Give Them a Foot and They’ll Want a Mile

“It may look like a $100,000 foot,” suggests San Francisco Mayor Willie Brown. Ridiculous, says artist Buster Simpson: it’s a $400,000 foot. At issue is a sculpture Simpson is designing for the city’s Embarcadero district, to be paid for by the San Francisco Art Commission. Simpson wants to sculpt a gigantic foot out of marble or granite, which would require the higher price tag, to symbolize “the motion of the foot embarking on land.” When he heard that Brown thought it should cost less, Simpson scoffed. “Maybe if the mayor wants it in tin or something — or maybe inflatable,” he suggested. (AP) ...No no no. For it to be a proper monument to the mayor, it would have to be an inflatable head.