Well, I can’t resist sharing this ARTICLE about the discovery of secret underground bathrooms beneath the flowery landscaping of Milwaukee’s boulevards. The median strips are pretty ho-hum today, but when I first moved to Milwaukee in the early 1980s, our boulevards were world-class AMAZING! The first time I ever saw the gorgeous bird of paradise flower (Wikipedia article HERE) was in maybe 1983 as I was driving along Humboldt Boulevard.
Sigh. The world isn’t what it once was. Appliances are no longer built to last a lifetime. A half-gallon of ice cream is now 1.75 or even 1.5 quarts, because we’re apparently supposed to be dumb enough not to notice that everything is downsizing in order to raise prices. And flowers (and even trees) are extravagances that cities can’t afford to maintain on any kind of scale.
On the other hand, I suppose once we’re all living in the Metaverse, we can have as many virtual flowers as we want. We’ll just need VR headsets or other XR devices to see them. And sadly, no one has figured out yet how to digitize scent, so we won’t be able to enjoy them that way. But no matter. By then COVID (“Covid”? Or entirely lowercase “covid”? Or whatever, because who even cares?) may have stolen humanity’s sense of smell anyway.
Gee, sorry about this. All I meant to do was share a fun article. And then I actually went and wrote a downer of a post. I assume I’ll be in a better mood next time!
