In this picture., taken from the skyway, are several buildings. The one in the upper-left hand corner is the Ameriprise building, the transition between my building and the 333. It has lost some tenants, due to consolidation and WFM and other factors. It has 31 stories and was the tallest building constructed in the United States in 2000. In 2016, it changed hands, and fetched a price of $200 million.
It was announced today that it had been sold again. For $6.7 million dollars. There's a haircut, and there's decapitation stroke that bisects the sternum.
Last Friday I was complaining about the cold, right? Remember? Resigned to die in a frozen, pitiless expanse, and all that mewling? It was 18 below during the worst of that week. I would like to note that it was 47 degrees today. That is a 65 degree swing in a week. It certainly improved moods, but we all know it's just a pause in the shelling. The absence of snow nags at the local psyche, because the less snow we suffer now, the more we fear we must endure at the end of winter, when the heart is the heaviest and the blood is tired. There is, of course, no such thing as weather karma. There is, of course, no one one secretly doesn't believe there is.
Yesterday on X (yes, I gave up) there’s a big post & picture from Tonya Harding, announcing she has a new account, and today I walk past the office TV and they’re interviewing Nancy Corrigan.
Good question, Coop.
Can’t think about one without the other. Events bond people in the public imagination, until everyone who remembered the animus has joined the choir eternal. But it can’t be a murdery connection. More like a Buckley-Vidal thing. We may remember Crippen, but we don’t remember his wife.
By the way, speaking of Crippen, I ran across a movie about him that portrayed him with evident sympathy. Great casting. Donald Pleasence. As the movie starts, he's going to court, and a bystander slaps him:
Title, raked across the screen!
Wikipedia quotes a review:
Bosley Crowther in The New York Times wrote: "Well, one must give good scores to Mr. Pleasence, Miss Browne, Miss Eggar and the rest of the cast for giving a sense of solemnity and suffocation to this stiff tale ... But the mystery, the action and the pathos are all too academic and thin – too milky and uneventful – except for those who are real Crippen fans.”
Who the hell is a Crippen fan? Perhaps he means people interested in the case. If so, Crowther would’ve loved the 2007 story about the DNA analysis of the body found in Crippen’s basement. It wasn’t his wife.
I'm not bothered much by an inconclusive Crippen story, becase I am not a real Crippen fan. Crowther, by the way, was eventually easied aside from his top-critic post at the Times, and some speculated it was due to his incesseant criticism of Bonnie and Clyde. All the popular kids thought it was great, and if you didn't get it, man, you were Herbert. You know, L-7.
(No-prize to whomever gets the first reference. I got the second one from a movie, probably a G-rated hippie spoof that starred Bob Hope, and I can tell you no more about it.)
It's time for our end-of-month round-up of web detritus - the bad ads that infect and demean our beloved internet. The crap-chum. The misleading misdirets.
I doubt that.
I find these ads useful because they show where my web location is at the moment.
Also, she wasn't one, and she doesn't.
Whoops, forgot to turn on the VPN.
Also, no, she doesn't.
Well, fat lot of good that does me. Also, no, they didn't.
I guess we're suppose to assume he is terminally ill, since no one knows the name of any relation who might have died.
I'm surprised the AI didn't give them a picture of a shoe.
I have seven more of these.
Time-travel juice!
Again, who cares, ignore, move along, get an ad blocker - well, I don't ad block on sites I like. And it's instructive to know what the actual internet looks like, like you put on They Live glasses.
It was the last day in Mexico. I was part of a large group that had some professional connection, staying at a hotel. I had already had a bad incident in the bathroom,which was generally filthy, and full of people who didn’t respect your privacy; there had been some issue up at the office we’d set up, and I didn’t like my desk, or my assignments. The food was the only good part. Note: it was winter, and there was an empty jug of ice melt on the marquee on the second story of the building. It irritated me, and I considered throwing another jug of ice melt at it to knock it down, but then thought that the second jug would just sit there. Suddenly it was summer, and there were people sitting out on the top of the marquee enjoying the weather, and I wondered why they didn’t do anything about the jug.
More from the same prompt:
LANCE CHINSLAB era, very early. Good thing we know the cashier's name is Blake, that helps a lot
This year we're going back a (gulp) half century. Remember, just because they were low-charting in the top 250 doesn't mean they didn't rise up the next year. For my rankings I use the Whitburn collection, and I'm sure there are other charts that dispute these particular ranks. Who cares! It's just for fun.
This is interesting. Never heard it before - or rather, it made no impression if ever I did. McLean, who had tried our patience with "American Pie," did this short little trifle. The YouTube page says:
In an interview, Don stated: “The inspiration for ‘Wonderful Baby’ came from a baby in my first wife’s family. I can’t remember who it was, but I thought ‘This is a cute baby.’ And it was inspired by Fred Astaire, because I was listening to a lot of Fred Astaire.
I had a double album of his, with all this great stuff from the Thirties, and done in this snappy style. ‘I’m Putting All My Eggs In One Basket’, ‘Isn’t It A Lovely Day?’ - all these songs. He later recorded it himself, actually. He recorded it in England, and there is a plaque there that I saw written: ‘Wonderful Baby recorded by Fred Astaire.’”
Well, there's a lot there. I have to find the Astaire album now. (Easy: here) But it also just feels like "Mr. Sandman," even referencing the character at one point.
