The holiday week is over, but don't think it's over yet... because an all new Very Special YouTube Edition of Bullet Sunday starts... now...

   
• Diner! I am addicted to the Architectural Digest YouTube channel. There's a great assortment of videos, and if you're an archtecture nerd, it's terrific time sink. An interesting one is about diner archtecture and how it has influenced other structures... like the Space Needle...

And that's Americana for you.

   
• Space! Seattle is home to quite a few famous places, but the most iconic is the Space Needle. As a kid, I was kind of abssessed with it. Built for the 1962 world's Fair, it instantly became the symbol of the city. It had a massive renovation in 2017 that essentially gutted it and added glass floors and panels so that it fit into modern tourist attraction trends. This video is an excellent overview over how it all works...

A few notes...

• The structure originally had a revolving restaurant called "Sky City" (formerly "Eye of the Needle"). As a kid, I got to visit the Space Needle once on a school field trip and a couple time with my family. Since the restaurant was a "fine dining" establishment, it was too expensive for us to eat at. Eventually I did get to eat there on a date while on a work trip during my gap year. While the revolving restaurant itself was pretty cool, the food was overpriced and underwhelming. You were paying for the experience, not the meal.
• Even so, the restaurant was a worthy bucket-list event. Which is why it's sad that it was replaced with an adults-only cocktail lounge in the 2017 renovation. Had they just adjusted the menu to be good elevated-basic fare instead of crappy fancy, it would have been an amazing family dining experience the whole family could enjoy, even if it was still expensive. But there's more money to be made from slinging alcohol, so here we are. I often wonder if somebody has puked all over the glass walls and floors yet.
• Not to crap over the 2017 renovation entirely... the glass installations are incredible. A vast improvement over what was there previously.
• Interesting to note how the "Skyline Event Center" at the 100-foot level of the Space Needle is so often treated as if it's always been there. It hasn't. It was added in 1982. And it kinda bummed me out because the structure looked so much more elegant and cool without that big block between its legs. The excuse for adding it was that it was "in the original plans." But I don't know this is true. The plans I saw had two additional open-air observation decks... not a massive brick that changed the look of the profile. I wish they would just remove it. As an event space it has limited appeal anyway.
• Because I often meet up with visiting friends in Seattle, I've been up the Space Needle a ridiculous number of times. Between it and The Pike Place Market, that's what everybody knows about Seattle, so that's what everybody wants to do. I don't have a count, but it is surely 25 times minimum.

   
• Talent! Now this is somebody with skills..

It's amazing how people can do this kind of impossible stuff.

   
• LEGO! The best thing about The LEGO Movie is that it looked like LEGO. It was frickin' brilliant eye candy. And this is how they got there...

I've watched and re-watched The LEGO Movie just because I love how it moved. I skip the end, which is phenomenally stupid, but everything up to then is amazing. Fortunately The LEGO Batman Movie is brilliant from start to finish, so I watch every frame.

   
• Make Mine Marvel? Alrighty then. Guardians of the Galaxy Vol. 3 has a lot of things to like, but it's also one of the most sadistic fucking movies I've ever seen. The amount of torture and death is just inexcusable for an escapist super-hero fun comic book movie...

I don't understand the heavy amount of praise this movie has been getting given how utterly horrific it is. WTF?

   
• JUSTIIIIIICE! JUSTICE! JUSTICE FOR BUZZY! — This is wild. I remember a story at the time about a guy stealing stuff from Walt Disney World, but don't recall ever hearing what happened. The story is nuts...

   
• Thrown! A video pops up and now I'm mad all over again at the shitty fucking ending of Game of Thrones. Two arrogant assholes took the paycheck to rush the show to a truly awful conclusion instead of handing it off to somebody who gives a shit. All so they could move on to projects which never happened thanks to their horrific mishandling of the show that made them famous...

And then there's the fact that one of them is a shitty fucking writer and the other one has no experience. The only thing they're moderately good at is adapting other people's writing (and we know what happened when they ran out of books for Game of Thrones)...

I am MORTIFIED that they will be show runners and writers for 3 Body Problem over at Netflix. I have no fucking clue how they were ever hired by anybody ever again after the way they completely trashed Thrones.

   
Now back to my overcast Sunday.