The week ends with no news of my eventual role at the paper. I expect this limbo will persist for most of the summer. This will be the case next week, and the week after that. I will kvetch about it no more here, but concentrate on things of universal interest and importance.
The ceiling light in the lobby still isn't fixed. Still twitching like the eyelid of someone who's low on potassium. On the other hand . . . they put out the piano.
The saga of the ice machine had a happy conclusion, which I use for Monday's column. I ripped up the column on which I had been working. Like many, it was based on an email from some PR spokescreature who was trying to get the attention of the media for a particular product or website. They arrive every day in waves, starting in the morning. (The spam from Chinese factories - dear friend we are suppliers of small rubber things that go on the tips of long metal things - arrives overnight.) I feel sorry for the people who do this, and occasionally throw them a bone by writing about the survey - if there's a Minnesota angle. There was no such angle to this one, and it was more inane than most: a survey of what Gen X and Z like to snack upon while streaming!
Turns out that some like salty things, and others prefer something sweet. GET OUT. NO. The "study" said that half of the respondants "streamed" while snacking, a depressing image of passive consumption - and a timeless one. Go back to the 70s and you'll probably find illustrations in magazines of bleary-eyed guys in bathrobes digging into a bag of pretzels, bathed in blue light. Probably illustrated by Jack Davis. No, can't prove it. ANYWAY, here's the part of the survey that made me stop:
Gen Z loves to remix where they snack and stream, including in bed (76%), in the bathtub or shower (21%) and from the car (34%). Overall, 6 in 10 Americans (59%) are streaming and snacking in their bed.
Who is streaming in the shower? Media, I mean. More to the point:
Who is streaming and eating in the shower?
Snacking while bathing you can understand, if you imagine some Audrey-Hepburn Breakfast-at-Tiffany scene where she’s lounging in the suds with a long cigarette holder in one hand and a caviar fork in the other, and probably wearing a tiara. Indulgent and decadent and all that. The classic noir movie Laura, features a arrogant, self-regarding, supercilious newspaper columnist – but I repeat myself – who does his work sitting in the tub, but I can’t imagine anything more boring than a bath, really. Showers are a limerick. Baths are a plotless story.
Wasn't enough for a column, though. And I didn't want to get into some generational squabble between Z and X and Millennials. To be honest I don't really note the distinction. After a while there's your own vague cohort, and then there's just Young People. Technically I'm a boomer, but I've no identification with that cohort at all. To me the Boomers were about six years older, which is a chasm. If you were worried about getting drafted, you were a Boomer. Those of us who were actual single-digit kids in the 60s, and came of age in the full corpse-flower bloom of the seventies, were something different. We had nothing in common with anyone who had short hair and listened to the Kingston Trio and held campus meetings about Prejudice, and we're all tired of being lumped in with this pig-in-a-python demographic.
Sorry for that tangent, but we're at the end of the week and my mind wanders. Let's move right along, shall we?
We were putting on a variety show, and it wasn’t going well. The audience wasn’t booing, but they weren’t particularly engaged. I was doing some technical work that involved a fellow playing the harmonica, but it wasn’t working until I ran over to where he was sitting - at a desk piled with electrical equipment - and showed him how to use a Bluetooth microphone to project the sound. The microphone was shaped like a 1950s / 60s electric razor. He was too depressed to do it, but I did some bluesy riffs on the harmonica to show how well it synced with the action taking place on stage - whatever that was - and he was suddenly enthusiastic.
At the end of the show we were to take our bows, which meant going down a set of stairs from the lip of the stage to the floor; they were triangular and difficult to navigate. I decided I would go down the stairs like Donald O’Connor singing “Make ‘Em Laugh,” bound down the steps two at a time and miss and flail around on the floor, and everyone would enjoy that. But the fellow who went before me did O'Connor's spinning-around-on-the-floor-while-laughing routine, and spoiled it.
There was a flutter of recognition when I announced my name, but apparently that was the signal for the show to conclude, and everyone left with evident relief.
Prompt: depressed technician playing the harmonica by a table full of electrical equipment
I wonder if any of these electronic might be real. Almost certainly not.
And one more: he's either wailing the blues or eating it.
And now, a related feature that will provide some Friday amusements:
As I mentioned Wedesday, I like to have the unthinking AI brain conjure small towns in a particular period and particular style. This week I made the mistake of asking for movie marquees.
Let's see what's playing down at the ol' Si Teru, shall we?
Looks more like a store sign, to be fair. The Orin is your movie theater.
The Hirbaln was probably a silent house converted to sound. Maybe the same for the Ohcrver.
It was quite the sensaton when Ilytimel, that movie based on the scandalous book, came to the Morvire.
S HIMNCE was such a hit it was a foregone conclusion that they'd make a sequel.
Two different theaters here, I thibk. HIMCE is playing at the Love Sireks. The VONRE, I don't know.
You'll have to check the paper.
Took me a while. Not a long while, but longer than most.
Or he could've said "I don't know what you mean. I'd lke a lawyer."
