GET YOUR KICKS

My granddaughter. Ellie, was invited to a birthday party yesterday at a venue meant for kid craziness called Incredible Pizza Company. There is an all-you-can-eat buffet of pizza, tacos, hot dogs, salad and sweets, all cheap but edible.The main attraction is an enormous arcade of every kind of electronic game, plus a mini roller coaster, bumper cars, laser tag and I don't know what else. The kid had a ball.

The entryway celebrates old US Route 66, which went from Chicago to Los Angeles, with STL being a major node on the route. Think of the song Route 66, with best known versions by Chuck Berry and the Rolling Stones. https://youtu.be/tg2EbJy-9dc               

SIXTEEN YEARS

Today is St. Louis Daily Photo's sixteenth anniversary. 5,670 posts to date. Since I don't have anything fresh to post I thought I'd show an old favorite picture of the Gateway Arch, my most frequent subject. 

My posts may be sporadic for a while, or, for the first time. I may need to take a leave of absence. I'll talk about why when the time is right so please don't inquire.              

HOT COP

The St. Louis motorcycle police lead every parade around this town. It must be a fun break from their usual work. Always on black Harley Davidsons with black helmets, black leather jackets and perfectly polished black boots. 

One of my very few photographic claims to fame is that I was once asked to use a photo of a line of SLPD motorcycle cops for the catalog of a show at the Museum of Modern Art in NYC. The show was about the art of modern fashion and they wanted to use my picture in a section about motorcycle jackets. https://tinyurl.com/2p8b6pf7 Of course, they said they couldn't pay anything but offered me a couple of tickets and a copy of the catalog if I happened to show up during the run. I did. The contact person who said she would be there wasn't. I had to show the email exchange to a manager to get my meager compensation, but I got my five minutes of fame.             

IT WOULD BE HARD

A float in the St. Patrick's Day parade. We visited Northern Ireland once, flying into Dublin and driving north to Belfast. Although peace had long been restored by that time, I will never forget the violent Unionist graffiti on walls near our hotel. It was deeply unsettling. After driving around the North some more, the only way we could tell that we had returned to the Republic was that the speed limit signs changed from miles to kilometers per hour.                

IRONY, OR JUST DUMB?

Some of the crowd along Friday's St. Patrick's Day parade route. The colors are somewhat similar but do they realize they are waving an Italian, not an Irish flag?                  

HEY, IT'S COUSIN KEITH!

I mentioned that the neighborhood where yesterday's St. Pat's parade was held is called Dogtown. It is a traditionally Irish area. According to Wikipedia, Dogtown got its name as a small mining community in the mid-1800s. There was a concentration of small clay and coal mines in the area during that time, and the term "Dogtown" was widely used in the 1800s by miners to describe a group of small shelters around mines. 

So I was standing along the route when this huge pick up truck rolled by. The sign on the door caught my attention. Don't know Keith and the position, of course, is honorary but maybe our tribe is coming up in the world.

By the way, even by American standards, this is one of the biggest pick ups you will ever see. You can just notice the manufacturer's sticker in the back window. The list price is seventy - eight - thousand - dollars and it gets 15 miles per gallon. That's 6.4 kilometers per liter. The good that money could have done...      

THE LUCK OF THE IRISH

St. Patrick's Day is a big deal in a lot of the US. It certainly is here. We have two parades, a big municipal one on the Saturday before the event and a smaller, somehow more genuine one in one of our neighborhoods (called Dogtown - really) on the date itself. I hope to shoot some of it.

But today has more significance in our household. On March 17, 1973, a broke law student from New York and a young nurse from Kansas found themselves holding glasses of green beer, pushed into a corner of a bar near St. Louis University and awkwardly gazing at each other. He asked if she would like to play pinball. She had no idea what it was about. They agreed to meet for a beer after she got off work the next day. After a little while she said she had to go, having made plans to clean her fish tanks. He said he would help! OMG, she had a car, a job, an apartment, two fish tanks and two spice racks! After that she couldn't get rid of him. And that's how Mrs. C and I met 50 years ago today. Pretty lucky.