One more thing the world probably didn’t need is a jazz guitar cover of Robert Plant’s “Big Log”. I don’t know who recorded it nor why, and I don’t care enough to try to find out. I just know that it made it that much harder for me to fight my way through the traffic on I-40 this morning while scrambling to change the radio station.
Incidentally, the world could also have done quite well without the original in my view. But that’s another story.
Thank you for waiting so patiently (yeah, like anyone was doing that…). Following are 270 photos from my recent trip to the part of California I still actually like. flickr link here if you prefer.
[flickr-gallery mode=”photoset” photoset=”72157630442548328″]
How sad is it that I regularly spend my weekend nights pausing reruns of 1970s cop shows and trying to pick out locational clues so I can find contemporary views of the same spot on the iPad?
Note: That was a rhetorical question and I don’t really find it especially sad.
After being in something of a mood, I opted for my semi-traditional Sunday night torta followed by a movie on Netflix. I’d had this one in my instant queue for a while, not knowing much about it, and I decided tonight would be a good night to give it a shot.
It was a good choice. Aside from being a really quite wonderful movie (which lent its name to a really quite wonderful band), it was full of those gritty New York in the 1970s location shots I’m such a sucker for, including Times Square and what I assumed to be the interior of the now-demolished Rialto Theatre. But I hit the jackpot with the final fifteen minutes, most of which were filmed inside a vintage Pathmark store:
Suffice to say I’m in a better frame of mind as I go to bed.
They Might Be Giants
Anna Ng (1988)
Between Sunday night’s movie and hearing Anna Sun a lot lately, I’ve had this song stuck in my head for several days. Now you can too.
Pondering travel for the rest of the year. I’m thinking of a few days in and around DC the second weekend in August and my traditional autumn trip to assorted Canadian destinations sometime in October. Any suggestions for the week after Christmas–preferably someplace that won’t have too high a probability of weather issues?
For some reason, I also had the strangest craving to revisit Minneapolis the other day. But not in December…
After seven years and four months, I fear I may be losing the G5 tower. It hasn’t been my primary machine in about a year and a half, but I’ve been using it to digitize video while I do my regular stuff on a slightly newer iMac I got in the divorce settlement (and which isn’t feeling 100% healthy itself). The G5 has performed pretty well although it’s been a bit flaky the past week or so. I feared the problem might be an external drive I was using, but that’s apparently not it. Right now, I can’t even boot in safe mode or using a CD. Based on everything I’ve read it looks like I may have a fried CPU and/or motherboard.
I was thinking about buying a new desktop machine next week during the tax-free weekend anyway. I think it’s time.
When I was a youngster, I was always terrified that my parents might at some point decide to send me to summer camp. The thought of all that outdoors crap and assorted male bonding centered around sports and leathercraft seemed like the closest I could have come to hell on earth (and it still does).
This camp, on the other hand, would have thrilled me.
Something I never thought I’d see: Charlotte being cited as a model for Toronto in the area of “complete street” design:
But Whitney insists that it is possible to move past the divisiveness and political polarization that has impeded so much progress in Toronto. He cites the case of Charlotte, North Carolina, where an award-winning complete-streets policy was formally adopted in 2007. “Every single street there goes through the process and it’s no longer a question of left or right. Once it’s established, and once it’s integrated into the culture, it takes it out of the realm of politics and it becomes just the way that municipalities do business.”
Suppose you’re a member of a motel chain’s “frequent sleeper” program. Suppose this chain starts crediting someone else’s stays to your account. Suppose this results in extra free night certificates being sent your way just as you’re thinking of a weekend getaway.
Do you:
Hmmm…