The first writing award I ever won was for an “A Day In The Life of Leonardo da Vinci” contest in sixth grade in celebration of da Vinci’s 540th birthday. Leo is 559 years young today, and he’s still one of my Top 5 All Time Heroes. Happy Birthday, you amazing, astonishing man. Please give my regards to Nikola.
yours in humble admiration,
Christopher Cocca
Check out Eric Sylvester’s recent guest posts wherein he picks the winners of the NHL’s Eastern and Western Conference quarterfinals. I do believe all but two of his series picks (that is, team with the better jersey, according to Eric and his mom), won their first game of this round:
Eric, you might be on to something.
I’ll start this edition of the Search Term Answer Bag by admitting two things:
and a suspicion:
Now, on to the search terms!
First, my favorite:
chriscocca is wrong about everything?
Classic. There are a few other Chris Coccas out there in the world, so I won’t be big-headed enough to claim that this was a query about me as a matter of fact. But for the sake of this post, we’ll go with it.
I appreciate that this was searched with a question mark and not a exclamation point or, even worse, a period. As far as an answer goes, I’m willing to say that I’m probably not wrong about every single thing, but we can’t really be sure. I also think chriscoccaiswrongabouteverything would be a great name for a website not called The Daily Cocca, and it would be an excellent follow-up album to the still-on-hiatus uppityupalexvanderpoolera.
Searching for verbs and/or prepositions:
what to when you are almost finished a novel?
It’s unclear here whether the asker is almost finished reading or writing said novel. If reading, I’d say get ready to pick your next book. If writing, I’d say get ready to revise. That’s when the real writing happens. If you’ve done that, and have met with good writers groups and gotten feedback you trust and then revised again and then again and are sure you manuscript is exactly what it should be, then I guess you start sending query letters to agents and try to start publishing excerpts.
A get a lot of hits from people looking for information about Hess’s Department Store.
And rightly so. It was an amazing place. Today’s proper question:
when did hess’s dept store allentown pa remodel the front of the store
Sadly, I don’t know the answer to that, but I’m guessing it was before I was born (1980). Can any Allentonians/Lehigh Vallians help me out here? I’ve been getting a lot of hits from people looking for the famous rainbow-colored sugar from the Hess’s Patio Restaurant. I know you used to be able to buy it at MusikFest, and I’m willing to bet you can find it on ebay if not at places like the Moravian Bookstore or the Lehigh County Heritage Center. Sadly, I can’t be much help with those seeking strawberry pie recipes. But I can share this post, with 30+ commentators sharing their favorite Hess’s memories. Really a special place. I can also share this bittersweet, recent image sent to me by Frank Tienstra. It’s one of the old Hess’s trucks still sitting behind the South Mall as of January. Sad for anyone who knows what Hess’s was all about.
Lastly, a question about Facebook:
is facebook layout changing again for the summer 2011
I really don’t think so, but this could be one of the things I’m wrong about. Mashable has some of the best coverage of social media developments: here’s the Facebook news aggregator-inator. Soon, you may have better luck asking this guy:
Never heard of Paul Ceglia? He’s the chap that might (ooops) own half of Facebook. So who knows? Maybe Paul has a few design ideas stashed with all those old emails he keeps finding. When I first heard about this case last year, I thought it was a long shot. But the plot keeps thickening. When I try to imagine what might be the next big thing to come along and knock Facebook off the block, I have a pretty hard time. But you know what? It might just end up being Mark Zuckerberg.
Problem: you enter a convenience store thirsty, thinking you have money in your pocket. It turns out you have but one lone His Excellency. What to do you?
You go ahead and spend .99 on 23.5 ounces of 90s design aesthetic and acceptable levels of high fructose corn syrup. And you can totally recycle the can.
Yes, friends, this still exists. AriZona Tea, you are the unmoved mover of all the latter-day sweetened beverages, aren’t you? You immutable, glorious, drinkable urn of my youth. What can explain you? 2 what do U compare? If only I’d been wearing my awesome Arizona Jeans products from 1995-97. Alas, except for a choice pair of brown cords, all of those pants disintegrated after two or three times through the laundry. My mom said the holes at the pockets were the result of strain from wearing my blue jeans too low. As if. Why don’t you just call them slacks and be done with it, Mom? Oh, YES I AM going to see Fastball, Marcy Playground, Wyclef Jean, Green Day, Everclear, Mighty Mighty Bosstones, and Eve 6 in Camden. Oh I’m not? Really?
Really.
Don’t get the wrong idea: the concert debacle had nothing to do with my jeans. Sorry, friends. The AriZona is doing its thing.
I found this picture via the latest Jerry Reuss post at UniWatch:
What is up with Terry Francona’s mock turtle neck? This picture was taken last season, I believe. You know the umpire can’t believe he’s seeing this. “Calm down, Terry. And listen, man, I think, well, shit Franc, I think you’re wearing a tunic. Take it easy, little brother. Did Jayson Werth roll and smoke your jersey during interleague again? No, I don’t know why he’s not staying with the Phils, but Terry, that’s beside the point. You need to get back in the dugout. Now. You’re the manager of a legacy team, dude. You need to class this up.”
Don’t way it’s a new New England thing. Terry, you’re better than that. I don’t care what Scioscia does. He knows better, too.
Okay, so the music industry is suing LimeWire. Sue away, Lars Ulrich, sue away. You should, I guess. But you have to admit that this image, supposedly showing how much dough the biz has lost since the creation of Napster, is pretty convenient:
Isn’t it amazing that projected sales based on historic growth show none of the, er, historical plateauing you expect from any healthy graph and in fact see as having occurred here many times pre-Napsters and then NEVER AGAIN IF NAPSTER HADN’T HAPPENED.
Please.
Guess what, MusicTown? Even if Generation Y hadn’t happened, and even if the youngest members of Generation X kept buying music instead of (okay) stealing it in college, the economic still would have gone in the crapper at least twice since then. You’re not really saying that incing Napster early would have stopped the dotcom bubble burst or the downturn after 9/11 or the mortgage crisis, are you?
And remember how you abandoned all the Baby Boomers once you got your hands on their kids’ allowance? Remember how you stopped producing Adult Contemporary, remember how you colluded with radio stations and sales tracking companies? Remember how you gave us post-grunge? You’re saying that would not have happened? Are you saying MTV and Vh1 would have kept showing your ready-made commercials instead of banking easy cash from reality shows and nostalgia trips (which ironically tended to feature the very artists you’d stopped promoting)? For real?
Music Industry, you can do so much better than this. Throw in some downward trends to make this graph realistic. I’m disappointed in you, frankly.
Napster or no Napster, there’s no way I buy seven albums this year, friends. Radio is free, dynamic, and serendipitous. I do iTunes, but almost only when I have gift cards. Last album I bought? Neil Young Live at Massey Hall (digital download). Before that? No Line on the Horizon, physical copy. Both were excellent choices and lived up to the album mystique. But I knew that beforehand. Buying albums from new acts is, like, seriously committing. I don’t know. Though now that I think of it, I did buy a Taize album for someone for Christmas, and that was a good call.
Sales graph shenanigans aside, what do you think? Are albums (even digital ones) obsolete? Has Steve Jobs (not Napster) really killed the music business like His Royal Joveness says?
Remember the Tom and Jerry cartoons where Tom and Jerry and a little mouse I always assumed to be Jerry’s nephew were set in 17th century France? The little mouse thinks he can beat Tom with his chivalry and ethics (and musketeer pastiche), and goes around saying “touché, le pussy cat?” at the most hilarious moments possible. The best. So that’s what I was thinking of with the title. (Also, I am finishing a paper about The Sound and the Fury, and it strikes me that Quentin Everloving Compson is not unlike that nephew-mouse).
On to the main thrust of this post so that I can get back to finishing that paper.
My power adapter died for the billionth time. We took the whole deal over to the Apple Store. Even though I knew that the only way to make an AppleCare (ha!) appointment at an Apple Store was via the internet (and since my computer wasn’t working, I had no such thing), it still bugs me. That’s gripe #1. Yeah, I actually booked my appointment via a public library computer. If Apple made an e-reader it would be even more ironic. Oh wait, right.
So we go to the Apple Store on time and are not seen for 35 minutes. I had no idea that Apple was looking into taking over cable. I mean, I know they swiped most of their early ideas from Xerox (oops, Xerox, that one’s on you), but who would have thought they were cribbing the finer points of customer service from the great approximation school of temporal theory. So then blah blah blah, and we get the computer back today.
We specifically told them not to mess with our desktop icons. They specifically did not listen. My desktop, my comfortable, messy, organized-to-me desktop, has been wiped clean by conformocrats and I don’t know where they put the stuff. Quite frankly, that’s unacceptable. There will be a visit to a manager after I finish my paper, because I’m sorry, that’s an arrogant violation of my expectations. Blah blah blah it runs faster if we do this…yeah, whatever. Fix the power cord issue, friend. You don’t have to be a hero. In fact, faceless backroom tech who I haven’t met, you’ve become a villain with your cavalier approach to my long-established and well-articulated organizational preferences. You waved them away like they were so many PC users, didn’t you? How’s the weather up there, thou ascendant Form? You know better and you have the shirt to prove it, smarty. Quite frankly, I’m embarrassed that we probably have the same glasses and iTunes library.
Yeah, those were all easy shots. I know. I actually think this is Apple’s way of messing with me because I sort of called them the devil last week for maintaining a squeaky-clean and hipster-certified ethical veneer all whilst enabling the sweatshop gristmills of Shenzhen, China.
If you’re keeping score at home, that’s:
all in one compact post. I just do what I do, friends.
If you think I’m being too hard on the good folks at the Apple Store, know that I have no idea who worked on my computer. The friendly chap who processed the work order must not have written down the specific instructions to not go ahead and assume their tech dudes had the right to mess around with my stuff. That’s so…preemptive. Bam, I just added Obama to list of things this post is about.
Speaking of, I had a dream the other night that Barry O and I chilled over pizza for like two hours. He did some explaining. We solved a few world problems. But the first thing I did was ask him how we’re going to prevent this government shutdown. He punted to John Boehner, who was not available in my dream for comment, so that kind of wasn’t fair of you, Dream President Obama. And you said you didn’t come to town for politics as usual. By the way, I know I’m late to this party and all, but a note to the Republicans: 1995 called and it wants its epic fail back. It doesn’t seem to matter if you’re doing what you think is right according to the kind of fiscal conservatism that got you elected in November. Government shut downs don’t seem to spin out in your favor, fellas. Take no solace in the fact that Obama isn’t Clinton. Thing is, friends, he beat the Clintons. He’s the uber-Clinton and the anti-Clinton all rolled into one. Good thing you have one strong front-running candidate ready to get geared up for 2012.
But seriously, Apple, WTF? Touché, le corporate giant? Just wait until I dispatch Quentin Compson. Then we’re gonna dance.
Chris Cocca 