You know what I like about the people at Google? It's the little things. You can't really do much to spruce up your page when all it is an ad-free search engine. But on just about every holiday or event, they like to screw around with the "Google" logo. You know, at Christmas or Hanukah, they dress it up. Or for the Olympics, they put bears on skis or sleds or whatever for the duration of the games. So I was just there trying to confirm whether or not "unabomer" was supposed to be spelled without the "b," as I suspected it was, when I saw this:And I thought, gee, that looks familiar. It looks like a Mondrian painting. So I do the mouse rolloever, and sure enough, it says "Google celebrates Piet Mondrian's birthday." I don't know why, but my first impressions was to be really, uh, impressed. And when you click on it, it does a search for Piet Mondrian. I don't know why little things like this impress me so much. It's just the little flourishes and extra effort people put in. Never mind that they have the best search engine by far. It's these little things. But Piet Mondrian's birthday? Sorta trivial, don't you think. Thought I guess that's part of why I like it. A little culture for the unwashed masses. But, you know, it did dissapoint me a little bit when they didn't have anything up for the Chinese New Year. I actually went to their page just to see what they had up. And they had nothing. That sort of surprised me. So, while I am still impressed, it is sort of a slap in the face to see Mondrian's birthday celebrated and not the Chinese New Year, celebrated by more than a billion people. Still, the fact that someone bothered goes a long way with me. It's like the internet version of the lights on the Empire State Building, which change color ever few days in observance of holidays and other such stuff.
Yesterday, sitting in the Grey Dog's Coffee with nothing to read, I stared out the window and let the old imagination run on autopilot for a while. I was thinking about the fact that I sometimes believe I hav no imagination at all. I quickly recognized that as hogwash. Though my only reason for doing so was because of my over active fantasy life. Is that the same as an imagination. So then I continued thinking that the main reason that I can't seem to write anything of substance is because I have no imagination. Just fantasy. So I thought maybe I should just start writing down every little daydream and fantasy i have, and just see if anything comes of it. And then I thought maybe I'd start some sort of journal or something, divided into two columns, where the left column is what actually happened, and the right column is the fantasy version. It's inevitable that whenever something happens, I'm always envisioning a situation where it happens better, or where I'm not such a wimp, or that lucky break actually comes through. Maybe I just need practice expanding the old mind. So I thought that might be a good idea. Anyway, I had yet another encounter this morning that is absolutely flourishing in the fantasy realm, but here in reality is pretty much poop. But I'm finding it's much better to not think about that. Especially trapped here at work. So maybe I should *imagine* myself getting some work done. hoo-a.
I just took a little "politcal compass" test that Caryn forwarded me. It wasn't a complete waste of time, but I think the questions themselves were a little flawed in their phrasing. They leaned a little to the left. You'd have to be a real asshole to end up on the right side of the political spectrum. I ended up being pretty far to the left, and libertarian. Caryn was more extreme in both those categories than me, but that was to be expected. Anyway, as it turns out, my results were just about identical to those of Gandhi. Go figure.
