Monday, May 13, 2013

Going To The Big House — Doggerel

Riding METROLift to physical therapy a few days ago, I was treated to a rapid drive‑by survey of the houses in my neighborhood. The neighborhood is a desirable one; the house we lease is a "tear-downer" that will be gone in a few years, in favor of a much larger monstrosity. That's sad, because the neighborhood has (had?) real character: every house, modest though it may be, was individual, unlike those early suburbs in which every third house on the opposite side of a street was identical in every respect except perhaps the color it was painted. In any case, I was riding in one of the larger, more comfortable METROLift vans, and had my notepad handy; I was moved to scribble this...
Going Bimodal

While some of us fret
  about losing our jobs,
For others, there's hope
  of expansion:
Their pocket's so full
  that it practically throbs . . .
(Hot-damn! There's another
  McMansion!)

- SB the YDD


(There's a castle with a turret, similar to this one, two houses down the street from me. If I had $3m to spend on a home, I don't think I'd be quite this silly. But YMMV...)

8 comments:

  1. To quote Mrs. Doubtfire: "It simply reeks of taste."

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. I suppose the medical condition that inclines someone to buy such a building is "Turret's Syndrome" ...

      Delete
  2. Victorian Moorish Gothic - what an interesting design choice ...

    The last time I saw that color I was shoveling it out of a dairy barn.

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. Bryan - ROTFL!

      I learned something on this post. Ubuntu 12.04 has no built-in copy of Comic Sans MS. In order to view the post in something resembling its Microsoft mode, I had to learn how to do a font substitution. It's not hard to do, but damn, Mozilla makes it hard to learn; you find a half dozen refs to the technique in help before they ever tell you precisely how:

      Change to your home user folder and then to ".mozilla", onward to the profile folder, and within that, to "chrome". creating chrome if necessary. Edit (create if necessary) file userContent.css (as always in *nix, caps matter), and insert a line something like this:

      @font-face { font-family: 'Comic Sans MS'; src: local('TSCu_Comic'); }

      Henceforth, web page refs to 'Comic Sans MS' will be rendered in a font called 'TSCu_Comic', which you need to find on the web and install.

      There's a way to do it in Google Chrome, too, but that's not as hard to find.

      You talk about Victorian Moorish Gothic...

      Delete
  3. We have some McMansions like this up in the UPPER part of our town... strange piles of 'high-class' idiocy. What people do when they have lots of money and no taste....

    ReplyDelete
    Replies
    1. ellroon, a cellist I worked with years ago used the zinger, "All your taste is in your mouth!" She was seldom wrong in applying the barb.

      Delete
  4. What fun! Does it come with a Princess?

    ReplyDelete

USING THIS PAGE TO LEAVE A COMMENT

• Click here to view existing comments.
• Or enter your new rhyme or reason
in the new comment box here.
• Or click the first Reply link below an existing
comment or reply and type in the
new reply box provided.
• Scrolling manually up and down the page
is also OK.

Static Pages (About, Quotes, etc.)

No Police Like H•lmes



(removed)