DebRLewis

If you encountered one, you probably do. The Jetsons-esque space bubble over the mechanical press and the gauges. The carnival barker letters announcing “MOLD-A-RAMA” in primary colors with a demo figurine displayed as if on a pre-flatscreen TV in COLORFUL PLASTIC. (Yes, plastic as a selling point!) If your parents coughed up the coins (I date myself here), the smell of warm plastic pervaded the area as you waited. You watched the sides of the mold press together. If you were with me, you were probably at Chicago’s Museum of Science and Industry and feeling more scientific than usual, so you may have watched the pressure gauges while I remained caught up in the mechanics. Unseen, injected molten plastic coated the mold and, after an interval, set. The pistons pulled the mold halves apart, revealing the newly made figurine in whatever color — a gray submarine, a green dinosaur, a black train engine — whatever was that machine’s specialty. (If you wanted something different, especially in the Mold-a-Rama heyday, another machine with a different something in a different color was mere steps away). Then a small spatula slid forward to unstick it from the surface, pushing it into receptacle with the tilt-up door where you’d fetch your warm prize.

Here’s a video of one in action, but I warn you: You’ll miss out on the unmistakable scent, the wayward chance of a drop of hot plastic dripping out the bottom onto your skin (you’ll notice in the video a sign’s been added to the machine warning of this possibility), and the supreme pleasure, when you get home, of picking the extraneous flecks of plastic from the holes in the bottom (until you go a step too far, ruin it, and it’s time again hunt down that Mold-a-Rama machine).

If you’d like a slightly deeper dive…

Orange Bean has a lovely feature on the history of these machines, and I recommend you check it out:

Mold-A-Rama Toys Marks 60 Years of Hot Plastic

Around 10:45 am, I started my account and within four minutes, identity verified, was ready to explore.

But who the hell am I? Certainly not a financial wiz. I’ve got a retirement account in traditional stocks. Early on, I made beginner’s mistakes, buying and selling too often — commissions eating up my pipsqueak gains. I’ve learned what numbers to watch, whose advice I trust, and I’ve made a couple timely buys over the years that have grown in value 4350% and 5600% respectively, plus some others with more modest gains. One of the cool things with stocks is that the companies usually provide some kind of products or services — if what the company provides is a good value for its customers, makes a profit, and the finances of the organization are responsibly run, usually it’ll make money for shareholders. Even if you own two $10 shares. You can make choices based on the markers that matter to you.

Cryptocurrency requires a different decision-making process. I’d already started a different crypto account elsewhere, put in a little bit of money, read up a bit and bought three kinds of tokens and was rewarded with $50 worth of a fourth token (for some reason I think I’ve figured out). This tiny portfolio has tripled in value (largely due, I suspect, to the excitement around Bitcoin’s highs in the $60ks) but I still feel out to sea.

I decided this morning to take Coinbase up on their offer to give me free cryptocurrency in exchange for learning more about it through their app.

First, I received $5.00 worth of Bitcoin for signing up. At the moment, that’s .00008179 BTC.

Under the Learn and Earn heading in the top-left menu were featured lessons on Bounce Token (AUCTION), Loopring (LRC), Amp (AMP), Clover Finance (CLV), Fetch.ai (FET), Compound (COMP), and The Graph (GRT). Each had a series of infographic slides followed by a quiz — often three separate rounds for separate quizzes. These were multiple choice, and when I got one answer wrong, it allowed me to choose again for the correct answer and still get the awarded currency. All told, the quizzes netted me $25 worth of seven different types of crypto within a couple hours of signing up, and this includes several interruptions and diversions in reading around the app.

The For You tab has Education, News, and Get More Crypto headings, and I found the articles here interesting and informative. If you’re used to stock investing vocabulary, crypto terminology will take some adjustment.

You can, of course, trade on the app. Once you have your bearings, there are options to pay, earn, or borrow crypto as well using the menu in the top left corner.

I don’t have this “future of currency” all figured out, but I think I can get a much better feel for it. Coinbase is a good place to start.

December 11, 2021 Quick update: The opportunities to Learn & Earn continue to crop up. $3 Quant and $3 IoTex most recently. It’s better than a sharp stick in the eye, eh?

Montrose Harbor is my place. Or it was before Mayor Lightfoot started cruising through the city, flip-flop in hand, telling clustering idiots, “Go home.” When the blues hit, when life sandpapered me raw, when I felt lonesome for my own company, I’d leave home in Rogers Park, hop off Lake Shore Drive at the Lawrence exit, and slowly tool through the long lakefront park to the harbor, say “hey” as I passed what we call the “llama tree,” and assure myself of a few things. Lake Michigan was still there. The crows were still there (they’d vanished one year, due to West Nile Virus killing so many, but their numbers have been recovering). The seasons were coming and going in their expected procession. I needed the reassurance. I needed the anchor in time.

Some fifteen years ago, my wife and I started driving the length of the park in a repeating circuit before picking up our tot from daycare. It was a way to savor being ourselves — our lover selves instead of our parenting selves — until the very last minute. We cherished it.

Ten years ago, my wife (and first reader) suffered a life-changing head injury at work. For six months, she couldn’t remember that I’d read to her the night before. I’d been reading her to sleep every night for years. She slept twenty-three hours a day. She’s since fought, centimeter by centimeter, to regain her sight from visual disturbances (which she described as “a static of orange spiders in motion”). A year out, she struggled to regain the ability to read. To ride in a car without a towel over her face to avoid motion sickness. Her recovery has been slow and incomplete, and still she amazes me.

After this injury, she was unable function as an RN and our hard-hit finances kept me up nights. I tried to calculate how much we could get for our furniture, some of our books, and realized a giant, everything-must-go yard sale wouldn’t save us. I wished I could go back in a time machine and un-buy almost everything in our home. When I slept, I dreamt of trying to whore myself out and finding no takers. I dreamt of cutting off an arm and trying to sell it.

I’m prone to depression and the fevers of mental illness ran high around this time. Gail couldn’t come with me, but after making sure she didn’t need my help to and from the bathroom and she didn’t want anything to eat or drink, I’d kiss her and say, “I’ll be back.”

“Where are you going?”

“To see if the lake is still there.”

And she understood.

The Harbor. I fed my beloved crows, keeping a rough count so I could report back at home, feeling small if there weren’t any, thrilling if there were more than a half dozen. I outwitted the greedy seagulls (really, they are the gimme-est of birds). I watched goslings transform from bipedal clumps of fluff following their parents through the grass to mature, fully wing-spanned geese. I watched the waves, listened to the sailboats’ rigging clink in the wind. I would marvel at the green of the grass and wonder at the endurance of trees. I’d wonder what the fisherfolk were catching. When the barrels came out, I knew it was smelt season. I’d write. I’d practice blues harmonica (which gives me much more joy than it will probably ever give anyone who listens). I gaze at intervening distances. On misty days, I’d seek a horizon erased by gray. I sometimes got out of the car to sit on the concrete steps and glory in the wind and weather, but I mostly enjoyed all this from the shell of our automobile.

These sound like such little nothings. Even if I throw in the two hawks I once saw tussling over a fish, a solar eclipse, the grackles and starlings, a wild turkey, and the squirrels. Don’t forget the squirrels, who tend toward small and gray, but a few have hints of auburn in their tails, and if you’re lucky you’ll see one or two lovely black ones. Obviously, I have my favorites. With all this and all I am leaving out, it sounds, I’m sure, like humble pie, as most experiential wonders tend to do, but I can’t say it any clearer than this: urban nature kept my brains in my skull.

I could peel myself off the proverbial ceiling as long as I could visit this spot two, three times per week. More often if things were worse. Less, if our family hit a patch of (relatively) smooth sailing. I’ve counted on this spot as a personal anchor for the better part of two decades.

When word first came that Chinese officials had expanded the radius of the January 23rd lockdown of Wuhan, my wife said, “That’s coming here. We need to get ready to hunker down.” Everyone in our household has underlying conditions that increase the risk of serious illness should Covid-19 make it across our threshold. We quietly stocked up on essentials and braced ourselves. I took photos of the crows. Dug out an old file with the sound of rigging in the wind.

The police barricades have been up since 1995 — no, since late March 2020 — but it feels much longer. Spring and Summer came day by day, as we had little to do but watch flowers bud and trees go to leaf, instead of coming all at once in the times we’ve been too busy to pay attention. I pine for the sights and sounds around Montrose Harbor. I am waiting for the day (and praying when it comes, the shortsighted don’t spoil it with their maskless, clumping contagion shutting it down all over again). I’d like to have the windows down, but I’d keep them up if I had to (maybe with a little cheat or two to throw those roasted-in-the-shell peanuts my crawking Corvid friends so like). I’ll wear a mask; I wear one everywhere anyway.

Yes, I’m grieving. Yes, it’s tough. Still, I applaud the efforts of Mayor Lightfoot and Governor Pritzker to slow the spread of Covid-19. If only everybody understood a lifting of restrictions means going more places, but with masks and social distancing instead of a barefaced free-for-all, but that’s a whole different post.

The Foster-Montrose stretch of park is a self-contained gem and, as of this writing, pretty much off limits to anyone wanting to drive in. Not every park can be so easily guarded. Me, I’ve been making do with the Loyola Park strip of lake shore. While it helps to see the water and hear the waves, it isn’t the same. Give me sailboats clanging. Give me crows as I cuss the greed of seagulls.

https://www.facebook.com/plugins/video.php?href=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.facebook.com%2FDeepLookPBS%2Fvideos%2F879300018921245%2F&show_text=0&width=560“>Crow Funerals from the PBS Deep Look series.

 

Roger Anderson is an aficionado of all things telephone–except calls from telemarketers. After putting his son on the phone with a sales guy who ended up cussing at the kid, he went to work creating a robot capable of reading inflections and holding long conversations with telemarketers, thus wasting their time. He’s even given a TED Talk about it. Since the first release, which featured Roger Anderson’s own voice, he’s expanded to a menu of various genders and personalities (there are samples here). Subscriptions are cheap, considering how jolly it is having some bots on your side.  Check it out: http://www.jollyrogertelco.com/

 

I stumbled upon this short (1 hour, 18 minutes) film on Netflix and it seems such a gem I have to share. InnSaei is an Icelandic word with multiple meanings, all appropriate –I won’t give it away, see the film!

Hrund Gunnsteinsdottir landed and worked for women’s rights in her dream job at the UN. Eventually the stress of her work led to a painful miscarriage, and she had get her bearings. How had she become so disconnected from her emotions to not realize she was burning out?

From there she seeks out scientists, like neuroscientist and indigenous consciousness expert Marti Spiegelman; Marina Abromovic, the artist well-known for her work of sitting and gazing with whomever sat before her to connect without words; and Malidoma Patrice Somé, a West African spiritual leader, and others.

It’s worth all 78 minutes. Leave time for a walk afterwards.