Wal-Mart

Bob Lefsetz:

Having become accustomed to the smell, my nose drawn to the flame, after multiple visits I inspected the jars, and that’s when I learned the candles were replicating apple pie, it said so right on them. And for Valentine’s Day, Felice set out to buy me my own apple pie candle, so I could relive the Two Elk experience right here at sea level.
So she called.
That wouldn’t even occur to me. That here in Los Angeles you could pick up the phone and make contact with someone at Two Elk, who ultimately told Felice that they’d purchased the apple pie candles at Wal-Mart.
That’s what led Felice to the two story edifice in Panorama City, a desire to elate me on Valentine’s Day. But while there, she decided to also pick up a PlayStation, and that’s how we ultimately got hooked on Rock Band. But the geek at the counter, outfitting her with all the necessary accoutrements, sold her an HDMI cable, so we could see the Rock Band images in all their Hi-Def glory.
But Felice’s HDTV is from the generation before HDMI. We had to use a component hook-up, which turns out to be quite good. And were left with one HDMI cable, which has a value of approximately $100 if you’re out of the loop. Finally, on Saturday, before going downtown to see Margaret Cho at the Orpheum, we journeyed into the heart of darkness, to Wal-Mart, to return the cable.
Remember that old TV show, “Big Valley”? Well, it is. Took us about twenty minutes to drive to Panorama City. And after passing Galpin Ford and its satellite dealerships, and burned out buildings, we found ourselves at Wal-Mart.
Let’s start with the abandoned buildings. If this is how the richest nation in the world looks, what’s it like in the third world? Is it tents with holes? Or does our media just refuse to expose how bad it is across so much of the U.S. landscape, how much our rich have ignored our poor?

More on Lefsetz here.

Addressing: The Revenge of Geography

Timothy Grayson:

Pondering a future for location intelligence is a speculative journey through geographic permanence and human transience that ends with proving location intelligence to be evermore crucial to businesses and governments.
The Canadian postal context
The post office has a natural connection to location and an unbeatable advantage over geo-matics, spatial mapping and so on: postal carriers go regularly to all locations.
Opened in 1755, the first Canadian post office facilitated commerce and nation-building at a time when locating people and places among the buffalo and beaver was a real challenge. By 2005, Canada Post was delivering 11.1-billion letters and packages – about 37-million pieces every day – to over 31-million individual Canadians plus over 1-million businesses and institutions at some 14-million points-of-call.
Canada Post has established an electronic pedigree as well. epostTM serves about 4-million subscribed Canadians, delivering electronic bills for over 90-percent of Canadian large volume mailers. Canada Post also provides both an electronic courier service to securely transmit large electronic documents and an Electronic PostMark.