Dick Hines, Saxon Square, RREEF Alternative Investments, sweeping away street clutter that only ivory-towered architects and design-specialists ever loved but we street-users hated. Clay Shirky in ‘Here Comes Everybody’ defines to whom the future belongs. Another suggestion-box item for geeks. Keeping the faith and changing the Church is not a trustworthy approach to perennial priestly atrocity. If only my friend and one-time mentor K would tell his story!
06h32-BST Thursday 24 April 2008-CE
Dick Hines of CDA, something to do with architects, had something to say about Saxon Square pedestrian shopping area in Christchurch. He claims that the projecting, tiled canopies were popular 30 years ago. In fact, they might have been popular with arty architects, dedicated to following the latest fashion, but so what? Perhaps the scheme got past the planning office given the quainty quality of the rain-protecting, potty projections. He goes:
“Today, these have the effect of making the mall feel very dark and narrow.” Dates, and feelings, have nothing to do with the issue, Richard, mate. The mall passages ARE dark. The solid canopies ARE to blame. It has been like that since the place was BUILT. The effect was predictable at the time to any person who was not an arty freako. In a narrow passageway between shops, solid canopies would block the light depressingly. Nobody liked it.
Glass rain canopies are to replace the previous olde-worlde ones. Another intention of the new owner, RREEF Alternative Investments, is to “clear ground level clutter” (GLC). Well come on down the Huddersfield Choral Society & give us a rousing rending of that old Happy-New-Year Chorus! NOW they get it! Arty designers called it ‘humanising art & shrubbery’. We users have always called it ‘great loads of crap’ (GLC) stuck in the f way.
Clay Shirky (I have finished reading his splendid ‘Here Comes Everybody’) says “The future belongs to those who take today for granted” (those who do not fight it but rather accept it and run with it, usually the young). He gives us www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=12344564 to go to for the story of how the old phone company fought against text and image. If it had won, we could have no cell/mobile system as we now know it.
I wish the geek laddies (& few ladies) would write a gimmick whereby each specific address for a web-site (or part thereof like the npr one above) would have a parallel (unique) identification IN NUMBERS ONLY to choose to use if it was easier. Both full address & the briefer ID# (in groups of four please) could be quoted. If only ID#, the system would refer to its register of addresses, then submit the long one, filled with slashes and abbreviations.
Clay relates many fascinating examples of how social sites enabled people to fight injustices and abuses. One reaction, to the revelation (to some) that some priests of the Church of Rome fondled and/or sodomised underage choirboys, was “KEEP THE FAITH; CHANGE THE CHURCH”. How clever and politically righteous! But I say: given that these C of R salesmen betray Yehoshua’s peace message, it is not worth saving. Dump it.
The murderer Saul of Tarsus was forgiven when he became Paul the Roving Salesman of the Christian Salvation Package Deal. My friend and one-time mentor who failed to take power to rule a nation where vile criminals got their deserts, and citizens were safe, has nothing to be forgiven for. I hoped to name him and tell his story but I cannot because he forbids it. “Power corrupts only the corruptible” was his defence when I raised the issue of control of our own people and ourselves when we, actually he, attained power.
FIN 08h10
