"I couldn't possibly fail to disagree with you less."
16 September 2006Somewhere off Main Street"One Gleeson Plaza" is the new designation for Sean and Phoebe's place, and it has a certain upscale sheen to it, which makes sense since it's only a stone's throw from the fabled Blog Building. It's an American thing, I think, to want our surroundings to bear pleasant-sounding names, although The Onion is reporting that Chicago is running out:
"It was bound to happen sooner or later," Chicago Mayor Richard M. Daley said at a Monday press conference in front of City Hall. "Oak Dale Springs, Whispering Pines, Stonewood Creek... We have used every tree, body of water, and living thing in the almanac. You don't have to drive all the way out to Kevin Acres to know we need a new naming system."
Oklahoma City is currently processing plats and such for Oakdale Valley, Quail Ridge Estates, Settler's Ridge, Silver Leaf East, Somers Pointe, Country Hollow, Marble Leaf, and Robin Ridge, among others. Most of these are innocuous, but enough with the "Pointe" business already: "pointe" is a ballet position, not a term of location. Which, in turn, reminds me of this from five years ago:
This afternoon, on the road to No Place In Particular, I traipsed through something called Danforth Farms, where every other street name has an equestrian origin — Oklahoma City insists upon the retention of numbers for east-west thoroughfares, lest the fire department get lost somewhere around 197th Street — and "Farms" notwithstanding, it's about as pastoral as a GMC dealership. Besides which, there's this unwritten Law of the Suburbs which mandates bigger boxes made of ticky-tacky, though they still all look just the same.
The city of Edmond, on the other hand, likes trees. Loves trees. The joke a few years ago was that there was a City Council motion to ban all further street or subdivision names that contained any mention of "oak", before the entire population wound up living on Something Oak Drive. At least, I think it was a joke. Coming back down Covell Road, I happened upon a subdivision that probably should have been called Ashford Oaks, but was in fact called "Asheforde Oaks", with a double helping of that Olde Englishe Codswallope that presumably impels people with ancestors named Martinez (such as, well, yours truly) to look elsewhere for housing. Include "Pointe" in said codswallop. Of course, here at Surlywood, we pay attention, not only to this world, but the next:
Having been part of a few focus groups in my time, I rather expect that when the Final Judgment is read, I can count on an extended stay at One Brimstone Place.
Sounds almost like a trip to Vegas, doesn't it? (And what happens there, I understand, really stays there.) Posted at 9:31 AM to Almost YogurtThanks. It doesn't have the baronial personality of a "Surlywood," but I was going for a more imposing, bloodless sort of ambience. By the way, it seems that Technorati has totally wiped its memory banks of Dustbury. I can't find any profile of you or your blog there anymore. Did you withdraw from Technorati yourself, or did they just lose you? Posted by: Sean Gleeson at 12:54 PM on 16 September 2006I had no trouble bringing up my profile, or the current links, but it doesn't show in the directory for some reason. I consider it One Of Those Glitches that occasionally bedevils Sifry & Co. from time to time, especially since two other sites I run show up just fine. Posted by: CGHill at 2:12 PM on 16 September 2006 |