So long, Spindle

I've seen Stonehenge and the Eiffel Tower. I've been to the top of the Empire State Building and I used to spend part of every summer near Mount Rushmore. Now I'd never suggest that "Spindle" (a.k.a., The Car Kabob) in Berwyn, Illinois, was on a par with any of these monumental structures, but I will confess to feeling a thrill when I discovered we were living a short hop away in Oak Park.

I'll also confess that I owe much of that thrill to Spindle's appearance in Wayne's World. Not a great film but WW did rise above its SNL spin-off cohort thanks to the ridiculous, pneumatic optimism of Mike Meyers' character and to some fine second unit photography of Spindle and other bits of suburban Americana. The two reverberated against each other, elevating the end result clear of the realm of cornball sketch mishagas. (The less said about Wayne's World 2, the better.)

When news of Spindle's demise surfaced last year, a local group tried to save it. They raised donations but not enough. Last week, the mall owner tried to sell it on eBay but there were no bids. So last Friday night, Spindle came down. Instead, the Cermak Plaza shopping center will get a new Walgreens. Doesn't seem like much of a trade.

And now the Chicago Tribune reports that Spindle may return, somewhere, some day. We shall see. All I know is that I'm even more motivated than ever to see Carhenge - before it gets replaced by a Bass Pro Shop.

Tiny hamlet

One more post before I disappear into a pile of packing paper.

I haven't even been paying attention to the Pennsylvania primary coverage. Yet somehow the phrase "hardscrabble town in western Pennsylvania" has popped out of the media cloud enough in the past few days that I now have Bill Murray's rant from Groundhog Day running on a loop in my mind. I consider this a blessing, so I thought I'd share.

Once again the eyes of the world turn to this "tiny hamlet in western Pennsylvania," blah blah blah... There is no way this winter is ever going to end as long as that groundhog keeps seeing his shadow. I don't see any way out of it. He’s got to be stopped. And I have to stop him.

Not for nothing (as they say further east), but don't look for any relief come Wednesday. The Groundhog Day we're all in looks to last all summer. To quote Phil Connors, again, "You wanna throw up here, or you wanna throw up in the car?"

Here come the boxes

At long last, we're finally going to be moving into our new place next week. I'm psyched.

Of course with all the packing, shuffling and settling there's going to be even less time to blog. See you in a couple of weeks.

Suess speaks (sort of)

Stop Making Movies About My Books

On the fourteenth of March, in towns nationwide / In every cinema, multiplex, on every barnside / Gleamed another adapting of one of my books / CGI-ed and digitized by another sly crook...

I have a VHS copy of How the Grinch Stole Christmas. Someday I'll get around to buying a digital copy from iTunes or something. But as for adaptations of books by the good Doctor, that's as far as I'm prepared to go. As such, I haven't seen any of the bloated big screen adaptations to come out since Theodor Seuss Geisel was translated to a less corporeal format.

So with glee I recommend reading the Onion op-ed above.

"Why it's simply an outrage—a crime, you must judge!—
To crap on my books with this big-budget sludge.
My books are for children to learn ones and twos in,
Not commercialous slop for Jim Carrey to ruin."

Geisel's widow Audrey gets roughed up near the end, but else what's a First Amendment for? Besides, April is supposedly "the cruelest month" and National Poetry Month, to boot.

Then I recommend buying one of the actual books.

City folk

I've heard it said that Chicago is like New York but with nicer people. Having lived in both places and approaching the six month mark of my Chicagoland residence, I'd say that in general the description fits. (There are assholes everywhere, after all, and, yes, I am talking about the pituitary case who manages that motel just off I-80 in Youngstown, Ohio).

As an illustration, take the image above, the snapping of which required me to stand in the middle of a busy sidewalk in the Loop and strike a number of modern dance poses. Most of the passersby gave me what felt like a polite berth and kept moving. In New York (by which I mean Manhattan), I would have expected to get an aggrieved berth accompanied by an annoyed grunt or possibly a remark.

I loved living in New York, but I always suspected that people occasionally stepped in front of cabs so they could let loose with a Ratzo Rizzo "I'm walkin' here!" My own crackpot theory about this is that there's something about the crush of humanity on the island combined with the awareness that so many people want your space (despite the fact that their space is probably so much better than yours ever will be) that results in a kind of neurotic territoriality.

One time I took a date to a movie on the Upper West Side. The place wasn't even a quarter full when my companion and I arrived and we were standing near the back trying to decide how close to the screen to sit when a woman in her 60s approached us and barked, "Excuse me!" I moved aside so she could enter the empty row I had been unintentionally blocking. We watched her shuffle along that empty row (one of at least a dozen on that side of the theater) until she got to the center aisle, which she then followed to the treasured and magical seat down front, the one she had earned by asserting hierarchy over me and my date. We shrugged. The movie looked fine from where we sat.

Whereabouts

The decent fellow who poses as the crusty blogger XO recently posted a post about the lessons he's learned in two years of blogging. They're worth reading, as is XO, generally. So go ahead and do that some time.

My point in posting today (and I purposely waited a day so this wouldn't come off as an April Fool's post) is to fess up to breaking Lesson #9:

Lesson #9 - POST! To paraphrase an old axiom "Bloggers blog." No one is going to add you to their Google Reader if you only post a couple of times a year. WRITE GODDAMNIT! Nobody is going to read a blog that only gets updated when the seasons change.

This brings up several issues:

• I don't know if you can "break" a lesson, but I respect your pedantry.
• It hadn't occurred to me that I might be on anyone's Google Reader.
• Spellcheck notwithstanding, I support the presence of the N in "GODDAMNIT!" I also support pronouncing the N sound which results in a satisfying Yosemite Sam impersonation if you say the word with sufficient vim.
• I wholeheartedly support Yosemite Sam impersonations. And adverbs.
  
• I actually have been writing quite a bit recently, although most of it has been on paper, which seems deliberately obscurantist but wasn't intended as such. It's just that I still have a thing for pens and paper. I'd take an hour in a good stationers over a museum anytime.
  
• There have been numerous things posted over at Oddment of Sandwiches, but let's face it that thing really isn't technically a blog, but more of a sheep in blog's clothing.
  

Still, it would have been considerate of me to inform all five of my readers when I felt this most recent hiatus coming on.

So, sorry about that. And as they used to say on the Carson show: More to come.

Hope for the future

Watch as rude camera-shoving on the streets of L.A. develops into a serious discussion of the future of healthcare in the U.S. Simply awesome.



Tip from the Hodg-man.