You want thoughts and experiences to intrigue and entertain you after a long day?  Well, here at the Sad Robot Bureau, we have you covered.  The Sad Robot Bureau blog brings together the greatest thinkers and philosophers of our time to reflect on the hip and interesting things in the world around us.  Day or night we are on the case.  We hope you enjoy the fun thoughts that the SRB has to offer.

Here’s some trivia to help you get the idea.  Can you guess the number of chain grocery stores within the city limits of Detroit?  The answer is zero.  Not one.  Don’t believe me? Look it up, you’re already on the internet. This has made it nearly impossible for residents to find fresh produce and made artery clogging fast food one of the only thriving industries in the state.  To counter this, communities have begun turning Detroit’s all too many vacant lots into urban vegetable gardens. Adding insult is the fact that the soil in the city is so toxic after years of industrial pollution, they have to import top soil from Illinois to make the food safe to eat.

I left that job feeling the problems in Detroit were unsolvable. That we should just wall it off and force Canada to annex the whole state. That is, until I visited another city that you have to see to believe, Amsterdam.  A city where the party never stops and where red lights mean 50 euro will buy you 15 minutes of pretty much whatever you want. Where you can’t smoke a cigarette in a bar, that is, unless there’s weed in it.   Before I got there I thought I knew, but I had no idea.   With all the craziness and excess around me, I could not believe how any work could possibly get done here!

After speaking to the Dutch it all began to make sense, too much sense.   They told me that the pot, the prostitution, the outdoor urinals for when you’ve had too much to drink were not there for them.  They were there for me.   They’re for the tourists, tourists who bring in hundreds of millions of dollars into the country every year.  If there’s one thing the Dutch will readily admit they’re good at, it’s making money.  They are the founders of the world’s first corporation, the Dutch East India Company.   Behind the scenes, this chaos is very well orchestrated.  Sex worker and coffee shop licenses (essentially a license to sell pot) are extremely hard to obtain and are very, very expensive.   And the taxes on marijuana and even alcohol or hotel rooms are as high as anywhere in the world.  Yet the tourists still come and they still spend.  This might seem at odds with Holland’s Calvinist history, but for them it isn’t.  The oldest Church in Amsterdam is right in the middle of the Red Light District and one did not grow around the other.  They were built at the same time 700 years ago.

Marijuana isn’t technically legal in Amsterdam, but the courts refuse to prosecute it.  This frees up vast amounts of the police department’s budget to combat harder and infinitely more harmful drugs… the same drugs Detroit is fighting a losing battle against.  Can you imagine the droves of teenagers and college students that would come from Chicago and Milwaukee and New York and a thousand other cities that would flood the city on day trips if Detroit followed Amsterdam’s model?  Can you imagine the money that they would bring with them?  Money the city and people of Detroit so desperately need.  It’s a chance to renew America’s forgotten metropolis, and I for one would smoke to that.

Michael Winand

Recently though, in an exception that proves the rule, I was invited to an event that required a suit.  As I put it on I was filled with an overwhelming urge to pair it with my Chuck Taylor Converse All-Stars.  A moment later I found myself asking why?  Why do I so fervently feel the need to put on shoes that are a staple in the closets of 14 year old girls across the country?

The cliché that I was somehow trying to “express my individuality “can be thrown out immediately. Nearly all my friends own a pair and they have been one of the most popular styles for almost a century.   In that time Chuck’s have meant different things to different people.  When they came out they where pinnacle of sports technology, in the 70’s they were adopted by the punk scene and in the 90’s Kurt Cobain wore them in all his flannel and angst.

But what do they mean to me now?  The theory I came up with is they no longer worn as a message to the world, but only to a few of us in it.  They seem to say “I didn’t really fit in high school either”.  In not so many words they stand for a kind of tongue in cheek irreverence and acceptance of one’s own geekdom. For an appreciation of British comedy, for public radio, for an addiction of the series of tubes that is the internet ,for the search for new music and an understanding that a Miley Cyrus single only sounds good when its mashed up with hardcore gansta rap. For everything that made us different as a kid, that are now the things we’re most proud of.  Essentially, for all the things that this whole site is about.

This message to our inner dorks is even more pronounced when worn with a suit, the uniform we associate with the work our generation spends most of its energy trying to avoid.  You might say that Chuck Taylor’s are as much a uniform as anything else, but those of us who wear them understand it. and I guess that the whole point after all.

Michael Winand

After a ballgame last night in which my favorite misery of a team (the Chicago Cubs) left my record at 0-5 on the season for all 5 Cubs games I’ve gone to this year, I headed to my car, parked in a nearby parking lot. Now when pulling into this lot before the game, each car chooses EZ-out parking for $40, or regular parking, where they squish all the cars together as close as possible, for $25. I chose patience over premium parking and opted to save the 15 extra bucks for a couple beers… as did everyone else whose cars were squished around mine.

So upon getting in my car after the game, it was obvious that no car was going anywhere fast, which is fine with me because I knew that’s what I was getting myself into when I parked. After a few minutes, the cars ahead of me start inching forward, and I am on my way… very slowly… which is fine… because that’s what I signed up for. Cars were slowly rolling forward from all angles towards the narrow one lane exit. And as happens in crowded parking lots where every car is inching up to maintain its position, the car in one lane filters to the exit, then a car in another lane moves forward toward the exit, then a car in a third lane takes their turn in moving up, then back to the next car in the first lane. It’s back to the basics of sharing and taking turns.

Of course, this is what does – and did – piss me off…
While everyone is staying courteous and obeying the system, it’s finally my turn to make my grand exit. I am staying as close to the car in front of me as possible to acknowledge to the other cars that I know it’s my turn to go and I will keep up the pace. All of a sudden, I see some car to my right trying to push his way forward around other cars, out of the established lanes we are all filtered into, you know, because he’s important and needs to go places. He starts inching up right next to me so that both my car and his are the same few inches away from the bumper in front of us. So apparently he thinks this is 3rd grade and he can cut in line ’cause he rules! Well, sir, ya can’t. So I keep inching forward towards the car in front of us to establish my alpha-male dominance over O’Doyle over there and what really pissed me off is he had the nerve to start yelling at me about going before him! Unbelievable. I have a feeling that his whole family is going down. As all our grandmas would say, someone should teach that boy some manners.

At the end of the day, it wouldn’t really have mattered to me if he was in front of me, and it shouldn’t have mattered to him. But it was the principle of the thing. We were all going to get out of there… slowly, but eventually. Was the extra 5 seconds he had to wait for me to pull my car ahead of him worth his frustration? Absolutely not… But the 5 seconds he took to yell at me certainly led to mine. Oh well, that’s life… Some people are just gonna piss you off.

Robby Silver