Monday, March 06, 2006

The Shining City of Larsen

Somewhere, next to a vast ocean of information, at the crossroads of what I know and what I'm going to learn, there is a city of me. It's an open city. Sure, Rick Steve's guide steers you clear of those dark spaces at the intersection of Open Bar and Karaoke Night and the Bridge of Sighs is much more of a tourist trap than its owners would have you believe (the Troubled Waters beneath appear to be Troubled largely because of the collection of pretty, hungry goldfish gathered at its surface) and the sports complex appears to be entirely deserted and entirely complicated. Still, if you get a chance, stop in at the Bird Brain restaurant, where the owner can be enticed to speak airily for hours at a time, his meal before him growing steadily colder and inedible, when before long, to satisfy the gods of hunger and punning, he is forced to Eat Crow.

Larsenopolis will not always entertain. It will not always endear itself to your heart. It promises to try, however, and hopefully not "try" as in "the Crucible" but "try" as in Olympiad, eternally hoping for bronze, silver or gold but even more secretly hoping to get its face on the front of the bloggers' Wheaties box.

Periodically, photographs should appear on this site. Romantics throughout the ages have valued them at approximately 1,000 words, but a quick back of the envelope calculation shows that, with a per-character memory limit of about 256 bytes for ASCI character, and an average word size of about four characters, each picture on this site should weigh in at about 1 megapixel, far, far greater resolution than on my crappy cameraphone. My pictures will be worth about 500 words, possibly less. I do not vouch for the colors and the graininess may astound photo aficionados. Nevertheless, some of us like to see the pretty pictures, if only to decide that Larseonopolis is a city we would love to visit by Internet and avoid in the flesh.

I hope you like it.

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