The Price of Tea in China

It’s quiet in here, too quiet, why is there no sound coming form the house? Oh, that’s right, the holidays are over, all of the family have gone home and the Big Guy or the Professional woman, (Cause no one in their right mind would call any woman The Big Woman, and even though the phrase Professional Woman might imply less something less than a proper career path for a lady, we’ll over look those narrow minded individuals and say Professional Woman cause this is an artist’s blog and filled with open-minded and generously spirited folks who would never allow a words connotation to influence their opinion.), have gone back to work and so when the television is off, because there is absolutely nothing on right now seeing as how all of the networks are running re-runs to make every buck they can squeeze out of the season, the house really is quiet.


And that means you have time to think, think about how you are going to spend all that money on, the cash you got for Christmas. Oh come on you know you did, fess up, the kids were too busy to shop and the old fossil couldn’t get off the sofa and relatives you haven’t seen since you were too young to stay up for Letterman have all kicked in and cashed out cause they know that graduation is just around the corner and they want to make sure that their little Johnny or Johnnyette get their money when the invitations are sent out and if they don’t kick in at Christmas they’ll give you just the excuse you need to toss that cream-colored blackmail note in the trash.

So there you are alone in an empty house with a handful of cash and questions about what and how to spend it.

Sure, you could do like Clark Howard thinks people do and invest it. So that the fat-cat bankers who plunged us into this depression can buy a new Mercedes or give out one of those shockingly vulgar bonuses and get their names on CNN, but you are far too smart to do that, if anyone is going to get their hands on this money it’s going to be you.

And you best do it before the kids realize just how much you took in or they’ll have a hand out for a cut of the swag.

So what to spend it on?

Again you could do the sensible thing and buy supplies for your studio, that mat cutter you’ve been dreaming about, a wide format printer or a coupla dozen stretched canvases, that’s what you could do, but I’m thinking you won’t.

Here’s why, you are just as vulnerable to television advertising as the average six year old only you have better impulse control and won’t give in at the drop of a hat, which is why you still have money ten days after Christmas. You’ve seen all the holiday advertisements and the shiny new stuff and all of the bells and whistles that they pack into products now days because they know that the one that you have is perfectly good and you have no reason to replace it unless it breaks or there’s a something which they convince you you have to have in order to live a full and complete life.

Like 3-D television. Yeah, I didn’t buy into it either, the last thing I need is Kim Kardashian in 3-D or Survivor, shudder… I just want to vote the whole program off the island. So if you aren’t buying a new television with 3-D what are you going to spend your wad of loot on?

Of course, I could have told you that, a tablet computer is just what you need and Steve Jobs is laughing in his grave knowing you will be eating cat food for a half a year to buy the newest Apple Ipad.

But before you commit to that tablet can we talk? Sure it does some pretty amazing things. It consumes media like the plant in Little Shop of Horrors, “Feed me, Seymore!”  You’ll have to have games and Itunes and Netflicks and live at the App store just to keep the beastie running and well fed. But is that why you got it or have you actually given any thought to why you got it or maybe you should give some thought to whether or not you should get it at all?

So let’s take a look.

Tablets do what they were designed to do famously. They play music, movies and games like nobody's business. But does that help you with your art?

Now tablets with their touch screens are wonderful for making small art. You can use something like Corel Draw and paint the picture right in your Iwhatsit. Just be careful, one of the things tablets had to sacrifice for their portability is space, hard drive space, in fact they may not even have a hard drive. They probably have a solid state memory unit from 16 to 64 GB. That sounds like a lot, but remember your computer has one hundred and fifty to three hundred GB and you know how fast that filed up.

My boids I posted yesterday, well the one I posted isn’t the only example I made, and the files run from 9MB to 25MB so they’d fill up a drive pretty fast if I had to start working on them. Those Photoshop manipulations eat up a lot of space and even though the other guy’s software isn’t as space hungry, it does take a lot of room.

So you have the app itself and then the file it creates and before you know it you have run out of space, (Probably because of all of those files you downloaded from Itunes cause you had to have the original YouTube of Sonny and Cher singing “I Got You Babe”) and you can’t just run down to the computer Jedi and have them add another hard drive.

But if you had spent that money on a laptop, you could.

And I’ll tell you a little secret, it hasn’t happened yet, but it will, before this year is over, prices on laptops are
going to fall. Seems people want a shiny, new, Apple Ithingy. And then watch out the cost of a laptop will drop like the Hindenburg. But you’ll have to be quick because like I mentioned in a year or maybe eighteen months people will realize the mistake they have made and will want a laptop again and then the prices will soar and all of the folks in Japan who have been eating fish heads and rice will be back driving Toyotas or Lexuses, (Even though a Lexus is nothing but a re-badged Camry which you have to paid eighteen thousand additional dollars for, but you are a rich American, [They haven’t heard about my complaint about Staties calling themselves Americans like they were the only ones living on the whole double continent.] and never pay any attention to what you spend foolishly.)and buying overpriced condos in Hawaii.

So before you spend your hard earned money, you did earn it by sucking up to all of those relatives all year, think about what you are getting a portable computer for. Maybe an older laptop will do fine for what you want and it will save you hundreds of dollars and then you can re-supply the studio or buy that chase lounge you saw at the auction house next to the half-column and wouldn’t that make a great prop for a tableau, so why not get a new computer, only let someone else break it in for you and then you can have your studio and props so that when you get a chance to paint/sculpt a naked pop tart you’ll have a chase lounge for them to recline and repose and drape themselves on and a nifty, neat and cool computer to store the image on until you are ready to use it.

And if you do decide to buy that new, bright and shiny tablet, why not give me your old laptop? I know just what to do with it!