It seemed like a lot of mulch, to borrow a phrase. Well, let’s get to it. I hacked off the plastic, and we repositioned seventy bags along the walk for easier distribution. When all the bags were out we took a brief break, then set about covering the ground with the mulch, hoping that the lawn service won’t blow it all away during fall cleaning, as with last year. That was a fun thing to discover. Look, your ground is nice and bare! Uh yeah about that
There is a particular posture you have to assume when shaking mulch out of a bag, on a hill. Muscles are involved for which no machine or exercise has been developed. I got, as the kids say, hella twingy in the back, and was glad when I could give it up and start dinner. After dinner I dragged six bags, two at a time, into the backyard, during which a dog-walking neighbor said:
“That’s a lot of mulch.”
I agreed that it was, but look at the spectacular result here. My wife’s botanical gift to the neighborhood. We should put a coin box at the bottom of the walk in case you want to show appreciation.
Half the bags will sit out overnight, and my wife expressed a slight concern that they might be gone in the morning. I said I understood - you never know these days - but there is no organized mulch-fencing ring of which I have heard, and the people who are roaming the neighborhood at night in search of things to steal A) do not have a need for mulch, and B) probably couldn’t resell it, the secondary market for hot mulch being small. The very idea of mulching is probably aliens to them. My neighbors won’t steal it, and I’m sure of that. Half are exhausted from raising kids and the other half are turning in early so they can get up and ride bikes at 6:30 AM with a zippity-do-dah song on their lips, all looking like a commercial for some drug that turns your life around except for the possible side effects of hair cancer, or something.
Met many neighbors the other day. It was a perfectly pleasant Saturday, with a neighborhood gathering: Tulipalooza, so named for the many flowers blooming in the host’s front yard. It’s this kind of neighborhood:
We are very much the Old Guard now, and I spent my time catching up with other men of the cohort. Good to see so many new young families, and bittersweet, I suppose, to see one’s status change from the Prevailing Demographic to the remnants of the Oughts. I remember walking around the neighborhood on Halloween with one as we trailed behind our daughters, talking about Target end-cap display strategies.
He was stocking dolls for Christmas, and we talked about what our daughters hoped to get.
Of course I'm going to keep going on and ON about this, because it's endlessly fascinating.
I admit I was surprised to see this:
I don’t know why; I’m sure the gig paid a little. Every time I see Orson Welles doing something below his extraordinary talents and intellect I think “he needed some walking around money.” But it’s a testament to the show how well he fit in, how his erudition and plummy tones and keen mind slipped right into the rhythms. I don’t think I’ve heard anyone ask the questions quite like this. (You can stop after a minute, after the history question.)
He’s preferable to, say, Tony Randall, who shows up with his usual attitude of easy delight, and just watching Randall makes you realize how well he could turn the dial up or down on the whole Prissy Factor.
He made a good Felix. For people of my generation he was the main Felix, just as Jack was the main Oscar, but we were - if we had studied the far-distant past of five years ago - aware that the true inhabitants of the character were Walter and Jack, and really, all other iterations were just mortals scuttling around in the raiments of the immortals.
The movie has some marvelous inadvertent documentary - the Times Square strip joint (the Metropole, IIRC) with its monotonous Hefti grind music, the flophouse, the grocery store, the late-night Manhattan restaurant - it all seems like New York on the cusp, ready to head up or down. I think my parents grew up seeing New York over and over again in the movies, and never had any desire to go there. Seeing it on the screen had the opposite effect on me.
The grocery stores had marquees!
Late night coffee shops!
Turquoise freezers! What a world.
Anyway. The guest on the Tony Randall ep was this fellow:
Smart and urbane. The minute he was announced - to great cheers - I said, out loud, calling back to a run of Diner radio shows over a quarter century ago:
"Hoby Hugs."
Surely at least one of you knows what I meant.
It’s 1928.
These ads were taken from Radio Retailers, a publication aimed at - well, you know.
Tough job for the ad agency, with a name like that. Grebe.
It was a Synchrophase, because everyone had to have a special name.
There’s a site devoted to the Grebe line, of course. Apparently Mr. G was a pioneer and innovator. And there’s wikipedia:
To stimulate public interest, he set up several radio stations. One, WAHG, was identified with his own initials; another, WBOQ, had call letters standing for Borough of Queens. WAHG is now WCBS, still a major radio station in New York City. He set up a broadcasting company called the "Atlantic Broadcasting Corporation," changing WAHG to WABC on November 1, 1926, which operated his stations until he sold them to CBS in January 1929. A different WABC was later formed as the flagship station for the eponymous "American Broadcasting Company."
And now you know.
All this high tech, and it still comes down to wood for the best sound.
Romantic wood, of course.
Very modern ad.
No pictures, no technobabble - well, splitdorf duplex, okay. But it's just an eye-catching sentence without DRAMATIC TUBE PICTURES.
The Splitdorf Electrical Company was an American manufacturer of ignition products for automobiles, and got into the radio business around 1923. The Edison Company purchased the Splitdorf Radio Company on January 14, 1929, and Charles Edison was elected president. Because of the Great Depression, the Edison venture into radio production ended in 1930.
I don’t know enough about early radio to tell you why they need these, but I gather that . . . interference from power generation was a problem? No, that can’t be it.
“In the majority of cases only Peerless Insulation will meet the requirements of men who have known it as the ‘fish paper’ since 1898!”
