LEGO America

If you use Google -- and if you're not a Microsoft or Yahoo employee, then you know that you do -- then, at some point, you've noticed that Google sometimes changes the word "Google" on its home page according to the season. For Christmas, it's dressed up for Christmas. For Valentine's Day the other day, there was a picture of a elderly couple in love and apparently sprinting away to some place where they didn't want to be watched. A few weeks ago, I clicked on Google and I noticed that the word "Google" depicted in square letters. I hadn't seen that before, so I looked closer. It turned out that it was the 50th anniversary of the LEGO brick.

This gave me a warm fuzzy because, man, I loved LEGO's when I was a kid -- especially Star Wars LEGO's. First, you'd assemble them according to the directions for whatever Star Wars ship you had bought or received and then, a week later, you'd tear them up and make race cars. The themed LEGO sets were the gateway to true LEGO obsession because, of course, the real attraction of LEGO's is the ability to make whatever the hell you want that you can get little bricks to form. Because you really don't care -- or at least I didn't care -- what color combination is involved with really great LEGO creations, they end up being a random mosaic of colors, kind of like the American melting pot as depicted on ABC's Schoolhouse Rock.

Which brings me finally to my point. In this most interesting of political years, the media is treating we voters -- at least the Democratic ones -- like LEGO bricks. It has become somewhat disturbing to watch television coverage of, and read print articles about, primary election returns because they are focusing so heavily on the demographics of the voters. Last week, Obama won Virginia and the big news was that he had cut into Clinton's "base" with "the female vote" and "the Latino vote." But the coverage didn't stop there: they then broke it down to how did how well with "white Catholics" and "white evangelicals." It's similar when Clinton wins.

It's as if the media sees the multi-colored LEGO creations that these candidates assemble to win in any given state and all that they want to do is smash them on the ground and examine the pieces. The pieces were never the point of LEGO's and are not the point of running an election. Do we really want people who want to be our president to be spending all of their time figuring out how to grind out a slightly higher percentage of the female Latino evangelical vote or the male biracial Hindu vote? Isn't that kind of thinking how we got to where we are today, which no one seems to think is where we should stay?

The joy of LEGO's is in their assembly. The assembly of voters hopefully will be the joy of this election year. The people who are telling us the story of this election need to remember that a little more.

They Killed The Time Lady

The clocks in our house drive me kind of crazy. None of them match. My alarm clock is something like seven minutes faster than The Muse's alarm clock. The clocks in our kitchen are somewhere in between, but they don't match either. Until very recently, I would have resolved these issues by calling the Time Lady.

You know the Time Lady. You could call 767-8900 and she would tell you exactly what time it was down to the ten-second intervals. "At the tone, Pacific Standard Time will be one forty-three p.m. and thirty seconds." No matter what, she always had this very smooth tone, just oozing pleasantness and knowledge. It always reminded of a really nice librarian. I began calling the Time Lady as a kid. It didn't occur to me until much later that the time quotes could have been assembled by a computer from little quotes from the Time Lady. I mean, for her to have recorded each individual ten-second interval, she would have had to record -- according to my calculations -- at least 69,120 time statements (6 10-second intervals per minute x 60 minutes per hour x 24 hours per day x 4 continental American time zones x 2 time alternatives [Standard and Daylight Savings] = 69,120). How could anyone have done that? But her time statements never sounded constructed, unlike the apartment information that the Muse and I got before we moved to the Bay Area ("Off . . . street par-king"). A few years ago, though, I was clicking channels at some point and saw some story in which they actually showed the Time Lady recording her time statements. She looked just as I imagined -- kind of bluish hair, glasses a little out of style. It made me happy.

And now they have killed her. Well, they haven't killed her -- I haven't heard her that the lady herself is dead. The phone company, however, no longer makes her time statements available. If you call 767-8900, you apparently get nothin'. This is wrong, wrong like how Mr. Dry Wit's friend described it as wrong when everyone on Sesame Street -- not just Big Bird -- became able to see Mr. Snuffleupogas. My kids will not be able to call the Time Lady to find out exactly what time is.

Nor will I and this bugs me. We have fewer and fewer common experiences these days. Everyone uses the Web and their My Yahoo pages and their iPods to edit the world per their predilections. The Time Lady, however, could tell everyone what time it was. Now what the hell are we all supposed to rely on? Atomic clocks are not yet available at Sharper Image or in SkyMall, as far as I know. What are the other options to find out exactly what time it is? The little clock in the bottom right-hand corner of your Microsoft Windows screen? Screw that. Bill Gates has his money-grubbing fingers in enough places in our lives. I don't need him to be defining time for me. The government? I'll bet Gates would send Dick Cheney a daily Excel file on everyone who accessed the government's official clock.

Where have you gone, Mrs. Time Lady? A nation turns its lonely ears to you.

Goodbye, Isuzu

There was an obituary in the business section. Isuzu decided to stop selling cars in the US. This made me sad.

The article focused on how Isuzu's "Joe Isuzu" commercials had been something of a phenomenon in the 1980's and how Isuzu had been one of the first companies to sell SUV's You remember Joe Isuzu. He was the oily used-car-salesman-type guy who described Isuzus as being able to go 300 miles an hour, with a little graphic below that said something like "going down a mountain in a hurricane." They were very funny and helped Isuzu sell a lot of cars for a while. Isuzu's Trooper was one of the first SUV's, along with the Jeep Cherokee. As you know, they spawned bigger and bigger SUV's, eventually achieving their ultimate expression. Once every freakin' car company on the planet except Yugo started building SUV's -- hello, Cadillac Escalade and Porsche Cayenne -- no one bought Isuzu Troopers any more and they died a long, slow death.

The end of Isuzu America made me sad because, in my first wave of sports car lust, I really wanted an Isuzu Impulse. Well, I really wanted a Porsche 911 or 944 or a Ferrari of any type, but that wasn't going to happen. An Isuzu Impulse was somewhere near the range of doable. The Impulse really was the spawn of the first generation of the VW GTI, the seminal pocket rocket car. While the first GTI was boxy and the GTI has never achieved artistic excellence, the Impluse was a very nice-looking car, being designed by some acclaimed Italian designer. It had a turbo four, which what my Audi has now. Besies being named "Isuzu," it had enough other kind of goofy features to give it some weird cred. It had pods of controls on either side of the instrument cluster whose height could be adjusted so that you could have your windshield wiper controls just where you wanted them. I didn't want a Toyota Celica -- that was a chick car. I didn't want a Nissan Pulsar -- that thing was butt ugly. The Dodge Daytona was pretty cool, but my parents had had a Dodge Charger that more or less fell to pieces under their feet, so that wasn't happening. I wanted an Isuzu Impulse.

I never got one and not too many other people did either. The GTI lives on, funky cool as ever. The Impulse is dead. When I read the article about Isuzu America's demise, I ran an Autotrader search for any Impulse between 1981 and 2008 within 500 miles of my town. There was not a single one for sale. They have disappeared from the face of the earth, like the dinosaurs and Michael Dukakis. Good luck, Isuzu, I wish you well back in Japan.

There Are Evil People In This World

SPOLIER ALERT: THIS IS NOT A FUN POST.

I'm not a religious guy, owing to circumstances that wouldn't interest you. I believe in a higher power and all, but not being attached to any particular faith and having gotten a UC education, I tend not to buy into a whole lot of handed-down rules other than the Golden one. A law school friend of mine had his own issues with religion, but married a more-or-less lapsed Mormon and found himself struggling with her family's faith. He described his philosophy to me one day as follows: "There are a lot of religions and I don't know which one is right, so I just try to treat people well and do what I think is right." He and his wife eventually divorced, although not over religion, but I have always liked his philosophy.

All of that being said, however, there are times when you just have to recognize that there are evil, evil people out there.

Today's confirmation came from Iraq, where else? I thought that the invasion was a stupid idea at the beginning and now am just one guy in about 85% of the American population that thinks that it was a stupid idea in retrospect. It drives me nuts that my kids are going to be paying for it, financially and possibly geopolitically, in that Iraq has sure managed to get a lot of people angry at our country. What Iraq such a difficult issue, however, is that you can't deny that at least some of the people who our troops are fighting over there are plain evil.

Yesterday, bombs in Iraq killed something like 30 people, the worst daily toll in a while. I saw that squib on my Yahoo home page and it made me queasy. When I read the article in today's paper, I wanted to puke. Apparently, after looking at the severed heads of the presumed bombers and talking to witnesses who had seen them before they exploded, the relevant authorities determined that the bombers actually were female beggars with Downs syndrome who someone had convinced to wear jackets of explosives during their daily begging in the market, someone who then detonated the explosives via remote control. No adjective is sufficient here.

Because of the Mermaid, I am very sensitive to the treatment of people with disabilities. You do not need to have a child with a disability, however, to recognize evil when you see it. I grew up during the Cold War and it was scary, thinking about all of those nuclear-tipped Soviets missiles pointed at us. The Soviets did some bad things, but they never sent planes to crash into our buildings and I don't ever remember hearing about them taking advantage of disabled people as bombers. It's a different thing out there in the world and we just need to recognize it for what it is.