Veritas et Venustas

Quote of the Day

“Someday, after mastering the winds, the waves, the tides and gravity, we shall harness for God the energies of love, and then, for a second time in the history of the world, man will have discovered fire.”

Pierre Teilhard de Chardin

Terrorism for Dummies

The bombers arrested in London barely live in the present. They wander around in a medieval, Crusader-like fog thinking God is guiding and protecting them as they murder, or try to murder, their innocent fellow men and women. The look on the faces of two of them when arrested seemed to say, "How can God allow this?"

All four live in the West, because they have fled the violence in their own countries. But in their fog, it is their sanctuary that must be punished.

50s Revival

This is a view of the lobby in an apartment house by the developers of the apartment building below. Note to the young designers participating in the Fifties Revival going on now: I remember the Fifties — they sucked. They were The Man In The Gray Flannel Suit, Gentleman's Agreement, What Makes Sammy Run, Ozzie and Harriett and Donald O'Connor. Why would anyone want to go there?

You can download RealPlayer clips from the real 1950s here.

Dog Bites Man

VIA Curbed and Triple Mint we have another exercise in graph-paper origami. Every other New York City building announced these days seems to be one of these "folded plane" glass-skinned things (Frank Gehry's Atlantic Yards, Gehry's InterActivCorp headquarters, David Childs' Freedom Tower, Childs's TimeWarner center, the Bank of America building, Bernard Tschumi's Blue, Christian de Portzamparc's 400 Park Avenue South, Zaha Hadid's Olympic Village...) but this won't stop New York Times architect's agent architecture critic Nicolia Ouroussoff from saying these buildings "aim to challenge the formal order that has ruled mainstream architecture for a century" — or something like that. Somehow we will understand that they are avant-garde and daring and socially revolutionary.

Even though every architect is designing one of them and most people think they look like Houston on steroids. How revolutionary is that?

And how revolutionary that they're designed to sell to Yuppies for $1,200 per square foot?

More comments on origami architecture here, here and here.

“Why Real Player Sucks”

“REAL PLAYER SUCKS” gets 780,000 hits at Google. The number one choice, recommended by Jason Kottke, is here.

I groaned when I had to download the latest RealPlayer to watch some NPR clips. I don't know why NPR techheads have such bad taste that they almost always pick the worst Windows products. My experience is below.

1. RP software is notoriously buggy and badly documented.
2. RP software is notoriously invasive and problematic for the system.
3. RealMedia tries to sell you many services with the software, and includes extra charges they try to conceal.
   
4. I’ve downloaded many versions because of corruption and failures.
5. Then the new download has a hard time with the previous version, which is hard to uninstall.
   
6. I had trouble with RM not canceling my account and improperly charging me for several months.
7. That’s precisely why they use to force “trial subscriptions” for “free software” -- it’s a scam.
8. I couldn’t download the latest software without the last four digits of my credit card even, though I canceled my account in 2003
9. It took RM 4 hours to respond to my download problem.
10. Then I had to wait on the phone for 15 minutes to talk to an RM representative.
    
11. “What do you mean?” he said, “your account was canceled in 2003.”
12. RM stole iTunes code in an attempt to force Apple into letting them into the iTunes market
13. Installing the latest version crashed my browser.
14. The latest version of RP won’t run without keeping an icon on my desktop -- unlike all my other applications.
    
15. AFTER running a file I downloaded it told me there were two security updates available.
16. Apple tries to make QuickTime compatible with the newest file type, but RP doesn't update them -- intentionally, because of the iTunes lawsuit?
17. The new RP crashed the first 3 times I used it.

Hot Time, Summer In The City II

YOU CAN'T SWIM at New York's Water Taxi Beach (or at the Lower East Side beach Richard Rogers has proposed). Why don't we get pools like the floating pools in the Seine in Paris? All the Hot Young Planners in Lindsey administration (Jaq Robertson, Bob Stern) proposed them 40 years ago.

The Piscine Deligny was the last one in Paris. It sank 12 years ago (here's a picture of it by Helmut Newton before its plunge). But the Mayor of Paris has proposed a new floating pool. Pictures of the old and the new "after the jump."

A postcard view of the Piscine Deligny under construction.
Much of the Paris we love so much was not yet built.

A view of the proposed pool. The pool will be a
good addition to the city, but the government
building in the background shows that the French
have forgotten many of the principles of
urbanism they used to know so well.

UPDATE: Pictures of the annual "Paris Plage," via StreetsBlog. Story in the New York Times.

Hot Time, Summer In The City (back o' my neck gettin' dirdy 'n gritty...

TOMORROW it's supposed to "feel like" 105 in New York. Maybe it's time for Water Taxi Beach. But you can't swim there—a movie doubleheader in the afternoon might be better (The March of the Penguins and ?), followed by the Bohemian Hall Beer Garden at night. Water Taxi Beach and Bohemian Hall are both in Queens.

Uh-0h: The Beach is only open Friday, Saturday, Sunday.

via Curbed

Click on the photo for a larger image.

Thoughts After the Angel Game

UPDATE: Shop Till You Drop — There's less than a week to go until the no-waiver trade deadline in the major leagues, and for the first time in nine years, the Yankees don't have one of the top three records in the American League: the last three years they've had the best record in the league at this point. It's questionable whether any of the center fielders available are better than what they've got (<strike>Sori's a free agent at the end of the year, but look at these home and away stats</strike> the Rangers still have an option year, but an expensive one - the Mets are looking at Sori), or if any of the pitchers available are worth what they'll cost. Yankee GM Cashman is a magician if he can make better offers for A.J. Burnett than the White Sox, Orioles or Red Sox, and after his experience with fellow Marlin Pavano, he might not want Burnett. Does anyone want Womack and Cabrera in a package?

The Giambino (finally), Robby Cano, Captain Jeter, A-Rod, Matsui, Sheff, Jorgie, Moose, Sturzie, Flash and Mo—those are players who can win a World Series. Bernie, Ruben, Flaherty and even Tino will do their part. Bubba will be good enough, and might surprise you: little, little-known players have frequently come through in the postseason.

That leaves the rest of the starting pitching and the middle relief. Johnson, Pavano, Wright, Leiter, Brown and Wang should be able to pitch well enough to give this team a very good record, but so far they haven't. The middle relief is a mystery.

Even with these problems, the Yanks were two late-inning home runs (including a Vladi Guerrero grand slam that was barely enough) away from an 8 and 3 road trip that was their toughest of the year.

點擊這裡

Click here, here and here. (Look at the URLs and you'll quickly discover the system. If you speak the languages, you'll see the problems.)

via City Comforts

21st Century Tradition

I'm one of those 21st century Traditionalists who thinks Modernism was a good thing, an important step for the growth of individual freedom and the pursuit of happiness.

When I say Modernism, I mean the whole body of culture and thought that changed society and the world, going back at least as far as the work of Walt Whitman and Claude Monet, a century and a half ago. Modern architecture, and even sprawl, were parts of this.

I bring this up after hearing Jacob Needleman on the NPR program Speaking of Faith. I’ve written about Needleman before, but not enough. His book The American Soul, Rediscovering the Wisdom of the Founders is one of the most important written contributions to what Traditional architects and urbanists are starting to call the New Discourse (also look here).

For architects and urbanists, the New Discourse reflects the fact that we're rediscovering traditional design, and that conservative and pre-Modern theories frequently don't explain what we're doing or why we're doing it.

Needleman's book is on a parallel track for philosophy and politics. In the American Founders he sees Classical thought with a relevance for Modern life that's very different than the Neo-Con / Chicago School interpretation of the same issues. His is a Progressive look on life after 20th Century Modern Liberalism. It indirectly addresses issues which the Republican party has cleverly marked as their own, such as moral values and our connection to history.

More on this in the weeks ahead.

You can download a RealPlayer* recording of the show by clicking here. There will probably be a transcript of the show going up this week: if so I'll post a link. There are also discussions of various parts of the show here.

* I wish NPR and its affiliates weren't so attached to RealPlayer, the worst of all the audio and video players. RealMedia has finally stopped forcing people into giving their credit cards for "trial subscriptions" for the "free software," but their software has always been buggy and badly documented.