I wrote a post back in 2012 about this relic from a long-closed amusement park on Milwaukee’s northwest side. The dinosaur has been a familiar fixture on North 76th Street in Milwaukee for at least 40 years, and for the past five years my post has prompted many comments from people sharing memories of Johnson’s Park. For many who grew up in Milwaukee, this guy signifies specific and meaningful times in their lives.
Well, sadly, our dino friend is finally gone. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel ran a story on his fate in Sunday’s paper (link here to the article).
Purchased for $11 at auction in December, the dinosaur will soon take up residence in the backyard of a home in Saukville, a town about an hour north of Milwaukee. The buyer has a personal connection to the dinosaur. As a child he played mini-golf and raced go-karts at Johnson’s Park, and as an adult he has worked at the various car dealerships that populate the neighborhood.
I like that.
Although I’ll miss glancing over at his hulking presence and weathered orange scales on the drive north to Mequon or Cedarburg, it helps to know our old buddy wound up in a place where he’ll be much loved 🙂
I love the creativity this blogger brings to her meal planning! She not only draws inspiration from the usual sources (like Pinterest and cookbooks) but she also takes ingredients and flavors she likes and uses them in new “formats.” Very creative and fun!
Someone asked where I get meal ideas. They come from many different places. Cookbooks, Pinterest, and menus are some of my favorite places to find inspiration. I have been known to snap pictures or descriptions of menus and my family’s food in restaurants.
Once a week my daughter and I go out to lunch/dinner. We are away from home all day so it is just easier to eat out one meal a week. This has proved to be a great source of inspiration.
Last week we went to Red Robin for burgers. I ordered the Southern Charm burger (above). It was pretty good. Bacon candied with brown sugar, honey BBQ sauce, sharp cheddar cheese, caramelized onions, lettuce on a ciabatta bun. My daughter ordered the Sautéed ‘Shroom Burger. This is her absolute favorite burger. Tons of sautéed mushrooms and Swiss cheese on a burger is her idea of the perfect…
Last week’s 10-minute interruption by a state-run Russian television network of the CSPAN 1 television feed of Rep. Maxine Waters speaking from the floor of the U.S. House of Representatives reminded me of SCTV’s prescient programming back in 1981.
First, here is what happened a week ago (Thursday, January 12).
And now some background: Second City Television (SCTV) was a Toronto-based television show about a low-budget local television station that, thanks to satellite distribution to cable systems, underwent an unlikely transformation to first a “superstation” and later a network (inspired, I assume, by Ted Turner’s WCTG Channel 17 superstation). Located in the fictitious Canadian town of Melonville, SCTV spoofed everything from Canadian Broadcasting rules requiring a certain percentage of Canadian-originated content (hence Bob and Doug McKenzie’s “Great White North,” a comically rambling show about beer and sibling resentments) to cheesy local TV programming, current events, and popular culture in general.
It’s hard for me to pick a favorite SCTV storyline or episode. This was one of my favorite television series ever, a show that gave us great actors like John Candy, Catherine O’Hara, Eugene Levy, Martin Short, Andrea Martin, Rick Moranis, Dave Thomas, and Joe Flaherty. But if I had to choose just one ongoing storyline, it would be CCCP 1 (or as they say it on the show: Three C P One).
The CCCP 1 “network” is SCTV’s Soviet counterpart, a decidedly low-budget Russian television station featuring 1950s-era technology like huge microphones hanging from cords around people’s necks and giant cameras requiring operators with brute strength to dolly forward and back. (Historic aside: Despite Soviet technological advances in military and space exploration, the USSR domestic sectors affecting ordinary, day-to-day life did not keep pace, so the heavy, outdated television-production equipment was a nod to that sorry fact.) Somehow CCCP 1 knocks out SCTV’s satellite (portrayed by a vintage lunch counter broiler with those rotating rows of hot dogs) . . .
. . . and takes over the SCTV feed, treating us to an incomprehensible Scrabble-like game show and a series called “Hey Giorgi!” about a happy guy who walks around his rural Russian town and solves everyone’s problems. (Again, the show demonstrates its smarts by incorporating local prejudices into the “Giorgi!” narrative: Car won’t start? Giorgi raises the hood to discover a cluster of straws in one corner. Hmm, looks like Uzbeks have been drinking your battery fluid again.)
So here is the CCCP 1 episode in its entirety. It opens with an ad for Perry Como’s concert (in which the singer’s famously “relaxed” style is taken to an extreme) and features most of my favorite characters. UPDATE: The clip I originally embedded got taken down. For a while I couldn’t find a CCCP 1 episode online, but today (12/23/2020) I found a new one.
Further update: This clip keeps on disappearing, sadly. You can find bits and pieces on YouTube but never the entire episode. This post is getting several hits today (February 28, 2022), most likely due to the Russian invasion of Ukraine. So I’ll update here with two clips to give you the gist of the CCCP 1 part of the episode.
First, a clip of the programming immediately prior to the satellite interception, a performance of Julius Caesar starring all your fave SCTV regulars.
Then the first CCCP 1 interception appears, immediately after Julius Caesar is stabbed. (Et tu Brute???)
This is the original text that closed my 2017 post: With today’s uncertainty over Russia and possible election hacking and now this unexplained interruption of the CSPAN 1 feed, it seems an ideal time to look back—both to laugh at and reflect upon the clunky reality of everyday Soviet life versus the frightening spectre of our Cold War enemy.
And now here are some thoughts on what is happening today, on the last day of February in 2022: I have never seen the type of worldwide response to a geopolitical event that we’ve witnessed in the past several days. I’ve written a few blog posts about Russia and Ukraine since 2014, which you can find by searching for those terms in the search bar of my website or, if you’re on a phone and have pulled up a post that isn’t hosted directly on my blog (which seems to happen on phones unless you go straight to my home page at KatherineWikoff.com), you should just be able to plug my name, Russia, and Ukraine into any search engine to find them.
Anyway, it is astonishing to see multiple independent actors doing their own things to aid Ukraine and apply “sanctions” of various sorts to Russia. Things like Anonymous hacking into government offices and banks in Russia and Belarus, plus renaming Putin’s yacht and changing the tracking manifest info to indicate that it is going to Hell. Social media instruction on how to make Molotov cocktails. An urban warfare expert at West Point sharing tips on Twitter to teach ordinary people how to fight against anyone who invades their city. A tank mechanic from Minnesota sharing info on how to locate tanks’ vulnerabilities and disable them, especially as the soldiers driving tanks rarely know how to repair them. TikTok videos demonstrating how to drive any abandoned tanks or military vehicles one might find. Major movie studios refusing to release films in Russia. Russian sports teams being barred from international competition. Google Wallet and Apple Pay apps ceasing to work.
It’s fascinating to watch this very 21st-century response to a 20th-century style military aggression. I just hope that the horrible weaponry alluded to in Putin’s vague (and insane, IMO) threats can remain firmly consigned to the past. Surely humankind has moved beyond the impulse toward self-annihilation–although I realize, even as I type the words, what a ridiculous and naive thought that is.
[UPDATE, May 12, 2025: I see this post is getting lots of traffic. Thank you, Ed Driscoll, over at Instapundit.com! Whenever the stats for this post leap sky high, it’s always because of you! 🙂 ]
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I’ve had this sinking feeling for a while that the actual content I’ve posted on my blog for the past almost-five years had almost nothing to do with the blog’s original tagline:
Ideas on creativity, innovation, lifelong learning, and other random stuff
Possibly it might fit with the “other random stuff.” Once in awhile “creativity” and “lifelong learning.” Never “innovation,” at least not in the way the world seems to define that term.
So lately I haven’t posted much.
Blame it on an existential rift between what I expected my blog to be when I started it five years ago and how it has turned out in actual fact. However, inspired by my friend Lisa Rivero, who recently posted on her renewed relationship with writing and blogging (link to “Dear Neglected Blog” here), I have reflected quite a bit since the start of 2017 on what I want my blog to be.
See my new tagline in the upper right-hand corner of this page?
Searching for meaning. Making connections. Noticing beauty. Discovering insights. Finding inspiration. Tending imagination. Trying to say yes.
Does all that sound pretentious? I sure hope not. I could have kept the original, lopping off everything except the words “random stuff.” That might have covered my all-over-the-place topics. But as a descriptive tagline for a blog? It was rather nondescript.
I drank a lot of coffee and made lots of lists to arrive at the phrases that appear in my new tagline. If you’ve read my blog over any length of time, would you agree that they seem to fit?
Maybe things that capture my imagination will also intrigue you. Maybe the “random stuff” I know about and share here will be useful.
My most-read blog post ever (and still receiving the highest number of views every day) is “What’s the difference between grammar, punctuation, and mechanics?” One of my daughters suggested that I should post regularly on writing/reading/speaking topics and collect links to those posts on a separate page on my website called “Help with English.” If she didn’t have me as a mom, she said, she wouldn’t have known what to do with a lot of her assignments in language arts classes. (I don’t know about that—she’s pretty sharp 🙂 )
Well, writing/reading/speaking is something I know about and would definitely be useful to other people.
Maybe I can strike a decent balance between truly practical posts and more self-indulgent ones on “noticing beauty” and “tending imagination.”
Let’s gravitate in this direction for a while anyway and just see how it goes. Or, in keeping with my new tagline, let’s try saying yes.
(Note: See comments for an updated answer to the question asked in this post’s title.)
My daughter and I both had projects to work on last night and, wanting some familiar, companionable television in the background, decided to put on Season One of Downton Abbey. (Love that show 🙂 )
Around about the third episode, the one with the little fair in the village, William (the second footman) is sad because Thomas (first footman) knew he wanted to ask Daisy (kitchen maid) to go to the fair with him and thus swooped in and asked her first, just to be mean. Later in the show, William is in the servants’ hall playing a sad-sounding tune on the piano, just a few bars, before Mrs. Hughes (housekeeper) appears in the doorway and kindly offers sympathy and wise words.
As William played the tune, I realized: hey, I think I know that song! The tiny little snatch of melody he played was the only part I knew, and I was pretty sure the words were (and they were the only words I knew): “After you’ve gone.”
Was it the song I was thinking I knew? I had my phone handy so did a quick search for those lyrics and found that yes, that seemed to be the song. You can hear the original recording in the video clip below. The “after you’ve gone” lyrics don’t come until one minute and eight seconds into the song. (I’m very patient when I’m on a quest 🙂 )
But wait!
Season One of Downton Abbey ends with Lord Grantham informing everyone attending the garden party that the UK was at war with Germany. According to the Wikipedia article on “After You’ve Gone,” this song, which William plays at some point prior to the start of World War I in 1914, wasn’t published, even in sheet music form, until 1918, the year it was recorded.
Really, really surprising to me, as the Downton production team was meticulous in their historical accuracy.
Then I started to wonder: How do I even know this song?
I had this weird sensation in some cloistered alcove of my memory of a woman singing just the words “after you’ve gone.” She is kind of swaying, and her voice is nasally and loud. I was trying to describe it to my daughter, thinking maybe she could help me out.
“Somehow I associate it with ‘Hazel,'” I told her. But we knew it wasn’t from a “Hazel” episode, because we both know the “Hazel” oeuvre pretty thoroughly. (Maybe that’s a post for another day 🙂 ) “A woman is singing, and I think she’s auditioning for something, but the people don’t like her. Like ‘go away.’ And she has this really grating voice, like Ethel Merman.”
The “Ethel Merman” reference was all my daughter needed. “I think it was Ethel Merman,” she said.
But where would I have seen her singing just that line? When would she have been auditioning and nobody liked her? And why would I have associated Ethel Merman with “Hazel”? (More to the point, how did my daughter even know who Ethel Merman was?)
Then I remembered.
Sony didn’t release the “Hazel” series on DVD until really late, long after lots of other old television shows had been released. So I had my old VHS tapes that I’d recorded from TV back in the early ’90s, and when I had time I’d watch them with my girls. When I was taping them I occasionally left the VCR running and accidentally recorded whatever show followed my “Hazel” episode.
Ethel Merman was in a “That Girl” episode once. And I was pretty sure I had accidentally recorded it on one of my “Hazel” tapes.
Thanks to YouTube I was able to find that episode. Yep, it was Ethel Merman! I’ve included the entire episode here, because it’s such a cute show. Ethel Merman sings shortly after the 19:40 mark (and then again at the end of that scene). Judge for yourself how accurate my little whisper of memory/sensation was 🙂
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It still kind of shocks me to read or hear people using that phrase to describe positive buy-in to a new idea. As in, “We’re extremely excited about our company’s new product. Everyone has been drinking the Kool Aid, and the entire sales team is really pumped.”
Apparently it takes fewer than 40 years for a phrase’s original meaning to be lost. On this date 38 years ago (November 18, 1978), more than 900 Americans died in a mass murder-suicide after drinking cyanide-laced Kool Aid at a religious commune in a Guyana jungle. More than a third of these people were children. Although some drank it voluntarily, many others, including babies, were forced to drink the poisoned liquid. We know the details because of the few people who managed to escape into the surrounding jungle.
The photos of the dead still haunt me. Bodies scattered like litter around the compound. I don’t want to post any of the pictures here. They make me too sad. But you can find them online easily if you do a search for “Jonestown.”
What was going on in America during the late 1970s and early 1980s that led people to join religious cults like Jim Jones’s Peoples Temple [sic]? I’d forgotten all about this strange period of our history before thinking about the Peoples Temple today.
I can personally recall seeing people selling flowers all summer at the northeast corner of Water and Wisconsin in downtown Milwaukee during the early 1980s—haggard-looking young men and women surrounded by white buckets of flowers, chanting over and over: “A dollar a bunch, a dollar a bunch, any bunch one dollar.” They were in a cult, everyone told me, Hare Krishna.
And who could forget the Rev. Sun Myung Moon and his Unification Church and the mass wedding ceremonies he performed (like the 1982 Madison Square Garden wedding of 2,075 couples).
The various” cults” (which was the word used in the media; perhaps it would be more accurate and less biased to call them “churches” today?) were very aggressive in their proselytizing. In fact, “brainwashing” was a term commonly associated with cults.
The movie Airplane! (made by Milwaukee natives Jim Abrahams and David and Jerry Zucker 🙂 ) is funny even if you don’t get any of the many, many satirical references. But to really appreciate it, you practically need footnotes—like reading a Shakespeare play. There are the homages to the 1970s-era airplane disaster movies and way-too-many-to-count references to popular culture (Saturday Night Fever), to politics (Howard Jarvis and the Proposition 13 tax revolt in California), and to cults and their aggressive proselytizing.
One “cult” reference is found in the inclusion of two Hare Krishna passengers on the plane (one of whom is David Leisure, later famous for playing Joe Isuzu in television ads and Charley Dietz in the television comedy “Empty Nest”).
The other is in this introduction to Robert Stack’s Capt. Rex Kramer, a no-nonsense tough-guy called in to help land the plane after the pilots are sickened by bad fish. Although the impatient, violent responses establishing his character no doubt elicit laughter on their own, only knowledge that public places in the 1970s were rife with such aggressive proselytizers provides the context that elevates slapstick to satire.
It rained all day long in Milwaukee yesterday—so windy that umbrellas turned inside out or were wrenched away. Lots of people, like me, gave up and decided to brave the elements in raincoats alone. Yes, I felt like an idiot walking down the street getting drenched while carrying my highly noticeable and very large tightly furled umbrella. But my bumbershoot, though battered, should be good for a couple more showers. So there’s one good thing. Because others didn’t make it 🙂
I actually prefer some of my other attempts in terms of composition, but in the end I decided to go with this photo because of that lone leaf whirling into the frame at the very moment I snapped the shutter. (Or whatever term is correct for the “Enter” button on an iPhone when taking a picture 🙂 )
First of all, is it “Crabapple,” “Crab Apple,” or “Crab-Apple”? I grew up thinking of it as a one-word tree name, but I see it spelled all three of these ways and could probably find even more variants if I searched for them. I think I’ll stick with “crabapple.”
It stormed last night in Milwaukee. If you were watching the Wisconsin–Ohio State football game on television (or, would that be the “Ohio State–Wisconsin” game?), you saw the rain passing through Madison and Camp Randall Stadium (which is built on the site of what actually used to be a Union army camp named for the governor at that time, Alexander Randall, during the Civil War). Speaking of the WI–OSU/OSU–WI game (I have divided loyalties😄), what a hard-fought contest that was!
Anyway, back to my tree bark. As I was taking out some recycling a few minutes ago, I noticed how strikingly textured and colorful the crabapple trunk looks while partially damp from last night’s rain.
So I took a few pictures and decided to put them on my blog. Hope you like them!
Katherine Wikoff 