It just so happens you can see me in Street View, captured in the act of gardening, even though I am not a gardener. There I am in the red T-shirt, down in a monkey crouch with a spade in my hand. That lady over there is my wife (she’s the gardener), and that’s our neighbor, chatting while he watches us work the soil of the tree lawn in front of our house. I actually remember the day quite well, though I never noticed any car with a strange bit of apparatus on it rolling slowly past.

After the initial glissando of a weird feeling that ran up my spine when I saw it, I felt strangely at ease about my Street View presence. When I showed the printouts to my brother the lawyer, he was spooked, for some reason. (Maybe that’s why he lives in the exurbs.) Am I nuts? I mean, anyone walking or driving by at that moment would have seen us, and frankly, you can’t make out our faces. (Google says it pixelates car license plates and faces, but it seems the resolution of the shots we’re in didn’t require it. I know it’s us because I know us pretty well.) But still … am I crazy not to care?

I confess I like Street View. Just the other day I wandered along the street in Cleveland where I was conceived and gestated (my parents and brother moved into a new house the day I was born, so I had never laid eyes on that neighborhood). Didn’t see any people, though. In my virtual wanderings in DC and elsewhere, I like seeing the traffic and people going about their business. I don’t recognize anyone, and certainly no one recognizes me. Is it voyeuristic or creepy to go Street Viewing in Paris or Chicago, or is it simply the cheapest, most ecological way to satisfy a mild case of wanderlust?

Perhaps more importantly, does this give the lie to my previously stated concerns about government encroachments on privacy? I think not, but the devoted reader is free to think otherwise.

Addendum 2009.05.21: A friend alerted me to this page describing the Google Trike that is photographing scenic footpaths in the UK. A bicyclist like me, he says this would be a neat job after retirement, and I agree.

Addendum 2009.05.22: Here’s a nice article in the New York Times about the Google camera car and the buzz surrounding it.

Okay, here’s the joke, recorded ca. 1900 BCE by a Sumerian who shall remain nameless:

Something which has never occurred since time immemorial; a young woman did not fart in her husband’s lap.

Hey, I didn’t say it was the world’s best joke.

Speaking of farts, listen to this snippet from the second movement* of the Haydn I mentioned:

Ah, that good old south German humor. Now, Haydn’s music in general is full of jokes and surprises. But this is a doozy. I’ve heard other conductors play it safe, letting the bassoon play in the usual suave manner (well, as suave as a bassoon can ever get). After all, this is clahssical music. But in this summer of audacity, I must say George Szell got it audaciously right.
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*Butt-head: “Huh-huh … you said ‘movement’!”

I will say this for them: the comments were extremely terse, with only one link apiece. Chinese spam comments go on and on and on …

[German soccer fans] are furious that Budweiser will be the official tipple for the World Cup, which starts next month. The American lager has secured a near-monopoly of beer sales inside World Cup stadiums and within a 500m radius of the grounds, supplanting more than 1,270 domestic breweries.

A Bavarian politician has called Bud “the worst beer in the world.” I haven’t tried every beer in the world (and I applaud Franz Maget for doing so), but I agree that Budweiser is truly awful. Wretched, really. I would rather drink water—it’s that bad.

It’s an odd projection of US power abroad. An American “beer” sponsoring a soccer event? Soccer? We can’t even manage to call it by its proper name!

It also reminds me of a brand of beer I drank rather too much of at Jimmy’s, the watering hole on 55th Street near the University of Chicago: Schlitz. Like Budweiser, it was made with rice. I got to calling it sake—I could taste the ricey overtones. Blyech.

Three cheers for American industry—lowering standards of taste everywhere!

Addendum 2006.05.24: A commenter at Newsrack Blog says Budweiser tastes better in Europe, speculating that a different formula is used. This changes things a bit, as I noted there. It might actually be illegal to sell American-style Bud in Germany as bier. In which case the beer mandated for the World Cup might not be the best in the world, but at least it won’t be the worst (despite what Herr Maget says).

Today was lobster day with the well-preserved 1970s-era Julia (now in “living color,” as they say). Her delivery was smoother, though she still had that touching way of looking at the camera (cameraman?) expectantly every time she shifted to another counter or table. She had broad selection of lobsters—one pound up to “Bertha the Behemoth.” You want the lively ones, she said, as the one she placed on the counter played dead. She continued talking about the different sizes, and soon she had one that actually moved. “This is what you want,” she exclaimed, as she got the thing to curl its tail.

We all know you have to boil lobsters alive. Did you know you should put them in head first? Yes. It’s only humane. That’s the easy part, in a way. It’s eating the things that is so darn disgusting. To me. Julia showed how to do it—the tools you need, the techniques that work best, what to eat and what to throw out. I thought: yech. She kept saying how indescribably tasty the meat is, the meat from the legs and the meat from the chest and so on, each tasty in its own way, and having tasted lobster I could understand her point if not her enthusiasm, but still I thought: yech.

Enough about lobster. On to meat in general. Often as I head out to hunt for a lunch that frequently consists of a blackened-chicken burrito or gyro, I think: would I eat this stuff if I actually had to kill the animal and prepare the meat myself? How many people nowadays would? Could I casually wring a chicken’s neck, like our great-great-grandmothers might have done; or shoot an elk, skin it, gut it, and so on?

I suppose if I were living in an African savanna, my empty stomach gurgling, I might chase down a wild animal and dispatch it. But here I am, in modern America—dozens of other people do all the dirty work for me. I get my meat in a very pretty form, on a plate or between slices of bread. Sometimes it doesn’t really look like meat—like those nifty round things you find on pizzas. It certainly never looks like an animal, unless it’s a fish.

There’s a passage in Berlin Alexanderplatz that comes to mind whenever I think about this. The author describes the activities of a slaughterhouse in language that varies from bureaucratic to elegiac, brutally anatomical to ironically poetic. It’s an assembly line of death, but for the men it’s all in a day’s work.

A man in a linen smock ambles through the corridor, the pen opens, he steps in between the animals with a stick; then, once the door is open, they rush out, squealing, grunting, and screaming. They crowd along the corridors. Across the courtyards, between the halls, he drives them up, those funny bare creatures with their jolly fat hams, their jolly little tails, and the green and red stripes on their backs. Here you have light, dear pigs, and here you have dirt, just give a sniff, go ahead and grub a while, for how many minutes longer will it be? No, you are right, one should not work by the clock, just go on sniffing and grubbing. You are going to be slaughtered, there you are, take a look at the slaughter-house, at the hog slaughter-house. There exist old houses, but you get a new model. It is bright, built of red brick, from the outside you might take it for a locksmith’s workshop, for a machine-shop, an office-room, or a drafting room. I am going to walk the other way, dear little pigs, for I’m a human being, I’ll go through this door, we’ll meet again, inside.*

I do the text an injustice by excerpting it, because the effect builds over fifteen pages (with a brief interlude). It’s horrific on many levels, and in the context of the book it raises the question of the effect of such mechanized killing on the persons who perform it and on society as a whole. At any rate, the passage by all rights should have made me a vegetarian. Clearly I lack the courage of my convictions.

The American Indians, from what I’ve been told, would thank an animal before killing it. Because they do not make a sharp distinction between other animals and themselves, the last line in the quoted passage above would not make sense to them. Their world is not divided into one where bison live and another where human beings live. The spiritual “economy” of humans and animals is fundamentally different from the European model we have inherited. An animal that allows itself to be killed and used for food or clothing is making a gift of itself, and attention is paid to all the proper spiritual aspects of gift-giving and gift-receiving, including the responsibilities of humans toward their fellow creatures.

How much of this is true and how much I dreamed up, I can’t say. But I’d like to remember it more often when I eat a hamburger.
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*Alfred Döblin: Berlin Alexanderplatz. Tr. Eugene Jolas. New York: Frederick Unger, 1983, p. 175.