Yo, Joe

“Dressed as a G.I. Joe series character, Jessica Jaszczak makes a call outside the exhibit hall on the first day of the Comic-Con International 2008 convention, in San Diego.”
(AP Photo/Denis Poroy, July 24, 2008)

Those of us old enough to remember the first few series of small G. I. Joe action figures and the 30-minute weekly commercial that used to run for them will recognize Miss Jaszczak’s outfit as a somewhat slinkier variation on a standard Cobra footsoldier uniform. (The actual uniforms looked more like simple fatigues, and there were no female Cobra troopers, although the original figures were armed with AKs.)

It struck me as interesting, because the Cobra organization was labeled as an "international terrorist organization." In "reality" Cobra was more of a private army of witless minions (with a remarkable behind-the-scenes logistics organization supplying them with advanced military hardware), doing the bidding of the buffoonish Cobra Commander. They never managed to really endanger anyone, and never seemed to have any real political demands. It was all very "Dr. Evil," and a very different, and non-threatening, understanding of terrorists - idiotic clowns whose plots could be foiled in under half an hour by America's heroic defenders.

Dressing up like a modern terrorist, making terrorist action figures or putting terrorists in children's television shows would be considered almost an act of terror itself in today's paranoid environment. Which is a pity. If we put Al-Queada on a level with Cobra, we could get back to living our lives.

Fifty Pictures

New pictures posted.

Or, you can check them out in the Slideshow on the right-hand-side of the page. This is one (and perhaps the only) area where Microsoft's Live Spaces is better than Blogger - you can have multiple slideshows, and the reader may pick between them. But it's a devil of a lot easier to load up large Blogger slideshows than Spaces slideshows.

The Culture of Debt

David Brooks has a thoughtful commentary in the International Herald Tribune about how we, as a nation, drifted from a culture of thrift to a culture of debt. In it he draws a broad outline of how the social story surrounding money and buying things has changed.

"Each time an avid lender struck a deal with an avid borrower, it reinforced a new definition of acceptable behavior for neighbors, family and friends. In a community, behavior sets off ripples. Every decision is a public contribution or a destructive act."
David Brooks

But you could also say that each deal reinforces a new definition of required behavior, in that, once credit begins to fuel a certain class of purchase, that allows prices to move out of reach of most people's cash on hand, thus requiring that more and more people purchase on credit. While this allows for products (and perhaps services should be included in this as well) to become more feature rich, it also allows for a certain level of inefficiency and higher margins to creep in over time. Automobiles may be a good example of this - the fact that most cars are purchased on credit has allowed prices to increase much faster than incomes. Modern cars have all sorts of whiz-bang features, many of which would be too costly to include if people were to by cars with cash as a matter of course. By the same token most, if not all, large automakers have finance arms (Ditech, for instance, is part of GMAC, if I recall correctly) that allow them to derive revenue from financing the cars they sell.

Photography for the Masses

The great thing about digital photography is that it's accessible to everyone with enough money to buy a small camera. Granted, a half-decent digital camera is going to set you back more than a half-decent film camera, but you don't have the recurring costs of film and processing to worry about. It's also virtually free to experiment, and learn how to use your equipment. (When you've got to have film developed, sucking is a time consuming and expensive process.)

So guys can take glamor shots of their girlfriends down by the shores of Puget Sound on a bright sunshiny day. And I get to people-watch. Everybody wins.

Peek-a-Boo

The face of the Siren peeks out over the clock tower down at Starbucks headquarters.