What would a Saturday be without News Chum Stew? It was a busy week at ACSAC, so I only have a few news articles that caught my eye:
- Be Careful What You Wish For? The Christian community in Oklahoma wanted to display the Ten Commandments. So they got the state legislature to set aside space on public land for them to erect a privately funded monument, figuring that would get them around separation of church and state. Wrong. Now a bunch of Satanists want to erect their own monument on the same public land. Their rationale? If you allow one religious monument, you must allow any religious monument. They would be perfectly happy if no monuments. Not to be stymied, some folks are insisting that the word “religion” in the first amendment means “Christianity”. Headdesk.
- … she lives in the Church nearby the restaurant, in the bell-tower, with her husband Ray and Fasha the dog. And livin’ in the bell tower like that, they got a lot of room downstairs where the pews used to be…. OK, I’m guilty of a really-long lead-in for this one. But the issue is an interesting one: Adaptive reuse of former worship spaces. How would you like to live in a former church sanctuary? Wouldn’t that be a neat house?
- Wanna Buy an Airport? Sometimes, things can’t be used. That adage of “If you build it, they will come” isn’t always true. Consider the case of an airport in Spain, hundreds of miles from the nearest metro airport. It was built in the anticipation of future growth… and no one is using it. So it is up for sale. What would you do with a used airport?
- The Circle of Life. Planet Money has been reporting on their effort to make a T-Shirt. As a side effect of this, they looked into what will happen to their shirt when it is eventually donated. They went to Africa where such shirts are sold, and found a T-shirt from a Bat Mitzvah in 1993. So they searched for its owner. With the help of Kveller, a Jewish parenting site, they found the elusive Jennifer. She was even interviewed.
- Flat Tops. Here’s something I never knew about my city: there is an ordinance requiring skyscrapers to have flat tops. This is obstensibly to make rescues easier. Thanks to the advances in firefighting technology, that may be changing, and you may be seeing spires on buildings in Los Angeles. Michael – perhaps this is why you think all buildings in Los Angeles look alike.
