Four Sticks

I didn't realize that yesterday's post was 1,111. So I'll rectify that. Look at the photo of Eliot Ness, which comes from a Max Collins novel. Eliot Ness in 1934. Look at his goddamn watch. Son of a bitch.

Four Sticks Can Be Expected in 2011, Even Five

 

I took photos of our blizzard earlier, and will have more in the morning. Its 1:15 AM and we are at about 16 inches, but the wind gusts are incredible, close to 50 MPH. I'll describe more in the next post, when I have photos to go with it. For now, a bus transfer, the kind that slides into a slot that then spits it back out, and a gallon of milk I purchased on the 2nd of January. I had no intention at all of scouting anywhere for the exact date shown. Oh, and the Tropicana mango juice is fantastic. Buy some.

Girl By The Orange Sculpture & The 11:11 Bus

...also two shots of the Dan Ryan as I waited for the 87th Street bus. I saw the girl as I was getting the train at Fullerton, and the bus home was much later than usual. Usually, I come so so so close, the bus pulls in by Long John Silver's/A&W right on time, 11:07, every Monday night. This time, I was able to catch the dreaded 11:11 and we were only at the Damen/Beverly stop. Yay me. Turned out the bus was delayed because there was a shooting on Cottage Grove and squads had backed up traffic. The city after dark.

Been awhile since I posted on 1111, right?

Well, Sid sends me a link to Jon Stewart running that Ferengi-looking guy from Texas, Gohmert, and, well, you can see the C-Span time stamp. I'm posting photos to a shared Chicago account on Flickr, 2 shots a day. Well, damn. Then I went to the Printers Ball with Ileana on July 31st and not only did my photos, as uploaded to Flickr, turn out to be **** in size, but dig the crazy cigarette machine. I know its cheating a bit, but take out all the zeros in the middle. I'd been putting this off, but Ferengi Gohmert tipped the scale.

More of Harry Fassl

More Harry Fassl stuff here. First, a photo Mark took of Diana and I in front of the residence, and remember, 1111 was a part of my cursed life in 1985, I did not meet Harry & Diana until 1992. We were in the basement, and there was the last postcard I sent Harry, still on his desk. Diana let me have it. I'd email Harry crazy stuff, pulling formulas off Wikipedia about Faraday cages and whatnot, then cut & pasting only a random part of the equation. Craziness. All us old guys have left. You might question the ball of clay. Harry had taken up sculpting, and Diana offered Mark and I a lump, and I accepted. The saddest thing, on the desk was a photo from my 40th birthday, my sis threw it as a surprise. A black and white photo of me & Harry cropped, ready to get slapped on a postcard with some funny saying. Maybe it would have been about Faraday cages. Son of a bitch.

Green Line Four Sticks

Check the clock at Roosevelt. This is from when I went to Oak Park to visit Ileana. In the next few days, I'll have some cool shots I'll post, as I went to ground level just before rush hour, when the angle of the sun gave up some pretty nice shadows.

My Favorite Photo of 2010 (So Far)

No, it's not the 11:11 at the Biograph. If you want to know more about 1111, there's plenty of links on my site. This shot is in the alley alongside the Majestic Building, which had been in pretty bad shape until it was cleaned up and now the place is home to the excitingly-named Bank Of America Theater. Anyhow, I like the photo because of the ball. It wasn't there last month. Oh, I should add that I cut through this alley to get from the Monroe Street subway to the bldg. where Greg works. I love it when unseen forces add props to photo locations for me.

Night of the Four Sticks

I think we all know what the Four Sticks Curse is by now...I just want to get it over with.

Again With the Four Sticks

I feel so bad for my astronomer buddy Louis, he was sucked into the four sticks by accident. It was the ubernet equivalent of someone walking up to a group and asking, hey, watcha talking about? Well, Louis sent me this link to a book on Amazon. Check the page count. That doesn't even make sense, that number. It's just there to taunt Those of Us Who Know.

Encyclopedia of Islands (Encyclopedias of the Natural World)

Product Details

* Hardcover: 1111 pages
* Publisher: University of California Press; 1 edition (August 19, 2009)
* Language: English
* ISBN-10: 0520256492
* ISBN-13: 978-0520256491

Universal Monsters Monday IV

Taking a break from the cards this week. First, though, it was a full moon with total quiet and hot weather, just like at the beginning of summer when I saw Harry's ghost. It was actually a quiet train ride from the readings over all, Mike Martinez, Joe Weintraub, and I talked about old Polish bakeries and Lithuanian restaurants until they left me at Grand and Harrison, respectively. I had a few extra minutes and so I got off at Roosevelt to get a big bottle of Fiji water, and on the way back I went down an alley to take some photos of the old Cleopatra bar, but they may come out dark. Over the years, from the elevated stop, I would watch the logo peel away over the back alley. It dawns on me that it was likely the fact that I then got on a more quiet train when I was again in the subway. So there you go.

I scanned some pages from UNIVERSAL MONSTERS 1931-1946, published by McFarland Press in 1988. I knew of the book and ended up buying it from Dennis Druktenis, publisher of SCARY MONSTERS magazine. (I wrote a tribute to John Agar after he died for SM, the magazine is still going strong and they sell it at Borders.) I cut a deal but still paid $60.00 for the book, which was totally fine with me, as it took me that entire summer to read. Lots of facts, like how and where Maria Ouspenskya died, and the fact that Dwight Frye (Renfield from DRACULA, above) died on his 41st birthday after he stepped off a bus and was hit by a car.

The book starts with my lookalike, FRANKENSTEIN, and ends with the film, THE BRUTE, with my OTHER lookalike, Rondo Hatten. There are many, many full page photos. The book even covers the Abbot & Costello films and the INNER SANCTUM series which starred Lon Chaney Jr.

Next week I'll get back to the cards. I really want to do THE MUMMY, but I should go back chronologically. So Dracula it will be. And, as you can see in the last image, I shrank each of these scans. And I will shit you not, I've always seen the scans at 2250 or 1215 on EVERYTHING. So where the hell did 1111 come from? Go ahead, Renfield, laugh it off. You ghoul.

Blame Louis

I was going to simply post his oddly painted bench inside the UIC Blue Line terminal, near the Greyound station, but Louis The Guy From Albany had to send me this photo, taken yesterday at a holiday gathering. The guy takes fantastic photos of the stars and night skies. You'd think he's stop pointing the camera so low. And so the curse continues...

SN 1572 & The Friday Night Four Sticks

Its that time again. Starts this way, I'm looking at Astronomy Photo Of the Day (APOD), and there's that top photo, the remnant of the Supernova of 1572 (which at one point had the luminosity of 200 full moons), and then it mentioned Tycho Brahe and his diary, I linked to that, and damn it all, first freaking sentence he writes mentions that he first saw the bright star on November 11th 1572. I mention that to Astronomer Louis and he pops back the the galaxy M 108 has a right ascenion of 11 hours and a declination of 11 minutes as of today, the spring equinox. It is a never ending hell. I googled more images, like last year when I found out that Black Label used to put out a malt called 11-11. This time out I typed in Eleven Eleven and then Four Sticks, the latter giving me the cycle license plate meant to drive Charles crazy, some crazy art exhibit in Calgary, and (though I have not posted an image), a California magazine called Eleven Eleven and I fully intend to mail (yes, you heard me, they accept only stories sent USPS so they must be Puritans!!!)I'll let you know how that goes. If I'm accepted, certainly that is my death knell. Well, by causing the Four Sticks curse on Louis he at least can find crazy astronomy lingo that shows 1111. I am think that perhaps what is needed is a Four Sticks constellation, but I suppose anybody can do that by looking at Gemini and shaking their head back and forth.

Howard Menger RIP on Venus

First off, let me tell you about my friend Louis, an astronomer in Albany. He overheard (kinda what you end up doing on Twitter) me and Sid discussing Four Sticks. Poor Louis, he wanted to know more, and sadly, he is now part of this horrible mess. He has sent me several 1111 photos in the last month. I feel for him, I do, because the Four Sticks will follow him around FOR THE REST OF HIS LIFE. Anyhow. Howard Menger. I have way too much crazy shit in my head, and a lot of it involves UFOs and the books about them. Whenever the subject comes up--you know, like when I'm wearing my blood-spattered clown suit in the Skydeck of the Sears Tower--I'll point out that, whereas all the books in the 80s and 90s wanted to one up the last, the "contactees" of the 1950s were content to tell their stories without bashing the next guy. George Adamski, goofy polak that he was, started the whole "tall, blonde Fabio-looking dudes from Venus" thing, always meeting in the desert, I guess to keep that Fabio-bronze working. Then there was Howard Betherum, a guy whose last name screams "Make me an element!" There were others, even one guy I never heard of until today, Calvin Girvin, who met a guy from Venus named Cryxtan. Thanks, Internet, another name I'm stuck with now. Howard Menger died over a week ago, he didn't see his saucers in the desert, he saw them in central New Jersey, so yay for him. (Then again, the aliens from Saturn might have been street tough). I have an old pb of his book somewheres; sadly, I don't have the LP of the space music. Any chance I see one of these books from the 50s, I grab them up. The story's may seem far-fetched, but you get a glimpse of the lives people had two generations back, before airplanes filled the night skies and it seemed logical enough that you could walk down a street and see a glowing light in a field, my point there being that I can't walk ANYWHERE without seeing strip malls and four lane main streets. And, like I said, Menger would not have written of his story by making it more fantastical to make it sell because the space girl he met (space girls always accompanied the Fabios) had bigger boobies than the ones in the desert, and I always thought that was a cool thing. And now he has gone on to our sister planet and maybe, just maybe, if I tilt my head near the constellation of Leo, I might hear his music bopping out from the rings of Saturn. And if there was any single reason for me to riff on this dude tonight, it was because of his obituary from the NJ paper. I could only cut & paste, but here is the opening paragraph. Going back to Louis, man, I'm on that ride with you, let's keep those four sticks coming...

Howard Menger, 87, beloved husband, father, retired Army veteran of World War Two, business owner, inventor, author, speaker, and long time resident of Vero Beach, transitioned peacefully at 11:11 PM on Wednesday, February 25, 2009.

Here's My Ride!

Actually, that's not Death lurking by the street light. Its some dude reminding me that it will be Four Sticks Day in a few hours.

Curse Of The Four Sticks, Redux

I've posted the shot of my royalty check before. I had scanned the time card from my old job a few months back, waiting for the eventual Four Sticks Curse to rear up again. At this point, though, not being at that particular job, I thought it might be a cool idea to include a bottle of 11-11 Malt Liquor. Yin and yang, good karma and bad. The reason I finally found a reason to post on the curse, the origin of which can be found by clicking my previous links below, is because, yes, the numbers have shown up again. This isn't a Hurley on LOST/numbers station listening post kinda thing going. In short, once someone is told about the Four Sticks, they will appear in your life when least expected. For no reason. Case in point, the following excerpt from an article I was using for research:



Grand jury lifting veil on unsolved mob hits
By Rick Jervis and Liam Ford, Tribune staff reporters. Tribune staff reporters Ray Gibson and Art Barnum contributed to this report

January 23, 2005

Joseph "the Clown" Lombardo was at a workbench in his small Near West Side shop, where masonry saws and tools are sharpened, when 10 federal agents swarmed in.

One agent waved a grand jury warrant, another carried a cotton swab. The agents dabbed the inside of Lombardo's mouth with the swab--gathering DNA--and were gone in less than two minutes.

Lombardo, a longtime Chicago Outfit leader who publicly swore off his mob ties after being released from prison in 1992, is one of more than a dozen mob bosses and associates who are subjects of a new federal probe into long-dormant mob murders, some dating as far back as three decades.

A federal grand jury is investigating at least 16 unsolved killings, making it one of the biggest law-enforcement strikes against organized crime in Chicago history. Sources close to the investigation--dubbed Operation Family Secrets--and attorneys for some of the alleged mob members say they expect the grand jury to hand up indictments as early as next month.

Convictions on this scale would be unprecedented. The Chicago Crime Commission counts 1,111 Chicago-area gangland slayings since 1919, but only 14 have ended in murder convictions and three cases were cleared when the suspected killers were murdered before being arrested, according to the commission.

Why not just say over a thousand? Why not round it off to Eleven hundred? ts because complete strangers are trying to drive me mad in the past, present, and very likely in the future, coming up with ways for the damnable sequence of ones to show up again and again...Wayne