Andy Chase

McDonald’s old-school deep-fried Apple Pies.

Apparently there was one McDonald’s in Allston, Massachusetts that kept selling them well into the 1990’s, but then it burned down.

Pizza Hut Priazzo

I believe they used to market it as “stuffed pizza”. The usual Pizza Hut ingredients in an inch-deep, crackery sort of crust, with more crust and cheese on top.

Hostess Pudding Pies

But not the green Ninja Turtle ones.

Snapple Soda

Tru Root Beer was the best, but I seem to recall a nice Raspberry-Lime flavor too.

Mister Donut

They had the coolest logo. We hardly ever actually bought donuts from the one that used to be in Gardner because they had a counter where all the old timers would go and smoke cigarettes, giving the all of the donuts a nice ashtray aftertaste.

The Pewter Pot

I can’t remember ever actually eating at one, but I was always fascinated by the anachronistic, heavy, dark colonial theme when you’d walk by one in the middle of a shopping mall.

Polar Orange Bitter

It was more or less like the “Orange Dry” they still sell, except it had quinine in it.

Friendly Cola

Friendly restaurants (back when they were “Friendly”, not “Friendly’s”) used to sell their own cola, which actually tasted like cola.

Fribbles

Speaking of Friendly’s, am I the only person on the planet who remembers when the Fribble was the super-thick, almost-too-thick-for-a-straw milk shake? That was the whole point of calling it something other than a regular old milkshake. I don’t know when they changed it, but I’ll never forgive them.

Deering Ice Cream

They were a lot like Friendly Restaurants, but just around Portland, Maine. They had their own green lemon-lime soda.

I seem to have a knack for discovering the limitations of content management software just when I have committed enough time and energy to learning it that I won’t back out.

In this case, I thought it would be nice to preserve the ‘Archives’ sidebar item on the Explosive Logorrhea, Music, and Lutherie pages, but have the menu (and its links) filter by the category you’re currently viewing. A feature that you would expect any reasonable set of template tags to accommodate, right?

Not WordPress 2.0.4, or any available plugins that I could find. Fortunately, somebody else already solved this problem. The solution involves modifying the WordPress core source code, but it’s manageable - follow the notes after the initial post, too:

http://wordpress.org/support/topic/69776

It’s been a hectic second half of the summer and between heat-waves, a bit of travel, and general stress I’ve managed not to play as much music as I did the first half… all it took was missing 2 or 3 sessions in a row at The Black Sheep and I’m treading water again. It’s really remarkable how much more I want to practice and learn new tunes if I feel like I can show it off at the following week’s session - or at least have the self-satisfaction of being able to keep up with the chord changes at speed.

Since moving to Mac OS X three and a half years ago, my use of Emacs as primary editing environment for text, HTML, PHP, XML, and pretty much everything else has dropped way off. I still use it all the time for quick command line editing of config files or Subversion commit comments, but for general text editing I've been using [TextWrangler][1].