Progress, and unrelated matters

The first competition (as we now must call it) has reached a very interesting point. After much debate and many failed attempts, we discovered a form last night (an urban design, a shape in the landscape) which is just brilliant. Very simple: a long, low rectangle along the eastern boundary of the site; but it's just somehow exactly right. Everyone who sees it is impressed. I'm really pleased with the project now, after a week of fending off despair when it just wouldn't come together. This will be at least a third prize unless we really screw up the disposition of the rooms (and that is always possible, since the people who wrote the briefing documents are not judging the competition).

The sun was nearly setting as I walked home today at 7 p.m. Winter is just around the corner! This is probably my most favourite of favourite seasons (i.e. they're all good, each in its own way). The new year begins in Autumn for me, not in January (but then, I've written about that before).

In other news it was thirty years ago tomorrow that I first heard Keith Jarrett's "Köln Concert", at around 1:30 in the afternoon. It was during the introduction week of my first year at university, when various famous and exciting professor-types would spend an hour each telling us how lucky we were to attend that particular college. The most famous of them all, so egregiously famous that even I had heard of him, broke the mould—as he had made a career of doing—by saying nothing at all. He just put on Part II of "Köln" and started a slide-show of student work from previous years. Marvellous. His presentation is the only event in that week which I still remember.

In other, other news Dale is on a roll, his last two posts are quite brilliant. There are times when I can hardly bear to read Dale's blog, his writing is so wonderful and his insights so ... insightful that they make my own little bloggeries seem quite inadequate.

In otherest news courtesy of Joe in Vegas, a trio of videos for your pleasure and/or annoyance. The first takes on the burning, unaddressed social issue of porn for nerds. The video itself is quite funny and harmless, despite the title, but the rest of the site and in particular the ads in the right column are definitely not things you want the boss to see on your monitor. Go to Joe's and try to view it on his blog, i.e. without the unsafe ads; but it wouldn't run for me there. (It starts by asking your birthday, to prove that you're over twenty-one; just pick a year before 1996 and you're rolling. Call me paranoid, but I would never tell my birthday or any other real information to such a website.) The second video tries a bit too hard, but the third is the funniest of them all—assuming (as I do) that it's faked, otherwise one would have to think it quite horrific. Your mileage may vary.