Snow! I'm being happy about it. There is no other option.
Well, there's being unhappy about it, I suppose.
Thursday felt like Friday, possibly because I was expecting Friday to be shut down or difficult, snow-wise. This empty winter has made weaklings of us all.
A good week, even though it concludes in cold. I had some good numbers at work, online. I always feel like I'm in a 50s corporate hell-tale when I mention that - Johnson! Get those numbers up for Q2! Push push push! I got some TV in, had a lackluster gym week thanks to the pervasive backache but I went, daily, and ran extra. I tweeted. I napped. I made good dinners. Worked on the book.
And came up with a new idea for a reality TV show: Hoarders, but in reverse. Bizarro-world Hoarders. People who love clutter and disorder visit the houses of people who have everything neat, clean, and perfect, and challenge them. Push their boundaries. How would you feel if we just set this Target back full of random impulse purchases here, for a year?
I'm really not comfortable with that
I hear what you're saying, but can you tell me why? If I set six empty hand-lotion bottles on top of this stack of computer magazines from 1996, would that make you feel the same?
I'm really feeling pressured right now (leaves the room; dramatic music; family members exchange tense glances)
At the end of the show the house is completely stuffed with things and the occupant is sleeping on one-third of a bed that's piled with clothes
Now, something stupid and random and possibly boring. I was researching a matchbook (for 2025) and I thought the exterior was the Bowery Bank on 42nd street in NYC. It was not, as it turned out, but when I dropped the little wiggly guy on the Google Street View . . .
Which is where? "Grand Central Offices." Google Street View except it's inside. You can walk around. Above you see the ugly elevator waiting room, with "Deco" wallpaper. You can head down the hallway which does not at all look like a river of baby poop . . .
And peer into the empty Executive Offices! You know you've made it when you have a window office in busy, exciting Manhattan:
WINDOWS ARE FOR WINNERS
GET THOSE NUMBERS UP JOHNSON
If you can make it here you'll make it annnnywhere
The outside.
It's always been a favorite. That great churchy entrance portal, which leads to a magnificent banking hall. A fellow could walk in a room and feel like a king because he had $47.34 in the bank, and a little book to prove it.
The adjacent structure. Back in the days they'd just build a few floors. Now they'd put up 39 stories.
Is that preferable to an interchangeable International Style facade? Matter of taste. Although yes, objectively and empirically, it is preferable. This is a means of transmitting the visual virtues and carrying civilization forward from past to the future.
On the other side of the building, 41st street:
That's the back door.
None of this was necessary. It's all a gift.
A vast NYC train station, for which my wife is showing uncharacteristic urban enthusiasm. We have to take the train to some small town to make a connection. I’ve no idea what the purpose of the visit was supposed to be, but I went to the ticket machine and inserted my card. There were other people in line who wanted to get tickets and were angry at me using a card; they were just waving their phones to get tickets. I got one ticket then realized I should get another, and reinserted the card. The printer began to make dozens of copies of a ticket, and jammed. I opened it up and saw a thick stack of copies of the tickets as well. I took them sheepishly, and left.
Then we were in a dilapidated department store that doubled as the train station for the connecting leg of the journey. It was apparent they made most of their money from the jumble of items they had in the waiting area, and nothing else in the store mattered very much.
That’s when I woke.
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
The prompt for the week's banners was just 60s art style, bar scene, happy people. It all has a yellow, sunny cast. For some reason.
"Let's go to that place where I'm up on the wall!"
"Oh I know that place"
After a while it went early 60s, and also Weimar:
The AI can't intuit drinking or smoking. People have two glasses and often point the lit end of the cigarette the wrong way.
Did Lance just say something wrong and Lors just DONE with him tonight?
And that's it for Fridays! Ha ha kidding, of course it's not.
Last year I cut out the tunes, but heck, why not bring them back. We'll be counting down the bottom 50 songs as listed by Whitburn. It'll be fun! Stuff you've never heard. A grab-bag of styles.
Someone, Brian Poole and the Tremeloes. Sweet little slow-dance number.
By the late 1960s, Poole was unable to keep up his reputation and spent most of the 1970s out of the music business working in his brothers butcher shop. He eventually went from employee to owner of the shop after his brother suddenly dropped ownership of the business: “My brother asked me to mind the shop one afternoon, he went out and never came back”.
Poole states that comedy duo Cannon and Ball persuaded him to return to music: “I went to see Cannon and Ball at Great Yarmouth and they saw me in the audience, stopped the show and said I should be back in the businesses where I belonged. I talked about it to the wife all the way home and decided I was going back.”
Poole had thoughts of retiring again in the early 2000s, but was also talked into staying in the industry, this time by the late Gerry Marsden of Gerry and the Pacemakers. Since then, he remains active, mainly touring either as a solo artist or in a 1960s nostalgia tour.
He is 82.
Now we're done. Thanks for your visit, and I'll see you Monday, with a Diner, and plenty of variations on our old familiar topics. Thanks for your visits, and we'll see you on the other side of the weekend delights.
