Hmm: low on milk. Not close to being out, but low. I like one jug in the door and two queued up on the shelf. The one in the door has an inch, and that's GO TIME, so when I'm at the store I see that milk is 4 / $5.00. What a deal! But I only need one. Put it in the cart. At the self-serv checkout, it rings up as 1.89 or something, and I realize I need a coupon. Go get the coupon book from the stack on the podium. Page through it, cursing to myself; I hate these things. JUST MARK DOWN THE PRICE. Not this page, not this page, not this page -

Aw, there's a coupon cut out. Someone took out a coupon and put the rest back. That spoils the entire book, because you don't know if it's the one you want. Get another coupon book. Not this page, not this page, not any page.

So it's in the other coupon insert, which has a row of coupons on a folded sheet on the inside. Don't see it. Self-serv assistant asks if he can help.

"Milk," I say, weeping.

He points to a coupon that had milk and cereal. I had seen the cereal and dismissed it. I beeped the coupon and put the milk in the bag.

PLEASE INSERT THE COUPON IN THE SLOT.

I put it in the slot. The machine repeated the request, so I blew into the slot, which usually works. It did.

PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.

I was.

PLEASE PLACE THE ITEM IN THE BAGGING AREA.

I picked it up and thumped it on the scale.

DO YOU WANT TO SKIP BAGGING ON THIS ITEM

Yes.

PLEASE WAIT FOR PERMISSION TO SKIP BAGGING

I picked up the milk and thumped it again, thinking it would be hilarious if I misjudged my own strength and the milk burst and showered everyone with udderly goodness. This time it worked and I picked up the milk and everything else and paid and left.

Rain outside. Rain threatening to contract to snow. Cruel wind; low grey skies. Scurried to the car, went to my pocket for my keys - which of course were in the left-side pocket. I was carrying everything with my left hand. I moved the bags to my right hand. The bag carrying the milk broke and the milk hit the ground.

When I picked it up, there was milk on the pavement. Well, maybe it popped the cap a little.

When I got home and opened the trunk, the best way to describe the liner in the back compartment was Milk Lake. Took out and put it on the driveway and threw the milk into the trash bin.

Daughter has five friends over. Made them all supper.

"Anyone want milk?" I asked. No.

"Thank you."


For the last three days I've been listening to an audio version of a book about the French Revolution, "A Place of Greater Safety." Possibly one of the most underwhelming titles you can imagine; right up there with "A Location of Additional Security." The story is familiar. The idealism! The patriotic fervor! But that's how it always starts, with the hoorahs and hoorays, and then comes the screaming and the chopping and the running blood in the gutters.

It always surprises me how the Revolution is still held in such regard. Within the space of a few years you had steely-eyed maniacs renaming everything and establishing a Cult of the Supreme Being, complete with springtime festivals that everyone felt they had to attend and mouth the things they did not believe. Because there's always someone scanning the crowd to see who's less enthusiastic than the fellow next to him.

I mention this because I was watching a film about another revolution, the Nazi one. Our appetite for the WW2 era cannot be slaked, because it has absolutely everything, turned up to 11. This one is not "Hitler's Goldfish," my projected documentary for National Geographic. It's the diaries of Goebbels. The Gerbster. The Goebbelator. Read by Kenneth Brannnnagggchhgh, with archival footage to match all the diary entries. This vile little rodent, this chinless nebbishy no-one, elevated up for his sycophancy and his facile grasp of new media. A sgtraight biography would be less interesting; this is more like unaware self-revelation with home movies, and you enter that strange mirror world of 30s Germany where the monsters are moving in. Invited in, really, with a wink and nod to their monstrousness.

 

I'm not sure if the photographer told her to look back, or something in her career inspired the expression. Garbo never had to do this.

It's Muriel Evans. Like yesterday's entry, she was born in Minneapolis in 1910. She married a Cudahy, one of the fellows who founded the famous packing company; they wed in 1929 set off on a world tour, settled in Paris, and divorced in 1930.

Then she went back to movies, until she married an agent, and retired - so this picture was taken before 1936.

I'm thinking that maybe that hat smelled.

 

 

Tonopah began as a mining town in 1900: gold in them thar hils, and silver too.

Its glory days just might be behind it.

Wikipedia:

The community began circa 1900 with the discovery of gold and silver-rich ore by prospector Jim Butler when he went looking for a lost burro he owned. The burro had wandered off during the night and sought shelter near a rock outcropping. When Butler discovered the animal the next morning, he picked up a rock to throw at the beast, but instead noticed the rock was unusually heavy. He had stumbled upon the second-richest silver strike in Nevada history.

As you might expect, that ends with "Citation needed."

Almost there. So close.

Let's zoom in a bit.

It has its own page: "The building was constructed in 1906 for Hiram Albert McKim, who had begun a mercantile business in the town two years prior. Carpenter craftsman J.J. Finley and stonemason E.E. Burdick constructed the building, a two-story stone building designed in the Classical Revival style."

Not . . . not really. The page also says that McKim's store "ultimately became the largest merchantile store in central Nevada."

Either they moved, or competition was rather scant.

Just try to figure this one out.

 

Clone-tool facade on the lower floors; the upper floors appear to be brick, not glued-on pieces of brick - and behind the shutters, unpainted brick in a different hue.

Two doors: one for the wide, one for skinnies.

 

"You say you want to move in and set up a competing liquor company, eh? Well, you'll want to talk to Mr. Sydewalck. Go down the hall and through the door."

Still a going concern, with good Yelp reviews and everything.

Here's the real attraction.

Tallest building in the state until 1929. A storied past! "According to legend, Wyatt Earp kept the saloon, Jack Dempsey was a bouncer, and Howard Hughes married Jean Peters at the Mizpah.."

Not one of those is true. But as long as we're telling tall tales:

The hotel is said to house a ghost deemed "the Lady in Red" by hotel guests who have experienced her presence. Legend says that the Lady in Red is the ghost of a prostitute who was beaten and murdered on the fifth floor of the hotel by a jealous ex-boyfriend. Another widely accepted description of the events is that The Lady in Red had been caught cheating by her husband at the hotel after he had missed a train, who then proceeded to kill her in a jealous rage.

Any pictures? Sure!

The social club:

Masonic groups, I think. The Masonic symbol is on top. The OES is the Order of the Eastern Star. F & A M stands for, I believe, Free and Associated Masons. The one in the middle I don't know. International Order of Really Fine Gents, perhaps.

 

The previous view was from Google Street View's smeary, tilted phase. This is better, and gives you the flavor of the town as it looked 60 years ago.

That's the Mizpah's neighbor, the Belvada. Began life as a bank, and it was three stories tall. Don't know what those bands were for, unless they wanted the horizontal lines to push the building down.

A 2006 newspaper story said it was being renovated, but these "paranormal investigators" shot this video in 2014. It's haunted, but perhaps not in the ways they believe.

Sometimes an old building just looks like it's trying to peek over the fence and see what folks are doing these days.

Those are the slantiest windows I've ever seen.

 

Finally, two reminders: you can do modernism on the cheap with some patterned concrete blocks, and . . .

And the hills will be here when all this is gone. Even the silver. Especially the silver.

 

That's what I saw. You might see something else.

 

Guess what's back? Restaurants! Because my last two postcard shows didn't supply a lot of examples, I'm doling them out at the rate of 2 per week.

 

 

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