| vagabondsurf.com It's about life - not 'lifestyle" |
| 2002 |
| The holidays are over now - it's January 2, 2002 as I write this - and time to get back to work. The world at large is still turning. The Euros have a new currency - the Euro. Except for the Brits, Swedes, and Danes...which probably means something. The War on Terrorism continues, and OBL (Osama Bin Laden in either Comedy Channel or Saturday Night Live Transcript-speak) is currently missing. Plenty of targets out there, though. A fun thing at the end of the year were all the year end news reviews on what seemed like every channel of television. Between that and the usual holiday rush things got surreal. At one point one evening somebody had one of the gossip/entertainment channels on and I heard from the kitchen somebody yammering about the alleged "breakdown" of pop singer Mariah Carey as one of the top "scandals" of 2001. Something unfortunate happens involving a celebrity and they call it scandal. The "details" seemed to be that she worked hard for years, had a less than stellar cd released, and made a movie that stunk. Pre-"breakdown" pictures showed a gaunt woman. Photos taken after her "recovery" show a more relaxed and somewhat larger Carey. My guess is she was just tired and hungry... SURFING magazine is now carried at Kmart and Target. Still core? SURFING GIRL was spotted among other magazines in the teen book section at Barnes and Noble. BODYBOARDING vanished from all grocery stores in my town at the end of summer. I only see it in surf shops and the major bookstores. A little blurb in the sports section of the Los Angeles Times reported that WAHINE magazine has ceased publication due to the current economic climate. WAHINE reports that they will concentrate on maintaining "the brand" and they sound like a budding clothing company... Favorite holiday television show: Christmas morning, while waiting for family to come over, my wife did a tv channel scan and found VH-1 playing a holiday special. On screen was a television playing Christmas song videos. Next to the tv were the lower reaches of a Christmas tree, a few wrapped packages, and 6 puppies. It looked terminally cute at first glance, but turned out to be a hoot. The puppies were bouncing around, chewing on the lowest branches, ripping open the boxes, barking, playing, and generally having a great time. Much more interesting than humans. For 2002 I wish someone would just run something like that over the evening news... I was in a hurry one morning and happened to walk past a section of a newspaper with a picture of a warship and the headline "USS Carl Vinson", which for no particular reason I thought read "USS Carl Wilson". I thought it was just fine to have named a military ship after one of the Beach Boys. It was only later when I sat down to read it that my mistake became clear. Again in a newspaper: a writer was complaining about how dull New Year's is in California. He was speculating that this was due to Californian's having watched the new year arrive all over the world before it gets to the west coast of the U.S. I have a different theory, however. I think it's because we live in the future, so when the calendar finally catches up a bit, no big thing... Nels Norene vagabondsurf.com |
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