While walking around downtown Nashville on my first afternoon out and about, it was inevitable that I’d run into various party vehicles. This was one of the first that I came across, and they were apparently really into the fact that I had my big camera with me, because my husband tapped my shoulder and indicated that they wanted a photo. I got a few shots in before they turned from 6th Ave onto Broadway, and this was definitely the best shot.
I’d love to share this photo with at least one person in the group so they have it, so if you were on a white school bus-turned party bus that was painted white that was tooling around Lower Broadway in Nashville on April 27th, 2024 in the middle afternoon, please let me know! Y’all look great, and I’d be happy to share the file with you!
Genuinely putting this out there to the internet to see if I can share this photo I took of a pretty fun-looking crew! When I took it they were turning from 6th Ave onto Broadway and they were having a hell of a good time, and I’d love for them to have this in their digital archives.
(Top photo is a still from the 30 Rock pilot - source here)
I’m going through my photos on my portable hard drive, and combing through my photos from when I lived in New York has sent me into a wave of nostalgia.
My commute to work at this point was rather absurd, but I always knew I was almost home when I saw the M&G Soul Food sign on 125th Street which got a lovely mention in the 30 Rock pilot. I adored the gorgeous signs and the bright yellow building, but right before we moved someone had bought the property and had started taking down the signs and the yellow paint had been stripped, and I swear I almost started crying on that bus on the way to work.
I had a shitty cell phone with a questionable camera at the time (see the tiny photo at the bottom of this collage), but I think I remembered to take a photo with my decent Nikon point-and-shoot camera one day one the way home from work, and I’m annoyed some smudge on the bus window obscured the M&G Soul Food sign. It also prompted me to go on a walkabout right before we moved to capture as much of my commute as possible, and I’m so glad I did because I have some kickass photos of things like the Lenox Lounge sign (RIP).
I went back to Morningside Heights and Harlem for the first time in a decade in 2021 to see our old stomping grounds, and I was so pleasantly surprised to see that the store that took over the space kept the M&G sign, while the memorable neon signs–or at least one of them–have been preserved by Marcus Samuelsson at Red Rooster.
This is the old Globe Dye Works factory in Philadelphia, PA that you can see from the train, and I was able to capture this with my new camera phone because it has this marvelous “moving image” feature that takes multiple shots at once for you and cleans them up.
The factory itself has been preserved and turned into a multi-use space, and I hope to see it up close one day.
The day I took this photo the sky really was this sepia-toned, and it works for this, at least for me.
I’m feeling a lot better–still coughing from time to time, but compared to when I have a really nasty bout of bronchitis, it’s not that bad–so that is something.
The worst day was definitely Saturday. Wednesday and Thursday I felt fine, if a little freaked out after M got a positive, but Friday morning I woke up with congestion at 5:30 and started to go downhill in the afternoon. Early Saturday morning I woke up around 2 with a powerfully sore throat and went into the kitchen to try to find any way I could self-soothe, and settled on sucking on ice cubes while sitting on the couch. I ended up sleeping on the couch for a bit because I could prop myself up better there, but I really didn’t sleep well at all. I felt like I was in a fog for the rest of the day, though I was able to eat and enjoyed a nice little light dinner of tempura.
Sunday I started with a lot of coughing, but I felt well enough to get a light workout in, and we had a nice little brunch and I made pasta and we had chicken parm, but otherwise we took it easy. I watched the latest SNL and I was upset because at first I thought c-vid had stolen my sense of humor because none of the sketches rang as particularly funny, but there were two that were OK so I felt better on that front.
If you’re dealing with this and you happen to have congestion, I highly recommend propping yourself up with pillows if you can, and if you can get some popsicles they will feel really good on a sore throat, but even some ice cubes do the trick, especially if it’s the middle of the night. Otherwise, drinking a lot of fluids, taking Mucinex to loosen the mucus to make your coughs more productive (so you ideally don’t have to cough as much), and taking it easy as much as possible seemed to help me, but of course, YMMV.
After avoiding the c-vid for more than two years, it’s descended onto our household this week. We’re both vaxxed and boosted (one boost as we aren’t eligible for any others yet) and it’s largely been an annoying experience, thankfully. My sinuses are congested so I’ve been taking Mucinex, and my sleep has been fucked with because I wake up with a sore throat on account of the congestion.
I didn’t lose my sense of smell or taste, and I’ve honestly had more severe cases of bronchitis compared to this, so all told, it’s manageable.
I know there’s been a lot of complaints about And Just Like That around why [SPOILER] didn’t call [SPOILER], but my non-spoilery complaint is that they heavily imply that Smith’s Bar (an iconic Hell’s Kitchen dive bar that closed in 2014 until Hayden Panettiere’s dad bought it and reopened it, leaving it largely unchanged) is actually up by Columbia University when it is not at all near it, as evidenced by this map. It’s not even on the same subway line!
You know what I think is really cool about language (English in this case)? It’s the way you can express “I don’t know” without opening your mouth. All you have to do is hum a low note, a high note, then another lower note. The same goes for yes and no. Does anyone know what this is called?
These are called vocables, a form of non-lexical utterance - that is, wordlike sounds that aren’t strictly words, have flexible meaning depending on context, and reflect the speakers emotional reaction to the context rather than stating something specific. They also include uh-oh! (that’s not good!), uh-huh and mm-hmm (yes), uhn-uhn (no), huh? (what?), huh… (oh, I see…), hmmn… (I wonder… / maybe…), awww! (that’s cute!), aww… (darn it…), um? (excuse me; that doesn’t seem right?), ugh and guh (expressions of alarm, disgust, or sympathy toward somebody else’s displeasure or distress), etc.
Every natural human language has at least a few vocables in it, and filler words like “um” and “erm” are also part of this overall class of utterances. Technically “vocable” itself refers to a wider category of utterances, but these types of sounds are the ones most frequently being referred to, when the word is used.
Reblog if u just hummed all of these out loud as you read them
Originally just a repository of my own photographs, it's evolved into my personal journal where I write about everything and anything. I'm into food, photography, football, TV comedies, film, and typefaces, naturally.
That said, I still love this...
