November 5, 2022

Notes on Nashville

  • If anyone ever tells me again that America is stagnating and points to China’s skyscraper forests that sprang out of nowhere, I’ll point them to Nashville. More cranes there than at a crane festival.
  • Ditto for the line about American cities being more and more alike, so that it doesn’t matter whether one lives in the suburbs of Albuquerque or Atlanta. Take a walk up and down Broadway at 1pm on a Monday, count the number of live music venues packed side to side, and tell me of any other place in the country that has the same number per meter squared.
  • Corollary to the above: if you can’t stand the smell of stale beer, probably best to stay out of downtown.
  • There was a time between Vanderbilt University being founded and Grand Ole Opry exploding in popularity when the city was known as the Athens of the South. This was even before they built a full-scale replica of the Parthenon on the city’s centennial, in 1897. [Note: The one from 1897 was made of plaster and torn down shortly after the World Fair it was built for. The more permanent one still standing is itself 100 years old now, being built in 1920. So yes, the Parthenon was so nice they built it twice. They were an industrious bunch. ]
  • Speaking of engineering feats: North America’s largest non-casino hotel & resort is in Nashville, ready to give you that indoor river cruise experience you could otherwise get only in Vegas.
  • Six bullet points in, and only now do we get to food? Well, it’s good! Much better food and service dollar-for-dollar than anything you will get inside the D.C. beltway at either end of the pricing spectrum. Hot chicken and banana pudding are favorites, though for full transparency I should add that none of puddings we had came close to the one from Bernard’s in Roanoke, VA.
  • Some good murals as well.
  • “Sarah Cannon Research Institute (SCRI) is a research organization focusing on therapies for patients which include drugs that are in development. With corporate headquarters in Nashville, Tennessee, United States, it conducts community-based clinical trials in oncology, cardiology, gastroenterology, and other therapeutic areas.”
  • We would pack our bags and move tomorrow if the summers weren’t as humid as D.C.’s. Also, catastrophic flood from as recently as 10 years ago would make me think twice. But it’s on the list!

October 16, 2022

Downtown Nashville TN, October 15 2022, 1:15pm CT.

Mural of a dog holding a girl in his or her paws like they just saved her from something while to the left a boy, presumably the gir’s brother, is looking wistfully through the window away from the dog/girl pair. The dog, it should be said, is comically large (or are the children extremely small?) but the image is anything but comedic. The caption above says “One day I will rescure your brother too”. The mural is painted on a wall facing a gray concrete parking lot half-filled with cars. To the left is a menacing glass skyscraper towering over the squat red building that hosts the mural, as if that is the thing children are being saved from. The sky is the same dull gray-blue as the skyscraper, which, the skyscraper being made of glass, only makes sense.

October 14, 2022

Madam’s Organ/Adams Morgan, Washington DC, October 14 2022, 8:30am EST.

Madam’s Organ mural in the Adam’s Morgan neighborhood of Washington, DC. An American flag is in the foreground, along with a neon sign for the “Original Jumbo Slice” pizza. An empty street is on the left (18th St NW, which will be crawling with people by late morning), and an equally empty restaurant patio is to the right (The Diner, which is a mediocre place to eat but has the benefit of being open very late in a street lined with bars). There have been many more patios open on 18th since the pandemic, and they are now occupying a whole lane previously dedicated to street parking. This is a good thing. I don’t know if the pizza is any good, but it’s DC, so probably not.

October 13, 2022

I love Hamilton the musical, but the opening 5 minutes didn’t quite capture the absolute horror of his tween years. Yikes.

October 12, 2022

Angela Lansbury (1925-2022). The original production of Sweeney Todd is my favorite work of hers, and The Worst Pies in London one of my favorite parts. I hear she’s known for other things as well.

October 7, 2022

And the day is off to a great start!

I have heard nothing but good things about the Playdate, save for the screen not being viewable under direct sunlight. Good thing it will be a wet, cold October in DC.

Playdate: your order is on the way!

September 24, 2022

It took me a while, but I finally got it: The Road Not Taken is not about individualism and thinking different(ly), but rather about the narrative fallacy, hindsight bias, and contemplation of the counterfactuals. Brilliant.

September 23, 2022

Pre-weekend reading: How to nurture a personal library. Just lovely.

September 13, 2022

Orange tabby cat wearing a crown: Stable Diffusion running on a meager M1 versus Midjourney running on who knows what. Either way, the visual arts will never be the same.

September 12, 2022

Thanks to a weekend trip to the DC zoo I now know about bear-cats, who are neither bears nor cats. Binturongs are cute as a button, smell like butter popcorn, and prey on backyard rodents. What’s not to love?