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Park Planter Figurines - The 'Gay Couple'
I kind of like Tristan Zimmerman's new planter figurine depicting two men engaged in the unspeakable vice of the Greeks. Zimmerman's various figurines depict people in city parks and are mostly named after whatever act their engaged in. For example, the mugger mugging someone is named "The Mugger" and the flasher flashing someone is named "The Flasher". Unfortunately, the name given to this figurine is "Gay Couple". Naming it this implies that the act of blowing strangers in a public park equates to being gay. If the couple'd been man/woman, I'm confident Zimmerman wouldn't have called the figurine "Heterosexual Couple". Okay, not to put too fine a point on this but...there is one other figurine of a salesman contempating directional signs, and he is called "Lost Salesman". Of course he's named this because his accoutrements (briefcase in one hand, overcoat in another) indicate he's a salesman, and his staring at directional signs indicates he's lost—hence, the Lost Salesman. But in "Gay Couple," the mere act of one man going down on another man doesn't necessarily indicate that they're either gay or a couple. In fact, they're more likely strangers cruising, or one's a hustler. But a couple, probably not. Couples have sex in their homes. And hustlers often aren't gay, they're just doing what brings money.
Sears
When I was a kid in the '70s, living in a small town in Florida, Sears was a really big deal. It's where we bought nearly everything including our home appliances, furniture, electronics, toys, tools and even clothes. I hated the clothes—called 'Toughskins,' ugh—but the rest seemed good, moderately inexpensive and always available when needed. But that was the '70s and Sears was the only store in town. Before the internet. But instead of seeing the internet as a worldwide market opening up to Sears, they've stayed frustratingly stuck in '70s brick and mortar mode, as if their only competition were the J.C. Penny at the other end of the mall. In the case of my defunct filter, Consumer Reports gave a Sears product its highest rating. Sears should have at least found a way to exploit that so that when someone googles 34551 (a lousy name, btw), the customer immediately finds a direct link to the product on the Sears site. At this point the top results mainly gives links to websites where people are complaining about no longer being able to find the product or its filters. So, this blog isn't meant to be Sears' obituary. Others more qualified than I will write that, and they'll detail every grim symptom that led to the company's death. I'm just a friend of the family who wishes Sears had awakened years ago to the need to become better in so many different ways, and thereby would have survived the shifting economy. And I still want my filter.
Rockford Files Theme Song At first I thought I was being sentimental when I listened to the Rockford Files theme song and loved it. But after a few more listens I appreciated that the synthesizer in this piece is amazing. It takes an otherwise murky '70s construction of guitars, drums and harmonica and makes it shine. Of course energized, optimistic synths would eventually become hallmarks of much mainstream '80s music, but in this it's the exception, and it makes a rather mediocre piece of music great.
J. Crew
The current line includes these paint-splattered pants that cost $285. Like stone washed pants designed to look "lived in," these give the impression of having been "worked in". A weekend spent painting the hurricane shutters in Cape Cod, perhaps. J. Crew describes them this way:
Stranger I find it absurd when men talk about about being happy (or not) with their sexual orientations. What they should say is whether or not they're happy in this society—meaning living among other people. That said , I'm sure I'd be unhappy regardless of my sexual orientation because people in general are not the kind of people I find myself wanting to be with. Physically, yes, other guys are attractive. But beyond the physical their souls are usually romantically unappealing to me. It's as though my sexual orientation has a subset: sexual-spiritual orientation. And in that, my kind rarely exist. Gay or straight, I'm a stranger in a strange land.
The Return of the Blog Since deciding to resume this blog I've been struggling to nail down why I'm doing it now after three years of silence. One reason I quit blogging in 2005 is because the blogosphere was just starting to feel crowded. When I started in 2001, it was—at least to me—still new and undetermined what the blogosphere would mean personally, culturally and politically. By 2003 Google had purchased blogger.com, and by 2004 Merriam-Webster chose the word "blog" as its word of the year. In August of 2005 Technorati reported that a new blog was being created every second. Every second. In the same month I quit. I tried to blog a little in the gated communities like livejournal and vox, but it just wasn't much fun anymore. That's one reason, but nut sufficient. After all, only a superficial jackass would quit something he loves just because his neighbors are doing it too. The truer reason was because I no longer felt a strong urge to talk into the open, anonymous web. I had a boyfriend and friends, and my words were increasingly more spoken than written, and they were finding resonance with my friends, and I was finding reciprocity. I suppose I was asking why I should talk to the void when a good friend was nearby? And now, though my life in one sense is in a happy trajectory upward, I've somehow managed to lose the friends, the boyfriend, the like-knows-like souls that used to surround me. Is a blog a diary? Is it notes sent to no one but hoping, like bread cast upon the water, that they will return? Perhaps in that question lies the blogosphere's eternal newness. There will always be corporate blogs and war blogs, but it's the personal blogs that started this sphere, and what is personal will be forever undetermined. I blog to no one about only one 'thing': myself. For some reason that's still important. And I've missed doing it for too long.
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Looking for a new water filter, I find that Consumer Reports gives its highest rating to the Kenmore (Sears) 34551. With this kind of publicity and praise, you'd expect Sears to promote the filter, but in fact Sears didn't even keep the 34551 in production. It's the sort of nonsensical failure one's come to expect from the company that has so badly failed to transition to an online economy. 
From time to time J. Crew reintroduces what could be described as their Douchebag Line of overpriced clothes meant to appeal to the clueless and wealthy—or at least those who like to pose as clueless and wealthy. (It's a surprisingly popular pose.)