Wednesday, January 14, 2009

January 14, 2009 - Coffee Break - Kansas City Missouri




My most popular posting continues to be the one on umbrellas. And why is that? Because most Internet users are rather unsophisticated users – obviously your are not one of them, the  less sophisticated are you, as I see you are reading this. The Internet is largely used for two purposes – to find and stay in touch with other people who will agree with you (stroking your ego) or to shop for snobby luxury items (some call this making a fashion statement). So of all the hits on my two sites, it has been shopping for premium umbrellas that has landed searchers here ninety percent of the time. One individual was looking for the Christo umbrella project and two were looking for a Theodore Roethke poem about umbrellas.

And then I wrote a piece about Premium brands– cat food, wine, coffees etc. and it got no hits at all. There is something about umbrellas though! So what about galoshes? A pair of SWIMS will set you back two-hundred bucks or you can buy tote overshoes at any five and dime for hardly anything at all – but who is going to go on the Internet to shop for totes.
And them Wellies (Wellingtons) are such an item of fashion – seriously – no 19th Century country English gent would be without em. And Monty Python made a lot of mileage in em. And then there was Gadot and his four buckle artics. Etiquette says that there is no way to remove them gracefully (teetering there out of balance) and they must be considered gauche – better to wear rain boots (NEOS) and carry a pair of shoes into which you can change (and I don’t see the difference between quietly sitting down and removing your toe rubbers and having a huge pair of Wellies sitting under your desk – why is one unfashionable and the other not).

So I am working on an essay about gumshoes (and Gummo Marx the unknown brother was named for them as he could sneak up silently – see the connection with Sam Spade?). And I am certain there is a lot of poems on em too and maybe Oldenberg even sculpted them – man o man look at them dickersons.
The guide reduces it all
To something that is consumable
A list of the best
Ranking it all
Listing the coveted
It is the discontented
That need these lists
And a guidebook is just
An extended list
There are a lot of them
Let us list some of them!


In art the subsconscious sometimes comes percolating through without warningRobert W Butler

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