SPECIAL STOLERN MOMENTS REPORTSTOLER and BETH Win Bay to BreakersOops. We Mean "STOLER and BETH In Bay to Breakers" (though you'll see, they definitely came off winners)San Francisco, May 19 -- Stoler and Beth brought their message of inspired goofiness to the country's largest footrace/carnival-in-sneakers, the annual Bay to Breakers Run/Walk. And although their plans to actually finish the race, even to get their names in the paper by finishing among the top ten thousand, were curtailed by inclement weather, they nevertheless accomplished their goals for the event, keeping the agreements under which they were able to run in the first place, and serendipitously ending up with much more newspaper publicity than they could have imagined.
Securing SponsorshipThe proposal to do the race had come originally from Beth, who had done it several years before. But for Stoler, it was not enough simply to complete the seven-and-a-half miles across San Francisco. Knowing that many participants run dressed in humorous Halloween-like attire, or in a complete lack of attire1, he set to work coming up with a worthy costume. But there were so many possibilities -- how to choose? Considering various options to select the optimal, he realized that, other things being equal, the best reason to choose a particular costume was because someone would pay you do wear it. Perhaps some business would remunerate Beth and him for dressing up as its mascot and advertising them before thousands of other runners and spectators and the media who always turn out to cover the event? But what company was down-to-earth and accessible enough that Stoler could contact them and make a deal with them, and yet also was associated with a symbol or character that would be fun to dress up as? Suddenly, he had it. For months now, he had found great amusement in the manically musical Flash animations to be found on the website www.threebrain.com, particularly the one titled "Weeeeee!" and featuring a dancing squirrel. He dashed off an email to the site's creator. Would he, Stoler wrote, be interested in sponsoring a "Team Threebrain" for the Bay to Breakers, paying Beth and Stoler's entrance fees and providing them with a couple of the Threebrain t-shirts already sold through the site, if they would do the race in squirrel costumes, wearing the shirts and waving banners to advertise the site? It was a true meeting of freakish minds; the Threebrain staff accepted the offer, and had a check on its way. Now, it was up to Stoler and Beth to hold up their end of the bargain. Creating the Creature CostumesStoler, meanwhile, set to work thinking about costumes, and procrastinating about actually making them. How to make a big bushy tail for basically no money? He decided to attack the problem according to Analogical principles. Instead of trying to plan out in advance how to do something, (which is pretty much impossible when you've never done it before), buying lots of expensive materials based on the plan, and sticking to it no matter what, as is the habit among information technology start-ups, he would rather arbitrarily choose one plan (maybe on the basis that it was the cheapest) and start working on it, altering it according to new information (about how well it works) and circumstances, making use of what was learned in the process. (Non-Analogical thinkers, those who "plan in advance" based on what they "know", might claim that time is wasted on false starts in the learning process. It's not; it is the necessary cost of gaining information, paid back by the advantages of an end product much more in tune with actual conditions. After all, what the non-A thinkers claim to "know" had to "learned" at some point, at a cost, which they may not be figuring into their accounting, and, since it does not come from actual experience, it's probably a lot less accurate and valuable anyway.) He started -- less than two days before the race? more than a full day before? -- with an infrastructure of chicken wire, which he had purchased for a few cents a foot at a hardware store. Stoler had originally thought that he should cover the wire with papier mâché, and then put furry fabric over that, or something2. Now, there was still the matter of making squirrel heads, or masks. Again, Stoler took the Analog approach, experimenting as he went, not entirely sure where he was going until he got there. He had an idea of what the finished product should be, but, if the materials and processes guided him otherwise, if it proved easier to do something else, he was willing to do that. (For everything is negotiable.) If it turned out that the original idea was unworkable, at least he would not have been too invested in it. It turned out that he would have to take consolation in this principle, as the masks he made didn't come out too well. "See, I had originally planned to use more chicken wire. It probably would have worked. But then I found this old trash can and thought, well, this is sort of the right shape already, and solid. You see, in building anything, there are three main challenges: getting the right surface appearance, getting it to the right shape, and getting it to hold together. You can achieve each of these either through creation or selection3, that is, by finding an object that is appropriately colored, textured, shaped, sized, and attached, or by making one, or, by some combination of finding and making. I generally prefer to find -- found objects can be made of things like molded plastic and cast metal that can be pretty hard to shape on your own. So when I found a discarded trash bin, one of the sort of slightly flared, rectangular prismatic kind, behind my building (where I find everything), I thought, I can just cut this into two halves, fold the open ends closed, and spray-paint the units brown. Pissed About Pasta, And A Pasta RepastWhich, even in the context of the tails, they would not have been. At least according to Beth. Now, it was Saturday evening, less than twelve hours before the race was supposed to begin. Stoler had come into the City around six, to meet Beth at a lead-up event, a pasta dinner and dance party to be held at the Bill Graham Auditorium at Civic Center and called the "Energy Booster". They had paid ten dollars apiece for tickets, their own money, not their sponsor's. Which brought them back to the point. They could simply have returned to Stoler's for some out-of-the-box spaghetti (to go with their out-of-the-box thinking) and out-of-the-jar sauce augmented with a selection of spices and chopped vegetables, and finished their costumes, gotten a good night's sleep, and been up and ready for the race. But at this point, sleep did not seem that important. After all, the previous evening, they had gone over the route. The idea of crossing the City on foot was not daunting (well, nothing is to the Dauntless), as they had many times walked from the Financial District all the way to Beth's home, blocks from the Ocean, or the other way. They had started off running but soon given up, though they had jogged a bit more at the end, but had kept up a brisk walking pace the whole way. Yet it had taken them about two hours to complete the march upcountry and down, and a check in the previous year's listing of the top race finishers in the Examiner revealed that to get this free publicity, they would need to cut over thirty minutes off their time. Stoler thought that if they saved their breath, a man and woman like them could do this, but Beth was resigned. "We might as well just have fun, and show off our costumes, and get publicity for Threebrain," she argued, and Stoler acceded. So with this in mind, they had no particular reason to hurry home, and so, feeling that the Universe still owed them a pasta dinner, but knowing that the Universe only actually owes you what you can get for yourself, they headed off to
The Rubber Meets the Road
Rain On the Parade
Finish Line or Bussed?The bus soon came, and they found they were not the only refugees wearing sneakers and numbers on board. They took seats near the front, and huddled for warmth (as they could no longer depend on motion to ward off the cold), until Stoler, seeing what appeared to be a woman of a certain age come on board, offered her his seat as required by Federal Law (at least, according to the posted warnings on the vehicle.) Of course, Stoler is a poor judge of age; he has this odd notion that Beth is older than he though she looks 25, and when selling tickets at the movie theater, in his zeal to insure that every senior citizen benefits from the discount offered those 62 and above, he has on more than one occasion provoked astonished questions of "Do I look that old?" from insulted fifty- and even forty-somethings. This woman, however, though definitely not elderly, was glad enough for the seat simply to be amused at Stoler's mistake. She turned out to be from Essex, England, which led Stoler to ask why there was an Essex (etymologically, "the land of the East Saxons"), and a Middlesex, and a Sussex, and, even, historically, a Wessex, but no "Nossex". What had happened to the North Saxons? Or were they the ones who gave everyone else the names, so they just considered themselves the default, "us"? (Kind of the way that the people in the 20's and 30's who really classified the literary periods called theirs "the Modern one" with no thought of what posterity, which would no doubt consider itself equally modern as time marched on [and consider the 20's-30's guys to belong to the fusty past], leaving their successors no choice but to be "Post-Modern" or quite at a loss for a name. "Oh, but we do have a Nossex," she replied, "Haven't you ever heard of the farce, 'Nossex, Please, We're British'?" When Stoler asked her what she did for a living, she promptly replied that she was a brain surgeon, at which he was deeply impressed, and asked her what expression she and her colleagues used to characterize (by contrast) a task regarded as quite simple; did they use "it's not rocket science", or have something else? "Oh, I'm not really a brain surgeon," she explained, "I just say that." Stoler was aghast. "What? You took advantage of people's gullibility and inability to verify and dared practice upon their credulous simplicity? I....I....just can't believe someone would do that." But the woman, whose name was Patricia, had one more surprise for them; her hotel had overbooked, and in apology for having to move her, had given her a certificate for a free night, which she, already ticketed to return to the other side of the Atlantic, would not be able to use...would Beth and Stoler like it? Most certainly, they said, resolving in the future to give up their bus seats and in general be nice to people whenever possible in the hope of getting even more goodies out of them. (Not that they don't do this already.) Meet the Press
The End of the RoadThey could have taken this bus almost all the way back to Beth's, but they did still want to pick up their official race t-shirts, whose value was probably a substantial part of their entry fee, at a post-race gathering near the finish line called "Footstock". So they rejoined the pack a mile or so from the end, just in time to pass under the photographers' platform and be shot once more Back to STOLERN MOMENTS Home![]() |
Notes1. Of course, the lack of something can be as distinctive as any something, just as, for instance, in Russian, the genitive plural of feminine nouns is marked not by any ending, as the other case/number combinations are, but simply by the lack of any ending attached to the stem. See Roman Jakobson, 1984 [1939]. "The zero sign", in "Russian and Slavic Grammar: Studies, 1931-1981", 151-160. Berlin: Mouton. Back 2. "Or something", as the last in a series of alternatives, ("Let's do A, or B, or C, or something!") is of course, the answer to the Ultimate Question of the Universe, which is, of course, "Or what?" (as in, "Are we going to do A, or B, or C, or what?") Back 3. Which of course become the same thing, given time and menu enough. Back 4. Good examples include The Right Stuff, with Donald Moffat doing a dead-on Lyndon Johnson and the incomparable Ed Harris embodying the priggish decency of John Glenn; the recent Thirteen Days, with most of the Kennedy Administration pretty well embodied, and Oliver Stone's Nixon, which deserved a special award for casting. Every one of the President's men (and women) from Anthony Hopkins's Nixon on down was brought to life by someone who, without being a dead ringer facially for his or her role model, managed to capture, without caricature, the essential components of the character. Having well known actors do it actually adds to the fun, as you suddenly realize how much symbols that are so familiar in one context, say, David Hyde Pierce as Niles Crane on "Frasier", can, with little change, have a completely different role in another context, and become John Dean. As with puns, one thinks, "I never (consciously) thought of that, but it's true, it works!" or "Hey, I noticed that resemblance as well...glad someone else did!" Back 5. In a world that expects conformity, sometimes it seems the only way to express individualism is through destroying beauty, destroying order, or destroying oneself (a human being being an example of both, to the extent they really are different.) This, of course, is the message of the wonderful new Elvis Costello song "Tear Off Your Own Head (It's a Doll Revolution)": tear off your OWN head, destroy yourself -- before someone does it for you! Back 6. This, of course, is the strategy being used by the Bush Administration towards the American people. The recent revelations about official foreknowledge of the September 11 attacks have at least strongly suggested that the Administration could have prevented them. We don't know if the Administration deliberately set up the leaks any more than we know if they set up the attacks, but under the principle that selection equals creation, and that anything can be recontextualized and spun to one's advantage, they seem to be making maximum use of it. Because since the allegations, people like the head of the FBI, Defense Secretary Rumsfeld, and the Vice President, have not stopped talking about the continued threats to the American people from terrorism. In his speech to the Bundestag on Thursday, 23 May, the President extended this warning to Europe. But the implication is clear: only the United States government stands between you and imminent and total destruction (for which, though there is obviously some evidence, you mostly have to go on our word.) This is the same approach used by cultic religious leaders, in fact, by religious leaders in general -- "salvation from hellfire comes only through unquestioned loyalty to us", and by torturers and hostage takers. Back 7. This is an extension of Stoler's father's theory that all of the French restaurants on the West Side of Manhattan were served from a common kitchen. Stoler at first scoffed at this idea, until during his freshman year at college he worked in the Harvard dining halls, and found that they were indeed served out of a common kitchen beneath Kirkland House and connected by tunnels. (This being 1985-6, a time when, despite the beginnings of glasnost and perestroika under Gorbachev, fear of superpower conflict still ran high, Stoler was glad for all the time he could spend underground surrounded by ample food supplies.) In time, he has been able to confirm that similar arrangements underly the operations of all the Indian restaurants in West Berkeley and the Asian establishments of Chinatowns everywhere. Back 8. You can try to view the picture full size by clicking here, if you've downloaded the Clever Picture Viewer. Maybe just by going to the page, you'll be offered the chance to do so; good luck and try not to be offended. Back Back to STOLERN MOMENTS Home |