Funny on so many levels:
File under "lazy Sunday posting."
Happy 22!
That's a little geek humor. See, 01/01/10 is 22. Get it?
You know, like, "There are 10 types of people in the world: those who understand binary, and those who don't"?
Right. Starting off the year well, I can see....
A bunch of people went over to Ruckus Pizza on Wednesday for their weekly trivia contest. I do much better at College Bowl-type quizzes, and this one was all pop culture, but that didn't diminish the company and the pizza. All good.
The second round featured advertising slogans. See if you can find one product for which all these slogans work beautifully:
- "The quicker picker-upper"
- Two for me, none for you
- Get up to four hours longer
- Makes mouth happy
- Stress stinks, ____ works
- Any time's a good time for ___
We thought "Viagra" was a pretty good answer...
The slide scanning project is almost done. I'm right now scanning the end of 1998, right around when I switched to digital cameras. Here are three from the mid-1990s showing bits of Chicago that no longer exist.
First, in this view from the Sears Tower from April 1993, you can see Meigs Field and Soldier Field, both since destroyed:
This April 1995 photo shows the view from the Michigan Avenue Bridge that now would encompass Trump Tower:
The sun, however, still rises above Lake Michigan:
Autumn in the Green Mountain State:
Cornwall, Vt., 17 October 1992. Same here:
Just up the road in Whiting, same day:
And up in Weybridge, 1 November 1992:
During the few months I lived in Vermont, Bill Clinton got elected President. He spoke at one big rally that year, up in Burlington, and thanks to a press pass from a friend at a radio station, I got to see him in person:
I think you can see the Secret Service agent pushing me away in this shot, though Clinton himself couldn't get enough of the rope line:
Then-Vermont-governor Howard Dean was there too:
Few people knew before, you know, this blog entry, that I lived in Vermont for a few months in 1992. (I was young, I needed the work.) Actually, it was the most beautiful place I've lived. That said, I grew up in one big city and went to college in another, so the things that made Vermont beautiful were precisely those things that made it difficult for me to live there: wide open spaces, trees, idyllic rural living, etc.
I moved back to Chicago in short order, but not after taking a few hundred photos. These, for example, I took in Middlebury, where I lived at the time:
The first two are from July 1992; the last one, from September, in southern Vermont, near where my friend Renee lived at the time.
I went back to Middlebury in May 2006. It looked almost exactly the same, except I had a digital camera with me instead of one that took expensive slides. Unfortunately it was rainy and gray in 2006, so these photos from 1992 turned out much better.
More photos from 1992. Taking the Kyle of Lochalsh train from Inverness through the Scottish highlands capped the trip. I took three rolls of film in as many hours. (We didn't have digital cameras back then, so each photo, with processing, cost about 35c—the equivalent of about 70c today—so those three rolls represent about $75 of today's dollars.)
Here are three of those shots, from 24 June 1992:
Note, please, that I have licensed some of my work as stock photos, and I would like to do so again. So even though generally this blog is licensed as a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 United States work, photographs are not, and have never been, CC-licensed. Only the text is covered by the CC license. Photos are, and always have been, Copyright © David Braverman, all rights reserved, from the point of creation.
The trip I took in 1992 went from West Sussex, England, to Nice, France; Genève, Switzerland; Strasbourg, France; then back to the U.K. As I continue the (excruciatingly slow) process of scanning all these slides, I'll continue to post the better ones. Like these, the first from Nice:
And Strasbourg:
