in10sity

sorry to keep doing this.

I'm just a little obsessed.

androgyny(ish)

transition

Nom

Can This Suburb Be Saved? -- At MoMA, curators and architects seek a way out of the cul-de-sac.

The exhibit springs from the belief (fleshed out in the Buell Center report) that fewer and fewer Americans have or want the lives that suburbs were designed for. Today, we mostly live alone, or share quarters with roommates and fluid configurations of relatives. We start kitchen-table businesses with vendors in China and customers all over the world. We’re starting to think of the car not as a passport to independence but as a toxic jail cell. For decades, coveting a house you couldn’t afford was a patriotic sentiment, an essential ingredient of the American Dream. Now millions of those houses have become crippling financial burdens, chits in a global game of poker, and incubators of suburban blight.


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Other than looking incredibly goofy and pointless, what the heck is the point of those things (trekking poles) anyways?

I chuckled at (t)his bit. 

Ever notice how four-legged animals can move faster over rough terrain than us two legged ones? Sure, us humans are great at long distance running through vast plains, but we don't do so well in rougher environments, especially with packs on. We tend to fall and injure our ankles. While some have tried to solve that with heavy boots that provide extra ankle support, using poles can be a much more effective solution. In addition, you can get extra support while on slippery slopes and unstable ground. Poles can reduce the stress on your knees and lower back too, which you will wish you had taken better care of once you get through your twenties.


See that I have absolutely no problem with. For health and safety, if you have bad balance, are actually on rough terrain, or have a bad back, I dunno whatever else plagues hikers and outdoorsy enthusiasts.


This though!

LOOK

five things wrong with this picture

1.They are walking

2. Trekking poles.

2.  On a road.

3.They look unhealthily skinny . 

4. They look like they're like twelve? ^_^

5. They are walking.


^_^ (maybe its because I'm from the South, but for some reason I say like a lot)

Sassy devil.

I call the interposition of wilderness chic. Why do I need to consume this in order to be more fit and healthy? 

As a consumer, we need to ask ourselves where draw the line. Will I accept this subliminal messaging of mass conformity, calm as Hindu cows jogging along in our Nike "fitness appropriate" athletic wear. Gone are the days I could just 'go outside' to 'go outside'. Nowadays, even this aspect of our lives is becoming commercialized so we can get it spoon fed to us too. That's something I am not willing to accept as a necessity of 

survival

Just how much of our technology really makes us better, as a civilization, and how much of it just slows us down?

_______________________________________________________

A girl dressed as a bear and a very large bear dressed as a ... girl?

For me this is where the distinction becomes blurry.

Did you see that not only did I put that "They are walking." twice (#'s 1 and 5) but I also put two two's. Instead of fixing it while I was editing this, I posted a comment, because I like my blog posts not making logic. Sense. Words.

Nuuuuuuuuuuu.

Where does one draw the line?

Aesthetics, or things pertaining to taste and pleasure (art, literature, music, dance) have no real tangible value, yet in today's society they are highly valued. At a still highly individual level, video games produce no real value, yet they are similarly highly valued in today's society both in price  and the amount of time individuals commit to patronizing them (though the prices might be changing soon).

Emotionally Foreign Concepts

Pictures of British soldiers before and after Afghanistan.

It is a mistake to think you can solve any major problems just with potatoes

-Douglas Adams

Excepting, of course, the Irish Potato Famine, although arguably potatoes were also the cause of that.

Q: how many potatoes does it take to kill an Irishman?

A:...none

Good thing I'm already going to hell. 

terrifying

On the evening of December 13, 1912, the three explorers pitched camp in the middle of yet another glacier. Mawson abandoned one of their three sledges and redistributed the load on the two others. Then the men slept fitfully, disturbed by distant booms and cracking deep below them. Mawson and Ninnis did not know what to make of the noises, but they frightened Mertz, whose long experience of snowfields taught him that warmer air had made the ground ahead of them unstable. “The snow masses must have been collapsing their arches,” he wrote. “The sound was like the distant thunder of cannon.”

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insight into a weird world

 

"If you’ve never been to Abercrombie, let me tell you, it definitely kills one’s ability to form coherent, logical thought. No one has ever discussed matters of philosophy or the status of Iran’s nuclear capabilities within its confines. Everything’s dark and loud and confusing. You half feel like you’re playing laser tag and half like you’ve bumbled onto a reshooting of “Eyes Wide Shut.” The cultural aesthetic of the store straddles all of these notions. It’s a confounding, bombastic and erotic slice of our American zeitgeist. Put another way: White people love it.

...

I cannot overstate the cultural impact of wearing very skinny jeans, then plunging a thumb into each front pocket. This stance is very important. If you haven’t tried it before, I suggest you do."

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Funny, in the Osama-riot people were happy FOR New York...

Apollo 15 Hammer and Feather Drop

During the final minutes of the third extravehicular activity, a short demonstration experiment was conducted. A heavy object (1.32 kg aluminium geological hammer) and a light object (a .03 kg falcon feather) were released simultaneously from approximately the same height (approximately 1.6 m) and were allowed to fall to the surface. Within the accuracy of the simultaneous release, the objects were observed to undergo the same acceleration and strike the lunar surface simultaneously, which was a result predicted by well-established theory, but a result nonetheless reassuring considering both the number of viewers that witnessed the experiment and the fact that the homeward journey was based critically on the validity of the particular theory being tested. 

To My Old Master

To My Old Master

Dayton, Ohio, 


August 7, 1865


To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee


Sir: I got your letter, and was glad to find that you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you. I thought the Yankees would have hung you long before this, for harboring Rebs they found at your house. I suppose they never heard about your going to Colonel Martin's to kill the Union soldier that was left by his company in their stable. Although you shot at me twice before I left you, I did not want to hear of your being hurt, and am glad you are still living. It would do me good to go back to the dear old home again, and see Miss Mary and Miss Martha and Allen, Esther, Green, and Lee. Give my love to them all, and tell them I hope we will meet in the better world, if not in this. I would have gone back to see you all when I was working in the Nashville Hospital, but one of the neighbors told me that Henry intended to shoot me if he ever got a chance.


I want to know particularly what the good chance is you propose to give me. I am doing tolerably well here. I get twenty-five dollars a month, with victuals and clothing; have a comfortable home for Mandy,—the folks call her Mrs. Anderson,—and the children—Milly, Jane, and Grundy—go to school and are learning well. The teacher says Grundy has a head for a preacher. They go to Sunday school, and Mandy and me attend church regularly. We are kindly treated. Sometimes we overhear others saying, "Them colored people were slaves" down in Tennessee. The children feel hurt when they hear such remarks; but I tell them it was no disgrace in Tennessee to belong to Colonel Anderson. Many darkeys would have been proud, as I used to be, to call you master. Now if you will write and say what wages you will give me, I will be better able to decide whether it would be to my advantage to move back again.


As to my freedom, which you say I can have, there is nothing to be gained on that score, as I got my free papers in 1864 from the Provost-Marshal-General of the Department of Nashville. Mandy says she would be afraid to go back without some proof that you were disposed to treat us justly and kindly; and we have concluded to test your sincerity by asking you to send us our wages for the time we served you. This will make us forget and forgive old scores, and rely on your justice and friendship in the future. I served you faithfully for thirty-two years, and Mandy twenty years. At twenty-five dollars a month for me, and two dollars a week for Mandy, our earnings would amount to eleven thousand six hundred and eighty dollars. Add to this the interest for the time our wages have been kept back, and deduct what you paid for our clothing, and three doctor's visits to me, and pulling a tooth for Mandy, and the balance will show what we are in justice entitled to. Please send the money by Adams's Express, in care of V. Winters, Esq., Dayton, Ohio. If you fail to pay us for faithful labors in the past, we can have little faith in your promises in the future. We trust the good Maker has opened your eyes to the wrongs which you and your fathers have done to me and my fathers, in making us toil for you for generations without recompense. Here I draw my wages every Saturday night; but in Tennessee there was never any pay-day for the negroes any more than for the horses and cows. Surely there will be a day of reckoning for those who defraud the laborer of his hire.


In answering this letter, please state if there would be any safety for my Milly and Jane, who are now grown up, and both good-looking girls. You know how it was with poor Matilda and Catherine. I would rather stay here and starve—and die, if it come to that—than have my girls brought to shame by the violence and wickedness of their young masters. You will also please state if there has been any schools opened for the colored children in your neighborhood. The great desire of my life now is to give my children an education, and have them form virtuous habits.


Say howdy to George Carter, and thank him for taking the pistol from you when you were shooting at me.


From your old servant,


Jourdon Anderson.

Copenhagen

Definitely a step in the right direction, although even so, the ideal would be no mechanical dependency at all. If you compare Copenhagen's bike infrastructure New York City's car based infrastructure, you find some interesting differences.

I hate the American dependency on grid based planning. Its ugly and not easier to navigate. Secondly, this notion that the car is the best way to move about.

There are many problems with this. Off the top of my head, the biggest is that it encourages people to buy cars because with our current infrastructure they are the only viable mode of transportation. Also, cars are REALLY expensive, they require parking in secure locations, and lastly building the infrastructure to sustain them is expensive. As mentioned above, this infrastructure is costly to maintain but by inherent design it also makes every other mode of transportation dangerous and less efficient by comparison.

Professor King

The title really is just one of my Professor's names, who has the good fortune to have the surname of King. Quite befitting of her style, in a way that I think Plato would approve of.

Too bad the class she teaches is duller than bricks.

If you can't make something boring interesting, I doubt you can make something interesting accessible.

And that's really what it all comes down to.

Things to pay attention to:

1) Rapid transportation (if you have a car)
2) 'Useless' green space; every house has a yard, the houses are all one or two story.
3) All the cars.

American Suburbs

Things to pay attention to:

1) Really Narrow Streets

2) Buildings close together (usually multistory)
3) No cars.

Italian Village

English Village

Chinese Village

America has to switch from this farmhouse style town to a model of urban and suburban development that incorporates village and pedestrian life, while excluding cars and the current standards of 'farmhouse' suburban sprawl.

new cities