Made a Tangine tonight. Had no idea what a tangine was, but now I know it’s a Moroccan dish named after the pot in which it was cooked. What’s for dinner? Pot. Aw we had pot last night. Can’t we have some kettle?

It was delicious, eventually. Daughter helped me make it, and the reason we are cooking together and making food that is not horrible is because I’m using one of those meal-delivery services that puts a box on your steps and hopes you open it up before everything inside goes rotten.

The previous meal was a cod stew with lots of chopped things, and of course I had to chop. This weekend’s task: sharper knives. All my knives have low IQ. The biggest is capable of halving a potato if you hit the spud hard and shout HASSAM, CHOP! (name that reference in the comments, if you like.) The cod stew was mostly potato, though. Sufficient cod to earn the name, but man, so many potatoes.

Started the second recipe tonight. It called for a potato. I didn’t have a potato. I realized I had used all the potatoes for the cod stew, which explained its chunky spudiness - but now I needed a potato. Singular. Set daughter to chopping and rice-making and sped to the store.

Sixty-eight cents for a 1-lb. potato. Building in transportation costs, overhead, profit for the grower, middleman, and grocery store, that’s a damned cheap thing. In 1913 people had to work an entire day to earn a potato. And their job consisted of growing potatoes. If they pocked one, they were beaten - which meant you had to have it mashed, I suppose. Chives on top? Chives were for Rockefellers.

I mentioned a video yesterday: well, here you go. Found this while going through old YouTube TV news shows from the 80s to extract the ads, as is my wont. They’ll be part of the 80s site, which will come along as soon as I have enough material - the magazines of the 80s aren’t very interesting, or look too similar to modern iterations, or are just too familiar to me. It’s fun to design the pages, though. I love the 80s. I loved them while they happened. I was less appreciative of the 90s, which in retrospect seems like an extended vacation, but at the time was fraught with strange undercurrents of unease. But that’s a different Bleat.

Behold, 1985: Newspaper Noir.

I showed this around the office. One person got the voice right away. My paper, pitched by him: perfect.

To explain the Bleat Banner for this week: you may have noticed how it moved from left to right. It came from a series of pictures I was doing about opposite sides of the street. How you'd conclude one thing about a downtown based on this . . .

. . . and something else entirely based on this.

The truth of the street, of course, is that it's both. If you turn around 180 degrees, you get this:

An entirely different character - tall, bright, spacious, colorful (Within the narrow pallette of American cities, anyway.) The tallest building is where I work. How I love it.

If you wouldn't mind indulging me, I'd like to give you some other shots of my fair city in lieu of Detritus and Construction. Not everything has to be just the way it was last week, you know.

Outside my building, looking towards the core. In the foreground, a perfect 60s International Style building; in the middle, a perfect 20s ofice tower; in the background, a late 20th century blue-green glass tower that holds its own quite well.

Reflections from the window spoil this one, bit I still like the way it all lines up. The lower triangular portion looks like it's level with the sidewalk, but of course it isn't.

This is a block away.

That white line is the east side of the glass building. It's two blocks behind the stone building in front. Figure that out.

The view from one of our conference rooms.

For scale, look at the small grey building that's right above these words. The old Daytons store. It turned into Macy's, and now it's closing. Macy's did a lousy job of making the store seem necessary or special, and while its loss is "keenly felt," as they say, it wasn't the proud retailing icon it had been. At least the second floor was busy and cosmopolitan, since it had skyway traffic flowing around the perfume counter with their bored and beautiful women.

In the foreground, the Baker building, whose website I just discovered had three bad links; I weep at my failures. (Fixed now.) In between, a blunt and unadorned building whose past beauty is suggested by the trim on the service core room atop. It has classical details. They weren't visible when it was built, but they did those things out of civic obligation, or just private pride. When they overhauled the building they left the details along, because no one would see them from the street. But we see them now.

PINNED: 2017 examines the innumerable custom music cues of a show whose rise and fall was unique . . . and yet not unique at all.

		A standard sweet piece of 40s fluff - with something unusual at the end. Very unusual.

		From the next show; same sitatuion. Eventually there would be a unique theme for Mr. Peavey, indicating we were going to his drugstore. What sound do you hear at the end? Now play the previous clip once more.

		This I can't explain: it's not as if they went to the composer and said "show's going to run a little sort - whip up something, would you?

		Not a cue, but a wartime PSA. A message importnat enough they had to have it made on the highly-rated shows. No shoes.

		1975: where are they now?

		It's like a frame from "Wild Wild West." All shootouts began this way: a guy's casually reaching for his gun while someone else plays guitar.

About Mr. G:

During the Depression, Gould, while a teenager, worked in New York City playing piano in movie theaters, as well as with vaudeville acts. When Radio City Music Hall opened, Gould was hired as the staff pianist. By 1935, he was conducting and arranging orchestral programs for New York's WOR radio station, where he reached a national audience via the Mutual Broadcasting System, combining popular programming with classical music.

He had quite a varied career, and ended as a Resident Guest Composer / Conductor" at the Disney Institute in Orlando. And that's where he died.

I can think of worse places.

		The end-of-show aphorisms. Simple country wisdom!They used them to fill up time. But this time they had time enough to say there wasn't enough time.

Had enough? There's more! Now I'll go write some more pages for you to enjoy down the road. Have a fine weekend.