Laying A Pumpkin

The Ohio State Buckeyes went to West Lafayette, Indiana last night hoping to play a football game. They laid a colossal pumpkin instead. And not just any pumpkin — an evil, grinning, death’s head pumpkin that was grimly reminiscent of last year’s debacle in Iowa City.

This year’s team has had serious issues on both sides of the ball, and hats off to the Purdue Boilermakers for ruthlessly exposing all of them. Now maybe the Buckeyes will stop thinking about their recruiting ratings and start focusing on becoming a football team that plays defense, runs the ball, and actually blocks and tackles. Otherwise, we members of Buckeye Nation are going to have to deal with more muerte pumpkins in our immediate future.

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Saturday Signage

I freely admit: this sign (and particularly the frowny face) made me laugh. Alas, we weren’t able to make that right turn, and had to stay to the left in the real life lane.

Pavement Rainbow

The oily sheen on the roadway, some lighting misting rain, and the light filtered through cloudy skies created a colorful pavement rainbow as I walked by Schiller Park recently.

It’s amazing how many pretty things you can find in the world if you just take a moment and let yourself really notice them.

Sliding Scores

I don’t think standardized tests should be the be-all and end-all in terms of measuring an individual student’s knowledge or preparedness, but when the overall average scores on standardized tests start to reveal long-term trends, we might want to start paying attention.

That’s why the ACT’s announcement earlier this week about a significant slide in college readiness — based on testing of more than 1.9 million high school graduates, which amounts to more than half of the 2018 American high school graduates — should be a cause for concern.  According to the ACT, the “percentage of ACT-tested graduates who met or surpassed the ACT College Readiness Benchmark in math—suggesting they are ready to succeed in a first-year college algebra class—fell to its lowest level since 2004” and “students’ average score on the ACT math test dropped to its lowest level in more than 20 years—down to 20.5 (on a scale of 1 to 36), continuing a slide from 21.1 in 2012 to 20.7 last year.”  Readiness in English, reading ability, and science also declined.

Even worse, the ACT announced that “[a] growing percentage of students are falling at the bottom of the preparedness scale,” with 35 percent of 2018 graduates met none of the four ACT College Readiness Benchmarks — which means they are likely to struggle in math, reading, English, and science as they move on to college.

It’s hard to tell how well our public schools are doing at preparing kids for college, but falling average test scores are a pretty compelling indication that things aren’t moving in the right direction.  We should once again be taking a careful look at what our public schools are teaching, and how.  If we aren’t teaching our kids what they need to know to live productive lives, we’re failing them — and failing the country.  For years now, people have been talking about how the jobs of the future are going to exist in technology-related fields.  Who is going to fill those jobs and allow America to compete globally if our kids can’t read or do math and science?

The King’s Privy

People often have romantic notions about the kings and queens of yore.  We think about turreted castles and fluttering pennants and knights in shining armor, but not about the uglier, nitty gritty details of what life was really like in those days — before modern dentistry, and the invention of air conditioning, and countless other developments that contribute every day to making our lives much better than they have ever been before.

Indoor plumbing obviously is one of those developments.  Which raises the question:  how did kings deal with that essential aspect of the human existence?

Historians note that England’s King Henry VIII — he of the six wives — actually had a courtier called the Groom of the Stool to take care of that element of the King’s daily routine.   The GOTS apparently was a high-ranking (if not coveted) position that involves taking careful notes about the monarch’s bowel movements and maintaining the “Stool Room.”  The Stool Room was a private privy where the King used a padded chair “covered in sheepskin, black velvet, and ribbons” positioned above a pewter chamber pot to take care of business.

Other members of the Court had their own private rooms with their own chamber pots, but the masses weren’t quite so lucky.  The article linked above indicates that servants working at the King’s palace tended to answer the call of nature in whatever happened to be nearby.  Fireplaces and the stone walls of the castle were popular targets, giving the castle a distinct aroma by the end of a long day.  And visitors and the staff also used a huge, open-air facility called the “Great House of Easement” that had 28 seats and no stalls or interior walls.  The facility and its tank were cleaned by a group of boys called the Gong Scourers who were appointed by the King.

Still entertaining romantic notions those days of olde?

Empty Malls

Sears announced this week that it is going into bankruptcy.  Once the largest retailer in the United States, Sears disclosed in August that it was closing 46 stores, and with its bankruptcy filing this week Sears identified another 142 stores that will be shuttered.

If you’ve been to one of the ubiquitous indoor malls in America recently, you didn’t need the bankruptcy filing to tell you that Sears has been having serious problems.  For years, Sears was one of the mainstay, “anchor” tenants in countless malls, usually located at the end of one of the concourses.  Sears and other department store tenants were key parts of the mall structure, giving shoppers a chance to check out their varied offerings, from women’s clothing to home furnishings to makeup and perfume, before the shoppers wandered out to hit The Gap or Foot Locker while sipping a drink they got from Orange Julius.  For generations of kids, the “mallrat” experience with their friends on a weekend day was a big part of growing up.

But if you’ve been to one of those malls recently, you’ve seen that some of those big storefronts for the anchor tenants at the end of the concourses are vacant.  Kish and I went to a mall in Bangor, Maine this summer, and it had the big void where one of the department stores used to be.  Many of the slots adjacent to the anchor location also were empty and closed up, leaving the whole section of the mall, where I took the picture for this post, feeling shuttered and empty.  And there’s nothing quite so desolate and deserted as a cavernous mall that is totally devoid of shoppers.

I’m old enough to have seen the whole arc of the American mall story.  I remember when the Summit Mall in Akron, Ohio opened to great fanfare, drawing throngs of shoppers away from the downtown stores to one convenient location.  In Columbus, the City Center mall in downtown Columbus opened in the ’80s as a key part of the downtown Columbus redevelopment plan — but then it failed within only a few years, to be torn down and replaced by a park.  The new approach to retail eschews the closed mall design in favor of open air developments like Easton in Columbus — which feels a lot like the downtown shopping areas that got elbowed to the curb by the malls.  Now we’re seeing many malls struggle, and in some extreme cases, city planners are left wondering what the heck to do with the huge, empty edifice that used to be a roaring hub of commercial activity and tax revenue.

And now Sears is going into bankruptcy.  The story linked above reports that liquidation sales at the 142 stores that are closing will begin in the next few weeks.

Getting The Axe

Today I took a different route home and discovered that Columbus has a places where you can throw axes: Dueling Axes, in Fourth Street. And since Dueling Axes describes itself as Columbus’ premier axe-throwing venue, I’m guessing that means there’s at least one other, perhaps more low rent place in town where you can hurl axes and let off steam.

When did axe throwing become a thing? Is it really BYOB, as the sidewalk sign indicates? Does Ed Ames* know about this? And who decided that an axe-throwing location should be called a “venue,” anyway?

* Vintage Johnny Carson Tonight Show reference