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Friday, June 29, 2007
IT'S GRIM UP NORTH
posted 8:58 PM
I have to watch this KLF video every six to eight months. I do.

Thursday, June 28, 2007
THE GOOD NEWS CHANNEL
posted 10:59 PM
German scientists remove AIDS virus from human cells.

Tuesday, June 26, 2007
PAINTED LADIES
posted 8:21 AM
Five hundred years of them.

Monday, June 11, 2007
OR NOT SO MUCH A TIE-TACK AS A LABRET STUD?
posted 9:21 AM
I like Toronto.

Cory Doctorow says Toronto is a great place to live, and not such a great place to visit. I agree. Once I start blanking out the local tourism signals, any given visit, there's always a flash of warm recognition: "Oh, yeah, *this* place!"

That "we are doing a city here, but we are simultaneously operating as a complex of gated attractions (and we've got the labret stud to prove it)" thing is inherently dodgy. Anywhere. Or everywhere, increasingly.

Yesterday, reading some retail-hipster web-guide to Berlin, I noted the writer taking it for granted that London loses a certain kind of tourist, these days, to Berlin and Amsterdam. The ones looking for the city thing as opposed to the gated attractions thing.

Saturday, June 09, 2007
SOVIET-PRESBYTERIAN HEROIC ARCHITECTURE
posted 4:59 AM
I'm in a hotel in Toronto next to the Convention Center, with a view of the foot of the CN Tower.

The Canadian Fernsehturm. World's Fair architecture, but without the excuse of having had a World's Fair.

Make your city wear a big ugly tie-tack it can never afford to remove. Now there's an idea.

Wednesday, June 06, 2007
ACTUALLY HB'S BIRTHDAY IS TOMORROW
posted 7:56 AM
June 7th, 1967. My bad, confusion over time zones.

Tuesday, June 05, 2007
HAPPY BIRTHDAY, HB!
posted 11:07 PM
Hubertus Bigend turns 40, today.

Saturday, June 02, 2007
READERS ASK: THE WINTER MARKET
posted 9:23 AM
Mike in St. Peterburg (mbravo) asks, re my short story of the same title, "what the (Winter) Market is/was?"

Vancouver's Granville Island, centered around Granville Island Market (produce and food fair) is a very successful (and pleasant) retrofit of an under-bridge urban island that previously was heavily industrial. When the story was written, the retrofit was recent, and I dirtied it up for requisite punky near-future effect.

Have regretted never having explored it prior to its regooding.

It works as well as it has because it's been very tightly and intelligently limited as to types of business. No fast food franchises, and a certain percentage of retail space must be marine-related, nautical.

Friday, June 01, 2007
MR. WOO'S ROBOTS
posted 10:26 PM
So very fine.

COLIN, THAT WAS
posted 11:39 AM
Poster Colin, yesterday, not just "somebody". "Since 2003" Sorry, Colin. I was in what I now hope was the last day of a weeks-long sinus headache. Stupid-making. My bad.