Stepford Ads

ABOUT the article "Synthetic Turf: Artificial Grass or Stepford Lawns?" (Bullhorn, Dec. 23): it is ironic how, online, the piece I wrote for Santa Cruz Weekly about synthetic turf (not overall in favor of the stuff) is accompanied by ads for—synthetic turf.

Is it that the product is marketed by robots and the robots never really read the article, they just saw the keywords "synthetic turf"?

Of course, plastic turf just starts repeating "I thought we were friends, I thought we were friends" after I stabbed it with my accusations of being a pseudo green product. It just does not get it. We are not friends, never have been and never will be.

Here's the text of one of the ads next to the article: Huge Selection of Synthetic Turf Synthetic GrassLawns, Playgrounds, Putting Greens. Looks Real. Feels Real. No Hassle. 

Ken Foster,

Santa Cruz

Open Letter to Sports Fan-in-Chief

SPEAKING to you as one sports fan to another, your count is 2 and 0. Your first strike was a swing and a miss in Afghanistan; a naive and clumsy lurch at a pitch so far out of the strike zone that you should have recognized it as a lost cause. A rookie mistake. Your second was a called strike in Copenhagen. You simply stood there while the opportunity whizzed by you as you tried to remember what your corporate batting coaches told you to do. Your team (the Pachyderms) are all standing in the dugout waiting to see what you will do with the next one. One more major blunder and you will be out of there. No great loss, but what about the game?

Pieter S. Myers,

Occidental

Send letters to the editor here.