Archive for the ‘ Diurnal dribble ’ Category
Lots of loose ends to briefly tie up and disordered messes to mop up. First, I came across this website via metafilter, a centennial tribute to the cottages built after the 1906 San Francisco earthquake. It particularly struck me because the most beautiful place I’ve ever lived was one such conversion at 23rd and Eureka. And [ READ MORE ]
Congrats go out to Shane, who has successfully defended his dissertation…without telling anyone he was going to! And regrets go out to the family and friends of Jane Jacobs, who passed away yesterday at 89. I saw her speak a couple of years ago at CUNY on her last book, I guess, Dark Age Ahead. She [ READ MORE ]
Walked around old town yesterday. I know this isn’t a new observation, but I was really put off by the fact that the history of Le Vieux Montreal really served only as a setting for commercial activity. I realized that most people were probably there for the stylishness of the environment to which they came [ READ MORE ]
Johannes’ panel on urban tourism was well-attended and generated a lively conversation that threatened to go on long past the time allotted. “How do you know?”, you ask, “Your panel was at exactly the same time.” And indeed it was. Here’s the tragic story. The other day I received an email from the panel moderator, W. [ READ MORE ]
I’ve been in Montreal for a day and am loving it so far. Lovely city. Lovely weather. Lots of French. Lots of English. Seems like I’m to be predominantly on my own. Johannes doesn’t seem to have surfaced. He’s probably freaking out about his presentation…as I have a slight dose of the same. Anyway, since [ READ MORE ]
Been busy, folks. Moved Jay from Harlem to Pelham Parkway. Read stuff. Did stuff. Most of it failed stuff, i.e., my venture into the Nairobi slums housing market, which will move forward again from tomorrow. And I’ll be back. [ READ MORE ]
The other night I stayed up watching the last three hours of The Century of the Self, a BBC4 documentary that strikes me as an improved version of Manufacturing Consent. It traces the history of psychoanalysis as a shaper of 20th century propaganda and advertising in the service of managing a capitalist democratic society. Fantastic [ READ MORE ]
Just added this disclaimer to the Gentrification of Orange entry. Disclaimer (added March 7): Since everyone gets their information in the Information Age first from Google and since Floyd’s response resulted in this page getting so many hits that it is now on the first page when you Google search him, I feel at the moment [ READ MORE ]
There has reasonably enough been some interest in recent developments that have raised the program security threat level to Orange. To my knowledge there have been no developments. Simply silence. I presume Floyd is taking some time to prepare a substantive response to the previous posting, which I eagerly await. As you may imagine, I [ READ MORE ]
From roughly 5:30 this morning, I’ve been unable to sleep. I thought it was because I had a lot of thoughts fluttering around my brain (missed registration deadlines, how I can get the statistics to work on the Nairobi slums paper I’m working on, tweaks to the code I wrote yesterday to plot quantiles for [ READ MORE ]
Last night, JS and I were truly blessed to have invited to a Lefebvre working goup discussing a set of ideas Peter was presenting. Despite the fact that the discussion was incredibly free-ranging–not what one would call a close reading of the text–it was fascinating to see how the big kids play…and they play rough [ READ MORE ]
I can’t let the day go by without noting my weekend. I finally made it to one of the grand parties at KK’s. I had eternally gotten lazy about going out to Clinton Hill on my own for a party that gets started at 11pm and goes on until the time I don’t want to [ READ MORE ]
In another dramatic change of fortune that suggests major regime change in the urban planning program, Grace has officially announced that she’s leaving to work for CB1 at the end of March. I’m very excited for her, and I’m very glad that there will be time to break a new person in to the demands [ READ MORE ]
The other day I ran into Peter Marcuse and was chatting with him about my comp exam. He was a bit surprised that there was a methodology question on the exam, since the faculty had apparently decided against that a decade ago. His explanation as to why was that focusing on methodology distracts too much [ READ MORE ]
Turns out that there was one more hurdle to leap before my exam sequence was over. Yesterday I spent nearly two hours going through my exam with Susan. She would flip through page by page, asking me questions about my answers based on her comments. In effect, I was expected to make the same corrections [ READ MORE ]