This is the Grand Lobby, sometime between 1905 and 1910.
I love this photo — it’s one of the coolest I’ve laid hands on via Wikimedia Commons.
I seem to have forgotten how to insert photos into a WordPress post so that viewers can “click to enlarge.” If any of you guys can advise me on that, I’d be grateful.
Check out the well-deserved praise for “Secret Diary of a Porter Girl,” one of my favorite blogs on the net!
I discovered something rather nice today — one of my recent “Throwback Thursday” blog posts got a nice mention over at “File 770,” Mike Glyer’s Hugo Award-winning science fiction fan newzine.
The post excerpted was about the offbeat late-1970’s “Planet of the Apes” merchandise I remembered from my early childhood. It was referenced on January 26th in Mr. Glyer’s regular “Pixel Scroll” feature, which highlights news, opinions and links from science fiction fandom around the web:
I’m flattered to be mentioned there, as the prestigious File 770 received the Hugo Award for Best Fanzine no fewer than six times, most recently in 2008. (Mr. Glyer is a three-time Hugo recipient for Best Fan Writer.)
The site is a hell of a lot of fun too — particularly for longtime genre fans who want to take a look at what other fans are reading and viewing. Check it out today; you won’t be disappointed.
Because my friends have too much time on their hands.
Yes, that is indeed Mr. Bentley from “The Jeffersons.”
I can’t quite muster the same enthusiasm as everyone else for “Southbound” (2015) — I’d give it a 7 out of 10. Yes, it’s clever how the five interlocking tales of this horror anthology are finally shown to weave together at the end (and it nicely parallels the equally clever movie poster below).
But the tales themselves were sometimes a little difficult to follow, with too little exposition. One seemed incoherent. And … exactly what was the role of the woman we see using the pay telephone?
It does have a few things going for it. The tone is right — it’s a definitely a serious horror anthology for adults, with no camp and no gratuitous gags.
This movie was largely saved for me by the flying baddies to which we are introduced in the first entry. (I don’t think that’s much of a spoiler, since we see them assailing us in the film’s trailer.) They’re entirely originally, artfully grotesque, and possibly nightmare inducing. You know what would have been an amazing movie? A well-scripted horror-mystery in the same vein as “The Ring” (2002) or “The Grudge” (2004), focusing entirely on these antagonists. Or maybe a supernatural desert-chase survival-horror movie. I’d watch that.
A Q111 bus entering southbound service at Parsons Boulevard and 88th Avenue, one block south of Hillside Avenue, in Jamaica, Queens.
By Tdorante10 (Own work) [CC BY-SA 4.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0)%5D, via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m honored once again to see my latest poem published by Dead Snakes! A big thanks to Editor Stephen Jarrell Williams for allowing me to share “blizzard.”
http://deadsnakes.blogspot.com/2016/02/eric-robert-nolan-poem.html
This happened just before 1 PM outside The Javits Center. The driver sprang out. True to form, the FDNY was there in minutes.
Watching them at work was educational. They do not simply hose a vehicle down and take lunch. They have to actually tear it open in places to hit its insides everywhere with water, to make sure there is nothing smoldering, I guess.
Also, there were two tremendous “POP”s as flames enveloped the vehicle. To a guy who’s seen a lot of war movies, it sounded like ammunition cooking off. A bystander helpfully informed the rest of us that this was the sound of the airbags exploding.
In some of these shots, you can see the Empire State Building in the background.
Hey — while we’re on the subject of public safety in Manhattan, the members of the United States Army guarding Penn Station were looking as tough and professional as always. I actually did feel safer traveling. If you know someone who serves in such a capacity in NYC or elsewhere, thank them for their service.
That headline isn’t a typo — the name of this group actually is “The The,” which made them incredibly hard to Google for me for a very long time. Turns out song titles help out a lot in online searches.
I used to opine that Depeche Mode was a sexier Pink Floyd with a faster beat. (Relax purists, I know that absolutely no one can truly compare to Pink Floyd.) I like to think of “The The” as though they were a low-tech garage-band equivalent of Depeche Mode — like maybe somebody crossbred Mode with Weezer, and threw some saxophone in.
Anyway, this 1993 album, “Dusk,” brings back college memories for me in the same way that “They Might Be Giants” or “Three Dog Night” probably does for my classmates.
Eric Robert Nolan, Author 