Famous Ankles

Thursday’s parade was very pleasant and for all of the right reasons.

Adults with children are always trying to get them into the right position to view the parade.  As I mentioned earlier, dad-duty involves putting your child on your shoulders for a view, despite what it means to those of you behind.  The picture below is what I call the “wall of dads”.

But there are easier means of propping up the little ones.  One very popular technique is to bring step-stools and even ladders.  Another is to put the kids on something high.

You can see from their expressions that they had a good view.  The problem is…well, they are kids and something always happens.

In the above case, the little one is objecting strongly to the loss of his camera to his dad.  That kid could wail!

But with enough balloons, even the greatest of injustices is assuaged.

There was only one sort of “celebrity sighting” from my vantage point.  When I first spotted the below float, I thought “These guys must be some sort of music group or boy band.”

I hadn’t the slightest idea who they might be.  I then googled the parade to see, and all I could find was something about Ground Zero firefighters.  It wasn’t until this morning that I was flipping channels and ran into some info that indicated that this was the new “Menundo”, a re-constituted boy-band from the 1990s.

My next picture was of something quite a bit different.  Whatdoyathink?

It turns out that this is a bit of real art done by artist Jeff Koons.  Apparently Macy’s is trying to bring in some artistic sentiment alongside the popular entertainment.  This is a highly enlarged, and balloonized, version of his work titled something like “Shiny Rabbit”.

It certainly provoked a lot of conversation amongst us who didn’t know of it beforehand.  It was regarded as something of a Bugs Bunny robot or a robot rabbit for whatever reason anyone would ever want a robot rabbit.

Now compare that with the cultural meaning of the below.

For me, Mr. Potato Head rules over Shiny Rabbit any day and in every aesthetic sense.  Of course, I’m a bit of a Luddite and metalicized rabbits aren’t my thing.

 [UPDATE on 11/25:  Just to show what I know about modern art, here’s a post about the rabbit.  I think you can get Mr. Potato Head for $10 or so.]

-H

This entry was posted on November 24, 2007 at 2:27 pm and is filed under Celebrity Points, Events, Manhattan, Parades. You can subscribe via RSS 2.0 feed to this post's comments. You can comment below, or link to this permanent URL from your own site.