pinchy dot org.

These days, miners need at least 30 tons of ore to get an ounce of gold, and extracting that gold causes cyanide, lead, mercury, and cadmium to ooze all over the place. (It also displaces anyone who was unfortunate enough to live on top of the ore before the mining company arrived.)

Meanwhile, in case you hadn’t heard already, our old computers often wind up in enormous, overseas garbage dumps, where the unlucky recipients, who use brute-force methods to salvage parts from the old machines, are poisoned by the toxins they contain.

A model of San Francisco, made of Jell-O. Would that the city’s actual buildings were so resiliently gelatinous.

My sample ballot for California’s upcoming Colossal Waste of Taxpayer Money Special Statewide Election says that my polling place is the “Shattuck Ave Meth Church.” Something tells me they’re about to get their tax-exempt status revoked.

According to the occasionally-reliable Wikipedia, an aptronym is “a name that is aptly suited to its owner.” I don’t know too many people whose names are aptronyms, but I do work with a city planner whose last name is a homophone for “charrette.”

Fortunately, Wikipedia also claims that “[t]here does not yet seem to be a standard terminology for this linguistic curiosity,” so perhaps there’s still time to replace the word “aptronym” with something that isn’t an overly precious neologism. Not that I’m particularly exercised about this issue, mind you.

I’m working on an epic rock album and film about a troubled city planner’s descent into madness. It’s called The Mall. Here are the lyrics for two of the songs, titled “The Happiest Allees of our Lives” and “Another Brick in the Mall, Part II”:

When we got into planning school
There were some professors
Who would change a streetscape any way they could

By putting London planes and benches in the right of way
No matter what the well-intentioned traffic engineers
Had to say

But in the studio, we knew when they got home at night
They led sad suburban lives
At strip malls in the SUVs they drive

We don’t need no Lewis Mumford
We don’t need no William Whyte
No traffic calming for the locals
Robert Moses had it right
Yeah! Robert Moses had it right

All in all, it’s just another brick in the mall
All in all, you’re just another brick in the mall