Friday: Another Andy Rooney Moment

Do you ever wonder what’s going through the mind of all those people who walk behind cars that are backing up?

“Quick,” I heard a father say to his small son as I backed into a parking space this afternoon. “Go behind him before he gets into the space.”

Luckily for the son, I did hear his father say that. Because the boy was too small to see in my rearview mirror, and I was already three-quarters of the way into the space and rolling backwards to get out of the way of the impatient traffic on the street.

The same father would never tell his son to walk in front of a moving car. What planet are he and the countless people like him from that they think the driver can see behind the car better than he or she can see in front of it?

The same thing happened to me yesterday. And those are the only two times I've been in the car in the past two weeks.

2) I was born in New York City, and I live in New York City, but I grew up in the Connecticut suburbs of New York (in Darien, rhymes with "Aryan" – probably not a coincidence).

Today I drove down the street where I grew up. (Andy Rooney lives nearby. I saw him in the news store one day when he cut in front of me without saying a word and grumpily thrust money at the cashier to pay for his New York Times.)

My beautiful old street was lined with one terrible new house after another.

Do you ever wonder why they call them "McMansions"?

It’s not because they’re big, although it’s obvious from our SUVs and our stomachs that Americans like Supersizing. (Didja notice McDonald’s announced they’re dropping Supersizing as part of their new Healthy Menus?)

For obvious reasons, McMansions are always built in places where people can afford big houses, so they’re rarely the first big houses in the neighborhood. In the case of Darien, for more than a century it’s been a place where successful investment bankers and lawyers from New York could hang their hat at night in a WASPy New England town (Darien - rhymes with Aryan, remember?) So there are plenty of mansions there already.

The reason they’re called McMansions is because even though they’re big and expensive, they look cheap. They’re badly proportioned, they have fiberglass columns instead of wooden ones, Garden State Brickface “stone” instead of local stone, “synthetic” slate instead of wooden shingles on the roof and so on. They’re badly sited, badly landscaped – they're just plain ol' ugly.

They’re generic 21st century “housing” that never fits in the local context. For example, Darien likes uptight, New England, restrained architecture. McMansions come from the National Homebuilders Convention tradition of the House of 27 Gables.

Good architecture makes you feel good. These architecturally challenged buildings make you feel bad.

" When you live in a high entropy society, as we do," Jim Kunstler says, " the entropy manifests in many ways: toxic waste, poor air quality, social alienation, epidemic obesity, odious popular culture, AND immersive ugliness."