The Fredösphere

Via Sploid, I caught a slightly peevish Slate article on the new "lifestyle centers," open-air malls that try to realize New Urbanist dreams.  Yes, there's something phony about these places, but sheesh, for now we need commercial developers to give us our downtowns because the civic authorities seem to be unable to do the friggin' job.  Why is that?  I notice Mickey Kaus also finds the article's hostility overblown -- or really, the Sploid headline.  Also, it sure would be nice if we could have these kinds of debates without requiring the traditionalists to waste half their time explaining they are not Nazis.

Yesterday's post was fairly serious, so naturally the whole business of writing it vexed me.  Wittgenstein?  Wittgenstein???  What the heck do I know about him?  Almost every sentence of that post needed about an hour's worth of thought, research, and rewriting.  I simply don't have the time to do serious posts properly.  Unfortunately, my Serious Ideas bladder is stretched to the breaking point, and every so often I have to relieve the pressure a bit.  So anyway, I wrote the post; it got silly at the end; then I came up with the silly title that only makes sense if you follow the last link.  Last night, I felt I had to email Ian Moss to make sure he understood I wasn't trying to undermine or make fun of the excellent point he made in his guest-post.  Fortunately, he's cool with the whole thing.

So, let's talk about something shallow, shall we?  Japanese pop sensation angela keeps turning up in the news, since they created songs for a couple of sci-fi-themed anime series.  The lead singer (a woman)  is described as employing "a truly unique falsetto and vibrato vocal style."  I needed to find out what they could possibly mean by "unique falsetto," and finding an audio sample turned out to be a chore.  Amazon.com has their albums, but not with sound samples.  Eventually I found my way to the official (I guess -- it's mostly in Japanese) website for the anime series Fafner and started clicking blindly on lots of links with labels I couldn't read.  Finally, I stumbled upon a video clip.  (Go here, then follow a link under "Fly me to the sky.")  It's remarkably unremarkable.  I'm exhausted.  All this hard work:  I do it for you, people.  You better be grateful.