Friday, July 24, 2009

Totally Random Tuesday: Weekend Backlash & Nostalgia

The many 5's of you who read my blog may have noted my absence yesterday... this was not due to anything exciting, merely my complete exhaustion.

My weekend, I'll just note for consistency's sake, contained but was not limited to:
  • A Porterhouse steak all for me which I did not share with anyone
  • Laughing until my sides hurt with almost total strangers at dinner
  • Great conversations in person and on the phone, though some made me wish for stuff I can't have right now - patience, patience, patience
  • Planning something to look forward to with someone who I "esteem greatly", in the speech of the Regency, where I wish I could have lived like Elizabeth Bennet but would certainly have been more of a scullery maid
  • Figuring out a gift for someone that will possibly not suck at all
  • Rain and lightening and deep blue skies that were a lie - it was just window tinting (still cool though)
  • Driving around most of the eastern half of Colorado for various important reasons
  • Cooking for many hours to make enchiladas and chicken casseroles for the week
  • Watching a new Dr. Who episode and finding a new show to love
See? Chock-full, but exhausting. Must have been all that steak.

And now, Totally Random Tuesday!

I miss Chicago sometimes, or more to the point the Chicago of my youth. You just don't get commercials like this anywhere else:

That Cicero hair! Those low rates!



And there are the strangely gleeful dancing farm animals!



I will still randomly shout "Mooooooo and Oink!" - listen at the end for what it sounds like - while shopping for milk and pork products, for which I receive stares and a lot more personal space at the grocery store.

Even better, thanks to our salted winter roads, our cars are in terrible shape ALL THE TIME!



I got to call Victory once to pick up my first car. I got 25.00 and a sense of extreme satisfaction, although what I really wanted was that bell-bottomed bad actor's bracelet.

Someday, though, I will truly get to complete my life by calling the top dog of Chicago commercials, the one for which anyone who's from Chicago can tell you the number off the top of their heads, on command and in tune. And they're national now so I can call them ANY TIME I WANT!


I trust this man.

Of course you *could* call Luna, but then you'd be a commie. I'm just saying.

Empire Carpets was (and still is) so iconic in Chicago it even had its own spoof by my very favorite TV host of all time (besides Jerry Bryant, host of JBTV and the uncrowned king of alternative music television)...



Son of Svengoolie, the man responsible for my fear of zombies. Even if you dilute it with jabs at Berwyn and rubber chickens, no 8-year-old should watch Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things.

That, my friends, was a huge chunk of my childhood right there... all that's missing is a special on the Rock-N-Roll McDonalds downtown, where I used to waste time while my mom was doing her side-job balancing the books at the gas station (a client of her then boss's) across the street. Incidentally, this is also where I used to watch JBTV - you couldn't tune it in anywhere but downtown.


OMG YES!

Thank god for these old videos, because now it looks like this. In my opinion, this makeover has officially killed the beauty of the place, because half the coolness factor was that on the outside, it was just a regular old crappy McDonald's, but when you went *inside*... my God, it was glorious.

Alas.

2 comments:

Julie said...

NOOOOOO!!!!! They killed McDonald's! I wish I hadn't seen that. So very sad.

Nova said...

Being Human is on my watch list now too!