20 verbs

Twenty Verbs to describe my day:

1. awoke
2. ate
3. drove
4. talked
   
5. prayed
6. thanked
7. listened
8. watched
9. heard
10. walked
11. touched
12. washed
13. brushed
14. communed
15. sang
16. napped
17. meditated
    
18. saw
19. learned
20. read

You?

litteroti: a sentence

Walking from near the tip of Tipperary Hill, I wended my way walking down Whittier, onto leaf-laden Lowell, onto sunny South Wilbur in front of Saint John's and its onion domes and on through West Genesee Street, its largest former car dealers shuttered, showing us the lonely signs of the Great Recession, ending my pedestrian promenade at Freedom of Espresso on Solar Street, but not before seeing the detritus of American consumption, the litteroti of careless consumerism: cigarette cartons (why so many boxes of Newport?), a cereal box, a can of Arizona ice tea, lottery tickets, a squashed plastic water bottle, and so much more lessening the landscape, aching for trash cans either missing or brimming over.

the landscape of wealth

". . . all those expensive citadels which simply to see triggered wonder at the immense wealth in America, at the vast depth on its bench. Who were these people? How could they have gotten so much money? How could there be so many of them? Their homes made his mouth water. They looked like fraternity houses, country clubs, embassies. Tudorial, stately, with high green hedges and curving driveways like painterly exercises in perspective. Blue Lake Michigan sucking up to their backyards. Attached to their carriage houses and wide garages were basketball hoops, gleaming cat's cradles of white net, taut and tapered as hourglasses. He imagined lean, expert girls in blue jeans, home from Radcliffe, Holyoke, Smith, setting them up, pushing them in, playing Horse and 21, with their tan, continent boyfriends who had once been pages in the Senate. The cropped lawns, green as felt on gaming tables, made him gulp, and an occasional sound from the swimming pool of splashing water like polite applause made his heart turn over. Lake Michigan and a pool. . . . "

-- from "The Condominium" in Searches & Seizures Three Novellas by Stanley Elkin, copyright 1973

Alas, what would Stanley Elkin write today if he were alive to describe our landscape of wealth or poverty or anything in-between?

One-Stop Folderol?

"I have never, ever heard a customer expressing the faintest wish for having everything delivered out of one hand." -- Léo Apotheker, chief executive of the German software giant SAP, as quoted in The New York Times, August 10, 2009

I love reading this counterintuitive declaration.

It provocatively questions a standard marketing and selling point: one-stop shopping, all services under one roof.

I mean, he has a great point.

Wasn't it actually intuitively obvious to us all, all along?

Deep down, we know that the firms who promise such sweeping excellence typically excel -- truly excel -- in niche areas.

Message in a Bottle

Sales of bottled water are declining, barely.

Bottled water. I remember having a Perrier or Poland Spring or S. Pellegrino now and then years ago, as a treat.

Now phobic consumers buy bottled water under the illusion they are drinking better water than tap water.

What a fraud! It's totally amazing that people buy bottled water, thinking they are acting healthier and being environmentally friendly.

Consider all the oil used to make the plastic. Consider where all those plastic bottles end up.

What a travesty.

Plus, tap water is exceedingly less expensive.

Truthiness

"It is not important why a man tells the truth. It is important that he is telling it. Even if he has one foot over the abyss."

-- Matvei Gonopolsky, Russian journalist, as quoted in The New York Times, June 10, 2009

Oh, Brother, Where Art Thou?

It's a mystery. No one seems to know for certain the whereabouts of the wildly brave, bold, human, patriotic Tank Man of Tienanmen Square.

Will we ever learn?