Daily Archives: July 14, 2008

Plymouth Rocks

Yahoo has some sort of relationship with CNN/Money, which itself seems to be a relationship between CNN and Money Magazine, if there is such a thing anymore as Money Magazine. Anyway. On the front portal page this morning, I notice that Yahoo’s got a news item about best places to live or somesuch. I generally shy away from such lists, but for some reason I thought I’d find out. Where’s the best place to live?

How funny. I’ve actually lived there. Plymouth, Minnesota.

Lived there in my dad’s house, from July 1982 to January 1983, when I moved into the dorm, Frontier Hall, on campus at the University of Minnesota. And although he must have moved to San Jose CA sometime in the late eighties, Zabasearch still reaches way back and lists the address. Amazing. Was 11245 36th Place North. And here’s Live.com’s bird’s eye view. We live in amazing times, people.

It’s one of the ones in the middle of the picture. I can’t remember exactly which one. I could probably go to the taxing jurisdiction’s website and get a plat map or something, find out exactly which one it is. But this is good enough for our purposes today, yeah?

Was a huge house, even though it’s duplex. I had to get to Minnesota about a month early for freshman orientation, then didn’t have much else to do until classes started. I didn’t know anybody except my dad. Must have sat around the house a lot. Probably listened to my records. I remember listening to the Clash’s Sandinista in my bedroom there. And Altered Images, Happy Birthday. Springsteen’s Nebraska.

Smoking was still allowed indoors back then. Dad let me smoke in the (finished) basement, down where the TV was. I remember watching Hill Street Blues down there. Dad loved Hill Street Blues. That would have been on Thursday nights. I remember watching the Clash on Saturday Night Live. They sang either Rock the Casbah or Should I Stay or Should I Go. I can’t remember which. Probably the latter, since Mick sings that, and Joe definitely sang Straight to Hell. Joe had his mohawk at this point, but not yet dyed orange. And I remember watching the news about guy who drove the truck up to the Washington Monument, threatened to blow it up. (He never did have any explosives, turned out. They found this out after they shot the poor man dead, of course.)