Friday « Kenny Smith | A remarkable thing happens …

Friday

Friday / photo — Comments Off
30
Aug 19

Phewwwww

During Ralph Parker’s cubist phase, he drew a lot of inspiration from his brother, Tommy Parker’s work in parking deck stairwells:

Ralph Parker is a misunderstood genius, sure, but everyone around the Parker family knew that Tommy was where it should have started. And probably it was Tommy where it should have stopped, as well. But only after he finished the job.

I understand paint swatches, but this is a public building, which means the personal investment of pretty much everyone is reduced. So this isn’t about determining the proper shade of gunmetal to use when considering the morning sun comes in from yonder window.

Sometimes just enough might not be enough, though. I bet they didn’t even take a carpenter’s square to the corners to make sure they hit this at 90 degrees.

The square in a rectangle is an evocative look, I must say.

Eventually some white hat vandal — Those are still a thing, right? They’re still around? — will figure out if they scrawl nonsense on the whole wall then, some 18 months later, everything will get painted.

And that’s really all I have to say about today, which is mercifully behind us. We have some company coming in later tonight to spend the weekend, which will be lovely. So bring on the three-day.

I hope yours is lovely.

adventures / Friday / music / video — Comments Off
23
Aug 19

Rockin’ on

Today was a delightful and light day. We drove down to one of the family haunts yesterday for the weekend’s festivities. My sister-friend, my friend-sister Elisabeth — we need a term for someone you meet under the oddest of circumstances who decides to keep you for so many years, and who wants you to them around too — and her husband flew in the other day. People have come in from all over, really.

I had a phone call and a teleconference, which isn’t too bad for a day you take off from work, I guess. They happened at virtually the same time, so, really, you could call it multitasking, which is pretty great for an off day.

I did get to sleep in, which is excellent. And there was a late breakfast, a brunch, really, if we need to be specific. And we should be as specific as possible in as many places as possible. We had dinner at the local Mexican restaurant. I hear it is merely OK, but I enjoyed my fajita enchilada. Probably it was the cheese.

We went to listen to some music after dinner. Dueling pianos don’t get enough credit for their easy entertainment potential.

The personality and the enthusiasm was more important than the soaring solos. There were, I counted, six different performers, and they all just cycled through the full array of instruments they had on stage: two pianos, a handful of different guitar set ups, a small drum kit. And they were a pretty talented bunch. It was nice because two or three of them would play, and the others went … elsewhere … and then they would one at a time rotate off. They didn’t take any set breaks. There wasn’t a lot of inane chatter. They just played covers and everyone there enjoyed themselves pretty well. The lady singing at the beginning of the clip might have been the best performer of the bunch. Sadly the audio of her singing didn’t carry over as well as it should. They were taking requests, as they do in a dueling piano setup, and I tried thinking up the most ridiculous songs I could challenge them with, figuring, They must get bored playing the same tunes every show.

They played four of them: Country Roads, Enter Sandman and the like. It was a nice evening, which is especially great for a day off.

Friday / IU — Comments Off
16
Aug 19

Happy National Tell A Joke Day

It is National Tell A Joke Day. (Should that be in all caps? How does national tell a joke day look, in comparison?) Did you know it was National Tell A Joke Day? This is one of those holidays that always sneaks up on me. But, fortunately, I caught it just in time.

I asked Siri to tell me some jokes to mark the occasion, because that’s what one does these days. I think I asked for 15 jokes, and these are the best eight of the bunch. These jokes, then, are the second best part of my day:

Now to put this in my calendar so I don’t miss it next year.

adventures / family / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off
9
Aug 19

Travel day

Well we made it. Despite the rescheduling of yesterday — apparently several days of storms had thrown off the air traffic patterns of the eastern seaboard and they only needed the one more night, and the passage of one line of storms last evening, to reset the process — and a lot of choppy, bouncy turbulence today, we made it to New York City.

Meaning Laguardia Airport, which is precisely the same amount of mess we left it in our last visit. They say it will be completed in 2022. I say when have you ever known a massive project to hit its target. And, Laguardia is a massive project. The signage also says uplifting things about a better tomorrow, but you’re smarter than all of that. We’re all just hoping it isn’t as bad as today out there.

From a design standpoint this is a fascinating puzzle. How do you rebuild one of the nation’s busiest airports (20th, it turns out) while keeping it one of the nation’s busiest airports? It’s a dreadful experience today, but make it better. You can’t example implode the buildings and start over. You can’t add extra land (it covers 680 acres). You can’t move those 30 million annual passengers someplace else.

So across the Throgg’s Neck Bridge and up the coast of the Long Island Sound. Throgg’s Neck is named after an early 17th century settler, John Throckmorton. It was a Dutch to English name thing, as best I can tell. Anyway, the Bronx and New York grew up around it. And we were on our way out of New York to summer on the Gold Coast, or at least have a weekend with the in-laws.

We used to summer on the Gold Coast here in beautiful Connecticut, but now we are busier, I guess. This year we are having a long weekend and celebrating two important birthdays. So tonight we had a delicious Italian dinner at a local favorite.

I had the chicken marsala, which was great because so far today I’ve had … the bag of Cheez-Its they gave me on the plane. I don’t know why eating and traveling is such a difficult proposition, but this is the way it goes. I had a late lunch at Chipotle yesterday, some fries for an early dinner and a snack last night. I’m sure the little cup of apple juice I also had on the plane kept me at an appropriate caloric level until dinner tonight. It’s a curious thing, that’s all.

The important thing is the birthdays, and that I ate a lot chicken marsala. And it was delicious.

adventures / food / Friday / photo — Comments Off
2
Aug 19

Happy weekend

Tonight we had pizza. I was told I could have whatever I wanted on my pizza. You see, my lovely bride makes the pizza (I retired from pie making my freshman year of college). And she always has a better grasp of what we have on hand for toppings. But, as ever, I am deferential to her tastes and wouldn’t dream of depriving someone else of an ingredient if we had only so much. But, she said, we had plenty of all of the things that she listed. And, thus, I could have whatever I wanted on my pizza.

“Except for whatever smart thing you’re about to say,” because I had the look on my face.

So I said I wanted Mellow Mushroom on my pizza. Mellow Mushroom, of course, being an incredibly tasty pizza every time. Sadly, there isn’t a store here. There’s one on the other side of Indianapolis and I am currently starting a low boil campaign to get them to open a shop here because they do great numbers in every college town they are in.

And they’d kill here. They would absolutely make bank here. I’ve had the consensus-opinion best pizza in town. And I honestly started asking people if I’d ordered the wrong thing. It was fine. It wasn’t bad by any stretch. But best pizza? In town? In a college town? It was Pizza Hut on a good day. I’ve also had their burgers, and their burgers were better. The best pizza joint in town is better at making burgers, is what I’m saying, and Mellow Mushroom should swoop in and capitalize, and we haven’t even started talking about the many side selections their menu offers.

So I could not have Mellow Mushroom on my pizza tonight, but I did want some. We did have some last month. It looks like this:

The Yankee’s pizzas are pretty good. They’ve been a fun experiment this year and great progress is being made. She makes a nice wheat crust pizza and there are fresh toppings and there’s just something about the sauce that I can’t yet quite put my finger on. It’s not Mellow Mushroom, but I think it is way up there on the best pizza in town list.

Unfortunately, I was too hungry to remember to take a photo of it this evening, but it looks pretty and it tastes nice. So it is definitely on the best pizza in town list.

Anyway, that’s the start of an easy weekend, pizza. And also we watched Endgame again. If you download the digital version from Amazon you get seven hours of material. That’s a lot of features, and I’m sure we’ll get to some of those later. Tomorrow we’ll have an early lunch at Chick-fil-A and the weekend will be warm and sunny and lovely and low key, the perfect kind of weekend, then.

Oh, and today I decided to send myself to Mars. I added my grandfather’s name early this year, and now we’re both going to be on a microchip sent to the red planet next year.

You can add your name here. The deadline to do so is September 30th. I mean, if you really need to get out of town …

But if you’re staying closer to home, have a great weekend there, too.