A couple of links, first off.
Arthur and Jason’s 2political podcast makes mention of my article re the Triangle Shirtwaist Fire.
Recent articles on my Times Union blog include the old YMCA becoming a church, the collective wisdom of the bus, and me asking if it is the job of a news organization to change behavior.
From Thursday Thunks, and this was the order of the questions; I don’t know why.
1. There is a song out there about you… it’s on the radio, the video is on tv (just not MTV) and everybody in the world knows this song is about you. Who sings it?
For some reason, I’ve had stuck in my head, for a couple of weeks, Whatcha See Is Whatcha Get by the Dramatics, which got to #9 on the pop charts and #3 on the soul charts in 1971. My daughter has been singing, “Some people are made of plastic; You know some people are made of wood”. Then instead of “Some people have hearts of stone; Some people are up to no good,” she makes up something else. It’s something basically honest, and therefore comforting, about WYSIWYG.
4. Have you ever sneaked..snuck…snucked…what is the right word? into a movie?
Actually no, and this proved to be a source of a rather heated discussion. My sister’s dopey then-boyfriend, who always had an angle, boasted how he’d pay for one movie but then see two or three. He was so proud of himself. “Everybody does it,” he proclaimed. “I never did,” I replied and my wife responded likewise. It was also the weekend he went on about what a superior Christian he was. Meh.
3. Déjà vu; meaning “already seen”, is the experience of feeling sure that one has already witnessed or experienced a current situation, even though the exact circumstances of the previous encounter are uncertain and were perhaps imagined. Thoughts on what it is? Have you experienced it?
I don’t know what it is, but I remember quite distinctly the first time I recall experiencing it. I was working at a summer camp when I was 17, mowing the acres of lawn on the boys’ side of the camp, then the girls’ side. I was walking down the dirt road that led from one side to the other, when I had the distinct impression that I had traveled that road before, though, at least in this lifetime, I had not.
2. Stick it to me, baby. What is the last bumper sticker you saw and why do you remember it?
There’s one I see all the time in my neighborhood: “Well-behaved women rarely make history”; seems to be true.
10. Ever wonder what fish think about?
Their school lessons, no doubt.
8. If you could paint President Obama’s fingernails any color, what would it be?
Yellow, for the cowardice he’s shown in a number of issues.
7. Do you have seat covers on your car seats? What do they look like?
No.
6. For the rest of your life you can eat one spice and one spice only (on whatever food you want, of course), what spice do you choose?
Allspice. If you’re going to be a spice, might as well be versatile
9. If you could slide down a rainbow, which side would you slide down?
The outside.
5. So a mom is suing her kids’ preschool because it failed to prepare the child for the kindergarten entrance exam… did you eat paste in preschool?
I’m fascinated by how much homework my daughter had in kindergarten and has in first grade. (I never went to preschool; not sure it’d been invented yet.)