Nashville’s One Weird Trick for Reviving the Starter Home, M. Nolan Gray, December 10, 2024

Spoiler in the sub-head: “It turns out that if you make it easy for local developers to build starter homes, they will build a lot of them.”

In cities across the country, duplexes, townhouses, and homes on smaller lots have nearly gone extinct. That is, except for in Nashville: Over the past 15 years, the city has built tens of thousands of townhouses and small-lot homes in neighborhoods close to the city’s downtown core. The Nashville starter home renaissance — the largest infill homeownership building boom in per capita terms in the country — has helped to keep the Music City relatively affordable, even as nearly 100,000 new residents came knocking.

To better understand how Nashville bucked the trend, I spoke with Charlie Gardner, a research fellow with the Mercatus Center at George Mason University and the co-author with Alex Pemberton of a new report on the obscure Tennessee law that enabled the building boom.

Gray just started this newsletter recently. He’s great. Give this a read and sign up!

The Double Life of Nat King Cole, Commentary, Terry Teachout, June 2021

This nice piece traces Cole’s career, and concludes with what seems like a diminishment, but then turns out to be the opposite:

What he could never have done was become a Sinatra-like cultural colossus, for he lacked Sinatra’s larger-than-life personality. Instead, he was content to be nothing more—or less—than a first-rate popular singer, and the reissue in 1991 of an 18-CD boxed set of the King Cole Trio’s recordings for Capitol triggered a revival of interest in his earlier work as a jazz pianist. Fortunately, it is not necessary to choose between the two Nat Coles: They were two different sides of a great popular artist, one who gave fully of himself in both capacities. In Will Friedwald’s well-chosen words, “he could do almost anything that any other artist could do, but no one else could do what he did.”

Of course, most people today probably know Cole only from his Christmas songs which still get plenty of airtime around the holidays. But he was far more talented, and a much bigger name at one time, than those songs would suggest. Read the whole thing.

The Beach Boys: Little Saint Nick, Lyrics, Weakly, December 25, 2009

I like reading these semi-serious critiques of silly Christmas songs, of which “Little Saint Nick” is definitely one.

Even if i actually am mishearing things, the only alternative i can come up with is “But she’s like a toboggan with a four speed stick”, which makes nearly as little sense, since as far as i can find toboggans are not normally outfitted for manual transmissions, let alone transmissions of any kind, as would be necessary for such a simile to work.

In comparison with that line, the second line is amazingly clear: “She’s candy apple red with a ski for a wheel”. Well, the color makes sense (and fits traditional descriptions of Santa’s sleigh), but “with a ski for a wheel” is, well, lacking. First of all, cars have four wheels, not one—so does this sled have one ski, or three wheels plus one ski (that is, one wheel having been replaced by a ski)? Maybe it’s a unicycle that’s been retrofitted with a ski for winter maneuverability. Oh, and a transmission.

The point, I guess, is that nobody is supposed to bother trying to analyze lyrics like this, and so the mere act of doing it is almost comedic in and of itself. If it’s your thing, enjoy. (Also, here’s a fun one on Michael Bublé’s…interesting choice to cover “Santa Baby.”)

The last item today is a neat bit of tech history I found on a Reddit thread, linking to a YouTube video: “Alien Resurrection found to have cheat code that allows playing burned backup games.”

Somehow, this PlayStation video game had a code error that allowed you to play an (illegally) burned disc in your PlayStation if you put the Alien game in first, removed it, and booted your burned game. How? Don’t quite understand. It’s a little spooky when computers act almost like living creatures, in these quirky ways that are tough to trace or pin down.

There are also some really interesting comments from folks who used to mess around with Game Sharks, Action Replays, and copied discs. Not an endorsement of piracy, I guess, but cool all the same.

Related Reading:

New and Old #72

New and Old #73

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