We Are In Agreement

Now my idea to start a moving company staffed with ovulating women doesn't look so crazy, does it?

When threatened by sexual assault, ovulating women display a measurable increase in physical strength. Slate

confederateyankee.mu.nu's post about Salon being "not just wrong, but embarrassingly wrong" is embarrassingly wrong

He writes:

"the 31-round magazines used in the shooting have never been banned from civilian ownership, or commercial and retail sale."

To which his commentors reply:

"More likely is was a 30-round magazine with one round loaded in the chamber. Not a 31 round magazine."

Lol.

Big Important News

I have a Google Reader folder called "First Thing" which I usually scroll through during the day - 95% of what I read in GR is in that folder.

Well, it's a new year and I've made some tough decisions:

Julian Sanchez, Jonathan Chait, and Michelle Malkin are cut and relegated to their normal folders; Glenn Greenwald, James Fallows, Ben Smith and Instpundit get called-up.

Congratulations (please be advised that this can change at any time).

What Los Angeles doesn't get about urban planning could fill a $1B football stadium

Which is good, because absent an actual football team, they'll need something other than Comicon and Porn conventions to populate it.

Chris Hawthorne describes the City of LA's breathless pursuit of a 1B$ stadium project.

But the mayor and his top advisors have also proved vulnerable, even more than politicians elsewhere, to the distracting appeal of the flashy mega-project. (via Atrios)

I don't really care whether or not LA picks up an NFL team (and if history is any indication, neither does anyone else in Los Angeles, 1, 2), but I do care to see a vibrant downtown.

Glitzy constructs with boring restaurants and over-priced bowling aren't sufficient to attract actual residents (i.e. the living things that make urban areas livable). If they were, there wouldn't be empty condos up and down Figueroa, Wilshire, Olive, 7th, Olympic etc., just blocks from the Staples Center.

Downtown LA doesn't need another commercial outgrowth, it needs greenspaces, dog runs, and bike lanes. And less bloody traffic, a London-style tax on non-commercial vehicles, maybe close a street or two.

And please: buildings with mixed commercial/residential zoning. Here are a couple street-shots near my old office, bland commercial/residential buildings with zero street-level retail.

Isn't it bleak? No parks, no stores, no cool little shops that attract residents, no bars, not even a fucking Starbucks. And this is the nice part of downtown - head a few blocks south of Los Angeles Street and it feels like you wandered into Gary, IN.

People want parks and stores and cafes and places where their kids can play; a stadium without those will just yield more of what we already have: a boring downtown, barren and gloomy after 6:00 p.m.

Happy 2011

I wonder if this is what Times Square looks like this morning.

Times Square facing south (I think) 1905