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Google Maps was made to answer
Monday, July 23 2007
It was a cool, rainy day, one ideally suited to baths (for me) and television (for both me and Gretchen), and I watched even all there was on the Tivo was a Nova rerun. Nova is usually disappointing in some way that I can't put my finger on, perhaps because ultimately it is a show designed for nerdy kids.
While I was watching Gretchen went out to the mailbox and returned with a CD I'd ordered. It was 24 Hours A Day by the usually-goofy Alt-Country band the Bottle Rockets. I'd ordered it for only one song, "Waitin' On Train," which I like mostly for its lyrics. The chorus is pure genius:
Waitin' on a train, waitin' on a train
The engine's burnin and the cars are [plain?]
Like me he's movin' slow
But he's got two things on me you know
Diesel power and he feels no pain.
But I also like this sad reference to the kind of past that rarely leads to a rosy future:
My alternator's dischargin'
And this old baby she ain't [clawin' for bar?]
I wish I could fix it
You know my dad, he would've known how
But the alcohol it took him away
And only you lord can help me now.
I don't often see much album art these days, but here was a non-pirated copy of 24 Hours A Day in my hands, so I could pull the insert out, unfold it, and take a gander. It's five panes wide, and on three panes of one side is a wide-angle photo featuring a bar called Slo Tom's Lounge (referenced repeatedly in a song on the CD). I looked up "Slo Tom's Lounge" in Google and found that it is an actual (and mostly uncelebrated) dive bar in St. Louis, Missouri (hometown of the Bottle Rockets). My ultimate goal was to see if the wide-angle photo on the CD insert was an actual photo or just a photo-montage, a question that Google Maps was made to answer. I quickly found Slo Tom's, although the Google pushpin for its address was directly in the middle of Broadway a half block to the northeast of the actual building (which I determined by comparing photos of its front with shadows cast on the ground in the Google satellite image. The bar is apparently on the east corner of E. Kraus and Broadway in this hybrid map-photo. Unfortunately, looking at the Google information, it doesn't appear that the pink building in the center of the "wide angle photo" could actually be in this picture. Neither, for that matter, could the Arch Motel. The album art appears to be a photo-montage, with seams patterned-away in Photoshop.
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http://asecular.com/blog.php?070723 feedback
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