Little Boxes first two verses:
Little boxes, on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky-tacky
Little boxes, little boxes
Little boxes, all the same
There’s a green one, and a pink one
And a blue one, and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same
Thanks for reminding me of that song. I then listened to my favorite cover of it.
What is very strange is I was reciting those lyrics to myself two days ago. Except I get the first verse’s lyrics wrong:
See the boxes, little boxes, see the boxes on the hillside
Little boxes, little boxes, all lined up in a row.
There’s some green ones, and some pink ones
And some blue ones, and some yellow ones
And they’re all made out of ticky-tacky
And they all look just the same.
There is a four-panel cartoon from 2016 that I have been looking for for the past 2 weeks.
It’s a weightlifting competition between a young WOC and a large Nazi-guy.
He says: “So if you win, I promise to treat you like a human being.
She says: “And if you win you promise to kill my entire family?”
He says: “Yes.”
She says: “Excuse me.”
She goes out of the frame and comes back with a sledgehammer and whacks him on the leg.
He is writhing in pain, the audience boos, and she has a pithy observation about evening the playing field, or something like that.
Does anyone remember that and where it came from?
When Weeds was still on Showtime, every time my wife and I would go visit my sister in Temecula (which sure looks a lot like Stevenson Ranch, where the first two seasons were filmed), she would begin singing the song as we turned into my sister’s neighborhood, with a wee bit of editorializing:
“There’s a beige one, and a beige one, and a beige one, and another beige one…”
Nailed it.
During the American midcentury economic expansion, having a job meant being middle class. Now, even having a good job still means you’re one catastrophe from homelessness and young people with good jobs can’t afford to buy a home the way that anyone with almost any job could back in the 50s-80s (aside from particularly nasty practices like redlining).
Also a good reason for Dems to stop doing what Biden and Harris did - saying repeatedly that they’re fighting for a strong middle class (and rarely if ever uttering the term “working class”).
Not anymore, sorry. You can have Investment Property Gray or … nah, just kidding. There is no ‘or.’
“Investment Property Gray”, that’s a good one. right up there with “condo property beige”.
when i first moved to arizona, in between jobs i would work with a paint crew, painting interiors. have any idea how many shades of “Navajo White” there are?
ticky-tacky, indeed!
I don’t recall if I ever got around to posting a picture of the completed paint job on our home. This is probably the single biggest declaration of This Is Our Home we could possibly make.
Quite fabulous if you ask me. If i was walking down the neighborhood i would think to myself “Now there’s some homeowners i would want to befriend”
My nesting partner and I had a serious discussion before even starting to get estimates on this. We are well aware that this does make us even more of a target than we already were, but at the same time we know how much a loud public statement can mean to someone afraid to be themselves or feeling like they’re alone.
And yes, we have had a few neighbors express how much they like it!
that is absolutely wonderful! 
as @Grey_Devil said above, i would definitely come to introduce myself.
“hi! i’m new to the neighborhood and wanted to say hello! i baked you a loaf of bread and brought a bottle of wine.”
see ya!
edit to stay on topic: i can see this sort of interaction leading to forming neighborhood collectives, where trading on one’s gardening, or labor skills get shared with neighbors. at least in a society that i would like to be your neighbor in…
