Dialing down

October 9, 2010

Not sure what’s in the air, but I feel an immense quietude settling around me: everyone seems either muted or not saying anything I’m hearing, and I feel the same way about my own voice. (Is anyone reading this? Listening? I doubt it… I feel entirely erased somehow. And island-bound.) I could write a diatribe […]

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Development and asynchronicity

October 7, 2010

The other day, we had an interesting conversation around the dinner table about development and asynchronicity. Asynchronicity is a familiar idea around here, because, as homeschoolers of asynchronous kids, we learned a decade ago (and had to address the fact) that development happens on several levels and usually not in lockstep. The intellectual, physical, and […]

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Retail realities

October 6, 2010

Yesterday’s post about ordering New Glasses online prompted Robert Randall to comment with some questions and thoughts about the future of retail. My first response was to point out that I posed those very questions way back in December 2006 in my article, Consuming Downtown. This is hardly a new problem, and if local retailers […]

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New glasses

October 5, 2010

I’ve been putting off a visit to my ophthalmologist for several years. I realize that’s not a good strategy at my age, but there are other bills to pay, and this one was “ignorable.” But now it happened: I broke my glasses over the weekend and need a new pair. So I’m going to try […]

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Wake-up calls and the seduction of the snooze button

October 4, 2010

Last week, while attending a professional / academic conference in Toronto, Vancouver-based academic and “social media power user” Raul Pacheco-Vega posted a blog entry called The future of my personal blog. He noted: I am in awe of the depth of knowledge and caliber of colleagues I am sitting with, and I am honored to […]

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The Sunday Diigo Links Post (weekly)

October 3, 2010

Striking images of disconnected streets and unwanted sprawl | Kaid Benfield’s Blog | Switchboard, from NRDC Based on Boston.com’s photo-essay of “human landscapes in SW Florida,” Kaid Benfield’s blog entry notes: QUOTE Among land use characteristics, poor street connectivity is the best predictor of a neighborhood’s low rate of walking, and the second best predictor […]

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Ever wondered why hotel staff turn down your bed?

October 1, 2010

Yet another section in Erve Chambers’s Native Tours jumped out at me today (see previous entries for other examples). Chambers references (pp.106-7) the work of Graham Dann, who in 1996 “described some of the ways in which language is used to promote various kinds of tourism, as well as to regulate and control interactions between […]

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Average delusions, Beautiful Delusion

September 30, 2010

Interesting article by Judy Berman on Flavorwire about Laurie Anderson‘s latest project, Delusion <–this link goes to Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM).  See a review of the show in the SFGate here. There’s a video interview with Anderson (on both the Flavorwire page as well as BAM’s) in which Anderson observes that almost every artist […]

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Authenticity, sweet confection

September 29, 2010

Another passage from Erve Chambers’s Native Tours (which I mentioned in Monday’s post) struck me today. I agree with Chambers’s thinking, and want to relate it to the City of Victoria’s maneuverings around heritage and tourism. But first, Chambers (I’ve added several emphases in bold): We need to ask at this point whether there are […]

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Worse than Katrina? Anti-density bombs over Detroit

September 28, 2010

Caught a Sept.23 post by David Byrne today, Don’t Forget the Motor City (found via a tweet by Richard Florida). Byrne writes: This is a city that still has an infrastructure, or some of it, for 2 million people, and now only 800,000 remain. One rides down majestic boulevards with only a few cars on […]

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