Blogger gets all weird and stuff

All this view by Cole lacks is spray painted graffiti

Welcome to the 21st century. By this juncture in the history of homo sap we were supposed to be wallowing in leisure time, Jetson-style flying cars, and tomatoes the size of watermelons. Instead we have a world that on nearly every count can't wipe its nose properly, and a load of hyper-sophisticated virtual/PC/electronic hooey that never malfunctions the same way twice from day to day and is continuously under attack (both legally and illegally) by irresponsible and/or piratical nincompoops (it's getter tougher to tell them apart any more). It's also a world where sentences the length of the previous one are no longer encouraged because "readers" nod off and drive into roadside mailboxes and drainage ditches about half-way through 'em. It's also a world where Blogger gets confused a lot and needs more and more maintenance which is why I'm writing this as Blogger seems to be in, as the computer wits dub it, Safety Mode.

All the real basic on-the-ground stuff that says civilized social existence--like feeding, educating, or housing people, or simply maintaining roads--is rapidly getting beyond us. Instead we've packed our emptying, ineffective, and trivializing lives with communications and artificial intelligence devices that, if they were living breathing people, would be diagnosed with senile dementia or at least bad manners. Nobody seems to be noticing this decline in quality of life and few are (or would be) complaining because all these "labor saving" and "life-enhancing" techno toys are essential to the continued appearance of paychecks and they help (in a kind of Biblically Satanic way) fill up all those empty spots in our lives. As far as those bad roads go (and that's just one of hundreds of warning signs) well, we've got SUVs galore and bicycles with shock absorbers and knobby tires--these days you need off-road vehicles to drive on a road. What does that say?

Fifty years ago the quality of life for many people was pretty OK and the chances of improving it, with the technology and materials right there at hand, were darned good. Last week, I drove through my boyhood suburban home town and sadly noted the creeping edgy chaos, the bad roads, the new pasteboard construction, the uncoordinated visual clutter. It looked awful and it was once a uniformly nice middle-class suburban community that owned a big mechanical street sweeper and fretted about where a tree would go and what color to paint the crosswalks. My olde high school (built in the classic late Fifties brick and picture window style) had covered up more than half the area of the previously huge classroom windows with what looked like painted plywood--the effect was depressing and no doubt indicated not just an inability to afford replacement glass but a disturbingly frequent need for it. The joint looks ready for an enemy assault (and in a sense probably is, but mostly from within).

The center of town is hideously overdeveloped with shopping plazas behind shopping plazas behind even more shopping plazas. Town Hall, a swell old stone structure built in the days when even small communities took considerable pride in their public buildings, is lost in this clutter of crappy commercial structures. The new library--replacing a lean, light, and cheerful brick structure from the 1960s--is of the new exposed steel truss variety. The spaces within the interior are just loopy (about the only thing an architect can do creatively with a modern structure is malevolently deform the shapes--I encountered a published professional discussion on this once) and none of the materials used in the detailing say quality. Like most modern buildings it looks like an inexpertly morphed temporary structure or a converted warehouse--meaning another Silly-Putty variant on Wal-Mart.

(More later--probably too much more)