Suburban Fantasy

While driving around Carver County (where I work, Shakopee, Savage, etc.) during my lunch hour one day this past summer I turned off the highway to look for some places to get food. I was greeted by a huge development of BigBox and flashy chain stores: a new Best Buy, Panera, Wal Mart, whatever the hell those new DQ restaurants are (grill and chill?) Sam's Club, several gas stations, Chilis, Flingers, and whatever else goes along with these types of developments. Yes, there were the typical housing developments off in the distance where every single unit looks exactly the same with a slightly different tint to its paint but still no trees. The landscape is a funny mix of newly built precast buildings that can be put up in a week with freshly paved parking lots completely engulfing the building making it an island in the maze of distributor roads blended with yet to be developed parcels of land (overgrown-prairie-grass-and-dirt-fields) that serve as excess parking during happy hour.

Scanning the surroundings at a stop sign I thought, why does it have to be this way? Why do we have to create our living environment that forces us to move vast distances to arrive at any particular destination. Aesthetically, it is downright ugly. Sameness, in a word, is what makes it physically unattractive.

So I come off as this urban elitist, bitching about the burbs in all its awfulness. And well... I am. The way cities were built during the post WW2 era was completely unsustainable, but it took 50 years for even a small fraction of people to start realising this is not the way to expand. So we end up with traffic congestion, pollution, health problems, expensive maintenance costs - just to list a few. The fact that I participate in all of this just adds to my detest of the burbs.

It has gotten to the point now where rings of suburbs are swallowing up what were once rural towns creating a strange mix of cardboard housing developments down the street from real small-town civic cores. Its a fantasy, an unreal living arrangement between big city and small town/rural setting.

*It took me 3 weeks to write this cause blogger kept deleting my drafts! Gah!

My Version of Luck

At work and in different groups I am constantly being entered into contests to win things (3 iPods are up for grabs at the moment) but I have never won a prize like this. I still throw my money away on the lottery, but $2 for a 60-80 ticket pot just seems worth it. I think luck for me happens like this: luck doesn't occur by me winning prize drawings at work, luck happens by my vending machine selection not getting stuck in the metal spirals. It isn't about something going right, it's about something not going wrong. I'll take what I can get.

Dropped

It only took me 4 days to be proven wrong about the Colbert presidential run. I'm gonna hang up my political punditry hat for now.

ED

Why do the networks continue to give Ellen Degeneres airtime? Now she is on TBS. In 6 months she'll be on the CW and thats the bottom rung. After that, poof, gone!

Materialistic Buying Spree

I am typing from one of those computers that fits on your lap. I've never had anything like this before - was always a huge fan of the mega fast desktops - so it's taken some time to get used to. I say I've become a bit materialistic over the few weeks, but I really haven't. It started months ago. On returning home from OZ there were three big ticket items I wanted: a digital camera, a laptop and a road bicycle. In the last two weeks I have bid and won the first two from eBay. I should have bought a nice digital SLR camera years ago. Since shooting on my A-1(which was awesome) I have probably spent just as much money on film, developing and accessories (goddamn batteries) as I have on the new camera and one starter and one decent lens. Plus there was no flash on my 35mm - annoying! And no photo review, which if you have seen my flickr page, there are quite a lot of "experimental" shots that would have been nice to take a look at right after, not 8 months later! So now I have fancy electronic gizmos to keep me occupied for the next few weeks - just to figure them out. And so far there has been no cognitive dissonance in regards to these purchases! Next big purchase will be closing out the whole of my student loan. Debt free! I've worked my ass off all summer so I deserve this =)

Colbert Run is for Real!

This could quite possibly be the greatest piss taking of the MSM-picks-the-candidate presidential campaign ever. While the Daily Show's Indecision '04 and Clusterfuck to the Whitehouse are funny and satirical on a high level, Colbert is coming close to genius every night on his show and in his run on the South Carolina ticket (to/on which he has officially applied). The top tier dems were asked about Colbert in a recent debate and Obama responded that he didn't even know he was from South Carolina and challenged Colbert to a grit off. When the camera came back to Colbert he was shovelling grits into his smirked mouth. There was also a nice snubbing of the republican party when he said he"just can't bring myself to write a $35,000 check to the republican party." It costs $2,500 to apply to the demcratic ballot.

I am well looking forward to seeing where he takes this campaign. I hope he cranks it up a notch or two (if that is possible) because there is a lot of work to do to combat the influence on the major news networks.