Crapaholics Anonymous

Dear Fellow Craptarians,

I tried to quit you. Once my obligation to obsessively count my crap for class was over, I turned my back on you, albeit regretfully. As I drove away on December 23, car laden with Christmas goodies, I loitered a few minutes for some memorable snaps. They’re too good not to share. I took obscene pleasure in my discovery of this frozen chunk of crap in the alley behind Griffith’s Tavern.

Merry Christmas, Griffith's Tavern

I thought the holiday box of Cella’s chocolate covered cherries from the Rite-Aid was a particularly festive touch. In honor of the twelve stepping nature of this post, I will also confess to this: I like chocolate covered cherries. Because I like maraschino cherries. They were really my gateway drug; it was an easy transition from the cherry-laden Shirley Temples of the Kahkwa Club to Manhattans. I would be remiss in my goal to enlighten one and all about the candies of the world, even the crappy ones, if I didn’t tell you about Cella’s. The fine folks at Cella’s have been responsible for regrettable hostess gifts and awkward Valentine’s since the Wars of Northern Aggression! It’s true. Demanding cherry enrobing duties undoubtedly resulted in much needed manpower being held back from fighting Johnny Reb.

There was so much going on in the yard, I couldn’t leave. Even though I was facing six hours of heinous holiday traffic, and a pile of worried grannies on the other end, the call of the crap was strong. I felt like Santa had made a special visit to my house; he left so many goodies that I hadn’t even thought of asking for! Such as the upside down can of Air Wick air freshener, making its first appearance in the yard.

Fresh Waters flavor. What was Santa trying to tell me?

Also intriguing? The sheer volume of plastic bags hanging out in the yard. I’m pretty sure that Krampus, in contrast to Santa’s

Who invited that giant paper dog food bag? I thought this was a restricted group.

sack of elf leather, favors ratty plastic bags. Hmm. Does Krampus carry a bag? Maybe I’m thinking of Zwarte Piet. It’s hard to keep track of all the racist holiday traditions. Hopefully one of my Flemish readers will be able to clear that one up. Can you see how much crap is in that one small stretch? Also attending the bag soiree was a random wad of teal green lint, about fifteen cigarette butts, some twist ties, and a Slim Jim wrapper. I have a horrible feeling that a lot of kids in Hamdpen get mechanically separated chicken parts in their Christmas stockings. Fun fact: Slim Jims came in bacon flavor back in the 70s, when Bam Bam Bigelow was their spokesman. Not so fun fact: the Slim Jim factory exploded in 2009, killing a bunch of workers. Full disclosure: I still eat Slim Jims.

The last snap I had to add to the collection before heading home for the holidays really didn’t turn out too well, so you’ll have to use your imagination. But once again, this item was making its first appearance in the yard, so I wanted to record it for posterity’s sake.

 

Girl Scouts Gone Wild, Peanut Butter Edition

I didn’t even know we had Girl Scouts in Hampden. What are they getting merit badges in, I wonder? I’m pretty sure ecological stewardship disks aren’t getting sewn onto anybody’s sash in my neighborhood. Maybe baby stroller maintenance, or how to feed you and your baby off a welfare check and the hot foods section at Royal Farms. Mean, I know. But there’s a gaggle of junior Hampdenites screaming at each other outside my stoop right now, and I have no kindness in my heart for them. I think that’s somewhere in the twelve steps, though, so I might have to work on that one. Did I get any of the steps right, other than admitting that I am powerless to resist the lure of crap?

Now, I know you’re probably wondering where the crap tally is. I even took a pile of photos that day, thinking I would tabulate via visual documentation in between wrapping presents and making yule logs. It didn’t happen, but not because I stopped loving the crap. A lot of stuff got in the way, like a needy family, poor health, and that pesky return to PhD studies. I haven’t made an executive decision about continuing the tally, but for now, at least, I can’t be bothered. I did create a Flickr page to post the crap highlights on, though, so do take a gander as the photos go up.

Welcome back, my fellow crapaholics. See ya, wagon!

 

Giant Furry Creatures

Only three words can describe yesterday in Hampden: Mayor’s Christmas Parade. This fun filled annual event (38 years strong!) brings lawn chair toting slack jawed yokels from all over Baltimore to see the single most depressing array of parade “floats,” marching bands, over the hill baton twirlers, Shriners, tiny horses, and yes, the mayor of Baltimore, pelting the malnourished, stringy haired, foul mouthed children of Hampden with Brach’s Starlight mints from the palatial comfort of the back of a convertible. If only Hampden had a book depository. I have witnessed many near death experiences as crack addled mothers shove their scrawny tykes out into the parade to snatch up “some of them candies.”  Now, I’m not a big parade person. But this combination makes for a magical experience. And yet I was willing to leave it all to see Burlesque with Ms. Hamm. What can I say? After two days of trying to render Hebrew bibliographic entries into English, even the now dude-like Cher seemed a better option than spending another moment hunched over the tiny screen of my 2004 Powerbook, surrounded by citation print outs and Chick-O-Stick wrappers while muttering angrily at Czech diacriticals that, as far as I can tell, are rendered into dialectical Klingon by Zotero. Thanks to Ms. Hamm’s blood hound like ability to scent out an opportunity to make fun of the misfortune of others, we found ourselves with the chance to take some photos in the parade’s staging area up the street.  She spotted the disturbingly erect tail of a Furry across several lanes of traffic; next thing I knew, we were blasting into the parking lot and interrogating these costume clad do-gooders, Critters for a Cause. Now, they were very nice, and they had logo shirts. But they purported to be non-profit fundraisers, yet were unable to describe either their non-profit status, or for whom they were raising funds. So I determined that they are still fair game as the object of ridicule.  Because they are wearing incredibly creepy animal costumes that no child could possibly want to be hugged by or photographed with, which they were all about.  And because they are so nice, they got dressed up for us, and posed for a photo. One of them hugged Lisa, and she’s still a little overwhelmed by the experience.

I believe that's a wolf, deer, raccoon, and hyena that we're looking at. Unfortunately you're unable to see the extremely erect tail of the hyena.

It was the high point of my day, Burlesque and all. Please enjoy these other photos of parade highlights.

 

Ahoy Hampden! Parade “float” at its most literal.

Vroom! The Zem Zem Shriners take a sharp left at the Rite Aid. Those carpets are undoubtedly hand loomed by third world children. But don’t worry, I’m sure the Shriners are raising money to straighten their teeth.

Ah, the Lipizzaner stallions of Hampden. Look how they prance in unison down the Falls Road!

Children unsure of their gender roles? These delightful throwbacks should set them on the proper path.

Extra credit to Hampden Junque owner Michal Makarovich and his extraordinary Pee Wee Herman nativity scenes. Baby Jesus has never looked so dapper. I like a festive Holy Family.

Way to speak truth to power, Hampden Junque. I have no illusions about the state of your festive orbs.

 

I realize this is a lot to take in. But you have to keep in mind the exponential crap that the parade brings ’round. I mean, on top of the normal dog excrement, it adds the potential for equine droppings, both tiny and Clydesdalian, not to mention what those Furries might get up to behind my bushes. So I was both surprised and saddened at this week’s low and unexciting crap count:

For the week ending December 5:

PAPER GOODS, Food related

• 2 Napkins

PAPER GOODS, Non-food

• 1 Receipt, Falkenhan’s Hardware
• 1 Lotto ticket

FOOD & DRINK, Savory

• 1 Coffee cup, Royal Farms

FOOD & DRINK, Sweet

• 1 Coca Cola
• 1 M & Ms Fun Size, Peanut
• 1 Crispy Cream donut paper
• 12 Brach’s Starlight Mint wrappers (thanks, Mayor Stephanie Rawlings-Blake)

MISCELLANEOUS

• 2 Cigarette wrappers
• 5 Cigarette butts
• 1 Cigarette foil
• 1 Cigarette pack, Pall Mall
• 2 Plastic bags; 1 Royal Farms

ACTUAL CRAP

• 1 Pile, very loose

If I am found murdered in my bed, be sure to have Baltimore CSI look for synthetic hyena hair on my mauled and badly decomposing corpse.

If I had a hammer

Oh, wait. I do have a new hammer, since I found this one inside a wadded up t-shirt in the Siberian holly bush. Unfortunately it’s an extremely rusty hammer, and I’m pretty sure someone was going to attempt to knock out a glass block window in my basement with it.  I should be more careful about whipping clothing of unknown origin out of the bushes. I’m recalling an event in Erie, Pennsylvania, where several city blocks were shut down after a man was observed  inside the barbed wire enclosed Sigsbee Reservoir. Turns out, some schlub shat himself, and he decided that the best option was to throw his soiled shorts over the fence into the reservoir. It was one of the best news stories ever to hit Erie, and the myriad of euphemisms the media came up with to avoid actually saying “he shit his pants” was revelatory. I didn’t credit them with that much creativity prior to the incident, but “turd terrorism” was my favorite. Of course Erie is also home to notorious pizza bomber Brian Wells, so nothing should come as a surprise after that. What was I trying to say? Oh, yes. There could have been actual crap wadded up in the shirt, instead of an extremely large and rusty hammer. No more whipping.

This week’s crap haul:

PAPER GOODS, Food related

• 2 Napkins

PAPER GOODS, Non-food

• 1 Receipt, Fed Ex, Charles Street
• 2 Lotto tickets
• 1 Brown paper bag, quart of Zelko size
• 1 Sheet music, Joy to the World

FOOD & DRINK, Savory

FOOD & DRINK, Sweet

• 1 Popeye’s cup
• 1 York Peppermint Patty

MISCELLANEOUS

• 1 Cigarette wrapper
• 7 Cigarette butts
• 1 Cigarette foil
• 1 Plastic tie down
• 1 Hammer
• 1 T-shirt, size large “Gotcha”

ACTUAL CRAP

• 2 Piles, bagged

As you can see, it was a light trash week, and I’m grateful. The hammer was enough excitement.  I’m a little perplexed about the two bags of dog shit, however. While I’m glad that the dog owners of Hampden seem to be progressing, in that they actually picked up their precious pooch’s poop, I’d like them to go the extra mile and not fling that steaming hot bag into my bushes. Unfortunately, Tom Ridge doesn’t live in my neighborhood, and my yard is not a fenced off reservoir, so I don’t think there’s much I can do about it. There are no points awarded if the poop doesn’t make it to a trash receptacle.

The bags of crap also remind me of my current undertaking in “digital scholarship.” There are giant piles of data available online; it’s making sense of it and putting it to good use that counts. There’s little point in generating data that cannot be analyzed unless you’re behind the firewall or on the back end of a database.  It seems a lot of people missed my description of my project two weeks ago, which takes a look at the research I did for my Master’s thesis between 1993 and 1996. As I was working on the topic prior to widespread internet usage, I thought it would be useful to look at what sort of research materials I can come up with now, compared to then. Can I research the topic as effectively, if not even more so, from the comfort of my own home than I could by trekking through archives across Europe? To make it an even more annoying project, I decided to learn how to use Zotero to track the bibliographic data for secondary sources. So far, Zotero displeases me. Why does it not have a feature to automatically eliminate duplicate records? Can’t they steal that from iTunes? So dumping data from the Library of Congress and the Holocaust Museum resulted in an hour of deletions. I believe I may have too much experience in databases to ever be satisfied with one that I don’t administer. But it’s always good to try new things, even if this is like trying to force down an odious brussel sprout.

Looking just at the secondary resources, it’s clear how much scholarship has happened after 1997; I count 471 items in JSTOR and the OCLC. During the dates that would encompass my original research, I can easily tell how much more I could have found had JSTOR existed. While I was able to find most scholarly articles that were historical, I missed much of the literature coming from other disciplines, such as literary theory, musicology, and theater. Given my initial focus on cultural life in the Theresienstadt Ghetto, those would be have been good sources to at least be familiar with.  JSTOR is also helpful in terms of language. While the majority of publications are in German, English, and Czech, there are also Israeli, Dutch, and Danish materials that I missed out on, simply because I don’t have the language skills to read them. My 20th century Dutch has improved tremendously in the past decade, so I can at least look over the materials in that language.

At the moment, my data dump into Zotero is from three sources: JSTOR, the Library of Congress, and the holdings of the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum.  The Holocaust Museum was just coming into existence when I was doing my research, and I helped select Czech items for the archives once I started working there. Most of their archival collections remain unprocessed. I was able to gather many of the secondary sources listed very cheaply when I was living in Czechoslovakia, and I clearly remain my own best research library for those materials. I made liberal use of my years with the Library of Congress as well.

This weekend I’ll delve deeper into the primary research, to see what there is to see. I remain certain today’s researcher would still need to spend some time in the Czech Republic. And who wouldn’t want to? I miss those delicious dumplings.

Lesson learned

Do not leave a plastic bag full of yard crap in the back of your car. Your car will smell like ass and bum pee when you finally return to it after leaving it to bake in the sun. On Sundays, I’m generally in a mad dash to pack up and head to Bethesda, my way station between Baltimore and Fairfax. Realizing I hadn’t tallied my yard crap for the week ending November 21, 2010, I photographed and collected it, and loaded it into Archie. Unfortunately I have the mind of a grapefruit, and was distracted by the shiny issue of copyright, so I left off the crap tally. And neglected to remove a bag of rotting garbage from my car.

Last week’s haul:

PAPER GOODS, Food related

• 2 Napkins
• 1 7/11 Hot dog box
• 1 Burger King cup
• 1 McDonald’s cup
• 1 Nutritional information for fine hazelnut chocolates, Ferraro-Roche

PAPER GOODS, Non-food

• 1 Receipt, Giant
• 1 White Owl Blunts label
• 1 Newspaper circular, Home Depot
• 1 Marlboro Slims coupon
• 6 Lotto tickets

FOOD & DRINK, Savory

• 1 Steel Reserve can
• 1 Dr. Pepper can
• 1 Doritos

FOOD & DRINK, Sweet

• 1 Quaker Chewy Low Fat S’mores
• 1 Reese’s Peanut Butter Tree-2 pack

MISCELLANEOUS

• 1 Cigarette wrapper
• 12 Cigarette butts
• 2 Straws
• 1 Cup lid
• 1 Perforated computer print out
• 1 Plastic beer cup
• 1 Colgate toothpaste, travel size
• 1 Color Stay mineral lip glaze
• 2 Photographs
• 1 Crate & Barrel gift card

ACTUAL CRAP

• 1 Pile

There were some clear winners. I was intrigued by the torn photographs; at first I thought someone must have had a bad break-up while walking down to the Avenue, and decided right then and there that these treasured photos were now so hateful that they must be destroyed. Upon closer inspection, it seems likely that they had simply been in someone’s wallet for so long that they’d naturally split at the fold. My hypothesis was further strengthened by the discovery of a Crate & Barrel gift card nearby. Then I sadly realized that someone was probably mugged, and this is what’s leftover from their wallet. I hope they weren’t mugged outside my house; I checked the Baltimore crime report, and couldn’t find any mention of theft or robbery in Hampden. So it’s possible that someone just decided to be done with these photos. The couple pictured reeks of Hampden. Much like Archibold does now.

Another new and exciting find was the beauty product array in the front tree pit. Hampden is hygienically challenged, so finding a travel size Colgate toothpaste and a tube of lip glaze was a total surprise. I also appreciate the artistic manner in which these items tumbled from some woman’s purse into the pit. It’s a no parking zone there, so I’d like to believe that the gods of vehicular compliance are punishing her with this loss. I’ll probably find the receipt for their replacement in the bushes next week.

Really?

I’m unsure how I’ve become the old cranky person of digital history, but is everyone really that incredibly lazy that they wouldn’t just, say, ASK FOR PERMISSION to use an image from someone’s website or publication? It’s worked that way for a very long time. It works quite well when you make the effort. Any time I do an exhibition, I have to clear copyright for every image that is used. This sometimes means hundreds of phone calls, emails, and letters; keep in mind that oral permission is not legally binding. Is it a pain in the ass? Yes, it is. A huge one. And yet it has never, ever, made me put a frowny face in an email to the person that is paying me with a little note saying “I don’t think we can use this because of copyright.” Yes, some people are total jerks who will not let you use their images. So you don’t play with them. But I have found that 99% of the time, if you are using images for completely non-profit, educational purposes, you will be given use of the image. You just have to credit the artist, owner, holder, etc; everyone likes to be given acknowledgment for their work. Sometimes you actually meet or talk to someone who is quite lovely, and they become an excellent ally in your future work.

If you look at the “About” page on my blog, you will see the artwork of the delightfully talented Alec Thibodeau. Even though I own this piece of artwork, I don’t own the right to do whatever I want with the image. So Alec and I exchanged emails, and he agreed to let me use the image. In return, I acknowledge that the artwork is Alec’s creation. Someone might see that artwork, want to know where they can get their very own Alec Thibodeau original, and contact said friendly artsy man in Providence. Yea! Everyone’s happy!

Yes, copyright is complicated. Yes, it seems like everyone should want you to read what they wrote, or look at their art or the photos, and tell their friends all about it. If you don’t want it to be shared in an online environment, then you state such on your website or poster or whatever format you’ve used to disseminate your creative and intellectual property. But some people really don’t want free access; they want to retain control of how their intellectual property is used. Hello, copyright. Hello, lawsuit. Hello, Shepard Fairey VS The Associated Press.

If you want to use photos from LOOK Magazine, well, tough crap. You can come to the Library of Congress and gaze at them, but they will never be put online, per the donor’s restrictions on use. You can read the Prints & Photographs Division’s information page for a dip into what their staff deals with every day, as no one seems to believe that copyright should ever apply if it’s going to involve, ye gads, the writing of a letter and the licking of a stamp. In over five years of assisting researchers, I had only one person out of over three hundred refuse use of their collection. That’s not bad. And that doesn’t account for the hundreds of people who likely didn’t bother to contact me for permission; the Library of Congress does not adjudicate copyright. They just process the paperwork, and hold the material. (Be glad you don’t work for the Copyright Office.)

Individuals are responsible for determining fair use, and for undertaking due diligence to clear copyright. Is individual responsibility really such a burden? This makes me so cranky I’ve had to use old people all caps.

Mistake at the Factory

People usually think I’m right when I say things. This was a much better power before the advent of the internet. I don’t know why my brain is a useless information warehouse; I can remember the phone number for Frank’s Cleaners or the Erie Yacht Club twenty years after the last time I dialed either, but for nearly a year I thought I had already turned thirty-five—I had simply forgotten how old I was. It is not useful to know tons of random bits of information. I once remarked to my German professor that I often hope to be struck by lightning, in the belief that all those phone numbers would be replaced by the German grammar I still struggle to remember. I’m fairly certain that resulted in a pity A-. But people are accustomed to the random knowledge, so I’ve always been the recipient of odd phone calls asking me how to spell things, or when the Treaty of Ghent took place, or what you feed a baby bat. I’ve always been perplexed that people believe I would know such things, and then take my word for it when I give them an answer.

Some smart people don’t. And they have the internet to back them up. And then they never, ever, let me forget about that time I was wrong. So for the record, I admit that Richard Dreyfuss was not in 2001: A Space Odyssey, or A History of Violence, nor was he in any other films by auteurs I dislike. There was a case not long ago when I became convinced that there had been a mistake at the Chick-O-Stick factory. If you’ve never had a Chick-O-Stick, you’ve been missing out. It’s hard to describe the satisfaction of snorfling down a log of crunchy peanut butter encrusted with toasted coconut that for some inexplicable reason is orange. The Chick-O-Stick comes in several sizes, which I usually call Papa Bear, Mama Bear, Baby Bear, and Fetus. I have pictured all except the nubbin size here, as it proved elusive to locate in the greater Baltimore area.

Baby Bear Chick-O-Stick is shockingly lacking in coconut encrustations.

After thirty years of eating Chick-O-Sticks, I finally noticed that the baby bear size does not have coconut on the outside, unlike the rest of the family. Having only a single example to go on, and unwilling to allow for genetic variation in the Stick Family, I insisted that there had been a “mistake at the factory.” It stands to reason that all of the Chick-O-Sticks are made on the same equipment at the Atkinson Candy Company in Lufkin, Texas. My friend, being one of the smart ones and wise to my brain, told me without hesitation that I’m an idiot. In my indignation, I got Atkinson PR on the horn; they gently informed me that I am, in fact, an idiot. Baby Bear Chick-O-Stick has the coconut on the inside, on purpose. While I remain dissatisfied with the logic of having only one size of Chick-O-Stick without a nubby coconut exterior, I admit defeat. There was no mistake at the factory, although I’m pretty sure Richard Dreyfuss is a major stockholder.

This brings me to my second project for Clio Wired. I’m not someone who views the internet as a shiny new toy, able to make toast and manage my collections while I wile away the hours on Facebook. While I’m very impractical in my personal life (e.g. giant brick pile), I’m remarkably pragmatic when someone pays me to do something. Filthy lucre makes me very practical. So when the institution I’m working for spends all of its time and money having people perform mind numbing tasks like processing collections into a giant database, I want to be confident that it’s being done in the smartest way possible. Having now created many smaller databases myself, I get cranky with the ones I encounter that are created by others. No data dictionary? Apoplectic. Content notes “hidden” in the back end? Vexed. No standardization? Spastic. What makes me really grumpy, however, is the cover-up. To me, an online “corpus” is a sleek legerdemain; it the secret handshake between the institution and the lazy thinker; the Cliff Notes version of history for the researcher who can’t be bothered to get off his ass and look for answers. The internet can give you Richard Dreyfuss’ oeuvre with the hit of the return key, but it can’t tell you why you should hate him and his ratty little beard and his squeaky little voice and his fawning over the social sciences. A database is only as good as the quality of the information that humans have entered into it; it’s only as useful as the queries you create. And when you put limitations on that database in the online environment, it just gets worse. So it’s cute that you can create a wordle of Moby Dick that’s kind of shaped like a whale, but in terms of scholarly exactitude, it’s a parlor trick.

I sometimes get paid really well to find stuff that other people can’t or don’t know how to. It makes me a fantastic researcher and curator, but not necessarily a good historian. I don’t know if I’m good or not, but I am at least responsible. And I will always be Little Miss Half Empty, as one of my more lackluster colleagues once dubbed me, because I am always going to point out the mistakes, the gaps, and the problems first. This does not make me popular with stultifyingly inept bosses who refuse to see that the emperor is stark naked, but it does make me popular with researchers who depend on my inquisitorial zeal to find materials for them within the collections I am responsible for.

Having now voiced my qualms about online databases, I am going to attempt to find one’s porcupine. The work I did for my master’s thesis involved learning two languages and conducting primary research in four countries. It was a joyful, arduous hunt for both funding and documentary evidence, and the end product was as satisfying as finding that perfect pound of bacon after you’ve rejected every package in the grocery store for being too lean. I defended in 1997, prior to the advent of the internet being a remarkably useful tool, and I was largely overseas when email bloomed. I missed the revolution while living in a borrowed apartment on the Letna plain. All of my work was done without any access or reference to online resources, yet at the time it was considered exhaustive.

Fast forward thirteen years, and I’ve returned to school and my ghetto. Living up to the manifold obligations of the title of Little Miss Half Empty, I’m going to attempt to repeat my research circa 1997, using only online resources. It’s work that I would need to do anyway (there’s that porcupine!), so even if it turns out that there’s no mistake at the factory, I still won’t be wasting my time. But I’m not giving up my crown and sash without a fight.

The Interloper

 

All in all, it's better than having a jack o' lantern smashed in your yard.

This week’s haul:

PAPER GOODS, Food related

• 3 Napkins, one Subway
• 1 Coffee cup w/lid, Royal Farms

PAPER GOODS, Non-food

• 1 Receipt, Rite Aid
• 1 Brown paper bag

FOOD & DRINK, Savory

• 1 Crystal water
• 2 Red peppers
• 1 Dunkin’ Donuts plastic cup

FOOD & DRINK, Sweet

• 1 Dots, fun size
• 1 Dunkin’ Donuts Breakfast box

MISCELLANEOUS

• 1 Cigarette wrappers
• 2 Cigarette butts
• 1 Aluminum foil sheet
• 1 Sock
• 1 Brick, origin unknown

ACTUAL CRAP

• 1 Pile crap, bagged

Striped footie.

I’ll touch on a few of these items before discussing the interloper. The sock has been taking its sweet time making its way to the yard. I first noticed it in the street well over a month ago, when it was still attached to its mate. Someone had lost a fresh pair of socks on the mean streets of Hampden. I was actually excited to see that it finally made it to me. Six weeks to make it twenty feet.

The peppers are decidedly the most perplexing new arrival. While there is more than one grocery store in the vicinity, I don’t think of Hampdenites purchasing a lot of fresh vegetation. I’m not sure what would prompt not just the depositing but the smashing of two sweet red peppers. Maybe Pistachio Man decided to give peppers a try, and found them a complete disappointment, both in texture and front stoop mortar removal? Perhaps someone forget to purchase a Halloween pumpkin, and tried pepper carving in a pinch?

I'm not sure where this interloper came from, but he's not part of my flock.

The brick, unlike the sock and the peppers, simply offends me. I’m not ashamed to admit that I’m something of a brick connoisseur. Or maybe just a hoarder. But for some reason, I love bricks. Not just any old bricks, mind you; mine come from Lake Erie. I’m from Erie, Pennsylvania, and have spent most of my life in, on, or very close to our Great Lake. When my mother finally moved to the beach, she became obsessive about collecting beach glass, which I believe should qualify as a full contact sport for Erieites. I became obsessive about flotsam and jetsom. If the lake throws up a plastic Army guy, I am compelled to take him home. Sometimes she gives me money, which is always appreciated. I make at least twenty bucks a summer that way. She also gave me a really nice men’s Seiko watch, which is, according to the jeweler, quite valuable. It’s rather huge and ugly, and contributes to a general mien of dykeiness, but I feel obligated to appreciate her present. Some poor fisherman still regrets its loss, I’m sure. She also sends me candy. And I eat it, to my mother’s dismay. Not a summer has gone by without a Sixlets or a mint finding its way to me. Again, it’s a sense of duty. Mother nature knows I love candy; who am I to spurn her gifts?   There is one item that washes up, above all others, that I am unable to resist: the brick.

A little gift from Mother Nature. Brick on Lake Erie, Erie, PA August 17, 2010.

After a good storm, the beach will be dotted with terra cotta rectangles, edges worn from years of tumbling along the depths of Lake Erie. I have hauled tons of these bricks for miles up and down Presque Isle. Sympathetic family members (enablers) indulge my obsession, and add to the collection, which grows in my mother’s parking space over the course of every summer. Infidels occasionally steal them to prop open doors, resulting in a verbal or written evisceration. I’ve not herniated myself lugging tons of building materials around for someone else’s door wedge. For years I’ve believed that the bricks are the result of the city dumping the torn down remnants of Erie’s industrial corridor into the lake. As an historian with a fondness for Erie’s Victorian brick factories, now mostly destroyed, I’ve always felt like I was saving a bit of Erie’s history.

I am not ashamed.

The brick pile residing in my basement in Baltimore has made me subject to some well deserved teasing from those aware of it. The pile has traveled from Erie via Mini Cooper, first to Hyattsville and now to Baltimore. I had to overinflate Archibold’s tires to prepare for the undercarriage-scraping journey.  When I talked of moving into a houseboat, there was no shortage of jokes about the likelihood of the brick pile sinking my new abode. Now I have a pile of handsome bricks in my basement, waiting for me to utilize them in an appropriately creative manner.

So I was very offended when this interloper appeared in the yard, and several of my friends assumed that it had simply escaped from my basement, in the hopes of finding a better life for itself. In defense of my weighty obsession, I put my invaluable curatorial assistant—my mother—on the case. She contacted Lake Erie historian and man about town Dave Frew, who had this to say: “Since Lake Erie is home to about 3,000 shipwrecks and many of those were late 19th Century materials transport ships hauling everything from stone and lumber to bricks and other construction materials, lots of bricks have been planted on the lake bottom.  In addition to those bricks, there was a lot of brick construction along the lake shore, sometimes bricks and other materials were used as “rip-rap” in dock construction.  All of these bricks have a way of being moved in ice, tumbling in sand and waves, breaking up and washing up on beaches.”

While slightly disillusioned, I don’t love them any less.

The brick has all sorts of household applications.

Cliometrics

I was most excited about the chocolate Laffy Taffy wrapper.

It’s a real word; look it up if you don’t believe me. I learned about quantitative history the really hard way, at the University of Pittsburgh with John Komlos. Komlos studied history and economics at the University of Chicago, where all of those Nobel prizes go every year. To make the idea of economic history even less attractive to budding historians, he called it “anthropometric history.” I stuck with Czech history despite having to read Nutrition and Economic Development in the Eighteenth-Century Habsbury Monarchy: An Anthro-pometric History. It was like nothing I had ever encountered before, and made me feel like I was back in high school, refusing to even open my Calculus textbook, lest I relive the crippling terror I’d experienced the year before in trigonometry. Yet all these years later, I am grateful for the understanding I gained from gnashing my way through statistical tables showing the average height of stumpy Bohemian peasants being measured for military service. The appreciation came into play when I started my work on the Theresienstadt ghetto.

The ghetto is an eighteenth century fortress, the building of which by Emperor Joseph II nearly bankrupted the Austrian Empire. During WWII, it was used as both holding pen and transit camp for mostly Central European Jews. At the height of its occupation, nearly 58000 people were forced into a walled town designed to hold no more than 7000. Those overseeing the ghetto kept up a constant demand for statistical reports about it, and the occupants complied. The technical department was able to protect many artists from transport to Auschwitz by keeping them busy creating reports from the incredibly detailed data compiled by the Jewish self government.

Part of the yearly report for 1943 shows that massive transports from January to December reducted the population from 49296 to 34655. Most of the deportees were over 65, and nearly all were murdered on arrival in Auschwitz.

As an historian, I was thrilled to find these reports, which saved me hundreds of hours of work trying to figure out everything from the fluctuation of the ghetto population to the number of lectures given each year. While my work on the ghetto made me appreciate what numbers could tell me, the subject of the Holocaust has also made me resistant to the overarching importance sometimes places on numbers. The number of those who died in the Holocaust remains hotly debated, but I find it hard to believe that five, seven, or ten million makes genocide somehow more or less horrible. The senior historian for the Holocaust Museum had one of his interns go through the documents to count how many homosexuals were actually in Auschwitz; the number is in the hundreds, yet historians have regularly reported numbers in the thousands or tens of thousands, to make Nazi persecution of homosexuals seem even more egregious. But isn’t murdering 300 homosexuals enough for it to be criminal? Sometimes we want numbers alone to form the basis for a qualitative judgment.

The art lover in me was taken by the beauty of the reports; there was not a simple pie chart or bar graph to be found. The graphs’ creators were well aware of the plight of their situation, yet they still choose to make their work exquisite. I’ve always admired graphic design and illustration, so it was easy for me to see the talent at work that could make one want to read a table.  I was reminded of this several times recently, first when looking at Nicholas Felton’s Feltron Reports. His annual reports of mundane personal data are transformed into engaging artwork. Part of this is physical presentation: they’re issued as limited edition, letterpressed works, giving them instant appeal as a desirable commodity. Mostly, though, it’s the originality and creativity that make  the reports an art form: they’re clean, elegant, and inviting. They make you want to know Mr. Felton’s comings and goings; what he’s been reading, eating, and listening to. And while we wouldn’t share a love of sushi, I see in him someone that would empathize with my choice to paint my bedroom swamp green and copper and document the crap in my yard.

Franco Moretti’s Graphs, Maps and Trees made me think of David Byrne’s Arboretum series. While Byrne’s “data” are entirely fanciful, his presentation of information in the classic tree diagram elevates it beyond mere doodling. The viewer is drawn into the artwork in part by curiosity; you want to understand what the information in the diagram is supposed to represent. I think the ghetto artists would have enjoyed Byrne’s sense of humor; in one famous case, a visiting SS officer didn’t like the way that a chart showed a decline in the number of deaths in the ghetto, so the artist simply turned the chart upside down, to make it look like the numbers were going up.

In honor of quantitative history, I spent some quality time in the yard today, and compiled all the crap. I wish that I could make a beautiful diagram like Mr. Felton, but I don’t have the technical skills to do so yet. So at this time, it’s just a list.

PAPER GOODS, Food related

• 1 Napkin-Chipotle
• 2 Paper plates
• 3 Styrafoam cups (1 McDonald’s Sweet Tea)
• 1 Coffee cup lid
• 1 7/11 Burrito wrapper
• 1 Cupcake panty

PAPER GOODS, Non-food

• 3 Restaurant fliers (2 Kabob Stop, 1 Belvedere)
• 1 Old Navy circular
• 1 Pick 4 lottery ticket
• 4 Receipts (Rite Aid, Superfresh, McDonald’s, Lids)
• 1 Magazine page (New Yorker, with directions written on back to IKEA)
• 1 Bill stub (Jonathan)
• 1 Car sticker backing
• 1 Business card (Precision Tattoo and Body Piercing)
• 1 Information card (Siberian tiger)

FOOD & DRINK, Savory

• 1 Utz pretzels
• 1 Doritos (Cool Ranch)
• 1 Slim Jim
• 1 Starbucks wrapper (Vanilla Frappucino)
• 1 Zelko Vodka (Pint size)

FOOD & DRINK, Sweet

• 2 Tasty Cake (Banana, not sure)
• 1 Famous Amos Chocolate Chip Cookies
• 1 Lollipop wrapper strip (3 lollis missing)
• 1 Flavor Ice
• 1 Jumbo Push Pop (Blue raspberry)
• 1 Rolos
• 1 Orbit (Peppermint)
• 1 Wrigley’s
• 1 Hershey’s Cookies ‘n’ Cream
• 1 Reese’s Peanut Butter Cup
• 1 PayDay
• 1 Starburst Gummi Burst (Tropical)
• 1 Airheads (Strawberry)
• 7 Snack size treats (Snickers, Butterfinger, Bit O’ Honey, M&M’s-plain, Laffy Taffy-chocolate, Warhead-blue raspberry, Double Bubble)
• 1 Andes Mint
• 1 After dinner mint
• 1 Gatorade (Fruit punch)

MISCELLANEOUS

• 1 Bottle cap
• 1 Prescription drug cap (CVS)
• 1 Drug info
• 1 Drink tab
• 2 Straw wrappers (1 Subway)
• 1 Piece metal
• 1 Copper wad (Chore Boy)
• 1 Crack vial (empty)
• 13 Cigarette wrappers
• 2 Cigarette butts (Marlboro)
• 1 Cigar wrapper (Palma)
• 6 Plastic bags (3 Baltimore Sun circulars, 1 Royal Farms)
• 2 Unidentifiable plastic wrappers

ACTUAL CRAP

• 1 Pile crap (Dog, small, probably Boston Terrier)

So that’s a lot of crap, but there were some surprises there. First of all, only one pile of dog shit? Is it possible that my radiating hatred of Biscuit and Princess has resulted in canine colon blockage? And only two cigarette butts? I’ve easily pulled dozens out at any given time, and I’m quite sure that the fine folks of Hampden aren’t smoking any less. When Baltimore banned public smoking, I had about a 400% uptick in the number of cigarette butts in the yard, thanks to the stool warmers at Griffith’s Tavern having to stumble outside to smoke. They did finally invest in one of those “Smoker’s Outpost” ashtrays for outside the bar, so that seems to have actually helped. I continue to be amazed by the popularity of blue raspberry flavored candy. There’s no such thing as blue raspberry. Doesn’t that bother anyone? What happened to good old grape? And I remain perplexed by the Precision Tattoo card, which offers not only a military discount, but also “Military Free Ride with Purchase of a Tattoo.” I mean, is that good for both there and back? What if you chicken out, and decide that you don’t really want your drill sergeant’s name tattooed on your left nut for time immemorial?  Do you have to walk back, or could you, say, buy a tattoo for a future customer, or get a gift card?

I’d appreciate input on the crap catalogue. Do you think it’s valuable enough to keep doing? How often does it have to be catalogued to be statistically viable? Daily, weekly, monthly? Or should I scrap the crap?

 

I read the bit about the Siberian tiger.

I see Jews

God I hope so.

True confession time. This week’s object did not come from the yard; nor was it the dénouement to an Asian repast. It came to me by way of the Target in Pikesville, Maryland. Pikesville has a large Jewish population, thus the Target has a small kosher food section, and a large selection of Bar and Bat Mitzvah cards. I was there to partake of their generous array of non-kosher, four dollar prescriptions, but was tickled pink by the realization that I was in the Jewish Target. While not Jewish, I am an Holocaust historian, and have spent most of my adult life hanging out with Jews. I was even congregational director for a synagogue in Prague. What can I say? I like Jews. I like their culture, I like their humor, I like their intelligence. And most people assume I’m Jewish, despite my Teutonic good looks, by virtue of what I do for a living. And the fact that my father is named Sheldon.

While perusing the five foot wide kosher section, I was very excited to find fortune cookies. I’m that rare breed that actually likes and eats fortune cookies, and will seek them out at times other than after a helping of garlic chicken. I’ve never derived much pleasure in the fortunes themselves, unless the Chinglish is extra absurd, or the “in bed” additive actually funny. My fortune often tells me cruel things, like “mind your own business.” No one likes a fortune that’s that apt. Until now that is, when ancient Chinese secret told me “people like to listen to your funny stories.” I was flush with the affirmation of my inherent funniness, and decided to find out all about the prescient fortune writers of the Umeya Rice Cake Company.

I was happy to discover that Umeya has a very good company website, with a fascinating history page. But why stop there? Part of me was torn: I should write about the fact that they’re Japanese, not Chinese, and that the company was shut down as a result of  the passing of Executive Order 9066 following the bombing of Pearl Harbor. But I’m trusting my loyal readership of five blood relations will be so fascinated they’ll click that link and read all about it. Plus, I am not easily swayed from my path, even though I’m easily amused. Ask Sheldon if you don’t believe me. I wanted to know who wrote my fortune. The first person that picked up the phone at the Umeya Rick Cake Company was a font of information. I was quickly dealt a few devastating blows, as my questions were met with a knowing Asian chuckle. Fact: Umeya Rice Cake Company does not employ a staff fortune writer (take that, back-up fantasy career!). Fact: Sometimes fortunes are withdrawn, after customer complaints. Apparently, fortunes were racier once upon a time, and angry brunette housewives griped about husbands finding out that they would be “meeting an attractive blond after dinner.” Fact: No one in the company (okay, first guy that picked up the phone) seems to know where the fortunes come from: “they’re just old sayings, floating around.” Most fascinating fact: Henny Youngmen offered his name and likeness to the Umeya Rice Cake Company, provided they used his jokes on the fortunes. They declined his offer. I also learned that the watermark on the fortune is the company’s logo, the plum blossom, which is also their translation of Umeya.

Prior to writing this story, I went back to the Jewish Target, to get another bag of kosher fortune cookies. To my dismay, I realized that these are not, in fact, kosher, although their ingredients would only prohibit their consumption during Passover, thanks to a leavening agent. It’s not like hooves play a key part in the production of the fortune cookie. While the Umeya Rice Cake Company markets fortune cookies for kids—”Just Say No to Drugs”—and provided fortune cookies for McDonald’s ill-fated Oriental Meals in the 1980s (remember Chicken McNuggets Shanghai?), they aren’t labeled a kosher product. The kosher section of Target abuts the Asian section of Target, and the fortune cookies were straddling the border.

My mind instantly created a cultural phenomenon that doesn’t actually need to exist: kosher fortune cookies.

Clap in my yard*

The last few weeks in Hampden have been tragic. I had encounters with two of my known associates, Crystal Meth and Margaret. Crystal’s been absent lately, likely due to a thirty day stint in the pokey on drug charges. This is common in Baltimore. Habitual users are picked up, sentenced, and quickly released, as holding them longer than thirty days would require the state to actually do something with them, along the lines of rehabilitation. Instead, they usually end up at the 7/11 on the corner to use the pay phone, hoping that someone in the world still loves them enough to take them in.

Crystal was outside the Bella Roma pizza, across from the 7/11, and I overheard her mention that she “has two babies, twelve and fourteen.” And I died a little inside, because I’ve been able to convince myself up until now that Crystal was only hurting herself, and my joy in her pantsless, whistling serenades was only a bit of schadenfreude. The realization that Crystal has children somewhere, and that the cycle of drugs, prison, and return must have already doomed them to a similar life, crushed me.

And then there’s Margaret. I came home one night to Margaret on my stoop. For those of you who’ve never enjoyed a city row home, you must realize that your stoop isn’t actually yours. It’s free game. I’ve spent many a night yelling at Hampden’s shiftless teens to get the hell off my property. I’ve also waited up, hoping to catch Pistachio Man in the act of sitting on the stoop, digging out the mortar of the front step with his used up pistachio shells. It’s either him, or a particularly mean spirited squirrel. But back to Margaret. She was drunk, and disorderly, and bloody. She asked me to call the police, as her son had hit her and knocked out her tooth. So I called the police, and checked out her mouth, and tried to give her a glass of water, which she informed me was “warm as piss” and would benefit from a shot of bourbon. Margaret is not a pleasant woman, and no one wants to deal with her. And apparently the Baltimore police don’t, either, because I called them twice, and they never showed up. Margaret eventually got tired of me, and wandered off, hollering at the night.

I have a soft spot for drunks.

Sometime later, I looked outside to find that a rumpled white minivan had pulled up extremely close to the back end of my Mini, Archibold. Baltimore city is a land of street parking, but Hampden doesn’t usually involve the sort of sweat inducing forty seven point turn parallel parking that many of us are accustomed to in most cities. There was a good stretch of parking on either side of Archibold, yet someone was making improper advances. I went outside to check on things, and saw a woman in the passenger’s seat, applying a swath of pancake concealer by the dim overhead light. It was after midnight. I asked her if everything was okay, and she said, in her best Bawlmerese, “we didn’t hit you, hon.” They’d apparently run out of gas, and tried to coast to a stop. I thought to myself, “move the car.” But it was late, and I didn’t have a bra on, and that seemed to be the clincher. I had somehow concluded that moving the car ten feet would result in terminal nipple chafe. On my way into the house, however, I found this gem, laid ever so gently into the holly tree at the front of the house:

Big Boyz Bail Bonds ballpoints are ubiquitous in Baltimore. Say that ten times fast.

The curator in me was thrilled at its pristine condition-no encrustations, no bodily fluids, and encased in a lovely plastic wrapper. The Batlimorean in me was tickled that I had been bestowed with an entire pack of Big Boyz Bail Bonds pens of my very own. Anyone who has ever eaten, shopped, or signed something in public in Baltimore has encountered these pens, which have to be one of the largest marketing blitzes in history. I was planning on telling you all about the pens, but when I called Big Boyz, they told me to check out their pen blog. It describes their manic campaign to take over the lucrative world of disposable pens, one greater Baltimore area business at a time.  But these were mine! All mine!

My joy was short lived, as is usually the case in Hampden. I awoke to find that the white minivan was now fully mounting Archibold, in a manner reminiscent of Mutual of Omaha’s Wild Kingdom. As the toothless operator of 7MD3635 was in situ, I moseyed on over to chat. He explained that he didn’t “hit” my car, he was just “resting” on my car. Noting my indignation, he asked “what would you like me to do, ma’am?” In a moment of self-righteous zeal, I retorted “you’re not going to do anything. I only want to know why you wouldn’t do the right thing.” Nothing angers me like being ma’amed. In high dudgeon I extracted Archibold from the minivan’s claspers, and toothless put the aggressor into gear to coast through the now-red light at the bottom of 37th.  He nearly hit two other cars on the way down, coming to a “rest” in the Rite Aid parking lot.

In retrospect, I realized that the woman I spoke to that night was not his wife, but one of Baltimore’s more unfortunate prostitutes. It made me wonder what a prostitute does in that situation. Does she still get paid? Does she have to chip in for gas money? Does he pay her for a taxi home? Or did they simply go ahead with their plans, and make cheap sweaty love in that heap of a minivan, while Archibold bore the terrible indignation of it all?

*title courtesy of Lisa Hamm