small happiness

October wasn't a terribly good month for me. There were some high points, don't get me wrong. Some things went well. I had my best Hallowe'en in years.

But overall I ended October feeling much older and sadder than I began it.

And that sort of feeling makes the small happinesses of life all the more important.

A perfect examplar of such small happinesses is a new Sony Europe ad for its Bravia line of LCD TVs. Sony unleashed a quarter of a million bouncy superballs on a street in San Francisco earlier this year and filmed the result. How could 250,000 bouncy superballs not improve someone's mood? Well, unless they were all being thrown at you. Edited to 60 seconds, slowed down, and played back to an amazing song by Jose Gonzalez...and it becomes just a magical piece of video footage.

It's ironic to me, kind of, that it should be a commercial that provides a much needed affirmation that there's still new, beautiful things to see in the world, and that something can be silly and lovely at the same time. This seems like it should be Art's job, not commerce's. Bad Art! Get with the program!

Anyway I've been kind of hooked on the Sony spot. Maybe it'll brighten your day, too.

a bridge too far

It's always a pleasure to find things that combine multiple of my interests. Like, for example, beautiful scenery, clever visual depictions of quantitative data, and doing oneself in.

A perfect example of this is the SF Chronicle's great chart showing just where people have jumped off the Golden Gate Bridge over the years.



See the original here.

Unsurprisingly, dead center (so to speak), facing the city, is by far the most popular place to do it. One has to wonder what the people who jumped from the very edges were thinking (probably they wanted to be sure they wouldn't survive...and maybe that they'd be found). And I'm also curious about the people who jumped facing the other direction...given the choice of final view, what must one think to turn one's back on society, literally, and stare into the limitless Pacific?

Or maybe it was just foggy that day.