Washington, NC Summer Festival 2007

...is basically a chance for some local gift shops and carnival-type food stations to get their wares out, get people buying stuff, and out in the sun. We went to this last year, and it was fun, but we didn't get anything. This year was different.


Click images to make them grow...

Here's Jen in the one on the right; the one on the left shows more of the booths that were selling stuff. Note the giant ice-cream cone building in the one on the left.

Last year, two things caught Jen's eye (nothing caught mine) but again, we didn't buy anything. This year we did. The first thing Jen wanted to see were the soda can sculptures. That's the best way to describe them. Last year they just had boats and planes, but this year they had the Star Trek ship Enterprise, the one from the 1960s. I paid $14 for one made of Coke cans. I could have also got Mountain Dew, or Pepsi, which really was the best-looking one, but I chose Coke because it made an important statement. The people in Star Trek are really communists, more so than capitalists; in Star Trek: First Contact Captain Picard as much as tells a woman from the late 21st century that in his time, society has all but done away with money, and people work to better humanity. However, you just know that once space travel becomes a reality, the corporate sponsors are going to roll in. And one of the biggest corporate whores is the Coca-Cola Company. So the idea of a Coca-Cola starship isn't too far-fetched. (This idea isn't mine, it's a tweak on a similar idea brought up in Fight Club; brilliant film, see it if you haven't already.) So it's a statement as well as a decoration. And here's Jen posing with it (and her Spiderman toy).



OK, here's the exact quote from Fight Club, as spoken by Edward Norton, as the Narrator: When deep space exploration ramps up, it'll be the corporations that name everything, the IBM Stellar Sphere, the Microsoft Galaxy, Planet Starbucks. So that's where I got it. Gotta give credit where it's due. IBM isn't so much a major player now as opposed to 1999 when Fight Club was made, but replace IBM with Apple or Coca-Cola or even Pepsi for that matter. Or a cigarette or beer company. Now, if you want, you can read more quotes from this movie - and it's the dialogue that makes it - you can read quotes here, just be warned there's some explicit stuff - not safe for work, not appropriate for minors.