The end of the week often has some flotsam I set aside but didn't use. This is distinct from the immeasurable gigabytes of sites yet to come. These things are perishable, in a sense; no place to put them elsewhere on the site, and I'll probably forget about them if I don't say something now. So I will say something and you will see something, to invert the useless mantra of those entrusted with our security.

This picture: it's a mystery.

My dad showed it to me when I went up to Fargo. He'd found it in some papers. He didn't remember where it was taken. Neither did I. It's an unusual shot, inasmuch as we're all in it, and we're obviously posing for a different photography. Based on my hair, glasses, and those awful shorts - which I remember - it was probably between 1971 and 1973. But where? It doesn't look like Fargo. It's a moment captured for posterity - and every detail about it has been forgotten.

BTW, I can also date it by the red patch on my Dad's shirt; that's the revised Texaco logo that replaced the round one. I guarantee you the tie came from the same company that made the shirt: UNITOG. It was polyester and you'd damn well better believe that he had a matching tie clasp with the Texaco logo.

I barely remember my sister at that age. I'm amazed by my Mom's dress.

All of this was familiar to us then. And at some point, it wasn't.

This was a building I discovered while going to the Roseville Parade earlier this week. It's like something out of prewar Germany - industrial, severe, rational.

 

Can't you imagine young architects, brains aflame with the thought of severely unoranamented housing for the proletariat, walking through those doors and nodding a curt good morning to their white-coated colleagues?

What ugliness they would wreak in the name of rationality.

A pupdate, because it's been a while. He expects nothing from you at the moment.

He's resting his head on something he chewed to pieces as a pup; we rebuild it with plastic wood. It never occurs to him to chew it now. He's a grown up.

So far all I've shown you of the KA Project is a big hole, because that's all it is. But this week the footings appeared, sprouting up from the shafts in the ground. The previous week a great crane poured concrete down the shafts, looking like some Transformer Hummingbird

Around the corner where a sewer project has ripped up the streets (EVERYTHING is being ripped up these days) I saw something that made me fear for the future of civilization. It was a John Deere tractor, a small one.

It was yellow.

I thought: why is it Case yellow? which is an odd thing for me to think, since I'm not a tractor driver - but I did grow up going to the Farm every Saturday, and you learn the hues. (If you're thinking - no, Case is red - there was a period when they were also creamy yellow. In fact there was a creamy yellow Case tractor the size of the Deere a few yards away.

Deeres are also red, but they ought to be green and yellow. I-Hs are red and white.

Rumely Oil-Pulls, I couldn't say.

 

 

 

 

Back to music cues for "The Little Things in Life," Peg Lynch's last continuously running sitcom. The cues run from substandard 60s cues to cringingly 70s, and I'm surprised at how few there were. I think I'm already repeating what I previously played. In fact I know I'm already repeating the fact that I think I'm repeating myself, but on we go: this is the sound of narrative radio in its strange last gasp.


     

70s stock music really loved to mix the flute way up front.

     

If this is your entrance music . . .

     

. . . you're a comical drunk.

     

 

From 1973, it's that horrible voice that goes through you like a fistful of knives:

     

Which is appropriate.

     

 

Can you make it to the end? It's hard. It's really hard.

It's everybody's grandmother! How did she deserve the honor?

     

What an act of altruism.

     

 

 

 

 

She has an imaginary gun and she's going to shoot her imaginary boyfriend. How romantic and madcap! Ah, Paris.

"Come on, my pet. You're drunk. Let's get you home."

 

   
 

 

It's "I Won't Dance." Okay then fine, suit yourself.

 

   

We lean, as usual, on Wikipedia:

Al Goodman (August 12, 1890 in Nikopol, Ukraine – January 10, 1972 in New York City, New York) was a conductor, songwriter, stage composer, musical director, arranger, and pianist.

This success, followed by the hit, “Sinbad”, which he produced with Al Jolson, led to positions as orchestra conductor for many Broadway productions including the highly successful Flyin’ High, The Student Prince, and Blossom Time. In all, during this period of his career, Goodman directed over 150 first-night performances and became one of the Great White Way's most popular conductors.

We cast an askance glance, as usual, on Wikipedia:

He was in such demand that it was not uncommon for him to conduct the orchestra of a show for the first few performances, and then hand the baton over to another while he prepared for a new production.

Makes it sound as if he did so in the middle of the performance. As for "Roberta," it was a popular Broadway musical from 1933 - starring Bob Hope, Sidney Greenstreet, Fred MacMurray.

You know, all those guys you associate with Broadway Musicals.

There you have it: another week in the can, another month in the back pocket. Monday will be a bit light, since it's the Fourth, but there will be something.

And there will be something quite different. Have a great Fourth!

 

 

 
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