Recommended: Johnny’s Luncheonette, just off of the notorious Heartbreak Hill, along the course of the Boston Marathon, in Newton Centre. We took Eric there tonight for dinner.
Category: Life with Pratts
A cool experiment
My son wanted a small refrigerator in his dorm room. A freezer compartment was neither needed, nor wanted. Another consideration was compressor noise. I took a chance on Haier’s NuCool, which technically is a cooler, and not a refrigerator, because it doesn’t have a compressor. The NuCool uses thermoelectric cooling, which has limited effectiveness compared to conventional refrigerators that circulate a coolant.
At home, with an ambient temperature of 68 degrees, the NuCool did fine, and even went below 37 degrees, according to a thermometer I had placed inside. But in the dorm, without air conditioning, where the room temp was over 80, the NuCool managed only 50 degrees. This morning it was in the safe region on the thermometer, but considering NuCool’s inability to maintain a constant temperature, my inclination is to return it to Target and buy Haier’s conventional cube fridge.
Follow-up: The NuCool is a success, assuming it holds up. It seems to manage a 40-degree difference in temperature, and when it was up to 50 the room was probably 90. Since then it’s held at 35 degrees, even with the thermostat turned down a notch.
The speed of light vs. sound
This morning I was on the porch stretching out, listening to NPR, when the radio suddenly shut off. A fraction of a second later I heard a BOOM from up the street.
Texasize Me
Denro says my lack of appreciation for Mitch Miller is due to the fact that his recording of The Yellow Rose of Texas was #1 in September, 1955, the week that I was born. Well, it’s true, I would have preferred anything else, even The Ballad of Davy Crockett!
The first video has the original Mitch Miller recording of The Yellow Rose of Texas…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=z5Lakexqqqc
… and the second has Stan Freberg’s parody of Mitch. Both are taken from 78 rpm records posted by fave YouTube member 45s4FR.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Y-By0vBrzDE
The Yellow Rose of Texas was written in 1858, and Texas has certainly changed since then, so let’s update things a bit, with this pair of TV commercials, made by an old friend of mine, for a restaurant chain called Cotton Patch Cafe. The first one has a straight-forward ZZ Top-style boogie…
…and I love the second spot, featuring music of epic proportions to go with the food of epic portions!
Post 2000
Well here it is, one month shy of the blog’s 4th anniversary. I began when Eric was entering high school, and next month he starts college. Along the way I’ve deleted some items, while others were lost to technical difficulties, so it’s taken a little longer to get here than it would have otherwise, but this is post number 2000. And, by coincidence, driving to work today, my car hit a milestone of its own.
Fanway Park
Eric (who is now only one month away from starting college) and I were at Fenway Park in Boston today to see the Red Sox play the Detroit Tigers. It was a lackluster game, with the Sox leading 3-0, until the 9th inning, when Detroit tied the score. The Sox won on a well-played bunt. [Samjay says that “well-placed” is the correct sports term.]
The two tickets cost $250. Considering the crowd that was there, and the money people spent on food, etc., the thing I want to know is, “what recession?”