My GOD it’s cold. So much cold so soon. I woke to a light dusting on the sidewalk, which I duly cleaned with a broom. Easier than a shovel. Mind you, I have a lot of sidewalk. This isn’t just a quick scrape. Well, done and dusted, literally, so I went inside and posted the Substack . . . only to see the snow whip up again and fall in the exact amount I had just removed. All my work for naught. The futility of man and his plans laid bare by the mocking wind.
The snow quit halfway to work. Parked and put on my big headphones, which serve as earmuffs and have better resistance to signal loss. When it gets this cold, AirPods go dead after a block or so. (One ear gives you the tumbling-down threnody, then the other a half-minute later.) I was in the usual winter pain by the time I got to the 333 building to enter the warmth of the skyway. It is absurd to have a concept like "the usual winter pain," and I suppose it’s my fault; could’ve worn thicker pants, could’ve wrapped my face entirely to shield against the wind, could’ve moved to AZ, etc.
Upon getting coffee a co-worker said congrats on the kudos. The kudos? A letter in the paper saying how happy they were that I was still here, still writing. He noted how many people had come up to him at the Fair booth and said how much they liked my work.
Somehow this is worse. It’s just another reminder that it was absolute idiocy to kill my column. There was nothing gained. I used to give this person 130 reasons per annum to pick up the paper, and now it's 30. And -
Ding! Email.
Ah: our editor resigned. Long letter.
Oh no. Anyway: I realized the other day that we are but a few weeks from the new year, and that means the annual Bleat retweaking. Doesn’t it? Yes, I suppose it does.
I have no idea if any of you expect it. There are sites I read daily that have not changed their look, ever, and in some instances are bare-bones templates with no graphical sophistication whatsoever. Fine for them, but I can’t do that. Have to rip it all down to the studs and rebuild to banish the cruft. The problem, as ever, is a minor defect in the template I don’t see and carry over from page to page. But not this year! No, knowing how that’s happened before, I am determined to make the first template perfect!
(Ends up looking at a page on August with 25 orphaned <map> chunks of code)
LATER Went home and re-broomed the walk. I was ill-dressed for the event and had minimal finger-feels upon concluding, but by GOD I showed those flakes who's who. Napped with concise efficiency, falling asleep immediately and jolting awake at the climax of a hectic dream with ten minutes on the timer to go. The timer is just a suggestion. I never sleep the entire session. I gauge the success of the nap by how much time is left. Ten minutes? That'll do. Two minutes? Oh perfect timing.
Made a hot cup of coffee and tweaked on the Wednesday template for 2025, realized there some standing heads I hadn't done. Sigh. Need to generate more rabbit-in-holes pictures. No, hold on, I've a piece due tomorrow (counting Bleat, Substack, and Discourse, it is a ten-piece week, what we call your Chicken Bucket week) so let's think about that.
LATER I did not think about that until 9:37, and then I banged it out. I loaded it with opinion and subjective remarks. Let's see if it bothers anyone because it's too much like a column. If it's too columny they have to set the headline in italics, which is our visual signal that the piece is subjective. I was repeatedly - and I mean, repeatedly instructed by my previous editor that I was not to write these things like columns. But it should be "voicey." Okay, can it be my voice? Or just generally voicey? It could have opinions, kinda sorta, but maybe like celery in tuna salad.
Maybe every other word in the headline could be italicized.
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
A while ago I was researching the Polish Colourists, as one does. The next day I opened my laptop and saw an open tab for one of them, Zygmunt Waliszewski. The fellow whose art I didn’t like much. Although his self-portrait has a certain something. Anyway, he said he’d lived in Krzeszowice. Never heard of it, of course. Click on the link . . . . Ah. Town of about 10 thousand souls. And:
Krzeszowice is located in southern part of the Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, with numerous caves and valleys in the area.
The upland, you say?
The Kraków-Częstochowa Upland, also known as the Polish Jurassic Highland or Polish Jura (Polish: Jura Krakowsko-Częstochowska), is part of the Jurassic System of south–central Poland.
The Jurassic Highland! You know, I actually thought that everything was pretty much in place by then, but no:
The Jurassic period is named after the Jura Mountains, where evidence of something or other was first found - don’t want to get into too many details. Why “Jura”? It seems obscure, but I love the fact that the name first appears in one of Julius Caesar’s commentaries. Wikipedia:
The relief of the upland developed since the Paleogene, under climatic conditions changing considerably. Its main component is a peneplain, crowned by monadnocks, rocky masses that resisted erosion, generated as hard rock on Late Jurassic buildup surrounded by less resistant bedded limestone of the same age.
Hold on: monadnocks?
Monadnock is derived from a Abenaki term for an isolated hill or a lone mountain that stands above the surrounding area, typically by surviving erosion.
I know the word first from architecture.
Burnham and Root, 1891.
This is the Monadnock, too. It has the same array of bays, but a cornice.
Wiki:
The later south half, constructed in 1893, was designed by Holabird & Roche and is similar in color and profile to the original, but the design is more traditionally ornate. When completed, it was the largest office building in the world.
Ah. Burnham and Root did the first part. Together with the Old Colony and the Fisher, you have an unchanged view of late 19th early 20th century Chicago, and how it must have seemed an awesome new age:
Add the Manhattan building . . .
. . . and you have an extant row of the old streetscape.
But no one seems to give much love to the Plymouth, sandwiched in between the bigger brothers.
Wiki:
The exterior alterations executed by the LSEU in 1945 were limited to the first two floors and the top two floors of the Plymouth Building’s Dearborn Street façade. The ground floor was reconfigured—storefronts with separate recessed entrances at the center and southernmost bays were removed, the main Dearborn Street entrance to the building was moved from the northernmost bay to the center bay, and new Chicago-style windows were inserted to flank the new entrance. The Sullivanesque cast-iron decoration was removed and replaced with the current Collegiate Gothic-style surround.
What
The projecting cornice above the tenth floor of the building was removed and the current Collegiate Gothic-style brick-and-terra-cotta top was constructed to mask the crudely constructed eleventh-floor addition.
So this is newer? They pried off decorative iron and replaced it with off-the-shelf Gothic terra-cotta in 1945?
But here’s the thing: they only did front. If you go around the block to the narrow street called Plymouth court. . .
There’s what the front must have looked like.
They had so much contempt for it they didn't even bother with the alley.
|
