Saturday, 10 March 2012

Patient pooches, premature pre-judgement, premonitory patterns, and pretty parks

A drop in the "validity bucket" of how good a dog she is:
I'll be home soon, dog-dog.  You wait there.  Good dog.
She waited for quite a while after I left for a run.  It makes me wonder what she does when we are both at work/school all day long...kind of makes one wish for the simple life.

More funny signs:
Lost in translation? No. Just ignorance on my part.  When in Rome...

Upon seeing this sign in Flushing (the other Chinatown of NYC), I immediately laughed and photographed it based on my ignorant assumption that something was lost in translation and that the RD was mistakingly added instead of ST (i.e. they meant to write fourty-first but exchanged the -st suffix with the -rd suffix we normally put on the number three).  Nothing like some close-minded stereotyping to make one fit right into the American culture (now there is some broad stereotyping for you).  When in Rome...  The funniest part of this story is that after sitting down to a great dinner of Malaysian fare with some friends we passed back by this sign and noted it to a new Chinese acquaintance of ours.  He corrected us.  The street sign is indicating Fourty-first Road (i.e. 41 RD).  Duely noted.

This randomly-generated pattern appeared on the coffee I brewed for my wife a couple of weeks ago.  I took it as a sign and proof that I brewed some extra love in to the mug for her.
That's a full-caf beating-heart drip to go.

It reminds me of the (in)famous jesus-toast story:
WWJD?  Probably break the bread and give it to someone in need.  Not moth-ball it indefinitely as undeniable proof of one's beliefs.  But who am I to judge.  I'm just sayin'.

Not my toast or my picture.

Lastly, I'll leave with a few snaps of a couple cool and wildly successful park installations in New York City (one old and one new).  As a landscape architecture student, I've learned about good and bad park design and, having studied both of these sites, I can say this: study famous landscape architecture until you're blue in the face - it's still not the same thing as experiencing the site in real life.
The water feature dominating the north wall of Paley Park.  This 'pocket park' was built on a tiny plot among the highrises on East 53rd Street in Manhattan in 1967.  Funded by the William S. Paley Foundation and built as a respite from the din of the city "for the people".  And respite it is.  You cannot hear a thing from the street (about 25m away) when sitting hear the fountain.
An axonometric drawing of Paley Park that I created for a project.  That would be the northern curb of East 53rd Street in the lower left portion of the drawing.  Axonometric drawings do look a little wierd, mostly due to the fact that they are scalable in all three axes.  In particular, this one looks anaemic since I opted to represent the honey locust (Gleditsia triacanthos var. inermis) trees as columns.  Gimme a break.  I generated this when I had only been a student in the MLA program for about 7 weeks and I hadn't yet learned how to draw trees.  And for the record, LAs can do a lot more than just drawing trees, which we can also do.  I probably shouldn't have to write this, but I'll do it anyway: © 2010 dg (that's me).
The High Line.  Raised railway going down the west side of Manhattan, abandoned in 1980 (according to good ol' Wiki), and recently (partly still under construction, I think) turned into a magnificant linear park (vision: two local residents and co-founders of Friends of the High Line, Joshua David and Robert Hammond, and designed by landscape architect, James Corner).