Philly Friday’s got your back

The O’Jays might arguably be Philadelphia International Records best known and most successful group. Their first Philly INT’L album, released in August 1972, was Back Stabbers. The title track topped out at #3 on Billboard’s US Hot 100 chart in ‘72 and went on to become The O’Jays’ first single to sell more than one million copies.

Seeing red, printing orange

Well, more precisely, printing an orange / red / brown / magenta / tomato mix. 

I’ve been working on creating waterslide decals to model the words that appear on the street-facing facade of the WBB. The plan was to take a photo of a brick section of the front wall on the model, overlay the photo with appropriate white lettering, and then print out the images on white decal paper. Since white cannot be directly printed, any white that appears in decals must be superimposed on some background colour – in this case an intensely red brick.

Long story short, neither our Lexmark nor Canon printers can print what I’d say is a match for the Krylon red used to paint the WSMoftheWBB. After much tweaking and adjusting and cleaning and other associated foofarah, I don’t think the blue / yellow / magenta ‘colour’ cartridges these machines use as their standard equipment are capable of printing the eye-searing fire engine red that is Krylon red.

When I looked again at the red sign I had printed with the Lexmark printer for the Art Deco Chapters build, it is not what I’d call ‘true red’ either when compared to its red window frames – which is pretty close to Krylon red. I did have a printer many years ago that we used with an ancient iMac that seemed to print a pretty good red, and I used it for printing decals for this spaceship model, so printing a true red is possible.

Well, in a bit of frustration, I did try and apply one of the off-red decals to the building with an eye towards manually tuning up the colour once it was dried and secure. With the help of decal setting solutions the decal did conform to the bricks quite well, but it was clear the colour was so far off that no post-application brush work was going to make it look right.  I peeled it off and I continue my mission to print a true red :-)

Building in a bag

Back in the winter I bought this bag of building parts at a swap meet. The seller assured me all the parts were included. For some reason I believed him and plopped down $4. It turns out he wasn’t lying and all the pieces were present, which is good because I wanted to believe him since it looked like from the parts on view, it might be a rather nice kit of a mid 20^th century style building. As it turns out, it is. It’s a Plastiville HO scale, ‘50s or ‘60s style car dealership. Overall, it’s rather toy-like, but it has a nice front façade and signage. I think with a little work it could be turned into a passable model; maybe a restaurant or diner. Located nearby a convenient streetcar stop of course :-)

The school for physicists

Leslie was gone and now I had to face the music. After searching high and low on the ‘lev, and throughout the station, she was nowhere to be found. Obviously, she squirrelled herself away somewhere on the ‘lev after she got out of her suite and made her escape as soon as we pulled into the station. By the time we had opened her room she was long gone. 

So, here I was in Adams’ office empty-handed. His phone had been ringing almost continuously since his secretary ushered me in. He wasn’t here, but someone on the other end of that phone sure wished he was. 

The phone stopped ringing and Adams finally entered the office from a private door behind his desk.  He gave me a little scowl and then turned his attention to the top paper on the mountain of papers covering his desk. 

The phone started to ring again.

Adams reached over the mountain and punched the speaker phone button, “Yes.”

“Mr. Adams, there’s a woman here at reception who says she’s a physicist with the Richard Feynman School of Lock-Picking and that she has an appointment to see you this morning.”

Adams looked at me. I looked at Adams.

“Send her up.”

The next instalment can be found here.

Philly Friday

A few weeks back I bought this DVD at the Ottawa Train Show – the first rail oriented DVD I’ve ever bought so I guess I’m an official rail fan now :-) It’s produced by GPS Video of Toronto. Although the titling and narration shots are a little dated, the footage of PCCs running in Toronto in various eras is excellent.

A lot of the scenes appear to have been shot in the ‘60s or ‘70s, but many have some generic music meant to be evocative of the ‘30s or ‘40s playing in the background. I suspect this was done to help convey a sense of place when the PCCs were new and in their heyday –also, that particular music was probably also easily licensable. To me though, in my mind I hear the music that came from that equally great North American streetcar city: Philadelphia. Specifically, The Philadelphia Sound.

I didn’t know it, but according to Wikipedia there was also a Toronto Sound whose prime years were from around 1959 to 1969. This predates the glory years of The Philadelphia Sound that I’d say extended from sometime in the late ‘60s to maybe the early ‘80s. Philadelphia International Records was certainly a foundational company when it came to producing The Philadelphia Sound, and their first hit to top the Billboard singles chart, for three weeks in December 1972, was Billy Paul’s Me and Mrs. Jones.