friend of the built environment

Quite often, sport boosters try to paint themselves as the epitome of civic pride: they love their team, they support their city. This is often the root argument when tempers flare over sport-facility-based redevelopment projects. “We love our Downtown and we want to make it livlier with our team”.
Would that it were true. The reality [...]

A good interview with former German Chancellor Gerhardt Schroeder, which provides another good perspective that the mainstream media is simply failing to broadcast. An especially astute observation about why Russia matters to the West:
“I see Russia as part of Europe, more than as part of any other constellation…  And we in Germany and Europe should [...]

Does someone at Apple just sit around saying “how can we eliminate the best and most usable features of our software or make it buggier and more resource-intensive?”
iTunes took away the only view I used - album view. I loved that because I like list view but I also like to see the album covers [...]

I’ve finally got this journal caught up to the same point at which I’d caught up my iWeb site. Took me far less time and I actually like this much better and am still motivated to continue working on it.
Though, admittedly, I still have my two most prolific years left to update.

I have finished completely back-populating my old journal entries. I still have a lot of fixing to do in terms of formatting entries and removing the gawdawful crap that iWeb did to the text (and in some cases it’s affecting the WordPress stylesheets even), but that will take a bit longer to complete.
In the meantime, [...]

Can someone remind me what it’s like not having to press the ‘pause’ button on my life for two weeks after every weekend I spend at home? I’ve forgotten.
Why is it that most of the nurses I see outside of Winston Salem’s two large institutional hospitals are either obese or smoking or both? Shouldn’t anyone [...]

“Who’s Your City” asks Richard Florida in his new book. Yes, it’s another Richard-Florida-bashing screed from your favorite uncreative classless git.
I’m probably more guilty of committing these sort of ‘city hunting’ atrocities - described by Florida as the most important thing a person will ever do. I’m aware, however, that this habit of mine is [...]

Courtesy of Amber, a nice, easy-to-read overview of the stinky stuff happening on Wall Street

I’ve either gone psycho or come to my senses. Decide for yourself; but I really, really like Cynthia McKinney. She is the first politician I’ve heard that actually seems to be the anti-populist. Neither does she seem an idealogue.
Sure, there are certain general aspects to any Green Party policies that seem excessively statist without visiting [...]

Ah… It’s nice that there’s someone putting money into this building - and a lot of it by the looks of the window treatments.
The Armoury was a place used by operative governments for the purpose of storing weapons that kill and maim people. But we, as free and enlightened sodomites, are taught to make use [...]

…And why would I want to taste him?

It’s not very surprising that so many Americans are such fans of the “Drill Now! Drill Everywhere” mentality to ’solving’ gas prices. Most people know nothing about market economics and this also explains why so many people continue to puff up over ‘price gouging’ and other conspiracy theories.
See, there’s these two countries called China and [...]

…Is the argument made very poetically by Jason L. Riley. My own views on the issue are largely identical, so this was an easy read.
But my favorite quote was the one that opened the book. A shiney nickel if you can guess who said it:
America is really many Americas. We call ourselves a nation of [...]