Placeholder

When all else fails.  Something to hold the place until the genuine article arrives.

Cousin to the seatfiller.  Someone who fills (duh) a seat (duh) at an event like the Academy Awards - especially while the true attendees attend to the call of nature.  So when the cameras pan the audience, no empty seats.  There's a whopping metaphor in there somewhere - some day I will suss it out.

Predator Drone

I'm sure predator drones are no laughing matter to the many people, bad and good, whom they have killed, but I have to note the irony.  Back before it was attached to technology, a drone was a "male bee... stingless, performs no work, and produces no honey..." (Webster's).   We've manned them up.

Nameless Dread

AKA "vague, nameless dread."  With a few minutes' googling it seems to come from A. Conan Doyle's A Study in Scarlet... but it sounds more like Poe.  (Through the miracle of the Search function it looks like Watson, in the same book, compares Holmes to a Poe character, and Holmes dismisses it.)  Sic transit dark 19th-century stuff - their version, I guess of noir.

What this is talking about, anyway, is the emotion of fear without knowing its cause.  In the middle of the night, not so surprising, could have come from a dream you don't remember.

But at high noon it's unwelcome.  Beat it.

Roadie

The guy you hire to haul gear to a gig. You can pay him most of what you make in a night, so you wind up playing for free.

Or the drink you pour for the road.  Usually a bad idea.  But after a gig where you've cleared zero and the crowd was calling for disco, it's hard to pass up.

Chicago

At 16F it's a little hard to love but still, the city with the best architecture.  Looking through the window from our room at The Tremont.

Advent Calendar 9

Faith.  A good thing that this calendar doesn't require tangible objects - for faith, all you can do is symbols.  A cross, or a candle, or a St. Bernard.

As a term, it's kind of religion-lite, at least in some contexts.  Faith-based initiatives.  A Sunday radio program, Speaking of Faith, now further secularized into a show called Being.  Communities of faith.  

But what interests me is the intersection between faith as another name for belief, and faith as in something you keep.   One has to do with a willing suspension of rationality and the other with steadiness.  In the searching-for-a-deity context each meaning makes sense.  And so, but maybe less so, when it comes to loyalty in the way partners, loved ones, and persons with government power treat their partners, lovers, and the governed.

Advent Calendar 8.

Literally out my window, the Eads Bridge over the Mississippi.

It's a famous bridge in engineering history, completed in 1874, still there, still in use.  I'm looking at it now, late afternoon light, a blue bowl of sky over it, the flat midwestern horizon behind.  This afternooon (not this picture) there's even the moon, about 7/8 full.

Eads's drawings are here at Washington University and they are as amazing as the bridge.

But there is nothing quite as amazing as James Buchanan Eads himself.