Karma's a bitch.

Talking to a customer about movies.

"Only two movies I've seen lately are 127 Hours and True Grit."

"So....you only go to arm chopping movies?"

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Young guy in my store. "This is wall to wall awesome!"

"Wait. Did you come up with that, or had you heard it before? Dude, that's my new promotional slogan!"

(Googled it. It's out there; mostly referring to a wall of video games....)

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I love the blurb to the comic Axe Cop. "Written by a 6 year old. Drawn by his 30 year old brother." The sidekick character is an automatic weapons touting, wise-cracking dinosaur....

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Oh, great. A paranoid District Attorney.

"Citing 'extreme security problems,' Flaherty seeks move to new office." Bulletin, 3/5/11. Combined with his subpoenas for leaks, it makes him sound a little zealous.

Then again -- when you read the actual article, his requests seem reasonably reasonable.

I'm not sure taking on the local newspaper is the smartest thing for a politician to do. They can write headlines that make you sound crazy....

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There have been a flurry of articles about how the Big Box stores are starting to scale down, for instance, a Walmart Express.

Another word for a scaled down Big Box store is --- well, store. You know, your average store.

Wait, wasn't the Big Box store an improvement on the -- you know, store? Isn't that why they were built?

Or were they, as I've always felt, a big old Ponzi scheme -- build up and build out and fill it with merchandise and carpet bomb the neighborhood and then build another one across town, and in the next town over, and make it bigger -- and on and on to infinity?

Well, exponential growth is impossible, and eventually you start cannibalizing your own customer base -- or the other chain, which is more or less exactly like you -- the Lowes to your Home Depot, the Office Max to your Staples -- builds right across the street from you.

And the public seems to funnel itself to these massive black holes, bypassing the neighborhood store on the way.

And now these same monsters want to build -- regular stores?

But wait again. I thought the reason for the ultra cheap prices at these Big Boxes was the economy of scale? Aren't you giving that up? I thought people flocked to these Big Boxes because they have everything there is to stock. Aren't you giving that up?

So...I think it's just a continuation of the Ponzi scheme. Keep on building, keep on vacuuming up all the available dollars, and hope no one notices that they're slicing the pie thinner and thinner.

Online is going to get them in the end anyway, heh.

And then, you know, when Blockbuster and Hollywood have disappeared, won't it be interesting to see a resurgence in neighborhood video and game stores? When Borders and Barnes and Noble disappear, won't it be interesting to see a resurgence in neighborhood bookstores?

You know. Human scaled. Reality based. Alternatives to the soulless online universe.

Karma's a bitch.