On Poetry and Autobahns

I'm still having strange dreams, but I think I'm ignoring them better now. Last night I dreampt about Taylor and a trip I went on to see him. Cable is a lovely mental anesthetic. If Karl Marx were alive, he would have said that television is the opiate of the masses. I watched a tv show yesterday about the autobahn. They made a big deal about the fact that it actually has fewer fatalities than american highways, but only made passing mention of the superior german cars, the mandatory individual driving training for a licecnce, the 18 year old minimum for a licence, and the fact that a driver's licence is $1,500 over there. See: here I am, writing in a blog about what I'm watching on TV.

Today we had another "happy hour" at work, where we stopped work an hour early and went downstairs for snacks and beer and looked over a lot of the old work that DWL did in the valley, including a slideshow from 20 years back. DWL's been working in the valley since the 1950's. The renderings they had, careful line drawings in ink, renderings in markers, we don't learn anymore. The chinese would say that we've lost the qi in the computer renderings. In that way, I think we're really missing out. Sure, give me some thousand dollar software with the latest light rendering engines and radiosity controls. It may be hyper-acurate, down to the color bouncing off of a colored wall onto perfectly rendered water, but it's still lacking that human touch. We're not taught drawing skills in school anymore, but really, it takes too much time. We're specializing in design, and the aestethic side of the profession is suffering, which is probably why we're seeing the rise of the interior designer.

Picked up some fresh mozzarella and tomatos for dinner with a fresh loaf of garlic bread. The cheese was good, but all my knives were dull and mostly smashed the tomatos. Mom got the tickets to Dubai, so I'm going there and then to Argentina. If you throw in the Maldives as a side trip, I'll set foot on four continents within the span of three weeks. It's hard to get more global than that.