Here's something you might be interested in.
I was all excited to get down to brass tacks and do some serious craigslist spelunking after a day off (rippin' it up at the velodrome--support your local bike racers by hitting up Tuesday night races through October!). There will be so many new ads, I thought, such bounty! Wrong. Quiet days. I have had to dig and delve like some sort of mutant digging delver to unearth the secret treasures. Runner-Up earns the honorable mention for such a dynamic use of the 'CapsLock' key and for not putting pictures up--you'd think that would be a prerequisite to selling art, eh?
I have decided to award the Best-Of to the following:
Black SentrySafe Safe - $20 (Normal Heights)
Seems boring, but I really can't let this slip through the cracks. It's a real gem when you consider that how the safe "has good weight to it" is apparently its biggest selling point. I have a soft spot for such meaningful--however erroneous--gestures, assessments, and the like. I heard a story once where a customer told a welder, "nice welds" and the welder replied, "how can you tell?" because it's not like the guy could judge the strength of a molecular bond just by looking.
We all do it: what happens when the car breaks down? You open the hood and look at the motor. What are you looking for? Unless the engine is visibly puking fluids, the source of the problem is unlikely to present itself to you on cursory visible inspection. Yet, because we feel that we must, somehow, maintain a degree of agency and control in our lives, we all open up the hood and stare at the motor.
I realize that sounds a little desperate, as though I'm saying we all fear some sort of metaphorical impotence and must make empty gestures to maintain a semblance of control over the world as we perceive it. Perhaps I am saying that, I'll own such a prediction, but maybe it is not so desperate as it at first seems. I think, in a lot of ways, the act of judging, say, the heft of a safe as indicative of its qualifications qua securing precious items actually functions to make the use of the safe possible in the first place. Beyond the guarantees of the manufacturer--which could easily amount to little more than a sales tactic--there is no real, concrete way to know that a safe actually works. Giving it a lift and making the correlation between heft and functionality is the irrational, but tremendously important, gesture which allows the safe-owner to trust the safe enough to commit valuable documents to its protection. There is a lot of power in that action, in the bringing into being of a reality which allows you to function in the world.
I was all excited to get down to brass tacks and do some serious craigslist spelunking after a day off (rippin' it up at the velodrome--support your local bike racers by hitting up Tuesday night races through October!). There will be so many new ads, I thought, such bounty! Wrong. Quiet days. I have had to dig and delve like some sort of mutant digging delver to unearth the secret treasures. Runner-Up earns the honorable mention for such a dynamic use of the 'CapsLock' key and for not putting pictures up--you'd think that would be a prerequisite to selling art, eh?
I have decided to award the Best-Of to the following:
Black SentrySafe Safe - $20 (Normal Heights)
Seems boring, but I really can't let this slip through the cracks. It's a real gem when you consider that how the safe "has good weight to it" is apparently its biggest selling point. I have a soft spot for such meaningful--however erroneous--gestures, assessments, and the like. I heard a story once where a customer told a welder, "nice welds" and the welder replied, "how can you tell?" because it's not like the guy could judge the strength of a molecular bond just by looking.
We all do it: what happens when the car breaks down? You open the hood and look at the motor. What are you looking for? Unless the engine is visibly puking fluids, the source of the problem is unlikely to present itself to you on cursory visible inspection. Yet, because we feel that we must, somehow, maintain a degree of agency and control in our lives, we all open up the hood and stare at the motor.
I realize that sounds a little desperate, as though I'm saying we all fear some sort of metaphorical impotence and must make empty gestures to maintain a semblance of control over the world as we perceive it. Perhaps I am saying that, I'll own such a prediction, but maybe it is not so desperate as it at first seems. I think, in a lot of ways, the act of judging, say, the heft of a safe as indicative of its qualifications qua securing precious items actually functions to make the use of the safe possible in the first place. Beyond the guarantees of the manufacturer--which could easily amount to little more than a sales tactic--there is no real, concrete way to know that a safe actually works. Giving it a lift and making the correlation between heft and functionality is the irrational, but tremendously important, gesture which allows the safe-owner to trust the safe enough to commit valuable documents to its protection. There is a lot of power in that action, in the bringing into being of a reality which allows you to function in the world.