I WANT TO EAT A NUT OF LAERMA!

One interesting thing about this blog I never really noticed until today are the links inside the Blogger ad bar at the top of the page. It's like, I always realized the ad bar was there, but I never really looked inside it before. But, it seems, that some sort of spider search function within Blogger scans what I write for key terms and then some articifical intelligence function tries to match what I write with links on the same subject. For example, I noticed, despite my best attempts to sabotage the domestic success of it**, I am inadvertently promoting sales of Spirited Away on DVD through the ad bar, just because of the many, many mentions of it on the site.

Also, I found a link to this article by Dan Roentsch arguing against designating all 16 acres of the World Trade Center site as a memorial and rallying against the "professional mourners" (from the Radical Capitalist***). It was written in January 2002, and is, as such, a little out-of-date, since the Lower Manhattan Redevelopment Committee has already chosen the Libeskind design with the "spire" and the "superpit", but, sadly, much of what Roentsch feared has indeed come to pass, even worse, because, instead of nearlty 16 empty acres in lower manhattan, we now have nearly 16 empty acres in a pit making things all that much more inconvenient. I still pretty much agree with everything he wrote completely, and I still haven't budged an inch in hoping that exact replicas of the Yamasaki-designed Twin Towers will occupy the space designated for the pit (or the Berzon proposal, with the rebuilt Twin Towers built just slightly to the east of the original site). I don't actually have that much of a problem with Libeskind's "spire"... it would make an interesting addition to the skyline next to the restored Twin Towers.


**Just kidding... I think Spirited Away is overrated, but "overrated" in no way implies that I hate it; it just means, in this case, that, I still regard it quite highly (****/*****) just not quite as highly as most of the critics did, and I think certain other Ghibli films (and Best Animated Feature Oscar nominees) are better, "better" being, of course, a purely subjective call.
*** I have a problem with the word "capitialist" since it defines those of us "laissez-faire" "free market-eers" according to Marxist terms. I only use the word when I absolutely have to.

posted by Steve Brandon @ 9:34 PM