Small Streams

The Map is not the Territory

For some reason, I've decided to play with Phoogle Maps, or at least create some sort of map widget.


For Phoogle to be useful, though, I have to figure out how to automagically add a database. Right now, I have to enter the addresses individually.

On the plus side, Phoogle finds the latitude and longitude information using street addresses.

Recycling in Pittsburgh

Am playing around with MapHub, a mapping program developed by some local folks. It has a very appealing interface for those who don't want to bother with google or yahoo apis. My map hub, which is called smallstreams412, consists of recycling points of interest in the city of Pittsburgh. I believe Pittsburghers recycle about a third of their garbage. I'm thinking that this could probably be doubled or even tripled over the next three years. Of course dropping your stuff off somewhere else doesn't necessary solve any problems. . . The problem with throwing things away is that when you throw it away it's still something and the away you throw it is still somewhere.

Vacant Church

I pass this church on the way home from dropping off Piper. So many wonderful looking churches have been abandoned in the last twenty years. For centuries churches were built to look like this. I imagine the parishioners are now going to churches that look like airplane hangars. I'm not saying that's bad; I'm just saying.
Vacant Church

Little Big Post

It's beeen more than two weeks since I've posted anything. If I don't write something quickly, I might lose the blog classification. Then Six Apart will come along and repossess my Movable Type and I'll have to start typing this into some wysiwyg html editor.

Have been making some progress, and have been fooling around with google maps api and map hub. Am going to start messing with the Yahoo Api and am actually going to start posting the locations of Isaly's. I got a great list from Chris Briem, who scanned an old business directory.

I've also been reading Thomas Berger's Little Big Man. Excuse me for the long passage I'm about to insert, but I think it says a lot about our present condition. I think Jerry Mander tries not to be overly romantic about Indian ways in The Absence of the Sacred, but you can't help but think that things might be better if we acted more like Native Americans/Indians. I will, however, side with the realist Little Big Man/Jack Crabb and his ex-slave friend Lavender.

The sun reflected off the lobes of Lavender's widespread dark nose. "You recall the Reverend Pendrake, Jack," he says. "How he was always spouting principles. They was good and even holy ones, I guess, and it was on account of them that he bought me from my old master and give me freedom. So I might be ungrateful when I say the longer I listened to him, the more I thought: he is a fool."

"So did I," I says, "even as a young boy."

"But why, Jack, why did we think that?" Lavender was real quizzical, and took off his hat and dropped it to the ground, showing his head of frizzy curls. "For I was black," he says, "but you knowed how to read and write."

I says: "Speaking for myself, I was thinking he was talking about how things should be rather than as they was."

"That's right! That's it!"shouts Lavender. "Whereas an Indian has it the other way around. . . . "Well then," he goes on, "why did both you and me turn about in time and leave the Indians, too? Tell me that."

I says: "Because we wasn't born barbarians."

"You said it."

"And it don't work if you are aware of anything else." I goes on. "It's been perfect if you been born in a tent and carried on your Ma's back and lived with hocus-pocus since the day you was born and never invented the wheel."

"If you come from civilization," says Lavender, "to live among the savages, it is fine for a while and then you get so powerful curious as to what is going on back home, you can't stand it. You got to see, so you come back, and it might be good or it might be awful, but it is happening."

So where does it leave us humanists and realists as we continue on our Koyaanisqatsi ways. Do we take the buffet-style approach, much maligned by David Brooks in his book Bobos in Paradise, or shoot for total immersion like the Last American Man? I'm not sure, but for now must go to the sacred place and wait for the visions to come.