Hooray and Huzzah! The Ecosystem is back up and running, and even better, I’ve made the evolutionary leap to Marauding Marsupial. Of course, I still have some work to do: the unupdated-in-six-months William Burton still outranks me, as does — gasp — the dullest blog in the world.

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I am really starting to be glad we got out of the Syracuse area when we did, even if our stay there was for only six months. The big basketball championship aside, I’m starting to wonder if there isn’t some kind of curse hanging over that entire region. And this one hits kind-of close to home: yesterday, one of the buildings at the apartment complex where we lived burned to the ground. It wasn’t the actual one, but judging by the address, the one that burned was within a quarter mile of our old apartment.

And while we did live there, a quarter mile in the other direction, a murder occurred. And there was the big ice storm in April, on the weekend we had to pack and leave. And there was generally a ton of snow. And the constant news of factory closings. And….man, there’s a pall over the Central New York region.

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Happy Birthday, belatedly, to Greg Harris. He doesn’t provide a number, so I’ll assume that he turned 57 until I am informed otherwise.

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I noticed a couple of funny things in the course of my latest viewing of The Fellowship of the Ring last night, both during the Moria sequence.

:: Remember the famous Far Side cartoon, in which a student is attempting to enter the Midvale School for the Gifted by pushing on the front door, even though the door is clearly marked “Pull”? Well, one of the things Gandalf does when he’s trying to open the Doors of Durin is to push on them with his shoulder…but when Frodo figures out the riddle and the doors open, they swing outward.

:: In Balin’s tomb, when Gandalf is reading the last entry in the journal kept by the dwarves before their deaths, we get a glimpse of the very last line, in which the dwarven runes trail off in an angle scrawl across the bottom of the page. I’m sorry, but this put me immediately in mind of Monty Python and the Holy Grail: “The Castle Arrrgggghhhhh…he must have died while carving it!”

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You know what I love? I love when it’s the middle of August and, even though we haven’t had anywhere near as hot and humid a summer as we’ve been known to have (and Buffalo summers aren’t nearly as hot and humid, as a rule, as those you’ll find in cities closer to the Atlantic), Canada will look down on us from her lonely perch in the north and say, “You folks could use a bit of arctic air.” That little kiss of Canadian chill, which in January or February threatens to freeze us to the marrow, is the most refreshing thing possible when it comes in August.

Thanks, Canada.

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Is John Stossel — that guy on ABC’s 20-20 — an obnoxious doofus or what? In his always provocative segment entitled “Give Me A Break!” the other night, he indignantly complained about — gasp! — the fact that movie studios, when doing publicity for movies everybody hates, will selectively quote from bad reviews to make them sound like raves, and they will use actual raves by little-known pseudo-critics who write gushing praise about every movie they see. And lest anyone think maybe they were simply re-running an old Stossel piece, all of the films featured are current or very recent releases, like Gigli and Alex and Emma.

I wonder if next week Mr. Stossel might do a “Give Me A Break!” piece on, say, the old practice in Radio Shack where the clerks would ask for your address if you were just buying a three-foot piece of video cord. Or maybe he’ll get angry about those unlawfully-removed mattress tags.

POST-SCRIPT: I actually wrote this post, as I am occasionally likely to do, on Friday night. (Sometimes I like to write posts in MSWord and then cut-and-paste them into the blog at a later time.) In between then and my actual posting it here, Jesse of Pandagon commented on the same Stossel feature. Weird. But Stossel’s still a doofus.

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Over on 2Blowhards, there are a couple of items of interest to me as a Buffalonian. The items aren’t specifically about Buffalo per se, but they do touch on a few issues of ongoing interest in this former rust-belt city that has had more trouble than just about any of its other brethren in moving beyond the hangover caused by the decay of local manufacturing, the concurrent population loss, and the mistakes that most cities have made over the last few decades.

First, one of the Blowhards speaks out against Frank Lloyd Wright. Buffalo is the home to one of Wright’s masterpieces, the Darwin Martin House, which I’ve written about before. The Martin House is a current object of a big restoration effort, and it is generally held to be one of the very finest of Buffalo’s buildings in a city where architecture is a big thing. I’m not sure I agree (or even if I know enough to really form an opinion, having never actually set foot inside a Wright building) but their take on Wright is pretty interesting. I never knew that Wright had something of a mania for low ceilings, and in the course of doing a little online research on Wright, I found that when he designed his famous Guggenheim Museum in New York City, and when museum officials pointed out that his ceilings would not allow clearance for some of the paintings, his response was: “Cut them in half.” Referring to the paintings. Wright, apparently, was something of an ass. (Which partly explains my negative reaction to Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead: Howard Roark, who was if I am not mistaken based on Wright, is supposed to be admired for his refusal to buckle under, and yet all I kept thinking as I read the book was, “Geez, this guy is an ass.”)

Second, the Blowhards did an absolutely fascinating two-part interview (part one, part two) with David Sucher, a writer and blogger whose main interest is in what he calls City Comforts: architecture, but as a function of how it serves the neighborhoods in which it occurs. There is a lot of fascinating stuff in this interview, and I plan to spend some time investigating Sucher’s work and blog in the future. I’ve already requested his book from the library. (Gods, I don’t ever want to live in a place where I cannot take advantage of a large metropolitan library system!)

One thing that immediately struck me is Sucher’s suggestion that all those mini-strips that seem to be popping up everywhere, especially in sprawled-out areas like Buffalo where new construction keeps going on out in the fringes while older, inner neighborhoods crumble and die, should at least be built right out to the sidewalk, with parking in the rear. As I drive through Buffalo’s suburbs, there are parking lots upon parking lots upon parking lots. Parking lots everywhere, with mini-strips and plazas and malls or whatever set back, way back, from the street. So pervasive has the sprawl become, and to such a degree have we conceded to the car and marginalized the pedestrian, that a lot of these wide streets do not even have sidewalks.

Sucher also has a blunt, practical attitude that is fairly refreshing in the face of all the bizarro “newspeak” that so often seems to be de rigeur for urban-planning types. Sucher doesn’t hate suburbs, he doesn’t hold them in disdain, and he simply says, “We can tear down the buildings if we need to.” This is certainly true. Modern construction isn’t like the building of a medieval cathedral, when a cornerstone would be laid in the year 1150 and then construction would finally end in 1325. We put buildings up in months these days.

Buffalo has a lot of problems, many of which are related to failed urban planning. I look forward to seeing if some of Sucher’s ideas are applicable.

(EDIT: I replaced my original link to Mr. Sucher’s blog with the up-to-date one.)

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Happiness is a Return of the King photo gallery. I especially like this one, which I assume happens just after Frodo is stabbed in the back by Bilbo, who has tracked him all the way from Rivendell to seize back the Ring.

(No, that’s not really what happens. Duh.)

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Via MeFi here is an interesting (I think) annotation of a scene from The Matrix Reloaded, in which Neo talks to someone called the Architect. I haven’t seen the movie yet — The Matrix is, for me, a wait-for-video venture — but this scene, although it sounds a bit spoilerish, didn’t spoil much for me at all. At least, I don’t think it did. It’s a lot of the “You don’t understand your true nature” stuff that filled the first movie. But fans might find the annotations interesting.

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I’m torn as to how to mock this story, so I’ll just toss up a couple of alternatives and let you all choose the one that tickles your fancy.

1. “Based on the event currently scheduled for September 13, I think that folks living in the vicinity of Neverland may want to watch the skies for the mothership to show up on September 14 and spirit Mr. Jackson back home.”

2. “In a related item, judges in the county where Neverland resides are already preparing the forms in advance for restraining orders, names to be filled in later.”

3. “When told that some of the proceeds are expected to be donated to his gubernatorial campaign, actor and candidate Arnold Schwarzenegger is said to have screamed, ‘No! No! Anything but that! What’s he trying to do, kill me?!’ National GOP overlord Karl Rove, though, speculated that Mr. Jackson is a secret French agent whose mission to disavow America has gone seriously awry.”

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