Josh in California - Part 6: Leaving San Francisco / Berkeley

Tuesday, October 30, 2001

I’m back at the Kinko’s across the street from the Greyhound terminal, waiting for my bus to Santa Cruz. It leaves at 6:15 and gets there at 8:55 and for real I’m going to Santa Cruz this time. Last week I just thought I’d be in Santa Cruz…

Anyway. I’m drowsy and my computer’s slowly crumbling. First Outlook decided to loose all of my mail (which I helped it find, with much trouble), and then something went wrong with the internal fan and it began making a terrible loud buzzing noise that just stopped a couple of minutes ago. I took these two events together as a reminder to back up all of my data somewhere else, just in case this computer decided to give up the ghost soon.

So I’m at the Kinko’s, possibly in need of a soda pop to perk me up.

I found a youth hostel in downtown Santa Cruz that will be perfect for me to stay at. Their desk will reopen at 5:00 and I’ll be able to call and make a reservation before I get on the bus. $18/night for a pad in downtown Santa Cruz. The only problem might be the weather, which has been cool and cloudy with occasional rain for the past several days.

This will be a good time to write about my stay with Mason in Berkeley, though. I arrived — accidentally — at about 10 AM Wednesday morning and spent the day walking around San Francisco, mainly between City Lights Bookstore and Washington Square on Columbus Avenue. I like that area. City Lights is a cool little book shop run by publisher-poet Lawrence Ferlinghetti and they seem to be very aware of what they sell. They sell very good books and you don’t find too much fluff, impressive considering the size of the place. And then Washington Square relaxes me so much. Every time I am there I want to read abook and fall asleep, which is exactly what I did on Wednesday. I had The Hobbit with me and read a few pages before dozing off. I finished my Columbus Avenue experience by having coffee and soda at acouple different places before coming back to the Transbay station (Greyhound station) to pick up my bags and call Mason. I worked on my computer at Kinko’s (sending Coté the mail below) and then went over to another coffeeshop (I forget all of the names by now) where I worked on my PlanetJLabs.com site while waiting to get in contact with Mason. When he finally called me back at about 10:30, I finished my work and took the BART to the Berkeley station where he picked me up in his car and took me up to his new place up near Euclid Avenue in the Berkeley hills. He doesn’t technically “live” there — he’s got a room still at Lothlorien — but Melissa stays there so Mason does, too.

As an aside, one of the irritating things about having a lot of fun is that I don’t want to stop and write in my journal. I want to have my fun. This is why my journal probably won’t be very detailed about my stay in Berkeley with Mason and Melissa. We ran around everywhere and did so much stuff and I never felt like I wanted to stop and write on my journal.

I probably won’t write all about it just right now, but I’ll allude to the highlights of the stay:

Thursday I biked with Mason up into Tilden Park. We rode out to Lake Anza where we found a rock that jutted out into the lake and sat and smoked a bit before deciding to jump off the high rock into the very cold water. We biked back a different route. That evening we went with Melissa, Samantha, and Winston (a DJ and former “e-tard” (his word) who lives with Melissa) to see Brenda Boynter at the Boom Boom Room, a blues club in SF. She fuckin’ rocked. We stole marachino cherries all night and danced some. And stole a mixed drink later in the night. After hearing Brenda, I got a good idea of what soul music was all about (I think). She did a great song called “Hoo-Doo Woman” and some other classic covers I recognized (like “Groove Me”) as well as plenty of songs I didn’t recognize.

Friday I hung around near Euclid and Hearst, an intersection right against the Berkeley campus with little food shops and stores along it. In the evening we went to a party at a co-op apartment complex where I got to meet Mason’s friends Fawad, Sahar, and Sharin for the first time. I’d heard the last two names so often in the past few years, I enjoyed finally getting to see the people. Many people dressed up for the party, but we didn’t. Mason and I just walked around from apartment to apartment saying “hello” to old friends of Mason’s and watching the funny people.

My birthday came on Saturday. My 24th. I couldn’t help feeling disappointed in that I didn’t get to do much to celebrate, but that’s sort of the drawback of having a birthday so close to a major holiday — people’s minds are elsewhere and your friends already have a reason to party besides you. Melissa and Samantha did sing me “Happy Birthday” around noon, while I sat on the back porch doing something (eating food, maybe). I liked that. I had a short conversation with my dad about his jog in Brightleaf park and I had an unexpectedly short conversation with my grandparents — I think my call might have interrupted their watching the World Series on television. The next day I got a voicemail from Claire saying “Happy birthday!” and a virtual postcard from Abby saying the same, but that’s about it. My birthdays have never been major events, unfortunately. This one I spent shopping for a Halloween costume and going to a big Halloween party in northern SF.

I never know what I want to be for Halloween, but this time I stuck upon what I thought would be fun while shopping at Mars, a local used-clothes store in Berkeley. Alien Admiral. They had this big, silly, white alien-head mask and several officer’s uniform jackets, but none of the jackets fit so I couldn’t really use them. I ended up being an Alien on Vacation, after buying a beautiful Hawaiian shirt at Buffalo Exchange and coming back to get the alien mask from Mars. At home before leaving for the party, I put on my cream-khaki pants and my shoes, and the new shirt. I tried covering my pants with aluminum foil, and when it became clear that that woldn’t work, I decided to cover my shoes instead. I did this and found an old cowboy hat of Mason’s and covered the top (not the brim) with foil, too, and made myself a little badge that said, “Hi! I’m ‘Bob’ from Canada!” on it in back permanent marker. So I did this, put on the big alien mask with the cowboy on top of it, tucked the mask’s collar into the shirt’s collar, and voila: I look rediculous. Perfect. Photos were taken — you just wait. Mason did a good job dressing like a cowboy and Melissa wore a chainmail haltertop and some little pants and nothing else but a cape. Samantha, who came with us, dressed like a flapper.

More soon. I’ve got to go get my bus now.

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Art Cars

Monday, October 29, 2001

This has nothing to do with anything, but while distracting myself from chacking my e-mail at the Moffitt Library at Berkeley, I found a page devoted to another art car called “Undersea Mah Jongg.” I had an art car once, but my art wasn’t nearly so sophisticated. Nor was my car.

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Josh in California - Part 5: A Note to Coté

Wednesday, October 24, 2001

Date: Wed, 24 Oct 2001 21:11:17 -0600
Subject: Kinko’s
From: Josh Knowles [chasing@mail.utexas.edu]
To: [cote@pobox.com]

I’m at Kinko’s, by the way, dealing with my web stuff. They provide free DSL service if you’ve got your own laptop! Good deal. I’m waiting for Mason to come back from a lecture or something so I can go over to his place.

I just gotta tell someone: this whole work-vacation thing works out really well, I think. With the laptop on my shoulder I’ve been taking in some sites and then sitting down and taking care of work while I get coffee or have a bite to eat. It’d be a sort of self-funding vacation if I were getting paid for any of this.

If Acorro got rolling and allowed me the opportunity to take my laptop and cellphone on the road for a month provided I still maintained contact and got the work done… Oh my.

- Hilbert

(‘Josh’ gets so… overused.)

See this piece I wrote last year…

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Josh in California - Part 4: Tar and Art Revisited

Wednesday, October 24, 2001

The Greyhound Station, 7:44 PM, Tuesday, October 23, 2001…

I’m back at the Greyhound station. A small oriental woman at the other place, where I tried to charge my PowerBook, got upset over my having plugged into one of her extension cords. I think she owned the place. “Not right! Not right!” she kept saying and pointing to where I’d attached my cord. “Not right!” Some of the little restaurants out in this part of town might not have the same sort of … understanding of laptops that student-oriented coffeehouses would. “Not right!” “I’m sorry! I’m sorry!” was all I could respond while removing my cable. I finished my cup of coffee without incident.

While sitting here I figured I’d catch up on some of my public journal. I went out to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art yesterday afternoon and evening and got to see lots of neat art and took some notes for myself. The actual reason for my being out there was to see the La Brea Tar Pits, but the La Brea Tar Pits actually surround LACMA, so I got to see both. Good deal.

(On the bus, now.)

The La Brea Tar Pits, by the way, are black puddles that bubble goo and stink of methane and oil. According to the La Brea Tar Pits Museum, their stickiness trapped enough creatures to make the location the site of more fossil finds than any other location on Earth. The museum resembles the Texas Memorial Museum with large, reconstructed dinosaur and prehistorical mammal skeletons all over and little stations where you can feel how much force it would require to pull a limb out from the tar. I saw mammoth skeletons and mastodon skeletons and sloths and sabre-toothed tiger skeletons and huge collection of wolverine skulls as well as bird skeletons of all sorts. I found myself surprised at how closely everyone’s skeletons resembles each other. I sound really naive writing about this stuff because I am. Bio and I didn’t mix very well during my formal education.

Buumpy ridinign on thi sbus. I’m getting nauseous reading my computer screen… I will continue.

I’m enjoying the freedom of travelling alone but I do sort of wish I had someone to debrief myself to, someone to dump my ideas on. Not having that person, I’ve decided to just Blog it all and see what happens with that, which will give me a much more permanent record of the whole journey, but I’d probably be, in general, more comfortable out here with a friend. Difficult finding a friend to go to California with for three weeks in the middle of the school semester, though. So…

LACMA, as Claire (Brenna’s roommate) calls it and thus I call it, has all sorts fo shit inside of it. It’s huge and full of art from around the world and quite a nice collection of modern American works from the likes of Andy Warhol and Roy Liechenstein. Warhol and Liechenstein are not news to me. I enjoy their work but I kind of knew what I would find in their rooms (they have their own rooms). Liechenstein’s Mondrian send-up called “Non Objective I” surprised me, though. It’s classic Mondrian — black lines and primary colored rectangles — but done in Liechenstein half-tone dots rather than solid colors. Not something I’d hang on my wall or that I would even care to look at very often, but I enjoyed seeing it once.

—- CAUTION: ART BABBLE —-

The piece that really caught my eye was a little digital art piece by a guy named John F. Simons and if I had an internet connection right now I’d go find some more information on him because his sole piece in the museum blew everything else away (for me). “Complex City,” he titled it, and the plaquard nearby said it attempted to recreate the essense and motion of a city in the same way Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie-Woogie” did. “Broadway Boogie-Woogie,” for those of you playing along at home, Mondrian painted later in his life, after all of the “Composition with Red and Yellow” pieces with the black lines and color fields (like Liechenstein copied — see above). It’s similar to those, but much more complex and “alive” with clear back-and-forth motion sort of like you might imagine traffic in Manhattan. I think I read that he found influence in jazz music, a source of influence for many painters and writers during the middle decades of the last century, and tried to jazz-up what he did in the “Composition” series. Anyway, John F. Simon, according to the plaquard, attempted to do something similar with recreating the bustle of the city within the frame of art. His piece used a Mac G3 displaying onto a fine-resolution LCD screen about fourteen-inches diagonal. On the bottom were “streets” — simple gray bars that intersected (with one going through diagonally sucha s Broadway cuts through midtown Manhattan — populated with little red, blue, yellow, and black squares representing, I imagine, cars. There were not street lights, but you could see the cars pile up when the invisible street light turned red and then reaccelerate when they got green. Some cars drove faster than others, but were programmed to navigate around each other rather than just go through each other. All the lights changed at he same time so you ended up with a cool effect of all the traffic flowing side-to-side or up-down at once. Not realistic traffic-management, for sure, but fun to watch. On the right some digital building had elevators that movedup and down and delivered colors to different levels of the virtual building. Below on the side was a sort of clock that I could figure out. Anyway, to sum up, think Sim City and Sim Tower but as a minimalist digital art piece that you don’t interact with. I liked it, but then, I’m totally insane.

—- END ART BABBLE (for now) —-

I’ve got more to say about LACMA, so beware. Maybe I’ll write it tomorrow.

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Josh in California - Part 3: Hollywoodland

Wednesday, October 24, 2001

Hollywood Boulevard, 5:15 PM, Tuesday, October 23, 2001…

I have to start this post off with a plug: If you find yourself hungry in Hollywood, let me recommend the inappropriately-named “Ronnie’s Donuts.” It’s a sub shop, really — “Home of the $1.50 Sub,” as they advertise on the storefront. I’m eating a big, Thundercloud-sized egg-salad sub and it really really cost only $1.50, which could make this one of my most comfortable eating experiences so far in Los Angeles. Most comfortable because I’m on a rather tight budget out here and spending $18.00 on incredible sushi like I did last night causes little alarms and sirens to go off in the back of my head: “If this continues, Josh, you’ll be spending your stay in Santa Cruz sleeping on the sidewalk.” Anyway, good sub for only a buck-fifty. And if this place can happily stay in business (it looks like it’s been here for a while and the servers had a good, silly rapport with the local businessman-sorts in line in front of me) I wonder what the hell makes most restaurants so much more expensive. Probably because they fail to creatively eliminate certain expersive overhead items, or maybe just because they can be.

This reminds me of a conversation I had with Claire the night before coming out here (that would be Thursday night). She’d mentioned sometime during the previous months her idea (of many, many) to found a chain of fast foods restaurants that serve normal food — “healthy” vegetarian sandwiches and raw veggies to go, I imagine. Imagine a place where I could get some sliced mixed veggies and dip, a medium-sized sandwich, and some juice for just a couple bucks. Yeah, you imagine that. I’ll imagine you with a green sombrero theatrically eating peach slices in light syrup straight from the can. What? I’m just floating off into space now. Let’s get back to the scene…

Besides this place, which is charming for its low-cost personality (it’s got a glass storefront about fifteen feet wide on Hollywood and goes about fifty feet deep with a counter with two fiesty Chinese women serving subs at the back and several round cheap-restaurant-standard round gray tables and simple padded cheap-restaurant-standard brown chairs around them), there’s the rest of Hollywood Boulevard which is predictably not that great. I’m up here because the Hollywood bus stop happened to be an easier trip from Brenna’s apartment than the LA station. That’s why I’ve got a few hours to kill (my bus leaves at 7:55 — I got the ticket at 3:40).

So I left my big travelling backpack at the bus station after an encounter with the surly ticket agents (all Greyhound ticket agents are surly, as far as I can tell) and decided to go walk around Hollywood to see what’s up. Now, let me save you the trouble of actually coming down here by describing exactly what you’re going to see. You’ll step onto Hollywood Blvd and think, “wow, look at the palm trees and, oh, look, here are those little stars that Hollywood sorts seem to make such a big deal about. Oh, look, ‘Ernest Borgnine,’ ‘Edward G. Robinson,’ ‘Zsa Zsa Gabor’ — famous names! Okay, that’s cool… And look at these shops I can visit! Boy, if I needed to buy pornography or cheap t-shirts that say ‘Los Angeles’ and ‘God Bless America,’ then this would be fucking heaven.”

I’m being grouchy.

It’s not so bad, really, I just find something logically funky with places that exist as tourist traps only to promote themselves… Something cyclical and pointless about that to me. I’m sure, if you’ve travelled with me, you’ve heard me bitch about it before and you’ll probably read some more bitching about it if you check back here in a few days, although not being quite as visible as a piece of American McCulture, I don’t think I’m going to find quite so much nonsense in the smaller towns of Monterrey and Santa Cruz. (The bus I’m taking this evening will take me to Santa Cruz.)

Anyway, I worked my way down to Mann’s Chinese Theater, which is actually quite nice, though under renovation right now. I could get an idea of what the place would look like without the scaffolding and I walked around looking at the cement hand-and-foot-prints of celebrities within the “courtyard” of the theater. Mann’s, in case you don’t know, is where many movie premieres are held and looks like a Art Deco Chinese temple with cut-iron dragons and reeds poinking off all the corners. Two arms sort of wrap around the entrance making a courtyard-sort-of area (there are no plants or anything here, just the celebrity cement-prints). This makes the perfect little celebrity photo-op fantasy-land, I bet. So I saw Harrison Ford’s prints and Nicolas Cage’s, Eddie Murphy and Shirly Temple and R2-D2, C3PO, and Darth Vader, the whole Star Trek (original) cast, and a bunch of older entertainment names I sort of vaguely have heard of but don’t really know anything about… All dedicated to Ted and … I forget the other name. Don, I think. Ted and Don. I didn’t know what to make of this. Ted and Don Grauman, maybe. The theater had a sign that said “Grauman’s Chinese Theater” on it. This could be the real name or this could be the name of the builders, designers, or owners. An interesting, unexpected find of mine was “Grauman’s Egyptian Theater” down the street, east of the Chinese Theater several blocks on the other side of the street. It’s a very similar construction, but with (hey!) and Egyptian theme. Same concrete-courtyard idea, but the building had orange—pink fake-sand colors with Hollywoodish Egyptian design elements on it. And they’re showing “Evil Dead” on Halloween, which is way cool. They have a whole classic film series happening right now.

After Mann’s I made my way back the other way — winding through some more residential areas a block north of Hollywood, just for something more natural — and ended up on the other side of the bus station out at Gower street. A web site I found that gives tips about viewing the “Hollywood” sign recommended Hollywood and Gower as a good place to see it from, and it’s right. Gower is aimed right at the sign so you can stand at the corner and go, “Yup, that’s the sign!” as you view it on the hill between the buildings that line Gower. There’s not really that much to do with the “Hollywood” sign except accept it’s existance. It’s pretty small from Hollywood and Gower, about a hand-width-at-arm’s-length wide. Maybe a little wider. And it’s really hazy out today (as it’s been through my entire stay in Los Angeles), so the sign wasn’t very highly visible. On a clearer day it might have been much more attractive on the side of a green hill with blue skies. This afternoon it shone a lighter shade of gray than its surrondings.

It’s about 6:00 and it’s getting dark outside. Ronnie’s Donuts is filling up with small groups of people — an Hispanic family, and Anglo family, a couple asian chicks, an older couple, and three business-boy sorts. Normal people, which seems odd for this part of town. 6247 Hollywood Boulevard — that’s the address painted on the storefront glass. The battery on my laptop is just about out of juice so I’m going to close up and take it back to the streets. I’ll be in Santa Cruz tomorrow morningat 6:55.

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Josh in California — Part 2: Glitz, Tar, Art

Tuesday, October 23, 2001

Well, I’m back at Brenna’s computer and I think we’re planning on taking off to get some coffee. We’ll see what happens there.

I had another full day, especially considering that I didn’t get out of the apartment until about a quarter before two. That’s not going to happen again — it made me feel lazy and drowsy and just not in the best mode for travelling. But, the day went well. The two highlights were my visits to Beverly Hills and to the La Brea Tarpits / L.A. County Museum of Art (they’re on the same piece of land). More soon.

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Josh in California — Part 1: Sunday at the Beach

Monday, October 22, 2001

I’m sitting at Brenna’s computer, now, checking my e-mail and writing in my little online journal. Brenna’s on the bed reading some passages for her linguistics class (“about the Frankish empire and it’s linguistic importance”) at UCLA. She’s a graduate student working towards here doctorate in linguistics, concentrating in the German language.

I can still feel the sand in my pores. Or the salt, maybe. Both. We spent most of today walking around between Santa Monica beach and Venice beach. We didn’t do too much but talk and look at what people around us were up to, but we had fun. Brenna’s only been living here for about five weeks so she still hadn’t made it out to the beach — we shared a first LA beach experience together.

I guess we got out to Santa Monica beach around 3:00 — rather late — after having pho (Brenna) and shrimp vermicelli (me) at a little sidewalk Vietnamese place on Santa Monica Boulevard near Brenna’s apartment. See, we both have the nasty habit of staying up until the wee hours of the morning, so we don’t really get moving until later in the day. So lunch was the first activity of the day. Anyway. We had lunch and took the Blue Bus down to the beach where we got off and wandered around. We started near a pier with amusement park rides on it — with a roller coaster, ferris wheel, carnival games, and such.

I’m not a big fan of tourism. I enjoy travelling around to different places and seeing what’s going on, but I, for the most part, can’t stand “touristy stuff.” Fake.

So, we ignored the pier and wandered south down the beach, running into a crowd of people gathered around a grassy patch where we saw a team of kids perform capoera dance-fighting routines, some trampoliners do wild spinning tricks, an an “eleven year-old, twelve-time world karate champ” kid raise screaming hell demonstrating his karate routines (katas, possibly?) involving first his own self spinning, flipping, striking, and kicking and then himself with a long pointy stick doing the same thing. Pretty crazy, the last bit — the kid, not the sentence. Brenna and I talked about what we thought would happen to a kid trained to go into a screaming blur with a pointy stick… Would he kill a teacher? Was he super-disciplined? Brenna got an ice cream bar and I an ice cream sandwich and we took off.

Brenna had her camera and about a half-mile down the beach — we were walking along right where the water was rather than up by the bike/rollerblade path (which we weren’t supposed to be on, anyway) and the pedestrian walk sided almost entirely with gross little shops selling “Venice Beach Lifeguard” baby-tees and sausage-on-a-stick sorts of stuff. Not my thing, let me reiterate. So she had her camera and we decided to write some things in the sand to then photograph to turn into post cards or gifts. Our first try involved a little black rock I found. I etched “IT’S A COLD / DAY IN CALI! / HEY, HoC!” in caps in the sand (the slashes indicate the line-breaks, and the “LD” of “COLD” and “LI!” of “CALI!” got kind of taken out by the wash). So, we took the photo, but I’m pretty sure that between the debris of dug-up sand and the loss of the letters due to the water the text in the photo will be more-or-less unreadable. Maybe it’ll turn out. Either way it’ll probably end up scanned and on the web somewhere. These letters dug in the sand were about three feet long and two feet wide each. Pretty big. I wonder if it stayed around long enough for anyone to be confused by “IT’S A CO / DAY IN CA / HEY, HoC!” scrawled in the otherwise shoeprinted and birdfootprinted damp sand.

So I thought it’d be cool to try again, but wasn’t interested in digging in the sand anymore. I got kind of dirty and Brenna got peeved when I touched her camera with my sandy mitts and we were fine just watching the sandpipers dig for crabs in the sand and watching other people travelling along the beach.

Odd things about this beach compared to my limited experiences on other beaches: There were homeless people sleeping everywhere! Not everywhere, but we must have seen… fifteen? twenty? It didn’t harm my experience much so I can’t say I was offended or anything like that. Sleeping on the beach sounds pretty cool to me and if the cops will let you do it, better than sleeping on the street, I suppose — though sort of odd to be doing it at four or five o’clock in the evening. I just got surprised on a few occasions when I’d be talking or walking somewhere and I’d realize that I was right by some person sleeping! I don’t want to disturb, but I also don’t feel like someone should be offended by someone else being loud on a loud beach in the late afternoon. Anyway, I don’t think I woke anyone up and I had no problems with them so it’s all good — but strange, nonetheless.

After walking another quarter-mile I decided that I wanted to try writing something on the beach again. We found a big clump of seaweed this time, figuring that the seaweed would be much more visible and wouldn’t be destroyed by the water. There wasn’t much seaweed so I fugured “Hi, Abby!” would be the best thing to write. After verifying with Brenna that I wasn’t going to get poisoned or have a rash break out from handing so much seaweed (“just don’t touch anything in it that looks alive,” I was warned), I took to untangling it and laying it out on the beach, again in three-by-two foot lettering (about). Brenna decorated this on with shiny rocks and shells and I took another photograph. It’ll turn out better, I think. It reminded me of the cover of the Phish album “Slip, Stitch, and Pass,” for those of you out there into Phish. Well, here’s a link to it if you’d like to see what I’m talking about… Remove the guy tied to the enormous ball of yarn and replace the white-line lettering of “Phish” with seaweed lettering and you get an idea of what the shot should look like. Again, it’ll probably be on the web soon enough. Hopefully she’ll appreciate it and hang it on her wall, maybe.

Okay, last time I wrote something really long Blogger cut off the ending and I didn’t like that. So, I’ll continue this in another posting, probably to be entitled “Josh in California - Part 2.” Stay tuned!

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Bass and Co. Pale Ale

Friday, October 19, 2001

For my next trick while drink beer alone at my laptop, I will consider the label of the Bass and Co. Pale Ale that’s sitting in front of me. I drank it — my third of the evening — while talking on the phone. Yeah, possibly the first time I’ve even gotten myself tipsy while talking on the phone. Maturity. Anyway, the label of a bottle of Bass has on it, as you might know, a large red equilateral triangle with the text “England’s First Registered Trademark” underneath it. I’d noticed the triangle many time before, but I’d never noticed the text.

What does this mean? It’s a stark red triangle, which triggers strange thoughts of secret symbols and secret societies in my brain… If Bass first got brewed in 1777, as the label says, the trademark couldn’t have been much farther behind, right? Thinking about this triangle and this text could shed some interesting light on the subjects of beer business and British trademark laws in the 19th century. Fascinating. Let’s go to the web, shall we?

The Bass website (bassale.com) says:

“In these days of logos and symbols, it is interesting that the label incorporating the world-famous Bass Red Triangle — originally a shipping mark — is the worldís oldest registered trademark. On the eve of the Trade Marks Registration Act of 1875 going into effect, it is said that a loyal member of the Bass staff spent an uncomfortable night on the steps of the registrarís office to ensure that the label with the red triangle — which had already been used officially by the company since 1855 — would hold the coveted No.1 place. And despite some reported jostling in the hall that morning, he also managed to take the No. 2 registration with the Bass red diamond, traditionally associated with Burton Ale, and No. 3 for the brown diamond of Porter and Extra Stout.”

I don’t think the information I’m going to find on the web will go much deeper, but it’s interesting to have a little glimpse behind the history of the beer. It’s good, I think, when beer bottles have little clues and interesting bits of history on them — gives you something to think about if you’re drinking alone like my lame ass is — but I think there should be more. I want a beer with text and interesting information written all over it, like those bars of Dr. Bronner’s soap. Anyway.

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