Month: November 2016

Footage of Corktown. Notice the huge swaths of darkness. You can’t see anything . . . because there isn’t anything to see. It’s just vacant blackness.

… Read the rest

Miscellaneous Rambling: Detroit

An old philosophical problem: If you’re sitting in an otherwise pitch black room with a single candle burning it, are you noticing the candle or the darkness?

I traveled to downtown Detroit Friday night. My in-laws told me about a great cocktail bar in Corktown. Corktown is that area around old Tiger Stadium. Even when Tiger Stadium was standing, I remember my Dad telling me that it was one of the worst areas of Detroit when games weren’t being played. I payed homage to old Tiger Stadium about six years ago, taking three kids there (see pics of old pitching mound below) before a Detroit Lions game at Ford Field, and I remember thinking, “I wouldn’t step foot down here at night, even if I were heavily armed.” And now four different in-laws were telling me it had been rehabilitated and was perfectly safe? To be honest, I was concerned that hometown cheerleading had replaced objectivity, but I decided to go anyway.

We went to two bars. Both were great, but the second one, Sugar House, blew me away. It was an old speakeasy and hangout of the Purple Gang. It is located right on Michigan Avenue (U.S. 12, which goes through my town 150 miles away), and it sits on a block with three other nice restaurants/bars. It is easily the coolest bar I’ve ever visited . . . and I’ve visited many. If you’re in Detroit and like classic cocktails, you gotta go.

But here’s the thing: I won’t vouch for your safety. I did, indeed, feel safe: the establishments in that block were packed with middle-class and … Read the rest

Welcome to Advent. I enter mine worn out and weary. I’m hoping to rebound. If you need a boost, too, maybe these will help. From GKC’s The Everlasting Man:

“Any agnostic or atheist whose childhood has known a real Christmas has ever afterwards, whether he likes it or not, an association in his mind between two ideas that most of mankind must regard as remote from each other; the idea of a baby and the idea of unknown strength that sustains the stars.”

“It is no more inevitable to connect God with an infant than to connect gravitation with a kitten.”

“Bethlehem is emphatically a place where extremes meet.”

“If the world wanted what is called a non-controversial aspect of Christianity, it would probably select Christmas.”

“You cannot chip away the statue of a mother from all round that of a new-born child. You cannot suspend the new-born child in mid-air; indeed you cannot really have a statue of a new-born child at all.”

“You cannot visit the child without visiting the mother; you cannot in common human life approach the child except through the mother. If we are to think of Christ in this aspect at all, the other idea follows as it is followed in history. We must either leave Christ out of Christmas, or Christmas out of Christ, or we must admit, if only as we admit it in an old picture, that those holy heads are too near together for the haloes not to mingle and cross.”… Read the rest

I’m glad Marie has a good sense of humor. She got her London pictures back earlier this week. She was whipping through them, handing them to the kids and me with quick commentary. She handed this one to us and said, “This is 10 Downing Street, where the prime minister lives.” I looked at it and said, “Sweetheart, um, I don’t think this is 10 Downing Street.” She insisted it was until I insisted she look at it again:

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“Gratitude is a fruit of great cultivation; you do not find it among gross people.” Samuel Johnson

“I would maintain that thanks are the highest form of thought; and that gratitude is happiness doubled by wonder.” G.K. Chesterton

“Gratitude is characteristic only of the humble. The egotistic are so impressed by their own importance that they take everything given them as if it were their due. They have no room in their hearts for recollection of the undeserved favors they received.” Fulton Sheen

“When the stomach is full, it is easy to talk of fasting.” St. Jerome

“If the only prayer you said in your whole life was, ‘thank you,’ that would suffice.” Meister Eckhart… Read the rest

Black Wednesday

I’ll confess a conceit: I think I became aware of Black Wednesday before anyone else. When I first started talking about it in the late 1980s, it was scarcely “a thing,” in the sense that nobody looked at it as a cultural phenomenon as much as just an evening when a lot of people met at the bar.

Now, I’m sure my conceit is grossly arrogant. Bar owners undoubtedly were gleefully aware that Thanksgiving Eve was one of their biggest nights, and I’m sure alcohol distributors were aware of it as well. But nobody, as far as I know, had given it a name or identified it as a separate cause of celebration.

That has all changed. The evening now has its own Wikipedia entry. It’s lame, but it’s an entry:

Blackout Wednesday or “Drinksgiving” is the night before the Thanksgiving holiday in the United States, which is always a Thursday. It is associated with binge drinking since very few people work on Thanksgiving, and most university students are home to celebrate the Thanksgiving holiday with their families. The name refers to “blacking out”, memory loss due to excessive alcohol intoxication. In Chicago in particular, Blackout Wednesday is sometimes a more popular partying night than even New Year’s Eve or Saint Patrick’s Day. In some cities, it is the top drunk driving night of the year.

So why do I say it’s lame? Lots of reasons:

1. I rarely see it referred to as “Blackout Wednesday.” That phrase is a juvenile celebration of excess, plus it stretches the parallelism with “Black Friday” to the point of collapse. (I edited the Wikipedia page, … Read the rest