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Sunday is usually the day where I throw a lot of extra pictures from the week on the blog, hoping to feel the space with images of things that didn’t otherwise get used.
Only I didn’t take a great many pictures this week. It won’t happen again.
We did receive a fine box of oranges from The Yankees grandparents:
Lovely people.
You can hear some of their stories.
Updated and edited my vita, which was a job that was past due.
Rode 25 miles on my bike, enjoying the beautiful January afternoon. The afternoon was the best part about it. It’s going to take three or five good long rides to start getting my form back. My only complaint about riding is that just when I hit my stride events overcome me. Something will come up to preoccupy me for too long and all that hard work is undone.
Around finals I had a nice 45 mile ride and just started to get back into a good pace and comfort level. Then I got sick for a week and change, and then there were 10 days of holiday travels.
So this week has been a return to square one. (I’m not a very good cyclist.)
Visited the library this evening. Thought I’d do a little historical research. This is an issue of the 1914 Orange and Blue, Auburn’s student paper that preceded The Plainsman:
Note the championship-wining football team’s headline. The story included this argument for facemasks:
Babe Taylor, Auburn warrior, and by the way, Birmingham-bred, displayed a vast amount of gameness yesterday afternoon. In the early part of the first quarter someone, unthoughtedly of course, kicked in the upper section of Babe’s face, in the neighborhood of the left eye. Babe’s face wore an expression of agony and the blood trickled down his features in doublequick time, but he stood by the fort and played a grand game of football.
Sixty percent of the front page is devoted to football, which happened pretty regularly, even in 1914. Note, also, that the band played Touchdown Auburn, which was a tune that pre-dated Jim Fyffe’s famous call by many decades. There’s a note that students from Alabama telegraphed their congratulations on the championship — you have to wonder what their angle was.
There’s a poem on the right hand side, a dream of a beautiful young woman, and “An Ode to some Pickles.”
Upon a night long ago
Three fellows sat at ease
And tried to soothe their inner man
With pickles and with cheese.The cheese, by nature yellow,
Met quick and sure defeat;
But the unassuming pickles
Were very green and sweet.The eats were good and everything
Seemed lovely for a while —
Till a feaster’s flesh, turned wan and pale
In the middle of a smile.His face began to shudder,
A twitch and then a jerk;
We looked at him and realized
The pickles were at work!
A private, and not especially good, joke 97 years ago was published in a newspaper. And you’re reading it today. None of this would have been conceivable to the poet who wrote those lines.
Didn’t find what I was looking for — though I have a feeling I’m getting close — so I’ll have to go back. No problem there, the old microfilms are great fun.
We’ve been trying to have doughnuts for breakfast since Sunday. But that was New Year’s Day, and so our local doughnut shop was closed. Monday? Closed for New Year’s Hangover, I suppose. Yesterday we had a real breakfast. Today we made it happen.
After the sugar kicked in and moved on — and after having made it through the morning edition of email, text messages and RSS reading — we decided for a light ride. Would have ridden yesterday, but it was too cold. Today it was just right, a light chill in the shade and a good breeze to keep the temperature right when you started working a bit.
Not that there’s a lot of that when you haven’t been on the bike in weeks, another victim of the holidays.
On Monday, though, I installed the new computers on our bikes. Now we’ll now just how bad at this we are! (Hint: Bad.)
The Yankee had two flats. It was one of those days.
At one point I was tucked in behind her, but went around because the time was right. We were about to hit a stretch where I perform slightly better than she does. There was a car coming, which is not where I want to be putting brakes to wheels. So I kicked.
And for one glorious, brief, sprinting, downhill, mass-forward, aerodynamically-tucked moment, I hit 37.6 miles per hour. If I could keep up that pace for 4,231 I might have been competitive in the 1987 Tour de France. The race has gotten a bit faster since then.
But I only rode 17 miles today, clearly there’s some work to be done. But that’s what tomorrow is for.
We made dinner to the Beatles, ate over the bowl game.
Somewhere along the way we put away clothes that will be donated. We ordered four pictures for over the fireplace. I found a new water filter for the refrigerator. It was a perfectly low key evening.
Finally answered one of the many nagging questions of my faulty childhood memory. It was a Woolco. The town I grew up in had a Zayre’s and one of the W stores in what I think of as the place’s two original strip malls. I could never recall if it was a Woolworth or a Woolco, though. Woolworth, you might remember, was one of the original American five-and-dime stores. They slipped in the 1980s and disappeared entirely in 1997. (Now their existing properties are the struggling Foot Locker entities.
Woolco, on the other hand, was their discount store. Think about that: the discount of store of a five-and-dime shop. I don’t remember much about it, I couldn’t even remember which name the store had. Woolco died in 1982, so I guess that’s when that store went away. Soon after Wal-Mart moved into that spot.
Not too much longer after that the Zayre’s down the street shut their doors. K-Mart went in there.
After a few years Wal-Mart moved three miles down the road to the interstate and a new Supercenter. There’s a Big Lots where the Wal-Mart and Woolco once operated. A thrift store occupies the place that used to run as Zayre’s and then K-Mart. That entire part of that town has dried up. What was once upon a time the longest lit road east of the Rocky Mountains and, prior to the Great Depression, was intended as the nation’s first freeway is a husk of itself.
For years, though, I’ve wondered: was that a Woolworth or a Woolco?
These are the questions that occupy a preoccupied mind. This all came about because of an essay I read about Best Buy:
Electronics retailer Best Buy is headed for the exits. I can’t say when exactly, but my guess is that it’s only a matter of time, maybe a few more years.
Consider a few key metrics. Despite the disappearance of competitors including Circuit City, the company is losing market share. Its last earnings announcement disappointed investors. In 2011, the company’s stock has lost 40% of its value. Forward P/E is a mere 6.23 (industry average is 10.20). Its market cap down to less than $9 billion. Its average analyst rating, according to The Street.com, is a B-.
Those are just some of the numbers, and they don’t look good. They bear out a prediction in March from the Wall Street Journal’s Heard on the Street column, which forecast “the worst is yet to come” for Best Buy investors. With the flop of 3D televisions and the expansion of Apple’s own retail locations, there was no killer product on the horizon that would lift it from the doldrums. Though the company accounts for almost a third of all U.S. consumer electronics purchases, analysts noted, the company remains a ripe target for more nimble competitors.
But the numbers only scratch the surface. To discover the real reasons behind the company’s decline, just take this simple test. Walk into one of the company’s retail locations or shop online. And try, really try, not to lose your temper.
The store goes on, sounding much like Circuit City and Service Merchandise and many others before it. The piece also included a Wikipedia list of defunct American stores that started between the 1920s and 1950s and now out of business, either consolidated, liquidated or folded. It is a great list for nostalgia.
The only thing I remember buying at that store is maybe some superhero-themed clothing. I wanted a digital watch, I remember distinctly, but my parents wouldn’t buy it for me. I needed to learn the analog watch first, they said. It was a good lesson.
I almost never misread my watch today.
The clock display on my bike’s new computer? Digital in every way.
Lovely day. Even the Committee on Greatest Day Ever, which meets quadrennially in a secure location in the Pyrenees, will be required to consider it for an international honorable mention. It only gets the purple ribbon because it is an especially cold day. This is unnecessary, and will be waited-out until a pleasant April day comes along.
Late breakfast at the Barbecue House, where the place was empty and thus the hash browns were plentiful. Mr. Price, if you’re keeping track, is back to not remembering me. He asked if we needed a menu. No thanks, I’ll just have the usual.
Stopped by world headquarters of The War Eagle Reader. We visited with one of Jeremy’s daughters, talked about tomorrow’s stories today and met Torch, official co-cat:
Later I visited Lowe’s, because they’ve offended me less than Home Depot. (The next time I need a hardware part I’ll visit Home Depot, because I hit up Lowe’s this time.) I needed to address an issue in the kitchen sink. Not the sink itself, but an attachment, that retractable spray hose. Not the spray hose, though, but rather the little plastic circle bracket it rests in.
The old one cracked in two before the holidays. I removed all of the cleaning supplies that live under the sink, crawled inside, reached around and through the various pipes and traced the hose up to where it attaches to the plumbing. There was no easy way to get to it, everything was by feel and felt awkward in every way. This was not going to be an easy task.
So at Lowe’s I walked around with the Confused Looked of Resignation until someone in a vest stumbled across my path. I’d been in three sections by then, when he asked “Can I help you find something?” I was surrounded by sinks at the time, but this was the wrong place to find a sink accessory attachment, which was four aisles away.
The good news, the gentleman told me, was that this is attached at the hose, not under the sink. That’s much better. But you have to buy both the nozzle and the flange. Used to be, he said, that you could buy just the flange, but no more. I picked up the cheapest one, which almost matched the one in our kitchen thinking, That might explain somethings.
There are instructions inside. On the outside it says you’ll need an adjustable wrench, adjustable pliers, needle nose pliers and pipe thread tape. I have the tools, or can make do, but I needed the tape. Found it two aisles over, nearer the sinks, so things are well organized. The tape cost $1.06.
Got home, where we had company. Visited for a while, talking of football and jobs and weddings and things.
Later we visited Target, where we received a gift card for Christmas. We decided to pick up frames and continue the house decorating. We walked out with seven frames, two of them will hold a trip we took to San Francisco four years ago. We framed a lithograph from Rome and two pieces from Greece, from our honeymoon two years ago. Good prints take time, you know. You have to study these things, consider them for taste and durability, before you commit them to a frame.
And then, like later tonight, there’s the pulling out the paper examples, replacing the mattes, cleaning the glass and making it all fit together again. And then there’s the difficulty of finding the proper wall. Where will the sun accentuate the proper setting? Will the ceiling fan reflect off this frame?
These are difficult questions.
Anyway. Saw this at Target:
In one swift, 8×10 motion the designer managed to offend at least two different groups of people. Keeping calm having to do with the Blitz, rocking on antithetical to the stiff upper lip of the English establishment. But when rock has become over-produced pop, and with rocking on now meaning a third thing entirely, we’re really just dumbing down the argument. There is no need, the artist suggests, to understand the origin of these expressions, their historical antecedents and how these two things are actually tied together by pushing against one another. Just appreciate the juxtaposition and this wicked awesome line art of a Flying V. And so it will be that a 13-year-old will have a cute, possibly ironic mantra for the Twilight generation.
Later still I returned to the sink fixture. Turned off the water, made the source pipe leak. Emptied the entire two cabinets in a hurry, mopped up the water, fixed the leak and carried on. The instructions tell you to remove the old sprayer, but not how. (It unscrews. Not to worry, though: I have an advanced education.)
Popped off the little clamp, removed the washers. Dropped one washer down the sink, where it fell perfectly through the drain.
Pull the hose out of the sink, putting the flange in place, feeding the hose back through. Insert the new washers, apply the new clamp. Screw on the new nozzle, turn on the water, give everything a try.
It works!
And then I completed reorganized the things under the cabinet.
Thing I’ll take the pipe thread tape back to the store. It never appeared in the directions, nor did any of the wrenches or pliers, so now I’ll be awake all night wondering if I’ve managed to manufactured by own leaky faucet.
Even still, wonderful day.
We visited Pepe’s. And, no, this is not becoming a food blog. But Pepe’s is Pepe’s. Here’s the old man on the cover of the menu:
But what can you tell about a man from line art? Oh, his pixels are lovely. Mr. Pepe’s actual photograph.
And, no, food photography is difficult, not my strong suit and never works on a cell phone, but this pizza can’t be ignored:
Pepe started his first store 86 years ago and, some argue, it is the origin of pizza in the U.S. Who knows? Truly it is the best pizza you’ve ever had. This is not opinion or left to taste, but rather a fact. It is science and we must accept it.
The place is owned by Pepe’s grandson today. We go there every time we visit the in-laws. Ronald Reagan loved it, too. That was back when Connecticut was a GOP stronghold. The Republicans had won Connecticut in eight of 11 presidential post-war elections, only John Kennedy, Lyndon Johnson and Barry Goldwater could break their grip. That led up to Bill Clinton, who also enjoyed Pepe’s.
Connecticut has gone Democrat in the last five elections since 1992. Clearly the pizza is the key.
More of their historic photographs are here.
In New Haven, where Pepe’s started, pizza is one of those cultural touchstones that says much about the diner. You’re a Pepe’s fan or a Sally’s person. The competing pizza place was actually founded by Pepe’s nephew in 1938. Sally’s Apizza is no good. As I wrote in 2007, the long wait outside in the cold and the long wait inside aren’t worth considering:
The waiter, who’s doing you a favor by being there, just got off his bike apparently and is still wearing his Harley vest. He finally gets your order, promptly brings the drinks and disappears for 20 minutes. He returns to ask about your order, which he’s incorrectly scribbled. How one pizza becomes three I’ve yet to figure out. Half-an-hour later, when you finally make eye contact with the waiter (who’s doing you a favor) you inquire as to the whereabouts of the pizza.
“We’re on a 90 minute wait,” he sneers while stalking off. Truly, the last half of the sentence is spoken with his back turned. We speculate the wait just grew to 100 minutes. At 75 minutes you consider calling Information to get the number to the nearest Domino’s and order a delivery. At 90 minutes you actually make eye contact with the waiter again (who’s doing you a favor) and get a simple refill.
Throughout this time as people peer into the windows to gauge how busy the little place is you wave them off. “Don’t do it! It isn’t worth it!”
At 100 minutes, as speculated, the pizza arrives.
And it isn’t worth it. The pizza is OK. It is not 100 minute pizza. If such a thing exists you will not find it here. Instead you’ll get a burnt crust and charcoal on your fingers.
Eight minutes later the pizza is gone, because everyone at your table was famished. Ninety-three seconds after that your bill arrives. Sixteen seconds after that you throw the money on the table. The exact change. To the penny. In pennies. Under the pizza tray.
So that’s Sally’s. Pepe’s, meanwhile, made the Guardian‘s best food in the world list.
That’s one down on that list. Forty-nine to go. Lists like that are dangerous for completists. When are you ever going to be in Lisbon, to eat supposedly the world’s best custard tart?
I received a copy of 1,000 Places To See Before You Die a few years ago from a dear friend who decided she wanted to give me angst via the written word. How can I accomplish this? And now I see there are apparently annual editions.
Great. One of my most recent achievements has been removed for the list in favor of some Mongolian Milk trailer 100 yards off the Great Wall of China that is operated by a talented group of tap dancing, orphan entrepreneurs.
She signed the book (which I have lately decided is the best part of receiving a book as a gift):
The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
But I have promises to keep,
And miles to go before I sleep,
And miles to go before I sleep.
I have visited 30 of the 1,000 sites listed in my copy. (Yes, I’ve counted.) Miles to go, indeed.
Robert Frost knew what he was talking about.
He died in 1963, in Boston. I wonder, did he ever have Pepe’s?
