getawayfromme

Big fan of these. I like standardized containers in general, and these are one of the best. Indestructible and useful for no end of applications. I love how for some reason they're always labelled so urgently like "IF YOU MISAPPROPRIATE THIS CRATE YOU WILL BE HANGED BY THE NECK UNTIL DEAD" but yet the only place you ever see them is miles from where they're supposed to be. According to Wikipedia, they're so famous for being stolen that it "has led at least one dairy farm to hire a private investigator to discover what is happening to the crates." I could have saved them some time. The crates are being used to transport dishes, hold books, lug junk in and out of businesses and old/new apartments and generally keep the world turning. An object that despises and resists its destiny, but unlike the characters in a Greek tragedy, the milk crate survives.

Cool in that it makes my car go, has a good smell, and I feel very at home at the station mini marts where it is sold. Uncool because of the emissions and wars. The cleaner at an old job I had used to stockpile it for the apocalypse. The thing about that is gasoline degrades pretty quickly no matter how much fuel stabilizer you add. I presume he stockpiles propane too and the gasoline was just a measure of how certain he was that things were going to kick off in the next twelve to eighteen months. My rating is inflated because I miss that guy.

People in Silver Lake, Los Angeles used to foretell good or bad luck for the day based on what side (happy or sad) of the rotating foot clinic sign they saw first when they passed its place. This is an excellent superstition in every respect. The foot is the window to the soul - when your feet are suffering your whole being suffers, to a much greater extent than most body parts. For the same reason, podiatrists are one of the best types of doctors. We all have superstitions that we read into our surroundings. (For example, there's a shop where I live that has these life size models of the Ninja Turtles, and I draw conclusions about my day ahead based on which one they have stood out next to the door. Michelangelo is the best omen, Donatello the worst.) It's brilliant that someone developed this one about the foot sign in their head and down the line, the whole city came to know it. Jonathan Lethem spins literary gold from this sign in You Don't Love Me Yet, one of the better novels of the rock band. There aren't very many novels of the rock band. It loses half a star here because it no longer spins in that place.