what about the plastic animals?

Miss Bellows Falls

Another photo from August 2006.  I know you shouldn't judge a book by its cover, but I'm pretty sure a diner as pretty as the Miss Bellows Falls would have to serve up a good daily special.  I didn't eat here because a) I had just had an ice cream at the Dari Joy up the street, b) Curtis' BBQ was only a few miles away in Putney, and c) the Miss Bellows Falls was closed for the day.

I've been spending too much time on the computer this week and I really wanted to not use it tonight, but then I saw the Classic Post-Punk Music Videos page and I was hooked for waaay too long.

Bridge of Flowers

Let's take a trip on the wayback machine!  To clear up space on my MacBook I've been burning photos to CDs (they're already backed-up to an external hard drive) and deleting them.  In doing so I was reminded of a whole bunch of photos from a trip I took to Vermont and Massachusetts in August 2006.

The Bridge of Flowers is located in Shelburne Falls, MA.  The bridge was built in 1908 to carry a trolley across the Deerfield River.  The trolley shut down 20 years later. Since the town's water main ran across it, the town quickly bought the bridge.  Private money was raised by the next year to plant the 400 ft. span with flowers.  The Bridge of Flowers is mostly maintained by volunteers.  I doubt it looks all that great in late-November, but it sure was pretty in August.

Beneath the falls there is an excellent example of glacial potholes, where rocks embedded at the bottom of a glacier grind out holes in the bedrock.  Elsewhere in town is the only remaining trolley car (restored) from the bridge, a few really nice used bookstores, a great-looking old movie theater that I wanted to see a movie in but I was there at noon and couldn't stay 'til evening, and a deli/health food store where I bought a tasty chicken sandwich.  There were also several art galleries and artsy-craftsy stores.

Some Entries are More Random than Others

I may have reached a level of Fairway insiderdom this evening.  There I was at the deli counter, number in hand, waiting patiently for the people holding numbers lower than mine to be served.  A deli guy looks at me and asks what I want.  I politely protested that there were people in line ahead of me.  The deli guy looked at the people I had pointed at, shrugged and asked me what I wanted.  Half a pound of roast beef.

While at Fairway I must have had a dairy craving.  I bought milk, butter, sharp cheddar, mild cheddar, gouda and romano cheese.  All but the romano are going into a mac and cheese extravaganza.

Is it Christmas yet?  You can sign up for their RSS feed for daily updates.

The lion above doesn't actually look like that.

Bondo Beauty

Not too much original body work remaining on this old Dodge Dart Swinger.

Black Friday Update

A couple of years ago, Marie, of Disarranging Mine fame, asked when Black Friday became Black Friday.  I did a quick search and found that the popularity of calling the day of shopping after Thanksgiving Black Friday really started increasing around 2002.  I didn't pay much attention to Black Friday last year because I was too busy being a Thanksgiving host.  This past weekend, however, found me lazing about at my father's, watching too much television.  It was non-stop Black Friday coverage by Syracuse tv news so I re-did my search.

In the intervening two years Lexis-Nexis changed their search tool, so the absolute numbers are way different even if the patterns are the same.  What I did this year was search for the phrase "black friday" occurring in headlines and lead paragraphs of U.S. newspapers for each November since 1991 (Note:  In 2005 the search over November and December resulted in fewer hits).  I removed duplicates and articles that included the phrase but were talking about something completely unrelated.

The results are slightly different this year.  There was a slow, unsteady rise from no mentions of "black friday" in 1991 to 85 hits in 2003.  Hits jumped about 80% from 2003 to 2004 and doubled the year after that.  The numbers for this year are current through whatever Lexis-Nexis had indexed through yesterday afternoon and are bound to rise by the end of the month.

By skimming the headlines you do see an interesting pattern.  Through the 1990s almost every article is a business article about the importance of the day to retailers.  The increasing number of Black Friday stories beginning around 2000 is due mostly to more news reports about shoppers descending upon stores and malls.  The big jump in 2004 is mainly from newspapers grasping the zeitgeist and getting proactive.  Lifestyle sections start doling out consumer hints, shopping strategies, and the rare cautionary story about not spending beyond your means, before the big day.

Curiously, the first appearance of a news item about Black Friday being so over was in 1999.

Curmudgeonly articles about the evils of shopping as a means to emotional fulfillment have slowly increased in the past several years as well.  They probably number less than a dozen this year.  Maybe that'll be the trend next year after the economy tanks!

Carver

My father had one official duty this Thanksgiving - carve the turkey.  I had no official duties other than eat to excess and watch many episodes of How is That Made? or whatever that show is called on the Science Channel.

It was a good trip.  I got to see a bit of snow and some cold weather.  My back still isn't 100 percent so I had to make a couple of extra stops to walk around and loosen up.  In doing so I got to see a lot of the upstate New York towns of Liberty, Marathon, Cortland, Deposit and Hancock.

Sunset Over Hoboken

Ack!  I don't have any Thanksgiving themed photos.  The sunset over Hoboken as seen through a chain link fence will have to do. 

Happy Thanksgiving everyone!  I'll be in upstate New York, eating turkey and staying away from the internet for a few days.

Smells Like...

One day over the summer I was enjoying a helping of takoyaki, Japanese octopus dumplings, in the little park by St. Mark's Church in the Bowery.  There were a couple of sidewalk booksellers along 2nd Avenue so I walked over to see what was available.  If you're not familiar with New York there are a lot of people that set up tables to sell books, new and used, around town.  I found this 1930s-era biography of John James Audubon that looked interesting.  Plus it had several color plates of Audubon's paintings. 

The bookseller examined the book and said it was a good read.  He started "I think this is..."

He halted.

He stuck his nose into the binding and inhaled deeply.

"Yes, this is from Ira Goldberg's estate in Bay Ridge."

I guess if you make your living buying used books in estates your nose becomes fine tuned to the aroma of used books. To me it had that standard slightly musty old book smell. 

The book is on my coffee table, patiently waiting for me to be in the mood to read it. 

Last week I managed to read How to Survive a Robot Uprising and Journey into Mohawk Country.  The latter is a graphic novel treatment of early Dutch settler Harmen Meyndertsz van den Bogaert's journal as he traveled west from Fort Orange (present day Albany) to Oneida Lake in order to strengthen trading ties with the Mohawks.

van den Bogaert was 23 when he made that journey in 1634.  He would later be an active member of Nieuw Amsterdam.  Perhaps too active.  For a while he owned a share of a pirate ship which he joined on one of its plunderings of the Caribbean.  In 1647 van den Bogaert was caught in the act with a young slave boy.  In a Calvinist Dutch colony such actions were a capital offense.  van den Bogaert escaped northward into Mohawk country.  He was eventually caught, escaped again, and drowned in the icy waters of the Hudson.  The judge in his sodomy trial was going to be none other than Pieter Stuyvesant.   

To bring this little story full-circle, St. Mark's Church in the Bowery, where I ate my octopi and bought the Audubon biography is on the site of Stuyvesant's estate and is where old Pegleg Pete is buried.

The Other White Meat

Pork.

Regun Theatre

You would never guess it is an old building but according to PropertyShark, the building that houses the fish market across the street from my apartment was constructed around 1913, possibly earlier.  One bored evening this summer I came across a Flickr photo of the storefront.  The picture is crap but the photographer is a movie house buff.  In an earlier life the Sea & Sea Fish Market was the Regun Theatre.

The Regun Theatre is known to have operated between 1916 and 1950.  On May 22nd, 1923 the theater hosted Annie Mathew's "Kiddies' Day", an event sponsored by the Register of New York County.  It was estimated that over 3000 children saw two performance that day.  According to the Times the kids were treated to "a first-class orchestra" as well as showings of "Daddy's Boy" and "The Little Church Around the Corner".  The highlight of the day was a performance by "Miss Rita Hogan, the youngest child actor in the "movies" who sang and danced for them [the kids] at both performances".

A couple months later the Regun was involved in an ugly incident next door.  The Regun screened movies on the roof during the summer.  The July 12th, 1923 issue of the Times reports that Jacob London, owner of the two six-story walk-up tenements next door filed suit against a number of his tenants.  The tenants, Mr. London alleged, were inviting friends over to watch the movies next door from the roof of their building.  Actually he asked for a restraining order to prevent his tenants from

congregating on the roof at any time to witness moving picture performances; from holding meetings or assemblages on the roof; from gathering collectively ion the roof for social or amusement purposes; from occupying windows connected with the common halls to witness moving picture performances; from inviting, soliciting, encouraging or urging persons to assemble with them, either on the roofs or in the hall windows to witness moving picture performances or for any unlawful purpose...

Up to 200 a night were congregating on the roof, possibly causing the roofing to sag.  The headline of that article is "Brings Suit to Keep Tenants Off Roof".  The scanner must have had a hard time distinguishing U from H as the headline in ProQuest when I did the search was "Brings Shit to Keep Tenants Off Roof".  Anyway...

A shorter article a day later sheds a more familiar light on the situation.   Max Klein an attorney for the tenant claimed that the landlord was using the roof issue as an excuse to get rid of the tenants.  The tenants named in the suit had lived in the building for 6-10 years and were protected from increases by rent laws.  Mr. Klein said the landlord was trying to get rid of the tenants so he "could get new ones who would have to pay $15 to $20 a month more" in rent.

On June 24th, 1930 five Hispanic men were arrested after they tried to storm the Regun in protest of its showing of "Under a Texas Moon", directed by Michael Curtiz. who later directed "Casablanca", and the first western filmed in color.  The news article is sketchy on details but it refers to the neighborhood, which was primarily Jewish at the time of the rooftop lawsuit, was now a "Latin-American colony".  On the night of the arrests about 100 protesters marched upon the theater carrying placards that read "Down With Under a Texas Moon.  It is a reflection on the women of Latin America."

The most recent article concerning the Regun that I could find in the Times was on November 10th, 1936.  Four people were injure when plaster fell from the ceiling of the theater.  The rooftop projection booth (the article says the building had formerly shown outdoor movies) sat on iron stilts.  The stilts rusted away from lack of maintenance and gave way on the night in question.  About 150 moviegoers "stampeded from the auditorium".  The story did not mention what movie was playing.