Thanksgiving and all that
Yes, it was a delightful day. A friend joined us for the day as her children were elsewhere, we watched the parade, made cranberry sauce (I fall firmly within the anti-can camp), applesauce, and then watched the endlessly hilarious “Scrooged” — possibly Michael O’Donoghue’s finest work, and that’s saying something — then went over to my Mom’s for a very nice dinner. Even got to meet my sister’s new boyfriend, whose existence I only know of thirdhand, but we’re not tight, so that’s how it is. Either he’s a nice guy, or I’m just realizing how much I didn’t like her ex, or both. But that’s not what this entry is about . . . .
And I had a lazy day mostly to myself yesterday, did some puttering and started to get out from behind a stack of CDs that desperately needed labels, which I’m still working on. Sorted out the ski equipment, got the Halloween lights back up in the loft, that sort of thing. Then we went to Proctor’s in Schenectady to see “Spider-man 2,” completely forgetting that last night was their big Christmas parade. Miraculously, we got a semi-legal spot in the Proctor’s parking lot. There is NO better place to see a movie than Proctor’s (though I do like the Sony theatres near Lincoln Center), although last night was apparently TB Sufferers Discount Night, to judge by the unbelievable amount of hacking going on over on the other side of the theater. Also, when people only pay $2 to see a movie, they are even more likely to think they’re free to talk, but again, for once we were lucky and not in the midst of the constant conversation. The movie rocked, by the way. Sets up nicely for the third movie, too, and I can’t wait to see under what pretense they get Kirsten Dunst’s dress soaked in that one. But that’s not what this post is about . . . .
This post is about the Internet letting me down. In this day and age, I assume that pretty much anything I want to know or see can be found on the Internet. So when I go into a deep label-production mode for all the CDs I’ve been ripping from my old LPs, I expect that I can conjure up an image of the original album cover in just about no time at all. If you’ve tried to scan an old LP, you know this is a good thing, because my scanner isn’t big enough to do an LP cover, getting the lighting right on a photo is a pain, and in the end I’m just putting a thumbnail on the label for easy recognition. And one of the albums I’ve been sitting on for a while is the National Lampoon classic “Goodbye Pop,” which I spent an entire stoned summer listening to, late at night, at high volumes, usually singing along, on the front porch of 602-1/2 University Avenue in the ‘Cuse. It was a summer I should regret a lot more than I do. Oddly, the album is just as good straight as it was stoned, and I finally got around to putting it on a CD some months ago. So I wanted to throw a label on it today, and can you believe it? I cannot find ONE image of the “Goodbye Pop” LP cover. I can barely even find any mentions of the album. It has a listing at MP3.com as “unavailable.” This is the album that brought together ingenious work by Bill Murray, Gilda Radner, and especially Christopher Guest — the classic “Kung Fu Christmas,” the brilliance of Guest’s sleazy record promoter Ron Fields (“He’s a manager, the man who discovered Cirkle”) — and yet the Internet has barely taken note. And worse than that, I’ve gotta scan the album cover. (Pictures of Bob & Ray, I had no problem finding, by the way.)
What am I thankful for? Well, I’m thankful that rant is over, for one thing . . . .