Cloudy with a Chance of Dreary

I love seeing generally credible news sources occasionally succumb to some completely subjective language use.*

Dreary? Really? Can such a word be reasonably employed to quantify precipitation, cloud cover, and temperature?

Not that I can disagree with the pithy poetics of CNN's meteorological assessment: I expect that it will be quite dreary indeed.

*It's worth noting that this forecast lasted only a few hours before replacing "Dreary" with "Showers"— perhaps someone took greater umbrage than yours truly. . .

On Target

March 3, 2005

Whenever I think of Target I think of a few things:*

1. Gemco— In my early childhood Gemco was the store in my neighborhood that went out of business and became a Target. I don't remember there being much difference between them at the time as they both carried Robotix.

2. Some wickedly good advertisement campaigns. 

That half-and-half campaign where an object from the store is divided in half with something fun and natural making up the other half. Brilliant. I still think about it. 

Buying all the ads in an issue of The New Yorker so as to feature ad based illustrations honoring the vibrance of the city. Also brilliant.

3. Those big red cement balls near the entrance of every store?

4. Cheap toilet paper.

*Presented in order of importance.

IKEAescence

February 9, 2005

At IKEA, extinction is seasonal, and every customer enables the demise of some product or other by not choosing. So I can't provide a link to this particular lampshade because it doesn't exist any longer. 

Does that make the lampshade in my living room more or less valuable? Will IKEA's designs become collectible? Will I see them in antique shops fifty years from now and shake my head at the 500% mark-up?  Would hordes of recent undergraduate couples buy, build, and discard this fiberboard furniture with such blind ambivalence if they thought it might generate retirement income? Is it even physically possible for such products to survive fifty years when they are designed for transience?

I'm not going to speculate. When the lampshade receives its final, irreconcilable, dent it will join its kin in the landfill. Future regret may be my fate, but in the end I'll have kept the part that is most valuable to me: the universally decipherable pictogram directions featuring a genderless community of grinning Homo sapiens without hands.