Saturday, August 26, 2006

One country, two systems

Here's another highlight, a picture my friend took in Beijing. All the chairman is missing is a trucker cap.


Competing with Fotomat when competing with Fotomat wasn't cool

I'm going through a shoebox of old photographs, and so far the most interesting thing I've found is not a picture at all -- or, at least, not a picture I took. Feast your eyes on this primo artifact of Music City living, circa 1984. Nashvillians in the know knew where to bring their snaps.


Thursday, August 24, 2006

Good word

"You can't rebel against Roy Orbison with music."

-- Roy Orbison, Jr.

Wednesday, August 23, 2006

Baked goods

The novelist Douglas Coupland blogs on the Web site of the New York Times, and in a recent entry he recalled the events of Sept. 11, 2001. It turns out he was marooned here in Madison after all the flights were grounded:
By the fifth day in Madison, I was beginning to think, Hmmm ... maybe if I'm stuck here for the rest of my life I could make a go of it. It's a pretty little town -- like TV's "Happy Days" -- nice houses and Mrs. Cunninghams all over the place making endless batches of cookies and cooling them on the ledges of Dutch doors.
His impressions of our fair city seem accurate, up to a point. What he probably didn't realize is that there was pot in those cookies.

Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Okay, this is funny

http://www.flickr.com/photos/nickledndimed/220619883
Appalling

Why stop at merely bullying a teenage kidnapping victim on national television? When you can also patronize her.
Good word

"Reporting -- meaning the tradition by which a member of a distinct occupational category gets to cross the usual bounds of geography and class, to go where important things are happening, to ask powerful people blunt and impertinent questions, and to report back, reliably and in plain language, to a general audience -- is a distinctive, fairly recent invention."

-- Nicholas Lemann

Monday, August 21, 2006

Brush with greatness

In Bayfield we stayed at Gruenke's First Street Inn, a place that is noteworthy in part because whitefish livers, a signature Bayfield delicacy, reportedly were first served there.

But Gruenke's has another claim to fame: John F. Kennedy, Jr. was once a guest. In a modern twist on George Washington Slept Here, the late scion is immortalized in a shrine that takes up much of one wall in the dining room. The arrangement includes his bill from the restaurant, and his registration form. The latter is signed, simply, "John Kennedy," and I confess that seeing his signature gave me shivers.

There also is a photograph of a light aircraft. Whether it's that light aircraft, I don't want to know.