Tuesday, 10/31

It may sound like the grossest thing in the world, but trust me—it was amazing.

First of all, Happy Halloween. Today's blog, despite the fact that I mentioned something gross, has nothing to do with the holiday. But I hope you enjoy the day nonetheless. And seeing as how it's kinda cold out, at least here in Marquette, you may celebrate your Halloween with some nice, warm soup, right?

That's what we're discussing today. Soup.

This past Saturday Loraine and I went out to Republic for our annual soup feast. Loraine's been adopted into an extended family out on the West End; every year around this time we head out there, show the pictures from our latest trip, and eat a lot of soup. Wanda, our hostess, always goes out of her way to make three different kinds of soups, and in the 7 or 8 years we've been doing it I don't think she's come up with a bad one. This year, she wanted to go out on a limb and try something a little different. She wasn't sure if it would work, but she saw a recipe and just had to try it.

And that's how I came to try Dill Pickle Soup.

I know, right? Soup made out of dill pickles is not the first kind of “oh, yum!” soup that pops into your mind. In fact, just about every single person at the soup feast went, “huh?” when first told about it. But just about every single person also went back for seconds (or thirds) after trying it. It's that good. I never thought that the combination of shredded dill pickles, chicken, potatoes, cream, and spices would work as a soup, but it does. It wasn't overly pickle-flavored, but it had enough pickle-ness to it to really make it stand out.

And stood out it did, even moreso than the Cheeseburger and Greek Chicken soups that Wanda also made. Both of those were amazing, and I had multiple bowls of both. But Cheeseburger and Greek Chicken are flavors you'd expect in soups. Dill Pickle certainly isn't.

But it rocks.

(jim@wmqt.com)

(p.s.--Wanda did give me the recipe; shoot me a note if you have the courage!)

Monday, 10/30

MONDAY, 10/30:

Wow. That's all I have to say about that.

Yesterday Loraine and I took advantage of a few relatively nice hours of weather to walk down to Shiras Park and check out some of the damage caused by Tuesday's cyclone. At first, walking down the bike path, things didn't seem so bad; a tree knocked over here and there, and a few branches blown around. But then we got to the park itself, and saw what happened when the ferocious power of Lake Superior was unleashed on that tiny peninsula--

As you can see, the parking lot is in shambles, and in many areas the beach was literally washed away. In fact, how often do you get to see a tree growing out off a beach?

That, of course, is only because the tree actually used to be up away from the shore. Now the shore has moved past the tree line. As an example, here's a picture Loraine took of me three years ago sitting on a bench--

Notice the nice sand beach in front of me? Well, look at the same area now, from a different angle--

No beach exists, nor does all the ground in front of the bench. You have water, and then a bunch off rocks washed up on shore. No beach, no sand, no nothing. In fact, the bench is lucky it's even there any more, as it came within a few inches of being washed away--

The park wasn't the only thing damaged by the storm. Lakeshore Boulevard is closed to vehicular traffic because, well, it's no longer a paved road--

A paved street probably still does exist underneath all that beach sand, washed up & over the tree line by the wave action Tuesday. It'll just take a while for it to all get cleaned up.

If you've ever wondered who would win in a battle between man-made objects and Lake Superior, wonder no more. In fact, it wouldn't even be close.

(jim@wmqt.com)

Friday, 10/27

It's going well, thanks for asking.

I've had a couple of people recently inquire about how the new season of “High School Bowl” is going, and I'm happy to say that the 40^th year of the show is, for the most part, cruising along at warp speed. The students have been a blast, the technical issues minor, and the host has only made a fool of himself on an occasional basis.

That's a good thing.

The one strange thing about the season so far is that we've been shooting it in chunks here and there. Because of a wicked number of scheduling problems we've been shooting part of one show one week and the other part of it a few days (or even weeks) later. For instance, in a few minutes I'll be heading out to shoot the first half of the season's third show. We shot the second half of the show three weeks ago. Yet (hopefully) thanks to the magic of TV you won't notice it when it airs. However, if you're wondering why my hair appears to be three weeks longer in the first half of the show than in the second (shot the day after I got a haircut), you now know our little secret.

Just don't tell anyone.

The other fun aspect of that would be the chart on my wall, the chart telling me what clothing I have to wear on what day. Because I have to be seen wearing the same clothes in both halves of the same show I had to come up with a handy reminder of what I need to wear when in order to make the programs line up. It's funny; I never thought my life would include a wardrobe chart like that, but it just goes to show you--

Life can be strange some times.

And with that, I hate to cut this short, but I do hafta head out in a few to shoot that first half of the show. I have on the black shirt with the purple tie, so I'm all set to go in that regard. As for the hair that's three weeks longer; well, there's nothing I can do about that. But it'll be interesting to see if anyone's actually paying attention enough to notice.

At least those of you who aren't in on the little secret.

Have a great weekend. Stay warm Stay dry. And remember—the new season of the show starts a week from tomorrow!

(jim@wmqt.com)

Thursday, 10/26

I hafta wonder—are the flowers even around after Tuesday's storm?

As you've probably figured out by now, Marquette has had some weird and wacky weather the past few days. And it wasn't just Hurricane Toivo Tuesday or the snow that fell outside the city Wednesday. Nope, the weird weather actually began Saturday when we had a late October day that was sunny and 75 degrees. It's hard to believe we went from sunny & 75 to snow in a space of a few days, but that's the U.P. for you. Anyway, one of the things I noticed while out playing in the sun Saturday was that the warm fall we've had (or at least up until Tuesday) had allowed all kinds of late blooming plants to bloom. In fact, Marquette has become a cornucopia of colors over the past few weeks, and while I don't know if any (or all) of them survived the past few days, I was able to preserve some of that color thanks to my never-ending quest to take every single picture I can ever take.

Just what kind of colors could you have seen if you were out this past Saturday? Well, you could've seen lots of purple--

Lots of orange--

Lots of pink & yellow--

Lots of red & yellow--

Lots of magenta (with a splash of yellow)--

And lots of...well, I'm not quite sure how you'd describe this color (salmon, maybe?), but you could see lots of it everywhere--

You could also see that the city was getting ready for Halloween--

As were people all around town--

In fact, I'm thinking some people were even trying to get into game shape for their Halloween party--

After all, you don't just wanna jump into a Halloween party without warming up, right?  You wanna stretch. You wanna warm up. You wanna make sure you don't pull anything and you're ready to go as you're getting ready to kill several thousand brain cells.

I'm still trying to figure out why the jar of pickles is there, though.

All that was just a few days ago in the warm sun. Now, if you'll excuse me, I hafta go running, in below freezing temperatures for the first time since (I think) the beginning of March. Wish me luck!

(jim@wmqt.com)

Wednesday, 10/25

That was fun. Let's not do it again any time soon.

Hurricane Toivo, as some people have dubbed yesterday's monster wind storm, is in the slow and agonizing process of dying down, leaving damage everywhere, hundreds of people across the U.P. still without power, and two people still missing after apparently being swept off of Black Rocks. You didn't have to go far to see its effects; in fact, I took this picture down the street from where I live--

It's not often you see a tree leaning on a house like a partying college student after six too many drinks, but we had that chance yesterday.

Of course, you had people ignoring warnings and the advice of police to gawk at everything that was going on. In fact, all along Lakeshore Boulevard in Marquette traffic crawled to a standstill not only because of hundreds of people were driving around looking at the waves, but because those very waves were washing over the street and stopping those very vehicles. Police finally had to close the whole street just so crews could try to get the water off the road.

It was so bad that places like Shiras Park (by Picnic Rocks) was underwater.. Not that that stopped people from going out there to take pictures, but the whole park was under water.

Yikes!

The other immediate side-effect of yesterday's cornucopia of yuck?  It seems as if every single leaf still on a tree was blown off. Just about every tree in Marquette now looks very skeleton like, perhaps appropriate for Halloween next week but still a jolt to the system of those of us naively clinging to the hope that winter may bypass us this year.

Once again, yikes.

Hopefully, things will be calmer today. Hopefully, the flooded parks will drain, those without power can turn on their lights, and someone figures out a way to put nice green leaves on those trees stripped bare yesterday. 

Well, to paraphrase a great American philosopher, two out of three wouldn't be bad.

(jim@wmqt.com)

Tuesday, 10/24

Why yes, I knew about that U.P. tie in to another pop culture classic, too. But I'm embarrassed to mention I just found out about it a year or so ago.

Yesterday I mentioned about how you can tie “It's the Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” and Marquette together via a road sign Snoopy comes across. Well, that prompted an e-mail from daily blog reader Donna in Marquette, who also wondered if I knew about the tie-in between the U.P. and the Beatles' movie “A Hard Day's Night”. Why yes, Donna, I do. But like I said, it took an embarrassingly long time for me to discover it.

First of all, let me say that I LOVE the movie “A Hard Day's Night”. I first saw it in the 80s during its big screen revival, and I've watched the DVD dozens of times since. The music's great, the performances are cheeky (and amazingly funny), and I'm still of the opinion that movie videos (and by extension MTV) would not have existed without the way that Richard Lester directed the flick.

It was the template for everything that came after it.

Anyway, back to the connection between the movie and the U.P. In the film, Ringo is a bit picked upon by the other members of the group, especially because he's always wanting to do thing like (gasp) read a book. Now what I didn't know is that Ringo was always trying to read a specific book, a book that escaped my attention the dozens of times I had watched the movie and knew nothing about until a Facebook thing about it made the rounds a year or so ago.

And just what book was Ringo trying to read?

Yup; Ringo, picked upon in the movie for trying to read a book, was trying to read “Anatomy of a Murder”, written by Ishpeming's John Voelker.

I can't believe I didn't know that; after finding out about it I felt tempted to go stand in a corner and feel shame for a few minutes. But as soon as I found out I whipped out the DVD, threw it in, fast-forwarded to the exact scene (because, at least I knew where THAT was) and stood there with my jaw agape as you could see Ringo, indeed, trying to read “Anatomy”. I have no idea how I missed it the first several dozen times I saw the movie, but I did. And all it took was hundreds (if not thousands) of people pointing it out on Facebook.

See? Social media DOES have something to recommend it, I guess.

So in case you didn't know, there's the story of how a second pop culture classic can be connected to Marquette County. Small world, isn't it?

(jim@wmqt.com)

Monday, 10/23

I know I've written about this before, but this time I have pictures!

It is, after all, that time of the year when many of us will pull out a certain dvd for the annual viewing of a holiday classic. So would you like to know how Marquette is connected, in the strangest way, to “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown”?

Yes, you read that right.  Keep reading on.

I love “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” (which is 51 years old this year!), and can recite most of the lines before the characters say them (much, I’m sure, to the amusement of Loraine, who somehow finds the inner strength to sit next to me when I watch it and recite said lines).  However, in the past couple of years we've come to realize that Marquette is indeed connected not only to the cartoon, but to the comic strip, as well.

If you watch the show closely you may remember the scene in the cartoon where Snoopy is a World War I flying ace, and is trying to sneak across France to make it out of enemy territory after being shot down. Well, while doing so, he comes across several road signs, one of which says “Pont-a-Mousson 3km”. Here's almost the same thing, taken from a “Peanuts” comic strip--

Now, if you remember our travels from this year, we actually stopped in Pont-a-Mousson because a certain French missionary and explorer received his education there. Which French missionary and explorer was that, you ask?

That’s right—in both the TV show and the comic strip Snoopy was less than 2 miles away from where Father Jacques Marquette went to school!

Loraine and I discovered this fact about a decade or so ago, and now every time we watch “It's The Great Pumpkin Charlie Brown” we always have to freeze the scene and laugh a little. After all, it's not every day you can make a connection (however tenuous) between the U.P. and one of the most famous and beloved cartoons in history. So when you watch the cartoon this year, by yourself or with your kids, watch for the sign, and realize that you, too, can stop and shake your head in amazement.

After all, Marquette and “It’s The Great Pumpkin, Charlie Brown” have something very important in common!

(jim@wmqt.com)