Fervent fireplugs for the Fourth.

One of the most charming outpourings of civic and national pride at the 1976 United States Bicentennial was ... fire hydrants. 

I don't think anyone is certain where the practice began, but in the leadup to July 1976, people in many communities across the fruited plains started giving the local fireplugs a makeover. 

My favorites were the ones done up like Minutemen -- such as this old soldier. 

I had kind of hoped that we might see this sort of thing return for the big 250, despite the fact that about vocal minority of the country seems to hate America beyond reason. I don't think anyone's hatred of the country or the president or whatever matters here, though. After all, how many people does it take to paint a fire hydrant?

Granted, there's something less impressive about 50-year celebrations. 100? YAY! 150? Yay. 200? YAY! 250? Yay. It just doesn't have enough zeroes to put it over the top. 

Also, there is an issue with painting fireplugs that may not have been a problem in 1976: color coding. Franklin, Tennessee, provides an explanation of the significance of different colors of its fireplugs:

The same code is not used throughout the United States; for one thing, most areas don't have yellow-barreled hydrants. But I have noted the difference among bonnets here in New York, and the difference between regular hydrants and those only used to flush the system. You see, though, why this would preempt celebratory hydrant painting. You wouldn't want the firemen to ignore the working hydrant just because it had been made to look like George Washington with a black bonnet in place of his trusty tricornered hat. 

Well, it's understandable, but it's a shame. I would have loved a patriotic excuse to give this hydrant a refresh:

Hmm -- does that orange top mean it spews up to 999 gallons a minute? And will the department know that when the paint flakes down to the iron? 

Let's hope they don't need to use it, anyway. We live here! 

Just ask my dog.

Crap -- uh, craft.

So, rock painting. Is that a thing now? Or is it origami again?

Did Bob Ross ever paint rocks?

These books were all in the wholesale club back-to-school pile, and may be more indicative of what the kids were up to last year than this year. Rock painting is something to do, I guess. I don't recall ever doing it in school. Maybe in New York City they were afraid to let the kids have rocks small enough to throw.

It got me thinking about Craft Projects of My Youth, most of which were connected with elementary school. It's funny how some kids will take to one and not to another, how it's not always the kid you would think who excels at a particular craft. Here are the ones I remember, and my rating (from 0 to 5 yarn balls 🧶). Your mileage will certainly vary. I'd love to hear your take in comments. 

🎨🖌🖇🧶

Paper crafts (corrugated paper edition): Cutting and gluing pictures using sheets of colored corrugated paper. You had to think ahead a little because your cut-out pieces had to have the same direction of corrugation as the background. Otherwise you might have a corrugated man running left-right when he should be up-down, so instead of walking he has to lie down. Lame. Only saved from 0 yarn balls because a classmate accused the school librarian of having corrugated lips, which is still funny. 🧶

Papier-mâché (puppet edition): Very intense exercise in using heavy conical dowels made of cardboard (a.k.a. yarn cones) as puppet bodies and making papier-mâché heads for them. The amount of wet newspaper in that classroom was amazing. The humidity level rose 30%. Later, the heads were painted and decorated with glued-on stuff, and little clothes were made for them. They were all Wizard of Oz themed, because we used the puppets for our class drama that year. I cannot begin to tell you how long we worked on this, but it seemed to be the whole school year. I memorized the entire script even though I had about five lines. As involving crafts go, it was amazing. As for the finished puppet heads, everything looked like blobs. Especially mine. Still: 🧶🧶🧶🧶🧶

Macrame (belt edition): Everyone in class had to have a macrame belt ready for the annual spring class dance at the end of the year. Not a school dance per se; each class had to do some kind of dance number. Our costume required us to make our own macrame belts. I don't want to say that I was bad at it, but a cat would have had a better chance at making a ball of yarn into a belt. In desperation the teacher asked the #1 macrame artist in the class to make my belt -- this little twerp, a jerk who would have been the class bully if he'd not been short, but as it was, was a loudmouth who could piss off anyone. He was a genius at macrame. Who knew? 🧶🧶

Stuff with Popsicle sticks (I have no idea edition): I just know there were tongue depressors and paint and glue. Nothing good ever came out of it. 🧶

Ceramics (painting edition): We got to pick our choice of unpainted ceramics to paint. When I say "our choice" I mean no choice at all, since we went by lottery. I got these little pine trees. Some kids got huge things with an opportunity to do some thoughtful and creative painting. I painted mine green. I am still disappointed, but on the other hand, I had those trees out every Christmas for decades. 🧶🧶 

Tilework (glue edition): We got sheets of little tiles, cut them to shape, and glued them on other things. In theory, pretty cool; in practice, mosaics for morons. 🧶

Pottery (middle school edition): Now we're talking. Using the snake coil method to build up a pot, painting, firing, glazing! Kilns were involved! My pot still came out looking like crap--literal crap, as I painted it brown for some reason, and it was lumpy--but it was tons of fun. I still have it somewhere. It's heavy enough to kill a guy. 🧶🧶🧶🧶🧶

Knitting (adult edition): This actually was team-building project designed by people who did not know anything about knitting, because when you have twenty people knitting a square, even if they knew how to knit, every square is still going to be a different size because of variations among knot sizes, hand sizes, and general ability. Most people did not know how to knit. The dreamed-of goal of having a group crazy quilt was put to bed within the hour. I, of course, could not even make a good snarl. No improvement from my macrame belt fiasco. 0

🎨🖌🖇🧶

That's all I can remember offhand. I am glad we didn't do origami. I think probably some kid would have lost a finger. I don't think our school turned out a lot of geniuses, is what I'm saying.

Two faces.

It's said that Henry VIII, king of England and all that, fell in love with his fourth wife, Anne of Cleves, before he'd even met her. He had gazed upon her portrait by Hans Holbein the Younger and got all worked up. I recall hearing that Hank the Ocho was so thrilled when Anne's ship arrived that he rode his horse right up the gangway in excitement. 

She looks nice.

It fell apart quickly. Will Cuppy, in The Decline and Fall of Practically Everybody, puts it this way: 

"Anne of Cleves had been much admired in the Low Countries, but in England she just wouldn't do. The way she got herself up, they thought she was playing charades. Anne of Cleves couldn't play or sing like Anne Boleyn. She could only spin, and nobody asked her to spin. Henry had seen her portrait by Holbein. She was a picture bride. Cromwell, who had helped arrange the wedding, was beheaded nineteen days after the divorce."

Cuppy says in the footnote, "Henry should have beheaded Holbein instead." 

I don't want to be picking on Anne of Cleves, whose looks may not have been all that Holbein made her out to be, but whose brother was a leader of Protestants in Western Germany. Henry was eager to make an alliance with them. However, with her lack of English skills and yes, her looks not being what that fat bastard was hoping for, Henry said screw the alliance and it was soon off to wife #5, and Cromwell's head in a basket for good measure. 

But that's not why I bring up any of this. Paul Begala is credited with the notion that politics is show business for ugly people, and that's why I thought of poor Anne of Cleves. In show business, most people who aren't character actors are expected to be good-looking, but in politics, you can be ugly. In fact, some of them abuse the privilege. However, I've noticed that more politicians are trying to gussy themselves up for the campaign season than in years past. 

The literature that stuffs the mailbox and the online ads show much more appealing people than the ones we see out pressing the flesh. The problem is, because these are local guys and gals working retail politics, we know what they look like. A touched-up photo from 1999 isn't fooling anyone.

Of course, their opponents will gladly use more realistic visuals of these politicians, rendered in horror-movie black-and-white, with narration by murder-show enthusiasts. Sometimes you can't even tell it's the same person.

This goes for everyone in the stupid game of politics, so I'm not singling any party out. And because politics is stupid, maybe these gimmicks work, although it would have to be on the most easily swayed independent ninnies. I loathe our state's senators, and it has nothing to do with their looks; one is passable and the other looks like a gnarled catcher's mitt with glasses perched atop an enormous baked ham. They're both liars, socialism-for-thee-but-not-for-me creeps who would run over the bodies to get on camera even if the blood from the train wreck was still flowing. I wouldn't trust either of them to manage nap time at a preschool. Half the children would die and the rest found wandering across town five days later.

My point today, though, is that if you went by campaign literature, our political class would be a collection of fine-looking youth, happy warriors, and genial sages; to go by their opponents' literature, you would move away from them on the subway platform. We have to stop paying so much attention to looks, or the political class will keep treating us like morons. 

♔📖♔📖♔📖

COMPLETELY UNRELATED NOTE: We all know the mnemonic to recite the ends of Henry VIII's wives: 

Divorced, Beheaded, Died

Divorced, Beheaded, Survived

Well, one of my all-time favorite book titles came from that, a youth novel by Barbara Williams published in 1987. If anyone out there has read it, I'd like your review; I never got a copy. The plot:

During a summer tour of England, two troubled teenagers--Lowell, upset by the remarriage of his mother, and Jane, a diabetic struggling to cope with her illness--come to terms with themselves and each other.

The title: Beheaded, Survived. 

I've had days like that. 

Pour one for the big guy.

Readers of a certain age will remember President Jimmy Carter's beloved but somewhat bumbling kid brother Billy Carter. Billy seemed much more like a good ol' boy than his big brother, and that in an era that honored rural down-home working folks.

Typical of Billy, though, he got in trouble. He once peed on an airport runway in full view of the press; worse, he got a $220,000 loan from Libya after registering as a representative of the country. That led to a Congressional investigation into Billy's influence peddling, which kind of ruined his good-ol'-boy-ness. It's not a good look for American small business owners and sons of the soil to represent OPEC nations. 

But while Billy's star was in the firmament, he inspired and recommended a beer called Billy Beer, sold in fine stores everywhere. 

Sure, the Secretary of the Treasury signs the money, but does he get to sign beer cans? No way.

Anyway, I've come up with a real winner of an idea. There's a little-known relative of the president, a son named Hunter, and I hear he likes to have a drink or two himself. I think we can make a deal to get him to endorse something like Billy Beer, maybe a malt liquor. Maybe a "fortified" malt liquor, you know? The way some delicious wines like M/D 2020 and Wild Irish Rose are fortified. And of course he would be paid in Fredcoin, the world's most Fred-like crytocurrency. 

Here's a mock-up of the label:

Trying to think of a good slogan, like "It'll Get You There" or "Throw Away Your Laptop and Forget Your Troubles" or "It's Like Kissing Your Sister-in-Law." I'm sure we can come up with something better. 

I'll be reaching out to the younger Biden soon to see what we can work out. Apparently Congress is just great with influence peddling now, so I doubt anyone will give him a problem on that end. And you know, they tell me that this Hunter fellow is a successful painter, which is great. My bathroom could use a fresh coat -- maybe we can add that to the deal.

Razzle-dazzle.

This dude's got him some razzle-dazzle. 

By that I don't mean the first definition of razzle-dazzle from Merriam-Webster, that being "a state of confusion or hilarity," which dates back to 1885. I'm thinking of the second definition, "a complex maneuver (as in sports) designed to confuse an opponent," or the third, "a confusing or colorful often gaudy action or display." That's because this crickety fellow shares a tactic that was developed by the United Kingdom and the United States during World War I, which was called razzle-dazzle, or the dazzle system.

The April 1919 issue of Popular Science Monthly noted:

When the German U-boats began their depredations, it became desperately necessary to provide some protective coloration for transport, food-ships, and the hundreds of vessels that were carrying munitions to Europe. 

Battleship gray had been devised to help ships blend into the sky and sea, but as the article notes, it had "proved utterly useless". What the artists came up with instead was the dazzle system, a means of painting ships not to render them invisible, but to use odd patterns of stripes to make it difficult for a U-boat to tell which way a ship was facing and at what speed it was traveling. The class of the ship (battleship, cargo, etc.) would be more difficult for the enemy to pinpoint as well. 

More than 2,000 ships got the dazzle treatment, but I don't know if it's possible to say how effective it was. Since U-boats would not act and betray their position unless they were positive of a hit, there's no telling how many shots they didn't take because of the dazzle system. 

The illustrations from the Popular Science article certainly make it seem impressive:

However, there's at least one sailor's story that questions its effectiveness:  

It was quiet sometimes and sometimes you were… once or twice we lost a couple of merchant ships. I can remember I was on watch one afternoon and we were coming up the east coast and I said to the signalman, ‘Hey, I said, look at that ship over yonder.’ And I says, it was the first ship we saw with the dazzle paint on. And lo and behold, not a couple minutes after, we heard a bang and a flash and we look across and it was this ship that was dazzled – sunk.

I guess by the time the Big One, WWII, broke out, they decided just to go back to battleship gray because you couldn't dazzle the enemy with just visual tricks anymore. Airplanes would not be fooled by stripes, and unlike in the First Big One, airplanes were used heavily in sea combat. 

Anyway, that's a thought for today, brought up by the bug. I'll have more to write on battleship gray tomorrow. 

Doge.

The Dark Side of the Renaissance

 

Porched earth policy.

So, to continue the saga from yesterday -- an all-day saga, if you will -- I had to paint the porch again because it looked like crap after one winter, and since I didn't paint it last year, it looked like crappity crap after two winters. I refused to paint white again, at least for the floorboards, and the Mrs. agreed. All colors can show dirt and wear, but nothing compares to white.

Picking a color took most of the spring, but that was okay since it was too rainy to paint then anyway. The question was, should the porch floor match the shutters and roof? Or would it be too matchy-matchy? Ultimately we decided to take a chance on matchy-matchy, because the house already has two bold and one mild color, and a fourth non-white color would make it start to look all crazy-quilt, which anyone can tell you is more risky than matchy-matchy.

The other big decision was to use a textured paint, which was new to me. Our porch is ridiculously slippery in the winter; I've fallen down the stairs at least once, and I live in fear of UPS men with attorneys delivering to us in the winter. This textured paint has some sand-like stuff in it gives you a little grip. If it prevents one concussion, one back injury, it's well worth the extra expense.

They used to call it sand paint. I remember my dad using it. It was very popular for ceilings in the fifties and sixties, and was still in many homes when I was a kid. Now they call them popcorn ceilings, but I first heard the term in this decade.

For kids, these ceilings ceased being popular as soon as we let go of our non-Mylar helium balloons, because that sucker was popping instantly. Sand paint did not feel like beach sand; it felt like broken glass. You wouldn't want it on your walls.

Anyway, I remember Dad using sand paint and it being quite difficult. What made it harder for him was the cleanup; Dad never used today's disposable brushes, paint rollers, or drop cloths. In fact, I am dead certain that he had the same drop cloths in use from before I was born until they sold the house after I graduated college.

So, yes, sand paint was difficult, and textured paint is not as bad (less sand), but still more difficult than regular paint, and I didn't prepare adequately.

We prepped the space all right; I even let my wife use the power washer and play Ghostbuster. Seriously, she probably saved me an hour. But the textured paint ate up all that time and more.

It's extremely thick, as you might imagine, and painting the trim around the deck was like icing a driveway with a rubber spatula. My one saving grace was that our porch is not that big.

To determine if I could afford this house, I'd have to factor in the money
to have flunkies on hand to paint the doggone porch.

Usually I can do the boards with a roller on a stick. The textured paint can warns you right on the lid to use a roller cover with a 1/2-inch nap. I thought I had one but I did not, so I thought -- this 3/8-inch cover is close enough, right? That's just an eighth of an inch off!

Har.

The roller got sunk in this goo and wouldn't move. Trying to roll it out was like try to butter new Wonder Bread with cold butter. I wound up doing most of the planks by hand, with which my back and legs took great issue by Sunday morning. I work in a chair most of the time; I have muscles that have been dormant since the Space Shuttle program ended. They registered their displeasure.

But despite that, on Sunday morning, I dragged my sorry behind to Home Depot and got the right roller covers, some more disposable brushes, and some more disposable roller pans. I was aiming to burn whatever I used after this job, because nothing would ever come clean.

And the job did get done, but for a touch-up on the white bits, which I'll do today. It came off looking pretty good. You don't get that nice, smooth finish with a textured paint, but I'll trade that for safety. From the street it looks great. Not too matchy-matchy.

The one thing I didn't mention in all this is that the dogs only leave the house by the porch. They both are scared of the cellar steps, and the back steps are very steep. I had to time the painting around their usual evacuation periods, because no way can I carry 100+ pound dogs down the other stairs. I should have started training them on those back stairs after the last debacle, when the porch got repaired. Anyway, no dogs exploded and my back is relatively intact.

And the porch looks good. Will it really be safer underfoot in the winter? Will it really still look good come spring? Watch this space in the months ahead for more kvetching, moaning, krexing, and general complaining to find out!

Porched.

Blarg.

I'm afraid I have little for you today, as yesterday was finally Paint the Porch Day. I literally cannot tell you how many times I've done this since we moved in here and my wife decided the porch needed to be stained white. At a guess I'd say five, plus one porch repair job that included professional painters. That's a lot, but the elements beat the crap out of the porch. How they got on my porch, I'll never know.

I was at it all afternoon, and then we went to the Vigil Mass Saturday evening so I could have all day Sunday to finish the job. Fun!

Anyway, there's more to the story (isn't there always?), which I will share with you Monday, if finishing the job doesn’t finish me today. Darn you, nice days! Where's the rain when I want to get out of chores?

Rejected paint colors.

Lobster Liver

Miscellaneous Brown

Magilla Gorilla

Star Trek™ Red

Booger

Vitamin Fred Pants Green

Prospector Tooth

Vertigo

Creepy Panel Van White

Malcontent Mauve

Algae

Harvest Goldberg

Whatcha-Got-in-the-Can Mystery Color

Malaise

Dog’s Breakfast

Sunburn

Detroit Gray

Dingleberry

Gefilte Fish

Poison Ivy

Dried Blood

Gluten-Free

Pseudoephed-Red

Mammal Enamel

Honky White

Phlegm

Plaid set (some assembly required)

Roadkill

Shroom

Snirt

Black-and-Blue

Hobo Nose

Extra Drippy Yellow

Teenage Goth Angst Black

Raw Turkey

Breaking Bad

Headache-Inducing Orange

White Castle

Shiny Cockroach


UPDATE: Mr. Philbin writes that I should add Talula Does the Hula from Hawaii. I think we can all agree that's a good idea.

Noisy neighborhood.

What's that loud clashing noise I hear all over the block?

It turns out they repainted the fire hydrants, again. The town seems to do this every now and then, and never the same color twice. This irritating red and orange hydrant was a stylish yellow and blue last week. Now it's so loud even the dogs won't go near it. Sensitive ears, you know.

I was puzzling out what this means. The town's done strange things on the street before, like leave street markings for alien ship landings. One thing they did just this week was notify us that the water might shut off one morning between nine and noon, but it never happened, unless it was just for a moment when we weren't in the shower or flushing the can. This was said to be part of a water flow improvement project, and I wondered if the Crayola attack on the hydrants was connected.

According to the site Today I Found Out, upon which one may find out things, fire hydrants may be color-coded according to their water pressure. "Due to the numerous different supply systems throughout the United States, there can be a wide range of available supply, from 500 GPM [gallons per minute] or less to over 2500 GPM." It's very helpful for firefighters to know at a glance what the water pressure is going to be when they hook up to the water supply. So that could be the answer, right?

Maybe not; the same article notes according to National Fire Protection Agency standards, while the caps indicate the water pressure (orange would be 500 to 999 GPM) the body of the thing should be "chrome yellow." A red cap would mean under 500 GPM. Using a red body muddles the code for the cap, if that's even what's being signaled here.

What the heck, town? Get your act together!

If I find out that this was some idiot councilman's idea of "aesthetics" to help keep our town "weird," I will write a strongly worded letter to the editor. This was a nice quiet block until those hydrants were repainted.

I confess, though, that I was kidding about the dogs. They still love the hydrants. Their color vision isn't as good as ours, so they aren't as offended by the color selections. Never hire a dog to redo the living room.

Eerie.

"Isn't it creepy, how his nose seems to follow you around the room?"

Pup art.

Was watching Antiques Roadshow again last night, and was irritated by this Karel Appel acrylic that was valued at up to $18,000.

It's from 1967, but I don't know what it was called. Piece of Crap would be my suggestion.

Looking at the Appel page on Wikipedia, I was surprised to see that the artist had done a sculpture at the Hague that I liked. Also, the fact that he his from the Nazis to avoid working in the munitions factory gets the thumbs-up from me, which I'm sure would make him happy. Apparently he set out to make childish works, but I can't say this plan is successful. Children don't set out to make childish works; they want to make art that looks like real things, but they only have childish skills. If my kid turned in something that looked like the above, the teacher would call in the school counselor. Or the nurse.

I decided that I could be a wealthy artist, since I'm lousy at art. But I realized that I could not achieve this kind of artistic genius because I would instinctively try to make my art good, not bad. Not that it would be good, but the fact that I was trying would show I was no genius. QED.

That's why my wife decided that the dog should be the artist in the family. He don't give a damn.

Here is one of Mr. Tralfaz's latest compositions:

Paw

All it needs to make it worth $18,000 is the right explanation.

Paw (water on asphalt; 2015) is one of Tralfaz's most ambitious creations. Here we see the artist making his mark, if you will, in a soulless world of cement and steel. The choice of materials is interesting---a watermark, which while ancient is not lasting, and brute paving, which while modern is hard to get rid of. Although Tralfaz has made a mark, it is obviously ephemeral in nature, posing the question: Has he really made anything at all? The irony of ancient but temporary vs. current but permanent is one of his running themes, a theme he has explored in other works such as Chewed Stick, P.P., and Poop in the Park.

Okay, great! Send me a check, art people. Thanks.

New and white.

The deck I painted looks a lot better now. Here it is after the first coat. Unfortunately, you can't see it in person because it reflects the sun so strongly you need your shades. 

The problem is that white structures are lovely and fresh and delightful when new, but nothing looks dingier and older and dirtier about, oh, two weeks later. 

Lincoln Center and the surrounding buildings are very nice at night, all lit up. During the day, a little dingy, old, and dirty.

Future home of the ballet version of Larry and the Mascots

People are aware of this when they buy cars---that if you buy a white car the dirt will show more than any other color. But not when they build massive cultural institutions (or, paint decks). It's all right if you're an ancient Greek or Roman and you're using marble. Then it's not dirt---it's patina.

Maybe I made a mistake with the deck. Maybe I should have stained it a dark brown. That never shows dirt.

Is it too late to make Lincoln Center brown?

Scraping by.

Nothing like scraping the paint off the deck to give a guy some humility. Unless you're an old hand and quite experienced, it's a job that is guaranteed to take longer and be more involved than you estimate it will. Why do we underestimate it so? Lots of discounting and eagerness. 

Discounting: The old paint is in such lousy condition it's virtually falling off on its own. I'll just go out there with my scraper and give it a little nudge, and in ten minutes, bare wood. 

Eagerness: It's gonna look so awesome when it's got that fresh paint on it---and painting isn't so hard! I love to paint!

The truth is, the old stuff will come off in patches, but other parts will stick on with the tenacity of a desperate, over-the-hill senator. Worse, though, are the areas that look like they're pretty well set until juuuust about the time you've finished the scraping... and then they want to come off and play.

Gah!

I hate paint removal. Oh, sure, you feel like a million bucks for five seconds when you peel off a big piece of the old flesh; it's like whipping off the shirt before you jump in the pool. Whooooee! But then you're back to scrape... scrape... are you coming off or can I paint over you? I can pain--- Okay, okay, scraping... scrape... scrape...

Made the mistake of going after it with the scraper first and the power washer last. The power washer is not that strong. Mine is a plug-in type, not gas-powered, which makes it more of a power-assist washer. But it's great, because you still feel like a Ghostbuster when you wield that big gun and fire a stream at the enemy.

I ain't afraid of no paint.

I figured I would loosen some more old stain, but I loosened a frigging whale of a lot more old stain. It flew everywhere, leaving little poison potato chips on the lawn for the dog.

But not all of it came off. Aaaaand you know what that means.

Scrape... scrape... scrape...