Note: If you want to keep up with this blog (and why wouldn’t you) and get almost daily not-so-exclusive yet interesting content that doesn’t appear here, please check out the blog’s Facebook page. Many photos and links that don’t make it here due to my laziness and procrastination, frequently appear on Facebook, where you can just as easily comment and like what you see.
San Francisco is the city where the War on Drugs was lost. Many times throughout the day, in different parts of town, one walks through a cloud of the familiar yet unusual in the streets of Kansas City smell and immediately takes another whiff just to make sure it’s not a mistake. In the middle of the day in the touristiest of the tourist areas, next to expensive stores and restaurants, a nicely dressed woman produced a mini-bong out of her pricey purse and turning her face ,to the wall, proceeded to treat her glaucoma (if you know what I mean). When my kid came out of the store, I started to recount that mind-blowing event, but then realized that she may not know the meaning of the word bong. She knew. Thank you, O-e School District for taking care of that awkward conversation!
San Francisco is beautiful city, with many different faces, amazing food of a mind-blowing variety, endless number of things to do, enough weather changes to keep an army of meteorologists busy, and more homeless people than an average resident of Midwest will encounter in a lifetime. My only advice is that if you are not in the greatest of shapes, visiting the Crookedest Street in the World is better done on a bus. It’s not that exciting and you almost need a Sherpa to get up on the damn hill. If you have time, check out SF Playhouse, we really enjoyed My Fair Lady, much better choice than a magician we originally set out to see.
There are multiple predictions about the future of the Earth after the humans are no longer populating it; scientists, writers, movie directors are guessing how long it will be before the Planet erases all the traces of our existence. These predictions are not very hard to make: there are multiple examples of abandoned and lost cities from the ancient times and not so ancient like Chernobyl.
And then there is former Benchmark Express Furniture store in Olathe, KS – a slowly deteriorating reminder of a failed business I drive by several times a day. The store closed around 4 years ago, when the economy was still doing fine and people still were spending the money they didn’t yet know they didn’t have. Recently one of the large signs fell down and I thought it was a good time to stop by and take a few photos.
Apparently the letter X is the first to go:
This sign crashed a month or two ago:
No one backed up to the loading dock for a long time:
Concrete is slowly converting back to its original ingredients:
Customers are long gone…
…and trespassers are not welcome:
Grass is growing on the parking lot:
This sign may last a year or two before it falls:
Formerly grand facade is sprouting cracks:
Even the parking lot signs are tired of standing idle:
Wind is blowing through the banner:
Soon after the final sale was over with and the store was closed for good, the developers promptly constructed more retail space across the street.
Recently a set of photos taken at the Kansas City’s Wonderland Arcade in the late 1960’s made rounds on the Internet. These photos are stored at the National Archives in the file “Wonderland Inc. v. United States of America, 1968 – 1968”. The National Archives allows searches but not direct links or bookmarks, so you will have to enter your own search terms.
The Arcade located at 1200 Grand from the 1940’s to the early 1980’s was covered in the press numerous times, like this Billboard Magazine article: Wonderland Arcade Good Model of Well-run Amusement Center published in 1946, when The Billboard was still an amusement industry trade magazine.
Same magazine in 1947 informed about the time when the Wonderland Arcade was robbed of $150 in nickels, some of which was spent on a “new suit, shoes and a tour of the city by taxicab”.
I’ll start by busting another myth: the streets of Buenos Aires are crowded with hot Latin-American women with model looks and explosive tempers, who would make a certain lonely foreigner lose his mind, ship his child back to the USA and make his home in Argentina, earning a meager living by playing guitar on a busy intersection and singing off-key. Let’s just say that I am writing this from home and the country of Argentina will never hear me sing. While it’s true that most Argentinians are in good physical shape, the looks of men and women you see on the street are pretty average, far from what my wild imagination led me to believe.
La Recoleta Cemetery is a world-famous Buenos Aires landmark and we visited it on our very first day in town. While being buried in a crypt (or mausoleum) is not a preferred way of getting rid of my body, the cemetery is fascinating to see for many reasons like architecture, sculpture, artwork, sheer amount of marble and granite, amount of religious imagery per square foot, record number of tourists looking for the Evita’s grave and a visual history of the Argentinian facial hair fashions. Over the period of almost 200 years the Argentinian upper crust invested untold amounts of money into placing their likenesses in a variety of Biblical, Roman, Egyptian and whatever else-inspired imagery. There is a mind-boggling number of mourning virgins, sad Jesus’s, Roman Emperors and weeping angels, portrayed in sculpture, portraits, engravings and stained glass. We took our time taking these pictures, but I will try to limit the number to a few that I like.
