Sopranos? Last Week?

[Pounds on Wood]

Anybody else here watch the Sopranos? Sure you do. Anyway, last week Tony S. is at his late fathers mistresses apartment. The place is 70's style I guess, including the kitchen. The kitchen cabinets are nice enough, natural wood of some kind with recessed panel doors. However, the pulls are in the center of each door panel. I don't mean the center of the stile, I mean dead center in the panel. Looked like shewt IMO. I know the show is mostly filmed on location, the Soprano house is an actual residence for example, but I wonder about those cabinets. I'm thinking totally clueless do-it-yourselfer, or maybe a set designers joke, or just maybe that was a style in the 70's.

Any guesses?

-- Bill Pounds

[skeezics]

while i agree with your assessment some 70's cabinets were done that way. mostly the DIY variety i think.

skeez

[Greg]

I have seen that. They do some strange stuff when a "designer" does what is astheticly pleasing (to them) without considering function. Of course there are lots of people who have "walk through" kitchens and they never really cook anything in them. The more expensive the house, the less likely someone will actually "live" there. My wife builds $750,000 houses that are used about 2-3 weeks a year and the people eat every meal out. These people get a bill from the country club, whether they actually eat there or not.

[Oregon]

The wife of a buddy of mine has a gig watching some rich couples' dog while they're on vac. He's told me stories about how the rich live. My sister in-law splits the year between houses in two states (weather preference). But your comments top them all. High dollar homes paid for, but largely unutilized, while paying CC dues (probably big bucks)? Amazing. I watch for sales on white oak, and these people piss away huge sums of money. I've always told myself that if I came into a giant pile of money, I'd be different. Probably not.

*****

"Greg" blah, blah... [snip] My wife builds $750,000 houses that are used about 2-3 weeks a year and the people eat every meal out. These people get a bill from the country club, whether they actually eat there or not.

[Alan Bierbaum]

Actually these style doors, and pulls, are not that rare. In the process of remodeling several hundred kitchens, I have run across this a large number of times. It is an awkward way to try and open doors though. Alan Bierbaum

web site:

[Jim Giblin]

I carpooled with a guy whose brother-in-law worked at the Parker House which, at the time, was one of the big hotels in Boston. The brother-in-law old us of a couple who maintained an annual lease on a suite in the hotel for those occasions when they came to Boston. The hotel staff dutifully fulfilled the people's standing requests which included replacing fresh cigarettes in containers in each room and having some veal delivered each day from a certain butcher in East Boston for a dog who was the only actual resident in the suite. The hotel staff was in a tizzy one day, the brother-in-law said, because word had come that the people were going to show up that day while they were waiting for flight connections at Logan Airport. No one at the hotel had seen these people for four years! The day came and went and the people never showed up. I can only imagine what an annual lease for a suite costs. These people live in a different galaxy than me because I am like the person that said he looks for white oak sales. Its one thing to spend extravagantly if you use the stuff you buy. It is quite another thing to spend but let the money go to waste.

Another interesting part of this story....

I was in the brother-in-laws apartment because the carpool car died and we had to wait a couple of hours for a tow truck to show up. The apartment was on Beacon Hill and had a big skylight window, like on the TV program Friends, that looked over the Boston skyline. The view was awesome! The apartment itself (i.e.decorations, etc.) could best be described as refined and elegant. I remember commenting on a knickknack the guy had on his coffee table. It was a U shaped piece of ivory or bone that was set on a short stand. I mention that it reminded me of a type of pillow I had seem in the Fine Arts museum. The brother-in-law confirmed that it was, in fact, a 3500 year old Egyptian neck brace (i.e. pillow). At best, my coffee table usually sports a can of diet Sprite!

The moral is everybody is different!

[Swingman]

You're probably right ... it's most definitely a different world. I only know this because of one of my sisters and her husband, at one time one of the richest men in the world according to Forbes, although they've come down a bit in the world and apparently only have a few hundred million left these days, once paid to have the logs in the "great room" (38 feet high, 80 feet long, 40 feet wide) of _one_ of their summer homes in WI, _hand rubbed_ with an oil/varnish finish.

Hell, besides the fact that it takes me almost two weeks to do that to one of my small projects, I could probably buy enough quarter sawn white oak to last the rest of my life with just what it cost to do that one room.

[Andy Dingley]

If you didn't live through it, you can't believe the horror that was The Decade That Style Forgot.

[Pounds on Wood]

It seemed it would be odd to use them. And real easy to smack yourself in the head with the door.

[Puff Griffis]

Ditto Andy ! Puff

[plantsman]

built. The center pulls were mainly for decoration. They had a backside cutout at the bottom corner of each door so that you could get hold of them to open them. We quickly replaced them with modern Haas cherry semi-custom cabinets.

David S.

[xrongor]

i cant remember if it was tv nation, or the awful truth, one of michael moore's tv shows anyway.

in it they asked rich people in some ultra rich part of NYC some questions that you would think anyone would know, but of course they were clueless. questions like how much does it cost to supersize at mcdonalds. even if you never eat there how can you avoid the commercials for it? and the guesses were just miles off...

its been a long time but there were lots of funny questions, i just dont remember many of them. only other one that comes to mind was that the rich all answered 'call a plumber' to the question 'what do you do if you try and flush the toilet and nothing happnes when you use the lever'. i mean come on. you got so much money and so little brains it never occurs to you to take the lid off and at least have a little looksie?

im sure it was edited to make the rich look even sillier than they would have on their own, but it was pretty funny. and probably not that far off...

randy

[Charlie Self]

xrongor notes:

I'm a long, long way from rich, but...how much does it cost to super-size a McDonald's whatever? I don't watch the commercials, either.

Or a lack of interest? You know you're not going to know what to do about what you might see, so why look?

Charlie Self "Religion is what keeps the poor from murdering the rich." Napoleon Bonaparte

[B a r r y]

So, you think those folks actually watch TV? They do things like fly the jets they own, ski Aspen or Zermatt, attend after parties at the Tour de France or Wimbledon. Or on some cases, they spend their waking moments running the business, making more money.

In other words, they DO things that common people watch documentaries about.

Why? Think of $250 in their eyes, as I wrote this, they probably made that much. Many of these folks do not have "more money than brains", they are using the brain to do much more important things than fix toilets. Paris Hilton excepted. "More money than brains" may apply to some athletes, but most of them don't stay rich. The truly rich, and staying that way, simply have better things to do.

I'm sure it isn't, but think about the real reasons.

Barry

[Andy Dingley]

I have no idea - no TV. I don't even know where McDonalds _is_ (I live in a fairly big city - I guess we must have them somewhere)

Of the people you know, for how many of them would this be good advice? I know people who can barely work something as complicated as the external lever.

When I was a student (so I'm sharing a house with supposedly "smart" people) the toilet cistern overflowed. So the people in the house _let_ it overflow, while they tried to find me in the pub to come back and fix it. Not one of them thought "Keep flushing it to empty it" in the meantime,.

if this sort of thing amuses you, read a copy of Paul Fussell's "Class"

[Edwin Pawlowski]

You are blaming people for not acting. In our society they are considered victims and you are guilty because you were in a pub instead of watching out for them. I think I need a lawyer or politician to get this straightened out. Ed

[Greg]

I think some of this is simply a regional thing. If you are in one of those places where the unions rules, people have a very compartmentalized way of thinking.

[Paul Kierstead]

Hmmm...I don't know the answer to this one, but do know that you won't be able to do so soon. Does that make me rich and informed, stupid, what?

As to the plumber thing...well, I have quite a few very urban friends; hard-core city people that have absolutely zero clue about any sort of house maintenance. When many of them bought houses, they called me quite a bit. Lots of 'em called professionals or let things be; things which were extremely easily repaired. Me, I am somewhere in-between; born in farm country to rural-bred parents, brought up mostly urban. I'll poke my hands into lots of things which I know nothing about, but still shy from a few things that my father will happily take a swing at.

None of us are rich, just apparently a different culture. Mr. Moore, who does amuse me, most certainly selected his targets carefully (NY is a very good start) and then edited the tape for only those responses which would suit him. This is in-line with other TV production; interesting and amusing, but you have to be real careful about drawing conclusions from it.

[Buck Turgidson]

Everytime I see Uncle Junior's house, and especially his couch, it looks like the house i grew up in....

[Scott Lurndal]

Those of us who remember the 70's also remember Buffy and Jody's[*] front door - with the knob dead center. I think it was just one of those "designer" things (along with avocado colored kitchens - blech...).

scott

[*] Family Affair.