To buy or not to buy?

Suppose your income was $200 a month and you had a family to support (including aging grandparents and parents who had no where else to go). Suppose life was tough, entertainment options were few, winter nights were long. Suppose you were used to buying things “under the counter” as it were, and you lived in a country where the word “copyright law” has not been in existence for the past 70 years.

Alright, supposing all the above, would a legitimately produced CD, priced at $10, or DVD priced at $20 cause you to turn away from the market of pirated copies, selling at $4 each? Showing titles that are more recent than what you can legitimately have access to? And appearing with ready translations into the language of your choice? You would do that? ARE YOU SURE??

The Times reports (here) that the American Film Industry is now trying to fight piracy in Russia by lowering prices of DVDs (cutting them back to $10 -$15). Still, it seems futile. I cannot imagine a person who earns that little spending so much just to feed the American Film Industry its rightful share of profit. I’m not saying that this is right, I am simply dubious that the Film Industry will make even an infinitesimal dent in piracy with this move.

Perennial quest to understand life around me

Early on in the blogger game, I puzzled over an intriguing bumper sticker (on Bukowski). That speculation proved to be the single most provocative thing I ever wrote here – it inspired pronouncements of anger, admiration, boredom, impatience, and confusion from all corners of the world. It was riveting to be in the midst of such controversy.

This time my walk through a parking lot made me spot yet another bumper sticker that I found puzzling. I do NOT anticipate a slew of emails over this one, though I must say, I am at wit’s end as to the meaning or purpose of the following sign:

“Visualize whirled peas”

I have two hints:
1. the person is not announcing anything of a politically conservative tenor since all other bumper stickers on this car were rather left-leaning.
2. a search on the Net produced the picture I've included here. But does this really help us any? I'm confused.

UPDATE: A reader unscrambled this one within seconds: World peace. Whirled Peas. Ah. It had nothing to do with sustainable agriculture after all.

Trying to make the best of "life in the suburbs," part 2

In a February post, I rhapsodized about the household across the street and their creative genius in bringing out (on a drab winter day) a stockpile of pink flamingos, to be arranged haphazardly in the snow by the children who live there.

Yesterday the entire family was hanging out in the front yard (I love this about them; only two households on the entire long block of some 30 houses, actually use their front yard for hanging out purposes) and so I finally quit being the voyeur and went over to introduce myself (they are fairly new arrivals to our neighborhood).

After this first encounter, I am convinced that they are indeed great people, creative, fun, terrific in all respects. But the flamingos? Alack, alas, these are not their birds. They do not have a single pink flamingo. Some service brought them around for a week, to celebrate the birthday of the woman living there.

Still, I was cheered to see buckets of colorful chalk by the garage. Maybe now that we’ve officially met, I can help paint dragons and monsters and butterflies on the street with them. At the very least, I can again watch the color unforld.

Accounted for

Today, Agence France-Presse announced that a plane wreck has been discovered off the coast of France. The plane has been identified as belonging to Antoine de Saint-Exupéry. This is certainly not a recent crash: Saint-Exupéry disappeared 60 years ago and although it was speculated that the plane he flew went down, the accident was never confirmed.

‘The Little Prince,’ written by Saint-Exupéry, was first published in 1943. The Times reports that it has since been translated into more than 100 languages and is third on the all-time-anywhere best seller list, after the Bible and Marx’s Das Kapital.

Das Kapital is second on the list of best sellers? Can you list ten people you know who have read Das Kapital? (I can be included on your list as it was required reading for me at the U of Warsaw; but then, I was an econometrics major and this was Poland in the 60-70s!) I would think that if you were going to be Marx obsessed you’d pick up the Communist Manifesto, not Das Kapital.

As for ‘The Little Prince’ – well, for me, too, it was a truly magical little book, but I don’t know why it uniformly inspires such feelings of rapture. It is quite a simple story. One might say that it is sort of the opposite of Das Kapital in that way. Are the same people reading both??? After the eyestrain of paging through Marx, ‘The Little Prince’ may well offer the perfect antidote.

‘The Little Prince’ is one of those books that makes you think that surely there is a subtext, a Great Meaning of some sort. It’s not hard to imagine a Great Meaning hidden in simple statements about our planet –as seen from the eyes of an interstellar traveler. Now that I’m remembering it, I can see how easy it is to get lost in the imagination of that storyteller. And the illustrations – well, after reading the Bible and Das Kapital, one would be so GRATEFUL for a book with illustrations. Gentle words, soothing pictures, nice text, possibly with Great Meaning, but probably not. Yeah, a nice relaxing moment, lyrical, calming to your senses, allowing you to forget about the deeply troubled world described in the “top two” best selling texts.