Anybody lose their shoes in the television studio last night?
They don’t fit me, so I know they aren’t mine. What’s more, you’d think a person would notice they didn’t have these on when they stepped outside.
The Yankee and I, as we often do these days, went to Chipotle for lunch today. I get to have lunch with her two or three times a week now and that hasn’t gotten old yet, but it was time to shake up the usual. So I tried …
“My name is David if it tastes good and Juan if it is bad,” the only chatty front line worker I’ve ever met at Chipotle said.
“Juan if it’s good, David if it isn’t. Got it!”
“Hey, no …”
They really should let them talk to you more.
Then again, it might be hard to come up with 1,900 interesting 45-second stories per day.
It’d take me at least two minutes to explain those shoes.
Tomorrow, the town will receive its first automated vehicle. It is said to be a bus. And you can ride in it. They gave away tickets! But if you didn’t get a ticket, there’s still a chance! They are doing walkup tours. All of this reminds me of those old newspaper stories about the first plane in town. Here, it was 1911, and the headlines read “‘Birdman’ with Machine Coming.”
“Take a ride in the air ship, and listen to the band play. Welcome to our city. There will be a hot time … stand on the hub of the wheel of the center of population and feel the world go around.”
That October, the flight crew reassembled their plane (it had to be hauled in by train) in the meadow next to our building. The paper says thousands of people came from all around to see two flights. An uneven field, a barbed wire fence and a stall on takeoff caused a crash.
The locals rushed in and started tearing apart the plane for souvenirs. One of the flight crew threatened to shoot the looters, so much of the plane, and the pilot, Horace Kearney, survived. He flew the plane again that December, but died in a plane crash the following year.
The next summer, there was another plane and another flight in Dunn Meadow, another pilot got his plane in the air. He crashed into a fence trying to dodge power lines and telephone wires.
So maybe that’s the reason they are also closing the roads for the automated bus.
The bus is expected to go up and down one of the main business roads. Today they’ve cleared off the parked cars, too. This is apparently going to be a three or four block ride up a straight street.
So, naturally, we’ve closed all of the intersecting roads, as well.
Blocks of two-lane gridlock.
You don’t want to inconvenience the robotic bus, after all.
And now, a nice little sports show you can watch to catch up on all of the local sporting news:
I saw this print in a restaurant last weekend:
We have a running question about whether it is true that Marilyn Monroe came home from that USO tour to her new husband and said “It was so wonderful, Joe. You never heard such cheering.”
“Yes,” Joe DiMaggio said, “I have.”
It’s a great line, because Joe DiMaggio. But it was apparently first written in a Gay Talese essay, so it almost seems too perfect. The nature of quotes is a fickle thing sometimes, but if we will them into being we can sometimes will disbelief into submission.
I don’t know. I wasn’t there. It’s interesting to think that it happened, because it says so much about Marilyn Monroe. But to think that it is just a manufactured line, that she would know better, would say an awful lot more. Which is why I like to think it didn’t happen, that that wasn’t the exchange between an aging ball player and a young starlet.
I do know this. She’s just glowing in pretty much the entire photo collection, and she’s got that little dress on, in Korean, in the winter. All of the troopers are bundled up. It is February and some 30 degrees, at best. But there she was, soaking in that adoration and lust. A shot of home in a place very much not.
And of course I see this photo on the side wall of a hallway heading to a restroom.
You know, it isn’t as easy to track down the photographer of a 63-year-old photo as you might imagine. Surely the rights to that photo belong to an agency by now, but they’re all buying each other up and none of that helps gets you back to the actual photo zapper.
I think she’s singing Diamonds Are A Girl’s Best Friend in that shot. You can see the same gesture here:
And if you watch the whole thing you might have to re-think everything you know about the 1950s.
I don’t really have a way to end this piece. I’ve looked for loops to repeat and curious, out-of-this-world trivia hooks that you wouldn’t believe. But everyone in the story is from somewhere else, or did other things. But I’ve watched that video a few times and I imagine Joe DiMaggio had a … different sort of adoring crowd.
About that Allie photo … she loves boxes now. There are four of them strewn about the house. Her boxes are all of various sizes. Mostly from Amazon. There’s a new Zappos box she is a bit skeptical about, but give it time. The one she’s curled into for today’s Catember photo is her favorite. It is just the right size and … well … who can tell why things make sense to The Black Cat?
Just as interesting, to me, is the idea behind how those boxes came to be her boxes. Quite a few of them come and go through the house, as is the case in so many places these days. Some go into the recycling pile. Some become her playthings. Her favorite box, I’m told, held a dress inside. Maybe she likes it best because of the size. Who can say, really?
Probably because she’s trained us to play with her when she goes to sit in that box.
The hoomans finally get it; don’t change it up.
Sounds pretty plausible for a cat, I’d imagine. Also, I like to think she uses semicolons in her internal monologue, what about it?
Anyway, another evening in the studio. The students are starting to hit their stride. It’s a nice treat to see such big strides early in the year. It bodes well for the shows to come.
This is that picture-of-a-picture thing, a bit hastily done:
Last week we had a little event in the building where they officially named the studio’s control room after an old IU graduate. He went out into television, had a good start to his career, did graduate school, went back into the news business. And then he’d ultimately go on to help build a few of the stations you might see on cable today. Ed Spray became a successful television executive, a president of Scripps and remains a nice and unassuming gentleman. So he and his family and a few friends were on campus for the event.
Someone accidentally left behind a few photographs. And the pictures made it into an envelope which made it to my hands today on the way back to the rightful owner. And I wanted to share a quick glimpse of the old gear.
This is what the new stuff looks like, a fraction of the weight, a lot more ability.
Wouldn’t it be great if people worked like technology does in that respect? Knowing more, weighing less?
