Pandemic memories

 In the corner of the entrance to my laboratory building lies a neglected and forgotten relic of the recent worldwide pandemic.  This month, four years ago, the saga of Covid began in this country and would severely test the social structure of the nation.  That first weekend of March 2020, my wife and I were on one of our frequent long weekend trips to New York city to see a Broadway show.  Early news stories at that time had just begun to describe a new viral illness, with cases being detected on the west coast, and mere days before our trip, in upstate New York.  With little concern, we went ahead with the trip and spent several days roaming around Manhattan taking few additional precautions over our normal routines.  We enjoyed being in the audience of a performance of The Lehman Trilogy, viewing what would be virtually the last performance of that wonderful show.  The Monday after that first March weekend, we flew home.  Less than a week later, Broadway closed and the city of New York locked down.  Thus began a public health crisis that would test the nation's resolve and resourcefulness.

Today, happily, the situation is much improved.  The past four years seem to be both a blink of the eye and an eternity.  The anachronistic sign that stands forgotten in a corner of my building is a souvenir of those difficult days as we struggled to deal with this new illness.  What the crisis revealed about society is both heartening and dismaying.  We saw the endless and largely unappreciated dedication of healthcare workers on the front lines of the fight against this new, insidious illness.  We also came to belatedly appreciate the value of the unsung members of society, the grocery store workers, restaurant servers, and all those in constant contact with the public who provide crucial services.  With more disappointment, however, we saw with clear vision the utter and complete moral and intellectual bankruptcy of the Republican party.  From the party leader and nation's president on down to local government, the GOP failed the nation with its endless obstruction of virtually every public health measure from masks to vaccines to social distancing, the vilification of scientists as they struggled valiantly (and sometimes imperfectly) to understand this new pathogen, to the belligerent, cultish adoption of unproven treatments and medications that were mere defiant emblems more than they were useful countermeasures to the disease.  So now, four years later, the nation and the world stands, scarred but hopefully wiser and better prepared for challenges to come.

Imagine, Dragons dancing

 March Madness is upon us.  This weekend, the various conferences concluded their tournaments before Selection Sunday ceremonies Sunday evening.  In the AAC, the UAB Blazers coasted to a comfortable 85-69 victory over the Temple Owls, who fell just short of an amazing Cinderella story tourney performance.  A conference cellar-dweller all season, Temple went on an impressive four-game run to earn a spot in the final game.  But the Owls could not overcome the hot shooting Blazers, who repeated the beatdown they served Temple ten days prior in the regular season.

Under the leadership of alumnus coach Andy Kennedy - the author of UAB's winningest four season stretch in school history - the "Bartow Standard" has returned to UAB.  Blazers once again join the Big Dance, and face San Diego State University (ranked 25 in this week's USA Today rankings) in Spokane, Washington of Friday.  Should the Blazers upset SD State and advance to the second round, they will likely face in-state neighbor Auburn, winners of the SEC Tournament Championship.  Such a matchup would give many Alabama college basketball fans a difficult choice of who to root for.  Let the madness begin!

HMS Bounty

 Ever since I was a very young boy, I've been fascinated by the story of the mutiny on HMS Bounty.  Before I made it to high school, I had already read Charles Nordoff's and James Norman Hall's novel Mutiny on the Bounty more than once.  In my college years, I travelled to England and visited the grave of Captain (later Admiral) Bligh in a Lambeth churchyard.  While I never got to personally visit the movie prop reproduction Bounty used in the 1962 movie, I have watched all the various movies through the years, read all the biographies and other books on the topic, and even read the facsimile copy of Bligh's log that he kept after the mutiny, when he was set adrift in a small boat with other loyalist crewmembers.  So I was especially proud to acquire an original oil painting of the storied vessel.  This artistic triumph was painted by Patrick O'Brien, an award-winning marine artist living in Baltimore, Maryland.  (He is not to be confused with the British novelist Patrick O'Brian, author of the "Master and Commander" series of novels.)  The artist O'Brien is president of the American Society of Marine Artists, and is a wonderfully talented painter and book illustrator.  His interpretation of the ill-fated Bounty now sits in my home and each day I can view it and think back to those tumultuous days in 1789 when a disaffected portion of the ship's crew took possession of the ship from its commander.

HMS Bounty Approaching Tahiti by Patrick O'Brien

Hot off the press

 Another wonderful issue of one of my favorite 'zines landed in my mailbox today.  This is No. 62 of The Mystery and Adventure Series Review, published by Fred Woodworth.  Fred has been steadily putting out multiple publications since 1969.  He does this entirely without use of digital equipment of any kind.  Instead, he uses analog offset printing presses and associated gear of the sort that I remember from my teen years, working in my father's print shop in the 1980s.  It's painstaking and skilled work, made more challenging by the fact that supplies for the printing process are becoming difficult or impossible to obtain. To overcome the obstacles, Fred turns to his endless resourcefulness to improvise solutions for each problem.  I'm astonished by his technical and typographic knowledge, and his unstoppable drive to publish his catalog of 'zines.

This 'zine ostensibly focuses on boy's series books, but delves into many literary and typographic topics.  On top of all that, Fred has been publishing a novel which has been serialized over several past issues in the manner of Charles Dickens in the mid 1850s.  This issue of the Review contains the final chapters of The Sunken City, a Tom Quest novel.  The anachronistic charm of every aspect of this magazine really gets me where I live.  I've been a subscriber for over a decade now, and while the years are piling up for Fred, I hope he continues for many more.

Rare Card Alert

 A very rare postcard arrived today.  This one was my first from Réunion, which I learn from Wikipedia is an island off the southeast coast of Africa, and is an overseas department administered by France.  Think of it like Guam is to the USA, I suppose.  The card ID number is 5380, which is wonderfully low and reflects the small population of this territory (there are only 66 Postcrossing members there).  And as I mention in my Postcrossing profile, card senders may write to me in French, and they did with my full understanding.  Thanks, DuoLingo!

10K

 Just moments ago, I reached a Postcrossing landmark.  The 10,000th card I've sent was registered by member juju in Germany.  The card took 13 days to make the 4,807 mile trip.  It's taken me a little over 11 years, or 4,126 days, to send this many cards.  And by this activity, I have reached a ranking of 29th highest among 74,378 Postcrossing members in the USA.  Write on!

Harvest Time

 Back on October 9, 2023 I planted my current crop of cherry tomatoes in my Aerogarden hydroponic grower.  And today I began to harvest the produce.  Some delicious, ripe tomatoes are included in the sack lunch I take to work today.  And plenty more will soon be ready.  With record cold weather this past week, this is a nice little reminder of the rhythm of life, and warm Summer weather soon to come.

Forever More Expensive

 Today, another postal rate increase goes into effect. It will now cost more to send postcards, letters and parcels around the country, as well as more to rent post office boxes.  A standard 1 ounce first class letter will now cost you 68 cents to send within the USA.  A postcard, 53 cents.  Sending either internationally will cost $1.55.  That last figure impacts me the most; as a Postcrossing member, I send about 100 postcards a month.  It's a substantially more costly hobby than when I began over ten years ago.  Postal rate increases have become regular and frequent in recent years- the last one on July 9, 2023 also raised costs by a similar amount.  But we can console ourselves in the knowledge that while rates have increased, postal service has declined significantly.  Even by their own official measures posted on the USPS social media pages, average transit times for mail have grown longer over the past year.  In my own personal experience, I regularly send first class mail from Helena, Alabama to a suburban Chicago town.  For many years, mail sent on Monday would reliably arrive on Thursday.  But for over a year, that is rarely the case.  Not only is mail arriving later, but it is also much more erratic.  So I can't even adjust for slower mail in timing arrival of things like birthday cards, as they now may arrive early or late.  For this, we have only Trump appointed Postmaster General Louis DeJoy to thank.  He may be making some progress in making the USPS more financially self sufficient, but he's single handedly destroyed the goodwill the service once had.  Other government services from Amtrack to the air traffic control system are similarly intended to be financially self supporting, but rely on government subsidies, without incurring the political outrage the USPS deals with.  For myself, I wish for a return to the days when the government had to provide a subsidy, but when the USPS was a reliable and dependable service that was able to move mail at least as quickly as it did 100 years ago.  Sadly, that's no longer the case.

Cut the cheese

 Despite a dismal reputation (well deserved, in certain respects), Alabama and Birmingham still can boast some admirable qualities.  The city, in fact, is a premiere foodie city.  Many great and award winning restaurants.  A vibrant and growing craft beer community.  And many purveyors of fine food provisions.  A relatively new member of the latter community is Son of a Butcher, a luxury meat, fish and cheese shop.  It was here that I bought a delicious beef tenderloin for a Beef Wellington for dinner last Christmas.  I often stop in to pick up treats from their small but excellently curated cheese selection.  With a dedicated cheese monger on site, one can usually find high quality cheese there that arrive from around the world.  In fact, it is one of the only places in town that I can get some of my favorite- authentic English Stilton.  So in this spirit, SOB last night held one of their regular Parmesan Reggiano cheese crackings.  They do this every couple of months with a new 90 pound wheel of the "King of Cheese".  The wheel opened last night was particularly rare- one of only 100 wheels made each year by the particular Italian cheese maker, and this wheel was one of only six that made it to the USA this year.  Attended with wine, bread, charcuterie and olive oil tastings, the cheese was opened, and generous tasting samples were provided.  A large crowd attended, and one had to be patient to finally obtain a wedge of the precious cheese to purchase.  But I ultimately did, and hurried home in the cold, rainy night with my small block of concentrated Italian goodness.  Thank you to SOB, and the cows of Italy for the tasty treat!

End of the road

 For several years, I have subscribed to a number of 'zines.  A couple of these are of special interest to me from the standpoint of typography.  They are both "anarchist" 'zines of long, venerable tenure.  To me, they evoke the subversive atmosphere of the radical activist 'zines of the 1960s- produced in basements and distributed on street corners and read in coffee houses.  I have enjoyed subscribing to two of these for at least a decade though their publication track record goes back much further.  And they have things in common- both are produced without computers or any other sort of digital equipment, in the conventional way of printing I learned in my father's print shop in the early 1980s.  One, The Match!, is produced by Fred Woodworth via offset printing methods.  The other, The Cunningham Amendment, is really an art 'zine, produced, as the publisher commonly says, "The R Supward Press: Letterpress Printers of Subversive Ephemera - Salvaged Type - Discarded Inks - Obsolete Machines".  TCA has been published regularly by Peter Good since 1974 (first, as Anarchism Lancastrium), making this the 50th year of publication.  An astonishing accomplishment for a small, one-man operation.  The craftsmanship of TCA is amazing, especially in the digital age.  Multicolor, typeset by hand, and presented on fine paper, it's a joy to hold in one's hands.

Last week, I received the latest copy of TCA, which is always a highlight of my day.  But instantly, it was clear this issue was different.  It was tiny, compared to the standard format.  Only a few pages and hardly larger than a dollar bill.  Well, Peter Good has experimented with interesting formats in the past, I thought.  I read through the issue and absorbed the familiar bits of humor and wisdom, while marveling at the printing.  But then, I reached the last page, and the paragraph shown below.  After 50 years of publication, this was to be the last issue of The Cunningham Amendment.  I was shocked.  Poor health is given as a reason, which isn't a surprise.  In private correspondence, Dr. Good has told me of his weakening health. And sharp eyesight and dexterous fingers are required for typesetting a letterpress page.  But still, I am heartbroken if this is to be the last issue of such a long-lived publication.  I've written well wishes Peter Good, with my deepest thanks for all enjoyment he has given me over the years.  I hope his remaining days are comfortable, peaceful, and proud of his publishing legacy.