Sunday, July 29, 2007

Not castles,

Today was the U. S. Sandcastle Open. It took place in Imperial Beach, as close to Mexico as you can get from here without leaving the United States, and it seems like everyone in San Diego was there - on the beach or circling around looking for parking. I found the entries - built by teams in five hours starting this morning - a pretty under- whelming lot in situ, smallish and unambitious. The most common motifs were coiling things like octupi, giant squid and dragons - easy to make, where's the challenge? Few were castles or otherwise architectural - I was looking forward to gables and drawbridges and winding staircases and impossibly ornate arcades, perhaps because a group of people made a remarkable 3-meter-high model of Mont Saint-Michel on a beach just north of here a few years ago. (I suppose it took them more than a few hours.) The cleverest of today's entries was this double-sided Mount Rushmore.
I've posted three other pleasing entries in the next post ... funny, they look more impressive in photos than they did in life. They seemed diminutive compared to people crowding around, many of whom made the biker pigs in "The three pigs: the revenge" (see below) look slim.