Delerium of Options


I came across this image while I was Stumbling through the web. There's a certain irony to the fact that I found it on Good Friday, which is a time of reflection for the Judeo-Christian family of faiths - and, more specifically, on Easter, the end of the Lenten time of abstinence.

Just look at it.

It's beautiful. It's terrifying. It explains why going to the grocery store is never a 3 min affair. You have to flirt with your options, investigate the colours, the proffered toy in the box, the ingredients. The price.

This is as much a manufactured landscape as a Burtynsky photograph.

You realize that this madcap montage really only centres around the same family clusters of flavour and nature, regardless of the aisle. There are Corn Flakes, and Corn Flake knockoffs. There are yellow breakfast cereals with Captains on the box. There are yellow breakfast cereals with a bear on the box. There used to be yellow breakfast cereals with Mr T on the box, but he's no longer a viable breakfast cereal spokesman.
There are 65 different takes on the fruit cup.
There are 2134223 rice cake brands.
Would we notice if our catalogue of food options diminished? What do we do with all this choice? And, the $100,000 question - how much of this is actually bought and consumed. Where does it all go? Likely, the place where all superfluousness goes to die, an Everest of breakfast rejects, guarded by the empty calls of overfed seagulls.

My brilliant friend Jason has an image like this one on his blog, as well as a reflective response to this kind of vivid consumerism.

His image lives here

His design solution lives here

Happy Passover, Jewish Peepstars


I tried to explain the Passover Seder to my colleagues the other day. One of them had a meeting, so I had to deliver the Coles Notes version. I'm glad I did. Suddenly, there's a new aura, a Twilight Zone dimension, to a holiday I always just, well, did.
I took for granted the craftsmanship involved in each step of the tradition.
Do yourself a favour. Take any ritual you take for granted, and strip it down to brass tacks.

For example. The Passover Seder in thirty seconds.
The purpose of the Seder is to commemorate the deliverance of Hebrews from Egypt. The same story immortalized through Charlton Heston and Yul Brynner's epic landmark 'The Ten Commandments'.
To kick things off, we draw attention to a platter of things on the table that represent aspects of slavery. Like parsley, horseradish, and a baked egg.
To further enunciate the Hebrew experience, we dip our fingers into our wine and shout out each of the ten biblical plagues -. from locusts and blood to beasts and slaying of the first born. Etc.
At this point, the family shares a glass of wine with an invisible man who's shown up in a flaming chariot (also invisible).
Then we eat lots because the first bits took a couple hours.
Post-feast, the children flee the table to find the matzoh cracker hidden somewhere in the house.
...for cash prizes!

I've included a picture of an ad I found on the inside cover of the Passover Haggadah (kind of a Seder manual) I was handed this year. It was published by Maxwell House in the 70s.

I have a new appreciation for my heritage.