This book (thanks Jamie) is so amazingly cool, both as art and as architectural history. It’s primarily composed of catalogue pages from glass companies promoting ultramodern “visible storefronts” in the modernist tradition, including sketches, floor plans, and construction materials. It’s incredibly beautiful.
Ever have one of those nights where you just crumple yourself into a little ball and keep asking yourself over and over again why you continue watching local TV news? Of course, I do it because of Lanie, but sometimes, like after a 90 minute newscast that covers exactly one story, I wonder if even she makes it worthwhile anymore.
Speaking of TV, I’ve decided after four episodes that I actually do like AMC’s Mad Men. I already liked it in theory, but I hadn’t decided for sure if I liked it in practice. I still don’t think it’s great art or anything, but it amuses me. It also occasionally makes me want a martini, which is not something I’ve ever particualrly wanted before (and is something I’ll probably skip).
Am I supposed to be surprised and impressed that the proceeds from a package of cheese will go to dairy farmers? Maybe I’m hopelessly naive, but where the hell else should I expect them to go? It’s not like dairy farmers are some impoverished charitable organiztion holding a benefit concert; they’re businesspeople who produce and sell dairy products for profit. Which, contrary to popular belief, is not inherently evil.
The idea that every single commercial transaction must include some random bit of philanthropy (on both sides) is wearing a bit thin, especially now that it’s such a cliché that it’s now being used to the advantage of the very “evil” corporations it’s presumably designed to be a reaction against.
It’s 11:00 at night, and it’s still 90° outside.
Notice how their layout doesn’t even allow for the possibility of three-digit temperatures? That’s because weather this hot is just wrong.
Endangered Durham is the kind of website I live for: the author is trying to document pretty much every piece of property in downtown Durham, over time and with vintage and current photos. This is the sort of obsessive mission the web is supposed to be all about, dang it.
I had my birthday six days early on Saturday night, since Mark will be in The City of Doom on Friday. I got a tripod, and some really good books, a Wait Till Your Father Gets Home DVD (or four), a cool set of fake plastic food, and a Pizza Elmo, which is one of my favorite Elmos so far.
Sunday being the hottest day of the year so far, we had also managed to plan a road trip to the hottest part of the state: the greater Rockingham-Hamlet-Laurinburg metropolitan area. That whole chunk of the state from Fayetteville south is so incredibly bleak and depressing. Rockingham and Hamlet remind me of Pixley and Los Banos in California, the former being a place where all hope seems to have vanished and the latter apparently exisiting only as a highway stopover and home to the area’s obligatory Wal-Mart Supercenter.
At least there’s a Piggly Wiggly in Hamlet, but it’s closed on Sunday. We had to visit the Food King instead. It’s a cool store, and it used to be a Piggly Wiggly (and before that, an A&P) but I was a little disturbed to note the mold growing on one of the cakes they had displayed. I was even more disturbed that the cashier didn’t really seem to care when I mentioned it to her.
We circled back through Charlotte, which is not really on the way unless you drive the way we do, and visited some friends and passed out tomatoes. We have lots of tomoatoes.
All in all, it was a good weekend.
We’re drving the sixty or so miles down to Kannapolis tonight to see The Simpsons Movie someplace a little more interesting than the neighborhood googolplex over by Wal-Mart.
Only seven shopping days left till my 43rd birthday, which will be memorable only for the fact that it means I’ve made exactly half the trek from 21 to 65. Which is, I suppose, considerably better than not making it.
I’m watching the 5:00 news, where I’m closely following the important breaking news that, after five days, Wake Forest basketball coach Skip Prosser continues to be dead. His ongoing mortality has been the subject of about three quarters of all live local news coverage since last Thursday.
It’s as if the whole news team at WXII is hovering over the corpse on the offside chance that Prosser might suddenly decide to get up and dance a little jig. If it happens, Cameron Kent will be there waiting with a camera, by God.
I just keep coming back like a bad penny hairstyle:
1982: I was a fresh-faced recent high school graduate. OK, my face wasn’t really all that fresh, and the photo was actually taken while I was still in high school…
1983: This is the only one that was issued to me as a continuing student. It just happened that 1983 was the year UNCG decided to redesign its ID cards.
1989: I returned to finish what I’d started in 1982. I succeeded this time.
2007: In which I am a graduate student…