Monday, January 5, 2009
The Blagojevich Tar Baby
Posted by: lain // Category: Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Joel Chandler Harris, Tar Baby // 11:41 am
If there’s a more apt description of Illinois Governor Rod Blagojevich, I can’t think of it.
I wonder if the cartoonist, Pat Oliphant, will hear any criticism about using the phrase tar baby. Though the use of tar baby is spot-on in the Joel Chandler Harris connotation, readers of this blog know how folks can flip out whenever someone says it.
Thanks for sending the cartoon along, Deb.
Related:
- Tar Baby Is Alive and Well on the Internet
- Tar Baby in Classic Saturday Night Live Sketch
- The Black Addams Family
Comments: 0
Wren’s Nest Conservation Update — Preparing for Paint
Posted by: lain // Category: 2008 - 2009 Wren's Nest Conservation Project, Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Historic Preservation // 1:39 pm
You may or may not have noticed that the Wren’s Nest needs a paint job.
The last time the Wren’s Nest was painted, the year was 1988.
The first President Bush had taken office, perestroika began in the USSR, Rick Astley was #4 on the Top 40 charts, and it would be at least five more months before I learned to tie my shoes.
Painting isn’t as easy as it sounds. First, our professionals needed to remove the old paint as best they could. This takes, scraping, hair dryers, sanding, hammering stuff, and a lot of patience.
On the days when the weather isn’t so warm, the painters will use hair dryers to heat up the old paint.
Then they’ll scrape the paint off, cover the nail holes with putty, and sand everything down until it’s smooth.
It’s painstaking, especially on cold days.
Right around Christmas I was always cranky because the painters were scraping, sanding, and hammering about 18″ away from my head.
Pretty, ain’t it?
At least the Benjamin Moore paint rep was impressed with their work. All of our other visitors are convinced we’re getting ready to tear the place down.
One mystifying side-effect of this construction work is that our visitors no longer ring our doorbell. Folks just call us from the porch to ask if we’re open, even though our doorbell has been successful and functional since the beginning of time.
If you’re feeling limber, compare this picture with picture #2. Not bad!
Comments: 1
From Nashville, Tennessee to St. Louis, Missouri
Posted by: lain // Category: Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Good Questions, House Museums, Nashville, Road Trips, St. Louis // 1:30 pm
Monday: We left Nashville owing a huge debt to our tour guide Tom (and his parents) who fed us, put a roof over our heads, and showed us the Nashville ropes. Thanks, y’all.
Tuesday: This morning we dropped Hazel off at the cleaners groomers Beauty Parlor for the day while we checked out the house museums of St. Louis. First stop, the Chatillon-DeMenil Mansion.
As usual, I neglected to get directions before hopping in the car. We got a little lost along the way, but stopped for guidance when we felt we were close.
(Close)
I walked into the Lemp Mansion Restaurant, thinking that maybe since they ran their operation out of an old house, they’d be in the know. Here’s how the conversation went–
LAIN: Hey! Do you know where the Chant-tee-yon Demumble House is?
WAITER: Dude, are you serious?
LAIN: I really don’t know how to pronounce it, I’m sorry.
WAITER: (eyeing me warily) It is literally next door.
LAIN: Reall–
WAITER: Literally. Next door.
The distance between the two houses was well before the stop sign.
So we found it. Review to follow.
Comments: 0Technical Difficulties
Posted by: lain // Category: Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable // 11:22 pm
You know how when you’re like, “I’m going to correct this person’s grammar” in a public forum, there’s this law that means you yourself will also have a grammar error?
I think the same law is in effect when you promise a blog post.
We’re safe and sound in St. Louis, and we’ll update soon, promise. Please! Amuse yourself with our slightly updated map in the meantime.
Comments: 1Poe Money, Poe Problems — The Edgar Allen Poe House in Baltimore
Posted by: Amelia // Category: Birds of a feather, Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, House Museums, Nonprofit Management, Really?, This is awkward // 1:14 pm
Many moons ago (mid-September to be exact), Lain and I traveled to Baltimore to be overzealous about The Wire, visit the Edgar Allen Poe House, and see friends, in that order.
Due to, ahem, technical difficulties, we didn’t have the pictures from our visit until now.
So first, let’s talk about The Wire, shall we? Because everyone loves it, I won’t take up space here telling you that it was quite possibly the best show on television and that your career as a television viewer is incomplete without it. That would be silly.
I will tell you this–The Wire focuses on the drug trade in Baltimore, and the set is Baltimore itself. The projects, to be exact.
Which is exactly where the Poe House is!
This leads to the Poe House’s voicemail being both helpful and unintentionally hilarious. Like, amazing. Here, I’ll sum it up for you:
Do not, by absolutely any means, walk to the Poe House! No, seriously, don’t. We know you think you can, but you cannot. Stop it.
It’s important to note the message is about 4 (wonderful) minutes long.
The Poe House is the very small home where Edgar Allen Poe lived the last years of his life, when he was ill, broke, and generally considered a wack-job. Very few original artifacts remain in the home.
The Director of the Poe House has a fierce loyalty to “Eddie,” but a possibly broken spirit as a result. The phone message isn’t the only evidence. Here, look at the Caution sign.
We too wish we could tell some people to control their durn kids, but to print and frame it? Incredible.
This sheet is your guide as you tour the house. I suspect it exists because the Director would have punched the next person who asked a dumb question.
There’s plenty of evidence of how he got to be this way, conveniently put into a video montage for visitors!
I’ve truly never seen someone taunted on television so many times, over so many years. If ever there was a good sport, it’s this Director.
This relief of Edgar Allen Poe is a good visual for the museum, I think.
Like the Wren’s Nest, the Poe House has seen good times and some really not so good times. This bad boy was originally put outside, after a couple other reliefs were stolen. Then it was damaged by environmental factors like acid rain.
Here are some framed copies of Gustave Doré’s famous illustrations of Poe’s The Raven. The Wren’s Nest also has a copy, since Joel Chandler Harris himself owned the very same version!
My favorite part of the house was the stairway to the third floor. It is so narrow, steep, and angled that it was truly difficult to turn around.
Here’s what it looks like upstairs.
Though it’s hard to tell in this picture, the ceiling is about 4 feet tall and the room is about 7 feet wide. If I could have stooped in there for a visual, I would have, but you weren’t allowed in the room.
So! There ends our tour of the Poe House, which was really a discussion of its war-weary Director and where The Wire was possibly filmed. Journalism at its finest.
Next time you’re in Baltimore, visit the Poe House. But listen to the voicemail first. It’s worth it.
Comments: 7Old Timey Ads and Joel Chandler Harris’ Fear of Electricity
Posted by: Amelia // Category: Cruel Games, Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Future: fact or fiction, Joel Chandler Harris, Technological Advances, Trickery, What Would JCH Do? // 2:52 pm
Today Boing Boing led me to this delightful Edison Electric ad.
Man, I love old-timey things. If only I could find a job that supported my interests! Oh well.
What I especially love about this are the reassurances in the ad. Electricity was a very new and very foreign thing in the 19th century, after all, and not everyone was ready to drink the Kool-Aid. Or, since Kool-Aid didn’t exist, toddies.
Believe it or not, Mr. Joel Chandler Harris himself was one of the wary.
Above is the gasolier in the West Parlor. Our gasoliers - aka gas chandeliers - have gas lamps on top and electric fixtures on the bottom, making them a unique artifact and representing a very specific slice of history.
Now, to be fair, Harris didn’t purchase these (for every room of the house) simply because he thought this electricity business was a fad. When electricity was first offered, it only came in during certain hours of the day, and no one wanted to be left in the dark after the electric company called it a day.
Logic-based, that’s our guy.
Or… not. You see, Harris was also “cautious” about riding a streetcar while wearing a wristwatch, convinced as he was that these two would combine to make him explode. Or stop time. Or create a black hole. We’re not really sure.
So what does a well-respected man do to hide his crazy? Why, he buys identical wrist watches and builds a secret drawer in his desk, of course.
That way Harris could slip off his watch before boarding the dreaded streetcar, and surreptitiously replace it once he got to work.
Don’t worry, Mr. Harris. Your secret is safe with me.
Comments: 5New and Improved Wren’s Nest Visitor Survey
Posted by: Amelia // Category: Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Gussying up, Nonprofit Management // 1:29 pm
Things are about to get seriously exciting here, folks. Why? We have a new Visitor’s Survey!
Behold–
The reasons we wanted a new survey are long and varied (untrue), but here’s what our logic boiled down to:
- We wanted something that looked a tad more professional than our previous photocopied sheet. Thanks Lampe-Farley! Serious format and card stock = serious comments, we hope.
- I like small things, and this is 5″ x 8″! 9″ x 11″ was just ungainly.
- Nobody, and I mean nobody, used our online survey.
We’re also lucky enough to have a friend of Lain’s making a sweet replica of the Wren’s Nest mailbox for the surveys.
Here is Lain’s totally awesome sketch. He claims to have made it without a ruler, but I’m skeptical.
(The little ledge/pocket/survey holder on the side was my idea.)
We felt guests shouldn’t have to hand their surveys back to the very people they were evaluating, and have been on the hunt for a suitable receptacle for a while. This idea was just gimmicky enough to do the trick.
So, what do you think?
Comments: 5Brer Rabbit’s Poorly-Timed Campaign for Atlanta’s Olympic Mascot
Posted by: lain // Category: Atlanta, Brer Rabbit, Celebrity Requests, Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Olympic Mascots, Shameless Promotion, Trickery // 2:22 pm
Yesterday I stumbled across some Olympic propaganda from 1995 — a few boxes of bumper stickers and books suggesting that Brer Rabbit should be Atlanta’s Olympic Mascot.
These were published well after the actual mascot was chosen. Izzy (né WhatIzIt) was, let’s say, not the most popular choice.
Here’s the bumper sticker–
And the book–
To be fair, anything would have been better than Izzy. Even I knew that as a nine year-old, and trust me — I was not a very bright nine year-old.
The book does make a pretty good case for Brer Rabbit–
“I mighta known you’d have a fit about the blue fuzzball,” said Brer Buzzard. “So have most of the rest of the folks. But it seems like what happened is that, when it came to the pickin’ of the mascot, the big guys in charge didn’t do their homework.”
“Don’t they know that we come from a proud tradition?” Brer Rabbit said. “Why, I can trace my own line back to Anansi and the great trickster heroes of Africa! Brer Fox ‘n Brer Bear ‘n the other critters, they go ‘way back too! Why, there’s trickster stories told about critters like us in just about every country in the world!”
“…don’t they know that the ordinary folks around here are proud of us? We kinda remind the people of Atlanta of themselves ’cause we’ve got the local sassy spirit ‘n quick wits! Whoever it was that decided to choose that blue thing, it was folks that don’t event know us!”
“They thought they knew who you were,” said Brer Buzzard. “They thought you and the other critters were stereotypes.”
“Whaddya mean stereotypes?” said Brer Rabbit. “We come from the real history of Atlanta. What’s that dumb lookin’ blue gizmo got for a history?”
Not much! Though given the reputation of the Atlanta Games, Izzy was perhaps the most appropriate mascot.
The final image in the book is particularly inspiring–
We’re totally going to start selling the book and the bumper sticker in the gift shop. Believe it or not, the campaign for nothing left us with a few extras.
Comments: 9Kingsized at the Wren’s Nest — We’re Getting Nervous
Posted by: lain // Category: Atlanta, Big Money No Whammies, Burritos and Other Fine Foods, Challenges!, Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Fundraising, Inappropriate Beer Drinking, Kingsized // 2:04 pm
By now you might have noticed that Kingsized is playing our fundraiser here on September 27th.
That’s less than 10 days away. I’m a little worried.
Don’t get me wrong — the show will be phenomenal, the tacos will be delicious, and the margaritas will have tequila. I’m mostly worried that folks might miss out on a great time.
We’ve got a lot to compete with — class reunions, out-of-town plans, laziness, stock market induced excuses, hatred of fun and margaritas — you name it.
And in typical Wren’s Nest fashion, we were late spreading the word. The price we pay? Restrained panic.
We’re looking to you, dear Wren’s Nest blog readers, to help us out. And boy howdy, have I got some incentive–
Inspire nine folks to come to the concert with you, and drinks for your entire table are on me.
You heard me.
Honestly, I don’t think anyone will take me up on this offer. I’m sure you’re either too busy or it’s too expensive or you don’t have time to rally your crew. I will be shocked if you can pull this together.
So prove me wrong.
Free drinks for you and your buddies all night, but only if you (1) are at least 21; (2) mention this blog post; (3) assemble your crew of 9 or more; (4) pay for your tickets in full; and (5) tell me about it before 4 pm on September 22nd (lain@wrensnestonline.com).
Please, test my generosity.
Comments: 8Life of Georgia Building Not So Lively, To Be Demolished
Posted by: Amelia // Category: Atlanta, Baby Pictures, Failed Attempts at Looking Reputable, Historic Preservation // 11:52 am
Today the AJC reports that yet another historic Atlanta building is in danger of being razed.
Let’s ignore, for a moment, the irony concerning the destruction of the “Life of Georgia” building. Really, Atlanta? Again? Can we just keep something? Please?
Jim Auchmutey (who is a very nice man) writes:
Emory Crawford Long Hospital plans to demolish the 78-year-old Life of Georgia building, at West Peachtree Street and Linden Avenue, to make way for a medical complex scheduled to open in 2013.
The Atlanta Preservation Center is already on the case, and you can sign their petition here, if you’re so inclined. And, by the way, you totally should be.
For one, the Life of Georgia building (also known as the Industrial Life and Health Insurance Co. building) is made of Indiana limestone. That stuff’s very pretty, in case you were wondering. Perhaps I am biased, having gone to a pretty college made of said pretty limestone.
For two, why do hospitals in Atlanta (or anywhere, really) have such spotty records when it comes to creating new facilities that so often detract from the environment around them?
I’m sure the insides are top o’ the line. But in terms of design, it’s like they’re trying to rend the urban fabric and kill any semblance of connectivity or pedestrian inclusion. Keeping this building would buck the trend, for sure.
So hey. We can do better than this. Preservation may be expensive now, but tearing down this building will be much more costly in the future.
h/t: Atlanta Intown’s In the Loop, from a while back
- Life of Georgia Photo Album on Flickr
- Life of Georgia Photos on Atlanta Time Machine
