Ben introduced me to the Project for Public Spaces by referring me to an article they posted on the 20 best North American neighbourhoods and pointed out that I’d lived in the 7th and 14th spots. Go team! I’ve only been to an additional two, though, so clearly I have some flights to book.
Alice and I are happy to be spending Christmas this year with her parents and family in Winnipeg. The timing of our arrival was perhaps not the greatest for two reasons. First, we just managed to miss the yearly dinner party. We just caught the tail end of it as we got out of the cab at a solid 10:30 at night. Next time we’ll try to be a little more clever, but orchestrating time off sort of tied our hands.
Secondly, and perhaps more alarmingly, it is freaking cold. Winnipeg always has a pleasingly hearty winter but we arrived during a cold snap. It’s predicted that the daily highs will rise from the current 40 below up into the negative twenties. (all figures celsius, but we all know that they line up at -40, right?) We brought along our piles of winter wear, so we’ll be fine, but it was still a little startling to inhale that burst of cold air as we left the airport. Maybe it wasn’t a good sign when we spent an hour on the tarmac in Minneapolis waiting for them to load luggage because their fancy luggage scanners had frozen.
It’s been very relaxing so far. I’ve huddled on the couch with my book most of the time. Alice and the ladies escaped to a local spa today. Reports indicate that it’s indeed pleasant to be wrapped in seaweed and rubbed with warm stones.
I was a little surprised to see Bill Moyers stepping down from NOW. It makes me wish I’d found the show a little earlier so I could have seen more of them. Ah, well. His final episode had a piece on independence in the right-wing media that was interesting for the interviews. Richard Viguerie’s description of journalism being just opinion was particularly awesome. I’d love to see that tagline on FOX. “Just opinion, just like all journalism.”
The espisode also had Anthony D. Romero saying typically level-headed things. This interview, and their recent work on behalf of same-sex couples in Oregon, reminds me that it’s time to throw more money at the ACLU.
I’ve been trying to find a permanent link to this NOW episode but can only seem to find current links that will shift. I suspect it will appear at http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript351_full.html, but it hasn’t quite yet.
The talking heads have been making lots of noise about red and blue states recently. This all reminded me of a nice article over a style.org (boy do I wish they’d produce some more content) on the misleading geographical maps of California’s gubernatorial election. I was hoping to find some similar work on the 2004 presidential election and I wasn’t disappointed. I think my favourite is the work done by a team at the University of Michigan: “Maps and cartograms of the 2004 US presidential election results”. (also, get your purple map shirts today!). I’m probably a big dork for coming to this a month and a half late, but here we are.
Also, while we’re at it, everyone point and laugh at the ever-useful Atlas of U.S. Presidential Elections for mispredicting what the rest of the world would mean by red and blue.
It seems that Fresh Air has been awash in Canadians recently.
As this entry’s title implies, my favourite was the interview with Dan Akroyd.
Alice has been bugging me to put up the photos we took at a recent trip in Seattle. It was partially on a whim to visit our friend Colette and partially an excuse to visit some fun ex-neighbours who have since moved to Seattle. I’m afraid that I don’t have a large reserve of colorful commentary but I can try to remember some high points.
We ran into the sand castles, uhm, outside the monorail stop. I don’t really know where that is. One of the castles was built around this great track that let kids put balls in the top and watch them roll down through the castle. They loved it.
It took us quite a while to get to the top of Smith tower. They kept turning us away because they weren’t open or were having some private party, or whatever. It ended up being a great view. One of the pictures I took in particular because it reminded me so much of a Sim City cityscape. I’m not sure how I feel about that.
I think everyone agreed that the ferry ride back from, uhm.. whatever island we took it to, was terrific. The breeze was pretty chilly but the view of the city as we approached was a great way to finish a day buzzing around back roads on the islands.
It didn’t take long for this new shiny WordPress installation to show up on the radar of the spam juggernaut. Today, for whatever reason, some bots somewhere got this address and started posting ridiculous comments with URLs to some defunct online gambling house. WordPress even happily asked me to approve comments that were submitted to posts that didn’t even exist yet. After a few dozen iterations of that I was not a happy Zach.
Thankfully I came across Trenca Spammers. It is a great plugin which requires someone submitting a comment to enter a number which is presented as an image. In theory humans get through but software shouldn’t. It was a breeze to install and seems to work. Here’s to hoping.
Oh, and if it wasn’t already clear, if you make a living writing spam software then I am not very happy with you. You are a bad, bad, person.
The last few days of our stay in Manhattan involved more predictable sight-seeing. We made a run down Museum Mile and stopped in at the Cooper-Hewitt and, of course, at the Met. The Cooper-Hewitt was great. Small but interesting and housed in Carnegie’s impressive former fifth-avenue mansion. The Met was entirely intimidating. We bobbed along happily for a few hours, the Temple of Dendur was especially grand, but it’s an incredible amount of stuff to take in. After a few hours it all starts to blur.
Trinity Church was also very cool, especially the graveyard. I wish we could find the text of a particularly pleasing monument in the graveyard. The inscription, written in the 19th century, was sure to explicitly mention how becoming the monument was.
We were more careful to eat modestly after our adventure at Aquavit. George took us to an Italian place near Columbia with some of his architect crew (Julia Stiles didn’t make a return appearance, sadly). Ben and Janet took us to a Korean BBQ place near Korea Way (32nd) which was some of the best food we had all weekend. Big Nick’s was a fun dive diner which brought the added benefit of being seated between German and what sounded like Norwegian tourists.
Alice asked me to be sure to point out that her big exciting pretzel was actually indistinguishble from a nasty hot dog by taste. We guessed that it had been stewing in hot dog run-off all day which is not something that any bread product should do.
All in all, a great trip.