The Corona Diaries Vol. 70: Stately Horticultural Domes and Some Other Pleasures of the Cream City

(mid-October 2022)

(Cower in fear at the prelude!)

As October progresses towards Halloween, I have been slowly getting into the spirit of things with “slowly” being the operative word. I’ve been thinking of a good horror movie to watch and have put buying a loaf of Pan de Muerto on my to-do list.

Now that we’re in the middle of the month, the fall colors are just spectacular. Here’s a tree across the street from us in the morning just after the sun breached the horizon.

Everywhere you go, nature provides brilliant scenery as orange, red, and yellow mix with green.

Soon my lawn will be filled with leaves that I am not going to rake. My neighbors will forget all about it when the snow hides the evidence of my laziness. Since I wasn't raking, I instead ambled down to Starkweather Creek where the leaves were slowly changing.

 Here’s a shot from the bike path on recent ride:

The community gardens are wrapping up for the season as the Green Man prepares to put the plants to bed for the winter so they can awaken in spring, or so the legend goes.

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Last week I jumped in my car after work and headed to Chicagoland to meet up with a couple of friends for a concert in lovely Lombard. We were to see Mac Sabbath, a “drive thru metal” band from Los Angeles that I discovered a couple years ago.

As you can see, they dress up as evil versions of McDonalds characters. They perform covers of 1970s era songs by the heavy metal band Black Sabbath but change the lyrics to be about the horrors of fast food, big ag, and whatnot. And so the Black Sabbath song “Electric Funeral” becomes “Organic Funeral”.

Some original lyrics:

Robot minds of robot slaves
Lead them to atomic graves
Plastic flowers melting sun
Fading moon falls upon

Dying world of radiation
Victims of man's frustration
Burning globe of obscene fire
Like electric funeral pyre

And they become:

Robots build diabetes Towers,
GMO’s take insecticide showers
Carminic acid, Meat paste-goop,
Black dyed buns bring green poop

Smuggling toxins over the border,
May I take your neurological disorder?
Prostate cancer, thyroid disease,
MADE TO ORDER AS YOU PLEASE!

But before we got to the Mac Sabbath goodness, there were 2 opening bands. The first was Lung from Cincinnati.

With just an electric cello and drums they were able to bang out heavy yet catchy lo-fi rock. Following them was a band from Texas called Speedealer. They play straight ahead hard core punk a la Minor Threat and The Dead Kennedys. They were energetic and fun.

Finally Mac Sabbath came on.

 

Ronald McDonald heads flanked the stage and spewed fog at various points throughout the show. The singer’s mic stand looked like a straw while the drums were dressed up as hamburgers.

Yes, there is a high novelty factor but these guys can really play. They do a fine Black Sabbath imitation and there’s a lot of campy humor in the performance. At one point, the singer threw giant inflatable hamburgers into the audience so we could get them bouncing around the room.

These guys put on a show that was just pure, unalloyed fun. I would jump at the chance to see them again. Someone recorded the show with video and kindly posted it online.

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I took the following day off from work and eventually made my way home. I then made preparations for heading to Milwaukee the following day for a long weekend. Our anniversary was a bust last month so I wanted to take my Frau somewhere. Plus I have a couple friends who live there that I see all too infrequently and we planned to visit with them.

We rolled into the city a bit peckish so our first stop was the Public Market in the Historic Third Ward. It opened in 2005 and is the envy of many here in Madison as we have struggled to open one here for nigh on 15 years. Located next to the interstate with its parking lot directly underneath, it may not have the most scenic of surroundings but someone had the fine idea of painting the support structures to make things a little prettier.

I hadn’t been there in many years and it was full of hungry people now just as it was back then. People were grabbing lunch and doing a little shopping as well. I think most of the stalls are given over to vendors offering ready to eat meals but there are still several selling the ingredients for cooking at home.

At one end a fishmonger offers the bounty of the seas. Other vendors have fresh produce on display as well as baked goods and local beers while a purveyor of spices has seemingly every kind of spice blend imaginable at the ready. I had bought some Grains of Paradise at that very stall on my last visit and was mildly disappointed to find that it was no longer available. It seems that spice blends are better sellers than individual spices these days.

As a non-Milwaukeean, I tend to think of the Public Market and the Third Ward generally as the public face of the city’s renewal after its decent into Rust Belt status. Once a thriving area with a warehouse district, deindustrialization shuttered many businesses and the construction of the interstate destroyed a large swath of the neighborhood.

Today tourists like us and the Milwaukee area’s middle class go to the Third Ward to eat, drink, and play but it belies the city’s many problems which include a high poverty rate and rampant segregation. These are compounded by a state government that has historically been hostile to Wisconsin’s largest city and center of the southeast region of the state which is responsible for, last I read, something like 35% of our economic activity.

In the 1950s the state nullified Milwaukee’s ability to grow by taking away its power to annex surrounding municipalities. Today the state’s funding model is shortchanging Milwaukee and I recently read that Milwaukee County’s public transit system is going to start cutting service because of lack of funding.

Milwaukee deserves better.

Anyway, we had lunch and headed over to Brady Street as the Frau wanted to stop at Peter Sciortino Bakery.

Brady Street is a bit like Willy Street here in Madison or Lincoln Park in Chicago. It began as a working class area in the 1860s, became a bohemian enclave 100 years later with hippies and artists calling it home. Today it’s more gentrified, with all of the expected middle class amenities like cafes, salons, and restaurants. And a juggling supply store.

The bakery was rather busy as a bus had let loose a gaggle of tourists who were buying goodies.

My Frau was keen on getting some cimino cookies which are rolled in sesame seeds.

They were quite tasty as you can see from this near empty box.

With our cache of cookies safely stowed away, we were off to our next destination, the Mitchell Park Horticultural Conservatory, a.k.a. – The Domes.

The Conservatory has 3 enormous domes with a different climate in each allowing for plants from around the world to have a home in Milwaukee. There’s a desert dome, a tropical dome, and the other one. I had never been there before and I don’t think my Frau had either.

We began in the dome that I cannot recall the climate of exactly but I suppose it was the temperate one and it was bursting with colorful flowers that didn’t seem at all exotic.

Next was the desert dome lush with cacti.

It was also home to several doves.

At one point I came across this plant, a Tongaland Cycad from South Africa:

That red cone in the center looks pretty but I got vague horror movie vibes from it, as if it would burst sending countless spores into the air which, when breathed in, would kill the helpless botanist or onlooker. Or turn them into a pod person.

Next up was the tropical dome. We stepped inside and were accosted by the heat and humidity, a sharp contrast to the chilly, overcast day outside.

As more of a boreal person, I felt a bit like a fish out of water in the desert dome. Not a lot of cacti here in Wisconsin, although we have some. Plus, I’ve been to the desert southwest so it felt foreign but I still had a passing familiarity. However, being in the tropical dome was truly to be amid alien corn. Some plants had these big, broad leaves that were waxy.

And then there was the Sausage Fruit tree.(?!)

Apparently these fruit can grow up to 2 feet long and weigh up to 20 pounds! Sadly, they are not edible for we humans. I suppose that it’s an appropriate tree for a city awash in bratwurst and kielbasa and that has a sausage race at its baseball games.

There was also a banana tree.

I had no idea that bunches of bananas had a long, dangly bit.

The Domes were really neat and the cool fall air had a little extra bite as we stepped outside. We could now check into our hotel so off we went back to downtown.

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Bonus photo. Madison recently put a few 100% electric buses into service and I finally got to ride one recently. It was much quieter than a diesel bus and it also sounded very different. Plus it has a rear window! It was genuinely odd to be able to see out the back. It was like the engine was missing.