The scene above was taken at the family reunion I mentioned on Monday. I like Birch trees. We had one in our yard in Fargo. You could write on the bark! The Hardy Boys told us so.
Maybe. The birch in front of my childhood home has been gone for a long time. (Google Street View told me so.) There was an apple tree in the back yard, and I don't know if it's there. I sold the apples door to door in my wagon, and used the proceeds to buy a new Lego-type construction kit that was supposed to be just like Lego but better. It was not. I felt like an idiot.
Your chubby entrepreneur, about to hard-sell the neighbors:
The Hiawatha Super was a Gambles product, something that will become of particular interest here at the Bleat . . . in the fourth week of November. As for the location: all these years later and the mail still drops in the same box.
That's from a few years ago.You can go home again! But saying "I got my Marvel comic stuff in that mailbox many decades ago and that's the address sign that was there when we moved in" does not get you in the front door. And I'm not sure I'd want to go in. What's worse - they changed everything, or nothing?
I bought a game today. Tiny Glade. You build small cottages and "medieval" structures. That's it. There are no objectives. There are no tutorials. There are no character-creation pages where you adjust the sliders to indicate the width of your top-surgery scars. There isn't any multi-player option. It's just a little quite interval of architectural therapy.
In the pane of games recommended for me: Gas Station Simulator.
Gas Station Simulator incorporates all the best elements from your multiple memorable times at gas stations. From refuelling cars at the pump to tending to customers at the checkout, and even changing tires in the workshop, the game looks to draw upon the best tasks of station life.
Dude. First of all, the best tasks? Second, the WORKSHOP? It's a service bay.
I'm tempted to buy it. My father would be . . . amused if I did, considering how I wanted little to do with the greasy station with all its motorheads and mechanics. If it doesn't have pneumatic lifts, though, I'm returning it.
This sudden burst of gaming interest is part of the daily structure I'm trying to put together. I know that "more gaming" doesn't sound like a vigorous path to personal improvement - you know, imagining what I shall be - but it's a break from the website and the writing and the working out and the scrolling, the damned scrolling.
Anyway, that's my boring topper for today. For more, keep scrolling!
Our weekly recap of a Wikipedia peregrination. Expect no conclusion or revelations, but if you've been with us since this started last year, you know . . . sometimes we learn interesting things.
Okay, so it's not a long and twisting journey. It's almost a Clippings entry, I suppose. I was looking through papers at random, and landed on a journal from Ada OK.
The papers of yore were absolutely stuffed with popular doggerel.
I can’t find anything on Mr. Dunlap. He wrote and drew homespun recollections. On the same page, a strip called “Mom ’n’ Pop” by a fellow named Wood Cowan.
It’s gooey stuff but it provided a nice little story twice a week. Indistinguishable from the style of a hundred others.
In the same paper, an editorial:
Pure autoganda! Some will say. There was a concerted effort by the car makers to brainwash people and destroy cities! Yeah, no. It’s hard for the anti-car folk to get their heads around this, but people liked cars and they particularly liked getting a nice home with a yard somewhere. This preceded the post-war suburbs.
The ads for the paper promised a PROGRESS! Edition on Sept 1st, and indeed, the glories of Ada were on full display.
The crash seems to have put the kibosh on that. I found a building that seemed like it might be the Mason temple, but wasn’t . . .
That’s a 2023 Street View picture. Go back a year . . .
Ugh. It was the old hotel.
Anyway, the Progress issue abounds with local pride, counting the strides Ada has made. The hospitals, the new roads.
The entire issue is remarkable. The number of homes with Frigedair: 122! A new zeppelin will be built, the world’s largest! Skyscrapers are going up!
New fashions!
All this prosperity . . . from oil, and farming. Absolute confidence and pride and uplifted eyes. I’d never thought about Ada until today, and now I wish I’d been there.
Of course, as a time traveler, I’d have to keep my mouth shut. The date for all these images is September 1, 1929.
(The town today? Ordinary. Not even much of interest for a Main Street.)
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Eight thousand souls. Wikipedia says "Prehistoric people occupied the Richfield area for more than 7,000 years" and I'm sure that's so. If they made a main street, the evidence is scant.
