So, it’s time to move on. I must say that Obama and Hillary are two excellent people. They both know how to play the current game. Although it is hard for spectators to understand or infer the rules. Media news and online information about the political process is almost impossible to put together. My one wish is for big ideas to show through. Risky stuff.

Prioritizing infrastructure. American adventures around the world boggle me when there is so much work to do at home. Last night Hillary Clinton referred to our dependency on “foreign oil.” This is not right, even if it is coded, and it’s simplistic. It’s oil that’s at issue. Not sources. “Foreign oil” implies the politics of energy and geography. “Bad” modifies both the adjective and the noun.

So many ideas are enriching the human ecology and built space communities (in which I include hypertext). But the current narratives restrict their going mainstream. Ideas that could do so much for human well-being. Everywhere the infrastucture’s crumbling: bridges, schools, homes, savings, and roads. With it, minds. It may be that all change takes is for one community to say “We’re going to install solar panels on all our municipal buildings and then we’re going to wait and see what happens to the space around the joint.” Certain resources will simply not be affordable in the future. We don’t need them anyway.

For those interested in the recent Doninger v. Niehoff court ruling, you can find the search area here. Docket number: 07-3885-cv. It is an interesting read. Thoughts forthcoming.

Here’s the bear who came for a snack this afternoon about 3:45 or so.

Red tag number 57 on the right ear. Cool, calm, and enjoying the sunflower seeds.

Carianne Mack, one of our fantastic professors of art, will be adding a painting to this weblog everyday through the summer. A painting a day, then.

Go, Carianne!

It’s now a cliche to write about the hypocrisy and irony of press coverage. It’s an issue now as dense as vapor in a glass jar.

Emptiness and irrelevance.

Link to what?

I’ve learned more from the novel (hypertext and traditional) than I have from reports. See Suttree.

I’m listening to some guy say that there’s much tension between Wright and Obama. Right. Back to Victory Garden, The Reprover, Extreme Conditions, and The Kite Runner.

How about just some snow for a change.

Neal Peirce has another interesting piece in the Courant on transit policy issues.

He writes:

After two years of intense work, a broad-based, bipartisan federal transportation commission mandated by Congress unveiled America’s first-ever 50-year balanced plan to repair and expand the highways, bridges, ports and rail systems the country needs to prosper internally and globally.

But because the report, presented to Congress this month, pointed mostly to public funding instead of responding directly to “consumer demand” (meaning private financing), Secretary of Transportation Mary Peters and the two other Bush administration appointees dissented, bemoaning the 12-member panel’s failure to “reach consensus.”

As has been typical, and Peirce is quick to point this out, Bush admin reasons for dissent are never “verifiable” or logical. He offers this:

An industry analyst quoted by the National Corridors Initiative called their “consensus” remark “frankly pathetic,” noting that “a very bipartisan commission … has called for a major overhaul of the transportation system, and for the money to do the job.”

Roads are a critical element of spatial politics. For example, the roads in my town, Simsbury, are an odd mix. They are single lane, clogged, but manageable. However, if I was going to “improve” he Route 10 corridor which links the several towns about, I’d figure out some way of making Route 10 a fitted and multi-use object that people can use in more ways than just point to point driving. The roads in Simsbury are limited to this use.

From this one premise, what happens along the road can therefore be discoverable. The premise should not be: let’s get more retail on R10. No, let’s diversify the road use with interesting designs. Say goodbye to yellow center lines and hello to imagination.

Sure, sometimes I yearn for the desert.

I still have no idea how to write New England.

I just walked by a commercial for an electric pepper grinder. I can think of a few cases where this might be a necessity, say someone with sever arthritis.

But it was also advertised with a hundred dollar grinder. Now that no one needs.

Theme: Americans are entertaining themselves to zero. Hm, that may be hyperbolic, but I suspect not.

Today’s Hartford Courant has an article by David Fink titled An Old Feeble Future which explores a subject often talked about here: young people fleeing the state and the current population burdened by inappropriate living spaces. Fink in the piece argues that housing costs is the problem. I disagree. Part of the issue has to do with affordable housing but limiting the problem to this one variable clouds reality. The larger issue is spatial: Connecticut doesn’t seem to be able to do anything about the notion that to live in a place one should be able to afford everything about it: so it’s not just housing; it’s energy, it’s scales of competition, it’s travel, it’s career opportunity, it’s relevant education, it’s the livability of cities and towns, and it’s people-centered politics.

An electric pepper grinder will not solve this, Connecticut’s most pressing concern: its livability.