There's a sign that hangs in the windows of shops in downtown Santa Cruz, California. "Keep Santa Cruz Weird." It's not unique to that town, of course -- the best known implementation of the slogan is the one seen all over Austin, Texas. Localized versions have also been spotted on t-shirts and bumper stickers in places like Portland and Boulder -- any area where the undercurrent of independent thinking does daily battle with the threat of homogenized commerce. The Santa Cruz example sticks in my mind in particular, of course, due to the five years I spent in that town, whose weirdness never fully recovered from the '89 earthquake, a natural disaster that both wreaked havoc on the landscape and caused a shift in the local zeitgeist, opening crumbled an
