New pix

I was in Seattle over Thanksgiving, and my cousin and I went down to the old part of town for a short photo tour.



View the results here.

Not gay if it's football!

Scholars at the University of Bristol are trying to determine if there is a relationship between good looks and athletic ability, so they polled Dutch women to determine who they thought were the best-looking quarterbacks in the NFL.

The winner was...


...Tom Brady, and that's clearly because good looks were part of the package he received when he murdered Chandra Levy and sacrificed her remains to Satan. But the second-place finisher was...



...Ben Roethlisberger? Huh?

I'm no expert on what women like, but I would think that there are other quarterbacks in the league who are better looking than Ben Roethlisberger, such as, say, Drew Brees...



Matt Ryan...



or Kyle Orton...



(Okay, maybe not Kyle Orton.)

The City... of the Future!

I'm sure that when you were 13 years old, you probably had a really cool idea that you thought was going to fix the future. Most of us have since grown up and realized that 85% of the ideas we have when we're 13 are crap.

And then there's Orville Simpson II.

Orv had an idea for the City of the Future in 1936. He grew up, became a landlord, and in 1960, he started drawing Victory City.

It contains all the standard utopian promises (houses 350,000 people in 3 square miles! costs 1/10th of a regular city! free education and health care! even goddamn monorails!) and it's as beautiful as it is practical:




Despite the fact that my surname approximately means "victory city," I'm too much of a cynic to be convinced. But if your life doesn't have enough of the "Jetsons" aesthetic in it and you're ready to make the dream happen, why not invest a few bucks? (Note: I strongly suspect that his $100 million estimate to build a Victory City hasn't been adjusted for inflation since 1936.)

December is National Novel Criticism Month

I know at least one of my readers is writing a novel this month, and more of you may be doing so. (I'm not, largely because I can only come up with a two-paragraph plot summary, and I'd have to futz around for 40,000 words to get from the setup to the conclusion.)

Anyway, here's an essay by George Eliot entitled "Silly Novels by Lady Novelists," the point of which applies to most first-time novelists, be they lady or gentleman. Namely, novels that are written as your wish fulfillment fantasy are not going to be any good, and perfect heroes are boring.