I Hate Glass

Butcher shop, Paris

Bath Spa

Train Station
Bath, England

Montmartre

I recently returned from a trip to London and Paris... fifteen hundred photographs... and even a few keepers... although, it hasn't taken long to realize I'm not the first to find this scene picturesque (cf. Rue Norvins).

3 Fingers...

James Surowiecki writes on oil prices and the ensuing congressional blame game:

"When bad things happen, it’s always nice to have a scapegoat. So, with Americans furious about soaring oil prices, Congress has gone in search of someone to blame. There are a number of usual suspects to choose from, depending on your politics—OPEC, greedy oil companies, lily-livered environmentalists opposed to oil drilling—but now Congress has seized on another set of villains: commodity speculators."

continued

Paris

Metro station,
Midnight.
White tile walls.
Black metal rails.

The sheltered waiting:
Patient.
Quiet.
Tired.

A donkey's bray,
Loud and surreal:
"Hee-yorrr! Hey-orrr!
Hee-honk! Hee-honk!"

Jittering eyes,
Twisting brows.
Shaking heads.
Shrugs.

A rooster's crow,
Impossible:
"Rawka-rok! Rawka-rok!
Erka-erka-rawka-roo!"

Puck discovered,
George Foreman's twin,
Across the tracks,
Sitting alone.

A chicken clucks.
He snickers,
Privately,
But contagiously.

A horse's whinny.
A chorus of laughter.
We all applaud
Before the train sweeps us away.

Rue Lepic

Rue Lepic, Montmartre, Paris

Nemo & the Irony Impaired

In response to the Pixar film about a clownfish happily escaping captivity, parents satisfying demands of children wanting their very own Nemo have put so many clownfish in captivity that an expert on the species now recommends listing them as endangered.

link

Land of the Lost

Dooce pens a post on Land of the Lost:

"I bet half of my readers haven't ever heard of that television show, and if you're one of those people then I am very sorry that your childhood was so unfulfilling. I bet you never owned a My Pretty Pony either. These are surely unresolved issues that you should bring up next time your family gets together for dinner, right after your father turns to your sister and says, "You were always the pretty one."

After all these years, it's hard not to wonder if the acting and special effects of this 70s Saturday morning sci-fi gem have ever been paralleled. Unfortunately, the following YouTube link for the show's introduction is now dead. Someone must have had it taken down, either to protect intellectual property or simply to save face. (Actually I really did love this show as a kid. Those Sleestaks were seriously terrifying at the time). What will be taken down next, Sigmund and the Sea Monsters? Sigh, that's gone too.

Cake or Pie?

My guess is the roots of the game, if you can call it that, trace back to an icebreaker offered at conventions for multilevel marketers, one of those silly get-to-know-me exercises where strangers bond through shenanigans congealing into camaraderie via collective humiliation.

I don't know the name of the game, I'm calling it Cake or Pie, and why a family who clearly knew each other quite well insisted on playing it inside our ears for the entire duration of a flight from Minneapolis to Seattle is a question I've filed between "Head cheese?" and "Why did he get re-elected?"

It goes like this. You propose a choice between two somewhat similar options and your partner offers his or her preference by choosing one of the two, presumably revealing a little of him-or-her-self in the process.

"Cake or pie?"
"Cake!"

"And then what?" you might ask, but there is no "and then what" other than taking turns doing this until... oh, I don't know... I guess until you tire of it.

"Custard or pudding?"
"Coke or Pepsi?"
"Pizza or pasta?"
"Paper or plastic?"
"Hari kari or jumping?"

We reached the jetway four hours later.




The Cake or Pie? family stood next to us at baggage claim, but this didn't bother us particularly, because we were minutes away from escaping them for perpetuity.

Or so we thought...

We hadn't considered the possibility of another twenty minutes of Cake or Pie? as they sat immediately behind us on the rental car shuttle (which, of course, they did). Can people sharing the same domicile and DNA ever get enough of this game? At this point the situation had passed from annoying to incomprehensibly comic, and we knew that soon, we'd be on our way never to see these folks again.

Or so we thought...

Lunch. The hostess sat us right next to the Cake or Pie? family. It doesn't sound terribly surprising or remarkable put that way, but even they seemed a little unnerved when we arrived, and stalking probably seemed the most reasonable explanation to them.

Fate. Every now and then when you become too much a believer in Chance, Fate gets sufficiently rankled and decides it's time to grab you by the shoulders and slap you up and down--just to show you who's the boss--and no matter how hard you try to credit Chance, you're doomed to a solar system of unsettling questions perpetually orbiting.

What were THEY doing for the past TWO HOURS? Why did they eat lunch SO LATE? Why did we wind up at THAT table given all the empty tables available in the section? There's the question of why THAT section? Why THAT restaurant in such an obscure location in Seattle given the thousands of possibilities?

Had I consciously plotted a circuitous escape path from Sea-Tac around the city, a plan designed with the singular purpose of escaping these people, I would have taken the same route we took...

My old apartment in Renton. The grave of Jimi Hendrix. The gun shop that became home to a Darwin Award. The winding timber-lined streets behind Factoria. Downtown Bellevue. A cruise along the lake through Kirkland before rolling over the 520 bridge. Lake Union. And finally, after all that, the little house doubling as a Thai restaurant on Roy Street.