DEBRIS.COMgood for a laugh, or possibly an aneurysm

Three bits of old-world fun:

Look up your telephone exchange at the Telephone EXchange Name Project. Then you can tell people your phone number using the code words that went out of fashion in the 1950s, e.g. PEnnsylvania 6-5000.
This site has a compound retro-cool factor. Not only does it describe something retro-cool… it is, itself, retro cool. Its list of official “Ma Bell” exchange names was published on the web in 1996. Had it been online a few years earlier, there wouldn’t have been a “line” to be “on.” (No, nobody remembers pre-1994 USENET but me.)

See the “future we were promised” in the exhibit of futurist and illustrator Art Radebaugh. Especially appealing are the hip cityscapes in the “Lost Portfolio” exhibit. One of those may end up on my wall at some point.

And just to round out the trio, here’s the Google homepage from 1998. Note: it still works!

As I was writing a check to the woman who had restretched the lumpy carpet in the basement, she was filling out an invoice. I delivered my standard privacy inquiry, which I do every time someone asks me for my address: “You don’t sell or share your customer mailing list, do you?” Most reputable businesses not only affirm that they don’t; they also manage to simultaneously convey distaste.

But she surprised me. She said, “I don’t know; I’ve never been asked. What did you have in mind?”

Clearly, my privacy is not her concern… she thought I was making an offer to purchase her customer list, which I considered doing briefly if only to warn everyone that their carpet installer shouldn’t be trusted. I was about to launch into a tirade about privacy rights, beginning with the the question, “So you think your customers’ home addresses constitute an asset you own?“… but then I saw that the woman had inscribed my address incorrectly.

Problem solved!

We went to meet a local cabinetmaker because we have a cabinet we want made. His shop is at the end of a long driveway at the end of a private road, at the end of another road that isn’t private but might as well be for all the traffic it gets — I’ve driven by it a hundred times and never noticed it.

The estate sprawls. “My shop is the building below the playground,” he’d said, as if I’d overlook the 1200 square foot barn with huge doors and skylights, filled with power tools, built on a hillside atop a grid of lumber-storage shelves. All the doors are custom-made; each demonstrates some boundary-pushing door-construction technique. I guess it’s his proof of education, a craftsman’s equivalent to a framed degree on the wall.

He was happy to hear we weren’t interested in kitchen cabinets. “I’m tired of doing kitchens,” he said. Later I saw his own kitchen. It’s the one room in the house that doesn’t look like he built it himself out of hand-planed, oil-rubbed teak-mahogany-walnut-maple-cherry with inlaid jatoba-purpleheart-koa; in fact I think the cabinets came from Ikea. His curvalicious California walnut bent-laminated bed organism, in contrast, has only one equal in the world, because he only ever made two of them. It looks like a mushroom.

I asked how much land he owned. “Just ten acres,” he replied. I marveled out loud that even with ten acres, we could still hear the neighbor running a lawnmower. “Oh, that’s my lawnmower,” he said. “I’ve got a guy working.”

Yep, this is one of those stories that doesn’t have an ending.

It took about 150 phone calls, but I managed to get reservations for dinner at the French Laundry (regarded by many as one of the best restaurants in the country). This ridiculously difficult process has been documented in detail elsewhere… in short, you have to call at exactly 10:00 AM two months to the day before the night you want to eat there.

I started speed-dialing at about 9:55 AM, and got through at ten past. They had one opening left. Yes, that means the entire restaurant had been booked (except for the 9:00 PM table they’d offered me) in ten minutes. This was for a Sunday night reservation.

Then the agent listed the attire restrictions: No jeans. No shorts. No tennis shoes. Suit jackets are required. I was about to inquire sarcastically whether a certain hairstyle was necessary as well, but decided I had too much to lose. Maybe I can get some cufflinks made that say “Question Authority.”

So we’re gearing up for a fancy dinner next weekend. By that I mean, we went out to buy me a suit jacket. Clearly this will be the most expensive dinner I’ve ever had, because I’ve already spent about $200 and I haven’t even arrived at the restaurant.

The other morning on my way to the gym, I happened to hear “Standby (Looks Like Rain)” (from the new OSI album) and “Everyday” (title track from the Dave Matthews Band’s 2001 release, Everyday) in a row. I realized that both songs were my favorites from their respective albums, and that both songs are the last on their respective albums. It seemed unusual — how often does it happen that the last song on an album is the most appealing?

Certainly this is subjective, but what the heck, so is my entire website. You must be used to it by now.

Sitting there in the car, I could think of only one more instance: “The Cinema Show,” from Genesis’ amazing 1973 album Selling England By The Pound. But this stretches the definition, because it’s the next-to-last track on the album, even if the two are generally played together as one long song.

So I had to dig through my CDs. I found a few more favorite-last-songs. The list is revealing for reasons that shall become obvious momentarily:

• “Ice,” from Camel’s I Can See Your House From Here. This is an instrumental classic, showcasing Andy Latimer’s famous guitar soloing. “Ice” has since become a staple of Camel’s live shows; the versions captured on both The Paris Collection and Never Let Go are wonderful in a dim-the-room-lights-while-the-music’s-playing way.
• “Lady Fantasy” from Camel’s astounding 1974 album Mirage. But picking a favorite from this is like picking one from Rush’s Moving Pictures; every song rocks. “Lady Fantasy” is a first among equals, and like “Ice” is a staple of the live set.
• “Follow You, Follow Me,” from incredible-shrinking-Genesis’ …and then there were three… Minus the fact that this was the theme song of every high school’s senior prom for the early 1980s, it’s a great track.

And that was just about it. I found two more but they’re less clearly the strongest songs on their albums:

• “Available Light,” from the Rush album Presto. I was never very fond of this album, and it’s only been recently I’ve listened to any of it with any frequency. The other song in contention for the title is the third track, “The Pass,” which I find more rhythmically interesting, but slightly less compelling overall.
• “La Villa Strangiato”, from the Rush album Hemispheres. Unquestionably a great track, but it’s up against “The Trees” and even “Cygnus X-1 Book II” — and that’s three of the four songs on the album. Still, “La Villa Strangiato” has the edge.

You might have noticed a certain homogeneity in the above list: two albums each by Camel, Rush, and Genesis. It’s true that these three bands comprise a disproportionate percentage (about 20%) of my CD collection. But maybe there’s an argument to be made that progressive-rock bands are less likely to front-load the hits onto each album. Or even, progressive-rock bands are less likely to pen “hits” in the traditional sense. Or, maybe my tastes are just weird.

Another similarity: “Ice” is 10 minutes long. “La Villa Strangiato” is 9:35. “The Cinema Show” is 11:30. “Lady Fantasy” is 12:45.

Another similarity: three of those long songs are instrumentals. How the heck a pop/gospel tune from Dave Matthews made this article is a mystery even to me.

(In the above text, song titles link to mid-fi MP3 samples that I’ve prepared to give you something to listen to while you’re killing time. At ~100 kbps they’re thin enough to stream over any non-dialup connection, and the quality is still excellent; they’re the best-sounding streaming audio clips I’ve heard. Album names link to Amazon, in case you want to research the albums further or buy them.)