Saturday News Chum: Poor Wandering Subject

Ah, the weekend. Time to rest, relax, and recharge… while gorging yourself on this collection of interesting links that didn’t quite fit into a theme:

• Forgotten Subway Stations. New York is a big city. So big, in fact, that it has subway stations it built and never uses. Here’s an interesting article on one of those stations: the City Hall station. Looks beautiful for a station that old. I always like the style of NYC subway stations. LA’s, even with their unique station art, are so utilitarian.
• Names, Second Generation. When my wife and I got married, she elected to keep her last name. This was actually quite common for folks of my generation. But times change. We then had a large period of hyphenation… and now… ? Here’s an interesting article that considers how the children of my generation got their last names.
• Not Fitting Into Stereotypes. Given I just mentioned names, I’m sure if I gave you a particular last name — Schwartz, Cohen, Abramowitz — you would think “Jewish”. But that’s a stereotype, and Jews just don’t fit your stereotypes. Here are 10 photos to remind you of that.
• A Singing Voice is Silenced. The first show we ever saw at McCabes was a young man out of Tucson by the name of Shep Cooke. His claim to fame was that he was part of the Stoney Poneys, Linda Ronstadt’s first group. Linda has had quite an interesting career — pop, rock, Broadway, Mexican music, standards, … and alas… that voice has been silenced by Parkinsons. Here’s to a brave women for discussing the effects of a horrible disease. [As a side note, we're on vacation... and the theatre here is actually doing a Ronstadt tribute show the day after week leave]
• Expensive Travel. We’re at the locale hinted at in the previous link because airfare to our normal timeshare was just too expensive (anyone got a good lead on airfares between LAX and OGG at the end of August?). Here’s an article explaining why airfares are so expensive. Think about this article the next time you hear that airline consolidations are good for the industry. Less competition always means prices rise.
• Watts Towers. If you’re a student of LA (as I am), you know that one of unique places is Watts Towers. Here’s an interesting article from UCLA on how UCLA engineers are studying the towers to make a better mortar that will enable the towers to stand for another generation.

 

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