WAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!! Pt. II
Well, speaking of celebrities felled by cancer, obviously, I was also very much saddened by the death of
Fred Rogers last Thursday, but I wasn't in a blogging mood last week, so I forgot to mark his passing. Subjectively, for whatever reason, I'm a lot more choked up about the death of the voice actress 99% of you reading this have never heard of, perhaps because, while I don't think I've seen a picture of You Inoue until this evening, I've seen several interviews with Mr. Rogers over the past year or so since 9/11, and, I'm afraid, he looked very frail, at least compared to the way I remember him looking on TV, so his death wasn't nearly as much a shock to me as that of Ms. Inoue.
WAAAAAAAHHHHHH!!!!!!!
Ms.
You Inoue died of cancer at age 56 on February 28th. She's an anime voice actress probably best known for doing the voice of Sayla Mass and a bunch of other characters on various
Gundam series, but I knew her best for being the voice of lesbian (?) supercop Kanuka Clancy on
Patlabor and the bi-polar (sometimes sweet, sometimes angry) alien from planet Oni (Ogre) Ran from
Urusei Yatsura, two of my favourite anime. Not that I ever likely would have met her, but still, she'll be very much missed.
Oh man... here in lovely suburban Pincourt, our electronic thermometer registered 1.5 degrees Celsius/Centigrade yesterday afternoon, but, yesterday evening, the temperature plummeted down to about -21.8 degrees Celsius/Centigrade. This has been one heckuva winter for Montreal... it pretty much started in October, when the temperatures often didn't get much above the freezing point during the day. We never really got an "Indian Summer" in the autumn or a "January Thaw". We've gotten through so much firewood that we had to order another truckful at the beginning of February.
CLEVELAND ROCKS! CLEVELAND ROCKS! CLEVELAND ROCKS! CLEVELAND ROCKS! OHIO!
Hey, alright, a
pro-American rally in Cleveland drew an estimated 10 000 people... not nearly as much as the anti-American (and anyone that pretends that they aren't is a communist tool or a useful idiot) protests, but our side isn't used to that sort of thing (well, aside from the hundreds of thousands that turn out in the streets of Washington D.C. each year to protest against abortion, but they're ignored by the mainstream press), so it's a good start.
FIFTH COLUMN UPDATE
Oh, this is just too funny. Yes, just like real shields,
the western "human shields" in Iraq are turning tail and running... no wait, they're nothing like real shields. Apparently they thought they were going to shield the cotton candy and fluffy puppy store and didn't anticipate that Saddam would want to send them to targets that would be of real strategic importance with very little in the way of innocent civilians nearby. Oh, you poor,
stupid na�ve
morons suckers.
Sorry, I've just been feeling too lazy to add anything over the past week, but there wasn't anything particularly compelling I had to say.
I don't particularly like the design for the new World Trade Center, as I have mentioned previously. I like that they decided not to build that utterly pretentious THINK design with the lattice work (which would be extremely hazardous to be standing under after a snowfall, with large blocks of snow and ice reaching high velocity before hitting the ground or whomever is standing below, not to mention that at least the lower half would be pigeon dropping green-white before too long), but, according to
Team Twin Towers, the Libeskind desing is only a touch less pretentious, with a frigging biosphere? Not that I have anything against biospheres,
there's a rather nice one here in Montreal, but that sort of thing can be done at ground level. Plus, that spire is a tapered building, so many of the upper storeys will be too small to be of any real, practical use to anybody. One thing, of many, that was wonderful about the REAL World Trade Center, Yamasaki's Twin Towers, was that they were both perfect squares that were extruded 110 storeys, so you got 220 storeys of useful office space, with the 110th floors of each building having essentially the same surface area as the lobbies (in fact, probably more, if I think about it, since not all the elevator shafts went all the way up). Plus, with the stupid Libeskund plan, you have the pit over the foundations that is a huge waste of Manhattan and which cuts off downtown from the rest of the city. Just because the pit is now grassy instead of grey doesn't make me like it any more. I'm all for a memorial, but not 16 acres of wasted space... yay! Let's go to New York and see... the grassy pit! Something horrible happened on this site once, therefore we can't build anything functional here ever again. Uh-uh. Fuck "sacred ground". Fuck "sanctified". Fuck "political correctness". And fuck "necropolises". The primary purpose of rebuilding a new World Trade Center is to restore the office space that was lost, and there's nothing remotely wrong or indecent about that. And, if you actually took a poll, at least the plurality, if not a true majority, of people would favour rebuilding the majestic Twin Towers as they were before, even if it's just to the east or west of the original site, and the damn politicians, mostly, and this is very disappointing to me, Republicans, should stop trying to be politically correct to the victim's families and do everything possible to influence Silverstein and the various boards that a rebuilt version of Yamasaki's design is the only thing that should be on the site.
And, I must say, I'm also disappointed with
John Derbyshire's take on the new WTC design. I mean, he's my second favourite
National Review contributor after Jonah Goldberg (partially because I have relatives around Northampton, where he's from), and I agree with him on the first part of his objections.
For one thing, they were all wacky. They just didn't look like real buildings. They looked like something a first-year architecture student would come up with, when he's got the math and the physics and the graphics software down pretty well, but before he has actually had to deal with actual people who actually wanted places they could actually live or work in.
But then he falls victim to the "no one will want to work there" mentality. One thing, while I am very sure there are terrorists within and outside the United States plotting nefarious things, they simply
can't attack in the same way with commercial airliners anymore. How can I be sure? Because, the terrorist attacks of September 11th only happened because Americans had been trained to be docile in the event of hijackings. If the passengers and flight crew fight back, as they would now, they couldn't pull that method of attack off.
Afterwards, Derbyshire submits his own proposal for what to do with the site, which is even worse than the original designs presented last summer.
So what would I do with the World Trade Center site? Divide it into 50x150 lots and auction them off, no two to the same developer. Let them build some nice modest ten-story apartments, stores, or offices. Put a decent plaque on one of the walls to commemorate the dead, and have a city employee go round and polish it bright once a week. Name the streets after people who perished while doing heroic deeds of rescue. And tell the fancy architects to go play their games in some city that has no serious business to attend to.
Ten stor
eys? Sorry, John, this is Liberty & Church we're talking about, not The Drapery & Mercer's Row. Manhattan you gotta build big and bold. As Yamasaki thought. (Well, at least I have Jonah Goldberg and Deroy Murdock on my side... that's not bad company.)
