Monthly Archives: August 2007

Aug182007

Random ‘Net Crap on a Saturday Afternoon

Well, I’ve been been accomplishing nothing fast on this lovely Saturday afternoon. The Girlfriend is spending the weekend at her parents’ place out in Tooele and I was planning to take care of all kinds of mundane jobs around the Compound that I keep putting off, but instead I’ve spent much of the day puttering around my office, surfing the web, IM’ing with some buddies, and listening to Pandora.com. (That’s been a strange journey today. The algorithms that supposedly determine your tastes started me off with Natalie Imbruglia’s “Torn”; now, three hours later, I’m listening to Ozzy Osbourne. That either says something about me, or about Pandora, and I haven’t been able to decide which…)

You know what, though? I’m okay with not having done anything noteworthy today. It’s felt damn good to just screw around, actually. I’ve been something of a stress-kitten lately, and I’ve been suffering for it (briefly, I carry my tension in my back and I also tend to sleep in awkward positions, and those two variables reached critical mass about a week ago and left me with a kinked neck that I couldn’t turn to the left without yelping in pain). Well, I just realized that nothing hurts at the moment, for the first time in days. It’s luxurious, and it goes a long way toward assuaging my conscience.

And if that’s not enough, I’ve found some amusing stuff out there today, which I will share with you below the fold:

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Aug182007

Video Tours of Crossroads and ZCMI Center

In hunting around YouTube for videos of this morning’s implosion, I found a few clips that may be of interest to sentimental slobs such as myself who want to reminisce about the downtown malls. The first is an appropriately titled “last look” that’s heavy on schmaltz (warning: Barbera Streisand’s “Memories” ahead!) and includes a little too much footage of the parking garages for my tastes, but also nicely encapsulates what’s going away in the name of progress:

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Aug182007

Key Bank Tower Implosion: The End of Crossroads

At a little after 6.30 this morning, the Key Bank Tower, a 30-year-old high-rise office building in downtown Salt Lake, was imploded to make way for the new City Creek Center redevelopment project. It was the first such implosion in the downtown area since the old Hotel Newhouse was demolished back in ’83 (which I didn’t care about at the time, but in retrospect seems a deep shame, especially since the place where the hotel stood is now — can you guess? — a parking lot! Moreover, a parking lot that is rarely anywhere near capacity! That was really worth taking out a historically interesting and beautiful building, wasn’t it?)

I haven’t been able to find an embeddable video of the Key Bank’s death to post up here, but if you go to KSL-TV’s site, there are several nifty clips for your viewing pleasure. I especially like Angle #1, which has a couple of men in the foreground to provide some scale and drama, and Angle #4, which is a long-distance shot that includes the First Security Building I wrote about a while back. (Look for the red glow; that would be the big neon sign I like so well.) With the Key Bank’s destruction, the so-called Crossroads Block — named for the mall that used to wrap around the base of the tower — is now clear. Meanwhile, across the street, the demolition of the ZCMI Center Mall continues. (Yes, you out-of-towners, Salt Lake used to have two malls right across the street from each other; it actually wasn’t as insane as it sounds, as they had a different mix of retailers and catered to different demographics. As with so many other things about Salt Lake culture, it’s a little complicated and it reflects the social schism between Mormons and non-Mormons…)

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Aug172007

Self-Evident Truths…

Well, duh...

Sometimes we need to be reminded of the startingly obvious. Click the image and go read the rest of the strip. Funny and wise, a rare combination…

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Aug172007

My First CD(s)

As long as we’re talking music, here’s an interesting trivia note: the compact disc was introduced 25 years ago today. There’s a pretty detailed article about its development here… although I notice it failed to mention that the preliminary work in converting analog music to a digital file was done by a grad student at my very own alma mater, the University of Utah. Granted, the actual physical disc technology was developed later, by other people, but the ground work for the digital music revolution was done right here in my back yard.

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Aug172007

Like a Boomerang, I Need a Repeat

So, if you weren’t following along in the comments, the correct answer to yesterday’s “pop quiz” — i.e., what do the groups ZZ Top, The Pretenders, and The Stray Cats have in common? — was provided by our esteemed webmaster Jack: those three bands all performed Wednesday night at West Valley City’s Usana Amphitheater, and The Girlfriend and I were there for what seems to be turning into an annual tradition for us, namely, seeing one multiple-act, ’80s-nostalgia outdoor concert per year. (Last year’s entry in this category was Journey and Def Leppard, if you’ll recall.)

I was pretty enthusiastic for this show, although it did strike me as a really strange line-up. When I first heard about it, the only thing I could think of that these bands had in common was that they all had hit songs in the year 1983. (That would be the three tunes whose videos I posted yesterday: “(She’s) Sexy + 17” by The Stray Cats, “Back on the Chain Gang” by The Pretenders, and “Gimme All Your Lovin'” by ZZ Top.) The more I pondered it, though, the more I realized that it was actually brilliant programming; there was something for everyone! You had the good-time retro rockabilly of The Cats for the neo-swing hipster crowd; the punk-influenced “modern” sound of The Pretenders for the aging New Wavers-turned-suburbanites (easy to spot in their madras shorts and polo shirts); and down-and-dirty, bluesy Tex-Mex rock and roll of ZZ for the former (and current) mulletheads. Guess which category I fall into?

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Aug152007

Pop Quiz

Before we begin, yes, that title up there is indeed a play on words, a pun, as it were. Groan if you feel the need. I’ll wait…
Finished with that? Good, now let’s begin. Tell me — if you can — what do the following three items have in common?

I’ll provide the answer sometime tomorrow, after I’ve gotten some sleep…

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Aug152007

The Future: Pretty Much More of the Same

Via Boing Boing this morning, I found an interesting New Yorker essay by Adam Gopnik on the late science-fiction novelist Philip K. Dick. Dick has long held a certain amount of fame for writing the novel on which the movie Blade Runner was based, but in recent years he’s also become increasingly respected by the Keepers of the Literary Standard, as evidenced by the anthology reprints of his much of his oeuvre in the ’90s and the recently published Library of America omnibus edition of his most significant novels. As Gopnik says, “Of all American writers, none have got the genre-hack-to-hidden-genius treatment quite so fully as Philip K. Dick, the California-raised and based science-fiction writer who, beginning in the nineteen-fifties, wrote thirty-six speed-fueled novels, went crazy in the early seventies, and died in 1982, only fifty-three.”
Now, I must be honest, all I really know of Dick’s work is some of the movies that have been based on it. I have read Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep?, the novel that inspired Blade Runner, but I was very young at the time, and it confused the hell out of me. I remember being baffled that it didn’t follow the movie more closely, and Dick’s tendency to invent words caused me no end of frustration. I’ve always intended to give the book another try, but haven’t gotten around to it yet.
In any event, Gopnik’s essay — which covers Dick’s fascinating and tumultuous life, and also offers some insightful criticism of his work — is a good read, and I recommend it to anyone who has even a passing interest in the subject. However, the point I really want to address with this entry actually turns on a single paragraph:

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Aug152007

More on the BHS Class of ’87 Reunion

I received an e-mail this morning from Jeff Farr, the president of Bingham High’s Class of 1987 and organizer of our upcoming 20-year reunion. Sounds like he could use some help!

I’ve forwarded his message on to all my former classmates for whom I had e-mail addresses, but maybe there are some more of you lurking silently here that I don’t know about. If you’re one of those, please read on, and then do what you can to spread the word…

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Aug142007

The Sad Saga of the Neighborhood Crazy Lady, Part Two

[Ed. note: Read the first part of this long story here.]

Fast-forward to just a couple years ago. Nearly three decades had passed since the Great Dirt-Pile Fracas. The Crazy Lady was now living alone after losing a second husband and seeing her kids move away — far away, in a couple of cases. Both she and my father had mellowed somewhat, enough to speak to one another occasionally with some degree of civility, although both of them still tried to keep their distance. But even with such limited contact, it started becoming obvious that something strange was happening to The Crazy Lady. She was becoming… well, nice. Sickeningly sweet, in fact. If she saw my mother out in the front yard, she’d cross the street to complement her on her roses. If Dad was trying to repair that decrepit old whiteboard fence across the front of the pasture just well enough to get through one more summer, she’d come ask him if he wanted a cool drink.

This behavior was… unsettling. It was extremely out of character for her, and it put my parents on guard. They thought at first it must surely be some kind of Trojan horse gambit that would inevitably lead to another fight. But no, The Crazy Lady continued to be nice and no attack ever came. Someone — Dad, perhaps, who has learned a great deal more compassion than he used to have — suggested that maybe she was lonely, or that having her children all run as far away as they could get had taught her a lesson. All too soon, however, we started to see other symptoms. And we recognized them for what they were.

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