Walk, and a chicklit book called The Vintage Affair.
What are you reading?
PS: I figured out the Mac thing. Never mind.
*PPS: I guess the movie has been filmed but is yet to be released?
Freedom & Fear
I started following what I called “The Affair of the Danish Mo-Toons” way back at the very beginning of that particular imbroglio, followed by the ruckus last year over “Everybody Draw Mohammad” and now we seem to have moved on to the Charlie Hebdo fiasco – a French satirical magazine dared to poke fun at the founder of Islam … by putting a cartoon version on the cover of their latest issue, with the result that their offices were firebombed. I think at this point it would have been fair to assume that representatives of the Religion of Peace would respond in a not-quite-so peaceful manner, so all props for the Charlie Hebdo management for even going ahead with it – for even thinking of standing up for freedom of thought, freedom of a press, even freedom to take the piss out of a target. (The following is what I wrote last year – still relevant to this latest case)
“Folk Art Battleship”
I was recently in Milwaukee at a very interesting antique store in the 5th ward called the “Riverview Antique Market“. A model caught my eye…
Of course it was a very well made “4 stacker” US destroyer of WW1 vintage. These destroyers were built in large numbers towards the end of WW1 to defeat German U-boats and were subsequently transferred to England in 1940 as part of “lend lease” as the US tried to help the Allies while remaining neutral prior to our entry in WW1.
When I looked at the price tag I was appropriately saddened as they described it as a “folk art battleship”. The antique owner didn’t even think to spend a couple of minutes online trying to figure out if it was a model of a real ship or just an “art object” that someone built from scratch.
Sad but likely only 1 in 10,000 individuals who passed by that model would have seen that it was a “real” model; the odds are probably even less in a hipster neighborhood of people looking for “vintage” objects. After all, it is all just art, anyways.
I, for one, was impressed.
Cross posted at LITGM