Try to contain your enthusiasm upon seeing our new breaker box. I know it’s exciting, but calm down ferchrissakes. The neighbors can hear you.

Random Tuesday evening stuff:

• It’s gotta suck when a TV station that has to announce that its own morning news anchor has been arrested for killing someone while driving drunk. The logistics of reporting a story like that can’t be very pleasant.
• Most disturbing song heard on Muzak weekend: someone’s horrid instrumental cover of “Bad Sneakers” by Steely Dan.
• Looks like the proposed “solution” to the problem of Charlotte’s nearly dead Eastland Mall is another vaguely new urbanist blast of banality. Wow. Who didn’t see that coming?
• Mmmm. Vertical file. I found the most amazing stuff at the Greensboro library this weekend. I love spending warm, sunny days inside the library, where I’m protected from from the bad weather.
• I also love Google Video much better than YouTube, because on Google, you can actually download stuff like this, edit it, and burn it to DVD so you can watch it on an actual TV.
• Had a visit from the ex-roomie and his parents today, whereupon I reflected on how neither of us would’ve expected ten years ago that I’d end up living in his old hometown and that he’d be the one of us who was still in San Francisco. Go figure.

Announced today:

• The last furniture store in downtown Greensboro is closing after 75 years.
• IKEA is opening a store in Charlotte.
• After a solid month of ridiculously high temperatures, we may see the first frozen precipitation of the season tomorrow.
• As it turns out, my new hometown (or at least its City Council) doesn’t have quite as much sense as I’d been hoping.
• At least, however, I’ll have a better Wal-Mart as of next Monday.

Yer Humble Host at the Kopper Kitchen in downtown Winston-Salem Friday morning.

You can pretty much tell just from the color of the booths that the place is pretty close to my idea of heaven. It’s one of those ancient eateries in a slightly run-down low-rise building on the periphery of downtown. Most of today’s planners and downtown boosters would want to raze the place and replace it with some sort of shiny, overplanned “mixed-use” complex (with loft condos, of course) because that would, by definition, be more “urban”, right?

Yeah. Right.

Random Thursday stuff:

• Why yes, I do find it alittle ironic that the “The Streets of San Francisco”, which was produced by Warner Bros. and aired on ABC, is being released on DVD under the Paramount and CBS labels. But I’m glad it’s happening, anyway.
• I’m very much hoping my new hometown has the good sense to reject those special delusions of grandeur that only a publicly-financed stadium built on the site of a bulldozed, poor, black neighborhood can provide. Is it 1957 again? Has Robert Moses risen from the grave and landed in Winston-Salem? God, I hope not.
• In case you haven’t visited lately, Groceteria now features a new photo journal on the front page. I’ve been pretty good about keeping it up so far.
• Also, someone has a whole new site. He writes about ballparks there too. I’ve limited my remarks to a certain message board where I should probably know better than to try challenging people’s definitions of “urban”.