You begin to interest me…vaguely
It’s cold out and there’s been snow on the ground for two weeks so it was a short visit to the Updike Farmstead, part of the Princeton Battlefield/Stony Brook Settlement Historic District and headquarters of the Princeton Historical Society.
New Orleans Mardi Gras parades have been cancelled because of COVID, so people are decorating their houses as floats instead:
‘Float houses’ are popping up all over New Orleans for Mardi Gras 2021: Now with 250 photos!
How the Mardi Gras float house phenomenon began and how it’s spreading beyond New Orleans
Featured image source: Reuters/Kathleen Flynn
You’ve seen the big Bed, Bath, and Beyond coupon many times. Now hear from the people who made it the (much bigger than I ever suspected) cultural icon it is:
The New York Times has the true story of how The World’s Biggest Coupon came to be.
Author Robert Caro’s personal archives will go to the New York Historical Society. Caro is still writing the final volume of his Lyndon B. Johnson biography.
The New York State Museum has just published James W. Bradley’s new book, Onondaga and Empire; An Iroquoian People in an Imperial Era. The book is available to freely download from the museum. At over 800 pages, it is a truly massive work and focuses on the Onondaga Iroquois and their interactions with Europeans over a fifty-year time span (c. A.D. 1650-1701).
Link to download: Onondaga and Empire
Featured image: Figure 7.16. from Onondaga and Empire depicts shell pendants and effigy figures from Indian Hill.
Nobody rocks harder than a 70s funk-rock band with two drummers.
When James Garner passed away, obituaries mentioned not only his movies (The Great Escape, Grand Prix) and TV Shows (Maverick, The Rockford Files), but also commercials he made for Polaroid cameras. Polaroid partnered him with actress Mariette Hartley, who had done mainly guest star appearances on TV shows (Gunsmoke, Star Trek, Mannix) up until then.
The ads were so successful that Garner reportedly made over 300 of them between about 1977 and 1983. He and Hartley had such a winning chemistry in the spots that viewers presumed that the two were actually married to each other. They were not.
Here’s a bunch of the Christmas-themed ads that Garner and Hartley did for Polaroid.
OK, I’m calling it: Sugar and Booze (which presciently came out last Christmas) is the most appropriate song for CFH (Christmas from Home) 2020.
Ana Gasteyer singing it live last year:
Sticking with the theme, the official runner up: Cider and Hennessy by Jordin Sparks:
Bonus: The studio version of Sugar and Booze:
Photos from a ride a couple months ago. The lake was created in 1906 by Andrew Carnegie so that the Princeton University crew team would have a place to practice their rowing. It is parallel to but separate from the Delaware & Raritan Canal. The Lake Carnegie Historic District, like the canal, is listed on the National Register of Historic Places.
