Doin' the right thing.

[captainsblog]

* Still not King. Also, still not signed up for the Trot to benefit the local Y, although I now think that's gonna happen tomorrow. Probably should try going for a run outside, at least once around the block before Thursday morning, huh.

* Paid the schadenfreude forward, seeing that the local Notorious B.I.G. foreclosure firm is going out of business now that they've been banhammered by the two biggest federal agencies. 

* In other local GOOB news, I drove by the local Syms clothing store, which has huge GOING OUT OF BUSINESS signs in the window. However, in keeping with the late Sy Syms's wishes, you still don't see the word "SALE." (Also, for our New England friends: apparently Filene's is included in this as well.)

* Did not go to Margie's Ithaca-based memorial over the weekend, but am planning to go to the one for her in Rochester a week from Wednesday night. This also gets me out of a dull local church meeting that same evening.

* Endured a half-hour sales call associated with my updating one of my business accounts to divert its negligible annual interest earnings to support legal services for the poor. Momentarily, it looked like I would have to make a significant financial commitment to pay for new checks, deposit tickets and such in order to make the change, but moments after I got off the phone with the checker-printer-agenter, it turned out these are all free to me because I made the switch.

* Got the following email from a new client who called me from a tight spot two weekends ago, following said client's receipt of my reasonable but by no means cheap proposal for the engagement of my services: To say this made my day when i saw this is an understatement.
I like shit like that so much, I don't even fix the capitalization errors in it:)

Thanks are being given already. Feel free to have some of them:)

Comments

[bill_sheehan.livejournal.com]

Sic transit gloria. The place where Filenes once proudly stood in Boston now looks like a bomb crater from the London Blitz.

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

(Edited to even asshattier meme format:)

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

In Boston, the headlines are "Filene's Basement Closing. (Also something called Syms.)

[captainsblog.livejournal.com]

I'd gotten the impression from Bill's earlier comment that the Boston one had already drawn the curtain and gone to join the choir invisible.

[liddle-oldman.livejournal.com]

Oh, yeah, it long since has. The "Filenes Basement" of these ads is a pale reflection of the real thing. I was streamlining for the sake of brevity.

The Basement (any other name was unnecessary) was actually where the big department store sent its unsold remnants and broken sizes, so you had to go pretty much weekly to glean gold from the dross. After a while it started getting other stores remainders, too; I've bought several Brooks Brothers shirts for like $5 and $3.50. Then -- and we all knew this was the first tinkle of the death knell -- they expanded the brand and founded a series of stores that just sold cheap, uninteresting clothes. That's what's closing now. The real store, Basement and all, was bought up by Macys and closed down. (They'd already bought Jordan Marsh, across the street, and turned them into a Macys.) Someone bought the building, tore it down, dug a huge pit, announced luxury condos, and went bust. Years later, it's still a hole in the ground.

In the movie Surrogates, in the scene where the reclusive inventor picks up Bruce Willis (in the meat) and lectures him on his case, you can see the last remnants of facade standing in the background.