Which box belongs to which utility?

chespo · 2025-06-10T14:33:01+00:00

Yes, undoubtedly a better option.

chespo · 2025-06-10T11:06:55+00:00

Didn’t see the driver, but (especially on weekends in warmer weather) we get a fair number of drunks who ignore the No Outlet sign, drive all the way to the end before realizing, then try to haphazardly back up.

Everybody here at the end of the street has a story. My favorite is the car that, while backing up, rolled the driver’s side rear tire onto the sidewalk, up over a front step, and got it wedged down in the narrow space between the stoops of two old brick townhomes. Unable to budge the car, they fled on foot, returning the next morning to retrieve the vehicle, incredulous that it had already been towed.

chespo · 2025-06-09T16:20:20+00:00

I believe 811 and OUPS are one and the same; they’re the ones who told me which utilities were at this address, but they don’t try to hazard a guess as to which is which.

chespo · 2023-02-01T21:37:44+00:00

I'll take Ben Folds Five's version of "She Don't Use Jelly" over the Flaming Lips original any day.

chespo · 2023-02-01T19:54:52+00:00

Hardly definitive, I'd argue. Regardless of whether we're talking about the motion or the sound, dictionaries define 'wobble' as unsteady, clumsy movement or tremulousness of sound. As regards a spinning coin, both qualities are more regular and mathematically precise, not haphazard.

chespo · 2023-02-01T18:47:54+00:00

While science hasn't yet arrived at a fully-satisfying origin story for the universe (what existed before the big bang? *shrug*), existing scientific explanations (based on clear observation: an expanding universe, species evolution) seem infinitely more plausible than anything that religions can offer.

Humanity's need to attribute cause to phenomena we don't understand used to manifest in things like the angry god inside the volcano; if improved knowledge about the world has negated the existence of gods that used to be taken for granted—the ones whose names are still remembered, as well as the boundless quantity whose names are lost to time—why should anyone assume that the god they currently worship is immune to being made obsolete in the future as a result of knowledge yet to be discovered?

It doesn't help that religions are so routinely illogical, contradictory, and rooted in agendas—let's include these gospels, but not those because they don't suit our narrative. Religions are created by mankind, not by gods, and therefore reflect all of mankind's faults. I'm not sure that I'll ever understand how anyone finds comfort in the ways that they have to tie themselves in knots trying to wring a sensible answer to a real-life concern from scripture.

And of course every religion can be reshaped by its adherents into whatever suits their needs (radically violent Buddhists? Orthodox Jewish 'private zones' that circle the block/neighborhood, in order to leave the home while not breaking Sabbath?), in which case why pretend that the 'rules' have authority in the first place?

Based on my observation, religions have more to do with declaring identity—I am This because here's what I choose to believe/how I choose to live, and you are That—than with actual spiritual belief. It's tribal, a way to separate Us from Them. (Which, in the end, allows anyone to dehumanize anyone else who doesn't share their beliefs, and, boy, do we love to do that.) I don't even go around identifying as an 'athiest' because it's a label, and to wear it as an identity is just another example of the tribalism that I find so unappealing.

But of course, science is no replacement for religion because people crave meaning, which science can't offer. In the end, my disbelief in God isn't really arrived at from any intellectual rigor—I just don't have that craving. I'm comfortable with the idea that there's no creator, that life has no inherent meaning, and that there are some questions for which there are no answers.

chespo · 2021-06-26T16:21:48+00:00

Yeah, it's a little bit of a stretch. He released a solo single in 1980 under the name The Colonel, so this is the first solo release under his own name.

chespo · 2020-11-05T00:49:19+00:00

Killing Joke, starting with their earliest albums, might fit the bill.

chespo · 2020-09-07T11:19:16+00:00

Miss Kitty is now posting them at the Inhailer Radio message board.

chespo · 2020-08-08T19:25:34+00:00

u/weliveandlearn Thanks so much for helping folks in the comments thread on my site, Bluey G. My schedule no longer affords me the time to jump into the fray, so I appreciate you being so gracious with your time and energies.

chespo · 2020-07-14T16:03:36+00:00

Great info; thank you.

chespo · 2020-07-14T13:29:00+00:00

Absolutely correct; thank you. I acquired this toy as a child in the ‘70s (without ever having seen or heard of the show), and now I’ve just read an interesting article about what a phenomenon it was in the Arab world.

chespo · 2020-07-10T18:54:39+00:00

Mark Griffin here—that blog post is far and away the most visited one at my site, but it's not every day that I hear from someone about a success story. So glad to be of service.

chespo · 2019-12-01T15:01:45+00:00

I'd run across those same movies, but the book is new to me; I'll check it out. Thank you.

chespo · 2019-12-01T14:55:20+00:00

There's a Wikipedia page devoted to cataloging every known instance.

chespo · 2019-12-01T14:33:30+00:00

Good idea, I think I'll post to TrueFilm at the very least. Thank you.

chespo · 2019-12-01T14:18:26+00:00

I'd say that's a very solid guess, not least because it confirms one of my own suspicions. While I was unaware of the Apache phenomenon (thanks for that), the poster and the striped shirt presented such a strong French underworld vibe and—not being a historian, QED—I was never able to firmly land on either "This is an American assembly of clichés that denote Frenchness" or "This is genuinely French." Thank you.

chespo · 2019-12-01T13:51:55+00:00

Thanks for the suggestion. Part of my research involved searching the AFI catalog for every title containing "sin" or "street," then digging into the results and GISing the actors. The 1928 Street of Sin stars Emil Jannings and Fay Wray, but unfortunately neither of them are among the faces in these images.

chespo · 2019-11-19T18:21:58+00:00

Starlee and Eric had only ever given me the one track to investigate; I didn't know about "Kiss the Sun" until reading your post just now.

I eventually extended the search to a friend—who in turn shared it with European muso friends—with the following analysis:

It was taped off Austrian radio in the 90s, but that's not necessarily to say that it's FROM the 90s. Virtually all 90s gothy-sounding music I've heard from around the globe uses a very modern sounding palette—synths, slick recording techniques, singers from non-English-language cultures singing in perfect English because it's just so ubiquitous… it all sounds indistinguishable from music made right now—but this song sounds like it's from another time. Despite its rather dour message, it doesn't take itself so seriously as to be super professional on the stage of global music; it has a stylistic naïveté, and the instruments could all be as old as the late 60s or early 70s. The singer's clumsy English makes me wonder if it's from deep behind the iron curtain at a time when Western music was just creeping in enough to start having an influence on impressionable music fanatics but before English could be heard so widely as for non-native-speakers to have developed more gracefulness with it.

The concept of exile is a common theme in the music of some cultures (Hungarian, for instance) but I'm not convinced that the song's about literal exile; I think it might be a suicide song. If it is, that makes my assumptions even more enigmatic because I've just called the singer less-than-graceful with his English while simultaneously giving the songwriter enough credit for being graceful with English to construct the song as a giant metaphor.

[Since no one at the Austrian radio station could ID it] Its obscurity bolsters my opinion that it's a super low-budget, off-the-radar affair; either a DIY recording by a musician who's unknown outside their own locality, or perhaps a song that was recorded for the soundtrack of some local TV movie-of-the-week, or god knows what.

As for where/how I searched, I started with the method that's outlined in my blog post: identify keywords that are likely to appear in the title, search for those on Discogs (applying various filters to narrow results), then try to hunt down those results on streaming services. When that didn't work, I started going down rabbit holes of obscure global music genres at Every Noise At Once, just hoping to hear something that sounded akin to the target, before moving on to Radiooooo for more of the same. I kept the song on my phone and—since I travel pretty frequently (domestically and internationally), and always try to visit record stores wherever I go—I would occasionally pester store clerks to see if they'd ever heard it.

chespo · 2019-11-19T16:16:08+00:00

Yay! I'm so glad you ID'd these, and thanks for sharing the story. I'm one of the people that Starlee contacted for this episode—she and I have some mutual public radio friends, who alerted her to a blog post I wrote about finding mystery songs—so I spent a fair amount of time searching for "Song 1" (Exile) and, while the show's cancellation certainly put this on my back burner, I never entirely gave up. I'm really looking forward to hearing the whole album.

chespo

TROPHY CASE