Thursday 8 November 2012
sticky fingers or mother’s little helper
paris? ORLY?
I don’t know if this is the current forecast and iIt does sound intriguing and efficient to design and zone new municipalities as radiating out from new hubs. I wonder, however, about the long and less than surgical extraction of the great old city airports, like Tempelhof in Berlin, replaced by a project (on the receding curb) removed to the countryside and only connected to its namesake by sprawl.
There seems to be more off-putting, which may not be such a bad thing, considering some of the apocalyptic visions of past futurists of unbroken pavements of highway and eternal journals with no end that fortunately were not wholly accurate. Perhaps such configurations will suit far-off colonies, but there does not seem to be many cities willing to give up their character for the sake of an orderly layout, nor virgin lands to jet off to. The planning and proximity of old cores of communities, with their various channels and rivulets, have gotten significantly more crowded but I think human-sized strides and footprints do a pretty good job of demarcation.
dice, deed and deck or weal of fortune
catagories: ๐ฒ, economic policy, Wikipedia
Wednesday 7 November 2012
eenie meanie or ฮญฮฝฮฑฯ ฮผฮนฮฑ ฮตฮฝฮฑ
Some time ago, I recall reading a broad overview (not disjointed but just non-sequitur and sparse explanation, like a freak-show of strange foreign customs) on Christmas traditions. According to the article, some Greek households leave a colander out on the doorstep (unlike stockings hung over a heath or a boot on Sankt Nikolas Tag in Germany for gifts) to confound mischievous spirits and keep them from entering the home.
catagories: ๐ฌ๐ท, ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐ง♂️, economic policy, holidays and observances, religion, Wikipedia
forward
catagories: America, economic policy, environment, foreign policy, revolution
Tuesday 6 November 2012
heebee jeebees
In a somewhat formulaic but still nightmare inducing and thought-provoking tradition of fake documentaries, in the spirit of the Blair Witch Project and revisited with the series Paranormal Activity, the same creative team has unleashed another lurid and worrisome monster in The Bay, apparently created out of a potion of pollution, agricultural run-off, steroids and nuclear waste. The inspiration, though not as aggressive in reality (though that maybe owing to the steroids and mutations), for these insidious and alien creatures, however, is not far removed from its portrayal.
catagories: ๐ช️, ๐ฌ, environment
ojos bien cerrados or pay no attention to that man behind the curtain
There a perfect cover for the meeting of finance ministers and reserve bank chiefs of the G20 nations going on in Mexico. One wonders about the timing of such things and though the meeting seems kind of formal and anodyne, one still cannot quite shake the feeling that important decisions are being vetted—the kind that governments cannot rely on democracy and openness to choose wisely. There is no rudeness, nor strategic advantage, I think, in not waiting for the outcome of the US elections, even though neither of these events went unplanned or were scheduled in a vacuum.
catagories: ๐, America, economic policy, Europe, foreign policy