Eye

Golden

LA Times architecture critic Christopher Hawthorne wrote an interesting piece on the expanding transit network in Los Angeles.  Citing the pessimistic view of most towards Southern California's hopes and objections to building a cohesive transit network, he looks at the pending opening of the Metro Gold Line Eastside Extension (Sunday!) and the transformative nature of projects like it:

The real significance of the stations' debut on Sunday flows from the fact that with every substantial extension of the rail and subway network, another piece of the future Los Angeles comes startlingly into focus. More transit means more pedestrians, more people who pay attention to the shape and design of the city up close. That, in turn, means a growing constituency for shared space in Los Angeles and new interest in our long-neglected streetscapes and public sphere.

To put it another way: Transit and the life of the street are inextricably intertwined, and a boost to one is almost always a boost to the other.
 

Blackboard

Masters Edit

UPDATED!
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SuperAndrew

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SF-Upside-Down-Cake

Ode to a Billy Goat

There once was a Billy Goat named Gene
Who lived in a time machine
But it whirred real fast
And flung him to the past
And he never again was seen

Back in the USSR

Recently rediscovered in my boxes of junk, I purchased these while in the Czech Republic a few years ago, where Angela and I wandered into an antique shop in the "Art Nouveau" district of Prague. Full of the typical antiques and curiosities, it was also full of boxes and boxes of old Soviet era trade union pins being sold for cents apiece. It was hard to find repeats in the thousands of pins, and each design was unique and beautiful, sometimes identifiable to the trade but most mysterious acronyms or illegible (to me) czech.