Blog Challenge To Do List

As I’ve mentioned at the bottoms of my last two blogs, I’m accepted @iaagustin‘s 30-Day Blog Challenge.  So now I figured I might want to do a little bit of organizing, so that I’m not just sitting her thinking, “crap, I HAVE to blog SOMETHING, what can I think up on the fly?”.

(between you & me, I’m pretty great at thinking things up on the fly, but you never want to exhaust your powers, right?)

Ok, so here’s a list of what I figure I’ll do to fill the days.

Day 1: done
Day 2: done
Day 3: also done
Day 4: this baby right here
Day 5: well…. what do ya got?

Okay, so I’m not good enough at planning to know day by day what will inspire me, but I definately have some topics I want to explore. Here we go:

• Finish off the drafts I never finished   (7 Posts)

• Baseball Season Starting    (3-5 Posts)

• Green/Urban/Environmental/Sustainable Topics  (3-5 Posts)

• Why I Like Comics   (1-3 Posts)

• News & World Events (1-3 Posts)

• Weekly 5 Things (4 Posts)

• Dear Ryan Weekly (4 Posts)

• Review the Challenge Post

There we go; that comes out to just about 30 posts or more.

Hopefully over the next month I can make some discoveries as I force myself to write consistently.

Hopefully I can also entertain while I do it.

Let me know when you think I’ve failed one of those.

(this is day 4 of the 30 day blog challenge)

I love cities

I do.  I love living in the city.  Not only because it fits my lifestyle, but because I love the promise of it.

Urban areas are traditionally the cradles of great ideas.  Think of Socrates, Cyrus, Solomon, Alexander, Magellan, Edison; democracy, art, opera, literature; all ideas born in cities, because cities allow us to know our fellow man in ways that yards & freeways & Cost Co’s don’t.

This got me thinking if there was an easier way to express my love of city life.

I hear people use the word “Urbanist” more and more lately, (or perhaps I’m just tuned into those types of channels more and more…) and I wondered if it’s a term that would apply to me.

So I Googled it.  But I had difficulty finding a clear definition.  I also learned that apparently there is some disagreement between “urbanism” and “new urbanism”.  Hmmm, well here’s the most well-written thing I could find. Wikipedia (pfft, great source, right?) defines New Urbanism as;

“an urban design movement, which promotes walkable neighborhoods that contain a range of housing and job types.”

Well that seems easy enough.  I love walkable neighborhoods, though my idea of walkable is probably a little more aggressive than most peoples.  Walkable for me just means “has flat-ish areas” and “hopefully few hobos and/or feral animals”.

Then I read a quote from the Congress for the New Urbanism:

We advocate the restructuring of public policy and development practices to support the following principles: neighborhoods should be diverse in use and population; communities should be designed for the pedestrian and transit as well as the car; cities and towns should be shaped by physically defined and universally accessible public spaces and community institutions; urban places should be framed by architecture and landscape design that celebrate local history, climate, ecology, and building practice.

So what do we have here?

• Neighorhoods?  Great
• Accessibility?  Indeed!
• Diversity?  Always good.
• Public Policy?  Can always use help.
• Pedestrian and Transit?  I’ve BEEN on-board with that for decades.

Alright, so this sounds like an agenda to get with.

As you know from my previous post about freeways, urban sprawl is something I definitely cannot get with.  In truth, even when I lived miles away from my job and school, I still took public transit, and as opportunity presented itself, I moved closer and closer to the core.  Now I live 1.5 miles from my office, right next to a light rail stop, and withing walking distance of parks, museums, great restaurants, pubs, a farmer’s market, the full gamut of culture in Phoenix, AND my favorite coffee shop.  I don’t see how a car would improve my life.

We really COULD improve my life, and the lives of thousands of people around me, is a good healthy dose of Urban ReUse.

I don’t say Urban Renewal, because Roosevelt Row and many parts of Downtown Phoenix are already vibrant and thriving in their own way, so I don’t want to solicit the type of “renewal” typically thought of.

No, what I would like to see is more redesign and reuse of existing structures, filling in the empty store fronts and repopulating the vacant lots that leave gaps in our neighborhood picture.  Just like an MRI, you can have 90% healthy areas, but if you have 10% missing, then you’ve got a problem.

So I was decently intrigued to see this post by fellow #30DayBC participant (and RDJ doppleganger) Tony A.  I’m interested to see how his series turns out, and perhaps add a few spots to the list.

(Ironically, for 5-years I used to live next-door to the first place he mentioned, and didn’t know that it had since turned into a vacant shell.)

So, in closing, give cities a boost, for all they’ve done for you.

…and be kind to the planet while you do it….

(This is Day 5 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge)

Your Inner Superman

We all know Superman, “Mild-Mannered Reporter” Clark Kent’s alter-ego.  Beneath the surface Kent always has his super-powers at the ready, to pitch in when disaster calls.

But what about the rest of us.

Certainly we all have talents and abilities that we don’t broadcast.

Here’s my list:
– Incredible BS/Gift-of-gab ability
– Extremely powerful eyebrows and facial expressions
– near-mythical efficiency

(all adjectives are thematically exaggerated)

What’s your Superpower?  What do you have laying right below the surface?

(this is day 3 of the 30 day blog challenge)

“You said to never take the freeway”

Sorry, any chance to use a Matrix quote has to be capitalized on, right?

So, to follow-up on yesterday’s blog, I thought I’d take a look at one of the most ridiculous inventions of the last century: freeways

Before I give my opinion, let’s list some facts:
1.)  Freeways cost money to build and maintain
2.)  Freeways cost more money for highway patrolmen and/or the nefarious speedcam
3.)  Freeways are often noisy and unsightly
4.)  They don’t accomplish their stated goals

That last one may have been a surprise to some, so I’ll back it up.

A recent study by Brown University economist Nathaniel Baum-Snow shows that building a freeway to serve the residents of a community actually reduces that population by 18%.  No, the massive concrete beast didn’t eat up the area that those people’s houses used to be in.  But by creating a new tool for their commute, you’ve now told them that with a few adjustments, they could live somewhere else and still make their same commute.

If suburb A builds a highway to connect to suburb B, that’s going to effect the distribution of commutes not only between those suburbs but also the commutes in the region as a whole. So there are going to be these externalities where someone in suburb C has a faster way to get to work, so they’re going to start using it and filling up this new highway. And a business downtown might say, hey, there’s this new infrastructure, let’s go locate out there and I can have a lot more space to work with. So anytime one part of a region changes something, it’s going to effect population and employment throughout the metropolitan area. So I think it’s important to engage at the regional level.

A lot of people think that decentralization is about fleeing to the suburbs out of central cities, but if you look at the change in the spatial distribution of the population across large metropolitan areas, you find that it’s really much more of a spatial phenomenon. You see that the population density in the more peripheral regions of central cities actually went up quite a bit over the last 50 years, while the population of the central business districts went down.

Sometimes an Idea is almost Too Novel

borrowed infographic from GOOD.is:

The inner-environmentalist in me think that this is exactly the kind of great idea we need to make happen.  Imagine if Chicago, LA, Miami, Phoenix…all these big, sprawling cities weren’t needed anymore.  Have one Megapolis with all the finance and creative and any other urban industries, and let the rest of the US go fallow.

We already know that NYC is one of the greenest cities because of it’s use of mass transit.

Now imagine you have a huge vacuum and you could suck out all the pollution from all the cars in bumper-to-bumper traffic in LA, all the smog that hover over Phoenix every day (and all that cow-stench that pervades Chicago still).  And you’d never have to re-vacuum again…

Sometimes I wish we hadn’t achieved Manifest Destiny.

Of course this idea will never happen, but it’d be awesome if it did.

(this is Day 1 of the 30 day Blog Challenge.  To see who else is in, click here)

Temporary Shelter for Temporary Fun

Tell me this doesn’t look like the ideal place for a rainy-day #Buzzcation…
(and before you ask, no 10am is NOT too early to be thinking/talking about a #Buzzcation)

Found this on INHABITAT, so show them so love if you dig this as much as I do.

Supposedly, a team of Rotterdamn architects built the bar from visitor’s umbrellas…. it looks like a full-out umbrella party ensued, ’cause the cops had to break up the 300-strong party at 2am. The whole thing was a celebration of the Architecture of Consequence exhibition at the Netherlands Architecture Institute (NAi).

Hmmm…. what would a Phoenix version of this sort of thing be?  A gazebo made from ceiling fans?  That could actually be kind of fun.

(This is Day 8 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge, be sure to check out the other participants at #30DayBC)

What does your RSS Reader say about You?

I’ve recently had a few conversations about RSS feeds, how many blogs is a standard number to subscribe to, self-promotion overkill and 1 really gigantic “subscribe to me” button.

So this morning, as I was thinking of what to read, and absent mindedly scrolling through my reader, I pondered, what does this list say about me.

Does someone’s blog reader hold the same window into their mind as their Bookshelf does?  How about their cd/dvd collections?

Well, let’s take a look at how I spend my blog-reading time:

• Culture/Entertainment Blogs:  2

• Environmental Blogs: 3

• Nerdy Blogs: 5

• Funny Pictures: 1

• Street Art Sites: 1

• Computer Blogs: 1

• People I know or met IRL:  3

• Cool Phoenix People I haven’t met: 4

• Poker Blogs:  2

• Design Blogs:  3

• Video Game Blogs: 3

• Random Personal Blogs Someone Recommended: 3

• Blogs about Blogging: 3

• Flickr Feed: 1

Having made that list, one thought is to summarize me as someone who’s “nerdy”, “environmentalist”, and into gaming, reading, and blogging.  And clearly I’m interested in the view points of people who live near me.  And you wouldn’t be wrong.

But then I looked at the categories that only had 1 blog, and those are honestly the ones where I find the most stimulating content, and/or have followed for the longest time.  Perhaps I only follow 1 blog in that genre because the 1 I follow does it well and there’s no need for more….

(This is Day 7 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge, be sure to check out the other participants at #30DayBC)

Why do I like random stuff?

Below is a picture of a Mighty Mugg figure I saw on Agent M’s blog.

Aside from the fact that Agent M might have the coolest job in the world, and therefore everything he mentions takes on a nerdy-Bondsian cool-factor, this dude pictured looks like something I’d want to have on my desk.

Oh wait.  I do have him on my desk
(just not the same one)

I remember when I bought this dude, Anie looked at me very puzzled, and asked why I was buying it.  The simple fact was I wanted to own a Wolverine figure, and the price of $10 was no deterrence.

Then I realized that what she was talking about was really, “why would you buy a random thing like that to put on your desk at work”.

I still haven’t worked out a good answer, but everyone who’s seen it seems to like it, too.

It does puzzle me why, for a pseudo-minimalist, I like to have random thing around.  Perhaps my dark-side is a secret horder.

Nah, that can’t be it.

Maybe it’s because I couldn’t get this stuff when I was a kid, so now I buy it for myself?

That’s probably closer to home, but in truth, I had all the ninja turtles I wanted as a kid, just far less than the kids down the block.

Maybe it’s something totemic, like the Wolverine on my desk is a modern version of the idols we learned about in Art History class.  Instead of fertility, I’m seeking to channel virility and latent aggression?

How about you?  Do you have anything on your desk (at home or at work) that really doesn’t belong there but you always want to keep it around?

(This is Day 6 of the 30 Day Blog Challenge)