Notes on Bodega Engineering

umbrella

If $2 bodega umbrellas are really so crappy, how did mine manage to self-destruct so exquisitely the moment I stepped into the rain today?

“I bow to the economic miracle,” says the narrator in Chris Marker’s film, Sans Soleil. And now I throw it in the trash.

Umbrella in trash

‘I am proud that we Chinese have the capability to worry about our astronaut,’ said Zhou Qing’an, 26, a PhD candidate at Tsinghua University. ‘Just imagine if we were a poor country and had no advanced technology, then it would not be necessary for us to worry about him at all.’

– “China’s New Space Hero Returns,” The Washington Post, October 15, 2003.

In repentance for all of our trash, time to make two rainy-day resolutions:

  1. Make something I’m proud of
  2. When I’ve got to buy something, and the alternative is available, buy what looks like someone was proud to make

“But what I want to show you,” continues the narrator in Sans Soleil, “are the neighborhood celebrations.”


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