Seen and Heard: A Recent Inventory

Hollywood Brush with Greatness

Last week I was driving down Hollywood Blvd and I passed a double-decker bus. There was a crew of black-haired guys cheering and waving at the characters in the street: Marilyn, Spider Man, Darth; and a few people on the sidewalk were cheering back at them. I looked across the street at some guy with a camera hanging off the roof of the Jimmy Kimmel Building and he was surrounded by a few people chanting Chile, Chile, Chile. I realized the guys on the double-decker were the rescued miners. I waved, beeped my horn and continued on to school.

Metaphor For Life

If you blindfold a person and ask him to walk ½ mile, he can’t walk in a straight line but rather will walk in an overlapping series of circles. Try it.

Bubby’s Teeth

I don’t know how or why it happened but I have my step-Father’s false teeth in my drawer. Lately Harry has been playing with them along with his action figures and Bakugans. I can’t think of anything to say about that, except that in a strange way, this is very comforting to me.

Mr. Social

I read an article about some new facebook application that Mark Zuckerberg created because he believes that writing an email was too much of a “cognitive load” for people used to texting and instant messaging. The cognitive load theory has something to do with the idea that our working memory is limited (duh; and yes I looked that up on Widipedia) but the thing is, if we want our memory to improve shouldn’t we exercise it a bit by giving it something “heavy”. I hate that everything, even conversation, is becoming abbreviated. Maybe it’s less of a load for our brains but isn’t it also less of a connection? Maybe not, but I still think Mark Zuckerberg is on a mission to make us be more like him, i.e. alone in his room, in front of a computer, wishing he had a friend.

Drugs and The Good Old Days

I took my Dad out for coffee recently and we were talking about the good old days when people took drugs and smoked out in the open. He said that on the famous album cover of Abbey Road, with the four guys walking across the street, that the cigarette in Paul's hand has been digitally erased. Weird. I've never taken hallucinogenic drugs, but I think if I blindfolded myself and tried to walk half a mile while listening to this beautiful song, I could recreate the experience.