Someone invited himself to Franke James’ house for dinner. Woah. Ballsy, but kinda cool, actually. Now I’m trying to think of someone whose house I should invite myself to… (I’m putting this under the “urbanism” category on this blog because I actually think of this as being, in some odd way, notably urban behavior. People [...]
Morgantown, WV, which is very close to my family’s property on the Cheat Lake, has one of the cooler mass transit systems that I’ve ever seen (though I’ve never had reason to ride it). The PRT is discussed in today’s New York Times. It’s worth checking out, if only for the wow factor.
From today’s Tuesday Morning Quarterback: Los Angeles note: Grant and I stayed at a downtown hotel, and met an old friend of mine at Philippes, a local landmark sandwich restaurant that seems not to have changed one whit since opening in 1908. I used MapQuest for directions. The restaurant was about two miles from the [...]
A challenge: reduce your CO2 output. Easy, right? Here’s one thing that helps: live in a strawbale house.
A guy I work with pointed out Improv Everywhere to me earlier today; sheer genius. The Best Buy mission was the one that had come to his attention first, but some of the others are better… Seriously funny. I wonder if there’s anyone around Boston who does stuff like this….if not, I wonder if I [...]
I showed the picture above to my students yesterday, in company with pictures of a couple of other labs over at MIT (built, respectively, in the early 1960′s and the late 1980′s). I asked them to compare them, and which one they liked the most. One student, Isaiah, had this to say: “It looks like [...]
First Citizen Schools class is tomorrow, and I’m having a fun little evening of panic. Am I prepared? Ack! What the hell am I doing? AH! And so on, and on, and on… On the upside, I’m pretty sure that I am prepared; I know what I’m going to teach, I don’t have all the [...]
The article “Revolting High Rises“, which ran last weekend in the New York Times Magazine, is worth a look. It presents the thesis that the physical environment in the low-income suburbs of Paris and other French cities may have contributed to the riots that occurred there last month. Unlike American cities, wherein the poorer citizens [...]
Jacob Weisberg suggests in this Slate column that liberals, currently busy ranting about the prospect of the Gulf Coast becoming a laboratory for conservative social and economic policy, take a breather and let Bush and company have their way with New Orleans. My initial reaction was that Weisberg was nuts. I have a bad feeling [...]
Riding on an Amtrak train in west-central Pennsylvania. We just passed through the Norfolk Southern yards in Altoona. Stretching for a couple of miles, these yards appear to be almost abandoned. Here and there a newish locomotive sits on a well-used siding, but most of the engines in the lot look as though they might [...]