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He’s Back

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Back from Fresno and other assorted points west. More later about:

  • Family.
  • Friends.
  • Vomit.
  • Machaca in Madera, pizza in San Francisco, waffles in Millbrae, and chicken pie omelettes in Fresno.
  • Loving my boy.
  • Running into someone I’ve “known” for years but had never actually met, on a travel day that was even more sucktastic for him than mine was for me.
  • Safeway Select Diet Grapefriut Soda.
  • The rather exciting fact that most radio stations in California seem to be broadcasting in Spanish these days.

Alarming Announcement

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The Detroit Free Press announced yesterday that it will begin limiting home delivery of its print edition to three days a week starting early next year. Apparently, there will still be some sort of printed newspaper available on the other four days as well, but it will only be sold in stores and racks.

I find this pretty alarming, but not really unexpected. Smaller newspapers have been making similar announcements and cutbacks for quite some time, but this is a major metropolitan daily, and I’m pretty sure this won’t be the last such announcement. We’ve all been hearing for decades about how newspapers were on the way out. Seems it may finally be happening. And that’s sad, not just because it means the end of an institution that has been such an important part of history, but because it also signals the end of a very effective, compact, and convenient means of preserving that history in the future. A complete newspaper from, say, 1942 or 1959, is perhaps the quintessential pop culture artifact of its day; nothing else is really comparable.

I’m pretty comfortable accessing most of my information digitally, but barring a digital display tool that approximates the size and feel–but more importantly, the foldability and browsability–of a newspaper, it’s never going to be quite the same for me once the printed version finally disappears.

Asshole

This son of a bitch stole an entire page from Groceteria, posted it on his own site (images linked directly from my server and all) without attribution and didn’t even include a link to the page he stole it from. Far be it from me to suggest that you add a comment telling him what you think of that, but…

By way of an update, the page was removed shortly after I commented on his site and made some creative edits to the photos he’d leeched.

Videolog: Behind the Wheel


Depeche Mode
Behind the Wheel, 1987

When I drag up images of myself living in Charlotte in the late 1980s, this is one of about half a dozen or so songs that are pretty much always playing in the background. Others come from such varied performers as The Leather Nun, Tones on Tail, The Information Society, The Cure, and Siouxsie and the Banshees, among others. Maybe I’ll feature some of the rest soon. Or maybe not.

‘Twas the Night After Christmas…

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Christmas, family, food, etc. You know the drill. This year, we hosted my dad’s side of the family (a dwindling group, alas) and my mom took care of her side of the family, which meant she had a much bigger group to face.

Mark and I are off to Charleston WV, Pittsburgh, and Richmond for a week starting tomorrow morning.We’ll be giving the new (to us) Buick its first major road test, and hoping today’s three hundred bucks worth of repairs will have corrected all the problems we inherited with it.

Just in case this turns out to be the last post of 2008, happy New Year.

Winston-Salem to Charleston

We both needed a vacation. I needed to be surrounded by something a little more urban and Mark probably needed to be someplace a little less, well, San Francisco. We had a new (to us) Buick to break in. Charleston and Pittsburgh proved to be the perfect choice.

I’ve had a fetish for Pittsburgh since my very first visit in 1997. Even then, I thought it was both more aesthetically pleasing than San Francisco and also a more realistic place for mere mortals to live. I love the diners, the variety of neighborhoods, the fact that a viable working class coexists with a major collegiate presence, and that whole Rust Belt vibe. Pittsburgh has a very undeserved bad reputation as an ugly, grim, depressed sort of place. It’s not. It is, however, one of my favorite cities, and it’s probably the most likely big city I’d ever consider relocating to.

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But the trip started in Charleston, following a drive up a series of back roads that took us through Mt. Airy, Princeton, Beckley, and the Kanawha River Valley,a nd offered several Kroger locations for our convenience. Once in Charleston, we found an ancient Italian restaurant and had dinner before retiring to out stylish accommodations at the Kanawha City Red Roof Inn.