A huge section of the city of Constantinople, Turkey, was set ablaze on this day in 1870. When the smoke finally
cleared, 3,000 homes were destroyed and 900 people were dead. The story -- which may be apocryphal like Mrs. O'Leary's cow in Chicago -- is that a young girl was carrying a hot piece of charcoal in an iron pan when she tripped, sending the charcoal out the
kitchen window and onto the roof of an adjacent home. A fire quickly spread along Feridje Street, one of Constantinople’s main streets. High winds coming down the Bosporus Strait spread the fire quickly.
We spent a couple of days in Constantinople (for some reason when we were there everybody called it Istanbul) and had a very nice time. The Blue Mosque (see our photo below) is quite a sight, even though the odor of smelly feet is a little off-putting.
We also stopped at a small port city called Marmaris, Turkey, that reminded me of Santa Barbara. Eating in a sidewalk cafe there, we asked the waiter if he preferred to be paid in Turkish lira or US dollars or Euros. He said, "Hey, it's all money."
Happy 150th birthday! The Pillsbury company got its start in Minneapolis on this day in 1869 when John and Charles Pillsbury bought a small flour mill on the banks of the Mississippi. The company grew and so did the town, earning the nickname Mill City. According to a recent story by Eric Roper in the Star-Tribune, the last flour mill in Minneapolis will shut down in August.
The video by Erik Koskinen is a favorite and (sort of) fits the theme.
We have a very tenuous connection to the Pillsbury dynasty, having purchased our home from a great grandson of Charles (also named Charles Pillsbury but everybody around here calls him Chuck).
Rudy Perpich, a dentist from Hibbing, was Governor of Minnesota when, on this day in 1990, he hosted a visit from Mikhail Gorbachev, then Premier (or president or czar) of the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics. I've looked at several news stories of that event and I'm still not quite sure why Gorby decided to come to Minnesota after his summit meeting with President George Bush. Perpich was positively aglow -- he loved the spotlight and he took the opportunity to rub it in a little bit by not inviting Minnesota's senators (Boschwitz and Durenberger were Republicans and Perpich was very assuredly not.)
Gorbachev met with a bunch of business leaders at Control Data headquarters. Control Data doesn't exist any more. For that mater, neither does the USSR. Just 18 months after the beaming Premier (or president or tzar) left Minnesota, he resigned and the USSR fell apart at the seams.
One article said that, a month before the visit, Gorbachev's advance team came to the Twin Cities and when they left, they loaded a cargo plane with jeans and bicycles -- things that were very rare and valuable in Moscow at the time. I wonder who's wearing those Levis and riding around on vintage Schwinns.
Apparently, this blog still works. If that's true, I may be able to start writing dumb stuff here once again, which will thrill beyond measure all the readers who've waited so long....
The woman in front me at the grocery store checkout was buying twenty identical frozen dinners and nothing else. The clerk asked her, "Did you find everything you were looking for?"
This blog started life as a clumsy homage to Richard Brautigan, favorite poet. Today is, I understand, some kind of celebration of short poems. Brautigan was a master of the form, so it's hard to choose just one to carry around in my virtual pocket today. OK, maybe not that hard.
Tokyo / June 11, 1976
I have the five poems that I wrote earlier today in a notebook in the same pocket that I carry my passport. They are the same thing.
[from "June 30th, June 30th" Dell Publishing, 1978)
I read a lot. This summer, the local library sponsored a program in which patrons could log their reading and write capsule reviews to share. It was kind of fun. It made me realize that I miss the discipline of writing every day, which I had to do when I worked and which I did for pleasure on this old blog. So now I am planning to bore you once again with random reflections, musings, the occasional poem, and some dumb jokes.
