 Well, that was a week. Completely different and just the same. Odd how that works out. Odd how normal gets redefined so quickly, how some quirks persist, how new ones reappear. The one thing I’m glad I avoided was the desire to completely manufacture a simulacrum of pre-Brazil normalcy, like nothing happened, and middle-school starts in a few months!!!
No. I was thinking today about how parenthood is like the Flowers for Algernon scenario, in a way, not with the reversion necessarily but with someone who gradually forgets what you remember. You’re lucky if a few references are remembered, and most of those will be remembered because you labored to carry them forward. Which is a good thing! But in the back of my head it’s still 9:30 AM and Rolie Polie Olie is going off the air and it’s time for the opening credits of Stanley, after which the TV goes off.
It’ll never not be 9:30 AM - or better yet, 9:00 AM, when Olie starts! Olie was awesome.
Don’t take this to mean anything; it’s been a blast. It’s been shockingly normal, jarring in its normalcy. As in: what the hell happened?
I’m sure she’ll have that feeling in a few days as well - she got a job at the pavilion by the lake, and will in the coming weeks find herself on a rare slow moment looking out at the water and the sails, feeling the whole Brazilian experience recede just a millimeter, wanting to hold it a bit tighter somehow. You have to be where you are, but it doesn’t mean you can’t occasionally adore where you were.
In fact I recommend it. In fact it’s required.
UPDATE: she came back from a night with friends and we spent an hour making fun of BuzzFeed and scrolling Reddit
It's been a while since I posted a piece of odious, half-literate link chum. I've become numb. This one stuck out:
It’s not as if there isn’t room to show the KN. She gets a what? A knocking? A knickerbocker?
BTW, I can’t turn off all the ads at the bottomunless I pay. Once upon a time there was an option to just show text links, but they realized everyone would use it, and they wouldn’t generate the traffic the picture ads create. Although who, WHO clicks on this stuff, I can’t imagine.
From the Well Axtually lads over at Vox:
Fewer people got drunk and beat up other people. Maybe. The stats are not clear. There was the whole gang thing, but it was blown out of proportion. Yes, it made an entire nation learn to shrug at the law, but other than that, it worked better than you think.
Question is, how well did you think it worked in the first place? I think it did a pretty good job of shutting down every legitimate avenue for alcohol consumption. In fact I think it had a rather robust success rate for that. The failures were deeper and unsustainable. Anyway, he says:
There’s a balancing act to strike. Prohibition had benefits when it came to health and some areas of crime and public safety, but it had a negative impact on pleasure, freedom, and other areas of crime and safety. That’s true in general for alcohol and other drug policy: Policies can impact freedom, pleasure, health, crime, safety, or a combination, but almost always with downsides in one or more of these categories as well — with different effects depending not just on the policy but the type of drug, too. Maybe a higher alcohol tax or some other approach would achieve a better middle ground than Prohibition did.
So we don’t have to go as far as Carry Nation. But we should acknowledge that restrictions on things some of us like can curtail misuse and related public health and safety problems. The question is how far we as a society want to go before taking a hatchet to America’s bars and liquor stores.
“We as a society” obviously don’t want to go anywhere near anything that resembles Prohibition any more. What he wants are higher taxes, which will have a marginal effect on consumption among the troubled, and will reduce social consumption at businesses, leading to economic contraction. It’s like they have this golden gun called TAXES and they marvel that an object of such power has been entrusted to them, - but it’s a good thing they know how to use it. Oh look it has 503 settings! I do believe that #367 will produce the exact result I desire.
“We as a society” is often a hint that one person presumes his individual conclusions or desires extend to a vast nation with hundreds of millions of people.
What got my attention was this:
A snippet of the original, the rights of which I do not own. Hence the obtrusive disclaimer for fair use and all that. You can find the original at the site abou 2/3rds of the way down, and I encourage you to do so: it's pretty damned nifty.
But. The cutline says it’s 1929. Nnnnooo. First of all, the Broadway Trans-Lux theater - the name came from a patented rear-projection system - was opened in 1931. You can tell it’s Broadway because of the neighbors - the Winter Garden on the right, and the Capitol down the block.
This is the approximate location:
Anyway, all you have to do is google the movies. They’re from 1931. Does it matter? YES it matters. The shot is used to illustrate the Jazz Age, and it matters that it’s actually two years after the crash, when supposedly the city was nothing but bread lines and the faded chalk outlines of stockbrokers in the streets.
Hey hey it's our favorite part of a new construction feature: ungodly service core rising from the pit!
It'll get more interesting in about, oh, two months. Don't think I won't keep you up to date on every fascinating girder placement.
Our other two projects are still looking the way they did the last time we looked, but any day now they're going to start to assume their final character.
And now, the penultimate ep, and the last one.
Draw your conclusions carefully, then click here for the solution.
We begin the 2019 review of the music at the Blue Note Cafe.
Every show began the same way, at least during its heyday. The theme, a piano glissando down to the melody playing in the background of the bar, and some fourth-wall breaking with Ethelbert the bartender, Caset the Crime Photographer, and Tony Marvin, the shill.
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After the Casey Chord, you KNOW what's coming
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Is it a Christmas wedding?
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2019 returns to the bins, and the records dumped back into the world when someone dies and the kids give the contents of Mom and Dad's entertainment system to the Goodwill.
From the man who brought you Hell's Bells, an interesting album - that doesn't seem to think it should be an album, but a radio show.
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And once again, dirt's out. |
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That'll do - see you Monday! |
