I’ve been supplementing the audio of the Peg Lynch podcasts with visuals - old pictures, clippings, ads, and so on. Some come from her archives. Some I’ve found in old newspapers. I would like to direct your attention to this ordinary page from the Daily News, March of 1945:

Gasoline Alley, and three columns. About 2000 words. On one page. You got your money’s worth.

The OCR was confused by the layout, and kept combining the Broadway and Hollywood columns. The result is interesting.

Yes, Mike Todd has his peepers
I wish
he'd
take
mother
peep
on the Ritz Brothers.
at Lieut.
Cecil
Fisher s
play, "Hit the Bottle."

I did not expect this at all: the Broadway column is entirely war news. Start to finish. You wonder if the editors caught on. Hey, Danton, didn’t we hire you to cover theater? Aren’t there any plays you can do?

Sullivan’s all over the place. The last practitioner of the three-dot style was Larry King, and he wasn’t good at it. The style is impossible to define, but you know when it works.

Walter Pidgeon is fussing the models, and there are enemy subs off the Jersey coast.

Note how the “English women have had enough” story has to be broken up by the three dots, because otherwise it’s too large an item.

We should bring these back, no? But only in newspapers. Print versions. Every day.

The movie ads are familiar to anyone who’s studied the period. I’m always interested interested in this one, because it was such a grind-the-gears reinvention:

What’s the analogue today? Elton John as James Bond?

Note how the author isn’t mentioned at all. The character isn’t mentioned. They’re not telling you he’s playing Marlowe, because half the guys wouldn’t buy it.

I don’t think he works in the role, because he doesn’t have the presence one associates with Marlowe. But why is that? Is it because we associate him with Bogey, and think he was big? He wasn’t. Does the book leave us with the impression that Marlowe was big? I don’t remember, but we wanted to think of him that way: presence, and strength in reserve.

It doesn’t work if he actually looked like Chandler.

Oh, I suppose I should explain why there was a hiatus. I'm here!

Romantic and scenic!

The flight was - oh, who cares. Customs was interesting, as there was a “speedy” line that required an E-Passport. I am quite sure I do not have an E-Passport. It seemed to confound all who entered. While we waited in the line I saw ads for the Tourist Tax, which All Must Pay. It’s been in place since 2020 or so. Never heard of it. Never paid it. Never had a problem leaving the country. We’ll see. Supposedly it’s for the Ecology. Well, the hotel desk charged an Eco-Tax as well, once they -

Well, rewind. After we got through customs and got our bag and strolled SO NONCHALANTLY past the dogs, it was into the hellish scrum.

I regularly use the most generic company possible: Cancun Airport Transportation. There was no dude with the sign or shirt, so I walked to where we met them last time. No. A helpful guy said they were in bays 84 - 85; they were not. Another helpful dude said they were in the 20s. They were not. Also, it was raining. But that’s not a bad start, because it rains and then it doesn’t. The forecast says it’s supposed to be cloudy and rainy all week. I don’t believe it. Anyway, another helpful guy said he was in bay 12, so I went there, even though it was full of big buses. Indeed, there he was. He took our information and told us “five minutes,” Mexican for “probably, eventually.”

The ride gets shorter every time. I recognize these places now. Shall we take a little tour of the vernacular commercial design of a less prosperous part of the town? I'll skip the nice modern stuff and the big resorts.

The Plaza De Toros: At some point they realized it could be completely smothered in ads, and nothing would be missed.

Psycho Clown Supersonico . . . Junior? There's a wikipage for the original.

The other seems to be a junior as well.

I just liked this shot. (These are all from video, so quality varies.)

No one, no matter what size, is gettin' in here:

This I found a bit alarming, because it suggests that the world is not real, and the computer simulation sprayed the color texture at a certain height due to sloppy programming:

Ay y yi, tire rim muy stupido, go in corner and wear the dunce hat:

He's not listening

I know we've seen this before. Color placement is . . . idiosyncratic, but I wish more things here looked like this.

What happened here, you and I will never know:

Always love this landmark:

This will stand for another hundred years!

Around the corner:

Compare this to all the old brick Masonic temples we see. American versions didn't go for poorly scaled columns and boastful gold, but perhaps if they'd come along later, they might have.

But probably not.

Isn't there a Tarot card about a tower that falls down, or something?

Bags on hooks because . . . there were hooks, in want of something to do? Note the rebars, suggesting the intention to build another floor. Some day.

This has to be the old part of town, in place before Cancun was, uh, reimagined as a tourist destination.

I was just reading about Chet Baker in a novel, as it happens. Also, inflatable Feliz!

Day and night, men in white coats peer at beakers, inventing new varieties of Diesel!

An ordinary scene. We're about to leave the town and head into the jungle.

Wonder if I can find it. (Not yet.)

Wonder if any of these places have google reviews. (Later: Yes)

After 45 minutes, we arrive.

At the gate there was confusion, because they couldn’t find our reservation. Always my fear. I had made and cancelled a reservation, then rebooked, but had been double-checking fortnightly to ensure there wasn’t screw up. And now, they have nothing.

Well. I showed them all my reservations on the phone. They still couldn’t find it, but let us through to deal with the guy at reception. Eventually we found a mangled version under my wife’s name, so I now have an Italian name for the whole trip.

Annnnd we're here.

Up to the room, same as ever. Off to the lobby bar, and . . .

The bartender remembered me! Because I was the guy who came in the afternoon with a laptop and had coffee. That’s a delight. I remembered him, too, but I don’t see a hundred faces a day. He came up with a big smile and said “welcome back, I remember you,” and he grinned and pointed to my face and his, the universal language of recollected visages, I guess.

Hungry, with dinner hours away, we went to the Sports Bar, which has sports-bar food. There would be something out, said Kevin at the front desk. (Kevin tried to sell us memberships the first trip. Nice guy.) Eventually some cold hot dogs were rolled out by a four-foot tall stout old woman who is inevitably described as “stolid.” She laid out a variety of nacho toppings and we fell to it. All was well.

Dinner in the Thai restaurant that had been such a disaster our first trip. It was very good this time. I reminded Wife that we are on cruise ship rules: order as many appetizers as we wish, and we don’t wish to finish them, we need not. It’s all free!

Piacere for an underwhelming dessert and good coffee, then to Aqua for the nightcap. AS EVER. AS ALWAYS. Ordered my usual tequila, and within a few minutes we fell into conversation with a voluable fellow and his daughters and taciturn wife. Great people. He was in many things, but real estate; she had been a Lumber Broker. Well, they were from Canada. Daughter was a website and graphic designer, so we started chatting about that, and eventually I’m calling up lileks.com and showing her things, and when we get to Motels she said that her dad used to own one.

And here it is:

I got talking with the Dad about other things, and as these things usually go, a statement is made to sense the boundaries of the conversation, until we realize we’re on the same page and then it’s a festival of ideological agreement. Bed at a decent hour . . .

AND UP early, because there was a good breakfast to have! But there, as ever, may troubles began. That’s tomorrow.