As car manufacturers like Honda and Cadillac place increasingly larger and larger corporate logos/ornaments on their cards, there is a small but growing trend of car Logo Removal. I find it kind of fascinating and I’ve only really seen it in Bed-Stuy, of course. Some of the larger SUVs, in particular (and no, well, these are not cars), will have tricked out, customized front grills and very clean, logo-less skins. Most of these vehicles are painted black. These look very, very wicked, for some reason and my reasoning is as follows:
1. The car is anonymous in the way that the Secret Service employs for its automotive machines. The car looks like a conspiracy on wheels.
2. The car looks less recreational and all about business while at the same time, it defies big business identity, corporate culture, and visual recognition. It’s small-time, mob capitalism which we are not supposed to know enough about.
3. The car is cared for personally and in a real sense, the car is re-owned or re-captured from industry itself. This ironically makes the car appear sinister and romantic, cold and palpable, smart and aloof.

Sometimes I’ll read a book to my daughter which will show a large, usually uppercase, letter next to a picture or ideogram, such as an apple or a cat. So, an “B” will be next to a bird and an “Z” will be next to a “zebra.” Nothing interesting. But when one “reads” the book, one says “B is for bird, C is for cat, D is for dog, E is for Elephant” and so on. Why is the letter “for” something? How did it originate that a letter is “for” a word? Shouldn’t it be “Bird starts with B, Cat starts with C, Dog starts with D, Elephant starts with E” — or is this just non-alliterative and unfriendly. I think a lot of our language works this way, whether it’s childhood-related or not; a series of words stick and they are used to make sense of the world regardless of their internal logic. I just wish I was more conscious of this in daily, speaking life.

I’m not sure if I live in Brooklyn, New York or São Paulo, Brasil, what with all this rain.

Mark Bowden, who writes for the Philadelphia Inquirer, and wrote Black Hawk Down has much to say about the current state of Iraqi mis-affairs in this article: U.S. has gained little if Bush lied about reason for war.

I certainly don’t mean to be an apologist for Mr. Bush, though that is what it sounds like, perhaps, in the posting below. Rather, I really believe that Mr. Bush and his strategists have their finger on history in a way that the Democrats have totally abandoned—what do the Democrats stand for in the context of their social experiments, cultural gravitas, and general disgruntlement with their own kind? Do the Dems still believe in the social contract, in a humane society replete with healthcare for all and strong employment? It’s not clear and unless they change their too subtle political ways and means, Mr. Bush will have four more years to work his magic.
Underlining all of this, for me, is that Bush and Friends know how to use (or misuse) history for their own ends (e.g. Bush on the flight deck, Bush at Auschwitz, Bush as Ike) in ways that runs circles around the well-meaning but semiotically inept Democrats.

In a little-acknowledged story, President Bush visited Auschwitz-Birkenau yesterday for about an hour and a half. I’ve had the bad fortune of visiting that site three times while I lived in Krakow. While 1.5 hours is very little time to see this incredibly large complex of Nazi death machinery, it is historically interesting to watch Mr. Bush mildly connect the dots between Saddam Hussein and the Nazis. I know that his press secretary, Ari Fleischer (who lost family in World War II), won’t go so far as to say this, but Bush is clearly setting the stage for shifting political weight to Poland and those countries most recently subjugated to Fascism and Communism; this inherently, of course, makes France and Germany (and Russia) seem violently out of touch with contemporary human rights abuses and American and Soviet involvement in saving the continent from itself between 1943 and 1945. With activists very active in Geneva right now, my prediction is that this will be one of the more important G7/G8 meetings in history.

I’ve known for about a year that I would need a new workhorse in one year and I think that day has arrived. What’s strange about it is thinking about whether the planned obsolescence is mine or Apple’s. They say that 3 years is the limit for most computers, and I’ve seen this in so many cases, but how much has my own input into this computer affected its output? Did I type just one too many times on that Return key thus making the processor weary? Or was it that time I restarted four times in one day just to try out some new piece of crazy pixellation software? The question essentially boils down to nature or nurture; or, rather, technology and usage.

While I didn’t incorporate my company in Delaware, I do wish I could get a car license plate from the Great State of Delaware, which produces plates that beat anything else out there in the US. Their plate designs are simple, truly elegant forms, matte printed and they just look very base. Perhaps more interestingly, there is a fantastic website called LICENSE PLATES OF THE WORLD (their bold, my bad) which shows beautiful license plates from such places as Bhutan and North Korea. This is a phenomenal reference site.

After dinner, we all went out to the large pond near us to look at ducks, and lo and behond we saw two large swans swimming towards us. What was interesting was that tucked between them and barely noticable at first, were six baby swans, probably less than 1 week old. It looked like a little like this times six. They were grey, small, and very cognizant little birds. The father, on the other hand, was white, large, and very belligerant. The mother led the way.

A good 12:12 am weblog post: Earth is beautiful and this can be easily proven by a photograph taken 86 million miles away.