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Mine is the last garden standing:
Everybody else has tilled and raked and llama-manured, but I just didn't have the heart to kill all those marigolds. And as of yesterday, at least, the Swiss chard was still going strong and the peppers were flowering. I got about a quart of peppers, in fact:
Gonna do poppers with the big peppers and roast the rest.
It dropped well below freezing last night, so the Swiss chard and peppers and marigolds are probably on their way out.
I’ll put the garden to sleep some time this coming week.
Horrific windstorms night before last took out most of the yellow and gold leaves:
The stage is set for winter.
###
The Criterion Channel has a bunch of 1940s musicals right now, so last night I watched Meet Me in St. Louis. Judy Garland had the height of her speed addiction but in great voice!
Watching Meet Me in St Louis gave me the oddest feeling. Impossible to put into words, but I’ll try.
Meet Me in St. Louis is set in 1903, which is approximately 50 years before I was born.
It was made eight years before I was born, so I never saw it in a theater, but it showed up from time to time on my grandfather’s tiny black and white television screen as a Million Dollar Movie.
Obviously, Meet Me in St Louis is not a closely researched anthropological study. Its representation of turn-of-the-century life is mostly taken from memes of turn-of-the-century life, how people in the ultra-modern 1940s viewed the turn of the century. Look how quaint that technology is! Gas lights! Trollies! Look at those clothes! Look at those wacky social customs!
The 1970s is 50 years before the current crop of humans was born, and young people have exactly the same reaction to movies set in the 70s that I had to Meet Me in St. Louis: OmyGAWD! How quaint! They used pay phones! And typewriters! And beepers! Look at those clothes! Polyester leisure suits! Lime green! And all that chest hair!
Except that I lived through the 70s, and I know that memes like this are not in the least representative. In fact—grumble, grumble, grumble—the 1970s were a lot more nuanced and modulated than most of what passes as real life today—grumble, grumble, grumble—
But that’s what old people always think, right?
That life was somehow more real back then.
Of course, life was neither more nor less real back then. It’s just that being young, we had the capacity to experience life as more real.
This made me think that built-in obsolescence is not an industrial design quirk at all, but an economic reflection of some deep-rooted human developmental process.
Everything that happened before we were born is completely disposable.
It always has been.
It always will be.
It has to be.
###
In other news, the manicure I got two weeks ago for the Wedding of the Year is still flawless! The nail polish hasn’t chipped!
Must go back to that manicurist.
Everybody else has tilled and raked and llama-manured, but I just didn't have the heart to kill all those marigolds. And as of yesterday, at least, the Swiss chard was still going strong and the peppers were flowering. I got about a quart of peppers, in fact:
Gonna do poppers with the big peppers and roast the rest.
It dropped well below freezing last night, so the Swiss chard and peppers and marigolds are probably on their way out.
I’ll put the garden to sleep some time this coming week.
Horrific windstorms night before last took out most of the yellow and gold leaves:
The stage is set for winter.
###
The Criterion Channel has a bunch of 1940s musicals right now, so last night I watched Meet Me in St. Louis. Judy Garland had the height of her speed addiction but in great voice!
Watching Meet Me in St Louis gave me the oddest feeling. Impossible to put into words, but I’ll try.
Meet Me in St. Louis is set in 1903, which is approximately 50 years before I was born.
It was made eight years before I was born, so I never saw it in a theater, but it showed up from time to time on my grandfather’s tiny black and white television screen as a Million Dollar Movie.
Obviously, Meet Me in St Louis is not a closely researched anthropological study. Its representation of turn-of-the-century life is mostly taken from memes of turn-of-the-century life, how people in the ultra-modern 1940s viewed the turn of the century. Look how quaint that technology is! Gas lights! Trollies! Look at those clothes! Look at those wacky social customs!
The 1970s is 50 years before the current crop of humans was born, and young people have exactly the same reaction to movies set in the 70s that I had to Meet Me in St. Louis: OmyGAWD! How quaint! They used pay phones! And typewriters! And beepers! Look at those clothes! Polyester leisure suits! Lime green! And all that chest hair!
Except that I lived through the 70s, and I know that memes like this are not in the least representative. In fact—grumble, grumble, grumble—the 1970s were a lot more nuanced and modulated than most of what passes as real life today—grumble, grumble, grumble—
But that’s what old people always think, right?
That life was somehow more real back then.
Of course, life was neither more nor less real back then. It’s just that being young, we had the capacity to experience life as more real.
This made me think that built-in obsolescence is not an industrial design quirk at all, but an economic reflection of some deep-rooted human developmental process.
Everything that happened before we were born is completely disposable.
It always has been.
It always will be.
It has to be.
###
In other news, the manicure I got two weeks ago for the Wedding of the Year is still flawless! The nail polish hasn’t chipped!
Must go back to that manicurist.
