Friday I dropped my laptop on my foot, and broke it. I can probably break down the audience here into two types: those who wonder if I am limping, and those who are sad about the laptop. I tried rebooting it, and it declined to advance beyond the logo and the loading indicator. Ran a diagnostic, and after nine hours it reported more bad blocks than the Bronx in 1972. SMART disk status: FUBAR. Tried to reinstall the OS; fatal errors.
In the middle of this procedure my wife notes that her phone is acting up; some of the numbers don’t work.
“Did you drop it on your foot?” She did not. “Did you drop it on my foot? Because that seems to be a pattern here.” She had not dropped it. Some googling revealed that others had this problem as well, but if you google “my ear turned black after I listened to opera after eating prawns” you will find people who had this problem as well. But there was enough trouble to indicate that the phone was FUBAR.
Off to the Apple Store, then. I explained that I could put in a new hard drive, but it’s really tricky with this model. Right? I’m still a man. TELL ME I’M STILL A MAN. Then he called up some internal secret documents on the phone, and said they’d give me a new one. Free.
It’s the golden age of returning phones to Apple, I tell you!
Friday night I didn’t do much, because I had to get up at an ungodly hour Saturday to watch wife and child run. Wife has gotten back into running; want daughter to experience the joys. Daughter, like me as a child, regards running as something to be done only if fleeing tigers. But she’s game, and I’m encouraging, and so up and off we went. The run was around one of the lakes:
What a beautiful city. I was hitherto unfamiliar with running culture, and got a load: everyone is to be encouraged and urged on, which lead to the initially surprising sight of a woman walking along the path shouting WOOO RUNNERS! to absolute strangers. Or “finish strong!” to the last people trickling in 10 minutes after the first runner completed the 10K. Then it was the kid’s run, and since parents were invited I got in the huge wad of humans and waited for the starting gun. Well, not a gun; that would send a wrong message. I think they release a dove now and shout “DOVE.” The entire mass lurched forward, and after 3 seconds I almost bowled over a tiny little girl who was facing the wrong way, crying. So I stopped and formed an Immoveable Shield, and crab-walked her out of the torrent to the sidelines. So ended my running for the day.
Home for scones, then off to a postcard show in Eagan. Fifty-one dealers. Good Lord. I ended up with a batch of motel postcards – since it’s still summer, I’ll be posting them later – and four enormous McCall’s magazines from the 20s and 30s, things of absolute beauty. And more, including an inexplicable cigar band I’ll put up later this week.
Because my wife has this strange idea we should get out of the house and do things, we got out of the house and did a thing – attended the fireworks down by the river. First, we went to the Mill City Museum, a flour-centric exhibit installed in the ruins of an old mill.
Love that place. Even more so for the items they had in a cabinet of recipe books, as the image at the top of the page shows. I am less happy about the new Guthrie, which decided it wanted to have nothing to do with the historical district in which it resides, and sticks out a black metal tongue to the river:
Then we walked across the Stone Arch Bridge, which was already filled with people who’d staked out positions earlier in the evening. Walked over to the other side of the river, and yes, this is the city:
Walked across the Hennepin Avenue bridge at dusk. The Grain Belt sign:
On the way back from the Hennepin bridge we entered the Commercial Zone, where food in its carnival form was proffered for the multitudes: a walleye truck had a sign that said WINNER WINNER WALLEYE DINNER, which made me smile and grimace: nice twist, but the original phrase always annoyed. There are possibly two people in the world who can carry off the phrase “Winner, winner, chicken dinner.” One is Bill Murray. I have never met the second one. There were brats, cheese curds, pizza trucks – and that last one reminded me of the earlier contrusion with Domino’s. Twice we had ordered a pizza with extra-large pepperoni. Twice it had arrived without the extra large. See, the order is calibrated to hit everyone’s preferences, and my daughter will only have pepperoni, so: her half has pepperoni and extra-large pepperoni. But twice the pizza has arrived without.
“I’m going to call them,” I said.
“No, Dad, don’t! It’s okay! Don’t make a fuss about it.”
“Honey, a manager would want to know these things.”
So I called, and explained, and the manager asked if I ordered online. I said that I did, modern-type person that I was. That’s the problem. Extra-large has been discontinued, but it’s still on the online menu. Can you tell me what the printout on the bottom of the box said? I noted that it had elided the extra-large issue altogether. So the problem wasn’t on their end. He offered to comp me a pizza, but I said I didn’t want to have a bad effect on his customer-complaint stats. It wasn’t their fault. I don’t feel right about getting a free pizza when it’s not their fault. Crazy, I know, but it’s how I’m wired.
There was also a booth giving away free samples of Craisens and juice. We had some. The guy next to me in line stuffed fistfuls of free samples in his pockets. Then filled up the pockets in his cargo pants. My daughter must have caught my look of raised-Spock-eyebrow, because when she was thirsty and I said we could return to the Craisen juice stand, she said we’d already been there; wouldn’t be right to take more. I said she could take the cup I hadn’t taken. That worked.
Odd how these ethical examples manifest themselves.
Then we went to the Amex booth to have a seat. They wanted to know if I wanted to apply for a card. “Member since 1992,” I said, and the guy with the clipboard said “Awesome” and backed away, like he was in the presence of an ancient master or something. Then we returned to where we’d left Mommy, passing a bandshell with singers dressed in Target Red – they were the sponsors of the fireworks – and my daughter said “Eleanor Rigby, that’s the – oh!” What? She explained that the words sung by the singers had synced perfectly with the timing of the Gold – Bond – Flour blinking up in the sky, and it was just neat, that’s all, nevermind, I can’t explain.
Oh, but I knew what she meant. She’s ten. The world is a big strange wonderful place that’s completely understandable one moment, then throws some small lovely random synchronicity at you the next, and you start to realize that your understanding of things comes from the ability to assemble perception, recombine it, revel in your ability to adjudicate all this stuff. But you can’t say that. Not yet; you nod, and say “Cool.”
Because it is. So we walked on past the clowns – don’t look! Don’t make eye contact! they’ll steal your soul! – past the light-stick vendors, the camera nerds with tripods, the youths sprawled on blankets and old silent folk in folding chairs from 1967, the super-sized families eating nachos, the moms and harried dads with strollers, the goons, the dorks, the tat-slathered hipsters, the motorheads, the heavy-metal enthusiasts, all the people with whom you rarely share anything except the Fair and Target, and then we ended up back where we’d left Mom – who was sitting next to a woman from my office.
Big world. Small world. Dark world: they killed the streetlights when the fireworks began. It was a fine show, and the end – the usual everything-must-go extravaganza – made everyone on either side of the great broad Mississippi roar with primal delight; we leaned back in awe, showered with ash, eyes wide, mouths agape, howling the broad song of YEAAAAAHHHH as the detonations kicked us in the gut and the lights in the sky burned holes in your eyes. The end. From both sides of the river, Twain’s highway, a great yawp of gratitude poured up, and I grabbed my family and said GO.
I’d parked in the StarTribune lot, so beat the crowd, got on the highway, and were heading home in minutes. Stupid 70s disco on the radio; roll down the windows, turn up the radio, and drive. Man, it’s summer.
A very short video of the scenes can be found here. It’s 1:17, and is notable for one thing: it was entirely shot and mostly edited on a phone. Yes, this is the Modern World: you can capture life, trim it during the down time, and have a small movie in your hand before the event is almost over.
That was a grand day out.
Today: the LA Dining 1962 site is beginning to show signs of unexpected depth. I though I would just slap up the pages and leave it at that, but each little ad contains its own tiny secrets, some of which can be teased out of the vast deep of the Internet. Suddenly this project seems like more than scan-and-post; the 1962 Dining Guide is like a Rosetta Stone for explaining a place and time. It’s HERE; enjoy, and I’ll see you at Tumblr and PopCrush.
Pass it along, if you wish
50 Responses to A day in heaven
Host with the Most
_@_v – nice new condo block in second picture from the bottom! from that angle the massing looks a lot like the old canadian bank of commerce in toronto…
http://citynoise.org/article/10176
So I Googled “my ear turned black after I listened to opera after eating prawns” and all I got was a link back to this page…
And the second person to successfully carry off “winner, winner, chicken dinner” is Guy Fieri from Food Network. He’s used it on his show while visiting places known for their-yep, you guessed it-chicken dinners!
I read the first sentence and wondered whether it was the laptop or our Host’s foot that was broken. I guess it was the laptop.
51 dealers in postcards? The economy of hobbies is always fascinating to me. The division of labor not only allows us to find time to collect postcards, but allows some of us to collect and sell postcards to others.
Such a beautiful photo of the city, with river, bridge & foliage in late afternoon light!
Isn’t it nice that when you drop a book on your foot, the book still works?
That must have hurt! You must’ve been dancing around when the computer landed on your foot. Guess you can tell which camp I’m in…
Minneapolis is a lovely city. I went there as a child, but the memories are vague.
Joys of running? I can’t imagine it, though I’ve done my share of it. But I do enjoy long walks. We have many great places to walk here in the Ocean State, especially in Newport, RI, the scenic Cliff walk: http://www.google.com/images?hl=en&q=cliff+walk+newport+ri&um=1&ie=UTF-8&source=univ&ei=WHZNTOnJOZSesQPGlORI&sa=X&oi=image_result_group&ct=title&resnum=5&ved=0CEsQsAQwBA
My husband’s knees are hobbled from too much running. Now, he walks too.
Broke his foot, and then he ran? Did I get that right? I once broke my wrist coming off my bicycle, and then spent the next three months running, and I thought I might take to the sport. But my wrist healed and I was back on the bicycle and never looked back. Running is simply hard to like.
This morning, but not for the first time, I remembered the one thing I ever read in the one cycling magazine I ever cracked open: “Runners long ago surpassed dogs as the chief road hazard to bicyclists.” Amen, I said, and restored it to the library shelf.
So how is the poor laptop?
Oh, and I just have to say how disappointed I am with Mad Men last night — come on AMC, go Hi Def. Otherwise, glad to have you back.
You run to get away from tigers? Any tiger?
Bob
Can you get a solid state drive in the laptop? If you can, why then you could practically throw the laptop around without bumping platters into heads.
Guy Fieri has a new place in Roseville, and one a few miles from my office in Sacramento that I am tempted to go get a chicken dinner from. Just so I could be a winner. In fact, I’ll be in Santa Rosa in a few weeks to replace a server and router… I think I’ve gotten lunch sorted out for that trip.
That is neat when it happens. My nine year old noted that a particular song’s lyric: But your laying down some funky syncopation was out of phase, yet was still in fact sycopated with the original time signature of the melody. “That’s a cool trick, Dad”. Yes Daughter, yes it is. So proud. Sumpthin’ in my eye…
I admire your wife for managing to get you all out of the house to “do things.” I often lament we need to do things, but we rarely do them. They seem to want to know “what” things we should do–and I never really know.
“lovely random synchronicity” Thanks for this. It’s hard to explain such things and have people appreciate them. You either do, or you don’t. And trying to explain them just makes them a little less lovely.
Well, I googled the prawn/opera connection and the only result was this Bleat.
So, I guess it’s not as widespread as I was lead to believe.
One of the best things about The Bleat (and I’ve been a member since 2001) is the interaction between Dad and Daughter. I have two of my own. So, a quick note on the random synchronicity…
Kids are constantly making connections, with about 90% accuracy. (All my stats are made up, by the way.) Very quickly they progress beyond the “hot stove=burned finger” type and move on to things that will astonish you if you listen. But it’s the inaccurate 10% that are really interesting, because when kids are wrong they are spectacularly wrong. Wrong about correlation, wrong about causation, wrong about category…you name it. That’s why kids need to do things with parents who will never jeer at them for being wrong. It may take a trip to a fair for something to come out in conversation on the way home.
There’s one thing kids are never wrong about. If they say something is cool, it’s cool. If they say something is beautiful, it’s beautiful. Simple appreciation in a child can be a step toward good taste, deeper knowledge and more and better connections.
I can’t help but find it interesting that Natalie appears to be familiar with Eleanor Rigby, released in 1966. A 44 year old song. When I was 10 (1974) I very much doubt I could have identified any song from 1930. I’m not entirely certain I could do it now. I wonder what it is about pop music from the late 50′s on that has made it fairly enduring?
Synchronicity: I was out one night sitting around a campfire with some astronomy/planetarium geeks. The sky had a full moon and fast-moving clouds. Someone had brought a boom-box which was playing something by Vangelis, from heaven and Hell, I think–I told you, these guys were astronomy geeks!–and it was synchronizing perfectly with the clouds crossing the moon.
Spooky.
Minneapolis is a beautiful city. We’ve been through it several times enroute from the airport to vacation with friends near Bloomer, WI. Those photos of the old stacks and limestone walls look like the end scenes of Richard III with Ian McKellan as the aforementioned, in my favorite production of that play. Nice photos today, thank you for starting off the week for me so well.
44 year old song. got out of the fitness center today (have you had YOUR fit today?) and there was a very nice yellow 1961 Ford Galaxie in the parking lot. depending on manufacture date, that could be a 50-year-old car.
seven parking lot rows down, there was a late 90s Buick in the lot. rustout under the driver’s door, near-rustout at the rear fender, several tell-tale signs of holes to come elsewhere.
but the paint job was still nice otherwise.
Is the walkway at the mill something recent? The only time I was in the twin cities was 97. I remember the mill, but not the walkway. Love the idea, looks awesome. I loved Minneapolis even though it was early April.
A long time ago, I had the opportunity to move to Minneapolis/St. Paul, and even went so far as to do some research on the place. This was pre-Google, so I must have visited the scrolls down at the emporium. Didn’t go, but every once in awhile, I see a post like this and grow very thoughtful.
@ swschrad
When I was a kid (little kid), I wanted a Galaxie more than anything else. I don’t know why. When I turned 16, my dad bought me a Mercury Montery Marquis and said “it came out of the same factory.”
Well, probably…but just not the same thing!
Ahh, Juanito beat me to the SSD quip. In a couple of years (maybe sooner?) you’ll see a majority of laptops offered with SSD hard drives. If someone does not need a ton of storage, then you can get by with a 100 GB or so hard drive on a laptop.
The entire mass lurched forward, and after 3 seconds I almost bowled over a tiny little girl who was facing the wrong way, crying. So I stopped and formed an Immoveable Shield, and crab-walked her out of the torrent to the sidelines.
.
Something like that deserves at least an honorary SuperHero cape, just worn for ceremonial purposes, of course, as we all know how dangerous capes can be
I’d like to watch the video, but there’s no way I’m putting QuickTime on this machine. It’s kind of like Flash for the iPhone/Pod/Pad.
In other news, if you can put the laptop HD on a windows-based machine, there’s an outside chance that SpinRite would recover enough sectors to allow you to salvage the data from the drive. And I completely agree with the other folks touting the solid state drives, that’s going to be a requirement for my next laptop.
@Brisko: ah, the Monterey. my sister had one. gawdawful carburetor, there are 4-barrel racing carbs smaller than that one, and the top was prone to a bunch of spider cracking in the aluminum. which lost the suction in the unit, and the car was a hog to start and quick to flood. I finally scored the top and epoxied it. that only worked for a year.
sold it to the junkyard, they turned around and sold it to a ne’er-do-well, and the cops were calling my sister for two months because the punk didn’t change the license data.
@Spud: capes aren’t dangerous, you should have one. beware of superpowers, though. with my eye surgery almost a year ago, I got a cane-metal shield to tape on at night for a couple weeks, so I didn’t accidentally paw it all open again.
good news is, it came with superpowers… became Super Fly Eye. bad news is, the superpower was finding steaming piles. can’t avoid politics now. bzzzz.
James, did you really roll down the windows, or did you push a button that caused them to lower?
“I wonder what it is about pop music from the late 50’s on that has made it fairly enduring?”
Perhaps it’s due to the Baby-Boomers.
The Bleat and most Bleatniks = a refreshing, literary breeze that flows through the cube farm in which I reside and makes the morning tolerable.
Some days more than others and today is a fine example.
Love the movie! Love the story-telling! I have a friend flying in tonight from southern California. We met when we were 12. Our 35th HS reunion is this Saturday. I will show her your movie and ask her what part of this beautiful state she wants to see. Tomorrow is wide open. Thanks for continuing to inspire, James!
Just don’t mix up Gold Bond Flour with Gold Bond powder. Just…don’t.
“And the second person to successfully carry off “winner, winner, chicken dinner” is Guy Fieri from Food Network.”
Ya thought wrong, dude.
@Dave: and be sure it’s baking powder, not blasting powder. you can see what it did in the mill’s test kitchens.
_@_v – remember… the baby boomers were the first generation to experience *everything* so their perspective is the only valid one in the universe
Finally watched the video. A little shaky in spots, but I loved it.
Now why can’t my old brain remember the name of the song that James used to accompany his visuals?
Re Pop Crush Lunchbreak: James, you look too thin. Put the Wii down. Now.
@DryOwlTacos: I gotta agree- Mr. Lileks, get rid of the Wii and EAT a sandwich! (How are you going to review Mad Men every Monday if you have to wait for the HD, anyway?)
If not a sandwich, perhaps some sweet potatoes with marshmellow (but swallow it!)- you’ll understand once you see Mad Men in HD…
When I was a kid, there were no “oldies” stations like there are now. It took a pop-music fanatic named Sam Dunn to implant a love of pop hits from the twenties on up on me in junior-high music class in the mid-50′s. I still thank him every time I play the piano.
I often chuckle when I see high-schoolers with a Led Zeppelin or Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt. It’s like wearing a Paul Whiteman or Al Jolson t-shirt during the 70s.
Reasons–as others have said here, all history now seems to start with JFK and the Beatles. Because nothing of any consequence happened before that. Except perhaps the Nazis.
And marketing. Paul Whiteman didn’t have a very good agent.
_@_v – oddly enough the historic preservation movement started getting big enough in the 1970s to replace the urban renewal articles in encyclopedia ‘yearbooks’…
Am I the only one wondering where the photo at the top of the post came from (and why it’s there)?
Orson Scott Card removing the “Gallery Of Regrettable Food” from his mother’s shelf?
_@_v – from the post…
“Because my wife has this strange idea we should get out of the house and do things, we got out of the house and did a thing – attended the fireworks down by the river. First, we went to the Mill City Museum, a flour-centric exhibit installed in the ruins of an old mill.
Love that place. Even more so for the items they had in a cabinet of recipe books, as the image at the top of the page shows.”
When I was 10 in the 60s I would have recognized plenty of old songs from 30 or 40 years before. What is surprising about that? The sources of that knowledge would have been the same then as now – current movies set in the past, old movies set in their present, TV shows, oldies radio stations. The TV variety shows did plenty of old songs in their skits for example. Lawrence Welk did little else.
Back in those ancient times most families had one set and the kids watched what the parents wanted to see. Believe it or not.
There might not have been a lot of young boomers wearing Al Jolson images on their T shirts but there were plenty of fans of old movie stars like Bogart, Cagney, Mae West, Bette Davis, etc.
There were even fans of Beethoven, Mozart, and Bach among the musically inclined.
The song is “Once in a While” by Edwards and Green.
Way back when I was young and adventurous, I explored the then-abandoned Gold Medal Flour building. It had several semi-permanent residents whose personal items were lying around. At least one person was developing pictures in the sub-basement. Another was writing a novel with the recurring them of “I’m not nuts, take me back”.
I still have a fire-alarm sign for the third floor. White metal sign with red lettering, “fire alarm signal three short one long”. Which was one of those weird synchronicity things, since the building was largely gutted by fire, and our party oncluded three short people and one person over 6’6″. Just to bring things full circle.
[...] This does not represent a good practice of synchronizing your application data with the real world: Twice we had ordered a pizza with extra-large pepperoni. Twice it had arrived without the extra large. See, the order is calibrated to hit everyone’s preferences, and my daughter will only have pepperoni, so: her half has pepperoni and extra-large pepperoni. But twice the pizza has arrived without. [...]
Thank you, Mag!!!
That version of “Once in a While” reminded me so much of the lush sound achieved by the Jackie Gleason Orchestra, but I can’t seem to find any evidence to indicate that the JGO ever recorded it.
Spud:
Something like that deserves at least an honorary SuperHero cape, just worn for ceremonial purposes, of course, as we all know how dangerous capes can be
“NO capes, dahlink!”
I’ve repaired two MacBooks myself, thanks to a step-by-step instruction website called Ifixit.com. Hard drives are usually a cinch to replace. Other components are a nightmare due to being installed under about a dozen other components.
Another hassle is that some items, like the new super batteries, require a special tool that apparently can only be sold to repair outfits. You have to adapt other tools to work on this.
I’m impressed by solid state drives, but they’re still too expensive. A solid state 250 GB 2 1/2 inch hard drive for my PC laptop cost me $90. A solid state drive with this size and capacity runs about $800. That won’t be true a few years from now, but it is today.
She explained that the words sung by the singers had synced perfectly with the timing of the Gold – Bond – Flour blinking up in the sky, and it was just neat, that’s all, nevermind, I can’t explain.
I assume after watching the video that you meant Gold Medal Flour. I don’t think I’d want any baked goods made with body or foot powder, although the latter might come in handy for your not-broken foot from the laptop incident.
A few years ago, I dropped my laptop from about waist height, and tried to slow its fall or catch it with my foot. The laptop’s corner struck my left big toe and it broke.
My toe.
I now need a size 10-1/2 left shoe, but only a size 9 for my right, the difference representing the still-swollen joint that had been shattered.
But the laptop was unharmed, at least. (It’s been replaced probably six times over since then.)
It looks like Minneapolis is a beautiful city. I’ll put it on my “visit one day” list. Of course that list is long and may never actually be checked off but I’ll keep it in mind…