8.30.2008

Intentionally knicky-knacky

Discuss: impaired objectivity.

posted by double-secret anonymous sous-blogger

PS Can you tell that Himself taught me how to blog directly from my iPhone a couple weeks ago? I think my coolness factor just tripled, and so far, he hasn't taken away my double-O password privileges.

2 comments:

Stephanie said...

According to my understanding of modern American culture, I am now obligated to sue you for failure to footnote me as the source of your title. My lawyer will be in touch.

As for the issue of impaired objectivity, the question is what the owners of this mantle had in mind. Were they: a) thinking that the look that they were going for was a mantle full of knick-knacks, and that they should therefore head directly to Bibelot or a similar store and buy lots and lots of small, over-priced objects in order to achieve this look, or b) "Hey! That's a cool little Adirondack chair [or scooter, or whatever]!" and buy the said object, ending up with a mantle full of things they thought were cool?

Answer (a) is intentionally knick-knacky and would imply impaired objectivity on this issue, whereas answer (b) simply demonstrates completely normal human shopping behavior.

I am, of course, the expert on what constitutes completely normal human shopping behavior, because my recent garage sale purchases include an entire village of miniature clay houses, and an old, fake doctor's bag. Also, I just spent an hour buying things in a West African artisan's market. I'm now the proud owner of very, very old (or more likely, just dusty) statuette which is guaranteed to end problems with the wife and ease to my homelife. Since I live alone, it's hard to say what the real outcome will be, but since I can be very difficult to live with, I thought it couldn't hurt.

Stephanie said...

P.S. On the French news tonight (One of the great things about hanging out in former French colonies is being able to watch French TV--last night I got to watch two back-to-back episodes of ER dubbed into French. It made me very happy.), there was a report about some guy in northwestern France who's started a vacation camp for people interested in American Indian culture and cowboy lore. He lives in a teepee, wears a big feather headdress, and calls himself Grand Ours ("Big Bear"). There's also a guy there selling cowboy hats (he said that not all hats look good on everyone, but there's definitely a hat for everyone). They also teach western line dancing. It's not often that one has the opportunity to see a bunch of French people in cowboy hats line dancing.

This has nothing to do with knick-knacks, but I thought you should know.

Now I'm off to have dinner at an (Asian) Indian restaurant. My guidebook says that it's not as good as British curry, probably because they have to cater to French people, who hate spices. Globalization, anyone?