Rejected from McSweeney's

Worst Sports Team Names*

San Francisco Fog

Los Angeles Traffic

Miami Humidity (It’s not the heat…)

Anaheim Acne (We’re mildly irritating!)

Sacramento Sabines

Utah Unibrows

Las Vegas Vegans

Los Angeles Lapdogs

Brooklyn Plaid

Boston Drivers

New York Minutes

Pittsburgh Pits

Houston Hiccups

Alaska State Wintry Mix

University of Vermont (UV) Rays

San Diego Sniffles

West Point Light Brigadiers

Silicon Valley Studs

And last but not least - the Toronto Maple Leafs. (Yes, I know that's a real team.)

*Not actually rejected from McSweeney's. Yet.

Written in collaboration with jlebar.

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Vertical Bike Rack

The work of our hands!

A little backstory: We bought two bikes as soon as we could after moving here, so we could both bike to work. After a few uneventful months of chaining up our bikes next to our car in the carport of our apartment building, Justin's bike was stolen. (Mine was mysteriously left behind, together with Justin's pannier, which the thieves helpfully folded up and placed on top of my bike. My only guess is that the chain holding my bike was harder to cut than the chain on Justin's.) Since then, we've kept our bikes inside, hauling them up and down two flights of stairs to our third-floor apartment every time we take them out, which is usually a few times a week. Ugh. Better than buying a new bike every few months, though.

We needed a rack that would keep the bikes off the floor, off the walls, and in as small a footprint as possible, without requiring us to drill into or otherwise damage the walls (or floor or ceiling). This proved a challenge t…

Book Review: "Theory and Design in the First Machine Age"

Reyner Banham's Theory and Design in the First Machine Age (1960) is an engaging overview of the important theoretical developments of the early 20th century leading up to the "International Style" of the 1930s-40s. Banham does a fairly good job, in my opinion, of avoiding excessive editorializing, although he has a clear viewpoint on the Modern Movement and finishes with a strong conclusion. In opposition to his teacher, Nikolaus Pevsner, whose own history of modernism came out in 1936, Banham dismantled the "form follows function" credo that became the stereotype of modernism, arguing instead that formalism (a preoccupation with style and aesthetics) was an important, if not overriding, concern of Modern architects. Two sections of the book struck me in particular: his analysis of Le Corbusier's famous book Vers une architecture (Toward a [new] architecture) from 1923, and his Conclusion (chapter 22), where he breaks the link between functionalism and …

LEED Green Associate

Today I am pleased to report that I have passed the LEED® Green Associate exam, so I am now officially a LEED-accredited professional. I have a few thoughts on this process that might be helpful for others looking into getting their own LEED Green Associate credential. While I'm certainly in support of sustainable building practices, which is why I went to the trouble to get the credential in the first place, I don't think it's inappropriate to take a critical stance toward the whole enterprise in order to challenge the profession (and the industry) to be more self-aware.

The preparation: I passed the exam by using only resources that were freely available to me through my school library, including an e-book version of the LEED Green Associate study guide by Michelle Cottrell and the USGBC LEED Core Concepts Guide. (Although I asked the library to obtain a new copy of the official USGBC LEED Green Associate Study Guide since the one they had was lost, they still haven&…

Not Built in a Day

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