something about mary

Frank:

About the toughness of women, I recently read a book that was about the life of a typical t-shirt.... how the cotton is grown in Texas, then shipped to China where it is made into a t-shirt in some gigantic sweatshop, then shipped back to this country, etc., etc.  Eventually it is discarded and sent to Africa, where it is resold and gets a whole second life of wear.   The book got into the history of the textile industry to some degree, and it talked about how over the last 200 years of industrial cloth production, textile factory owners preferred women workers to men partly because they were better able to handle the tough repetitive physical conditions and the drudgery.  The men tended to just give up, or to rebel.  Plus, they were not as skilled with the fine motor skills. The ideal workers were women who had children or other people who depended on those women for their survival.  Those women would endure just about anything in order to bring home a paycheck.  Another type of worker that was preferable to men was children, before child labor laws, because they were docile and nimble, cheap, and expendable.

Something About Mary had a lot of funny parts.  It was interesting how much of the humor involved people with physical or mental disabilities.  One of my favorite parts in the movie is the short section with the murderous hitchhiker who is going on in his loony way about his idea for a "Seven Minute Abs" program, and he gets all riled up when Ted suggests that someone might come up with a "Six Minute Abs," and he's saying stuff like "7's the key number here. Think about it. 7-Elevens. 7 dwarves. 7, man, that's the number. 7 chipmunks twirlin' on a branch, eatin' lots of sunflowers on my uncle's ranch. You know that old children's tale from the sea?"

Meat cookies?  What are you talking about?

I didn't write yesterday because I was at a weekend "Men's Retreat."  I have been going to this weekly gathering of guys for some months now, where a bunch of men get together one morning each week, and talk about what's going on in their lives.  It's related to a church we go to off and on.  Anyway, each year they have a "retreat" where they get together someplace and spend a couple of days talking even more, especially about "deep" spiritual and emotional things.  That's the idea anyway.  Probably sounds like a pretty accurate description of "hell" to you, and it kind of sounded like that to me, too, but I thought it would be interesting and different to give it a try.  Why not?  And it was interesting and different, and both good and bad.  I just got back from it, so it's going to take awhile to process it all.  It was held at a monastery in New Hampshire, a place with monks living in in, who have given up all claim to private possessions and are now living in this community for the rest of their lives.  When they -- and we joined them -- for meals, they eat it total silence, no speaking.  But most of the time it was just the guys from the men's group, together, together, together. It is very unnatural for me to be in a group as much as I was, and it felt good when night came, and I got to be alone again.  From listening to these other guys talk, the guys in my men's group, I realized that most guys go through life from childhood to the present with all kinds of plans and intelligent approaches and systematic schemes for trying to get where they want to be.  Not me, boy.  I've just floated along from one thing to the next, like a baby crawling around on the forest floor.

--edward

children

Frank:

I would be a complete dud as a ship captain as well, whether the ship was sinking or not.  I would hide in my room, and do a lot of meditating, and sneak up on deck in the middle of the night when no one was around, so I could enjoy the view of the stars.  And that would be when the ship was doing fine.  Who knows what I'd do in an emergency?  Of course, the main difference between me and the Titanic captain and the others is that those other guys were ships captains, and I'm not.   They had actually aspired to that position, and achieved it, and were responsible for everyone on board.

Yes, women are different than men.  Not only do they have more sensitive noses, they are tougher, more resilient, and crueler.  And they are more likely to talk about disgusting things -- like picking up dog shit --  during mealtime.

No, I don't see myself getting hooked by the ipad and all the features it temptingly offers.  Mostly, because the features it offers aren't all that tempting.  I mean, sure, there are a lot of "cool" things you can do using i-pad apps, but do I really want to do those things? No, not really.  Just like most of the objects and stuff in the world seems to me like a bunch of clutter that just gets in the way, most of the nifty options available on the i-pad seem like more unnecessary crap to get in the way and trip over.  It's like being on a backpacking trip, and finding pretty rocks strewn along the way.  Do I really want to pick up all those rocks and carry them for the next six days?

So did you get the jerky made or not?  If so, was it a hit at the party?

We watched Something About Mary the other night.  Peggy had seen it once before and didn't particularly want to see it again, but in the end she enjoyed it.  I think the reason she didn't like it the first time was that we watched it with our kids when they were ten, or something, and each time there was a gross or indecent part, she probably had a bad reaction, thinking that kids shouldn't be watching something like that.  Now, with the kids grown up and gone, she is liberated.  I can understand why you would like that movie.  No offense -- I guess when someone starts out like that, you know they are about to say something offensive --  but you seem like you could easily be one of those guys, obsessing about Mary and having your entire life revolve around a hopeless pursuit of a Mary. I would not be like that, because I don't have the long range stick-to-itiveness needed for such devotion.  A few days after meeting Mary, something else would come along to distract me, and I'd move on to other things.


You remember that time we were boys and we went to that hillside opposite Peter Worden's house in the Berkeley hills and started digging a hole because we bought that cock and bull story about digging to China? I was picturing myself popping out on the other side, with a bunch of Chinese girls looking at me, taking photos of the first American child they'd ever seen. We start out all eager and fresh, pink and rosy faced -- me with my blue eyes, blond hair and cute little freckles, along with my black heart -- and we're thrusting our shovels in the dirt like we're going to get to China any second.  About a minute later, we're all hot and sweaty and tired, and  we realize the whole thing is a fake.  There's no digging to China.    Then that great big pain in the ass bully -- what was his name, Bee-low, right? -- he comes tearing down the hill. He was a total dick, but worse that than, he was stone scary and he liked beating up little kids.  He was basically a teenager shaped like a full grown man.  We scattered into the bushes, and he falls into the hole.  A second later, we heard him moaning and roaring at the same time.  Then:  "What the fuck!" he's screaming as he charges back up out of the hole.  "I'm going to fucking get you!"  We took off, stumbling and tripping down the hill, and he starts throwing rocks and big balls of mud and these heavy round pine cones.  I could hear them whistling past my ears, sucking out the air as they went by.  Then we were free, running down the street, and he was bellowing up on the hill, images of blood and violence exploding in his brain.  Children.

--edward

the meteorite

Frank:

I see the Portland paper finally put in a mention of the California meteorite, thanks to the fact that a couple of collectors had found bits of the debris.  That would be an interesting hobby -- or is it a job? -- to be a meteorite hunter.  It's amazing that two different collectors have found bits of this one already, given that the pieces are so small, and could be anywhere within a radius of who knows how many miles.  I wonder how they pinpointed where to look, and how they went about looking, and how much these little bits of space rock are worth.  I see one was found near the town of Coloma, and the other near Lotus.  I wonder if those towns are now filled with collectors, with all the motels filled up (or maybe there are no motels there), and the cafes full of meteorite-seekers in the morning, chowing down on bacon and eggs before heading out to do their prospecting.  Maybe those towns will have to hire Wyatt Earp-like sheriffs to bring law and order to the once-sleepy towns, now filled with drunken meteorite collectors, space rock robbers, and prostitutes.

I found a tick on me yesterday, and ever since I've been feeling imaginary ticks walking all over my body, under my clothes. 

For some reason, I've been spending a lot of time doing yard and garden work this spring.  Maybe it's because we've been having glorious April weather, and I don't mean this gloomy, overcast crap that you revel in.  No, it's sapphire-blue skies all the way, with no dismal clouds to clutter up the heavens like floating white funeral shrouds.  At any rate, I have been digging out unwanted scrub growth, and cutting down tree limbs that are dead or disorderly.  Of course, the real work begins once these bushes and trees are cut down and lying there on the ground.  They have to be all cut up and taken to the dump.  NOT!  I am serious advocate of the "find it and grind it" approach.  I take any branches, twigs and leaves that aren't ridiculously large, and spread them out over the lawn, which needs mowing anyway, then go over them with the lawn mower.  It's amazing how the mower tears this stuff up and makes it vanish.  Sometimes you have to go over it several times, but the lawn ends up getting mowed in the process, plus I tell myself that all this shredded organic matter is good for the soil.   I'm killing three birds with one stone.  Bring it on!  It's so much fun, once I've eliminated all the bad stuff, I'll probably do after all the good plants and bushes.  I'll grind everything, until we're living in a zen-like zone of complete emptiness.

There was an interesting piece in the paper about a 42-year old guy who died in the Portland area recently.  Each day, the paper focuses on one person who died -- usually people who led inspirational lives --  and writes up a story about him/her.  That sounds like a great job, by the way, being the reporter who writes that article, provided he has no other duties or responsibilities, which I'm sure he does.  Anyway, the article starts off talking about how everybody loved this guy who died, who looks kind of like of like Brent only smaller, and was saddened by his death.  Then it said that he has been in AA for the last two years, and it really turned his life around, and how he had a license plate that said GOD-AA or something like that. He was a short-order cook. His mother talked about how glad she was that he was getting better, she was so glad he had finally turned his life around, and how inspiring he was to other alcoholics.  Then it reveals that the way he died was that he was driving at high the wrong way on the interstate at 2:30 in the morning, and his SUV had flown off the road and he was ejected from the car and killed instantly.  His relatives had no idea where he was going at that time of night.  Then it said he lived with his mother.  And a brother said the guy had started drinking again about two months ago.  The end.  It's almost like the reporter started writing the article right away when he first started interviewing people, and the negative information only started coming out when he was halfway through the article.  By that time he probably realized this guy really wasn't appropriate to be the person to write the article about, but he figured what the hell, he'd already started it and it was too late to look for someone else.

--edward

dead relatives & Drop7

Frank:

That's amazing you can drive through different neighborhoods and the i-phone will show you which houses are for sale and how much they are asking.  I wonder if there is another gadget that tells how many people live there, and their names, and what they do, and give photos of them, and stuff like that.  It's sounds like John is a fully functioning virus in Apple's scheme of world domination.  Whether I am headed that direction remains to be seen.  I like your idea of using the i-pad to call up dead relatives.  I looked to see if there are any software applications under the title of "dead relatives," and was surprised to see there is not, but they have just about everything else.  Of course, there are many software applications related to genealogy, and ghosts (there's one called Ghost-o-meter that you can use in your house or anywhere else, and it has a meter that detects ghosts and other spiritual phenomena... and also ones called Paranormal Scanner and Ghost Detector) and graveyard and haunted site travel apps (Haunted California, Wicked Walks New Orleans, etc). I think there is a business possibility still waiting there, with the dead relatives idea. I imagine some sort of app where you would enter the name of the dead relative you want to contact, and specific questions, and the application would answer them, like a very sophisticated version of that old plastic "Magic 8" ball.  On the other hand, a little more research now shows me that there is are Ouija Board apps, and various spiritualism and fortune teller apps, so maybe it's already covered.

I was thinking today what objects could be now considered obsolete, if a person wanted to replace as much stuff as possible with his i-tools, which is probably the direction we're heading.  I thought of radios, TV's, normal phones, books, maps, paper photographs and maps and charts, and cameras, newspapers, magazines, newspapers, and certain tools like the compass and calculator, and no doubt a whole lot of other stuff.  On the other hand, a lot of basic material objects are still needed... furniture, clothes, cooking and eating utensils, personal care products, and such.

I had read an article in the New York Times recently about "silly" digital games ... games that are mindless and plotless, where you're just moving along from one level to the next, trying to score as many points as possible.  The article was titled "The Hyperaddictive, Time-Sucking, Relationship-Busting, Mind-Crushing Power and Allure of Silly Digital Games."  The author was talking about how millions of people do these games A LOT, and how many billions of hours are spent on them.  It's not like he was totally dissing them; he has experimented with many of these games himself.  He said the one game he got totally addicted to for awhile is called Drop7.  Out of curiosity I downloaded it (free) on the i-pad, and played it.  I can see how a person could get addicted to it, though I'm not there yet because I haven't played it enough to really get the hang of it.   Circles with numbers keep appearing steadily, and you're dropping them into various columns, and when you do it well, there are all sorts of noises and explosions.  A robotic sound track plays constantly in the background.  You feel purposeful, focused and energized while you're doing the game, like you are accomplishing important things, and that somehow you're making real progress in life, and you don't want anything to interfere with it....

Interesting that you have noticed the east coast media purveyors don't pay much attention to California.  So much of the news comes out of New York, and New York is actually a very ingrown, self-absorbed place that pretty much considers itself as the center of the universe, and pities anyone who lives anywhere else.  Many people who were raised in New York could not imagine living anywhere else.  There was a famous New Yorker cartoon by Saul Steinberg that pretty much said it all.  I attached it, hopefully.

--edward

the virus

Frank:

Interesting about the meteor.  I would think that would be headline news, but I guess it's no big deal, on a national level, anyway.  There's no coverage of it here. Is it big news in California?  Maybe meteors are constantly exploding all over the world with a loud bang. It really must have made people jump in the area where it was bright and forceful. 

It's interesting that Downieville would want to commemorate being the place where they lynched a woman for killing someone who tried to rape her.  Maybe they should add other attractions, like a statue showing a Downieville priest who abused little Mexican boys, and a plaque honoring the house where a local crazy woman drowned her two children in the bathtub.

Awhile back, we were talking about about how you like nature, and are not in favor of man's screwing it all up.  I was reminded of that today when I was taking our dog Ryder for a walk.  I was watching a pair of sweet little birds called the Eastern Bluebird.  They are larger than a chickadee, smaller than a robin, and are red on the breast and a nice shade of blue on the wings.  Before my time, they used to be a very common songbird on the east coast, but now you hardly ever seen them, in Maine, at least.  They have been wiped out by the millions by sparrows and starlings, which tend to find bluebird nesting spots, destroy the eggs, then take them over for themselves.  I wouldn't have seen any today except that a bluebird loving guy in our town erected a bunch of bluebird nesting boxes in a field.  I guess the entrance to the boxes somehow prohibits the other birds from getting in.  Sparrows and starlings are both non-native birds, introduced by man.  Of course, on the other hand, if a man hadn't come along and set up all these bluebird boxes, they wouldn't have returned, or wouldn't have survived, anyway. 

You might be surprised after all my talk about technology and how i-devices are turning people into viruses, that yesterday Margaret and I went out and bought an i-pad.  We needed it to replace our old, heavy laptop, which finally died, probably because of all the humidity in Costa Rica. Spilling Costa Rican coffee on it didn't help, either, I guess.  These i-pads are amazing devices, and I have to say they are incredibly well-designed to turn people into virulent viruses, more so than I had imagined.  They make it so easy to access and buy different kinds of technology, games and software, and also to share photos, thoughts, and who knows what else, to anybody you know, or don't know, that has an e-mail address.  You can even call people on the phone using the thing, and see each other as you speak, if you're both hooked up to that technology.  And of course it's got a great camera, and any time you take a picture, it's asking if you want to send the photo to other people, which you pretty much can do with just the tap of your finger. And any time you write something, it wants to know if you want to send it to someone.  And any time you look at something, it wants to know if you'd like to show it to someone else.  When the saleslady was showing us the i-pad at the Apple store yesterday, I commented "these things are training us all to be blabbermouths."  I could tell I had hurt her feelings, so I had to sort of back off that statement and try to explain it away, even though it was absolutely true.  At any rate, there is no question that these devices have the ultimate effect of encouraging people to become human cancer cells in a vast electronic chain of marketing and chatter.  Yesterday I looked up "Twitter" on Wikipedia because I wasn't really sure what it even is, and I noticed that a research firm has analyzed the messages that are sent via Twitter, and it determined that a majority of them constituted what they called "pointless babble."  And now, to contribute my own visual pointless babble, I am going to attach this photo I took of myself using the new i-pad. Why is the picture sideways?  I have no idea.  I notice that I I look like a cross between Bill Gates and Uncle Steve.  I wonder if I could get a job as a Bill Gates impersonator.  If I moved out to Seattle, and put on a little weight, and studied the way Bill Gates moves and talks, I bet I could fool a lot of people.  The only problem is that they'd all be asking me for money.

--edward

arbus breivik

Frank:

It's interesting to see that while regular big city newspapers are foundering, small town newspapers that only address local affairs and high school sports and so on, seem to be flourishing.  The Portland city newspaper gets smaller and worse (and more conservative, since it was purchased by a conservative conglomerate) each year, but there are a dozen little community weekly newspapers that apparently are doing fine.  I noticed the other day that one of these local Maine papers has an ad saying that there is an immediate opening for full time reporter.  One sentence in the ad says "We embrace newsroom technology and the use of social media, and so should you."  I'm not sure what "newsroom technology" is, but the part about social media reminds me how out of it I am in the technology world.  The same way a lot of conversation between guys used to be about sports or TV shows, now a lot of conversation, between men anyway, is all about i-pads, i-phones, and all sorts of "apps"  .... a lot of stuff I don't know much about and don't care much about. They sound like high school guys, talking about girls, only they're talking about electronic gadgets.  My only contribution to conversations like that is to call the other guys "viruses."  The other day I heard there is one application where you can speak into the i-pad what you want to say in English, and it comes back out in Spanish.  You said Jane has a high quality scanner... does she make much use of the computer?  I remember at one point you said she wasn't into it at all. How about Brent and Renee?

That Legends of the West website is interesting.  I wonder how much of it is actually true, and how much is just a collection of the most colorful claims that have been made over the years.  Of course, that could be said for just about any history.  A lot of the stuff that is considered facts was pulled from different quotes from old newspapers, and from various recollections of unreliable people, but in the end, the "truth" probably doesn't really matter since there are so many versions of it.  It might as well be a good story.

I bet you could take some interesting photographs in those old mining towns you are talking about.    If you were some fancy New York art photographer, you'd import a bunch of freakish people, such as a morbidly obese woman, and a hollowed out junkie, and people like that  (have you ever seen photographs by Diane Arbus? .... this is a real question, not to be ignored.  I attached a sample Arbus photo), and then have them pose among the various strangely leaning, decaying old mine buildings.  These photos, in black and white, would end up selling for thousands of dollars each in New York art galleries.

I have to say that following the Breivik trial turns out to be maddening, as you suggested it might be.  It seems that much of the time Breivik does get to go on and on spouting his political "philosophy," and describing killing all those teenagers in endless detail, while the family and survivors squirm and sob in the audience.  The whole Norwegian temperament is about trying to be as calm and controlled and polite as possible, and to make every effort to be fair and restrained, and the end result is that a nut like Breivik, who completely flaunts those traditions, takes full advantage.  The latest article about the trial in the New York Times was headlined "As Killer Gloats in Court, Norway Shows No Anger."  So you made a good decision not to read about it.  Too bad you've got me telling you about it anyway.

I would be flying into San Francisco or Oakland, and driving out to your place from there.

--edward

straw dogs and vines

Frank:

It is interesting that you were mad and frustrated because some reporter had gone ahead and taken your idea for reporting on the Latinos.  Of course, if you had completely, unanimously wanted to to act on that idea, you would have started working on it some time ago.  There obviously is a part of you that did not want to do it at all, a bigger and more influential part of you than the part that did want to do it, since it's the one that got to have his way.  So while the part of you that wanted to do it is now mad and frustrated, I would think the other part of you would be rejoicing and saying "Yes!"  Do you feel that at all,  or do you only feel the anger and frustration? 

By the way, was the article in the Tahoe Daily Tribune?  I tried to google "Tahoe King's Beach Latino" and it looked like there had been an article in the Tahoe Daily Tribune, but it said the article had been removed from the site.  I wonder why.

I never saw Straw Dogs, and now I'm so old and sensitive that it's too late. The movie would be too suspenseful and shocking for me now.  Here is an interesting fact -- the title "Straw Dogs" is taken from the most famous text on taoism, the Tao Te Ching, which supposedly collects the sayings of taoist sage from about 2500 years ago, Lao Tzu.  There is a passage there that says "Heaven and Earth are ruthless; they treat all creatures as straw dogs."  Straw dogs refers to little disposable straw figures that were used in certain Chinese religious ceremonies.  They were carefully set up to create a little diorama-like scene that was important for the ceremony, kind of like Christians might set up a little creche scene showing the baby Jesus and the wise men and all that.  As soon as the ceremony was over, they'd just crumple up the little straw figures and throw them away, or burn them.  So basically, it's saying that's how god treats all living things.

I'll have to watch There's Something About Mary again.  I think I've only seen it once and I remember it was very funny. 

Yesterday and today, I chopped and dug out five large brambly thorn bushes that have been growing on the edge of our property ever since we moved here.  It's some kind of invasive species that apparently is hated by most gardeners, though I didn't think they were too bad.  One of the negative things about these bushes is that these horrible vines were growing up near the base of the bushes. They'd grow out every year.  These vines were dark green and almost oily, and they'd make they nasty looking seed pods that reminded me of something from "Invasion of the Body Snatchers."  Also growing up beneath one of these bushes was another nasty vine, a great big woody thing that was about two inches in diameter at the base, which grew up and wrapped itself all around a nearby tree, like a python, and was made of a weird, spongy kind of wood that was very elastic and flexible.  I could never really get at these vines before, because they were protected by all the thorns of the thorn bushes.  Anyway, the point of all this is that is was interesting how these semi-evil plants were all growing together, all basically protecting and supporting each other, like some kind of gang.  It was satisfying to finally eradicate the whole mess, once and for all though I am now sore all over, from all the chopping and yanking and sawing.  The inner wood of the thorn bushes was a weird, almost fluorescent yellow. A lot of the digging out of roots had to be done with a crowbar.

It's looking like I'd be coming out to Tahoe probably the afternoon of June 22, and leaving the morning of June 26.  Does that sound okay?

--edward

passing out, again

Frank:

I don't have the willpower not to read about Breivik... if there's an article in the New York Times about him, I'll be reading it.  One interesting thing that came up in the trial so far is that he credits the hundreds of hours he spent paying a video game called Call of Duty: Modern Warfare for helping him hone his shooting skills. Apparently,  the game's holographic sight is very realistic. “You could give the sight to your grandmother and she would become a supermarksman,” he said.

That's interesting you bought the "Blind Dog" coffee.  I thought you were sold on the Costco brand.  Did you ever try that Vietnamese coffee making gadget I sent you?

You should be a salesman for that vacuum packing gadget you're always raving about.  You could have a stand at traveling carnivals, midways and fairs, between the stand selling deep fried "blooming onions" and a ring toss game.  I remember being at a carnival when I was a kid -- actually, come to think of it, I was probably about twenty -- and really enjoying a knife salesman who was selling fairly inexpensive knives that he was making all sorts of incredible claims about.  He was a great showman.    The only thing we ever have in our freezer here is ice cream, frozen peas, frozen corn, and ice cubes.  Nothing we're eagerly anticipating thawing out months down the line, with no freezer burn.

That's good that Jerry Brown seems to be tackling California's budget problems in a sustained, reasonable way.  It's actually been a long time since I've read or heard any news about California politics or Jerry Brown, or anything like that. You don't get much news coverage about California on the east coast, and I suppose the reverse it true as well.  I kind of forgot "Governor Moonbeam" was in office.  He's an interesting guy, and it's great he got re-elected and is doing well.

I don't know if I ever mentioned this, but I have a long and distinguished record of passing out in various situations and places, everywhere from airplanes to cocktail parties.  I've probably passed out at least eight times, with a few other maybes (such as the time I collapsed onto the deck of the boat after Steve and Martha took us fishing in Monterey Bay... did I pass out or just fall asleep?)  I added another pass-out event to my repertoire yesterday.  I was at a skin doctor's office, having a quarter-sized lesion cut off my shoulder, at the back.  It's actually a form of skin cancer, but a very benign, non-spreading one.  I probably got it from my annual frying-in-the-sun when your mom used to take us to the beach in the summer.  I was sitting in the doctor's exam chair, and he first injected me several times with some numbing chemical, which was painful in itself.  I don't think he used enough, because it was distinctly painful when he was cutting the thing out.  That would have been okay, but he did this cutting process repeatedly, each time a long slow cut like someone taking a big chunk from a large wheel of cheese.  That might have been okay, except that after that, he was cauterizing the wound with some sort of electronic zapper/burner, and that also was painful and strange.  And even that might have been okay, except the whole time, he was talking on and on about the Red Sox.  (I had gotten him started by asking him about a framed Ted Williams baseball hanging in a display case on his wall.)  There was something very disturbing about the combination of pain, the cutting and burning, and having to listen to an arcane monologue about the Red Sox at the same time.  So at a certain point I felt lightheaded and I told him I was dizzy and needed to take a break.  The next thing you know I was in a different dimension -- one that I know well -- where there was a loud buzzing, and the sound of voices that seemed to be coming from very far off, and seemingly muffled by blankets.  And then after what seemed like a long time, the sensation of rising up, like a balloon rising up slowly from the depths of the ocean.  The doctor told me I was out for about five seconds, and my eyes remained open, but totally glazed over.  Fortunately, I gave him the warning, so he was able to crank the chair down so I was lying flat, or I probably would have pitched forward onto the floor.... like on the boat.  Well, that's one way to get someone to stop talking about the Red Sox.

--edward

New York

Frank:

Thanks for your useful comments on my social network idea.  You make some good points.  It's true that young people probably wouldn't have any interest in interacting with middle aged or older people, unless they were people who could somehow further their careers.  And "winners" would have no interest in speaking with "losers."  Another problem is that most people are basically kind of boring, and there's not a whole lot you can do with that.  Really boring people would manage to come up with boring answers to anything, even questions that tried to somehow trick them into being interesting.  So, back to the drawing board.  Or not.

My vengeful self is delighted to see that the Norwegian prosecutors are starting to ask Anders Breivik questions designed to deflate him and make him look silly and pathetic, such as inquiries about the long period he spent living at his mother's house, playing the video game "World of Warcraft" sixteen hours a day.  Hopefully, they have a great deal more embarrassing material to cover, so they can successfully show him and the world that he is a sad, sick, ridiculous person.  That would be the ultimate punishment for a self-important coward like him.

I hope your tortillas turn out well.

I don't want to see Romney win because I think the economy is finally going to be turning around, and I don't want the Republicans to get to take credit for that.  But it is true that some very difficult decisions will have to be made in the next four years, and whoever makes them will look bad, and will infuriate the other side.  Or maybe difficult decisions don't have to be made, maybe we can just keep staggering along, putting it all off for another day.  It seems like the state of California is able to more or less be permanently bankrupt, without having to do anything about it.  Or is that not true?

You've got to hand it to New York City.... they pretty much have it made.   It has such a concentration of tourist sites and activities, and such a reputation as a happening, must-see experience, that it is constantly FILLED with tourists coming to spend thousands of dollars on lodging, food, shopping, theater, and everything else.  It is like Disneyland, masquerading as a huge city.  It is particularly attractive to foreign tourists.  Every time we go down there to visit Hayden we notice throngs of tourists from Asia and Europe.  In the last couple of years we've particularly noticed a lot of Russians, but there are plenty of people from all sorts of countries, including China. A lot of the really wealthy foreign people like to own an apartment in New York where they can stay when they're in town -- we're talking Arabs, Chinese, Russians and others with million dollar pads scattered in different places in the city.  This all helps keep the real estate prices permanently sky high.  Hayden is living down in the Wall Street area -- it's actually cheaper to live down there because it's not a lively social scene-type neighborhood, it's a place where people work all day, then clear out.  It's interesting that a very high percentage of the tourists down in Wall Street are foreigners.  They consider the New York Stock Exchange, and Wall Street to be must-see places, more so than American tourists.  The site of the World Trade Center is eventually going to be a huge tourist draw as well.... they're working on a stunning and large memorial area right now, and it's already flooded with people who come to observe the progress and snap pictures of where the twin towers once stood.  

I think most tea-party types think Bush was a dud because he wasn't conservative enough.... he didn't stand up for "true" conservative values.  And the fact that a lot of conservatives are now sort of agitating for some sort of more powerful military threat against Iran shows that people don't necessarily learn anything from past experience or history, even very recent history.

--edward

meeting strangers app....

Frank:

I can't speak for you or anyone else, but all this staying inside and avoiding people that you're doing would be unhealthy for me.  And it's probably exactly what I'd be doing, if it weren't for Peggy, who is always helping nudge me in a more wholesome direction than I'd be headed if I was left to my own resources.

Earlier today I was imagining some sort of new social networking computer application that probably would sound like hell to you, based on your horror of people.  I was thinking how most people, me included, tend to get isolated in their own little groups of somewhat similar folks, similar age-wise, education-wise, background-wise, outlook-wise and just about every other wise. I was thinking how it would be interesting and good to have some sort of computer application where people -- people who are interested in one-time interactions with others who are UNlike them -- could sign up for the opportunity to do just that. They would sign up and list various basics about themselves, such as age, educational background, place of birth, religion, political preferences, etc, etc.  When the inclination hit them to have one of these get-togethers, they'd go online and somehow a match would be arranged, with both people agreeing to get together, at a park or coffee shop, or whatever they agreed on.  So maybe a 55 year old businessman would get together with a 23 year old vegan hipster with rings in his nose, or young black college student with a 90 year old woman from China.   There'd be certain guidelines, for instance that the meeting only last half an hour or something like that, with no expectations beyond just that one encounter.  If at any point the two people run out of things to say, there'd be an online feature where the site would supply them with different questions or topics of conversation.  They could be randomly generated, or the general topics could be selected -- religion, politics, childhood, or just general conversation starters.  The questions would of course be designed to spur on unusual,  hopefully interesting conversation -- what's your first childhood memory?.... What would you do if you only had 24 hours left to live?.... When is the last time you cried?   Of course, only a small minority of people would be interested in something like this, and the types of people you would meet would be limited just by the fact of the kind of person who would be attracted to such an odd scheme... it would probably mostly be curious, open, somewhat adventurous people who are attracted to diversity and variety, who think the world is better when different kinds of people get to know each other a little.  Which is okay.   If something like that existed, I think I'd probably sign up for it.  If not, maybe I should start it.

I think you should not be frustrated that you are forgetting words in Spanish.  I think you should be expecting to forget words, and not frustrated or surprised at all. 

About those nutty republicans, I think there really is no limit to how crazy they can get.  I blame Fox News and its offshoots, as I do for most things.  When you've got a situation where millions of people rely on Fox for their information and spin on reality, the depths of potential nuttiness are unfathomable.  In order to attract and keep viewers, Fox needs to continually ratchet up the excitement, the sense of outrage, and the overall adrenaline-producing nature of their coverage.  It's like the way reality shows compete for an audience, all trying to outdo the others for sensationalism and drama.  That's how Fox approaches the news, and millions and millions of true believers are swept along by it.

And lastly, it's true that store bought flour tortillas are bland and cardboardy, but they are improved a whole lot by frying them in oil so they are golden brown with semi-inflated bubbles, and serving them hot out of the pan.

--edward

more photos

Frank:

Mysteriousness is a plus with photographs, as far as I'm concerned.  I have Mira's photographs  -- they would have been trashed when Steve was selling the house, if I hadn't been there.  The value of many of Mira's old photos is their mysteriousness.  All sorts of pictures of bygone, forgotten people, probably from the twenties and thirties, in unknown places in Maine mostly, doing mysterious things, some with Mira in them, some not.   So I have a little collection of these photos that I can "market"  (Emma will be interested in these) based on the fact of their mysteriousness.   But I have to give careful thought to how many photos to include in the mysterious section.  Too many will just tip it over into trash.   I also have a mystery section of photos taken by my dad when he was in the navy.  Snapshots from China, showing navy sailors on shipboard and in exotic places towering over Chinamen in pigtails.  There are pictures of dead people, and pictures showing "Japs"  doing this and that... I guess it was shortly after a Japanese invasion of China. I've culled out enough so that the remaining collection is really a fascinating, bizarre grouping that somehow sheds murky light on my dad, while asking dozens of unanswerable questions.  So, as you can see, I'm not actually the destroyer-of-history that I make myself out to be sometimes, but I do think some heavy pruning or editing is necessarily to create an impression that's going to have some attraction to descendants who aren't necessarily super interested in this stuff. 

So now that you've finished The Great Wall of Martinez and are back in Tahoe, are you doing any projects around your house?  I know you like animals and dislike people, but have you met anyone in the area that you interact with?

We have been eating burritoes for about five days, and I'm not tired of them yet.  I took a cheap cut of beef and cooked it in the crock pot for a few hours, in a liquid of beef broth, garlic, crushed tomatoes, sliced up hot peppers, and some other stuff, until it was about the consistency of pulled pork.  That's the main filling for the burritoes, along with a rice and beans mix, a salsa with cilantro, some caramelized  onions, avocados, cheese, and other stuff.  I know the drawback is that we're using store bought flour tortillas as opposed to Mama Rosa's handmade tortillas, or some other equally wonderful product, and I do wish I had some great tortillas, but still, it's pretty good.  I was tempted to whip up some homemade tortillas today, frying them in oil so they'd almost be like fried dough, only thinner, but then I figured, "Nah, too much work." 

Yes, I bet Delta gave Dan and his brother some pointers on how to act and what to say.  This whole twins-in-the-air thing is great for Delta, but only if they dutifully play their part. 

--edward

Bruce Ismay

Frank:

Emma is interested in old photographs and family stuff, within limits.   I'm sure Henry will value some photos too, as long as he isn't confronted with a whole heap of them, the good and the bad all mixed together in a confusing tangle.  In that case he'd probably lose all interest and say he didn't want any of them. I am pretty sure my approach to photos is a good one, if the main goal is to have a new generation cherish an essence of family history and and some of the objects. It's like in a garden -- a whole bunch of little carrot seedlings all crowded together growing on top of each other.  If you want any of them to flourish, you've got to thin them out, try to give the best ones some space and sunlight.  If you cut down on the overall number of photos,  you make the remaining ones a whole lot more appealing.  Maybe more important, there's the fact that you're not just randomly cutting down on the quantity of photographs; you're getting rid of the ones that aren't even interesting, the ones that make the whole batch seem uninteresting and overwhelming by association.

You wouldn't have to actually get rid of the duds if that was a problem for you.  You could store them away in a box somewhere.  The first step would be to separate the really interesting ones from the whole mass, then put the mass away some place where nobody else has to deal with them and possibly get infected with the "ugh, let's just chuck this stuff" virus.

Watching the Titanic show wasn't at all a disaster, and was nothing like eating at In-n-Out Burger, which definitely was a bad, bad experience.  I actually enjoyed the part of the show I watched.  It's just that when it got to a certain point and I weighed the enjoyment of watching another hour and a half of the program, compared with the benefits of sleeping for an hour and a half, sleep won out.  The cost of watching the rest of program would be a day of fatigue interspersed with disturbing sadness.  Plus the ads were just killing me.  It was like I could see myself as a puppet, being manipulated to sit there and watch, while they kept increasing the number of ads at each break once they know the viewers were getting hooked.  It's degrading.  But sleep was the main factor.

Bruce Ismay, right.  Okay, now you have triggered my knee-jerk contrary streak, which is one of the most prominent features of my personality. I'm going to stand up for the guy even though I used to hate him too, thanks to the way he is so effectively portrayed as the evil, slimy villain in the Titanic movies I've seen.  But now I feel a little sorry for him.  I read up a little about him,  to gather information to support my new, more forgiving hypothesis. This Bruce Ismay guy was an insecure, ill-at-ease person, bullied and overshadowed by his self-made tycoon father.  He felt more comfortable with things -- like ships -- than people.  I think he was truly enthralled with the Titanic, and had complete faith in its safety and elegance, which is why he didn't want to mess up the gracefulness by cluttering it up with a bunch of what he assumed were additional unnecessary lifeboats. The guy had few close friends and was estranged from his wife.  The ship was his love.  He was out of his depth as manager of the White Star Line, which his blustering father had started.  Then of course he horribly fails the bravery test when the ship goes down -- a test that many would fail, and few have to face.  If he had just mastered his fear -- or just been knocked out by a piece of falling debris -- and gone down with the ship, he wouldn't be hated.  Sure, people would have said he was guilty of some bad judgment, but essentially he would be considered an okay guy.  But no, panic overcame him  and he got in a lifeboat. When it was all over, his hair had turned white almost overnight.  He spends the next 25 years as one of the most hated, scorned people on earth.  I don't think he can be blamed for the company's treatment of its employees after the sinking; his reputation was gone and he didn't last long at the helm of White Line.  He definitely had some serious character flaws that wouldn't have mattered much except that he was the big man in the century's biggest disaster.  Destiny had  him in its crosshairs.  And speaking of destiny, you've got this line, that could very well be true, that we are all largely products of our inborn characteristics and genes.  We are who we are.  That's true for him too.... he was just playing out the hand that was dealt to him.  He didn't get off scot free, that's for sure.  Those last 25 years of his reclusive life must have seemed pretty long and sad, being the person everyone despised. 

An amazingly warm day here in Maine today, for the month of April, following up on a very, very mild winter.   We're all scuttling happily about like lobsters in a pot where the temperature is gradually being turned up degree by degree.  A that the weatherman would call "another glorious, unusually warm spring day."

--edward

Portraits

Frank:

Here's the thing about family photos, and pretty much all other things....  if you have too many, it devalues all of them. The sheer volume transforms them from precious artifacts to a dreary nuisance. This is why diamonds are valuable and heaps of quartz crystals are just rubble.  If you save hundreds of family photographs, when it comes time for someone else to deal with them, they are soon overwhelmed, and the little voice in their head goes from "This is cool!" to  "Get rid of this shit!"   Your preservationist instincts could help destroy the very thing you love.  If there are just a few photos -- the best of the lot -- and especially if you have a good story about what tragically happened to the rest of them, such as "they all burned up when Grandma Henderson's house caught fire, and this was all we could save," or "they went down with the Titanic,"  then there is great interest in the remaining photos, and they will be infinitely treasured.  Family items are like any other commodity; they are valued when they are scarce. 

On a related note, I have a carton of photos -- of Mira, me, my parents, our grandparents, and so on.  I was showing them to Emma a few months ago when she was here. She wanted to see them.  We came across about seven different portraits of grandfather.  Now that I think about it, having that many portraits of one person is a very bad thing.  The first one or two that I looked at, I had a good impression of him as a person.  He seemed dignified and substantial.  But by the time I had come across the sixth or seventh one, my reaction had completely changed.  I was thinking "What a vain, pompous asshole!"   I'm pretty sure Emma had the same impression.    I'm sorry that happened, and it'll probably take ten years for that impression to be erased from her mind.  There were also too many pictures of Mira, come to think of it... she also was devalued by the quantity of images of her, not that there are all that many... but too many.   So -- I'm thinking as I'm writing -- I'm going to cull out a few of the grandfather portraits, and a few of the pictures of Mira. Not because I don't care for their memory, but because I do.  I want our kids to have a good impression of these relatives they never really knew, not to think they were tiresome bores.  Would you like me to send the extras to you?  If you don't, I'll just throw them away. 

Speaking of the Titanic, I violated my no-Tv rule last night, and we watched part of an ABC miniseries about the Titanic.  You had gotten me thinking about the Titanic, and we had forgotten to order DVD movies from Netflix. Well, "miniseries" isn't a good word for what we watched, because they were all bundled into a single showing, which lasted three hours.  We hung in there for about an hour and a half, and then we just decided to go to bed.  The show kept following characters until the point that the ship was sinking, then it would go all the way back to the launching of the ship and introduce some more characters, and show how they were interacting with the original characters up to when the ship was sinking, then back to the launching, and on and on. Once I got the hang of how the thing was organized, I pretty much bailed.  Investing three hours meeting a few dozen characters, and getting roped into caring about them, and then watching them drown,  just didn't do it for me.  Plus the constant bombardment of advertisements, which were particularly jolting since it's been so long since I was subjected to TV ads.    I noticed that once the ship hit the iceburg, and the viewers were presumably hooked at that point, they doubled the number of ads at each commercial break.  What is interesting is that this morning I meditated, and I realized my head was full of Titanic-related thoughts, all based on the show.  Those characters were still moving around and interacting in my head, like little wind-up toys. That's one of the great things about meditation.  It's like having a faucet in the side of your head that you can open up to drain the stagnant pool of stupid thoughts that constantly gets refilled every day.

I didn't know that Thomas Kinkade supposedly pissed on a Winnie the Pooh statue at Disneyland.  That's some serious shit.  To most of Kinkade's fans, that's like urinating on God.

Those ideas you have if I come to visit sound like fun.  I'd like to do those things.  I'll let you know when the travel dates are a little more established.

--edward

Ecclesiastes

Frank:

Thanks for the photo of me as a kid, where I am looking so sweet and innocent.... taking a little break from beating and burning ants to death, I suppose.  Photographs are interesting for the way they capture a momentary flash of something that looks like reality, but is just tiny sliver of the essence of what's really going on.  Who knows what was going on in that imp's mind before, during and after the picture was taken?

For some reason, that reminds me of a very short book in the Bible, called Ecclesiastes.  You should read it some time.  It's fascinating.  It is surprising, very surprising, that it was included among all the writings that were joined together into the book called the Bible, because its message is so joltingly strange and contrary to what the rest of the Bible says.  The text begins: "Meaningless! Meaningless! says the Teacher.  Utterly meaningless!  Everything is meaningless!  What does a man gain from all his labor at which he toils under the sun?"  He goes on to say that the dead are better off than the living, but that even better than that is someone who has never lived at all.  And "all labor and all achievement spring from man's envy of his neighbor."   I thought about the book of Ecclesiastes, because after I looked at that photograph of me as a pure-looking kid, I remembered a line from it: "The hearts of men, moreover, are full of evil and there is madness in their hearts..."  Anyway, almost everything in Ecclesiastes sounds like the polar opposite of the Christian religion.  Preachers very seldom mention the book in their sermons, and when they do, they say it's in the Bible to illustrate how horrible and pointless life is if you're not a Christian.

When you referred to "Octomom Nadia Suleman" I was thinking you were talking about some guy whose first name is "Octomom" and I was thinking it is a very unusual name, maybe Hispanic or Arabic?  Then I realized she must be one of these cartoon characters, like the Kardashanians (?) that the media industry has invented to keep Americans amused, while they drain our pocketbooks and mold our perceptions of reality, and milk us, like cows at the feedlot.   They want us all to be like autistic children, staring happily at the blades of a fan going round and round, with a dazed, contented look on our faces.

I see that Thomas Kinkade died recently.  I wouldn't have known his name except that you told me about him in Salt Lake City, and I'm glad you did, since he's actually a pretty big figure in America.  The New York Times obituary on him said that one in twenty homes in America has at least one piece of art by him, which is amazing.  And now it has been reported that he was an out-of-control alcoholic, and that's no doubt what finished him off at the age of 54.  Supposedly he was a devoted Christian, and he had it all in terms of what people usually long for -- fame, glory, oceans of money.  There's part of me that wants to gloat over him, since I delight in seeing celebrities brought low, and his artwork that was so successful seems astoundingly junky and sickly sweet to me.  But still, it's a sad thing.  But then I read that one of his many business ventures was creating and selling gating communities with houses and grounds that built to look exactly like images from his paintings, and most of my sympathy evaporates, like the last glint of light in a sunset from a Thomas Kinkade painting.

On the radio yesterday, I heard a snatch of Mitt Romney giving a speech to the NRA.  It's the most annoying thing I've heard for a long time, Romney going on in that wheedling voice of his, in front of a bunch of gun nuts.  Later I read coverage of the speech in the newspaper, and read a quote of one diehard NRA member who said he didn't trust Romney because when he was governor of Massachusetts he came out in favor of regulating the sale of assault weapons.   Just one more trace of previous reasonableness that chameleon Romney must now somehow try to erase from public consciousness so that he can be accepted at the crazy table.

By the way, we're thinking of going out to see Emma in Eugene in the early part of July.  I was thinking I might go out several days ahead of time, in late June.  Could I come to Lake Tahoe for two or three days?

--edward

all Titanic news

Frank:

This will be an all-Titanic letter.

Yes, I suppose there would be a big fuss about the Titanic, since it's the 100th anniversary.  I wonder if smart people were buying up all sorts of Titanic related curios about three years ago, and will be selling them pretty soon, once the demand is at full peak and the stuff is worth about twice as much, temporarily.  I know that Titanic memorabilia greatly increased in value when the movie came out years ago, only to begin a long, slow decline a couple of years later.  The whole Titanic story contains everything to make it epic and fascinating -- the ship itself, the circumstances, the people involved, and pretty much everything else.  Plus, for people who are detail oriented, there are endless opportunities to study and argue about technical things such as the angle of the ship when it broke in half.  The only thing missing, as far as I can tell, is a  conspiracy theory for people who enjoy descending into paranoia.  There probably is a conspiracy element to it, I just don't know about it. 

When you watch all these Titanic shows, are you emotionally troubled by it later, or not?  If I watched a bunch of shows like that, which are all doing their damnest to outdo each other in giving the viewers a gripping, sensational experience, I think I'd spend a couple of days afterwards kind of disturbed by reverberations of all the sensations of horror, tragedy and sadness the movie makers fire hosed into my brain.  The older I get, I find the more sensitive I am to stuff like that.

That's interesting that you are bothered that the ship has become accessible and that people are puttering around in their tourist submarines and screwing it all up... you'd prefer that the ship had never been found.  I know some people talk about how it's a "sacred" place, and like a graveyard, or whatever.  I don't really get it... is it sort of religious shrine?  I kind of like the way they dealt with this stuff back in the days of the old west, when there was some kind of big gunfight, and later people would come and tear off pieces of clothing and bloodstained pieces of wood, and stuff, as souvenirs.  Or like the way people used to chip off pieces of Plymouth Rock, until there was almost nothing left.  The only reason this didn't happen to the Titanic was that it went down so deep...it took awhile for technology to catch up. It seems to me that people should be able to go down there whenever they want and yank off all kinds of stuff so they can take it home and put in on their mantle.  That would be a nice way to dispose of a lot of that underwater rubbish, and would make a lot of people happy and proud to have those Titanic knick knacks on display.   But I'm just being contrary.  If you said you thought it was a good thing that people can go down there an look at it and remember it and take pictures of it, I'd probably say they should just cover it up in mud so no one can ever see it again.

It is an interesting question, I guess, to consider how each person might have acted if they were on the Titanic, though of course none of us knows that... whatever we think is probably totally wrong.  I'm pretty sure I wouldn't have been one of these gallant heroes, offering my seat on the lifeboat to some little Irish kid.  I don't mean to brag,  but I tend to arrogantly separate myself from crowds and their herd mentalities, though maybe it would be different in a panicked, life or death situation. I'm the person who when I'm leaving some packed auditorium, notices there is usually a second, closed door, next to the open one that hundreds of people are jamming up against, trying to get exit through.  I'm the one who goes through that other door, and suddenly there is a whole new stampede of people pouring through that one as well. I wouldn't be surprised if my contrariness-in-crowds tendency would have clicked in, and I would not have joined the general rush where everyone else was going.  It probably wouldn't have done me any good, though.  I'd be thinking something like "Hey, everyone is on deck, I could go down to Mr. Astor's cabin and steal his cashbox!"  And thus my skeleton would now be disintegrating somewhere down in the first class hallways.

At any rate, the whole Titanic event was a wonderful illustration of the line, "If you want to hear god laugh, tell him your plans."  The whole thing was a total, shocking reversal of everyone's expectations and plans.

--Edward

dear frank

Frank:

That's interesting that browning potatoes creates a cancer causing chemical.  Well, I'm not going to worry about it.  We're all basically in a sort of race to see what ends up killing us, and I have a feeling that potato-browning hazards are probably the least of my worries.  I do think it's funny they post a warning about acrylamide, when the real hazard of potato chips probably lies more in the calories, trans fat, and salt.... the basic make-up of a potato chip itself.  It's like having a warning on sticks of dynamite, saying that  the tissue paper wrapping has a red dye that studies have shown is linked to diabetes.

No, they don't have King Cole potato chips any more.  That company was bought out by another company.  I think they still make them, under the brand of Humpty Dumpty potato chips, in South Portland.  Years ago, when people could still take tours of factories, before insurance regulations shut that all down, I toured the Humpty Dumpty factory.  It was great... walking along over slippery, grease covered floors, watching huge cauldrons of sliced potatoes being dumped into giant vats of bubbling oil, and all of that, and getting handed a bag of potato chips at the end.

We were down in New York over Easter, visiting Henry.  You remember that I had been thinking about how cell phones and various internet gadgets are used to turn people into viruses-like agents so that various companies can use those people to further their marketing campaigns.  Being in New York made me think all more about how everything these days is marketing and selling.  As humans, we are basically seen by corporations as herds of consumers,  and New York is a headquarters of that whole business of marketing, and selling shit to people.  I was noticing how many people wear clothes and carry gear that has large logos for the company... they've got people paying good money for the right to be walking billboards.  In some sense, the more popular of a person you are -- the more "friends" you have on Facebook, for instance -- the more valuable you are to these companies, because the odds go up that you will influence other people to buy the same stuff that excites you.  I had a good time in New York, but I did come away with a heightened, dispiriting understanding about how in the modern world we are treated like vast herds of cows, to be milked and stampeded and slaughtered.  Companies put in vast amounts of research and energy figuring out how to manipulate us in every conceivable way.  

As part of hospice, Margaret is seeing a woman who sounds a lot like you, in regards to her weather preferences.  She is from Oregon, which probably explains it.  On a sunny day, she will have her curtains all tightly shut, to keep out the disturbing light.  But when it is cloudy or rainy, she has the curtains thrown open wide, and she happily soaks up the grayness.  She is in a much better, more alert mood when it is overcast.  If there is a stretch of sunny weather she becomes downcast, and very homesick for the cloudy skies of Oregon.

That is pretty sad about the parents who are getting out of hand at Easter egg hunts.  On the other hand, maybe it's just better for parents to set the thing up themselves on a small scale, anyway.  Why do they have to turn it into some huge affair with hundreds of kids, and thousands of eggs lying all over the ground in this roped-off area?  It seems like an unnecessarily sterile,commercial, competitive setting to begin with.  It would be as if people decided they didn't want to have a family Christmas at home any more, and instead set up a huge Christmas Tree in the middle of a parking lot, with hundreds of presents under it, and everybody stood behind ropes until the GO! command.  That probably wouldn't go over too well either.  This might not be related, but one of my pet peeves is that people don't seem to think a think is worth doing unless they film it and photograph it and blog about it....  people market their own personal lives the same way corporations market all the crap they sell.

--Edward