Forget all the stalled construction on the strip. They've boarded up the windows on where my Johnny Carino's and On the Border were about to be. The Quiznos on Jones is just empty windows. Every "coming soon" Fresh & Easy isn't. And a new Cupcakery down the street? Heh. Don't taunt.
But, a few blocks down, a "Glazier's Food Marketplace" does seem to be about to open at Durango and Warm Springs. Interesting! And right across from the terrible Vons, too. (Terrible because a) the lines are always awful, b) the prices are scary unless you cary a Vons card, c) Vons is the only place I know of that makes you carry a full-size discount card - no keychain sizes, and d) the huge groups of teens sitting in the parking lot at night are on the communal lawn.)
I visited the GFM website to see what that's about.
Alas, in a city of cranes, sometimes even the websites are under construction... In this case, construction from... 1995?
("Company Logo Goes Here"? Non-transparent GIF? Table-based layout with spacer images? onMouseOver/doRollover?)
I haven't been a site snob in years. (And how could I? Here, please make yourself comfortable in my glass house. Stone?) But this... I don't know if it's ghetto fabulous or if I should go behind the sofa and cry a little, remembering my old web dev career, and thinking of how I never lucked into the kind of clients who would pay for crap like this. (Darn like-minded clients with high standards!)
To deeply paraphrase Sloane Peterson in Ferris Bueller's Day Off, "I choose... pretending that this is a charming and rare sighting."
(Note: I'd never be so mean about a personal website or a small business or even a large business in a small locale or any business that made this kind of site in an ironic, devil-may-care way. However, I guess mean is mean. Sorry. But not sorry enough to hit backspace-backspace-backspace.)
(I was terribly mean on a mega-blog the other day. But, I meant every word, so that's okay, right? But, moment of outrage having been slept on thrice, I probably should have left out the one sentence that crossed the line between "you know it's true" and "I'll tell you what else, sugar-tits!" That's right: Mel Gibson waved me over from the other side. Blame him.)
I wonder if someday I will enjoy looking at old, <center>-tagged blinky websites with the same nostalgia that is slowly allowing me to appreciate the run-down architecture near where I work. (I'd say what kind of architecture, but it's such a buzzword at the moment and I have selfish reasons, perhaps to be revealed later, for not saying it out loud. And definitely not saying it out loud three times in front of a mirror in a dark bathroom.)
Which is the really slow way of saying that tonight I've been exploring Cinerama. DId you know that Cinerama screens were really strips fitted together, like blinds? Look at this sad picture.
I'm just full of sad images today. Says the girl whose recent Flickr stream is nothing but blurry camsnaps.
(The girl? Now who is retro and misguided?)
(And still too scaredy-cat from her mega-blog comment to turn on comments here? Oh, tsk.)
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