(no subject)

I can't recall why -- I'm sure there was a good reason at the time, I think I was writing about Chicago as a planned/unplanned city -- but Tazigo on Tumblr recommended I read "The Death and Life of Great American Cities" by Jane Jacobs.

I think this is an interesting book for people studying city planning or even urban communities, but I'm not sure it's for the lay person. It's about how city planning interacts with social communities, and I am 100% positive that at the time it was written, in 1961, it was revolutionary. The thing is that city planning really was still just getting off the ground in the sixties, and there were also a lot of civic movements (white flight, new suburbia) that have been dealt with since. There are almost two full generations between this book and now, and so I had a hard time figuring out what to extract from it, as someone who wasn't planning to actually plan a city.

There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served. --p. 15

I gave it my usual fifty pages I give every book, but at the end of fifty pages I was struggling to keep up, and I didn't feel I was getting much out of it. Normally I don't worry if I'm not "getting much" from fiction, but nonfiction I feel like I should be bringing something useful away from it, and if I'm not, I tend to stop reading.

So this is one of those rare books where I think if you have the chance to give it a try, you should -- but I'm not sure you'll get any more out of it than I did. WHY NOT TRY IT, YOU MIGHT LIKE IT. :D

(no subject)

So, after the success of the Tony Throwdown from a few weeks ago, we thought it would be fun to continue THROWIN' DOWN.

Knotta, our gracious host at the Tony Throwdown, has renamed the throwdown tumblr from tonythrowdown to marvelthrowdown, and the latest competition just went up: five of us are in competition to see who can write THE BEST BRUCE BANNER/BETTY ROSS EVER, which incidentally has doubled the number of Bruce/Betty fics to begin with.

I did take part this time, so one of the fics linked below is mine, and once the authors are revealed I'll post it up on Sam_Storyteller and AO3.

They should all be considered Mature rated, and warnings are posted in the headers of each fic. The rules are the same: read, enjoy, and if you want to vote, you have to be logged into Tumblr and click the little "heart" in the upper right corner. Only "liking", not comments or reblogs, counts as a vote.

HAVE FUN. They're all awesome, in my opinion :D

Somewhere That's Green

The Letter

Audrey

Keep Calm and Come Home

The Plural of Anecdote

(no subject)

So, my grandmother's estate is finally starting to clear, and that means inheritances are slowly cropping up.

I'm not sure why this happened, because I filled out the same paperwork my parents did for my siblings. All the grandkids had a share in an annuity Mama Tickey set up, and everyone else got a check for that share two weeks ago. It's not a fortune, but it's certainly a nice bonus.

I, somehow, did not get a check. Instead, the investment company set me up with my own account and investments. My share of the annuity is now an annuity of its own, based on Mama Tickey's investment picks. Potentially this has something to do with my status as eldest of the grandchildren, or my status as awesomest of the grandchildren, I don't know. The only thing I have really learned about the whole situation is that Mama Tickey really liked equity securities. Or, as google informs me they are also called, stocks.

This was all unexpected, but may not actually be a bad thing. There's a reasonable chance these investments make more money, in general, than a savings account would, and I still have access to the money if I need it. It's taking a little work to get my head around what I'm invested in and its level of viability, but I've been tinkering with my retirement fund for a few years now and I at least understand the fundamentals. I know how to read a prospectus and I'm actually a fairly good judge of the quality of a given fund.

I do need to do some googling once I'm done gauging everything, because I have to make sure that I'm not investing in anything especially immoral. I'm trying to keep away from supporting the deforestation of large swathes of the planet or the murder of children, that kind of thing. I don't know, are Junk Bonds a bad thing? Because right now they seem to be making a lot of money, and I'm suspicious of anything that makes money in this economy.

Then I have to call the investment company and tell them their forms are vague and they need to explain, on page three, whether they want my address, my bank branch's address, or the bank's corporate headquarters address.

And what to do if my voided check has an inaccurate address on it, because I only look like a grownup who has his shit together.

(no subject)

THAT WAS AWESOME.

I went out to a movie tonight, a rare showing of Pocket Full of Soul, which is a documentary about harmonica music that is more or less impossible to come by. I had emailed R to ask if he'd drive us to it if I bought the tickets, and he said "YEAH! LET'S BRING THE SENIORS."

The Seniors are an adorable octogenarian couple, one of whom has played the harmonica for sixty years, the other of whom barely tolerates it. They are amazing. The entire car ride from here to Skokie, where the film was playing, was nothing but harmonica music and backseat driving. When we got out of the car the Seniors FORGED AHEAD, and R and I just looked at each other and busted up laughing in the parking lot.

The documentary was good too. It had its flaws, mainly that it was a LOT of white dudes talking about a musical genre generally dominated by African-American musicians, but it was enjoyable nonetheless and I learned some history, like how ABRAHAM LINCOLN played the harmonica, and how it's apparently huge in Taiwan.

A bunch of the movie was filmed in Chicago, so at one point I realised I had BEEN where those dudes were talking.

Me: *whispering* Is that Kingston Mines?
R: *whispering back* No, that's BLUES, you philistine.
Me: It's across the street! I was close!
R: MILES OFF, MY FRIEND.

There followed a mild shoving match, with much spilled popcorn. Then R had to stifle our harmonica-playing guest, who declared THEY ALL SOUND ALIKE really loudly. (That they all sounded alike was the point, to drive home how most harmonica musicians sooner or later try to impersonate Little Walter.) I think we would have gotten in more trouble for all of this, except between R, myself, and the Seniors, we knew about 3/4 of the people in attendance.

Anyway, if you get a chance to see it, I highly recommend it. Even if you don't go with a mob of unruly blues musicians.