By:
The Dude on the Right
Well at least I had one thing right about my prediction for "The Sopranos"
ending – it would take place in an ice cream shop in New Jersey. What
surprised me was that most people giving predictions, from fans to critics,
seemed to forget the story of how there was this ice cream shop in New Jersey
that the show’s people wanted to shoot the final scene at but the town wouldn’t
give them a permit. Then the town thought better of it and gave them a
permit. Low and behold the final scene was at a place called "Holsten’s,"
which whether you liked the ending of the show or not, if you are/were a fan of
the "The Sopranos," and if you are anywhere near Bloomfield, NJ, you will
probably try to make a trip there. With all of their publicity, though,
you would think they might update their web site. Going to
holstons.com you see the
most simplistic of designed web sites, and more importantly, if you click on the
"Luncheon Menu"
link, there is something missing from the menu, namely onion rings. There
is another website with a photo of a current menu, and it does show onion rings
are available, but if the Holston’s folks want some help redesigning their
website, I’m offering my
services, if only because it would give me a real excuse to visit New Jersey
again, other than just vacationing on Long Beach Island.
But now that "The
Sopranos" are done, or is it "is done," I always get that confused, and so far I
haven’t gotten sucked into any summer TV yet, I’m looking to revive doing
concert reviews during this summer season, setting a consistent schedule for CD
and DVD reviews, finishing the re-design of entertainmentavenue.com, and in the
middle of all of these things, digitize my entire photo collection, starting
with my concert photos, mostly so I can update the lousy looking concert shots
on the web site because, in reality, they aren’t that lousy (some of those were
digitized with an old, hand-held scanner, bought back in like 1996). The
nice thing about the digitizing is I can do it in the middle of typing and
posting things – simply slide another negative into my old HP Photosmart
scanner, and since it’s pretty slow, well, I don’t lose that much stream of
consciousness in my writing. The bad thing is that since it is kinda slow,
I might be at this digitizing things for years.
I guess I never realized how
many pictures I took back in those old days of using film, and concerts alone
I’m looking at, by rough count, some 720 rolls of film to digitize. If I
can get two rolls done a day I guess I might be done with the concert photos
sometime next year. Then there are all of the negatives from college and
high school, and if I’m on track for this, we’re looking at, well, maybe 2010 by
the time my entire film collection is safely stored away on CD-R’s (that by then
will probably be useless), and I might be able to put together a nice high school
retrospective for my high school classmates at our 25th year reunion, that is,
of course, if Bon Jovi doesn’t have a concert on the same day as our reunion in
2010 like they did
back in 1995, and 2005.
It looks to be a fun summer for this dude, as long
as I can keep my TV turned off in the evening hours. If not, expect a lot
more blogs about crappy, summer TV shows that I have gotten sucked into
watching. Maybe I’ll even try to squeeze in a trip to New Jersey for some
ice cream, and sit in the "Tony Soprano Got Whacked Here, Or Maybe He Didn’t"
booth. I just wonder if the onion rings at Holston’s are that good.
That’s it for this one!
I’m The Dude on the Right!! L8R!!!