Another Week: Number 140

One sound I have noticed more this summer is the güiro-siren of the cicadas. While last summer was supposedly our Brood XIII cicada-palooza, it’s this summer that I find myself fearing advanced tinnitus — only to realize that it’s just the music of the tymbals, a sort of shortwave dental drill interrupting the usual car alarms and barking dogs.

Aside from their din, this was a glorious week for enjoying open windows. September arrived a week early, and I hope it stays here for several months. The first eight leaves changed color among the trees on Highway JR. I made my first batch of oatmeal this season on Monday, and saw a murmuration of starlings while driving home Wednesday afternoon.

The new strip of asphalt put in to serve as Mitchell School’s bus loop across from me has become quite a tourist attraction in summer’s waning days. Parents and kids bicycle its length in wonderment. Some seem to think of it as a runway from which they might take flight. Big, noisy Harleys and tiny, clown-sized minibikes traverse the fresh blacktop all day long. It’s adorable the way simple pavement triggers such smiles.

On Thursday, Mitchell School held an open house to show off its new amenities. It was a sunny and breezy late afternoon, and the folding tables set up outside along the bus loop gave the event a Monty Python-esque elation.

Elsewhere, of course, a puffy old raccoon has somehow gotten into the White House, and we’re letting him stay there and run things.

This week, Generalissimo Trumpty Dumpty — “Il Douché” — held yet another of his many horseshitting sessions in an Oval Office cluttered up like a rummage sale and packed with more characters than the Sgt. Pepper’s album cover. He was signing yet another of his proclamations, this one regarding sending armed troops to various U.S. cities on the premise of “fighting crime.”

While most of the news media now debate real vs. imaginary crime statistics, they should instead be connecting the dots to the 2026 midterm elections — and remembering how the Nazi SA intimidated voters in the early 1930s.

Speaking of our dictator’s aesthetics and proclamations this week, he also issued one requiring all federal buildings to “embrace classical architecture.” There was no immediate indication as to whether he prefers his classicism starved.

Remember the majestic “Trump-Putin Summit” that was so crucial last Friday? It dissipated like a weak fart hours later. All talk of “severe consequences” and the promised “Putin-Zelensky meeting” dried up faster than the blood of Ukrainian children injured in new Russian attacks.

I walked 6.24 miles this week.

Remembering A Prairie Home Companion

I was thinking a lot this week about A Prairie Home Companion, and how that show used to be such a shared national experience and a public radio juggernaut.

The entire 40-year festival was conceived by Anoka, Minnesota’s own Gary Keillor, who rebranded himself as “Garrison” to sound more writerly, and meticulously developed a universe of characters, jingles, jokes, droll catchphrases, and sound effects, all padded with folk and gospel music, American standards, and sing-alongs, leading up to a central monologue, “The News from Lake Wobegon,” his weekly campfire tale.

Many Saturday evenings — but especially in the fall — we would turn the radio on in the kitchen as we prepared dinner, or in the living room with the lights dimmed, listening to ringmaster Garrison onstage at the Fitzgerald Theater in St. Paul, or The Town Hall in Manhattan. The show was a sacred ritual, and hugely popular with public radio donors during my years at WGTD in Kenosha.

It’s astonishing that one shy person’s quirky take on life could click with so many others and knit such a network for four decades.

Now, trying to recapture some of that old, autumnal, acoustic thrill, I put on Emmylou Harris’s At the Ryman album — or Bruce Springsteen’s Nebraska.

The Third Man (1949)

I sometimes find myself awake in the wee hours, and may launch the BBC on my phone to distract myself. This week, a Witness History segment suggested an old movie to watch with my mom on Saturday night.

The Third Man, directed by Sir Carol Reed, is plenty famous, but neither Mom nor I was very familiar with it. The zither score by Anton Karas is recognizable, and there’s an iconic scene on a ferris wheel. The movie is currently streaming free with commercials on Tubi.

It stars Joseph Cotten as Holly Martins, a struggling author of Old West novels who travels from the States to post-war Vienna only to find that the old friend who invited him there — Harry Lime — has just died, hit by a vehicle in the street outside his apartment. As Martins attempts to understand the incident, the accounts of the witnesses and his friend’s associates don’t all completely add up.

Martins’ confusion is heightened by everyone else frequently speaking German and making allusions to some unspecified black market business his friend Lime was involved in.

The plot is fine, Robert Krasker’s cinematography is spectacular, and Orson Welles, when he finally enters the picture, is compelling.

We enjoyed it. My mom was initially annoyed by all the un-translated German until I assured her it was a device.