Ode to Street Art

We'd only been in Chi-town for 10 minutes before we stumbled across this...


Wha?


Huh?


Zah?


Guh?

Plastic bag sprites? Is that last one some sort of recycling Pied Piper? My guess is they received a $5,000 grant from the Illinois Sanitation Department to regale the children of Chicago in the joys of refuse reuse. They blew in to Millennium Park on the wind and floated out minutes later. Except for one who got caught on a tree branch.

If these are art or drama students, it would be the second run in I've had in the last week. Recent happenstance found me at Carnegie Mellon University where I was fortunate enough to meet Valerie, as in Val the computer sciences robotic receptionist. "She" was programmed and built by the robotics nerds but given a "personality" by the drama geeks.

Val's got herself a keyboard so you can axe her questions and she responds with the dry cool wit of an action hero. Unless she's at lunch. Then she won't answer. Also, if you ask her too many inane questions she gets an incoming call and begs off to talk to her mother.

And she loves Barbara Streisand. So if you get up to Pittsburgh axe her about Prince of Tides. She loves that shit.