~ it is bad enough that you emptied two months’ worth of comics from our subscription box, including the issue covering the return of the black uniform, but it was it necessary to patronize us by shouting to the clerk from across the store, ‘show them where it says to come in and pick up books.’? we are aware that we need to physically appear in the store in order to pick up our books. after shopping at your store for two years, we were not under the impression that we would somehow receive the books into our possession without taking any action to place our hands on them. after you discarded our books, we had made plans to never enter your store again, but as your clerk had a new subscription sheet waiting for us at the counter, we felt obliged to fill it out. so, enjoy holding those books for three months before discarding them, as well.

~ regarding litter, guns, and philadelphia’s insistence on thin whitewash over deep itreatment nstead of painting a mural of trees next to the empty lot on 47th, why not just plant some real trees in the empty lot on 47th?

~ what we mean to say is, the enormous amounts of garbage that litter the streets and sidewalks of philadelphia – ‘cheetos’ bags, beer bottles, chicken bones – are a larger threat to a suitable quality of life than is the possibilty that a teenager might have a firearm. if teenagers aren’t swayed by the consequences of robbing or shooting someone, they aren’t going to be dismayed by the thought of being fined if they caught with a gun. they aren’t using guns because guns are available; they are using them because they have no other prospects around here. on top of that, frisking people in the streets is unconstitutional. cleaning up pizza boxes and campaign signs in the park – and picking up recycled materials from residences once a week – is not.

~ also, to the white house, if jimmy carter is ‘increasingly irrelevant’, then he wouldn’t be on the front page, and you wouldn’t be commenting on him. the fact that you go to the press with statements on him proves you have defeated your own argument.

~ baltimore quote: ‘if michael nutter didn’t want to be an asshole, instead of stopping and frisking citizens, he’d make it illegal to leave unsolicited pizza fliers on everyone’s door.’
to continue this trajectory: nutter, along with all the losers, should also be forced to personally walk through the city and pick up every one of these campaign signs that are littering public property such as clark park, telephone poles, and thoroughfare medians.

~ whilst the rest of the nation publickly mourns, so that images of their compassion might show up in yahoo! news’ most popular photos, why does the angry red planet demonstrate its own insensitivity with ‘crass’ manipulated images and anonymous posts to messageboards? one might note our affinity for satirical response to an obvious charade, but our attempts to puncture the u.s. facade of feigned sensitivity are eclipsed by this fossil from arizona:

In response to an audience question about military action against Iran, the Arizona senator [John McCain] briefly sang the chorus of the surf-rocker classic “Barbara Ann.”

“That old, eh, that old Beach Boys song, Bomb Iran,” he said in jest Wednesday, chuckling with the crowd. Then, he softly sang to the melody: “Bomb, bomb, bomb, bomb, anyway, ah …” The audience responded with more laughter. –msnbc.com

Granted he is an out of touch coot who doesn’t know what condoms are, but the fact that audience ‘laughs’ at the notion of bombing some folks arbitrarily suggests, or proves, that secretly laughed when they heard that a man named Cho shot down some kids in some town of which they’ve never heard.

~ r.i.p. kurt vonnegut

“Tiger got to hunt,
Bird got to fly;
Man got to sit and wonder, ‘Why, why, why?’

Tiger got to sleep,
Bird got to land;
Man got to tell himself he understand”

-Bokonon, Cat’s Cradle

so it goes.

~ special thanks to l’homme moderne [w] for shipping our rhodia blocs and our cafetiere and coffee tumbler. we have always held the cafetiere in contempt, perhaps because they look too cheap to produce decent coffee. however, upon discovering no coffee machine of any type at chez vidal, we needed to provide our own and made sure to find the cheapest item in barbes, for sure, but this machine proved surprisingly fun and simple to use—certainly simpler than the french press. we’ve run a dozen cups through it in the past 2 days; who would have figured that we would turn on our beloved french press?

the cafetiere could not have arrived too soon, as we just learned this week that coffee produced with the french press is extremely high in ‘cafestol’; we do not know what the fuck that is, but we’ve been assured that it is ‘bad’ for human health.

we feel dirty using the cafetiere; it seems fit only to serve after spending the night amongst apple cores and rotten madelines on the tile floor in a dark tenement behind gare du nord – filled with chain store robusta, heated on a hot plate, and served in a chipped plastic bowl.

maybe we should just invest in a smaller french press, so we aren’t brewing 2 liters at a time, which is the main problem when drinking alone.

~ unlike some workers, we are not embarrassed to show our personal images; have a look at our late visit to london and paris.

~

booty.

~ happy 99th to oscar niemeyer

~

my first pair of paths and a hat to match