HOCKEY THE WAY IT USED TO BE.

Milwaukee Admirals beat [Iowa] Wild, coldest game in AHL history.  "The teams played outdoors at the United Heroes League in Hastings, Minnesota as part of Hockey Day Minnesota."  The Wild scored the first two goals, the Admirals the next three, with everybody getting ninety seconds of extra outdoor time.

Years ago, my dad scored some points with his future father-in-law watching my mom's brother play in an outdoor game in Green Bay.  Might be that after December 1944 in Belgium, a chilly night properly bundled up and fed to watch hockey held no terrors.

WOKE RUINS EVERYTHING.

A Canadian musicologist, James Deaville, linked to by The College Fix, offers an essay (in something called The Conversation, I don't know if that qualifies as a Minimal Publishable Unit) describing It's A Wonderful Life as "A Christmas classic that reflects bigoted ideas about ‘proper’ music in the 1940s."  He could have stuck to the musicology, perhaps coming to grips with director Frank Capra and the soundtrack composer never collaborating again.  Instead, he has to inject contemporary sensibilities that might have not been relevant immediately after the War.

The movie’s soundtrack — including contributions by Hollywood composer Dimitri Tiomkin — plays a central role in It’s a Wonderful Life, underscoring problems and tensions beneath the surface. Some depictions of music and sound beg analysis around how these reflect racist ideas about “proper” musical, social and community norms.

Perhaps those depictions "begged" analysis in the sense that nobody would have perceived any cause to offer any, or perhaps the phrase the professor seeks is "provoke analysis," or "prompt me to inject my sensibilities," because that's what a lot of people who claim to be intellectual do these days.

MARKING OFF.

It has long been my custom to post a Festive Season video, featuring vintage, or sometimes modern-retro, tinplate trains under the tree.

As was the case last year, this video features only the vintage trains in the sun room, running in a moderate tempo.  Feel free to enjoy them with a glass of hot tea, properly provided with a podstakannik, or a glass of mulled wine or perhaps egg-nog enlivened with a splash of bourbon or rum.

Rest assured, there are videos in preparation showing the scale model railroad rolling stock going through their paces, as well as showing tinplate trains chasing their tails at high speed the way children of all ages flock to see.

As was the case a year ago, I'm taking time away for a few football games, for a long winter's nap, for some tidying up around the house, and for some serious work down cellar.

Thank you for looking in.  Enjoy the Festive Season.  Posting will resume next year, some time after Three Kings.

SILVER BELLS ABOVE THE BUSTLE.

Pajamas Media's Tim O'Brien correctly suggests, "Christmas was never Christmas without Downtown."

Well, yes.

Yes, with the kids making their list and checking it twice.  "Some of that was still in place in the last days of The America That Worked^(TM), it being a family ritual, come early December, for everyone to scrub up, spiff up, and head Downtown to do the Christmas shopping, and enjoy a meal at the Boston Store restaurant."  Mom, Dad, grandparents, siblings, schoolteacher, school gift exchange, check, check, check.

My boyhood Christmas shopping was in downtown Milwaukee, after the streetcars. Mr O'Brien's Pittsburgh still had its Pennsylvania-gauge PCCs.

Pittsburgh never had actual street vendors, but Downtown was filled with these small, warm places that would kick their doors open and even crack the windows to let some of that wintery cool air in, and the beautiful smells of a griddle and a coffeemaker out. Add to that, ubiquitous cigarette and cigar smoke, and the ever-present overcast, courtesy of the town’s steel mills, and you had air that refused to be a bit player in the Downtown experience. All was not sugarplums and lollipops, but it didn’t get any more real.

Red Christmas bells lit up every pole along every street in Downtown. Everyone was going somewhere in a hurry, and they were happy. You could feel it. My mom was happy, I was happy, my brother was happy.

Where your bus stop or streetcar stop was determined whether you were a Gimbel’s family, a Joseph Horne’s family, or a Kaufmann’s family. The department stores were the anchors of Downtown retail and were located in such a way that those of us from the east side of town got off the streetcar closest to Gimbel’s.

The toys were on the 11th floor, and the way to get there was on a narrow (even for a kid), rickety wooden escalator. Once you got to the 10th floor and stood at the base of the escalator to the 11th floor, you could look up to the top and see an overhead miniature train track. If the train was operating, that meant Santa Claus was in the house. If not, he wasn’t. That’s how the store communicated.

I was conditioned. Just like Ralphie and his little brother in the film A Christmas Story. The Downtown department store Santa was the only Santa. At no other time in my Christmas season did I ever cross paths with the man in the red suit. Only in Gimbel’s, so for me, that was like a visit to the North Pole.

Milwaukee's Gimbel's had the same sort of narrower, wooden-step escalators on the upper two or three floors, including to the toy department on the top floor.  No overhead miniature train.  There was a kid-sized monorail orbiting above the Boston Store toy department.

III. ADVENT.

The late Charlie Kirk's last book offered advice on opting out of the rat race.

It was the culmination of a period that began in 2021, when Charlie, on the advice of Dennis Prager, first began observing the Sabbath, turning off his phone for a period of time every week. Initially, he managed only an hour. But as he discovered that it unlocked a completely elevated version of himself, he began to expand the time, until he was offline from sundown Friday to mid-morning Saturday—and later, until as late as Sunday morning. My phone would be on in case of an emergency, but people knew not to contact me unless there was a catastrophe that couldn’t wait for 24 hours.

During that time, we would rest. I’d let him sleep in on the weekends. The babies and I would go out for a walk in the morning, and I’d have coffee ready for him when he woke. The television stayed off, except for a football game here and there. Mostly, we spent the day praying, going for hikes, sitting in the sun, journaling, detaching from the noise.

Some people have words they use to get them into a specific mind-set. For Charlie, that was Shabbat Shalom. Even at the beginning, even when it was for just an hour, he would begin the Sabbath with that phrase. He was verbalizing something vital: I am committing to a definitive moment in time. Shabbat Shalom. And with that, his weekly mental health vacation would begin.

Yes, that's of a piece with not checking electronic mail in the morning or understanding the distinction between what is important and what somebody else thinks is urgent.  The validity, or not, of "getting and spending we lay waste our powers" has long mattered in the ordinary business of life.

What ever happened to Mark Twain's hobbyist carriage drivers? To refresh your memory: offer them wages and they would give up the hobby. Tom Sawyer.

Next comes Daniel Hamermesh, formerly of Michigan State, now with Texas and Royal Holloway, with a properly Hamermeshian formulation. “It’s unfair if highly paid workaholics force their hours on others.” Yes, that's the traditional problem with free competition, perhaps the workaholics obtain their high pay by outworking everyone else. "By imposing their own long hours on others, highly paid people can end up forcing their subordinates to work harder than is fair. Perhaps this is a good argument for higher tax rates on very high earners – a sin tax to discourage them from working excessively long hours."

The weekly sabbatical (yes, the Hebrew for "seven" and "sabbath" share a common root) might help damp down the workplace stress that all that secular advice attempts to moderate.

Charlie wanted to heal the country, and he saw his conversations with students on campus as a piece of the puzzle. But when he was on campus, if someone was screaming at him, he knew they weren’t actually listening. When you’re constantly combative and fighting, you have no time to treat other people like human beings. Charlie genuinely felt that if the world had a weekly day of rest, just one, it would be the ultimate game changer.

The call to action here is very important. People will say, “Okay, this sounds great in theory, but how do I do it?” The answer is, it will look different for everyone. Charlie didn’t observe the Sabbath perfectly. There were times when he was traveling and he couldn’t do a traditional Friday to Sunday morning. So he’d have to adjust. But the Sabbath is the one commandment that if you choose not to do it, you are the one who’s missing out on the blessing. Not God. Even if you don’t believe in God, you still have to rest.

Put another way, it is more important to make the effort to be good to yourself, even if you sometimes fall short.  You do not have to feel guilty about disconnecting from the hubbub.  You have time: time management is work.  Outworking everyone else is hazardous to your health.  That breathing spell you're hoping for isn't going to happen.  Per corollary, it's easy enough to think you have to be on all weekend.  Those sports your kids are playing in?  Enjoy their efforts, put the electronic shackles away.

Yes, the Kirks couch their essay in sacred terms.

One day, your children will tell their children how you lived. What will they say? That you were always busy, always stressed, always distracted? Or will they say, “My father knew how to stop. My mother knew how to delight. They made time for joy. They protected space for God.”

Better that than "As I hung up the 'phone it occurred to me, my boy was just like me."

YES, WE ARE A CREEDAL NATION.

That has long been the Cold Spring Shops position.  "Give these kids an America to buy into, and an America that buys into these kids, and we'll be OK."  Pajamas Media contributor Jamie K. Wilson would like to restrict that a bit.  "An American is a person who belongs to the historic political, cultural, and moral community formed by the United States — a community joined not by ancestry alone but by entering, adopting, and upholding its constitutional order, its laws, its common language, its civic story, and its ethic of self-rule, ordered liberty, and mutual responsibility."  I suppose my youth in Milwaukee where one could still find storefronts and sometimes libraries labelled in German, Polish, and Spanish makes me less inclined to be restrictive about language, and I've tended to view cultural and moral communities as emergent and evolving: do we still want to observe Sundays in the way of the Puritan rather than of the German?

STRONG THE ENTITLEMENT IS IN THIS ONE.

Hot Air's David Strom sees "Women's Health: Being Single Makes You Happy!," has doubts.

The current cultural elite narrative that being single and childless is great is contradicted by every credible study ever done.

Single women, it has consistently been found, are about half as likely to report being "very happy" as married women.

Not that you would know this if you read Women's Health Magazine. In fact, being single gives women "joy," so quit dating and enjoy your freedom, gals!

And yes, the article does open with a good-news-is-bad-news-is-wrong vibe.

Single women, by and large, are actually quite happy, quite fulfilled, and quite content, thankyouverymuch. And as their numbers continue to grow, their experiences and wisdom could help shape the way we all approach our mental and emotional well-being. We just have to listen, as the whispers grow to a roar.

Read on, dear reader, and ask whether the article's author, and perhaps a few of the authorities the author consults, are due for a privilege check.

“It’s more doable to be single,” says Bella DePaulo, PhD, a social scientist and the author of Single at Heart. “If you don’t want to cook, there’s takeout. If you don’t want to do your laundry, there’s laundry service. If you don’t want to do repairs in your house, you can go online and find people.”

Our interconnected world also means we don’t need to rely on a live-in partner for socializing or emotional support. “Communication technologies have made it much more fulfilling to be single,” DePaulo says. “If you’re single and you live alone, you’re not isolated. You are one text message, email, chat room away from the rest of the world.”

While stigmas still persist around singlehood—especially for women—DePaulo also notes that the increase in unmarried people may be self-perpetuating.

The effect of all those creature comforts on income and wealth inequality are left as an exercise.  When the television is on at headquarters, there's a good chance that a few of the advertisements are for those sorts of service: it's also possible to hire in a cleaning service or to have the dog food delivered as well as to interact selectively with people online rather than take pot luck at the bar, coffee house, or library.  And Professor DePaulo has long been a critic of the marriage-industrial complex.

CONSERVING ANCIENT CLOCKS.

A few years ago, Cold Spring Shops added a toy clock to the study.  We've subsequently learned more about the song it plays.  Tradition has composer Henry Clay Work being inspired by the story of a broken floor clock in a North Country inn.  There might be a second element to the song, though, in the Work family house in Massachusetts.

That very clock sat in Dan Parker’s grandfather’s home in Massachusetts when Parker, now retired and living at the Holly Creek retirement community in Centennial, was growing up.

“The first time I was aware of it I was about 5 years old or so,” Parker said. “We lived on the second floor of the farmhouse and my grandparents were on — the clock lived on the first floor. I'd hear it strike and that didn't bother me any. But then the first time I saw it I was about, oh, I don't know, but maybe 36, 40 inches tall … I had to just about bend back over to see the top.”

The song was written in 1876 by a well-known composer named Henry Clay Work, who was married to Parker’s second-great aunt. Counting back from then and noting the song’s lyric “it stood 90 years on the floor,” Parker figures the clock was built sometime in the early 1790s.

That Mr Work might have borrowed details from the history of his clock is how art proceeds, but, clearly, if Dan Parker is hearing it chiming during this century, that clock could not have stopped. short. never to go again.

A SCHISM WORTH HAVING.

I've cracked wise about how those present in New England ("New England town clusters (East Millpond, Millpond Centre, Millpond Hall, Millpond Heights) represent an irreconcilable breakdown of consensus among relatively like-minded people") and sometimes congregations fret over the hymnal.

Then there was the creation of the American Baptist Assembly.

Jennifer Cromack was combing through the American Baptist archive when she uncovered a slim box among some 18th and 19th century journals. Opening it, she found a scroll in pristine condition.

A closer look revealed the 5-foot-long document was a handwritten declaration titled “A Resolution and Protest Against Slavery," signed by 116 New England ministers in Boston and adopted March 2, 1847. Until its discovery in May at the archives in Groton, American Baptist officials worried the anti-slavery document had been lost forever after fruitless searches at Harvard and Brown universities and other locations. A copy was last seen in a 1902 history book.

“I was just amazed and excited,” Cromack, a retired teacher who volunteers at the archive, said. “We made a find that really says something to the people of the state and the people in the country. ... It speaks of their commitment to keeping people safe and out of situations that they should not be in."

The document offers a glimpse into an emerging debate over slavery in the 18th century in the Northeast. The document was signed 14 years before the start of the Civil War as a growing number of religious leaders were starting to speak out against slavery.

It is only fitting and proper that such a document remain in a local church office rather than an Ivy League university.  Boston's First Baptist  affiliate with the American Baptist Churches maintaining an office in Valley Forge.  I wonder if there's a copy of that scroll in the archives there.

THE POISONOUS CONSCIOUSNESS REVOLUTION.

Smug culture studies type Peter H. Schwartz comes up with a perfect metaphor for that sort of cosmopolitan thinking.  "Anyone looking to drench themselves in the 1950s nostalgia currently favored by the religious right in America should consider watching 'Leave It to Beaver' stoned."  What was I telling you, dear reader, ten years ago, about the Trump phenomenon?  "That generalization is more likely true of the bicoastal upper-middle class types in their enclaves of smug, where residents enjoy the privileges of sneering at and sticking rhetorical fingers in the eyes of people who don't qualify as the gentry's mascots."

NOBLE FRAGMENTS.

Too often for my liking, the land under an amusement park is more valuable subdivided for townhouses or condominium complexes or maybe a big box store.

Cold Spring Shops has not documented a related phenomenon, the parting out of vintage hand-carved carroussels, as a well-rendered horse is easier to put on display near the suit of armor or grandfather's clock than the entire ride, unless you have lots of real estate and a penchant for preservation.  Thus the individual carvings are worth more sold separately than the intact ride would be.

WASTE NOT, WANT NOT.

Second-hand Rose, second-hand clothes.

One of the themes explored in “Dress Codes” will be re-wearing, and how the Royal family have been interested in passing down and repairing their clothing through generations – since well before the current Princess of Wales, Princess Royal and the King became heralded as sustainability role models thanks to their modern-day approaches.

A pair of Liberty print dresses that belonged to a young Princess Elizabeth and Princess Margaret are a particularly special example, says Matthew Storey, a curator at Historic Royal Palaces.

Royals or not, they were Depression babies, and "use it up" is good advice, in New England or Olde England.

“The dresses are in a Liberty print which dates from 1936, we’ve traced it in their archive,” he explains. “They are in this classic, quality British fabric and when you look at the bigger dress in particular you can see all of the evidence of the history of this object and the way it was worn by Queen Elizabeth II when she was a child.”

The larger of the two dresses shows signs firstly of being tailored to accommodate a growing Princess Elizabeth.

“You can see how it was let out,” Storey notes, “and it probably originally had quite a large hem allowance at the bottom from which they’ve taken fabric, and then added that at the waist to make the bodice a bit longer. They’ve also taken panels and added them at the side of the bodice as well to make it larger. When you look at the making up close, it looks as if it was all done by hand at home – these are skills that would have existed in the Royal household.”

There is also a suggestion that the dress has then been adjusted further, in order to likely become a “hand me down” for Princess Margaret, who was four years younger than her sister. While the princesses will have initially matched in their co-ordinated frocks, the larger of the two is evidently more faded, says Storey, implying that it was washed and worn many more times overall.

Use it up, wear it out, make it do, or do without is sound advice no matter what your station.  Mr Storey concludes, “We can’t tell for sure [there are no photographs in the public domain to firm up the evidence], but it makes sense, as that’s what many aristocratic families would have done at the time. The bigger dress is clearly more faded, and has also got a couple of little stains on it, which we would never remove, because it’s evidence of wear.”  Well, yes, treating garments as disposable when the subjects are mending and mending can irritate the subjects, with pitchforks and torches to follow.

CARRY-OUT PIZZA UPSTAGES CURATED CATERED MEAL.

Dear reader, if you remember this, what comes after the quotation will be self-evident.  "Hell is either being trapped in a monologue given by a vegan, or by an egalitarian outraged that some people spend five thousand bucks on an ugly coat."

REDISCOVERING THE TOYS OF OUR YOUTH?

American Science and Surplus never cease to delight.  Now on offer, a Mini Building Blocks offering of a Saturn V rocket.

The company's offerings provide kits of parts that assemble a specific model of something, in the case of the moon shot, complete with simulated flames from the engines.  This has become more of a thing in the past fifty years, with custom Lego blocks making all sorts of replicas possible.

WHAT'S IN A NAME?

Shaniqua McClendon wants her good name back.

By the time I reached college, there was no longer any ambiguity about how people felt about my name. I was often told I seemed more like an “Ashley,” or “nothing like a Shaniqua.” During my run for president of the Black Student Movement, students left disparaging comments about me. The one that cut deepest was, “And of course her name is Shaniqua.”

It's an instructive column, with an amusing conclusion.  "Prejudice does not end where it’s convenient for you, and one day a name as common as Susan could be subject to this same bigotry."

Karen would like a word.

IT'S OKTOBERFEST SEASON.

Last Saturday, despite the college football disaster in Madison, the Oktoberfest at Bavarian Bierhaus in Glendale was well-attended, with the traffic controllers directing automobiles to the overflow parking.  Yes, I've been there before.  I've also cracked wise about Polonia and Bavaria not re-litigating the Polish Corridor on the soccer pitch.  And so it went.  Nebraska football jerseys are unusual, welcome all the same.

There are even challenges for youngsters, of whom there are many, sometimes on the dance floor, sometimes playing Jenga.

I wonder if any of those culture-studies types from Marquette were in attendance.

There are two or three more weekends in Oktoberfest season.  Find yourself an Oktoberfest and go to it.

IT'S ANOTHER PLEASANT VALLEY SUNDAY.

Here in Status Symbol Land, and everywhere else, it's a good bet that anybody you see cutting the grass is a guy.  Once upon a time, there might have been a Dave Barry column about those domestic labor studies that made an issue of who washed the dishes or changed the baby, but those surveys left out the painting and the yard care and cleaning the gutters.  Oh, and it would do the guys no good to stew about it.  "If another person is not saying anything, and you're wondering if this might be because something is bothering that person, and you ask that person what that person is thinking, and that person says, 'Nothing,' do you accept this perfectly reasonable answer, or do you proceed to nag the person half to death?"

THE CASE FOR SUBURBAN LIVING.

Two apparently unrelated essays from the left wing make it.  We start with Stan Cox, part of the Common Dreams stable of provocateurs who provoke laughter, now pronouncing anathema on air conditioning.  (Never mind that all the weather broadcasters encourage people to seek shelter there as the temperatures do their summer thing.)  Mr Cox grants leave to do so, although not without the scolding.

I’ve always made it a point to emphasize the life-saving role that air-conditioning plays during severe heatwaves, stressing that what I want to see eliminated is the routine overcooling that occurs at other times. Consider the widespread American practice of keeping windows closed year-round and simply switching the thermostat from “heat” to “cool” in the spring and back to “heat” in the fall. That not only wastes energy and increases emissions, but also squanders opportunities to enjoy comfortably warm stretches of summertime and comfortably cool stretches of winter that commonly occur in much of the country. Sadly, though, if those grim climate forecasts prove correct (and unless global emissions are reduced dramatically and fast, there’s no doubt they will be), such temperate summer interludes will become rarer and shorter in the years ahead, and Americans will become even more dependent on indoor cooling.

I’m not going to stop defending open windows or critiquing air-conditioning just because the world’s getting hotter, but I’ll need to stress more than ever that the harms aggravated by air-conditioning extend well beyond global warming.

It being Common Dreams, those "harms" include a place of your own with an ample yard for the kiddos to play on.

I’ve often argued that air-conditioning’s role in molding America’s built environment and society in general is underappreciated. An exception was a 1999 survey in which members of the Society for American City and Regional Planning History were asked to rank “the top 10 influences on the American metropolis of the past 50 years.” Air-conditioning made the list at number nine. More importantly, through its key role in the massive post-World War II population movement from Rustbelt to Sunbelt, air-conditioning helped drive six more of those top-ten influences: the de-industrialization of northern cities; Sunbelt-style urban sprawl; enclosed shopping malls; downtown redevelopment; the Levittown-style suburban tract house (which, without air-conditioning, could have functioned only as what Fortune magazine characterized in 1953 as a “TV-equipped hotbox”); and the dominance of the automobile. (Imagine hundreds of thousands of sweat-soaked commuters stuck, windows down, under the August sun, in one of Atlanta’s or Dallas’ legendary traffic jams.)

That's in the usual line of Social Criticism from the collectivist types, right back to the first tract houses for returning G.I.s.  Perhaps the planned use development is an evolutionary dead end.

FRIDAY short TAKES.

The prologue this week isn't exactly short, is it?  So it sometimes goes.

If something isn't working, stop doing it.  "The international community is an elite, a clique, even something like a religious sect."  Falsity defines our politics.  By their fruits?  "We are using unqualified midwits and lackwits from the bowels of the Democratic foreign policy intelligentsia instead of legitimately smart people."  Elite anxiety is the root of modernism at its worst.

Speaking of unqualified midwits.  "Biden has had, by most standard measures, a pretty successful presidency. But he’s being blamed for high inflation, the U.S. troops withdrawal from Afghanistan and the Israel-Hamas war in Gaza."  What does that success look like?  "Big government is likely to achieve big progress, that incentives are of second-order importance, that the title of a bill need not reflect its contents, and that profits are glorified theft by private business from workers and consumers."  Thus does the decline continue.  Losers in life never accept personal responsibility. Why accept, when you can deflect?  "Better leaders would take responsibility for their errors in addition to asking that others be held accountable for theirs. Unfortunately, we've only got the conveniently selective memories of Trump and Biden."  We're noticing.  "Nowadays the only truly unbelievable conspiracy theory is the one that assures us the people who are running things are honest, and know what they’re doing. "

A self-reinforcing feedback loop deepens.  "One of the strange paradoxes of academia today is that the fierce competition for academic jobs and pressure for university departments to climb up the coveted U.S. News rankings actually stifles innovation and risk-taking within many disciplines."  That hive mind infects other Influential People.  "From the takeover of cities by activists to the unquestioned origins of COVID-19 to the normalization of men competing as women in women's sports, we all sat back and watched once-vaunted pillars of journalism in our country, such as the Times, The Washington Post, NBC and CBS repeatedly telling us there was nothing to see there."  It's not working out well.  "Nost of the recent efforts to undermine constitutional norms, hallowed traditions and customs, and the normal symmetrical application of the law have originated with bicoastal political, media, and academic elites."  Garbage elites, that is.  "While Biden and De Niro keep making this election about Jan. 6 and democracy, voters seem much more concerned about other things, such as affording food and housing for their families."

You can't save democracy by destroying it first.  How many people is Mitch "Shot in the Dark" Berg speaking for?  "Congrats, Dems. You did it. You dragged me, kicking and screaming, into supporting Trump.  Let’s make America a constitutional republic with the rule of laws, not men, again."

I want better choices.  "After four dour years of continual crises abroad and inflation at home, does sunshine now remind voters of Trump?"  Should it?  "Many libertarians support the Libertarian Party precisely because they do not trust ether Biden or Trump to avoid destroying the country; in fact, some of the most anti-libertarian policies have advanced under both Republican and Democratic administrations, from runaway federal spending to government surveillance to public health tyranny."

The weekly round-up of pithy elaborations on traditional Cold Spring Shops themes follows.

EVOLUTIONARY STABILITY IS REAL.

From time to time, Cold Spring Shops calls attention to the effects of the sexual revolution and hook-up culture on human unhappiness.  Two observations from a 2011 post structure that argument.  First, "contemporary mating practices and admissions policies might not be evolutionarily stable."  Second, "younger people have different time horizons, and different rates of time preferences."  Those observations tended to rely on opinion columns.  The mini-dissertation below the jump will engage recent Serious Scholarship on those themes.