Christmas is over and now I need a vacation from my vacation.
After a trip to Syracuse to celebrate with one family Shona and I
came home and visited with another part of the family for
Christmas day. Sticking with the annual tradition I was pounded
with books, new and used. Between the two of us Shona and I got
about 70 books. I don't think that I can read a book every five
days over the next year, especially considering there at at least
a dozen that are in line before I can even get to the new ones.
On that note, I finally finished reading Picture
Windows: How the Suburbs Happened. It was a good read
about, well, how the suburbs happened. It talked about many of
the experiments in housing, including public housing,
limited-dividend financed communities and, finally, private
housing in the forms of the suburbs, especially Levittown. It
includes a lot of good social commentary and lots of interviews
with residents. It's up to date as well, including information
from up to the late 80s. It's also interesting because it makes
some digs at one of my other favorite books, Suburban
Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American
Dream. It makes some good points about the single
mindedness of the book in its treatment of architecture as the
single cause of the way that people act in the suburbs.
Personally, I think they are both partially right. Architecture
plays an important role as does good community building
Mozilla
0.9.7 came out with almost no participation from yours truly.
Hopefully for the next version I won't be so busy with Holiday to
help out. I promise I'll be less of a post, just standing there
stuck in the earth, just getting in the way.