11.13.06
Posted in Photography at 1:53 am by thomas
Just stumbled across an incredibly detailed panorama of Tokyo on an Australian photo blog called digitalarts Mind Socket.
Much of Tokyo – in fact much of Japan – consists of this never-ending and never-changing conglomerations of concrete mid-rise buildings with the odd high-rise thrown in for variety.
The first impression on the traveler to Japan is one of cold ugliness that is curiously incongruous to the expectations of Japanese design prowess and Asian elegance.
But I’ve learned to love these Japanese mega cities that are not so much an architecturalĂ‚Â contest on the micro-level but a complex organism that grows almost like a biological entity where each little cell is not important, but where the resulting body works like a wondrous machine.
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11.05.06
Posted in Good Stuff at 11:28 pm by thomas
To counter the permanently negative press that video game enthusiasts are getting, the makers of the Penny Arcade have created a charity called Child’s Play that supports children’s hospitals from all over the world with toys.
The system is beautifully simple – choose a children’s hospital from the map on the site and you will be directed to a Amazon wishlist for the hospital.
Many of the toys, books and videos in these lists cost only six or seven dollars and will bring many hours of joy to sick children. All of us can easily afford spending twenty or thirty dollars, so don’t let me stop you, go and do it now!
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11.02.06
Posted in One World, Rants at 9:00 pm by thomas
While I do not always agree with Jim Kunstler, he writes with a steady, intense passion about what our future without oil will be like. He abhors the suburbanized, mall-ified modern cities that have sprung up all over the United States with their dependence on cars and cheap oil and I fully agree with him that these abominations of city planning will become disastrous, festering wounds for this society once the oil price takes up permanent residency in the four-dollar neighborhood.
Here is an article from a few weeks ago where Jim succinctly creates an arc from the current militaristic misadventure in Iraq, to a collapsing mid-eastern political landscape and on to the destruction of the American Dream.
All of this could be preventable if this society would realize what they have become and that intensive research of alternative energies and new modes of mass transportation are crucial life-or-death items on our collective to-do list.
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