Rainy and cool. On the evening walk it rumbled in the distance, and Birch decided: no. He wanted to go home. Fine, although we would've made it around the circle without endampening. Just as well: I had things to do! I was going to put up the pictures that required a nail in the wall, and I'd been putting it off for fear I'd misalign them, or wouldn't like them. But they can't sit on the table forever. Screw up your courage and pound that nail.

They look fine. They're stylized luggage tags for Heathrow and Boston. A reminder when I enter and leave that there are places I love, waiting.

This was supper tonight: "Savory Campfire" pork (it said so on the label) with my signature Cayenne Potatoes.

Sounds more impressive when you say it’s a signature dish, no? They’re just roasted potatoes with cayenne pepper, but when you say “signature” it suggests you’re known for something that has a long tradition, and was developed after careful testing and blending. Or, if it’s a storied dish, it was invented on the spot in 1906 at Delmonico’s by a chef who had to prepare dinner for a duke after the place had closed and had nothing but leeks and turmeric, or something.

Sitting on the lamppost base this afternoon, I thought “let’s just look at small houses in Edina on one of these informative websites,” and hello there’s one that’s quite reasonably priced. Let’s peek inside -

Oh

It looks like a computer game from 1997. Maybe it is. When you go downstairs you have to boot up the room and hit an ESCAPE key to go through three credit screens and get to the menu.

ANYWAY we will spare the tedious account of your host's psycho-emotional state today, because I'm hooking up my PC and I'm going to make a new world in a game, or boot up an old game and perforate some Nazis until my hand hurts. But of course we've always something more.

And now . . .

Previously known as "Here to There."

I don’t know what I was looking for, or if I was looking for something at all. But somehow I found this woman, sitting on a utility pole.

This led me to search for Annie Jenkins, to see what became of her. I was doubtful I’d find anything. One of the returns went to a skyscraperpage.com page about Los Angeles utility poles. It has a better picture. Honestly, urban nerds can fixate on the oddest things.

The location: outside the Tower theater. We could talk about that, but we’ve grazed on the topic before. What caught my eye was the discussion on the same page about helipads on downtown LA buildings, how there used to be a law requiring them in new construction, and how helicopter service - indeed, helicopter buses were part of the area’s transportation system.

They fell from favor, figurtively and literally:

Los Angeles Airways Flight 417 was a Sikorsky S-61 helicopter that crashed on August 14, 1968 in the city of Compton, California. All eighteen passengers and three crew members were killed. The aircraft was destroyed by impact and fire. According to the National Transportation Safety Board the probable cause of the accident was fatigue failure.

The accident happened when the (arbitrarily designated) yellow blade, one of five main rotor blades, separated from the spindle that attached the blade to the rotor head. Following failure, the helicopter was uncontrollable and it fell to the ground. The fatigue crack originated in an area of substandard hardness and inadequate shot peening.

Thanks, wikipedia editor, for linking “shot peening. ”Trust me, it's boring. Anyway, the helicopters were a major part of Disney Tomorrowland lore, as this page shows with remarkable detail and fantastic old pictures.

There had been another fatal crash in 1968, and the double-whammy would begin the end of Los Angeles Airways.

What does that have to do with Annie on the pole? Absolutely nothing. But I was amused by the story and headline directly beneath her sole claim to fame:

No, she wasn't a Pole Agent. They meant "Polish." He was a Red agent, Pavel Monat. His story had a most unusual - but, in a way, all-American - coda.