Alan Gutierrez

Photogamer: In your pockets by Kenn Christ.

He is at Fair Grinds. He wants a Times-Picayune. There is fifty cents in his jacket pocket for a Times-Picayune. He knows this. He recalls putting the two quarters into his jacket pocket for the purpose of purchasing a Times-Picayune from the paper box in front of Fair Grinds. His jacket is draped over the chair that sits across from him at the table where he has set himself up with his laptop to write. He gets up to fetch the two quarters. He looks in one pocket and does not find them. He looks in the second pocket and doesn’t find them. He looks in his pants pockets, but he knows the quarters are not there. He looks in the inner pocket in the jacket, but there is none. He looks in one jacket pocket a second time and does not find them. He looks in the second jacket pocket a second time and does not find them.

He then picks the jacket up off the back of the chair, swings it over his shoulders. As his hands exit the tunnel of the sleeves and just as the jacket comes to rest on his shoulders, he reaches into his right jacket pocket and grabs both quarters between his thumb and two foremost fingers. He folds his shoulders and doffs his jacket and returns it to the back of the chair, cradling the quarters in his palm.

He looks at the quarters and it occurs to him that logically, he could have just scavenged his jacket pockets a third time as the jacket hung from the back of the chair.

At that point he understood something about doing without thinking, but he soon forgot it.

This had me laughing out loud. A great sense of humor bas Barack Obama. From Why Republicans Fear Obama by Byron York at the National Review Online.

“You notice that people who’ve been in Washington too long, they don’t talk like ordinary folks,” Obama began. “We had this debate in Las Vegas, and somebody asked me, ‘What are your weaknesses?” So I said, ‘Well, you know, I don’t keep track of paper that well, I’m always losing paper, my desk is a mess.’ And then they asked the next two candidates. And one candidate says, ‘Well, my biggest weakness is I’m just so passionate about helping poor people.’ And then the other one says, ‘I’m just so impatient to help the American people solve their problems.’ So then I realize well, I wish I’d gone last and then I would have known.”

I was reading Christopher Johnston today and he linked to this very lovely story Expert networking techniques from a playground-savvy 9-year old.

According to this Girl and Cat cartoon Large Mediums found via David Weinberger, television did not become conscious of itself until the Simpsons. I recall a Road Runner cartoon that was oddly self-reflective. Two boys in a Road Runner cartoon watching Road Runner cartoon, eventually speaking with Wile E. Coyote through the screen about his fetish for Road Runners. At seven, it struck me as out of the box.

Cats In Sinks, a Flickr photo pool.

For those of you tuneing in from beyond the bayou, here’s a little more Chocote City for you. It’s Kalypso and Ray Nagin with Kalypso’s take on our city’s diversity.

Wandering out of 910 Esplanade today with Becky Houtman in tow, off to see the opening of the new Farrington Smith Gallery, when, to my surprise, I encoutered a letter carrier, with my letter box opened. I have no mailbox key, so this was an fleeting opportunity to check my mail. I produced my driver’s license, the one recently aquired for the sake of domestic travel, the one that says that I live at 910 Esplanade Ave Apt 5, New Orleans, LA.

She begins to extract letters and magazines, compacted into the bin for apartment. They’d been mashed down, the letters at the bottom were soaking from today’s rain.

Nothing had my name on it. My motor voter registration did not take apparently, as I expected to at least have recieved my new voter registration card. The only message I had that belonged to me was, in fact, addressed to resident. It was to inform me of the arrival of a new neighbor, a sex offender.

The letter carrier asked that I give her the letters that were not addressed to me. Becky and I fretted, and tought to get a plastic bag for the dripping wad of mail, but my carrier was ready with a rubber band. She inisted that first class mail be returned to the post office to be forwarded to the indended recipient. The letters were flattened and banded. As I handed her a particularly soggy magazine, she addressed my quizzical look by saying, “We know how to dry them out.”

And so we parted, our representative of the United States Post Office having given us a sense that all was right with the world. The rules attached to a particular class of postage were being adhered to strictly, in the lower French Quarter or New Orleans.

At the Goal Free Living Blog by Stephen Shapiro blog there is an entry about a Kit Kat commercial that tells a classic story of life in different hemispheres. Thank you Steven for hosting The Mexican Fisherman story as told by Nestlé Rowntree.