Yesterday, I got around to actually finding out the name of the cool Tom Waits album that I've heard, and been trying to find each time I've gone to Tower Records for the past few months. It's Small Change, and I'm sure I've seen it and looked right over it a time or two, while trying to identify the album by front cover illo, when it turns out that what I was looking for was Small Change's back cover illo. So I took advantage of the warming weather and strolled down to Tower last night.

On the way down, I stopped off at the Astor Place K-Mart, which I hadn't been in yet, to pick up some shampoo. It's impressive, and very not-New-York. It's got the wide aisles, vast selections, and huge family-size products that I'd gotten used to when I lived in Rochester, but which you just don't see in what passes for supermarkets in New York. I picked up a family-sized container of Prell for about half what it usually costs me (it was on sale), and then wandered, stunned, around the aisles, mumbling to myself "I feel so ... suburban." Several times, I came across things I'd be tempted to buy (Scott toilet paper -- 12 rolls for US$5) that would just be too much of a pain in the butt to drag home on the subway. It was quite enough to get me nostalgic about owning a car.

Eventually, I made my save against feelings of overwhelming consumerism, and headed off to Tower, for some merely whelming consumerism. They didn't have Small Change, which turns out to be for the best, because if it had been there, I would have just bought it and walked out, but as it was I figured I'd look around for a bit, which meant I got to pick up the last copy of Then, the new retrospective album by They Might Be Giants. Disk 1: They Might Be Giants, half of Miscellaneous T, and nine bonus tracks. Disk 2: Lincoln, the other half of Miscellaneous T, and ten more bonus tracks, including "Particle Man" sung by a chorus of schoolchildren. About four albums worth of material, stuffed onto two disks, on sale for US$25. Life is good.

Note:

cd picture You can buy these CDs through Amazon.com: