On Saturday Lesley and I were in Union Square in San Francisco and did a little sightseeing. We went into the Neiman-Marcus store, a new and architecturally disastrous building that replaced the beloved City of Paris building (yes, they preserved the atrium, but the sleek glass and metal skin around the rotunda, as architectural Paul Goldberg wrote in the NYT, is “…one of this city’s most conspicuous architectural mistakes.”)
MOREOVER, check out the prices ($790 for a pair of sneakers, $5300 for that pair of long black boots)!
Almost all the items (especially the purses and handbags) in there looked ugly to my unsophisticated country boy eyes. Well, wait a minute, here’s a nice shirt, but, ulp, $1650.
What kind of people buy krap at such outrageous prices?
Go to my Instagram post to see the 40-odd comments.
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Photo by Hans Frey
Wooden sculptures at The Buckeye restaurant in Mill Valley, Calif.
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The VW Pea (sorry, you can’t buy one — it was commissioned by Bird’s Eye for a commercial) It started out as a VW Microbus, but was modified into a pea.
The Pea car first appeared in a Birds Eye television advertisement in December, 2005.
London-based special effects company, Asylum, took six weeks to build the car using a heavily modified chassis from an off-road go-kart fitted with a Honda engine.
Weighing just 750kg, it was capable of 50mph/80.47kph even though it had no gears. Whilst bearing a Volkswagen resemblance, only the headlights were sourced from a beetle. The indicators are of Lancia origin, wing mirrors from a specialist shop and all other parts were made to order.
The advert showed the car driving straight from the farmer’s field but slowly losing its body parts along the road. The car reaches its destination as just a bare chassis. Then from the back of a refrigerated lorry emerges a brand new pea car. A voice over narrates how vegetables lose vitamins from the moment they are picked whereas Birds Eye peas are immediately frozen thus retaining essential vitamins.
Above from: retrokimmer.com/2015/12/the-vw-pea-car-story.html
I picked this up from Amy Sedaris’ Instagram account. She posts excellent stuff. @amysedaris
It was sex, drugs and rock and roll, and those were all fun. But at the core of the counterculture was a spiritual revolution, in a sense of leaving the Western religions of control, and exploring the Eastern disciplines of liberation. There was meditation. There were workshops in advanced breathing.
The counterculture represented a certain economic threat, because here were several people sharing a car, or not getting insurance, but taking care of each other, making their own clothes, using less electricity, making candles.
The Justice Department was trying to infiltrate communes. I spoke to a friend of an ex-FBI guy who said they had the FBI hippie squad. And they had to learn how to roll joints, the better to infiltrate with. Originally, the CIA intended LSD to be used as a means of control, but all these young people deprogrammed themselves from the mainstream culture, and then reprogrammed themselves with a more humane value system.
All the people I know from that time have, whatever their profession, they brought that same sense of idealism and compassion with them. Socrates said, “Know thyself”, then Norman Mailer, said “Be thyself” and the unspoken mantra of the counterculture was “Change thyself.” And the psychedelics — but not necessarily them, it could’ve been meditation or Zen or whatever — served as vehicles for people to change themselves. And that included protesting against the war, which meant that the CIA’s plan had backfired.
The full interview is available here.
The Realist archive: www.ep.tc/realist
Usually when I see a list of quotes, there might be one or two that I like. Here they are all zingers:
• “I’ve always been very careful never to predict anything that has not already happened.” — Marshall McLuhan
• “The cure for boredom is curiosity. There is no cure for curiosity.” — Dorothy Parker
• “Decisions are made by those who show up.” — Jennifer Pahlka
• “If at first the idea is not absurd, then there is no hope for it.” — Albert Einstein
• “Not long ago what we have today was so implausible that nobody bothered to say it would never happen.“ — Marc Andreessen
• “The first 90% of a project is a lot easier than the second 90%.” — Tim Sweeney
• “If you don’t like change, you are going to like irrelevance even less.” — General Shinseki
— Kevin Kelly
This is from Recomendo, a weekly newsletter from Kevin Kelly, Mark Frauenfelder, and Claudia Dawson that “…gives you 6 brief personal recommendations of cool stuff”: https://recomendo.com/
Also from Recomendo:
Unlocking phone:
If you bought a phone that’s locked to a specific mobile carrier, you won’t be able to use it with another carrier until you get it unlocked. AT&T says they will unlock phones you’ve had for two years, but the process is so arduous that it’s never worked for me. They make it difficult on purpose, I suspect. But I’ve unlocked phones using an unlocking service on eBay and paying $6 per phone. I gave them the phone’s 15-digit IMEI (International Mobile Equipment Identity) serial number and a day later they sent me an email to let me know it’s been unlocked. I have no idea how they do it, but it works. — MF
“There’s this young polar bear….Goes up to its mother and asks, Mummy, am I a real polar bear?” Mummy replies, “Course you are. You’ve got white fur, you’ve got claws, you live in the Arctic and you eat fish. Why do you ask?” Young polar bear replies, “Because I’m fucking freezing.”
-From the novel Black Widow by Christopher Brookmyre
Photo: Lloyd Alter
(You probably have to be over 50 to get this.)
I’ve always had backpacks for airplane travel, eschewing suitcases and wheeled bags. I figured it was a good workout to have the weight on my shoulders, and I always walked up the stairs instead of using escalators, and never took the moving walkways. BUT on my last trip, I had so much weight, it wore me out. This time I got an Osprey rolling pack (with day pack, wheels, and shoulder straps), a new Da Kine day pack, and cut down on clothing as much as I could. Much improved.
Even though I have a (11″) MacAir laptop, a bunch of camera gear, couple of books, and on this trip, a digital projector, the weight is on wheels — such a relief. Well, duh.
Airports are stressful enough as it is. I’ll get my workouts in other ways. The strap is for a fairly aerodynamic camera bag, in which I have my new Olympus OM5-D10 with 3 lenses — gonna carry it in my city explorations here. The vest is a Columbia Omni-Shade — lightweight, bunch of pockets Also, stealth vaping — heh-heh — works in airports.
