sovay: (Silver: against blue)
sovay ([personal profile] sovay) wrote2023-03-29 10:17 pm

You want to party, you want to show and tell

I aten't dead, I am just phenomenally tired to the point where I spent almost all of yesterday in a cat-supporting stupor on the couch. It was potentially unwise to take a walk this afternoon, especially a longer walk than planned, but the light was so beautiful. We made a sort of loop of the nearby Mystic and discovered a dead gas station.



I don't know what this mile marker was pointing from or to, but I loved its granite and lichen in the late sun.



Looking through a pussy willow screen. There were two swans on the river as we crossed it, one on either bank.



I have a better shot of the sign itself, but I liked the abstraction of this angle.



Scrub the traffic cones and the graffiti and we'd have an Edward Hopper. His kinds of colors and his kind of light.



R.I.P. Simon's Gas.



Who had at some point acquired a safe from a Masonic chapter in Roslindale, apparently. I wonder if they still exist to want it back.

Night After Night (1932) would be deservedly immortal for introducing Mae West to the movies, but it won my heart in the opening scenes when Roscoe Karns ran a bath for George Raft, who got into it wearing nothing but a strategic camera angle. I wanted to phone the ghost of Boyd McDonald. Let's hear it for pre-Code Hollywood.
mrissa: (Default)

[personal profile] mrissa 2023-03-30 01:17 pm (UTC)(link)
"I found the safe from the Masonic Temple in an alley three suburbs away," is the first line of a story, but it's not the kind of story I write.
mrissa: (Default)

[personal profile] mrissa 2023-03-31 04:49 pm (UTC)(link)
Okay story time:

I was driving my dad and my three closest Swedish cousins, who are 10, 12, and 14 years younger than me, respectively, through Minneapolis. I was 29 at the time. And as we were driving, one of the teenage Swedes in my backseat pointed out the window and said, "What is this, please?" I said, "oh, it's the Masonic Temple." "What religion is this?"

I said, "Oh, uh, it's not a religion, it's an international society." Baffled silence from my backseat.

But I knew they were fans of the Simpsons, so I said, "It's, uh, it's--well, you know--" and I started singing, "Who controls the British crown, who keeps the metric system down?" and from my backseat came three Swedish voices, "We do! We do!"

And then there was a little pause and the middle one said to me, "But this was a JOKE." I said, "Oh no! I mean, yes, it was a joke, but it was a joke based on a real thing, the Masons are real, they have them all over. You have them in Sweden." "OH no," said the youngest politely, "here perhaps, but not in Sweden." I said, "But yes!" and we could not come to a consensus on this matter.
choco_frosh: Konstanz, imaginary depiction in a map of the Swabian War, 1500 (Costenitz)

[personal profile] choco_frosh 2023-03-31 06:47 pm (UTC)(link)
< Looks this up on Wikipedia >
...Yikes, there's a whole Swedish Rite variation.
mrissa: (Default)

[personal profile] mrissa 2023-03-31 07:25 pm (UTC)(link)
Oh yes, I knew for a fact they were wrong, but it turns out to be quite hard to convince someone that you know something about their country that they don't.