Earl and I have been enjoying LoDo and Larimer Square in Denver today. The weather is beautiful. The vibe is enjoyable. I told Earl that Denver reminds me of a western spin on Philadelphia. He agrees.
October 2024
Creativity.
Our flight from Phoenix to Denver last night was uneventful. I had a glass of sparkling wine, Earl had a glass of sparkling water, and we both enjoyed a bag of “Skinny Pop”. We agreed with the male flight attendant, that it’s one of our favorite snacks. He was chatty with the eldergays.
Flight time from PHX to DEN on a B737 is about one hour and 30 minutes. I didn’t bother with the wifi. I did take a few photos; the window was filthy so my shots didn’t come out as good as I wanted them to look.
I did get one shot that I’m particularly proud of.
I am using this one as the wallpaper on my iPhone. I find it inspiring.
Caturday.
While we are on vacation Truman is in the very capable hands of the rest of the family. He’s probably telling them who’s boss and just hanging out watching the action in the rest of the household.
Club.
Earl and I are sitting in the United Club at SkyHarbor International Airport in Phoenix. We arrived a little ahead of schedule, and boarding time is about 90 minutes away.
We are on our way to Denver.
This is the first leg of our 12 day/11 night vacation. It’s been a while since we’ve been gone this long. I’m looking forward to the adventure. I plan on taking a lot of video and photos. I’ll probably share something on my Youtube channel.
Tears.
Back in the late 1980s and early 1990s, 1-900 numbers here in the United States were quite popular. Commercials were popping up all the time, urging the viewer to call 1-900-whatever to experience just about anything. Late night TV leaned hard on sexual escapades. I called one of those lines once and the guy sounded too hot and I hung on him. Too intimidating.
I remembering hearing ads on Kiss 108 in Boston. They went something like, “Are you gay? Does gay life intrigue you? Call 1-900-BE-THE-GAY (or whatever)…” and for only $2 a minute, after $4 for the first minute, you could talk to gay people.
Not once did I ever hear a word about “grooming” back then.
Most famously, Dionne Warwick (she had dropped her optional “e” by then), led the Psychic Friends Network. Dionne showed all her teeth and glory in rabid infomericals, urging viewers to call a 1-900 number to get a reading from a renowned psychic. I think her name was Linda Gregorian or something ordinary like that. You think she would have had a name like “Zesty Zelda” or something, but no, you could talk to Linda for $6 a minute on your Alltel bill.
I never called it.
For some reason I recently remembered an ad for a 1-900 line where people could call in so they could start crying. “Everyone needs a good cry once in a while”. I couldn’t bring myself to call into this line to see what was going on the other end of the wire, but I remember the relentless images of people crying on the phone in this ad to be quite upsetting.
Posting this screenshot from the ad is still quite upsetting to me.
I had a friend back in the day that called this number once and they said there was a calm voice telling a sad story about someone close to the narrator dying or something. This was back during Desert Storm; even in 1990 there was enough in the news to cry about, I didn’t need to rack up money on my New England Telephone bill to find a reason to cry. Not really fitting into the social scene of Boston was reason enough for me to cry, let alone all the stuff going on in the news back then.
Of course, 1-900 numbers gave way to the Internet. And with the Information Highway and the constant bombardment of other people’s business, we all have plenty of reasons to cry now.
Tweaks.
I’ve been making some tweaks to the self-hosted WordPress instance that’s running Ye Ol’ Ancient Blog. There’s a lot of drama going on with the company that owns WordPress, and while I’ve been following along a little bit with said drama, I haven’t really gotten into the weeds on the whole thing. I don’t like the idea of my blog running on software supported by a lot of drama, so I’m contemplating moving to a new platform by the end of the year. We’ll see if that happens.
In the meanwhile I’ve been tweaking settings and trying to make things run a little bit faster. I’ve felt inclined to blog a bit more this week, and that’s probably because of my ongoing social media fatigue. A few of the folks I follow on Mastodon have been striking a weird, self-righteous vibe, at least a stronger vibe than usual. I blame the impending U.S. Elections. Perhaps this is confined to my bubble but people seem a little more high strung and on edge than usual.
I find this fatiguing.
Confusion.
I’m not a fan of commercialism rushing or overtaking the holiday season. We went shopping at our local Kohl’s last night and I was very confused by their holiday display, which was a mix of Halloween and Christmas decorations. Personally, I feel like Christmas decorations shouldn’t be sold before the 1st of November and establishments should be decorated for Christmas until after Thanksgiving, but then again I don’t want those pesky kids on my lawn.
One of the reasons I’m less enthused about the Christmas holiday season in general is because of the commercialism of it all. Every time I see Charlie Brown mention it during the annual Peanuts TV special, which was produced in the 1960s, I want to yell back at the screen, “kid, you have no idea how bad it’s going to get”. Granted, Charlie Brown had to deal with aluminum trees but he also got to enjoy tinsel, which has turned into something we don’t do anymore.
And now I’m talking about Christmas decorations on the 1st of October. I need to end this blog entry. Now.
