One of the other retail food service establishments in the Great Mall Food Court (which sounds like some kind of place where foods go on trial for being bad) is a place called “Hot Dog on a Stick.” Why it’s not called “Corn Dogs” is beyond me; could the term “corn dog” still be a trademark, or under copyright?

Naturally, the children gravitated to it, because it combines their two favorite food groups, hot dogs and sticks.

This is a place whose main claim to fame seems to be that the corn dogs- pardon me, hot dogs on a stick- are hand-dipped before they’re fried. Now, I don’t want to seem elitist, but even at it’s best this isn’t exactly a foodstuff that is going to show up on the Chez Panisse menu, and just what value is added by having it hand-dipped eludes me. It adds to the cooking time, and it lets you experience your child’s increasing impatience (expressed by a desire to attack the lemons that are artfully arranged on the counter, to advertise the $3 lemonade); but I defy anyone to argue that it’s actually a BETTER corn dog.

And aren’t corn dogs one of those foods that’s SUPPOSED to be mass-produced? It’s like sugar wafers, a form of cookie that is actually BETTER when it’s cheaper: the $3 organic Belgian ones have nothing on the 50-cent for a pound ones sporting artificial coloring that looks like it’s produced in a cyclotron.

This afternoon we went to the Great Mall, a… well, large… mall in Milpitas. (Or somewhere in the part of the Bay Area that one passes when driving between Palo Alto and Berkeley, and which I always classify as Bits You See Out the Window But Don’t Need to Know Anything About.) It was a fascinating experience.

For one thing, I had my children with me, and being put in a mall with two kids under 5 means that you pay attention to all kinds of things that you normally don’t even see. For example, it turns out that there are tremendous number of gumball machines and people selling helium balloons. I know this because Daniel took a great interest in the former, and Elizabeth was fairly obsessed with the latter. Both would have been visual background noise had I been there by myself.

But it was also fascinating because it was a weird slice of California’s present and future, and had some strange mixes of conventional mall culture and something else. The Great Mall isn’t a high-end retail space: I think it was a factory in a previous life, and it has a lot of outlets, a few stores whose unsold inventory is bound for the grey market- those stores in city centers that have lots of flourescent light and garish hand-drawn signs.

There were also some stores that seemed both weird and familiar. They were a total mystery, and it kept bothering me, even as I was distracted with fetching the children out of tents that were set up in the sporting goods shop. I finally figured it out, in a toy store that was selling everything from doll’s clothes to battery-powered motorbikes. It was the kind of store that I had seen in cities in Latin America and Asia, only normally they’re about five feed across and ten feet deep, and absolutely CRAMMED FULL of stuff. If you’ve seen these kinds of small shops, you know exactly what kind of a visual riot it can be; but blown up to American mall-sized proportions, it just seems cheap and a little pathetic.

As Robert Venturi, Jane Jacobs, and any number of urban and shopping theorists will tell you, there are times when crowded is good: it adds vibrancy, color, and makes cheap toys manufactured in Taiwan and China seem a little cooler. But the whole experience just becomes kind of dissipated when translated into American retail space.

Another thing that was really striking was that there were virtually no white people there. The crowd was middle class, but almost completely South and Pacific Asian, and Hispanic. It was an exaggerated version of the minority-majority California of the future. This diversity was picked up in the food court, which had a McDonalds and Subway, but also places (I’m not sure if they can be called “restaurants” when they face a food court) selling Thai, Indian, Japanese, Chinese, Cajun, Italian, and Mongolian food. (I know, I know. There’s Mongolian fast food? And it’s FRANCHISED?)

Somehow I got out of the habit of watching “The Simpsons.” (Oh wait, I remember. I have kids. And Heather hates it, almost as much as “The Three Stooges.” God, they were great.) So I missed this reference to blogging in a recent episode:

Homer: See Lisa, instead of one big-shot controlling all the media, now there’s a thousand freaks xeroxing their worthless opinions.
Lisa: I couldn’t be prouder.

…

Cut to Mr. Burns and Smiths standing at the window overlooking Springfield.

Mr. Burns: (stares into “camera”) Well, I suppose it isn’t possible to control all the media… unless, of course, you are Rupert Murdoch. [beat] He is one beautiful man.
Smithers: (stares into “camera”) I couldn’t agree more.

[via Destiny-land]

[To the tune of Louis Armstrong, “When The Saints Go Marchin’ In,” from the album Tiger Rag.]

We appear to be reaching a point with spam where the purpose is no longer to communicate with humans, but to avoid filtering programs. Spam aims no longer to sell; it aims to survive.

My spam filter caught a piece of mail advertising- well, I’m not sure what. But a couple things caught me about it: the subject header ("What are the washing instructions?"), the opening line ("animal era grill hecatomb ampere haynes temporal grille pokerface livermore cowpox ell"), and generally, the amount of nonsense the message contained:

When I have fears that I may cease to be, Before my pen has gleaned my teeming brain.
No one ever lost his honor, except he who had it not.
You’ve got to ask! Asking is, in my opinion, the world’s most powerful — and neglected — secret to success and happiness.
Procrastination is one of the most common and deadliest of diseases and its toll on success and happiness is heavy.
Learning. The kind of ignorance distinguishing the studious.
Every existing thing is born without reason, prolongs itself out of weakness, and dies by chance.
Desire, like the atom, is explosive with creative force.
Labor is the curse of the world, and nobody can meddle with it without becoming proportionately brutified.
To give an accurate and exhaustive account of that period would need a far less brilliant pen than mine.

The thing that strikes me is that none of this has anything to do with selling anything, and I don’t think that anyone who looks at the message would think, "Gee, there’s a lot of junk information here, I think I’ll go visit the Web site!" Unless I’m terribly wrong about human nature, noise is not something that generally builds trust- though perhaps the incomprehensibility of technical manuals, and the wackily broken English of Japanese manuals from the 1970s, proves me wrong.

The irony is that the search for meaning- embodied in this case in filtering software that’s becoming increasingly sophisticated and better able at filtering signal from noise- is generating yet new forms of noise aimed at overcoming that search for meaning. There’s some kind of weird co-evolutionary thing going on here.

What would Philip Dick have made of all this, I wonder? What secret messages or hidden patterns would he have detected in this stuff?

[To the tune of Louis Armstrong, "Blue Skies," from the album Louis Armstrong And His All-Stars.]

From Salon:

Bill Maher on the cancellation of “Politically Incorrect” after he made controversial comments in the wake of 9/11: “Isn’t there something wrong when so far the only person to be fired because of terrorism is me?”