birthday

World's Largest Cake image via

I'm afraid this is another post about other people's posts. I have an excuse though which is that my wife and I have just had another baby - a beautiful girl called Nancy (named after the female sleuth, obviously) - so there's likely to be an extended blogging hiatus while we get to grips with our expanded family.

But the strangely blissful days of paternity leave do allow some time for reading - normally at odd hours - so I can draw your attention to some good stuff out there, even though many of my regular haunts have sadly gone rather quiet of late. 

First up, the fabulously but utterly correctly titled Is Localism Bollocks? post at new-ish blog Jones the Planner. After all the mealy-mouthed complicity of the RIBA and the 'architects can get a slice of the local action' advice of BD, AJ etc., it's refreshing to read someone who knows what they're talking about telling it like it is.

Jones also has what looks like being an interesting series of posts on various city walks, including this one on underrated Leicester. 

Mr Matt Tempest has a blog, mostly about Berlin and with a nice line in homages to communist era-design, especially this beautiful bit of pre-cast concrete mere-facadism. I tend to miss this stuff much more than the soon to close Tacheles from my time in Berlin, especially as I lived for a while on Alexander Platz, home to the finest collection of patterned pre-cast concrete facadism.

The Bi-Blog, as well as being bravely named given the way the internet works involves one-time FAT employee E. Sean Bayley, always a man most likely too who now gone and has. I linked to it recently via Will Wiles' contribution but it's consistently worth checking out. The format is simple - two pieces are commissioned on the same very loosely defined topic - but the results are invariably fascinating and nicely tangential. I've chosen to steal the image at the top of the post from this one, for obvious reasons. 

Finally - and I've been intending to link to this for ages - there's Rheomode, an excellent blog and research archive written by Jon Goodbun (Full disclaimer: he once stole my last fish finger). Jon's forthcoming AD on the issue of scarcity looks like being a lot of more vital to civilisation than mine which will just feature lots of garish buildings and post modern sillyness. So far, though, no posts about the Style Council (in-joke).

I'm never quite sure whether to link to political stuff on here although I spend a good deal of my time ranting about it on Twitter. Somehow that seems OK although it tends to lose me followers who have offered to make me lots of money on the US stock exchange. Anyhow, this post on Paul Mason's Idle Scrawl blog has already done the rounds of that infernal micro-blogging site (which incidentally makes perfect sense if you aren't at work and have sporadic moments of being able to engage with the internets) but is a tremendously acute piece of speculation on current goings on nonetheless. AND, it mentions Deleuze and Guattari on the BBC Newsnight website and you don't get that from Jeremy Paxman. In an increasingly parched and barren cultural climate this is cause for celebration at least. As is Nancy, of course. Goodnight....