Is it just me, or is there something unspeakably ghoulish about the concept of Piggly Wiggly selling whole pigs for $1.19 per pound? And is it perhaps even more ghoulish that their cartoon spokespig looks so damned excited about it?
More pictures from our day trip to Fayetteville (a/k/a “The Armpit of North Carolina”) coming soon, I hope.
What if they built an airline, and you were only allowed to go to and from Columbus, Ohio on it?
My local airport is one of those served by the new Skybus Airlines. Their fares are great, with every flight having a certain number of seats as low as ten bucks. There’s only one problem: if you want to fly someplace other than Columbus, you still not only have to go through there, but you also have to spend the night. That’s because all flights into Columbus (from all destinations, as far as I can tell) are in the afternoon, while all flights out are in the morning.
Am I just missing something, or is this complete madness? Is there really that much demand for an airline that basically only serves this one midwest city? And, in particular, are there really that many people itching to fly there from Greensboro of all places?
Columbus is a nice place and all, but jeez…
I’ve heard Undercover Angel two different times on two different radio stations in the past five days, and this fact frightnes me just a little. I’m even more frightened, though, by the rest of the top five songs from the week of 9 July 1977, as listed on that page to which I just linked. It was a very bad week in music history.
I guess America was just too busy celebrating the recent arrival of one of its newest citizens. Which is as good a way as any to leave hints about his upcoming birthday, I guess.
Eleven-plus years into this whole website business, I think I now have quite sufficient perspective to see how my approach to it (and your reaction to my approach) has evolved over the years.
A few weeks back, a longtime reader emailed me about something else and added as an aside how much he appreciated the fact that I’d been a “thoughtful” and “reflective” sort and that this site had apparently provided him with something rather useful over the years. It’s not the sort of message I get very often these days, and I appreciated it. In fact, as I’ll discuss later, I think my site is actually much less reflective now, at least on a personal level, and it was nice to hear from someone who’d stuck around since the days when it was more so.
It also reminded me, though, that I rarely get any sort of feedback about the site nowadays. I’m not sure if that’s because my traffic is way down from the “peak” years, or because people no longer use email the way they used to (and because I continue to use straight HTML here with no PHP-based comments option), or maybe because I got so bad about responding to comments over the years. Then again, it could be that I’m just not writing anything of any particular interest anymore. Although it’s something I think about from time to time, it’s not really a big concern for me. As I’ve often said, the website is primarily for my own amusement; if someone else enjoys it too, then so much the better.
Anyone with a website who pretends not to care at all about being read or noticed, though, is either lying or deluding himself. If we didn’t care about being seen, we’d just write in a personal journal and call it a day, wouldn’t we? In fact, I think I’m a much better writer now than I was ten years ago. I edit myself more stringently and am more careful not to repeat the same old ideas and beat the same old dead horses; that’s part of why I post much less often than I used to. I’ve composed a few essays in the past year or two that I thought were pretty damned good — much better than the stuff I wrote in the early days of the site — but none of them generated any discussion to speak of. And yeah, that bothered me a little.
Over the years, I’ve used the site as a means of making friends — including my best friend, the one that I’m spending my life with — as well as for self-expression. And yes, I maybe felt a little slighted when a few recent milestones passed without comment. I put a lot of effort into a tenth anniversary retrospective in 2006 that almost no one mentioned. A few months later, I made another very big (and less happy) announcement, although I minimized and even buried it somewhat, and I heard very little about that either. But I understand; I haven’t been very aggressive about reacting to other people’s milestones, and I rarely write to other people about their sites at all these days either.
The site is less about my life than it used to be. There are a lot of reasons.
To begin with, even though it suits me just fine now, I can’t imagine that the current version of my life would be all that fascinating to anyone else. A lot of people lost interest when I “coupled” and stopped writing about bars and sex clubs and boys I’d picked up. Others stopped coming by when I finally left San Francisco, since we all know that nothing of substance or consequence ever happens anyplace else, right?
In addition, I’ve become increasingly uncomfortable about revealing too many intimate details here. Things that would have been big time post fodder eight or ten years ago now sometimes distract me from posting. Privacy is a concern, of course, as is the fact that my personal life is now somewhat shared and revelations about it now affect another person as well, no matter how well we retain our individual identities. Frankly, it’s too late for me to try to be completely anonymous; I’ve left too much of a trail dating back to a more “innocent” time online.
Anyway, I’ve been doing this for more than a quarter of my life, and I don’t plan to stop anytime soon, although I know the process will continue to evolve. I’m not quite sure just what Otherstream is these days. In retrospect, though, I’ve never been sure of what it was, and it’s never stopped me before.
My apologies for being rambling and wordy. I’ll probably continue to do that for the foreseeable future as well.
Tonight, in honor of the season, I’m celebrating May Sweeps. May Sweeps 1977, that is. These are taken from actual May 1977 issues of TV Guide, part of my sizable collection with which I’ve recently been reunited.
I remember 1977. It was the year the Brady Bunch embarassed themselves and their fans by doing perhaps the worst variety show in the history of network TV. And I watched every episode, for some reason. Masochism, I guess. Or a crush on Peter…
Yes, it’s the original Charlie’s Angels, and a special 90-minute episode, at that. And who remembers Space:1999, featuring the grooviest spaceship decor ever, stuff that I would have killed for in 1999. Or now.
The third anniversary of Happy Days. As I recall, that was about the time the whole cast got tired of having 1950s haircuts and started sporting a strange sort of Brylcreem and Blow-dried hybrid look.
Funny, but the term “brand new action tonight” in an ad makes me think of just about anything but Barnaby Jones.
Doesn’t it stand to reason that if it’s Chevy’s very first special, it would, by definition, be “like no special he’s ever done before”? Or is that the gag? I’m sure, though, that it must’ve bombed against the Arnold Schwarzenegger episode of The Streets of San Francisco.
Ah, 1977. When network TV still mattered. Except of course for Space:1999 and the Nixon-Front Interviews, which were syndicated shows. Had to add that for accuracy’s sake.
I drove to Tennessee for the afternoon today, just because I could. If it weren’t almost three hours away, I’d drive to Bristol again tomorrow, just so it would be Monday and this place would be open, so I could eat there.
We took a stroll around downtown last night after dinner.
For your amusement, The Carolinas, a new photo gallery featuring photos from places other than my assorted hometowns, which already have their own galleries.
Is the following hilarious tidbit about pious mechanical mammals taken from The Onion, or from a major metropolitan daily newspaper? You be the judge:
Take Sally Ledford of Columbus, Ohio. “I just started crying when I came in here and saw the Scripture (on the trusses),” she said.
She even liked the museum’s animatronic cow, which looks real and quotes from the Bible, too.
“I just love to hear an animal praise the Lord and use Scripture.”
If you guessed “major metropolitan daily newspaper”, you’d be right.
Aa s side note, why is the word “scripture” capitalized here? The tendency of local newspapers to capitalize any pronoun referring to “God” really annoys me, but I could still understand capitalizing “Bible”, or maybe even “The Holy Scriptures” because they could be seen as book titles. Is it necessary, though, to capitalize the mere word “scripture”?
If I worked for the Observer and I were writing story about God blowing “His” nose, would I have to capitalize the word “handkerchief” every time I used it? How about “snot”?
I just don’t think there’s much I can add to this…