Saturday, August 20, 2005 

"They say that destruction is a crude form of art."


"We all can be artists: Just burn from the heart."

Watching kids doing anything in their power to damage the junked car that was scheduled to be launched in a trebuchet left me with "Grab A Crowbar" by Mr. McFeely stuck in my head.

I didn't get to see the car get launched. When they said the car would be launched at :"threeish," they clearly meant more like "sevenish," and I was only halfway through my four photo opportunities of the day. But I did have a very fascinating time watching the kids. Most of the inside of the car was torn out, the hood was just an empty shell, the side windows were gone, and the kids who were there saw this as an opporunity. This car is junk, it's about to be smashed. This means we can tear it apart and it won't matter. So they swarmed at it, hopping on it, hitting it with objects, tearing the sidepanels out of the insides of the doors, kicking it and pushing it and anything else they could think of. I spent my whole memory card taking action shots of them wailing on it, and had to curl up in the dismembered scoop of a bulldozer to copy the photos onto my laptop so I could take more pictures. (This is when my compatriot H------ arrived, and I'd like to see the pictures she got of me playing with my laptop in the scoop.)

I saw the lady who'd adjusted the nose pieces on my glasses earlier in the day, and we both sort of went "Oh! Hi! Huh!" It turned out it was her car that the kids were destroying, and that was going to be fired in the trebuchet the crane was currently helping assemble.

I don't know if it worked or not. One of my friends who showed up is an engineer, and he took one look at the big trebuchet and went "Those supports are going to just collapse sideways."