The Termites Get A Headache

At the San Diego Interior Design & Landscape Expo there was a lot of interest in fake things. Metal-clad wood, epoxy-filled wood, plastic wood, imitation rocks, cast concrete slate, stamped brick. The only guy I met who was really interested in real wood was the owner of a garage door company. Even then, he built his roll-up doors cum carriage doors with mahogany veneer covered plywood. Despite that, he was the most legitimate craftsman in the joint. How could I tell? My spider sense tingling?

It was the missing digits. Like your shop teacher. The first philanges on his right thumb and index finger had gone missing. Clearly there’s a lesson there, but the only one I took away was to always clamp your work. Fortunately, I’d learned that lesson a long time ago from my own shop teacher. The one who said that he could build a stronger house by gluing all the joints instead of nailing them.The one who held up his own three-fingered hand to illustrate the importance of “respecting the equipment.” Of course, he also railed against the “do it quickly on the cheap” bastards who built homes with those common nails. He also drank vodka and smoked cigars with my English teacher in his office during their lunch break.

That explains a couple of things, doesn’t it?

Other things I didn’t need to know from the show were these:

• A plexiglas septic tank is a bad idea.
• Using whole potatoes to illustrate the flush-potential of your new toilet is off-putting.
• 2004 will be known as the year of Mediterranean Chic in interior design. If I never see another lion’s head spewing water, dark stone archway, or blue tile table it’ll be too soon.
• Ten horsepower pumps in above-ground spas are now the norm. I guess you need that when you have forty or fifty jets, but great jumpin’ Jeebus! Ten horses is enough to blow you clean out of the water! Good thing they have sturdy handles near your knees in the benches.
• Those same spa manufacturers are in a feature race, the horsepower and jet count being only two. How many speakers? Two? We’ve got four. We’ve got ten! Eight above, and two woofers under the water! We’ve got an AM/FM tuner built into the side of ours. Oh yeah? We’ve got Sirius satellite radio! (no, I’m not kidding.)

That’s only scratching the surface, but you get the idea. It was silly, indulgent, and I’m sure that the fools here in San Diego will snap that crap up like winning lottery tickets.

Meow,

bob