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Thirty years ago tonight

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The stupid baseball game ran almost two hours late, delaying my debut until after 1AM. Finally, though, I started out with “While My Guitar Gently Weeps” by the Beatles. It seems a slightly odd choice now but was pretty appropriate for me at the time. Later, there were the Clash, the B-52s, and Laurie Anderson. And I realized that one month shy of legal age I’d finally found a musical instrument I knew how to play: the turntable.

It was a good move. Through that whole experience, I met some of my closest lifelong friends. In a year of many beginnings–high school graduation, “coming out”, my first actual date with a man, and the start of college among others–it’s amazing that i still find this to be perhaps the real defining moment when i went from being a teenager to a prospective adult. Not bad for an unpaid gig in the middle of he night, eh?

I pondered some sort of celebratory project to mark the anniversary but this is the best I could do. And the picture above wasn’t taken the day of, but it’s a reasonable facsimile of what the whole affair might have looked like.

More WUAG memorabilia for those who care (work in progress).

God, I’m old…

They might be giants

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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:

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Suffice to say I’m in a better frame of mind as I go to bed.

Travel plans

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…

Shocker

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.”

(Not really a) moral dilemma

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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:

  1. Alert them to the issue and return those certificates?
  2. Use the damned things as quickly as you can before they figure out what happened?

Hmmm…

Jameson Avenue, 1958

The Big Step – First Apartment in Toronto 1950s from Tiki Films on Vimeo.

Aside from being really cool on its own, this is extra cool for me just because I walked down Jameson between King and Queen ogling these very apartment buildings last fall when I was in Toronto.

More random links I’ve been storing up and forgetting to share: