Museums and talking cars
Jun. 20th, 2004 06:54 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
xaaraMy little brother, little sister and I went downtown today to meander through the Smithsonian and take a look at the Folklife Festival that is being set up on the National Mall. Not being a tourist but acting like a tourist is a lot of fun. First, we stopped into the Museum of American History because they serve the best ice cream in the continental United States there, then we followed the 1/10 billion-scale model of the solar system past the Castle to the Air and Space Museum, where we puttered around and ate lunch.
It was a beautiful lazy day, especially when the trash containers in the food court of the Air and Space Museum thanked us for using them. That made me laugh so hard I had to try it over, and sure enough, when I pushed the little flaps open again, the trash receptacle repeated its "Thank you." Humans are brilliant in their attention to the most immaterial details. The only more amusing "improvements" upon something we take for granted are the self-cleaning toilet seats I found all over in Europe. Evidently, someone came up with the ingenious idea of creating a toilet with a seat that could rotate through a spray of disinfectant after each use. The only advantage of doing this is to create a film of cold liquid over the seat so the next user (if unsuspecting enough to use the toilet immediately after it's been flushed) is treated to an unpleasant surprise. Self-cleaning toilets have caught on in Austria, and provided me with no end of entertainment while I was stuck indoors there as temperatures dropped well below freezing.
Oh wait, no, there was a funnier instance of utterly botched "helpful" technology. When we rented a car in Switzerland once, it came equipped with a Global Positioning System that talked at us incessantly. And when I say incessantly, I mean without pause. The car wouldn't shut up, and we couldn't figure out how to turn it off. It kept telling us where we were, and had somehow gotten the idea that we wanted to drive to Morocco, so it insisted upon telling us that we were going the wrong way. Two infuriating days later, we exchanged the car for an older, but much more agreeable, piece of machinery. Dipsticks and sparkplugs and batteries and radiators I can deal with. Talking cars I cannot.
<<<<>>>><<<<>>>><<<<>>>><<<<>>>>
Willow
Xander buys me a bag of chocolate. The world almost ended, a gaping void swallowed Buffy into Hell, and with an apologetic expression, Xander stands before me, holding out a bag of Hershey's hugs and kisses.
"You want one?" he asks. "You haven't really eaten anything, and...."
I grab the package and rip it open, spilling tiny foil-wrapped chocolates across the floor. I've stuffed three candies into my mouth before I think to thank him.
When I look up at him, his eyes fill, and then I'm in his arms, craving his hug more than the chocolate ones.
"Love you."
It was a beautiful lazy day, especially when the trash containers in the food court of the Air and Space Museum thanked us for using them. That made me laugh so hard I had to try it over, and sure enough, when I pushed the little flaps open again, the trash receptacle repeated its "Thank you." Humans are brilliant in their attention to the most immaterial details. The only more amusing "improvements" upon something we take for granted are the self-cleaning toilet seats I found all over in Europe. Evidently, someone came up with the ingenious idea of creating a toilet with a seat that could rotate through a spray of disinfectant after each use. The only advantage of doing this is to create a film of cold liquid over the seat so the next user (if unsuspecting enough to use the toilet immediately after it's been flushed) is treated to an unpleasant surprise. Self-cleaning toilets have caught on in Austria, and provided me with no end of entertainment while I was stuck indoors there as temperatures dropped well below freezing.
Oh wait, no, there was a funnier instance of utterly botched "helpful" technology. When we rented a car in Switzerland once, it came equipped with a Global Positioning System that talked at us incessantly. And when I say incessantly, I mean without pause. The car wouldn't shut up, and we couldn't figure out how to turn it off. It kept telling us where we were, and had somehow gotten the idea that we wanted to drive to Morocco, so it insisted upon telling us that we were going the wrong way. Two infuriating days later, we exchanged the car for an older, but much more agreeable, piece of machinery. Dipsticks and sparkplugs and batteries and radiators I can deal with. Talking cars I cannot.
<<<<>>>><<<<>>>><<<<>>>><<<<>>>>
Willow
Xander buys me a bag of chocolate. The world almost ended, a gaping void swallowed Buffy into Hell, and with an apologetic expression, Xander stands before me, holding out a bag of Hershey's hugs and kisses.
"You want one?" he asks. "You haven't really eaten anything, and...."
I grab the package and rip it open, spilling tiny foil-wrapped chocolates across the floor. I've stuffed three candies into my mouth before I think to thank him.
When I look up at him, his eyes fill, and then I'm in his arms, craving his hug more than the chocolate ones.
"Love you."
