Laying the ugly year to rest

New Years can be a disapointing holiday. So we thought we'd go all out, dive into the dreariness of the whole affair, and have a funeral for 2004. We made traditional funeral foods from around the world (recipes from Death Warmed Over). Everyone was invited to bring small objects to put in a wooden coffin. Not surprisingly, three people chose items related to the presedential election. The coffin now sits in the parlour, as per the traditional victorian mourning period. In the meantime, I'm looking for a suitable burial plot.

Bad Justifications

Yucca-Man: Don't Close the Blinds

I found this on the internet. Its purpose is to justify the war in Iraq to children or, I suppose, viewers of Fox News. In this analogy, a father tells his son to look out his window at his neighborhood and do some questioning:

"Now I want you to stand there and look out the window and see that man come out of his house with his wife and he has her by the hair and is hitting her. You see her bleeding and crying. He hits her in the face, he throws her on the ground, then he starts to kick her to death. Their children run out and are afraid to stop him, they are crying, they are watching this but do nothing because they are kids and afraid of their father. You see all of this son....what do you do?"

The whole point is that if you witness brutality you don't close the blinds. You do something about it. But to tell the whole story you'd also have to ask:

What if you'd given that evil neighbor a garden tool to beat up another neighbor that you didn't like?

What if you'd secretly loaned that other neighbor a chainsaw to clobber the other neighbor with?

What if you'd encouraged his kids to stand up to him, promised to support them, and then didn't?

What if you knew his house had a giant oil well underneath it...?

DeYoungZilla

This is a rather funny satire on the ugly new DeYoung museum tower. The DeYoung, for any occasional out-of-town readers, is the new, rather unsightly museum in Golden Gate Park. It is this museum which is at the center of the parking garage/road widening debacle.

The Bad Seed

Here I am, in my Peugeot hat, rather a long time ago. I'm smiling because the SUV has yet to be invented and I'm not yet cognizent of the cold war.