I TAKE MY SNOOTY FRIEND TO GET SOME FAST FOOD

I don't know why so many people hate fast food restaurants. I understand why they got a bad reputation early on when they were crowded and noisy with plastic seats, but that was then and this is now. My local Carl Jr.'s is quiet and comfortable and the food isn't bad if you know what to order. Anyway, yesterday I finally convinced my food snob friend Mike to try it.

I guess I picked the wrong day because the restaurant was full of mentally challenged people with carts filled with teddy bears and "Lion King' memorabelia. There must have been a convention nearby. They were all shouting incoherently and of course they all seemed to gravitate to Mike.

I forgot that using a door is a learned skill. A man who hadn't learned it yet came to the door, saw his friends inside, but couldn't get in because a slab (the door) was in the way. After making a few tentative little pushes he opened the door about 20% of the way, then tried to squeeze in through the narrow opening. The door, which had a normal amount of spring tension, gently began to close on him, pinning him there by the shoulders. The man painstakingly turned sideways to get more room but the door closed on him in that position too, forcing him to wheedle through sideways, like a crab. I'm embarrassed to say that I was so suprised by what I was seeing that I forgot to offer to help. Besides I was distracted by a little kid who was trying to hit Mike on the head with a DVD box.

I also forgot that using a cup is a learned skill. A man settled into a booth with a cup of coffee and looked wistfully out the window. Nothing wrong with that, just a citizen enjoying a cup of coffee. "Ah!" you could almost hear him thinking, "Life is good!" He took a sip then went to take another sip and was shocked to discover that the cup was empty. He looked at the kitchen angrily then got up and filled it again. Back in the booth he took another long, relaxed sip. "Aaaaah!", you could hear him think, "That's good!" But wait a minute! When he went to take a another sip nothing was there! What kind of restaurant are they running here? Once again he angrily looked at the kitchen then went up and got more coffee. This went on and on, with him looking suprised that he had nothing in his cup then filling it with only one sip's worth of coffee. Once again I didn't offer to help because the kid was back hitting Mike with the DVD box again.

I should add that Mike was sitting close to the aisle. Every time the coffee man passed he would fart next to Mike's head. And when I say "passed," I mean passed in both directions. Mike would get a fart in his face on the guy's way up to the counter and a fart in the face on the guy's way back.


I suggested to Mike that we slide farther in on our seats so we could get away from the aisle but when we did that the woman in the booth behind us cast a murderous stare at Mike, probably thinking that he was the father who abused her and now deserved to be stabbed. Regretfully we slid back to the aisle where Mike was promptly farted on.

So that was my lunch with food snob Mike. I guess we won't be eating at Carl's again any time soon.

THE ROOFTOPS OF PARIS

I got a great book called "The Rooftops of Paris" for Christmas. Thumbing through it I found myself asking, "What are these rooftops trying to tell us?" They seem to be saying something, I just can't figure out what it is.

In the 19th century, when a lot of these buildings were put up, the poorest people lived on the top floor. That's because there were few mechanical elevators and getting up there required an arduous climb. What a good deal for the poor! They not only got a terrific view of the city but they were able to look out over the surreal, mysterious, innovative, historic, artistic wonderland of the rooftops!

Some rooftops seemed to be planned and ornate, others seeme to be gerry-rigged and put up almost as an afterthought. Maybe some featured add-on rooms, built without knowledge of the law. Some of the most creative designs might have been add-ons.

Rooftops like these provoke so many interesting questions. Are we wasting the best part of buildings by putting them so high above the street that nobody can see them? Should we build rooftop-type structures on the street level? Should we promote a world above the ground by bridging rooftops? Should we deliberately send our eccentrics up there to live in the hope that they'll create an interesting world up there? Should we have trolleys up there so rooftop people could visit each other without going down to the ground?

Matbe witches or Dickensian criminal types like Fagin should live up there. Maybe ninjas. Maybe thatched cottages and trees should be permitted. Maybe a foreign country should be allowed to exist up there.

I borrowed this picture from a previous post. This suggests that people in higher rooftops could lean over a railing and enjoy the antics of people on lower rooftops. Or maybe it suggests a kind of pedestrian highway enabling fast travel on the rooftops.

WHAT BIRDS ARE TRYING TO TELL US

Everybody loves the sound of chirping birds. There's something soothing and peacefull about waking up in the morning to the sound of bird calls. It's as if the birds said to each other, "Let's fill this neighborhood with song so the humans will reflect on how glorious and full of happiness the world is!" At least that's what I used to think.

After seeing a TV documentary on the subject I now know what they're really saying:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my tree!"

"Where's the women!"

Fascinating!

Maybe this is the universal message that the animal world is trying to communicate to us. I remember that years ago the hippies used to talk about communicating with dolphins. A researcher named Lily wrote a book about his ongoing attempt to teach language to dolphins and his book was on every hippie bookshelf. Lily speculated that when we learn to talk to them dolphins will share with us their rich culture and philosophy along with a history of the oceans going back to the time before man.

Lily died before he could finish his work but others took it up and after years of arduous labor they finally achieved what they were after. A dolphin who learned to manipulate a typewriter with his nose painstakingly typed out a message to his hippie friends who were waiting with abated breath. The message, which was the culmination of tears of work, read:

"I'm hungry!"

"This is my water."

"Where's the women?"

I guess that's the universal message.

I JUST BOUGHT A WATER PEN!

I just bought a water pen and I'm delighted with it! How long have these been around? How come I never heard of them before? I only discovered it because Enrico, who runs the Sketchcrawl website did a watercolor sketch of it (above). He seemed to awear by it so I made a trip to the art store to see what he was talking about. Man, am I glad I did!

What it is, is a refillable brush pen loaded with water. If you have a little portable set of watercolors like the Windsor & Newton set above then you're all set to color pictures on the move, any time, anywhere. No fuss, no mess, the brush has it's own water. It's easy to clean and easy to remove the old color to make way for a new one.

I like funny subjects so my pictures aren't likely to look like the ones above. I'm just grateful to Sketchcrawl for turning me on to the materials. The sketchbook he recommended looked pretty interesting too. I never used the Mikado pencil.

THEORY CORNER - SCIENCE SECTION

The reason is that the normal human attention span for just about anything is probably only two or three minutes. When the limit is reached people collapse then have to summon the strength to begin a new round of attention. The guy in the drawings wasn't bored, he was actually intensely interested in what was going on around him. He simply reached the end of his attention span.

So far as I know this important phenomenon was discovered by John Krisfalusi. One day I met John for lunch and I found him animating flipbooks on the restaurant table. Most of the books were funny, I wish you could have seen them, but one one book in particular stood out. It showed a guy getting a glassey-eyed stare, collapsing then straightening up again. I asked John what it was and he said he was just animating what the people at the other tables were doing. I stared at those people while John made more flipbooks and that's when I noticed what I drew above. Every single person at every table got a glassey stare and collapsed every few minutes. It's subtle, and I probably would never have noticed it if I hadn't been for the flipbook, but when you know what to look for it's unmistakable.

Interesting, huh?

I WANT TO PODCAST!

The more I hear about podcasting the more I like it. What it amounts to is radio that you can listen to at any time, almost anywhere, with no commercials. That's amazing! I'd love to try that on this site, maybe a 10 or 15 minute podcast once a week in addition to everything else that's here.

What kind of format? Not theories, they come off better in print. I'm dying to tell original stories: horror, sci-fi, comedy, kids'show etc. The first one I want to do would be a romance serial. Man, I can't wait!
I have no idea how to go about this. I got a book from the library, "Podcasting for Dummies" that mentions one way so I'll describe that here and see if anyone knows how to do it better. The method: 1) buy an iRiver T-10 portable mp3 player. It contains a microphone and converts voice recordings to digital mp3 files, 2) use Audacity software (for PCs, free off the internet) to edit, and 3) get an audio card installed in the computer. The book recommends the Audiophile2496 PCI digital Audio Card for Windows XP users. According to the book If you have this stuff you're ready to go.

I'll add that Kali told me about another possibility: use the microphone on any digital camera. I know that Windows XP contains some kind of sound editing program. Maybe that can do what Audacity does. Maybe it's not necessary to buy anything!

BTW, the pictures above are of radio personalities Orson Welles (topmost) and Jean Shepherd (below Welles).

THREE OF MY FAVORITE CLASSIC BOOKS

Here's the book (above) that influenced me more than any other: "Hamlet." I'd read Shakespeare in school and liked it but never gave a second thought to it after the assignments were turned in. One day, when I was 17 or 18, a friend and I took in Olivier's Hamlet at a revival house. I wasn't expecting much, I was just curious to see why other people liked it. Well, the curtain went up and I've never been the same since. When the film ended I could hardly stand. My friend and I walked home in silence. Neither one of us had the words to articulate the new and wonderfull thoughts the film had put in our heads.

I can truthfully say that I've never had a day in my adult life when I didn't think, at least briefly, about this play. I compare every book, film, song, bubble gum comic, and conversation, to it. It's the standard that I use to determine if the media I'm thinking about is "good enough." Actually I had one other experience like this, which was when I saw Clampett's "Great Piggy Bank Robbery" for the first time, but we're talking about books so I'll leave that for another day.

Like everyone else I've been reduced to tears by this story (above) many times. The candlestick scene is one of the greatest in all of literature. The story is especially important to me because I think it revealed my own true self to me. Before I read this I used to imitate what other people did and seemed to have success with, even if it felt hard-edged and out of character to me. After reading the story I realized that I was a Hugo kind of character, sentimental and earnest, and that life strategies that worked for other personality types probably wouldn't work for me. Frankly if I could chose my personality I think I'd pick something different but these are the cards I've been dealt and Hugo taught me to accept them.

"David Copperfield" (above) and Boswell's "Life of Johnson" (below) both taught me the importance of character in all the meanings of that word. One sense requires a layering and a balancing of interesting traits that don't always fit comfortably together. The other sense indicates reliability and guts. I don't have these characteristics but I'm grateful for the push in that direction provided by these books.

I also like the way England is described in these books. You get a sense of a rough, brutal place which is somehow struggling to give birth to something really impressive and worthwhile.

Well, that's it. I should add that I picked these pictures from the internet based soley on the attractiveness of the covers. If you're going to read these books then you should shop around for the the best type styles, editing and translations. For the Boswell book start with the part about a third of the way through where Boswell meets Johnson then, when you've read to the end, go back and read the first third. You might want a slight abridgement of the Hugo story.