friend of the built environment

It’s only started to occur to me very recently how I deal with pain, loss and grief. Every time I say goodbye to someone or someplace which means a lot to me, I die a little inside, and it erodes a bit of what makes me who I am. As antisocial as I am in [...]

The Economist, not your average liberal rag, has been coming out fairly scathingly critical of President Bush and perversely supportive of candidate Kerry these days… Which gives me some semblance of hope that the divisiveness of the past few years is turning from the usual religious- or wealth-based dichotomies to something more akin to stupidity [...]

The fever of Olympiana has once again consumed the world. Every few years, the governments of the world, both autocratic and democratic, rally their minions to their flags to support an institution which purports to enshrine values which every human should supposely appreciate: national pride, athleticism, cameraderie, etc.
All the while, we never seem to question [...]

Anyone who knows me well knows I care very little for sports. Aside from occasionally fetishizing the body of a stocky jock, I could not care less about what happened to which team yesterday. Along those lines, I’m also not a fan of the Olympics. I don’t find many differences between your everyday sporting business [...]

I started listening to The Cure when I was 10 years old. My sister had bought a few tapes by them, and within a few months I had approriated them and they were on endless rotation in my little cassette player. I was in love. Robert Smith was my hero. The Cure saved me from a possible [...]

I’ve become especially sensitive lately with the way every public medium and social institution today seems to be less concerned with its own specialized role and more dedicated to a sort of “catalogue” response to the world. This spans everything from social clubs to political candidates, public issues to editorial stances. I’ve written about it [...]

Fall is the best time of year. Not only is the California fall mildly cool and predictable (an important factor when you live in the Bay Area, where “climate control” is considered insulting to the environment), but Starbucks starts rolling out seasonal latte flavors. It starts slow with such things as the Pumpkin Spice latte and culminates [...]

So I have this suggestion for campaign finance reform that I believe would end the corruption, pork-barrel and maybe even the 2-party system as we know it in America. It would even work well in any other country with a good legal democratic system. It involves three specific rules for all campaign contributions:

Outlaw direct campaign [...]

With the end of our vacation and a snap back to reality, the desire to move on is getting ever more pressing. The current planned destination is likely to be an affordable urban island within a red state, with the potential for future intraregional relocations as the years progress and we recover from the draining effects [...]

Siouxsie is my hero.