Crash Test Dummies
Mmm Mmm Mmm Mmm (1993)
And check out the Weird Al parody for some very specific bits of 1990s pop culture…
It was a wonderfully gloomy, stormy day today. Nice background for a wedding, although the principals might not agree. Regardless of weather, it’s a happy thing to watch two people who so clearly should be married actually doing so. Congrats to Carroll and Lex.
Saturday was much better than Friday, which pretty thoroughly sucked in many most ways for me. Many thanks to Duncan for helping to temper the suckage for a while on Friday afternoon; you maybe don’t know quite how much I needed that. And my apologies to anyone else who came in contact with me in any way whatsoever, especially my parents and the poor folks at the Harris Teeter on Cloverdale. Enough said. I’m not joking when I say it was a pretty shitty day.
But now I’m contentedly in the basement, listening to Capitale Rock and working on Groceteria databases and (hooray!) on the last of the analog home video. I should be done with that by tomorrow. The digital stuff requires much less babysitting and I’ll finally have my home video archived to…um…archival standards very soon. That will make me very happy. Then I can start making MP4 access copies so I can easily watch it all on the Apple TV. Or not…
Camper Van Beethoven
Take the Skinheads Bowling (1985)
Yeah, I know it’s a rerun but I heard it on the radio the other day and it made me happy, so there you go…
Nothing like a birthday you don’t particularly want to celebrate, a really depressing and soul-sucking birthday dinner with your parents, and a wedding all in close proximity to really drive home the fact that your life really isn’t quite what you expected it to be a couple of years back.
Interesting–if perhaps overly simplistic–perspective from north of the border.
Pittsburgh or DC for Labor Day weekend?
I guess it all comes down to that age old battle between pastrami at Smallman Street or a Double R Bar Burger at Roy Rogers.
DC has the edge for now but I can be very impulsive about these things.
M + M o/k/a Martha and The Muffins
Black Stations/White Stations (1984)
From: iProspect <british.gas@iprospect.com>
Subject: Otherstream: Link Removal Request(Urgent)
Date: August 8, 2012 7:28:54 AM EDTHello,
I work for the digital marketing agency iProspect on behalf of British Gas.
As part of our ongoing SEO campaign – we looking to edit or remove some of the backlinks pointing to the http://www.britishgas.co.uk domain name.We have identified the following link to British Gas on your site (otherstream.com):
http://www.otherstream.com/sections/school/page/4/
http://www.otherstream.com/2009/02/05/boliers-and-books/We would like to work with you and request that one of the below actions are taken regarding this link.
This is to ensure that our client avoids violating the Google Webmaster Guidelines in any form due to a historic decision they or a previous agency has made.• Please remove the link(s) from your website
Please note that we are not trying to imply that your website is of fault for violating any guidelines, but that we have advised British Gas should remove any historic links that they acquired which could be interpreted as paid or intended to manipulate PageRank.
Please let me know if you are able to action this request or if you require any further information.
Apologies if you have received multiple emails, this is due to their being multiple links on your website (please review each one).Kind regards
I believe I’ll decline. And by the way, please take this opportunity to go fuck yourself.
I’m not sure what’s worse: my mom’s constant agitation and “crises” or my dad’s reactions to them.
I can’t quite seem to get him to understand that having Alzheimer’s means that by definition she will be getting upset about something on a regular basis…maybe even daily. He therefore cannot go into crisis mode–and expect me to do the same thing–every time she calls him up and complains, cries, rants, etc. It doesn’t help her because all it does is draw increased attention to the issue at hand, usually an imaginary one, making her dwell on it and stay upset even longer. And it sure as hell doesn’t help us much. I honestly can’t live this way much longer and may have to stop answering his phone calls unless there’s a real emergency. The problem is that I never quite know for sure.
I know it’s hard for him. He’s a more dependent person than he’d like to admit and he’s not sure quite how to behave without my mom around. He will not stop asking her advice about the bills even though this confuses her terribly and gets her even more upset because she doesn’t understand them. And he basically has nothing to do but sit around and obsess about things all day long, but he’s completely uninterested in finding something else to do. God knows, if anyone ever needed a hobby…
He’s making things so much worse by constantly going over there and dwelling and harping on whatever she’s ranting about rather than trying to calm her down and change the subject. Or even worse, he argues with her about it. Then he calls me to discuss it for a half hour or so or to suggest very subtly and passive-aggressively that I drop whatever I’m doing and try to clean it up…but only if I “feel like it,” of course. Lest it sound cold, though, I do have things to do other than sit around and obsess about Mom, especially about relatively small things that neither of us really needs to worry about (nor can do much of anything about) to begin with. How can I make him understand that going to pieces over the small stuff will basically do nothing but make us too exhausted to deal with the big stuff when it comes up?
I hoped that having her in the assisted living facility would help make his life easier too, but he won’t let them take care of the simple things despite all the money he’s spending so they can do just that. And he has this knack for waiting until she’s relatively calm and then deciding to mention just the perfect thing to set her off again. I know it’s better now that it would be if she were home where she could and would wander off and he wouldn’t be able to catch her. I shudder to think what a nightmare it would be for everyone if she were home.
But I’m only slightly less terrified to answer the phone now than I was back in November and December. And that sucks.
Sorry for the venting. I don’t plan to make it a running theme.
Three things I really don’t give a flying fuck about about tonight:
- Prince Harry’s wang.
- Lance Armstrong’s body chemistry.
- Whether or not the Republican National Convention ever starts.
Three things I do care about tonight:
- Great post about one of my own idols, Victor Gruen. What a lot of people don’t realize is that the “inventor” of the suburban mall was actually very much an urbanist at heart and had some interesting ideas on development strategies in the postwar years.
- Interesting commentary on the “Quebec question.”
- Good story on how digital may be the death of many historic cinemas in resort towns (and probably other small towns as well).