Watching paint dry

That’s how much fun I’m having right now. Hello World’s first finish coat was applied this morning. Speaking of Malcolm X (today’s his birthday, he’d be 85) here’s an insidious bit of racial marketing I came across.

The VOCs from the Interlux Brightside White paint are intense!  As replacement filters for my old respirator are hard to find I decided to buy a new respirator. My local Ace Hardware stocked several models from AO Safety. They all used the same filters and ranged in price from high $20 to mid $40. The highest priced had a picture of a serious looking middle aged white male with iron gray hair. The lowest price looked like this…

Is that subtle or what? Here’s the embarrassing part – I instinctively reached for the expensive one first because I assumed it would provide better protection, until I noticed that the filters were identical. Was I choosing based on price (inference of quality), or racial affinity?

I ended up buying the brown people respirator. You know what? It pretty much sucks. After painting for couple of hours this morning I had a headache. WTF? Tell me there aren’t aliens running the planet. You can sell us the crappy respirators, but you can’t kill us.

Here’s Hugh Hamilton’s show Talk Back on WBAI FM New York for May 19, 2010, (local archive is here). There’s fundraising during the first 10 minutes or so, but after that are excerpts from some of El Hajj Malik el Shabazz’s most amazing speeches.