the blog of Dec. 16, 2005

Citrus-flavored Listerine

I must admit that the new citrus-flavored Listerine caught my eye, and in the land of theory it works. But I'm sad to report that in practice it doesn't live up to expectations. It tastes like one of the artificially-flavored medicines I was given in the 1970's, possibly for a cold. It's in no way as pleasant as say baby aspirin or chewable vitamin C.

Lisa disagrees. She likes it. "It's got an interesting flavor" she says.

In any case we're stuck with two bottles of the stuff, since we got the two-for-one special at Target. That alone should have been a red flag that all was not well in citrus-Listerine land. I'm looking forward to going back to "classic" Listerine. This is their "New Coke" moment.

the blog of Dec. 12, 2005

Where's the "Reverence for Life" when you need it?

The scheduled execution of Tookie Williams casts a pall over this entire evening, regardless of what one does. Yesterday I finally got around to watching the "Downfall" dvd from Netflix, and that well-made but exceedingly heavy film is still haunting me. After seeing Hitler under a microscope, I can't help but feeling that Schwarzenegger, the other oddball-Austrian-turned-statesman-of-a-much-larger-land, has some nerve to use his power to send a man to his death. It would be much better if he used this opportunity to affirm a culture of life.

The USA treasures capitol punishment as though it were an endangered species. Modern Europe on the other hand forbids it. I lean heavily toward the European position, but I do wonder exactly how they deal with their homicidal maniacs (they do have some). If they have figured out the answer -- life in prison? cutting-edge rehab? -- then the USA should eagerly embrace it. But what specifically the Europeans do with their criminals, apart from running a more civil society that reduces the level of crime in the first place, seems to be missing from the conversation.

The paradox of the European position came home to me while watching "Downfall". While it's great that they've done away with capital punishment, it wasn't that long ago that they had something worse, namely casual and random murder and suicide on a scale that I don't think America has ever seen, even in the Wild West or during the Civil War. Could it be that Europe's centuries of bloodbath have reached a saturation point that enables them to evolve to the next level?

abandoned

These nearby abandoned buildings appear to be the remains of a labor camp.

life may be a bowl of cherries...

...but are these ripe?

it's a cherry

The tree with the puffy white flowers (featured in the blog of 4/5) is definitely a cherry.

the shapes of the states

As a geographer I couldn't help noticing the new book How the States Got Their Shapes by Mark Stein at a local public library. It's full of great stuff... Who remembers that New Netherlands was bound by the Connecticut River on the east and the Delaware River on the west, but included Delaware? By extension, Vermont was a part of New York state, and Protestant Delaware refused to be annexed by Maryland. Instead it was annexed by Pennsylvania so that the latter could secure access to the sea. In a similar land grab, Nevada was extended to the Colorado River, pissing off Arizonans. And who recalls that Massachussetts, Connecticut, and Georgia all extended to the Pacific Ocean? This is a fun book, highly recommended. (image from Wikimedia Commons)

Sooty Shearwaters

I was driving around listening to a local radio station that made passing reference to Alfred Hitchcock's The Birds being inspired by a local event. I'd never heard of such a thing and was intrigued. I knew the film was shot in Bodega Bay, just north of San Francisco; what I didn't know, what took me my entire life to learn, was that Alfred Hitchcock's primary residence as of 1940 was Scotts Valley, a little town up in the Santa Cruz mountains. This explains why some of his films were shot in Northern CA. Apparently in 1961 flocks of sickened Sooty Shearwaters carpeted the seaside town of Capitola, crashing kamikaze style into anything that got in their way. Hitchcock read about this bizarre event and weaved it into his 1963 film. (image from Wikimedia Commons)