Paths of Glory

Posted on December 1, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Actually, that post title came to me just now because I wanted something to do with “paths,” and Paths of Glory, the old Stanley Kubrick film starring Kirk Douglas, is one of my favorites.  Sadly, if you were hoping to read about the film, this post doesn’t have anything to do with it 🙂

Actually, this is sort of a post about our dogs.  Sorry.  (You can stop reading now if you despise this kind of cuteness.)

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This afternoon I came home from work, fed the dogs, put away groceries, and took out the garbage.  All my usual getting-home chores.  The snow  melted over the weekend, although today is quite cold.  So I noticed when I went outside that our dogs’ trails/paths through the yard are quite visible, even now when the grass is matted down and frozen and covered by leaves.  (Yes, we raked, but it snowed before all the leaves had a chance to fall.  Leaves are still falling!) 100_1495[1] 100_1497[1]

If you have pets, you have probably noticed that they like to walk in the same familiar little byways throughout your yard.  Locally, the roads between Milwaukee and other cities like Green Bay, Watertown, and Chicago were originally Indian trails.  When the roads were built over them much later, I guess everyone saw the wisdom of the original footpaths.

Even the planets seem to have an affinity for revolving through eternity along their same old elliptical orbits.

What is it about a well-worn path?  Why is it so attractive?  Yes, Robert Frost decided to take the less traveled road “Because it was grassy and wanted wear.”  But he’s an exception.  For most of us, the myriad complexities of daily life demand simplification.

And simplification requires routine—i.e., the road more traveled by!

 

Posted in Life, Nature, Science | Tagged , , , , | 4 Comments

Countdown to Downton Abbey – Cora’s YouTube Music Video

Posted on November 30, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Last year I wrote a series of “Countdown” posts in anticipation of Season 4 of Downton Abbey.  I had not intended to do the same this year, but yesterday I stumbled across something that was too fun not to share.

So, first the “countdown” part.  Season 5 of Downton Abbey is set to premiere in the U.S. on January 4 at 8:00 pm Central Time (9:00 Eastern).  The official PBS Downton Abbey page doesn’t have a countdown clock, as it has in past years, forcing us all to do the math ourselves.  But the page does have trailers and links and all the usual time-wasting stuff 🙂

Now for Cora’s music video.  Actress Elizabeth McGovern, who plays Lady Grantham, has a band in real life called Sadie and the Hotheads.  They’ve just released a cover of “The Little Drummer Boy,” which has a YouTube video (below) and which is also available for downloading at iTunes.

And, of course, the song itself has now put me in mind of two other versions (well, actually just one; the other is an exact replica, with uncanny mimicry) that I also feel compelled to share 🙂   The first features Bing Crosby and David Bowie, an odd pairing if there ever was one—and an excellent example of how innovative it can be to combine wildly disparate elements.

Apparently the creation of this polyphony between the old “Drummer Boy” and the new “Peace on Earth” was a completely unexpected turn of events.  A Washington Post article, “Bing and Bowie,” details the strange serendipity behind the song’s composition.  Apparently Bing Crosby happened to be in England on a concert tour in September 1977 and had lined up some British stars to appear as guests on his annual Christmas special.  David Bowie’s home was near the studio where Crosby was recording scenes for the show, so convenience was one factor in getting him.  But at the last minute Bowie announced that he hated “The Little Drummer Boy” and refused to sing it, so Crosby’s writers hurriedly wrote the “Peace on Earth” song for him to sing in counterpoint instead.  Necessity truly is the mother of invention.

By the way, Crosby died about a month after this performance was recorded.  So “serendipity” may be a very relevant description, indeed.

The second video is a parody of the first, with dead-on accuracy of reproduction by Will Ferrell and John C. Reilly.  I don’t know why this video makes me laugh so much.  Will Ferrell plays it completely straight, which you can see if you compare the two videos closely, but every eyebrow lift and turn of the head is hilarious.  You’ll have to head over to YouTube to actually watch this video: link here.  For whatever reason, Funny or Die (the producers) have set it up so that I can’t embed it for you to view on my blog.  You’ll be subjected to a really long ad at first, but it’s worth enduring in order to watch the video, IMO 🙂

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Black Friday – Spreading Like Retail Ebola

Posted on November 28, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I am both mystified and appalled to discover that the Black Friday phenomenon is fast becoming a new international “holiday.”

In scrolling through my Twitter feed last night, I came across a BBC News article describing how police have been called to supermarkets across the UK to deal with unruly “Black Friday” crowds.  My first reaction was to laugh, of course, at the very idea of a Black Friday stampede to get a deal on iceberg lettuce.

But then I read the article, and I suspect that “supermarket” must refer to a different kind of shopping establishment across the pond.  One shopper referred to getting a great deal on a coffee machine, a 70% discount, at a store called Tesco.  Apparently Tesco has said that it expects Black Friday to beat Boxing Day sales in 2014.

Boxing Day sales?  My family used to live in Canada, and what I know about Boxing Day is that it’s the day after Christmas, it’s the day on which Downton Abbey sorts used to give servants their Christmas “boxes,” and it’s a holiday on which all stores are closed.  But now, apparently, it’s a holiday similar to our Black Friday, in which retailers and deal-hungry customers engage in what can only be described as crass commercialism.

Black Friday got its start in the United Kingdom four years ago, according to the BBC article:

Black Friday—historically the big sales day in America that follows the Thanksgiving holiday—has been adopted by an increasing number of shops in the UK.

It was brought over by online store Amazon four years ago after internet shoppers noticed the US got the best deals.

The Black Friday craze has not only infected Europe.  This year it is spreading to Asia, as well.  An article in Wednesday’s Wall Street Journal, titled “Spreading Black Friday Fever to China’s Shoppers,” says

China doesn’t officially celebrate Thanksgiving or Christmas, but American retailers are hoping to convert a generation of consumers in the world’s most populous country into year-end binge buyers anyway.

Apparently, thanks to Alipay, a new Pay Pal imitator tied to e-commerce giant Alibaba, American retailers like Macy’s and American Apparel can make their Black Friday discounts available to Chinese shoppers.

This isn’t really a bad thing, of course, especially for Macy’s and American Apparel.  But the idea of Black Friday becoming a worldwide phenomenon kind of depresses me.  I avoid malls like the plague (to use another disease-related metaphor, which I’ve seemed employ a couple of times in this post already 🙂 ) during the Christmas shopping season.  I dislike the crowds, and there’s something antithetical about the euphoric combination of generosity and abject greed that shoppers seem to exhibit at this time of year.

They are shopping, presumably, to find the nicest gifts they can at the most affordable prices in order to honor people that they love.  But somehow, through an alchemy that is shrouded in magic and beyond my comprehension, that admirable sentiment undergoes a transformation to become pure avarice.  At least that’s what it looks like to me when people are assaulted (at best) and trampled to death (at worst) in the interest of a “deal.”

The most troubling part, and I know that reasonable people can disagree on this, is the fact that Black Friday is becoming seen as a holiday in and of itself.  The day itself is an actual federal holiday, meaning that U.S. government offices are closed, and many states also close up on this day.  Which is fine, as far as giving people extra time off to travel and visit with family.  That makes sense.

What doesn’t make sense is that Black Friday, an American retail phenomenon meant to jump start the Christmas shopping season, should be perceived as and adopted by people in other countries entirely out of context as a representation of an American day of celebration.  On the introduction of Black Friday shopping to China, Jingming Li, U.S. president of Alipay, had this to say in the Wall Street Journal article:

We’re just bringing more attendees to this American holiday.

The definition of “holiday,” to me, is the celebration of some unique aspect of a culture’s history or identity.  It’s both ironic and fitting—while at the same time fairly depressing—that Chinese citizens are about to become better acquainted with “the real America” through Black Friday shopping.

Posted in Life, News, Popular culture | Tagged , , , , , | 3 Comments

Thankful for Libby Gaughan’s Pecan Pie

Posted on November 27, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

For a quick Thanksgiving Day post, I want to share a recipe that we love and that has special meaning for me.  Plus, it’s pretty easy to make 🙂

Libby Gaughan was a friend of my grandmother’s many years ago (she died sometime in the 1980s).  Her son Jack was a famous, Hugo-Award-winning artist who illustrated science-fiction novels.  Libby was an indomitable force, the spine of the Republican Party in Clark County, Ohio; her house was filled with little elephant knickknacks and doorstops and photographs of herself with important Republicans like Richard Nixon.

Libby was also an excellent cook—even though she rarely did it.  Instead she drove clear to the other end of town every day to eat dinner at the Holiday Inn.  It was probably really good for her socially to have that daily connection.  Libby lived alone (her son lived in New York, I believe), and the waitresses at the Holiday Inn were so good to her.  When my grandmother and I went there with her once, it was sweet to see how all the waitresses came over to say hello and make a fuss over her.

Anyway, one of Libby’s special recipes was for pecan pie.  The best I’ve ever eaten!  It uses Kraft caramels, so it probably came from that company and isn’t some family heirloom kind of thing.  But still, it’s easy and delicious.

Libby used to say that the hardest part of making this pie was taking the wrappers off of all those caramels.  And if you use a frozen pie crust or one of those refrigerated ones, I would agree with that statement.  But I make my own crust because, for us, that is the “secret ingredient” that puts this pie over the top.  And for me, that is the hardest part of making this pie.  But so worth it!

Libby Gaughan’s Pecan Pie (makes 2)

Crust – for two 10-inch pies

  1. In a large mixing bowl mix together 3 cups sifted, all-purpose flour, 1½ teaspoons salt, and 1 cup of butter-flavored Crisco.
  2. Using a pastry cutter (or two knives) “cut” the shortening and flour together (mix by slicing) until the pieces of dough are pea-sized.
  3. Sprinkle 7 to 9 tablespoons of ICE water (you want it to be VERY COLD) over the mixture to moisten, in 2-3 tablespoon increments, mixing the dough to distribute the water evenly.  You want to handle the dough as little as possible, so toss it very gently with two forks, like a salad.  Eventually you’ll get closer to a dough than a pebbly mess of flour and shortening.
  4. Form into two balls.  Wrap with plastic wrap and refrigerate until ready to use.
  5. To roll out, spread one sheet of parchment paper (next to the waxed paper and aluminum foil in the supermarket) on a flat surface.  Sprinkle with flour.  Place one ball of dough atop the parchment sheet.  Sprinkle the dough with flour.  Place another sheet of parchment paper on top of the dough.  Use a rolling pin  to flatten the dough between the parchment sheets.  Roll in all directions, until the dough is the shape of a large circle big enough to fill your 10-inch pie pan.
  6. Remove the top sheet of parchment.  Place your pie pan upside down over the flattened dough.  Slip one hand under the bottom sheet of parchment; then, pushing the crust dough upward into the pie pan, flip both the crust and pie pan right side up.  Through the parchment, lightly use your fingers to press the dough into the contours of the pie pan.
  7. Repeat the previous steps with the second ball of dough.
  8. Trim the pie crusts slightly beyond (maybe by an inch) the edge of your pie pan.  Fold the extra under, and then either crimp it with your fingers to make a pleasing edge that undulates in waves OR press down on it with the tines of a fork to create an edge patterned with striped lines.
  9. You can stop at this point if you want and refrigerate (or freeze) the prepared crusts in advance of a busy Thanksgiving day.  Just be sure to let the crusts come to room temperature before baking.

Filling

  1. Unwrap 72 Kraft caramels.  You’ll need at least two bags (check the package count; everything seems to be downsizing these days!).  Place in a large, microwave-friendly glass or ceramic mixing bowl.  I use a really large Pyrex measuring bowl, with a handle and spout, which is convenient for pouring.
  2. Add ½ cup water and ½ cup butter.  Melt caramels, water, and butter in the microwave.
  3. Remove from microwave and stir in 1½ cups of sugar, ½ teaspoon of salt, 1 teaspoon of vanilla.
  4. Beat 6 eggs in a separate bowl and stir into the caramel mixture.
  5. Add 2 cups of pecan halves.

Bake

  1. Fill your two 10-inch pie crusts with the pecan-caramel mixture.  Place on foil-covered baking sheets (to catch drips and make for easy cleanup!).
  2. Bake in a preheated 350º oven for 45 to 50 minutes.
  3. Let cool for at least two hours before eating.
  4. The filling will appear to be very soft right out of the oven.  Don’t worry.  It will firm up as it cools.

Serve with whipped cream if desired.  And then tell me if this isn’t the BEST pecan pie you’ve ever eaten!

Thank you, Libby Gaughan!  God bless, and rest in peace.

Posted in Food, Life | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 2 Comments

Ndamukong Suh – A Lifelong Learner to Learn From

Posted on November 26, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Today’s Wall Street Journal has an article on the back page of the “Personal Journal” section titled “The Bruiser and the Billionaire.”  A truly inspiring read for anyone interested in lifelong learning!

Detroit Lions’ defensive lineman Ndamukong Suh, the subject of this article (the “Bruiser” of the title), is a really smart guy, who has been preparing for his post-football career for years (he’s only 27).  His college major was construction management, and Suh credits the many engineering classes he took with developing his ability to problem-solve.  Suh also learned how to manage his time in such a way that lifelong learning has become part of his daily routine:

Everyone says, “Wait til [sic] your football career is over.” Or the biggest saying is always “Life after football.”  But as an athlete, someone who is bright enough and understands how to compartmentalize, and has time management from already having two jobs at once—playing football and going to class and getting good grades—you can have 70 to 90% of the focus on your ultimate job but at the same time slowly build to what you are going to be one day.

Suh first met Warren Buffett (the “Billionaire,” obviously 🙂 ) at a game during his time playing college football for Nebraska.  Because Suh hoped to learn as much from the Bershire Hathaway chairman as possible, his coach helped put them together again.  The two men have developed a mentoring relationship, and Suh has also routinely met with other athlete/businessmen like Magic Johnson, Roger Staubach, and Junior Bridgeman (a former Milwaukee Bucks player I remember from his days on the team).

In fact, Suh devotes every Tuesday, his day off from his job as a professional football player, to talking with advisors and studying contracts—in short, to learning about business and finance.

A similar learning culture has been created at many innovative companies, a culture that encourages continual self-directed learning among the employees.  Google has its famous 20% time.  Pixar University (described in this 2006 New York Times article) encourages all employees to spend four hours every week taking classes to learn about some aspect of film making.  Randy S. Nelson, dean of Pixar University, subsequently moved on to Apple and is now the Director of Apple University.  And for about 65 years 3M has encouraged its employees to spend about 15% of their working time on their own projects, resulting in innovations like Post-it Notes (see the company’s “Time to Think” page describing their 15 Percent Time).

The Pareto Principle (better known as the 80/20 rule) states that approximately 80% of your results arise from 20% of your causes.  I’m misusing the concept here a little, but looking at Ndamukong Suh’s time management strategy for spending one day per week to learn about business and finance while spending the rest of his work week focusing on his highly successful NFL career seems instructive.

Comedian Jay Leno “reportedly lives off of revenue from stand-up gigs and banks the rest,” according to Forbes magazine’s profile on the former “Tonight Show” host.  That’s not quite the same thing, either.  But Leno recognized that television is fickle.  An interview/profile published in The Wall Street Journal on August 21, 2009, described Leno’s practice in a way that sounds remarkably similar to Ndamukong Suh’s time management strategy:

Using a tactic he picked up as a teenager juggling jobs at McDonald’s and a local Ford dealership, Mr. Leno lives off his earnings from doing stand-up and banks his NBC salary, he says. “It just keeps your head straight,” he says. “In TV they can fire your ass at any minute for whatever reason. OK, I’ll be in Vegas.”

Opting not to depend on “The Tonight Show” for a living gave Leno the freedom to create  a nightly show that could take more chances, be more “out there” than it might have been had financial security been a primary concern.

So here is my takeaway from the Ndamukong Suh article.  When it comes to self-directed learning, innovation, and creative exploration, a strategy of “compartmentalizing”—keeping safe some small but significant percentage of your time/money (time is money in some ways, right?)—seems essential for any person or organization seeking growth.

 

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Bruno Mars—as you’ve (probably) never seen him!

Posted on November 9, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I’m teaching contemporary literature this quarter at Milwaukee School of Engineering, and the text we’re discussing this coming week is literally hot off the presses—”The Flick,” which is the play that won the Pulitzer Prize for Drama last spring and which just came out in book format about a month ago.

Anyway, as I was paging through the play tonight to prep for tomorrow’s class, I reread a section where one of the characters, who is a major film lover, discovers in a dream that his favorite movie was not a classic or anything by Truffaut or Tarantino but was, instead, Honeymoon in Vegas.  Not knowing much about this film, I went straight to Wikipedia to see if I could figure out how its plot relates to the play.

I quickly got sidetracked when I glanced through the cast list and saw a familiar name: Bruno Mars.  What?

First of all, just in case you don’t know who Bruno Mars is, here is his spectacular Super Bowl halftime performance from last winter.

So back to Honeymoon in Vegas.  How could Bruno Mars have been in that film?  It came out in 1992.  Mars was born in 1985, which would have made him seven in 1992 and even younger when the movie was shot.

Well, Mars turned out to be one of the film’s many Elvis impersonators.  Take a look at his adorable “Little Elvis” scene below.

The first time I ever saw Mars perform was at the Grammy Awards show in February 2012.  Electrifying!  And I marveled that someone could be so very polished and accomplished at such a young age.

Little did I realize:  Mars had already been practicing his craft for over twenty years!

Posted in Books and reading, Life, Movies and film, Music, Popular culture, Teaching | Tagged , , , , , , | 2 Comments

F. Scott Fitzgerald: Football Genius?

Posted on October 26, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I was about to toss yesterday’s Wall Street Journal into the recycling bin this morning but realized I hadn’t read the “Review” section.  Am I glad I took a minute to page through!  On page C3 was this excellent essay/article, “Fitzgerald and the Football Revolution,” by Kevin Helliker.

The gist of the article—and I love stories like this—is that in 1956 a romance languages graduate student at the University of Michigan thought to interview the head football coach, Fritz Crisler, for the school newspaper to see whether, by chance, he’d ever had contact with F. Scott Fitzgerald during his years coaching the Princeton team.

Apparently what this graduate student knew, and most people didn’t, was that Fitzgerald was a lifelong devoted fan of Princeton’s football team.  When Fitzgerald died of a heart attack at age 44, according to the WSJ article, he was in the middle of reading a Princeton Alumni Weekly analysis of the upcoming football season.  (The WSJ article also notes that Fitzgerald had written notes in the margins, “which makes college football the last thing he ever wrote about.”)

Why, yes, Head Coach Fritz Crisler told the grad student, Donald A. Yates.  He had had contact with Fitzgerald during those years at Princeton.  In fact, Fitzgerald used to call him up in the middle of the night before game day with ideas about plays the coach should use.  Often Crisler could hear “the laughter and cries of a dying party” in the background.  (Crisler’s Princeton coaching years were 1932–1937.)

Fritz Crisler is famous for inventing “two-platoon football,” or the use of two separate offensive and defensive teams.  Prior to that innovation the same eleven players played the entire game, switching off between offense and defense.  Yates knew little about football, so when Crisler told him that one of Fitzgerald’s “fantastic” ideas was “a scheme for a whole new offense[, something] that involved a two-platoon system,” Yates didn’t realize the import of that statement and didn’t think to follow up by asking whether Fitzgerald, in fact, gave Crisler the idea that revolutionized the sport.

Reflecting on the interview conversation today, Yates (a professor emeritus of Latin American literature at Michigan State) says, “That seems to be what he is saying.”

The author of the WSJ article found additional support for Fitzgerald’s influence in a 1962 Fitzgerald biography written by Andrew Turnbull.  Turnbull cites an athletic manager under Crisler at Princeton who remembers getting a call from Fitzgerald during those years saying, “Princeton must have two teams.  One will be big—all men over two hundred [pounds].  This team will be used to batter them down and wear them out.  Then the little team, the pony team, will go in and make the touchdowns.”

I find it fascinating that people who are creative innovators in one area so often turn out to be creative innovators in multiple other areas.  The term for people like this is “polymath,” and their numbers include people like Leonardo da Vinci, Benjamin Franklin, actress Hedy Lamarr, Doobie Brothers/Steely Dan guitarist Jeff Baxter, and many others.  (Hmm, this is a topic I should probably blog about 🙂 )

This Wall Street Journal article is really interesting and well written.  If you have time you should link over and read it.

[UPDATE – September 29, 2025. I noticed this post getting lots of views today and managed to find discussion linking over from Bluesky and Reddit. HELLO! if that is the case with you. I found a very sharp, with-it Reddit contributor involved in the discussion about Fitzgerald there two years ago (shout out to Omynt), who was able to contribute direct links to both the Wall Street Journal article (no paywall) and the 1956 Donald Yates article interviewing the Michigan football coach. Because there’s so much interest in this topic and post today, I thought I’d also link to those articles from my blog. But all credit for tracking these sources down goes to Omynt!]

Wall Street Journal article LINK HERE.

The Michigan Daily article (to view entire article on pages 1 and 2, download the “issue” PDF, all 8 pages) LINK HERE

Posted in Books and reading, History, Life, Popular culture | Tagged , , , , , , , , , | 4 Comments

Cloudy Windows

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Here’s a picture I took this morning around 10:15 while walking to the Red Arrow Starbucks.  Not a dramatic image in itself.  But if you click on the top half of the building to enlarge it, the reflected clouds start to assume this weird Magritte or M.C. Escher character, in which it’s not clear where the sky starts and ends or whether you might be gazing up at the sky through an empty grid of concrete.  Kind of fun, so I thought I’d share 🙂

Cloudy windows

Posted in architecture, Art, Milwaukee | Tagged , , , | 2 Comments

Milwaukee’s City Hall Under a Cloud

Posted on October 7, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

Hee hee 🙂

Milwaukee City Hall under a Cloud

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“Unsquare Dance” in Silver Linings Playbook

Posted on October 1, 2014 by Katherine Wikoff

I’m showing Silver Linings Playbook in one of my classes this week, and for the first time I really thought about how interesting it is that Dave Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance” is the song playing as Tiffany walks out to meet Pat for their first date. (Well, maybe not a “date” after all, as Pat orders raisin bran 🙂 )

Brubeck’s “Unsquare Dance” has a 7/4 time signature, which makes the beat very unsettled, kind of asymmetrical and off-kilter. For Pat, who is attracted to Tiffany while still wrongly convinced he’s in love with his ex-wife Nikki, this moment is full of import. He is most definitely off-balance and perched unsteadily at the edge of this new relationship opportunity.

Anyway, I wanted to double check the time signature, went to Wikipedia’s entry, and then happened upon a wonderful video of a talented duo dancing to this exuberant song. Looks like it must have aired on television in the early 1960s. You know, if programming like this were the norm today, I’d watch a lot more television. Enjoy!

UPDATE (August 25, 2022): The YouTube clip is gone, but I found the video on Facebook. Here’s the link.😀

https://fb.watch/f7uzPDWGHV/

And as long as I’m updating this post, here’s a clip from another amazing movie, Baby Driver, that also uses “Unsquare Dance” to excellent effect.

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Posted in Movies and film, Music, Popular culture, Television | Tagged , , , | 1 Comment