Cold Spring Shops has an interesting article on how the apparently fragmented METRA system in Chicago works, when the privatised mess we have in Britain doesn’t. (Link from UK Transport).
Interesting railway-themed site, with links to the author Steve Karlson’s O-gauge layout. Could do with some more railway-related blog entries, though!
In an earlier post, I described Atlanta as “Bracknell on Steroids”.
Bracknell is a soulless 1960s new town 25 miles west of London, seemingly built around cars rather than people. As a major centre for IT companies it was the subject of a lot of negative comments in the satirical BackBytes column in Computing.
When I first visited Atlanta, it reminded me of a gigantic version of Bracknell, covering an area the size of Greater London. This Atlanta Journal-Constitution article confirms this; it appears that Atlanta is the 4th most sprawling city in the whole of the US.
I hate sprawls! The one big reason I turned down my ex-employer’s offer to relocate to Atlanta was the fact that it’s simply impossible to survive there without a car. The city lacks the sort of comprehensive public transport networks we have in any British city of similar size. Worse still, the physical layout of the city would make any decent mass transit system prohibitively expensive to construct. Yes, they do have the MARTA network, but it covers only a tiny fraction of the city; and it went nowhere near my ex-employer’s offices. I found most of the bus services in the suburbs are less frequent that the services in rural Cornwall!
Of course one reason American cities sprawl the way they do is that they simply have the space. But how much is due to leaving everything to ‘the market’? On the other hand, who built all those roads that encourage the sprawl?
Yes! More Merricun politics! (I wonder how many Merricans can name a single British politician other than Tony Blair?) Get Patriotic Posters from Whitehouse.org. Gems such as this
or this
and many, many more… (Thanks to Scott).
BBC NEWS | Entertainment | Arts | Minister attacks Turner art
Culture minister Kim Howells has denounced the modern art up for this year’s Turner Prize as “cold, mechanical, conceptual bullshit”.
Mr Howells left a note at the Tate Britain gallery, where the nominated work is on display, saying British art was “lost” if that was the best it could produce.
I’m sure I’m not the only person that thinks that if a piece of ‘Art’ can’t connect in some way to Joe Public, and is comprehensible only to a narrow clique of art students, it’s not really art, but pretentious nonsense. Or does that just make me a hopeless philistine?
The Turner Prize’s best moment was when it was sent up by “The K Foundation” with their competition for the worst piece of art of the year, the nominations for which were just coincidentally the same as the four entrants for the Turner Prize.
What is art anyway? Why not take a model railway layout (preferably an accurate fine-scale layout in the Mostyn league), operate it to a strict prototypical timetable, and call it a piece of performance art? I’m sure at least as much effort goes into researching and building a project like Mostyn as goes into some of the Turner entries, such as that light flashing on and off.
I’d meant to post this a few days ago. I don’t know much about American politics, being British, but the late Senator Wellstone sounds a bit like an American answer to Tony Benn (only without the arrogance). Even his political opponents respected his principles although they didn’t agree with him.
Respect for opponents doesn’t seem to cut any ice with some warbloggers, though. One, calling himself “The Anti-Idoitarian Rottweiler” dances on his grave, with lines like this:
As far as I’m concerned, this piece of traitorous sh*t useless idiot can rot in Hell forever, I’m not ever going to say something nice about a load of crap that was willing to trade the future of my two boys for the fake halo of being “principled”.
Words fail me. It seems to me that some of the pro-war crowd are now so convinced about their arguments that anyone that disagrees with them are not only misguided, but evil.
That’s the sort of thinking that causes atrocities and genocides.
I refuse to link to this rabid animal myself, but I will link to A Skeptical Blog‘s ‘fisking’ of it.
Carnival of the Vanities #6 is up at Silflay Hraka. Just thought you’d like to know
Yes, another posting about Virgin Voyagers. This came in from Matthew Cambourne on the SWRG mailing list. Says it all really.
Almost all of the Virgin staff I have seen today have been saying how much they hate the Voyager. One member of staff thrust his fist in the air on seeing his train was an HST.
After deleting ICQ a few months back because I was fed up of the number of blue screens of death and my machine being continually hosed, I’ve tried installing Trillian. Let’s see if this is any more stable that the piece of AOL-owned bloatware I deleted.
For those that are interested my ICQ ID is 74213108, and my AIM ID is “karazthan1“
BBC NEWS | Wales | Blow-up tank ‘missing in action’
The British army have lost an inflatable tank!
The inflatable, life-size dummy tank was moored to the ground during a training exercise near Tredegar, south Wales.
But 80 mile per hour winds tore the battle tank replica from ropes tethering it to the ground and the vehicle is officially “missing in action”.
A widescale search including a helicopter is now underway for the errant inflatable.
On Monday a military spokesman said they were anxious to hear from anyone who may have woken during the morning to find a tank in their garden.
Shades of Pink Floyd’s famous escaped pig (from the cover of “Animals”) that drifted over south London 25 years ago.
Widdlywiddlywiddlywiddlywiddlywiddlywiddlywiddlywooooo! Yes, Swedish neo-classical guitar shredder Yngwie Malmsteen has a new album out.
As ever, the revolving door of musicians gives yet another line-up. This time he’s got ex-Rainbow singer Doogie White, former Dream Theater man Derek Sherinian on keys, and Yngwie stalwart Patrick Johansson on drums.
Musically, it’s much what we expect from a Yngwie album; a lot of blindingly-fast scales and arpeggios, and songs with violent imagery. Sadly, most of the songs are fairly ordinary, with the standouts being the two of the instrumentals, “Majestic Blue” and “Air”. Derek Sherinian’s talents are largely wasted, since the keys are mostly inaudible. On one song, Yngwie proves to the world he can’t sing when he takes the vocals of “Freedom isn’t Free”.
Lyrics are either mindless macho crap or gloriously dumb, depending on your opinion. For example, in “Valhalla”, we get this Spinal tap-esqu gem:
We come from the north
We come from the ice
We live dangerously
And very short lives
We fight day by day
Sailing the seas
Makes his earlier “I am a Viking” look like a classic.
Overall, this is neither better nor worse than any of his previous umpteen albums. Yngwie has been a parody of himself for years. Although he’s got an undoubted instrumental talent, he’s never been more than a mediocre songwriter and a truly terrible lyricist. He really ought to team up with a singer that writes, but sadly his gigantic ego prevents him from collaborating with anyone else with some compositional talent, I’d love to hear him do an album with Dio, for instance, but I can’t see it ever happening.
I’ll rate this one as a mere two (out of five)
