the best and worst of a day in retail
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Remember
Those who have served. Those who have supported them. Buffalo Soldiers and Lionesses. Citizens and not. They have suffered at the hands of enemies and far too often have harmed themselves. At 3:00 p.m. tomorrow, a grateful nation honors the fallen.
SOLDATI
Bosco di Courton luglio 1918
Si sta come
D’autunno
Sugli alberi
Le foglie.
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2:01 PM
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Labels: Memorial Day
Thursday, May 21, 2009
Grown up pops

No, Silly! Not those Pops! Popsicles! Shopgirlove doesn't have much of a sweet tooth. So, when the weather turns steamy, she feels a little left out on the frozen goodie front. But why not make savory chilled treats? Something for a more sophisticated palate? Not to denigrate the lovely fudgesicle, mind you...but some taste buds shrivel at sugar. Others have gone before her but she has some ideas of her own, why not just freeze any salty, saucy dish you love:
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6:24 PM
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Labels: Fred, Pickle Popsicles, savory popsicles, Summer, the Pops
Sunday, May 17, 2009
Scandal!

Shopgirlove loves a controversy. Boston delivers pretty consistently: busing, corruption, disappearing gangsters, gigantic public works projects, the Catholic Church, and the always entertaining university presidents, not to mention the equally entertaining students. But nothing is quite as much fun as local art and architecture! Brandeis announced it was going to sell off the remarkable collection of the Rose Art Museum and fired the Director. That didn't go over very well... MIT bought an international, edgy, landmark that promptly fell apart. Contemporary art got a new home that turned its back on the patrons. (Also falling apart. Check out the electrical tape on the back railings.) Ah, and then there's Renzo Piano. Povero Piano! The FAA had a little problem with his vision competing with the vision of those silly airplane pilots and the people of Cambridge had the gall to suggest that Harvard should maybe limit the grand experimental gestures to non-residential sites. The crimson tide rolled back and settled for a rehab, sorry "transformation," of its existing space. But the Piano plan that got even Shopgirlove deeply perturbed? Tear down the carriage house at the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum. STOP THE MADNESS!
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9:52 PM
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Labels: 9/11, architecture, art, Boston, Brandeis, busing, Cambridge, design, Gehry, Harvard, Jesuits, Larry Summers, massport, MIT, Moskow Linn, Piano, the Big Dig, Whitey Bulger, Young Republicans
Saturday, May 16, 2009
Thursday, May 7, 2009
Swine flu vs. the Conficker worm
Shopgirlove isn't really all that worried about the latest flu pandemic. While the Spanish flu was nothing to sneeze at, the ill-named Swine flu is statistically only slightly more deadly than every other flu strain seen in the recent past.
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1:38 AM
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Labels: CDC, Conficker, hand-washing, pandemic, Spanish flu, swine flu, WHO
Saturday, May 2, 2009
Transcendent
Shopgirlove was utterly undone by a strange little film called "The Story of the Weeping Camel." She has no way to express the impact of this cinematic journey--except to say that it managed to distill everything of any weight in the human experience to one universal tale that relied entirely on sight and sound. Watch it without the subtitles. This story rises above dialect. It rises above plot. And action. And big names. It is nothing more, nor less, than the most compelling argument for the role that art can play in our lives if we let it. And the role that we could play if we truly accepted our responsibility to the world we have shaped: for better or for worse.
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3:33 AM
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Labels: art, cinema, National Geographic films, the Story of the Weeping Camel
