Schreiber

MAAAANNN, Ruby Sales is clearly SOOO quietly pissed off at police brutality.
(Oh wait, AND HAS BEEN for the last sixty years.)

(livestreaming a presentation/discussion)


( Notes to myself )

It has been a weird week.

I mean, it's been a weird week for everyone. COVID-19, social distancing, trying to figure out how much social distancing is enough/overreaction, disruption. The weirdest thing about my week, in some ways, was the ways where this wasn't unexpected. ( Read more... )

( Mostly amusing only if you know something about the history of Anglo-Catholicism )

Also, this.

Also, there were wild turkeys walking the Freedom Trail as we walked back down Salem Street yesterday. I'd seen three toms showing off to passers-by from the windows of my bus earlier, which was a little more explicable, but in the North End??

It would appear that the answer to the question I posed last time - Where do I go to buy a formal shirt? is simpler than I'd expected: take the T to Central Square. The new Target there hooked me up with a reasonable shirt* and some much-needed new boxers.
Perhaps more importantly, it turns out that the thrift shop across the way is actually awesome. The clothes are actually accurately sorted by size; the staff are sarcastic hipsters who may or may not be HIV sufferers, which is a definite step up from the permanently harried/indifferent staff at my local Goodwill. Anyway, one pink shirt, one slightly oversize*** Formality-flexible shirt that I'm wearing at the moment, another pair of khakis to replace some of the ones that my job keeps eating. About half the price of my total at Target.

I still spent what I think of as Way Too Much Money, even after I (luckily) reminded the salesperson at Target that I was due a $10 discount.
I will definitely be going back, though. At least to the Thrift Shop.
Anyone want to organize an Expotishun at some point?

...I should get my lunch made. More later.

* Actually, I have no idea whether it's ACTUALLY decent or whether it will self-destruct within a year, but meh. Still cheaper than J. Press, probably not much worse than I would have found at the mall.

I was simultaneously amused, tempted, and vaguely unsettled to find it in a rack of shirt/jacket combinations that appeared to have been designed as "You too can dress like a hipster! In one easy step!" Seriously, I'm fairly sure I have seen at least one of those combos on one or other of the beardy 20-somethings who make CotA their home.**

** As opposed to the clean-shaven twenty-somethings who appear to have entered a contest for "Who can look the MOST like a Young Republican?", who can also be seen at any given service there. There's also the compromise position of guys who look like they're cosplaying someone from the '20s.
Err, 1920s, that is. We'll find out what people wear in the 2020s in a couple of years, I guess. Anything from "Total revival of the 1920s" through "Unironic post-apocalyptic grunge" to Space-Chic seems possible.

***On me, dH. I probably need to regain some weight. People are starting to comment, though my "Hungry-and-not-quite-all-there" appearance last night at church was due to the fact that my traditional practice on Good Friday involves fasting from solid food until after whatever service I'm going to...and at CotA, that's one that STARTS at 6:30. But anyway, I'm thinking malted milkshake diet after Easter.

I still think of it as Galata: the former Genoese colony to the north of the Golden Horn, crowned by a huge fourteenth-century tower. It’s at the top of a very steep hill, which we hiked up more or less by guesswork. Beyond it begins Istanbul’s main shopping street, the Iskiklal Cad, which we wandered around before hiking down, through increasingly poor neighbourhoods, to reach ( Christ Church )

On Josh's landlord, name NOT withheld:
My landlord is called Joe. Joe is generally a very pleasant landlord: when something goes catastrophically wrong (e.g. you lock yourself out of the apartment...) he makes sure your problem gets solved (unlike some landlords I can think of. ahem.) And when something is mildly annoying, he generally also fixes it...although it make take a few months, as in the case of a refrigerator light, or the wasps' nest in the window of the back hall. But these are trifles.
Unfortunately, the same workaholic urge to improve his property that moves him to install and revarnish wood floors in this house, and that led him to build the patio out front, is now leading him to comply with fire codes by installing a second staircase to the third floor. Site for said staircase: the space previously occupied by the closet in our front room. As an additional consequence, we had to move everything out of one side of the said room, although this DID have the salutary effect of getting me to clean out my desk MORE than 48 hrs before departing for Germany. And the apartment was filled all afternoon with large Italian guys knocking holes in the walls. They'll be back on Tuesday. They might even build that staircase.

Of course, I missed most of this, since I spent most of the afternoon at the going-away party for the revvy reverend Matt Lincoln. St John's North haven is losing him for six months, as he goes on sabbatical to Iona and various other interesting parts of the world. St John's, (though actually less so this party) contains a substantial fraction of enormous, extended North Haven Italian families, who got disaffected from the Roman Catholic Church and found a spiritual home with the local Episcopalians...at least for the purpose of getting baptised and married. (But being used thus is a hazard of life for Episcopal clergy...as in the joke about the bats). But anyway. Food, folks, and silly speeches by the senior warden.

In fact, most facets of life in the New Haven area are dominated by Italians. It's not just our landlord-cum-drywall-installer: there are old Italian guys sitting outside our local grocery store talking animatedly in something that was a Sicilian dialect a century ago, and has since evolved in the classic fashion of isolated populations. The Mayor's DeStephano, the congresswoman's DeLauro, and New Haven claims to have invented pizza as we know it (and has several local restaurants who fight over who first created it, and scads whose clientele is prepared to assert that they have the best pie in town.) The culture is changing, as the Italian-speaking generation dies out and Curry places come to outnumber Pizza joints and high-end Wooster Square restaurants, but for the moment, this remains very much an Italian town.
Oh, and my sister-in-law's ex has mob connections. Distant. That's more of a West Haven thing. ;)