There are bookstores — I’ve been in them — that are treasure troves crossed with nightmares. You never know what you might find, but that’s primarily because you have no idea where to start looking — and gods help you if you are in search of something specific. There are boxes everywhere, on and under shelves that sag threateningly under the weight of piles of who-knows-what. Card tables are set up haphazardly, forming makeshift aisles. The walls of the maze are made up of even more books, magazines, and VHS tapes that probably have some vintage porn recorded on them.
While we’re certain that the local judges who picked the nominees for the 2007 BAMA awards are intelligent and discerning (and quite possibly on our mailing list), we notice that there’s a certain band in which we play that was left off the list. Not that there aren’t many talented and fun (and quite possibly on our mailing list) musicians deserving of nominations on the ballot, but we feel that any ballot is empty and incomplete without the Exhibit(s) there.
If anyone out there can decipher the French enough to give me a clue on some search terms for wherever this is, you can come with me and CL on our honeymoon. Probably to keep her company at the base, since she’s terribly acrophobic, but still, it’s France… (or is it?)
I sat at the restaurant, one that I’ve frequented for years, and watched the floor manager try to placate the customer who got the new server on Friday night — you know, the one who probably shouldn’t be a server in the first place, but heard that it’s easy money and a good way to score drugs? She’s a little ditzy, definitely not cut out for a high volume weekend night shift, but she’s also a good kid, well-meaning and trying her best. She’s waited on me a number of times, and while I might question her abilities, I certainly can’t fault her attitude.
But this moron — and I say that in the old 1960s way, much the same way that people forty years from now will use the word “retarded” — is apparently suffering an aneurysm over the fact that he got unsweet tea instead of sweet, and that it’s taken five minutes longer than he expected to get his well done steak. His poor kids are shrinking underneath the table, while his wife eggs him on, both of them complaining that they’ve eaten here for a decade, at least, and they’ve never had service this bad, and how that girl doesn’t belong in a restaurant, much less a fine establishment such as this.
As my work with third party web designers has expanded over the past few months (prior to now, I did the design work — along with the development — whereas now I’m primarily working to implement other people’s designs into a content management system), I’ve started seeing more and more one of the primary downfalls of the web as a medium to date. More and more, I’m coming to realize that designers (by and large) are either trained and trapped completely in a static medium (print, by and large) or — hopefully not the case — utterly incapable of thinking in dynamic terms.
