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captainsblogThat was quite a week, wasn't it?
The Bills' player is conscious, first writing on his own (his first question was Who won the game?, to which the only answer is YOU DID!), eventually breathing and speaking without assistance once tubes were removed. The stories- of the heroics on the field and the kindnesses displayed with and to him by fans and players from his team, the home team and even unrelated teams- continue to inspire. The game will never be resumed or replayed, various post-season contingencies will await the outcomes of several games today and tomorrow, but none of that is nearly as important as him making it through this experience that will hopefully never be seen again on a field, pitch or rink of play.
After my learning of that Monday night news, followed by a stressful return to live court on Wednesday and a Thursday spent at my Buffalo desk mostly with the feeling of herding cats, I ended the day filing papers in a Southtowns clerk's office and trying to serve an always absent tenant who's been fighting eviction for a year and a half, I needed a distraction to end the day, and one awaited just Up The Transit from there. Our gym periodically gives us challenges measured by time or distance, on a treadmill or rower. Thursday's was a short one, as they go. My form and endurance have improved over the months since I last took this challenge on, so this seemed, as they say, challenging but doable. My friend Jory who was coaching even confirmed that this wasn’t one to hold back on strokes per minute; I should go ahead and try to blow the roof off the dump.
Welp? Roof, no. Dump, absolutely.
Here we go!
This is not sped up. It's a room full of crazy people. I'm second from the far end near the exit. After about 30 seconds, you will see I stop and then step off. That's when my ass fell off the seat (but no further- thanks, handle!). Later, we got to give it a second crack (heh), and I did NOT fall off the seat and came within about a quarter second of a personal record for the distance:) That also put me at the top of my age group, all the more impressive because this time I had an age group:
Not bad for an old guy.
Also not bad that the old guy was able to embed that video here. Damn, these sites make them proprietary as fuck. To get that off Facebook where Jory posted it, I had to go through three rounds of tabs, renames and a two-step save to get it onto my computer in a Youtube-compatible format. Then I found that they are pains in the ass now, too; unlike regular videos there that can be embedded in two clicks, this one saved as a "short" (presumably because it's, not long, I guess?) that took five more hops, skips and jumps to get onto this page.
At least there's not a 40 second ad ahead of the 40 second video. Yet.
----
Yesterday brought my first Rochester visit of the year. It began meeting a client who works at a restaurant in a west side suburban mall. It opens out to the parking lot as well as to a mall entrance; I usually just come in from the outside but was a little early for their opening, so I walked around the mall for a few minutes, the first time probably in months I'd set foot in one of these onetime shopping meccas.
Wow. It's not quite at the level of Dead Mall of the former two-story palace in Irondequoit to its east, and there are no piles of rubble outside it like I saw to its south last week, but still. That place needs more life support than Damar Hamlin did the other night. This particular one was two separate malls when I moved there: Greece Towne, run by the leading mall developer Wilmorite, and Long Ridge next to it, were eventually merged into a Wilmorite megaplex called Greece Ridge and was the only such mecca on the west side of the Genesee River.
Its mixed parentage, along with the seeming lack of residential cachet on the west side of the city, hindered it in becoming the likely sole survivor of the Mall Hunger Games there. That honor seems to have fallen to Eastview, out in the zip code of McMansions just over the county line and "just north of the Thruway," as the original ads for it used to say. That's where Wilmorite has placed the Cheesecake Factory and the fancier schmancier specialty shops. Greece Ridge is a dying collection of photo booths, kid's claw-game arcades, vibrating relaxation Barcaloungers where the Sunglass Huts and Piercing Pagodas used to be,.... and mall walkers. Even here, where the Walden Galleria seems to be the only mall with any hope of survival, the two stories of aisles appear more full of mall walkers than actual shoppers. That mall used to attract most of the Canadian crowd, but even with the loosened border restrictions, they seem to have gotten oot of the habit of coming that way anymore.
One of the biggest unique draws of both are the humongous movie megaplexes, but those are dying their own deaths on account of other dynamics. The Regal inside Greece Ridge was shut tight as a drum just before noon, and I doubt there's anything drawing huge crowds to them at night anymore, either. Regal just sold one of their megaplexes in this area to a local operator, which itself recently closed one of its smaller Dead Mall three-screeners that I remember fondly as a General Cinema back in the day.
I'm convinced that these late-20th-century cultural icons are more important for how they look, and what people think they are, than for what they actually are. I'm reminded of this every time I drive past the Galleria on the 90, on the way to the chiropractor, the absent tenant or the rower torture: Lord & Taylor continues to have its signature logo plastered on the outside of its bigly but empty anchor box, more than two years after the location closed in the early days of the chain's 2020 bankruptcy. I doubt if even the average Canadian shopper ever set foot in the place when it was open, given its priciness, but just having it there increased the hoity-toity atmosphere of the whole place. It may never have even been an actual store at all, for all I know.
----
At last the weekend has arrived, as have our copies (here and at Emily's) of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. That snail got to its destination a lot faster than Kevin McCarthy finally made it to his. Lord only knows what concessions he had to make to get over the top in the middle of the night last night. I expect to see this edit on his Wikipedia page any time now:
Kevin and his wife had two children together, a daughter now named Meghan Boebert and a son now named Connor Gaetz.
In the long run, though, those concessions likely mean that our Kevin may well have ensured Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker-elect sooner rather than later. Here's why:
Kev agreed to the House rule change that allows a single member to put forward a motion to vacate the chair. At least two members of his supporting bloc (Perry of PA, Santos of NY) are facing criminal indictments for an assortment of misdeeds,while Matt Gaetz of FL, who knuckled to a "present" vote at the end, is also facing a metal toilet in HIS future.
In Florida, DeSantis will no doubt act with the speed of an amped-up gay penguin to call a special election to spill more garbage into Matt's seat, but if the other two get perp-walked out, their states have Democrat Guvs who can call the special elections to replace them any old, very old, extremely old time they feel like it. That will reduce the numerator and denominator by at least 2, and Hakeem's 212 could go up as easily as Kev's 216 could go down.
("What's that gay penguin doing on top of this line?"
"NOT SAYING GAY!"
"I CAN SEE THAT!")
I'm a lot prouder of my rower fail than Kevin gets to be of what he thinks he succeeded at.
The Bills' player is conscious, first writing on his own (his first question was Who won the game?, to which the only answer is YOU DID!), eventually breathing and speaking without assistance once tubes were removed. The stories- of the heroics on the field and the kindnesses displayed with and to him by fans and players from his team, the home team and even unrelated teams- continue to inspire. The game will never be resumed or replayed, various post-season contingencies will await the outcomes of several games today and tomorrow, but none of that is nearly as important as him making it through this experience that will hopefully never be seen again on a field, pitch or rink of play.
After my learning of that Monday night news, followed by a stressful return to live court on Wednesday and a Thursday spent at my Buffalo desk mostly with the feeling of herding cats, I ended the day filing papers in a Southtowns clerk's office and trying to serve an always absent tenant who's been fighting eviction for a year and a half, I needed a distraction to end the day, and one awaited just Up The Transit from there. Our gym periodically gives us challenges measured by time or distance, on a treadmill or rower. Thursday's was a short one, as they go. My form and endurance have improved over the months since I last took this challenge on, so this seemed, as they say, challenging but doable. My friend Jory who was coaching even confirmed that this wasn’t one to hold back on strokes per minute; I should go ahead and try to blow the roof off the dump.
Welp? Roof, no. Dump, absolutely.
Here we go!
This is not sped up. It's a room full of crazy people. I'm second from the far end near the exit. After about 30 seconds, you will see I stop and then step off. That's when my ass fell off the seat (but no further- thanks, handle!). Later, we got to give it a second crack (heh), and I did NOT fall off the seat and came within about a quarter second of a personal record for the distance:) That also put me at the top of my age group, all the more impressive because this time I had an age group:
Not bad for an old guy.
Also not bad that the old guy was able to embed that video here. Damn, these sites make them proprietary as fuck. To get that off Facebook where Jory posted it, I had to go through three rounds of tabs, renames and a two-step save to get it onto my computer in a Youtube-compatible format. Then I found that they are pains in the ass now, too; unlike regular videos there that can be embedded in two clicks, this one saved as a "short" (presumably because it's, not long, I guess?) that took five more hops, skips and jumps to get onto this page.
At least there's not a 40 second ad ahead of the 40 second video. Yet.
----
Yesterday brought my first Rochester visit of the year. It began meeting a client who works at a restaurant in a west side suburban mall. It opens out to the parking lot as well as to a mall entrance; I usually just come in from the outside but was a little early for their opening, so I walked around the mall for a few minutes, the first time probably in months I'd set foot in one of these onetime shopping meccas.
Wow. It's not quite at the level of Dead Mall of the former two-story palace in Irondequoit to its east, and there are no piles of rubble outside it like I saw to its south last week, but still. That place needs more life support than Damar Hamlin did the other night. This particular one was two separate malls when I moved there: Greece Towne, run by the leading mall developer Wilmorite, and Long Ridge next to it, were eventually merged into a Wilmorite megaplex called Greece Ridge and was the only such mecca on the west side of the Genesee River.
Its mixed parentage, along with the seeming lack of residential cachet on the west side of the city, hindered it in becoming the likely sole survivor of the Mall Hunger Games there. That honor seems to have fallen to Eastview, out in the zip code of McMansions just over the county line and "just north of the Thruway," as the original ads for it used to say. That's where Wilmorite has placed the Cheesecake Factory and the fancier schmancier specialty shops. Greece Ridge is a dying collection of photo booths, kid's claw-game arcades, vibrating relaxation Barcaloungers where the Sunglass Huts and Piercing Pagodas used to be,.... and mall walkers. Even here, where the Walden Galleria seems to be the only mall with any hope of survival, the two stories of aisles appear more full of mall walkers than actual shoppers. That mall used to attract most of the Canadian crowd, but even with the loosened border restrictions, they seem to have gotten oot of the habit of coming that way anymore.
One of the biggest unique draws of both are the humongous movie megaplexes, but those are dying their own deaths on account of other dynamics. The Regal inside Greece Ridge was shut tight as a drum just before noon, and I doubt there's anything drawing huge crowds to them at night anymore, either. Regal just sold one of their megaplexes in this area to a local operator, which itself recently closed one of its smaller Dead Mall three-screeners that I remember fondly as a General Cinema back in the day.
I'm convinced that these late-20th-century cultural icons are more important for how they look, and what people think they are, than for what they actually are. I'm reminded of this every time I drive past the Galleria on the 90, on the way to the chiropractor, the absent tenant or the rower torture: Lord & Taylor continues to have its signature logo plastered on the outside of its bigly but empty anchor box, more than two years after the location closed in the early days of the chain's 2020 bankruptcy. I doubt if even the average Canadian shopper ever set foot in the place when it was open, given its priciness, but just having it there increased the hoity-toity atmosphere of the whole place. It may never have even been an actual store at all, for all I know.
----
At last the weekend has arrived, as have our copies (here and at Emily's) of Marcel the Shell With Shoes On. That snail got to its destination a lot faster than Kevin McCarthy finally made it to his. Lord only knows what concessions he had to make to get over the top in the middle of the night last night. I expect to see this edit on his Wikipedia page any time now:
Kevin and his wife had two children together, a daughter now named Meghan Boebert and a son now named Connor Gaetz.
In the long run, though, those concessions likely mean that our Kevin may well have ensured Hakeem Jeffries as Speaker-elect sooner rather than later. Here's why:
Kev agreed to the House rule change that allows a single member to put forward a motion to vacate the chair. At least two members of his supporting bloc (Perry of PA, Santos of NY) are facing criminal indictments for an assortment of misdeeds,while Matt Gaetz of FL, who knuckled to a "present" vote at the end, is also facing a metal toilet in HIS future.
In Florida, DeSantis will no doubt act with the speed of an amped-up gay penguin to call a special election to spill more garbage into Matt's seat, but if the other two get perp-walked out, their states have Democrat Guvs who can call the special elections to replace them any old, very old, extremely old time they feel like it. That will reduce the numerator and denominator by at least 2, and Hakeem's 212 could go up as easily as Kev's 216 could go down.
("What's that gay penguin doing on top of this line?"
"NOT SAYING GAY!"
"I CAN SEE THAT!")
I'm a lot prouder of my rower fail than Kevin gets to be of what he thinks he succeeded at.
no subject
Date: 2023-01-07 11:41 pm (UTC)It's kind of a shame about malls. They were good places for pedestrians not to get run over, and for denizens of the sprawl to shop with choices, and for teens to do their hanging about in gaggles. What they did to the downtowns was sad, though, and the huge parking lots. And in this area, a few of them actually replaced the downtowns, which was a horrible misstep, so now we have to go through the arguments, lawsuits, and years-long construction to have them replaced with big blocks of small, vastly overpriced apartments with coffee shops, exercise places, semi-fast food, and not much else at street level, and everybody has to drive 10 or more miles to a surviving mall (or one that's been rebuilt as scattered big box buildings) to buy underwear, shoes, or toys. (This valley consists of multiple suburban towns and cities and one of the most sprawl-happy cities in the US, with malls in various states of decrepitude built far out in the hills and shoved in the light industrial borderland with the little cities that successfully resisted annexation. Plus one outlet mall way over around the head of the Bay that's in a former car factory. And they wonder why the traffic's even worse (and why the parks are bursting at the seams).