The Discourse on Twitter / X has concerned the Youth of America Doordashing burritos. This is an offshoot of the recurring complaint about doordashing in general, and how one oughtn't kevtch about affordability and not being able to get ahead if you're paying someone to bring you food. I'm not going to get into that here, except to say I saw this delivered last night and left in the airlock:

 

 

These kids, ordering single cans for delivery - when I was starting a family in 1973 in our four-bedroom rambler, the wife made batches of cola in a galvanized tub and put it up for the winter

A good day, all things considered. Morning work, gym, walk on the Spine, desultory afternoon work, nap - then the sad realization that I did not have enough leftover Crumbled Mexican Chicken for a supper meal. It's a lunch, tops. Well, what else in the freezer needs using up? What have I been avoiding? Ah: the artisanally-spiced breaded cod wedges I bought in a BOGOF, thinking I'd get four meals out of the purchase for $4.99. I am halfway through the box and do not look forward to the forthcoming episodes of cod-wedge consumption.

Did the Aftershow on the Hughniverse, then the Birch walk. The wild turkeys are still there, still wandering around in the same area. I counted nine tonight, the largest number. Idiots, all of them. Birch gave chase and they waddled away clucking in annoyance.

Pause to give the day its due:

 

 

Then back to work.

And now, for no reason other than it's one of the things I've been doing, it's time for things that caught my eye in a mid-50s architecture magazine.

It's Richmond's turn: the old department store to get an aluminum jacket.

 

 

Even prisons have windows.

Defunct and razed.

Oh, speaking of which: a story in three parts, taken from a Google Street View trip I took while looking for something else. The Union Carbide Building:

 

 

This may look like every other rote International Style skyscraper put up in the 50s, and that's because it does. Lead architects were Bunshaft and Natalie de Blois at SOM, and even though Bunshaft gets top billing I think it's accepted that this is her work. You might say: what could possibly be the different if Bunshaft had designed it? They all look alike. Yes. But. There's something about the proportions and simplicity of this one. It had an elegant effect. I liked it.

A half-century and change later:

 

 

It was the tallest building in the world that was "voluntarily demolished."

Now:

 

 

The JP Morgan building. I'm not a big fan.

Say, pal, got any more of those colorized mid-50s interiors? Why yes.

AI added nothing, except color, and some sharpening. It still looks too good to be true.

 

 

I don't think they ever had William Conrad over, and if they did, he probably never got into the kitchen.

More severe suburban modernism:

 

The architects and designers loved that chair. It was intended to tell you everything you needed to know about the forward-facing tastes of the host, just as the paintings signified tradition.

From a feature on shopping centers:

 

 

They loved the skinny unadorned poles.

I've also been colorizing pictures from the 1939 and1940 editions. Schraft's, in New York:

 

 

Larger version here.

Other odds and ends:

     
  Saw this at Petco. Leaving aside the nonsensical concept, I was amused to see an old friend back to work.
     

You know you've been around the internet and design and typefaces a long time if you instantly said "Font Diner Sparkly." It's roughly the same age as this site - but I don't think I've ever used it.

Let's see, anything else . . . oh lord, I have chumjunk and bad Chinese ads in the misc folder. Well, everything must go.

We're internet readers. This one thing really bothers people who are tired to their pith with vagueposting come-ons.

 

They're really annoyed when you attach a styrofoam red arrow to your coffee cup with a small wire, and sit in the lobby hoping people notice you.

Amazon Krep:

 

 

As Wikipedia notes in its biography of Ernst Mach, "The ratio of the speed of a fluid to the local speed of sound vp/vs is called the Mach number after him," but I don't think that's applicable here.

A Decade Engineer Excellence:

 


Look, it was awarded the Authentic High Quality Original Thing for unleashing spotless homes! Previously, spot-free homes were on a tight tether!

I confess to buying these - from someone. Might not have been everyone's favorite long-standing sponge purveyor, Zit-tle-Gee.

 

 

I lost the rest of it, but if I recall its claims, it insisted that their passionate engineers worked tirelessly to make cleaning the good of thing to healthy your home and family, ot something like that. They're sturdy sponges, and cheap, too. Scrubbing power isn't impressive. Nothing beats a ScotchBrite.

 

 

 

  
   

 

 

I was at a restaurant, it was some sort of special gala event, and I guess the idea was that you showed up and then they put you in a limo and drove you around and fed you steak in the limo. Before I got in the limo, I decided to use the bathroom, but my surprise the bathroom was actually an elevator and it started going up while I was trying to do my business.

I went back to the restaurant and found two people had passed out from doing nitrous oxide, which is apparently part of the process of the driving-around-and-getting-steak. I declined to do so.

A little later, I was on my bike downtown, trying to get back to the steak party place and I was stuck in an alleyway waiting for the light. A drunk came up and started bothering me, and I had to tell him to stop bothering me. He nodded and went away and fell down and then crawled towards me on his hands and knees, and I had to put my shoe on his head and push it into the alley wall and kindly stated that he should not bother me anymore. He was wearing headphones, so I’m not sure he heard me. Hanging over the entire dream It was a sense of disappointment that I hadn’t really spoken much with a woman for whom I had a great passion – apparently we would really gotten along well the previous year when this whole group got together, like a convention, but this year we’d hardly said anything to each other at all.

 

 

 

 

The worst opening 30 seconds we've seen this year.

"Not now Robert"

 
 

Very '86 song, though.

He's still around but he doesn't seem very happy about the fact.

 

That will do. I thank you for bearing with me this week. Substack for the paying customers around 11, and as ever, thank you for your patronage. Have a grand weekend.