This is 99% invisible. I'm Roman Mars.

There's a well-known literary technique called Checkoff's gun, named after the Russian playwright.

Basically, if a gun appears in the first act, it better be fired in the following act.

There are no unnecessary details.

You see a gun, that gun gets used to shoot someone.

I have a corollary principle of my own invention and it relates to movies

where there is a scene at a construction site and it is this. If on the screen you see an

ugly shaft of exposed rebar. Somebody is getting impaled. There's

something about rebar that fascinates me.

If nothing else, because there are very few things that invoke a fear of being skewered.

My pathological preoccupation with metal reinforcement bars dovetails nicely with a structure in San Francisco.

I've kind of become obsessed with a tiny bridge in Golden Gate Park.

This is the Alfred Lake Bridge by Ernest Ransom.

This is William Littman.

He teaches architecture at the California College of the Arts and he was the first person to

tip me off to the importance of this humble little structure on the very eastern edge of the park.

It's sort of the entrance to the park from the hate side,

from the kind of hippie slacker hate area right at the edge of the park and sort of leading into the children's

playground. It's not a place that most people really want to linger. It is a

spot for drug dealing and various illicit

asinations.

And that is Robert Corlin,

...