bread and circuses

With the latest spate of celebrity culling, there is one outstanding example of the ways in which reality becomes perverted. The Michael Jackson circus far outshines in terms of discussion and descent into madness the losses of Ed McMahon, Karl Mauldin ("Don't leave home without it") or Farra Fawcett-Majors--the fact that she died from anal cancer, which is surely a sad and tragic thing, and the condition has not had news reports dedicated to it, is pretty significant. I thought it was some biographical-vandalism when I first saw it, but I guess now no one will be comfortable taking about anal cancer is mixed company. There is talk now that Michael Jackson is to be buried without his brain, freezing it so he can be reincarnated in a robot body as Captain Eo. I've unfortuneately bought into that whole speculation and wild rumour trap. Like with Elvis, the King of Rock, one wonders if the King of Pop (he was married to his daughter, by the way) is really dead. It was certainly a brillant career move, erasing all the debt he accumulated. Michael Jackson spread those very rumours about him buying the skeleton of the Elephant Man and sleeping in a hyberbolic chamber, but that wasn't the half of it. Seeing Jackson interviewed makes me think that he might have tried a stunt like that--faking his own death and disappearing with Elizabeth Taylor to the Island of Doctor Moreau. Remember those "Paul is dead" rumours in the early eighties about Paul McCartney? I think McCartney's friend and business partner Michael Jackson started them, too. What is it about eccentricity (maybe that's too general or mild of a term) that drives disbelief that they're gone, anti-fame?

off-colour elephant

Everyone has occasion for fancy napkins, and one ought to always have a stock like this handy--I really adore the characters--Inconstant Sparrow, Magical Mushroom, Blinky Pengiun, Off-Colour Elephant and Psychadelic Frog who licked himself. I might like to be a graphic artist for the conglomeration that produces stuff like this. Graphic designers, however, no longer sit at a drafting table or are plucked from the ranks of those talented enough to raw Petey Pirate or Tommy Turtle any longer. I only use mundane general-issue sorts of graphics programs to make tepid slideshow presentations--it is like watching someone else's tedious holiday snapshoots, though I think H and I are on the crest of a resurrgence it that activity. We rather like showing off and seeing the pictures of others on vacation. Still I don't imagine that I could hack it as a graphic designer, when the graphic desigher says that he does not know how to do something, maybe it is not a matter of drawing skill or manual dexterity but rather lack of familiarity or patience with certain software.

ersatz

Quite possibly it is acceptable, from time to time, to fool Mother Nature. Either manifested as these great fly-swatters in the desert or as a non-descript kiosk about the size of a bank of public toliets, environmental researchers are developing a pretend tree of sorts--one that can snatch and sequestir stray carbon in the atmosphere. It doesn't seem like a great improvement from the original design, at first, since trees rather just happen and one only has to take care not to cut them down. These synthetic trees, however, grab carbon dioxide from any source (though it's not as if real trees are discriminatory and insistent on taking carbon dioxide only exhaled from the lungs they gave oxygen to) year round (trees only breath-in for half a year) and inside of producing wood pulp or fruit, the carbon collected can be compressed and liquified for other uses.

In other ugly plant news: the EU has lifted a regulation governing the aesthetics of produce on grocery shelves. The headlines read praise all-around for lifting the almost 20 year ban on wonky fruit and veg. Apparently, there was a law stipulating that 26 varieties of fruits and vegetables ought to be show-bread material, defining roundness and uniformity standards, while perfectly edible knobby carrots and lumpy tomatoes were wasted. This is a good thing, to not associate nutrition with the ideal apple or pear. Maybe shoppers were just averse to finding suggestive plant bits in their shopping carts--a great phallic cucumber or hinder-shaped apricots like H and saw at the super market, yesterday, just hours after the ban was rescinded.

bob the builder

Over the weekend, H and I worked more on the living room and hung strips of wallpaper. The bit of color was an accent--a single strip off-set from the wall's center. To make sure the paper was self-same and perpendicular to the floor and the paste was swabbed economically, H needed a heavy weight, a plumb-bob, and what proved to be the handiest object, the right size and the right amount of heft, was my little copper and iron crucifix suspended from a lenght of kite string. Incidentally, it was the same little cross that has been on tour with us in Rome and overlooking the plaza pictured. I told H he looked as if he were fishing for nuns.

in-situ

Previously, I've mentioned the unease that major construction projects give me around the workplace. Of course, the US army has to make good on its commitments, regardless of how delays and set-backs have made the particular building project in question moot or obsolete. In the past, the army has whipped up this procrastination into a fine art--having all the contractors paid just in time for base-closure and hand-over of facilities back to the German government. Looking at some of the work they are doing now, it appears that the construction firms have gotten wise to this tactic, and, in order to save themselves the extra work a year later, are putting a nice local touch on sidewalks, breezeways and pedestrian malls. It's as if they are terraforming the base in prepartion for an eventual take-over. There's even plans for a Biergarten. The work the teams are doing is very nice, though it doesn't fit the overall junkyard character of the place that hasn't been re-done--but I imagine there is still just enough time for all the just-in-time re-engineering.