pinchy dot org.

Here are some links that I’ve been meaning to post for ages. These should keep you all busy for a while:

• Panoramic photos of Paris Métro stations.
• Closed stations on the Paris Métro. Includes links to similar pages for other cities.
• And in the same vein, disused stations on the London Underground. I’m a complete sucker for this stuff.
• Seamless City: A 30 mile long continuous portrait of San Francisco.
• Rephotography: San Francisco, Paris, New York.
• Color photographs of Russia, taken by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorskii between 1907 and 1915. Each is a composite of three separate plates, one each for red, green, and blue. Absolutely stunning.
• More Prokudin-Gorskii color photos, composited by hobbyists. Less spectacular than the ones created by the Library of Congress, but still very nice.
• Leafy sea dragons!

John Kerry’s next career move should be to record an album called In a Blue State. Something Leonard Cohen-esque, perhaps.

Graduate school has fairly flown by. Next semester will be my last, and there are a dozen courses I want to take but can’t. There are so many things I won’t have learned about when I leave. And hanging around for longer than you’re supposed to is strictly verboten, since it reduces the number of slots available for new students. Choosing my fourth course for next semester is proving to be tricky indeed. Should I learn about transportation finance? Environmental factors for building design? Historic preservation? Something else entirely?

I want to take French, too, but language classes really mess up your schedule. Most of them meet five days a week in the morning, which makes it tough to hold down another job (or—let’s be honest—to stay out late on a weeknight). Apparently there are courses that meet less frequently, designed for busy grad students, but they conflict with my other classes. Oh, well. Or, more appropriately, c’est la vie. I can always learn a new language after I get my masters.

November has kept me hopping like a frog in Calaveras County, as Dan Rather might or might not say. Between the homemade cinnamon rolls, Crooked Jades and Grey De Lisle concerts, silent films, wine-tasting trips, movie-watching parties, farewell dinners, housewarming dinners, phone calls to friends, and, oh yeah, graduate school projects, my life has been wonderfully hectic. I’m about to spend a couple of weeks in the end-of-the-semester meat grinder—also hectic, but in a less wonderful way. I get to see Iron & Wine as I emerge, though, which will be a nice treat.

Collectively, my fellow students have about 23 different contagious diseases right now, and I think I may be coming down with one of them. It’s just a minor cold, though. I’m infusing my body with as much Emer’gen-C as seems reasonable. Maybe I can beat this thing. I hope I can. The end-of-the-semester grinder is not kind to diseased meat.

I have too many sources of information—too many weblogs whose news feeds I track; too many local and national newspapers that I read every week, or day; too many magazines filling my mailbox. As much as I enjoy reading miscellany from around the globe, I’m a graduate student, so my job, almost by definition, is to focus my attention on a relatively narrow area. Right now, my head is so cluttered that it’s tough to focus on anything.

I’ve dropped a few weblogs from the list already, and I’ll probably drop more over the next week. My hope is that this will usher in a new era of hyperproductivity, enabling me to finish my professional report at the speed of light. Failing that, perhaps I’ll have time to learn how to play the borrowed guitar that’s sitting in my living room, taunting me with its mysterious frets.

Ladies and gentlemen, we are seriously fucked.

Where do we go from here?