Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass

...al grass. I think animals may have gotten into the garbage cans overnight, making it all worse, but clearly a lot of that trash, especially the Easter grass and Silly String, was probably on the ground when the picnickers left. One lonely, overburdened city maintenance guy was already raking up the garbage, but it was a Sisyphean task, and I doubt he’ll be so fine tuned as to focus on the Easter grass, but the Easter grass may be the most problema...

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078 Mark Lakeman on City Repair

...the community architecture and planning firm Communitecture. He is also an urban place-maker, permaculture designer and community design facilitator. And if you’re on the West Coast of the US, you have a chance to participate in a series of workshops this month. For more information visit marklakeman.net. To find out about events in Los Angeles visit change-making.com. If you want to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 5...

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Who Needs Windows?

...rmicheal. “And you know in a modern digital age, it just fights us all the time. It’s about 17 stories tall, depending on how you count the floors, and so it takes a long time to go up and down and grab records and bring them down. When people come to use the original records, they sit in our search room and we bring them the records they want, and they sit there waiting.” There are issues with climate control, exacerbated by the building’s shape....

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Learning to Draw Version 4.0

...that again. The takeaway from those classes was the importance of setting time limits and doing sketches that are loose and quick as well as long and detailed. For architectural sketching I’ve been working my way through a new book, Sketch Club Urban Drawing. See above for my warning on shopping for art supplies, but I do really like my Rotring Isograph College Set. It comes with three refillable pens, a mechanical pencil, an eraser and a handy r...

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Saturday Tweets: Rainy Day Tweets

...December 7, 2018 My report, "Empty Seats" showed that 40% of Uber and Lyft time in the Manhattan CBD is spent without passengers (betwn drop-off & next pickup) — more than yellow cabs. Dead time leads to the large increases in VMT that Alejandro also found. https://t.co/YjolfbafVZ — Bruce Schaller (@Bruce_Schaller) December 7, 2018 Advent calendar: Day 6 pic.twitter.com/6DseQQtaVw — 70s Dinner Party (@70s_party) December 6, 2018 Cross inscribed st...

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