Welcome to Edge City

I am in the Apple Store in Walnut Creek. This is one of the line of exceedingly prosperous Bay Area suburbs over the mountains east from the Oakland side of the bay. Washington Post journalist Joel Garreau fifteen years ago wrote the book Edge City about these kinds of places, of which the explicit subject was America's recent urban grown, but which in fact was an extraordinarily prescient book about the future of retail, of the information economy, the growth of the mentalities of red and blue states, and the kind of country that America was coming. This book influenced me as much as any book ever had. People like David Brooks and Virginia Postrel have spent the years since explaining the same things much later and with less insight. And as someone interested in how the modern world is growing, this book taught me what to look at.

Travelling

Right now I am in an internet cafe in Mendocino in northern California drinking espresso and listening to Suzanne Vega being played in the background in the cafe. This is very northern California somehow. I went to a friend's wedding in Sonoma county just north of San Francisco last Sunday. Since then I drove up the I5 inland, ultimately visiting Crater Lake in southern Oregon (which is a truly glorious and remarkable place) and I am now making my way down the coast back to San Francisco.

Unfortunately the screen of my almost brand new Sony Vaio T2 laptop died horribly on the flight over, which has led to extreme frustration, as WiFi hotspots are plentiful in this part of the US but internet cafes are rare.

The striking thing of course about leaving the big cities of California is just how culturally different the rest of the state is: physically enormous and not extensively populated, and culturally the conservative American heartland. One imagines the American coast as quite densely populated, but the north of California is actually very sparsely populated - it feels like the southern coast of New South Wales in Australia or something like that.

More when I get back to London

Possible redirection

The Samizdata Illuminatus (who is a collective identity that we use when one of us wants to say something anonymously) has over the last couple of days had a couple of things to say about the terrorist attacks on London.

Brief Update

Firstly, if anyone is wondering, like most people in London I was rather shaken by today's terrorist attacks, but I am fine. The Citigroup Centre at Canary Wharf where I work is clearly potentially a major terrorist target, and we were all extremely nervous after the atrocities of this morning. We were given the option of going home if we wished to, and everyone in my team took up the option. As the London Underground and Docklands Light Railway were out of action (as were many mainline rail services) getting home initially seemed like it might be a problem, but things weren't too bad. I walked to Lewisham, and the number 75 bus to Croydon was still running, as were most buses outside the centre of London. I felt a certain trepidation about getting on a London bus given the events of the morning, but obviously I was fine.

Sadly, it has been at the back of my mind for a long time that a terrorist atteck on London was inevitable at some point, and today it happened. That doesn't make it any more pleasant, and doesn't make my wish that the terrorists who did this be hunted down and shot like dogs any the less heatfelt. Thankfully I know of nobody amongst my friends and relatives who were injured or killed today. One friend was on the tube two stops from Liverpool Street when the bomb went off there, and one other went through King's Cross station ten minutes before the bomb went off there. Both of them were lucky. Hopefully everybody else I know is okay. I have plans to go into central London tomorrow evening for dinner with friends. I shall probably still do this.

Redirection

I have posted a couple of cricket related photographs on ubersportingpundit, with commentary on Bangladeshi cricket supporters and Shane Warne.

And alas Natalie, unlike the case with you and Patrick your wish is not my command.

Redirection

I have a piece on visiting Italian gourmet food shops and bringing cheese back from abroad over at gastroblog.

My boss yesterday became aware of the existence of this website

The timestamps on posts on this blog are actually US Eastern time. This is because (a) that is the default for blogger and I was too lazy to change it and (b) back in the days when I used to post every day this meant that I did not have to post before midnight to make a post "that day". However, it also means that if (say) the timestamp says that I posted at 3pm on a wednesday, that actually means I posted at 8pm London time.

Just thought I'd mention that.

Back in London, and redirection

Thankfully it is a little cooler here than there. I have a photograph of an interesting scarf that was on sale in Milan over at ubersportingpundit.

I like Milan a lot

That said, I find Italy's idea of civil society to be a little lacking at times. And by god it has been hot and humid here this weekend.

Role models

Natalie Solent links to a post from Thought Mesh, asking why so few other countries have adopted constitutions similar to that of the United States, given the success of that country. It is of course quite interesting to read the Australian constitution (written in the second half of the 1890s, enacted in January 1, 1901) from this perspective. An awful lot of it is clearly based on the American constitution, and in places it is close to being the American constitution word for word. And of course it is certainly what Thought Mesh calls a "structural constition">, which outlines the powers of government and certain intitutions, without attempting policiy prescriptions. In terms of the particular structure, the big difference is the lack of a directly elected executive in Australia. However, a lot of the written bits of the Australian constitution follow the US model, and the unwritten bits tend to follow the British model. (There are bits of the Swiss model thrown in too).

And as for Thought Mesh's further comment about the US model perhaps being unfriendly to founding fathers who hoped to rule using the model itself and thus unpopular with such people, this sort of issue did not apply in Australia. Australia was already a democracy (or perhaps six of them - the colonies had elected their own legislatures from the 1850s), the delegates who wrote the constitution were country lawyers who had been democratically elected to the constitutional conventions, and the constitution had to be approved by referendum in each of the six states and enacted as an act by the British parliament before coming into effect. All this meant that the document was not intended primarily as a vehicle for the personal ambitions of the people who wrote and enacted it.

And the constitution in question has been an unusually successful one, having provided Australia with peace, prosperity and democratic government for more than a century. The circumstances of its enactment are different to that of the US contitution, but they had in many ways a very similar result.

I am in Milan

I can make a few obvious comments, for instance that it is indeed true that the Italians have no understanding whatsoever of the concept of queueing. (I wonder if the concept immediately becomes understood if you go north and cross the border into Switzerland). They do understand the concepts of food and of coffee, however, so I must be grateful for certain things.

Another thing. Many guidebooks will start the section on accommodation with a description of how hard or easy it is to find accommodation in a city. Often (and this is true of what the Lonely Planet Italy says about Milan), they start with things like "It can be very hard to find a hotel room in \, particularly during \". (In Milan this referred to weeks with fashion shows. In Strasbourg it was times when the European Parliament is sitting). In practice, such comments usually mean the city contains lots of hotels, and it is quite easy to find a hotel room at all times other than when those seasonal activities are occurring. This turned out to be the case in Strasbourg, and it is the case in Milan. I guess that highly uneven demand leads to the ultimate number of hotel rooms being somewhere between the demand levels, whereas more even demand leads to capacity being close to full most of the time (and prices being more constant too). Airline seats are like this too, which is how I managed to fly from London to Milan for £45 return including taxes.

Redirection

I have some thoughts on how Malcolm Glazer might actually make money from Manchester United over at Samizdata.

That's interesting

Yesterday I received a recommendation e-mail from Amazon. You know the kind. "Based on other items you have ordered, we think you will like the following DVDs". Number 1 on the list was "The Terminator". Number 2 on the list was "Sense and Sensibility".

Redirection

I have a piece on a day in Shenzhen in China over at Samizdata.

Redirection

I have a piece on visiting one of my favourite Hunter Valley wineries over at gastroblog.

Redirection

I have a piece on the greatness of Adam Gilchrist (and tangentially on Viv Richards) over at ubersportingpundit.

There really are lots of places I haven't been



create your own visited countries map
or vertaling Duits Nederlands

Although I have a quite a lot of travel planned for the rest of the year, I do not have a single trip planned to a country I have not visited before. I might be able to fit in another weekend somewhere at some point, but that is about it, and most possible destinations are places I have been beofre. So I don't think this map is going to change this year, unless I go to Norway or Switzerland.

Redirection

I have a piece on eating Dim Sum in a local restaurant in Kowloon City over at Gastroblog.

Early Saturday morning song lyrics

Line one is the time
That you, you first stayed over at mine
And we drank our first bottle of wine
And we cried

Line two we’re away
And we both, we both had nowhere to stay
Well the bus-shelter’s always ok
When you’re young

Now you’re older and I look at your face
Every wrinkle is so easy to place
And I only write them down just in case
That you die

Let’s take a look at these crows feet, just look
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of decembers
Fifty-nine 4th of julys
Not through the age or the failure, children
Not through the hate or despise
Take a good look at these crows feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes

Line three I forget
But I think, I think it was our first ever bet
And the horse we backed was short of a leg
Never mind

Line four in a park
And the things, the things that people do in the dark
I could hear the faintest beat of your heart
Then we did

Now you’re older and I look at your face
Every wrinkle is so easy to place
And I only write them down just in case
You should die

Lets take a look at these crows feet, just look
Sitting on the prettiest eyes
Sixty 25th of decembers
Fifty-nine 4th of julys
You can’t have too many good times, children
You can’t have too many lines
Take a good look at these crows feet
Sitting on the prettiest eyes

Well my eyes look like a map of the town
And my teeth are either yellow or they’re brown
But you’ll never hear the crack of a frown
When you are here
You’ll never hear the crack
Of a frown

- Prettiest Eyes, by the Beautiful South, a song that I know from their best of Albulm Carry On Up the Charts. Generally, the songs on that album are more cynical, but I choose this one as an act of optimism as a revolutionary act (as Lloyd Dobbler a la Cameron Crowe might say).

In truth I rather like this

At a dinner party this evening, the question "Is there anywhere you haven't been to?" was asked of me. Of course, the answer is "lots of places", but I am doing my best.