"Life is as sweet as the candy colored houses that line the streets".

You will take delight in simple pleasures, and you will like it.

With regard to the second one, it seems especially appropriate that David Lynch was discussed on the Mefi front page today.

I couldn't finish watching the video. Her soothing, mellow voice was putting. me. to. sleep.

Don't try to run the planet. Just be a passenger.

Who came up with this precious little gem? Sorry, I'm feeling rather crusty and contrary right now. I think I should go to bed. Maybe I'll watch the video again to speed up the falling asleep process.

Holy shit, I just clued in that there are places like that right around here! "Predator Ridge," a lovely little community on a world-class golf course. But, y'see, no churches, retail, or school.

Still unnerving, the way it's pitched. Planned community. Ugh. Antithetical to the very idea of community. Non-organic. Unadaptive.

These are mainly vacation homes, BTW. One doesn't actually live in them. One either retires to them, or splits time between several of them.

Mr. Wiggin (John Cleese): Good morning, gentlemen.
Clients: Good morning.
Mr. Wiggin: This is a 12-storey block combining classical neo-Georgian features with the efficiency of modern techniques. The tenants arrive here and are carried along the corridor on a conveyor belt in extreme comfort, past murals depicting Mediterranean scenes, towards the rotating knives. The last twenty feet of the corridor are heavily soundproofed. The blood pours down these chutes and the mangled flesh slurps into these....
Client 1: Excuse me.
Mr. Wiggin: Yes?
Client 1: Did you say 'knives'?
Mr. Wiggin: Rotating knives, yes.
Client 2: Do I take it that you are proposing to slaughter our tenants?
Mr. Wiggin: ...Does that not fit in with your plans?

I do live in a place "where neighbors swap stories over the fence and shopkeepers know each customer by name".

Today's story: When the female half of the new couple from across the street came home this afternoon her 3 year old daughter saw one of the neighborhood feral cats that I've talked about recently laying on their warm sunny front porch and she cried "Look mommy! The mailman left us a kitty!"

I may be wrong but this place does not feel to me like that kind of place.

"Good morning! And if I don't see you later - Good afternoon, good evening and good night!!"


Somewhere in that place there's cybernetic virgin-harlot wifebots serving their evil masters.

You probably really hate The Truman Show, then.

Watching the second spiel, I half-expected to hear the following sped-up, high-pitched add-on like an ad for prescription drugs:

Void where prohibited. Singles, schwartzes, spics, wetbacks and queers look elsewhere. Noisy children will be swaddled and/or medically muffled, if necessary. The elderly may stay for occasional visits, unless they are infirm, overly wrinkled, or suffer from incontinence, flatulence, senile dementia ....

I liked it.

So is there a vacation spot for people who do want to run the planet? One that we can afford, that is.

I imagine there's no cable, satellite or internet, then. They might ruin the sense that you're in 1955.

How much "swapping stories over the picket fence" is likely to go on if all your neighbors are just down for the week and you only see them once or twice a year?

Is it wrong that this reminded me of the depressing Thai life insurance commercials someone posted over at Metafilter?

I was waiting for something BAD to happen.

Seaside is a community in the Florida panhandle. I think the movie, The Truman Show was filmed there.

The video is hilarious. What a sales pitch. As if all your worries are going to disappear upon moving to Seaside. As if people that don't live in Seaside can''t enjoy sunsets or "simple pleasures". Gag.

I used to watch the Home and Garden channel a lot and there is a beautiful house in Seaside profiled on one of the shows. The owner made a point to tell the camera that she lived in the old part, the original part, of Seaside. It was if she was implying: "I've been here forever, before all of the riffraff came in."

LOL @ rob511.

It's really our fault, you know. We're nostalgic for something that never was and "they" keep trying to sell it to us.