The Corona Diaries Vol. 57: To the Land of Limburger

I suppose that, for my summer entries, we should just take it as read that I took a bike ride down to Acewood Park. On my most recent one I saw that the algae and weeds were coming in.

So it goes.

It was a bit louder than my previous visit. More birds chirping and trilling away. Unfortunately, the only decent bird photograph I managed to get was this one:

This is a killdeer. I’ve seen quite a few this summer but don’t recall doing so in years past. They been hanging out near the building I work at as well as by the water runoff retention creek thingy along the Capital City Trail. Did I simply not notice or are they more common these days?

Here are a couple mallard drakes that I spied across the pond.

At one point when I was wandering through the woods, I noticed a chipmunk watching me.

It was just a lovely day, if a bit overcast, to just hang out in nature.

 

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I took the day of my Frau's birthday off from work (she had taken the whole week off) and we headed south to New Glarus as she wanted to grab lunch at Glarner Stube and soak in the old school Swiss vibe of the town. Although she said that she wasn’t in the mood for fondue, I was going to order it anyway.

She discovered that it wasn’t open that day but further internet sleuthing resulted in a restaurant in Monroe, about 15 miles to the south, that appealed to her. Away we went.

While Wisconsin is known for cheese generally, caseiculture is the lifeblood of Monroe. Curds are to be found everywhere you go and the streets run with whey. There are several cheesemakers in the area and it’s home to the only maker of limburger in the United States, Chalet Cheese Cooperative.

It being summer, the town was beset by road construction and we ended up driving through the town square. I remarked to the Frau that Baumgartner’s was close by and she had an instant change of mind and said that we should go there for lunch.

Baumgartner’s is a genuine slice of Wisconsin being both a tavern and a cheese store. In fact, the cheesemongers there claim that it's the oldest cheese store in the state. It’s claim to fame is its cheese sandwiches which consist of your choice of cheese, including limburger, along with salami or braunschweiger on rye. I hadn’t been there in ages so I was happy to make its acquaintance once more.

The mural above the bar portrays the war between beer (the steins) and wine (bottles). It is a replica of a mural at the UW-Madison’s Memorial Union with a few changes. For instance, instead of castles in the background, it is Monroe’s old Blumer brewery that looks down upon the boozy belligerents from afar.

While neither of us opted for the house specialty, we still had plenty of fine cheese with our meals. The Frau’s sandwich came garnished, not just with a pickle, but also a slab of the stuff.

With lunch we had Vienna lagers from the Lena Brewing Company in Lena, IL. I don’t think I’d ever had their beer before as they don’t appear to distribute to Madison.

Once we had finished lunch, we traversed a part of the square where there was a series of wedge-shaped works of art.

I do believe this one was made by the same person who did the mural inside Baumgartner’s.

After stopping at a confectionery store, we headed back home as the Frau had plans with friends that evening.

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I recently saw Memoria, the latest movie by Thai director Apichatpong Weerasethakul. This was the first of his films that I have seen although his Uncle Boonmee Who Can Recall His Past Lives from 2010 is on my to-watch list.

Memoria is a long, slow, dreamy film concerning a Scottish expat named Jessica, played by Tilda Swinton, who lives in Columbia. She is awoken one night by a loud boom that no one else is seemingly able to hear. In pursuit of identifying the noise, she approaches a sound engineer named Hernán and asks him to recreate the crashing sound she heard that night.

Later, Jessica wanders into the country and meets a gentleman who mysteriously is also named Hernán. They talk and, at one point, it is revealed that they share some of the same memories.

I won’t spoil things in case anyone is able to see it but we do learn what the boom was that woke Jessica and it was absolutely not what I was expecting at all.

Weerasethakul’s style is deliberate and dreamlike. Shots linger with little action on screen as if we’re being invited to ponder mysteries just like the characters do. This is not everyone’s cup of tea but I really enjoyed this slowly unfolding enigma and wish that someone I knew had also seen the film so that we could discuss it. Memoria is one of those movies that can be processed by my brain more fully if I talk about it. I also wish to see it a second time but heard that, for some reason, the movie will not have a streaming nor home video release. Hopefully this is merely gossip.

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As a coffee lover, I’d been meaning to read about the stuff for some time now. Well, I finally did so and read Uncommon Grounds by Mark Pendergrast. While the subtitle is “The History of Coffee and How it Transformed the World”, the focus is really the United States as it's the biggest market for java.

Since we don’t grow coffee, other countries have large roles in the story and the book pulls no punches in describing the often times horrible circumstances under which we Americans get our fix. There are many accounts of farmers who grow the stuff being bullied by large corporations as well as being killed by blood thirsty dictatorships.

When wholesale coffee prices got expensive or someone’s claims of coffee’s ill effects gained traction with the public, Folgers, Maxwell House, etc. engaged in all manner of chicanery to keep people drinking. Coffee was cut with chicory, less coffee was put into the same sized containers to fool customers, and ridiculous claims of being able to use less coffee to achieve the same strength of flavor abounded.

I laughed out loud while reading the book on the bus when I read a section about Edgar Bergen & Charlie McCarthy shilling for Chase & Sanborn coffee on the radio show Amateur Hour. Mae West was the guest on the 12 December 1937 episode and she threw the censors into fits of outrage.

Chicago is featured in the book. It was the first destination east of the Mississippi River for west coast roasters such as Folger’s and Hills Brothers in the 1930s. Nearly 60 years later, Chicago was the first city not on the west coast to have Starbucks cafes starting in 1987.

I wish that the book delved into the early history of coffee a bit more as it glossed over its emergence in Ethiopia and how it migrated north into the Middle East in the late Middle Ages. Still, it was very interesting and entertaining and I got the itch to travel when reading about how different cultures prepare and consume coffee differently.

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Bonus photo time! The house of a local artist has all kinds of things adorning it including this knight out front.