Burger King was not so bold as to assert actual Italianness. They’ve used scare quotes as an apologetic hedge, or so it seems at first glance.

Immersed in American kitsch in San Antonio’s tourism epicentre, I kinda wanted to buy a snow globe-entrapped armadillo last week. But. This quote from Boing Boing’s recent interview with Joey Roth has been ringing accurate to me, and so I passed.

“Irony was the dominant approach a few years ago, and it’s still popular. I think it has no place in design, since physical resources are consumed when something is mass-produced, and a joke is only witty for so long.”

Not coincidentally, Joey has produced the nicest object in recent memory.

See also…

This was taken a year ago.

From the top of the Umeda Sky Building in Osaka.

I was so entertained by the songs that play when trains stop at major stations that I recorded them. All I had to record was my sister’s compact digital camera in video mode, so I captured the video too. Here it is.

This is probably only interesting if you’ve been there recently.

But why settle for a ghetto recording when you can just play it on piano…

And some funny signs…

And some photos from Jillian’s camera…