Being able to see moving images of the fantastic was a rare thing for the general populace before VHS rentals became ubiquitous. These wild visions would show up regularly on broadcast television, either late at night, or during  the weekends, but by regularly, I mean you could see a particular movie twice a year if you were lucky. Or you might be able to catch them in a midnight movie, or a revival house. Organizations could rent 16mm prints of movies and show them, so sometimes you’d get lucky at summer camp or a school auditorium on a rainy day. (I know devotees would collect 16mm prints, too, and 8mm reels were available, but I’m talking about the non-collector, non-devotee type. Not everyone owned a movie projector.) Cable TV was only starting out.

So, when I went to The Ritz one night with some friends to see, um, Marianne Faithful?, Adrian Sherwood’s Tackhead?, sorry can’t remember. I was absolutely transfixed by the video DJ-ing that was going on pre-show.

One of the clips shown was Kali.

Fantastic!

Recently, the Hoboken Historical Museum, of which Lisa and I are proud members, mounted a map exhibit. After taking in the show, I had a nice conversation with the Museum’s Bob Foster. The result? A map of Hoboken’s named street signs, monuments and statues.

Of course, Google Maps allows anyone to make custom maps, like the one I made of a path I saw a raccoon walk in City Line, Brookyn a few years ago. However, I wanted the street signs to be find-able by any Google Maps user, so I used Mapmaker to add/make sure each of these items was included. So, if you go to Google Maps and search on “Biggie’s Way” in Hoboken you’ll get a hit.

So, here’s my custom map. Bob and I first discussed the street signs. Then I went ahead and added the statues and monuments, since I had already added them to Google Maps. My little icons are serviceable, and were fun to make. I also took snapshots of each place (well, maybe not all of them). If you click on the icon you should see the snapshot in the pop-up. If you have any suggestions, let me know.

View City of Hoboken Street Signs, Monuments, Statues in a larger map

While interesting, I don’t like that kind of presentation because it mixes geography with population. Showing, for example, big ol’ sparsely populated Montana, Idaho, and the Dakotas colored according to votes, but not showing their population skews interpretation of the image.

So, I took the Electoral Vote Cartogram by ChrisnHouston on Wikimedia Commons and did the same as mentioned above, using percentages for each state from MSNBC’s and Fox News’ websites. It’s a little rough around the edges, but I thought it’d be fun to post it.

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

I also put a similarly colored full US electoral cartogram at the lower right reflecting the color of the total popular vote, as well as three squares showing 100% red, 50% red 50% blue, and 100% blue.

and have a Fluffernutter

Not that we had Fluff all the time, but when it was in the house, it was in order to have Fluffernutters. Would there have been any other reason? Check the link to go to a page that includes an audio file of an old-school Fluffernutter commercial.

My point in writing this?  I have realized that for a few years now, probably 35 years or more since I last had a Fluffernutter, that I have been indulging in a modern variant.

Multi(usually 12)-Grain sliced bread with organic ground-by-me-in-the-local-shop-so-it’s-chunky/crunchy peanut butter and… wait for it…  organic fig preserves.

It EVOKES the Fluffernutter in the crunchy, fiber-y manner that I prefer these days. Depending on the style of the preserve, the fig can also remind us that the Fig Newton is a very processed snack treat.

In said post, I mentioned “The Hoboken Sound”, a local NYC news produced documentary from 1985 about the music scene. Well, after some comments on the Maxwell’s Facebook page/group, a near-complete copy of the show was offered by Jesse Jarnow. I then converted and posted it to my YouTube page. It is almost complete, because I have a memory of reporter Bob O’Brien riding off on a motorcycle at some point in the show, perhaps the final shot. That scene is not in this video. I also noticed a Group W title, that seems to indicate to me that this is from a recording where the documentary was perhaps re-shown or syndicated, rather than a recording of the actual first local NYC broadcast.

And here it is:

24 December 1980 - Lakes Music

"This container is a replica of the original store tin that was sold on March 6, 1912 in Hoboken, New Jersey. Oreo biscuits became an instant success and now are the best selling cookies in the world."

I have eaten many Oreos.

And enjoy Hoboken’s history.