Why don't we make a scene together

[austin_dern]

Disney Channel's celebrating its ``Celebrity of the Month'' -- which their promos make sound like an ominous prediction rather than singling out a special person -- Lindsay Lohan with what they call ``the movie that started it all,'' a phrase which makes me wish I could demand antecedents from people. In this case the movie is the 90s remake of The Parent Trap, which they follow up the next day with Hayley Mills and Hayley Mills in ... The Parent Trap II. I'm sure it makes sense to the marketing department. Somewhere in this Madeline: Lost in Paris has jumped from Disney to Cartoon Network.

In the process of cleaning my apartment I broke my mop. It's not useless, understand, just the collapsing staff on it ... collapses, so I have to either drag it backwards or go hunched over.

And in the ever-baffling business news department, the Raffles Holding Group has chosen to sell the famous Raffles Hotel, although it will continue to own Raffles City and hotels near to the hotel. I haven't felt like this since Westinghouse bought CBS, spun off all its non-television business, and changed its name to CBS.

Trivia: In 1912 there were about 40,000 miles of electric railroad and trolley track in the United States. Source: A New History of the United States, William Miller.

Currently Reading: The Nemesis Affair: A Story of the Death of Dinosaurs and the Ways of Science, David M Raup. It's a mid-80s book by one of the people who promoted the ``Nemesis'' companion star theory, about how it got developed and flared into a controversy. It's a fascinating (and very even-handed) read about a fascinating problem on the edge of the available evidence. You'd think there'd be more books about things like that, since it's as dramatic for theories that get accepted as for polywater or cold fusion. (There's got to have been a science fiction writer who's told the story of such a marginal-effect thing, but I can't think of one, except where something the entire scientific community has determined to be stupid turns out in the hands of the plucky indefatigable protagonist to revolutionize the very history of revolutions.)

Comments

[xolo.livejournal.com]

When I lived near South Bend, IN, I used to ride the South Shore Line (http://web.presby.edu/~jtbell/transit/Chicago/SouthShore/) to Chicago on weekends. It's apparently the last true electric interurban still operating. In the summer especially, you'd get groups of train buffs riding, all of them wandering through the cars taking pictures of this and that.

[austin-dern.livejournal.com]

The interurbans are a fascinating little niche of railroad history. I'm not much of a train buffer, although I am plainly psychologically ready for it. I'm curious why they lingered longest in the Chicago area, although I suppose it's the least improbable region for it.