Wikipedia Sentence for Today

The prig undertakes all projects with a definite sense of Smugness.

Luxury Gasoline

In the course of my daily TV watching, I noticed that Shell Oil is running ads for their gasoline, comparing it favorably to "discount gas". Two things come to mind: First, you seldom see companies advertising so openly that their product is more expensive. I see those ads, and I say, sign me up for some discount gas please.

Second, discount gasoline? I'm a normal American, and until I saw these ads, and possibly still, I had thought of gasoline as fungible, like pork bellies or gold. I guess in principle it doesn't have to be; gasoline could have more or fewer additives, or be leaded or unleaded, or have a variable octane rating. But gasoline futures are traded in commodities exchanges, and that argues that there's a same-yness about gasoline that makes one gallon good as another to the boys in the pit with the ticker. During the Cola Wars, you didn't see Coke and Pepsi traded indistinguishably under the heading of "Light Sweet Cola".

I think the man on the street still thinks of gasoline like electricity or water, as something that comes out of the tap, and you either take what's on offer or you don't. He's going to have a hard time believing that gasoline can come in brands. Of course, that's what they said about water, but at least bottled water has its bottle to create brand awareness with. All gasoline has is the pump, and that shell graphic is looking pretty tired. Is "seashells" really what the youth of today associate with "luxury gasoline"? Myself, when all is said and done, I'm pretty tempted to go with the discount gas. If you're going to get into the gasoline marketing business, Shell, you need to get in it to win it.

Plato Was Wrong

I think I understand how dog shows work. Each dog, of each different breed, is compared to the ideal of its breed. This being a vale of sorrow, each dog falls short, and the dog with the least imperfection is judged the winner. In the last dog show I watched, the beagle was the winner, and boy was that one happy dog!

I don't mean to say that dog show judges are incompetent, but surely it's impossible to say just how the best dogs of each breed fail to live up to their breed standards. There are thousands of perfectly good German Shepherds in the world, and am I supposed to believe that the best German Shepherd of them all, the one selected to appear in the Westminster Kennel Club show, was distinguishable in any meaningful way from the perfect German Shepherd?

Am I supposed to believe that this was the case for every dog in the show (with the possible exception of the beagle) and that every dog in the show was not only unsatisfactory, but detectably so?

That's the key point, because while we're all well equipped to say how even the most beautiful people fall short, and notice the mote in our neighbor's eye, that neighbor is usually human. Dogs are more difficult to tell apart, and while there's some evidence that the standards of beauty for humans are inborn (e.g. it is probably not a social construct that we find people between 4 and 7 feet most beautiful) the same is not the case with dogs. I don't believe we were born with perfect Ideas of dog breeds from a previous life. Standards of doggy beauty are set by the WKC, more or less arbitrarily, and unless they are so specific that we can compare any dog with the reference book and find it wanting, dog judging is just a matter of how much the judges like the dog.

It turns out dog shows are just another popularity contest. Kind of puts a bitter gloss on the "standing ovation" that the beagle won, at the expense of the other dogs' feelings, I'm sure.

#2 = "Pork Princess"

Thinking about the McCain scandal, and God knows it's not worth thinking about, we tried to come up with prospective names for a pornography whose plot involved a Senator who did "favors" for a sexy lady lobbyist. Claire won with "Sexual Congress"

Now My Life Can Begin In Earnest

Sandwich time is fun time now that I realize the most important element of any sandwich is salt. Warner Brothers knew it; that's why whenever Daffy Duck is stranded on a life raft and imagines his partner to be a giant sandwich, he commences to salt him.

Most elements of a sandwich, were they not layered, would be awfully under-salted. Cheese isn't usually salty, bread is bland, and vegetables are notoriously low in sodium. Meat is fairly savory, but it's not enough to carry a sandwich by itself. If, like me, you always found sandwiches to be a little neutral, well, now you know the reason why. Just salt each layer as you assemble it, and I think you too will climb on board the salt locomotive.

Faux Photography

If you think I'm going insane, and need proof, it may be that I don't find food photography appetizing. I don't find anything very appetizing, which perhaps is a problem of its own, but food photography of the sort that comes up when you Google "food photography" looks unreal to me, not at all like real food. I can recognize the ingredients, of course, but the dish usually looks a little like it has been sculpted out of plasticine: Ineffably wrong.

Maybe it's that I never eat the kind of food that's photographed, or maybe it's the incapacity of a still image to transmit the idea of "food" to my hindbrain, but the dissociation between what I see in a food photograph and what I feel is a little chilling. Photographs of other things look more or less normal, landscapes and people and such. Just the food is weird.

Of course, the refrain of my life is, "do other people have this problem?" I hope so, because if they do, I have a million dollar idea: Mock-food photos.

I hate cameras, and don't understand anything about lighting or lens size, but perhaps you photographers out there can explain what it is you do to make a food photograph look characteristically the way it does, crisp and evenly lit. Then, apply those techniques to meals that are obviously not food.

• Place a boot on a plate, with mud "sauce painting" and pebbles to garnish.
  
• Shave a bar of soap into elegant curls and stand pencils up in them, with erasers on the side.
• Wad up some rags on a platter and edge them with grass clippings or maple leaves.
  

I am sure these descriptions fail to wow in the abstract, but I suppose that is where the art comes in. That is where you, my photographing friend, come in. In my mind's eye, these photos are already awesome. You'll make a million dollars.

Iced Tea is Gross Anyway

In case you were wondering why things had been so much better these past few years, I discovered the reason. Nestea no longer runs those ads in which a snowman's skeleton drinks Nestea iced tea, and fleshes out to become a regular snowman. I can remember thinking those ads would never end, as they came out with a new variation on the theme every month.

Was the snowman supposed to be evil? He was sure portrayed that way, but at worst he was just a little grabby with the drinks. It just came off, every time, as bewildering, like Nestle was trying to drag that snowman through the mud. Evil is as evil does, and if Nestea is going to try to jerk my moral sense around like that, I'm not sure I want what they're selling.