Category Archives: Thought of the Week

Once-weekly posts on whatever nonsense crosses my mind.

What’s in the Garbage?

I used to live in England. It isn’t where I’m from, but I’ve lived there longer than any other place in my life, so I might as well call it home. I appreciate the many ways in which the European influence has cultured the country, and enjoyed my time there.

There are, of course, some notable ways in which England is behind other countries in the world, and especially the United States. Growing up in Portland, Oregon, nearly twenty-five years ago now, I remember having several separate crates we filled each week with glass, plastic and paper. Each week, we would dutifully place these on the curb, and upon return find them empty, magically cleared by the mysterious and rarely-seen garbage men.

However, where I lived in Sheffield, curbside paper recycling has only taken hold in the past five years, and glass and other materials even more recently than that. It would be collected once a month.

I now live in New Jersey, and without going all the dubious benefits this entails, the garbage and recycling cycles have intrigued me. This stuff is collected all the time. I mean it. Household trash is collected on Wednesdays and Saturdays. Recycling is collected every two weeks on Monday. Needless to say, our family of three doesn’t come close to filling the requirements of these tailgating pickups; often we miss one or more pickups with no consequences to speak of.

What truly astonishes me, however, is our neighbors. Generally, every single garbage day, they have one (or more) garbage cans on the curb, often overflowing with trash. Same goes for recycling, so I can’t even say that they simply aren’t too green. Every day.

What are they throwing out? I can’t imagine that three days’ worth of table scraps – even for a large family – would fill a whole garbage can. Kitty litter? No cat shits that much. Do they, perhaps, cook an extra meal every night to feed the hungry kitchen bin?

Perhaps it’s all packaging from the prodigious number of toys, gadgets and other miscellany they buy every few days at Stop & Shop. If so, where do they get the money, and how can I get some? My job’s not that crappy, and even a gajillion dollars of credit card debt couldn’t really account for it.

So what’s in their garbage? Try as I might, I can’t fathom it. They are likely larger families than ours, but more mouths eat more, not trash more. Maybe they get disproportionately more junk mail than we do (which is already staggering). Perhaps I’m just unaware that we’re surrounded by the mafia, and these are simply their weekly body dumps (the black sacks the funeral home around the corner leaves on the street are decidedly suspicious).

Ultimately, there may no answer (other than to knock on their doors and politely ask, and I don’t fancy contributing to their trash). I’ll continue to notice and continue to wonder; perhaps the truth is only known to the mysterious garbagemen. What an insight into our lives they must have.

Why Isn’t The Phantom Tollbooth a Movie?

One of the great joys in my life is reading to my son before bed. I know there will only be so many years that this can continue, and I still have to get through Bridge to Terabitha, Great Expectations, all of the Harry Potters, and so many more. But of all the great books of my (and others’) youth, The Phantom Tollbooth (to my knowledge) has never been made into a live-action film.

Yes – there was the semi-live/animated version from 1970, and indeed I watched this endlessly growing up. But it was abridged, and the animation was second-rate.

What I’m talking about is a genuine, live-action epic that traces Milo’s adventures through the lands beyond. I read Lord of the Rings with Miles, and we then watched the superb movies. We read Treasure Island, and then watched (okay, I’ll admit it) Muppet Treasure Island (surprisingly accurate, actually). But why not The Phantom Tollbooth?

Should such an endeavor be attempted, here’s what it would need to be.

  1. A Tim Burton movie. There really is no discussion here.
  2. Live. This doesn’t mean no CGI, but certainly no cartoons.
  3. The complete story. Don’t chicken out at Dictionopolis and miss the whole point of the book. We need to see the Mountains of Ignorance, complete with Demons, and even some great flashback battles as the Prince of Wisdom first arrives in the Land of Null.
  4. Featuring a new child actor.
  5. Faithful to the dialogue of the book. Nearly every idiom in the English language appears somewhere in this book, and are the source of one of the main joys I got out of it. Only now, as an adult, do I understand the whimsical humor of Milo eating his own words.

It’s quite likely that if and when The Phantom Tollbooth is made into a movie, it will not be a good one. It will probably not be directed by Tim Burton, and it will probably not be faithful to the book. The trailer for Bridge to Terabitha looked so damningly awful I never went to see it. I would hate to see another of my childhood favorites butchered, but the sad truth is that it’s more than likely. Nonetheless, I will probably go to see it, and Miles and I at least will enjoy it.

Update: It turns out The Phantom Tollbooth may be made into a movie after all. Wikipedia says it will come out in 2013, though I can’t say I’ll be thrilled to see Gary Ross direct it. Eh.

What happens to the first post when the second one is made?

One of the things that intrigues me about WordPress is discovering how it works and what it does. I certainly don’t find it as intuitive as I might hope, yet sadly no less intuitive than the multitude of other blogging and social networking sites that I’ve come across before. Facebook is mystifyingly cumbersome to me, and so far on Twitter I haven’t found anything remotely interesting to follow (never mind tweet).

At the very least, WordPress seems to at least follow the misshapen logic of most domain registration sites, wherein lots of friendly colors and chunky buttons help to conceal their functions’ ambiguity. What do we have under appearance? Strange talk of banners and headers. What do I have surrounding this box I’m typing in? Well, as a starting point, vast amounts of text. Interesting, that on a site where my writing is purportedly the most important thing, I am faced insurmountably by someone else’s words.

I fail to see why simple design becomes so difficult. I picked the WordPress theme you see here (Chateau, I believe it’s called), because of its wide spaces, pleasant use of a mildly interesting serif font, and the simple contrast of black, and gray, and red. I wasn’t looking for digital wood panelling to prop my blog posts as though they were back issues of National Geographic on a decaying library shelf (though I’m sure I am no more read than they).

I seem unable even to remove some of the less desirable elements from the page. Why on earth would anyone want to subscribe to an RSS feed of my blog’s comments? I suppose I can understand the need for an archive, and I may eventually come to use categories (thought I doubt my ‘readers’ will find browsing them of much use).

Even my handle – satis – was mysteriously taken, though by whom I can’t tell (satis.wordpress.com is abandoned, so why, I wonder, can’t I have it?). The double-line between the post and the ‘sidebar’ is nice touch.

I will admit, however, that it could be worse. WordPress could have asked my to worry about HTML (ha, I laugh in the face of danger); they could have asked me to submit my site to search engines myself (ha, even louder). They even seem to autosave my draft every time I stop to think about what to write next (how do they know…?).

In short, I could be doing this on a web-building application on my computer.

The proliferation of the blog and the tweet has all but destroyed the personal website, and in some ways it’s about time. If you want a personal website, the information you share on it could like as not be shared in an email to the people you actually know. If you want a ‘personal’ website that actually acts as a public showcase of your own banality, well hey – there’s Facebook and Twitter. And if you want a professional website, there’s always the old-fashioned way: get someone to do it for you.

In any case, I can’t say I’ve spent a huge amount of time exploring exactly what WordPress has to offer, but I will continue to play, in the hopes that one day someone other than myself might read it.

Now I’m off to find out what happened to my last post.