'Bred Crumbs
01.18.03
Protesters take the high ground to hear anti-war speakers.
My first massive anti-war rally left me a little disheartened. Until after I left it.
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Things offered on signs at the rally as alternatives to war:
Protest sign that made the least sense:
TAKE THE E
OUT OF
HATE
And the guy holding it wasn't even wearing a hat.
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The San Francisco Chronicle has conjured a new tech-age twist on the fairly useless mass-media mainstay of the man-on-the-street interview: the roving thoughts-collecting laptop.
01.17.03
Quotes of the Week, by which I mean, peculiar but truthful and brilliant sentences I read this week that were written much earlier:
Dale McIntyre in New Scientist, answering the reader question "Does beheading hurt?":
Most nations with science sophisticated enough to determine this question have long since abandoned decapitation as a legal tool.
User "Badtz Maru," in a long bulletin-board thread on The Straight Dope speculating how The Lord of the Rings would have turned out if written by someone besides Tolkien:
I'd do LotR by Stephen Donaldson, but I can't decide who Frodo would rape.
(Links via NextDraft and Metafilter. And lest you wonder, I'm a huge Donaldson fan. If you read no other science fiction this year, read his Gap series. Yes, all five books.)
01.16.03
The normally burrow-potato penguins at the San Francisco Zoo are suddenly obsessed with trying to migrate to nowhere, reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Damned Ohio troublemakers.
01.14.03
(On TV, a woman is frolicking in swirly clothes in a Lothlórienesque glade as giant blue droplets from the sky begin to cascade around her.)
Robbie: "We've got all these sets left over from Lord of the Rings, we oughta to do something with them." "I know, we'll make a Skittles commercial!"
(On TV, the word "Skittles" makes its first appearance in the commercial.)
Me: It scares me that you knew that was a Skittles commercial already.
Robbie: Well, Skittles in commercials are always coming from somewhere that if they really were, you wouldn't eat them.
01.13.03
While I wait for Mississippi's quarter to hit my pocket for review, California is giving its denizens the chance to select the design for its 2005 release. Finally, I can do something besides just criticize. I can participate and criticize.
California's input site offers 20 choices. We throw out five of them right off the bat because they include state outlines. What is my obsessive objection to state outlines? (1) In a country where too many people don't even know where the United States is in the world, why show a state outline out of its geographical context? (2) State outlines just call too much attention to the ghost in this commemorative machine: that states are a misleading concept anyway.
As such, you can't get too parochial, and much as I love San Francisco, it unfortunately can't be said to represent the whole state. So there go the four designs concentrating on the Golden Gate Bridge. Two more make laudable attempts to combine the bridge with movie film to indicate Hollywood, but I just don't see any of those working in their engraved versions. Coin 19 doesn't use the bridge but is still too San Francentric, and Coin 8 is trying to cram too many state symbols into one small space.
Let's pause here to discard and heap scorn upon Coin 11 (shown here), which would be great for the backdrop of a second-grade plate, but not for currency.
Coin 12, depicting some sort of marching giantess, won't do at all.
Four of the remaining five contenders have nature themes; of them, let's eliminate the one that shows just one tree, sequoia though it may be. (The tree-rings background is an admirable touch, but too subtle; I didn't even notice it the first three times I looked at it.) And one with a Yosemite background features a giant California grizzly, but maybe it's best not to call attention to a state symbol that's been driven to extinction. That leaves three finalists: the only grizzled prospector that wasn't cut in earlier rounds; noted nature-studier John Muir gazing at glorious Yosemite; and a sort of police lineup of the state's flora.
Hold it: the prospector coin has the words A GOLDEN MOMENT tucked away, which would be fine if it were a Hallmark card, but it's not. So that leaves trees or Muir.
It's tempting to settle the winner by coin toss, but no: Yosemite gets the nod.
In two years, we'll see how influential I'm not.
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On the upper right of the home page you'll see a new feature blatantly stolen from Dewayne. The Hit Lists highlight, with no or little comment, things that have recently brought joy or coolness ('Bred Winners) and things that need to go away (The Dungheap). If it helps, think of them as an It List and a Shit List. Both will get 'blog-like updating: new items will appear on top of each list, older items will go away after a while.
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