Architecture | erutcetihcrA

I've been hunting for architecture blogs. This is harder than you might think. I've added two to the blogroll.

First, Eyes on the Street [link] A nice blend of text and photos/maps for a personal blog.

I also added rodcorp. [link] By Rod McLaren, it's a little more eclectic.

There are two other sites which I have not added to the blogroll for various reasons. First is an Architecture Photoblog [link] which is interesting but really not informative. And then there's MoCoLoco [link] which is much more oriented to design in a broad sense. Plus it has tons of pictures of cool things I can't afford.

A picture of the Millennium Bridge in London. It is one of the featured projects in the New City Architecture Exhibition [link]. Other favorites: 2 Puddle Dock [link], 30 St Mary Axe [link], and 51 Lime St [link].

This barely merits my menitioning but there is an article in the Chicago Tribune [link] about planning, density, new urbanism, and [...] sprawl. I wouldn't link it except it comes from Chicago, and I'm taking a personal and academic interest in all development news out of that city over the next several months.

In the Don't Miss This Category:
"The rush to privatize water is underway across the world. In the new documentary 'Thirst,' filmmakers Deborah Kaufman and Alan Snitow set out to explore the consequences." [link] - PBS Tuesday, July 13th at 10 PM.

Airships that were never built [link].

Corn

A backwards sorta trip through today's learning about corn.

Purdue Boilermaker etched in Corn. [link] Note the use of GPS to find the accurate path.

It's a fungus, [link] it's a delicacy, [link] it's ... Corn Smut! [link]

What corn discussion is complete without mentioning Cornholio. [link]

File Under Wal * Mart

"'Lawsuits by individual women had no more effect than a pinprick. Now, however, the playing field has been levelled. Wal-Mart will face the combined power of 1.6 million women in court,' " [link]

Comics Code Authority plus SRL vol. II update

"The CCA's strict code prohibited depictions of gore, sexuality, and excessive violence; it required that authority figures were never to be ridiculed or presented disrespectfully, and that good must always win; it prohibited any scenes with vampires, werewolves, ghouls or zombies. The code also prohibited advertisements of liquor, tobacco, knives, fireworks, nude pin-ups and postcards, and 'toiletry products of questionable nature'."

+ Summer Reading List Vol. II ++

Finished: Fight Club, Sanctuary

Current: Kim

Fresh off the Library Shelf: Crime and Punishment, Haroun and the Sea of Stories

Sitting Over There: I, Robot; Gangs of Chicago; Alias Grace

Ulysses and Mario in the Cristo Rey Truck

Completed hours of community service: 6/11.

The Onion, on TV Tonight [link]. My favorite entries, "Somebody marry someone!" and "Nuns a blazin'." - This is a good issue so I'll [link] to another article. "Yes, of course—if there is a tomorrow, indeed. The Thanatos device does make one nostalgic for the old days of mutually assured nuclear destruction and its attendant comfort of shelter beneath the mountains. Even the phrase, 'mutually assured nuclear destruction,' seems rather quaint now, doesn't it?"

Later in the Thanatos Device article Tachyons are mentioned, this got me thinking about Dr. Manhattan, so I went on wikipedia.

[Superhero] this brought me to supervillians and,
[Doomsday] and the city he leveled,
[Metropolis] cut: "The co-creator and original artist of Superman, Joe Shuster, modeled the Metropolis skyline after both Toronto, Ontario (where he was born), and Cleveland, Ohio (where he later lived and met co-creator Jerry Siegel in high school)." - My impression was that Metropolis was a New York metaphor. I would never expect its orgins to be Midwestern/Canadian.

Now using Bloglines [link]. If you check a bunch of blogs this is nice.

The big news today: private space flight [link].

I passed the 100 post mark for Toponymy.

Caveman Clobber

Newt Gingrich, Amazon Top 500 Reviewer. [link]

Pistons will be on brand name orange cereal box famous for prominent display of top athletes. [link] And another good article, from the GR press, about the Pistons and their overwhelming domination of the Lakers. [link]

"When the zombies take over, how long till the electricity fails?" [link] Yes, I probably should check The Straight Dope more often.

Learn about something new: Santerí­a. [link]

Two pieces about Moscow. One: suburban Muscovites are paying out the wazoo for land, and this is having some interesting impacts on the area's built environment. [link] Two: something I have seen before but probably not mentioned on Toponymy before - it's about the wholesale demolition of Moscow's historical sites. [link]

... Excellent

BBC NEWS | Science/Nature | Teleportation breakthrough made

[Insert Infamous Star Trek Line Here]

Susumu Tachi's next project: invisible walls.

Game 4

the caption: "From Big Ben, the bell is tolling for Kobe and L.A." [Excellent]

Just thinking about a Pistons championship, and the possibility of winning at the Palace. Wow.

What else is happening in the enormous echo chamber [link] that is the Internet? - I'm certainly glad you asked.

This was at the top of blogdex. I think some people might find it useful/funny/poorly formatted. The two things for anything. [link] No planning reference, maybe I'll have to change that. Probably not.

gmail-is-too-creepy.com [link] I'm not convinced but it seems like these whack-jobs are multiplying.

Man beats horse [link] in a foot race.

I'd gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today. Whimpy, the cartoon, the legend. [link]

Okay, I tried to connect Whimpy's famous line to the BBC article on password protection. Namely, password SELF-protection. "More than 70% of people would reveal their computer password in exchange for a bar of chocolate, a survey has found." [link]

$3.99 coffee beans

I didn't believe Chris when he first said it, I thought there was some catch, that this was probably some hoax. But I found it. Biodiesel:

"After a few months of driving 10 miles to a biodiesel fueling station, Toal-Rossi went online to find a recipe and began making his own fuel. Because Toal-Rossi gets the primary ingredient -- used cooking oil -- from a nearby restaurant for free, he spends just 41 cents per gallon to make his 12-liter batches of biodiesel." [link]

The recepie is online, too. [link] The catch is that this is for Diesel engines. This, however, is inspiring. Maybe, oh, just maybe, we'll break our gasoline addiction. Someday. Read the Slashdot. [link]

Cincinnati almost had a subway. Now it has caves. [link] [more]

This spring I wrote a paper about destroyed cities. The destruction of a city is an apocalypse. I chose to discuss Pompeii, Troy, the fires of Chicago and London, Dresden, and Hiroshima. I left out Centralia, PA [city evacuated because of long-term underground coal mine fires] and Atlantis. Cetralia was a space decison, it didn't add to the paper. Atlantis was an intelectual decision, it would be devious to mention a "mythical" city in any detail as an example of post-catastrophe planning. But, I should have reconsidered. [link] Was Plato honest?

Finally, 50 Coolest Song Parts. [link]

addendum: two wikipedia links found during post. relegated to the dustbin of the bottom of this post. [apocalypse] [psychohistory]

Filthy, Rotten Bastards.

"The memo, prepared for Defense Secretary Donald H. Rumsfeld, also said that any executive branch officials, including those in the military, could be immune from domestic and international prohibitions against torture for a variety of reasons."

"The report then offers a series of legal justifications for limiting or disregarding antitorture laws and proposed legal defenses that government officials could use if they were accused of torture."

The fury this will unleash.

Yo! I changed my photo. + SRL vol. II update

After experiencing technical difficulties with Blogger the other day I resigned myself to using the photo of me, reading a Rolling Stone [off-camera] while sitting on a futon [also off-camera] in front of a MSU Block-S Flag. But, after some tweaking and waiting I have put up a new pic. I cropped off the left-half of my face because it's just too scary to read something while I'm looking at you. [Strangely, some part of me feels that only half-a-face is even more sinister. Hmm.] I've got some pics where I'm not looking directly into the camera that I am still considering as replacements.

SRL vol. II update:
~Finished~
+ The Last Don - Mario Puzo
+ Step Across This Line - Salman Rushdie [Okay, I didn't read all his essays, but I got the jist of it.]
+ Watchmen - Moore, Gibbons
+ The Thorn Birds - Colleen McCullough

~Working on~
+ Sanctuary - William Faulkner [as suggested by She Smelled Like Trees]

~Up Next~
+ Fight Club - Chuck Palahniuk
+ I, Robot - Isaac Asimov [In preparation for the CGI carnage]
+ The Gangs of Chicago - Asbury [Same idea/author as Gangs of New York, should probably bone-up on windy city underworld in preparation for Spring semester...]

My playground will be a home, my home will be a playground.

Behold - Spiral Staircase and Slide. Very infrequently do dreams become a reality. Here, a man has bridged the ultimate gap between childish desire and gravity-defying utility. Beautiful.


"You may have defeated my Southern Hook Palm technique, but can you defeat the 1000 styles of Rumsfeld?" [link]

And, while we're on the topic of the military, you should definately read "The 213 Things Skippy is No Longer Allowed to Do in the U.S. Army". [link] I found this on the net a while ago but recently came across it again.

I already sent this to Jon and hopefully he submits something. I hope you, too, try your hand at the contest. [link]

HBO gets a dude out of a possible Death Penalty for a murder he most definately was falsely accused of. [link]

79 mph "Baby Bullet" to start running in the Bay Area. [link]

And, finally, to satisfy our growing list of concerns about the Iraq situation, Chalmers Johnson posits 12 questions to President Bush in hopes of improving the remainder of his speeches before 30 June. The most interesting, in my estimation, "2. Please tell us: If we plan to return Iraq to the Iraqis, why is the U.S. currently building fourteen permanent bases there?" [link - about halfway down]

The Last Don, and business cards pinched by aligator clips

Finished reading Mario Puzo's The Last Don. I picked it up at a Library Used Book Sale [a 4th of July tradition in these parts]. I hadn't read it but brought it to State in hopes of finishing it before exams. Patrick read it since I was too busy to ever get past the first chapter. He highly recommended it. I kept picturing The Godfather scenes, and some of the plotting is remarkably similar to that of the Godfather movies [sending family "hammers" - read assassins - to The Boot for a few years so they don't get arrested; harassment of Hollywood studio owners/producers; the undeniably wise Don] The departure is that here, Puzo spreads his wealth of knowledge slightly beyond the borders of New York's syndicates to the Family operations in Las Vegas and the Western U.S. I loved the conclusion, sweet revenge delivered masterfully. One criticism: way too much detail on minor characters, could be 50-90 pages shorter.