Jane Jacobs
NEW YORK (AP) – Jane Jacobs, an author and
community activist of singular influence whose classic “The Death and Life of Great American Cities'' transformed ideas about urban planning, died Tuesday, her publisher said. She was 89.
Jacobs died at a Toronto hospital, which she entered a few days ago, according to Random House publicist Sally Marvin. The author, who would have turned 90 on May 4, had been in poor health.
A native of Scranton, Pa., Jacobs lived for many years in New York before moving to Toronto in the late 1960s. She and her husband, architect Robert Jacobs Jr., were unhappy that their taxes supported the Vietnam War and moved to Canada. Robert Jacobs died in 1996.
Jacobs, who based her findings on deep, eclectic reading and firsthand observation, challenged assumptions she believed damaged modern cities – that neighborhoods should be isolated from each other, that an empty street was safer than a crowded one, that the car represented progress over the pedestrian.
Her priorities were for integrated, manageable communities, for diversity of people, transportation, architecture and commerce. She also believed that economies need to be self-sustaining and self-renewing, relying on local initiative instead of centralized bureaucracies.
Jacobs received a number of prizes, including a lifetime achievement award in 2000 from the National Building Foundation in Washington, D.C.
You can’t buy publicity like this
Revenge of the Shit
From The Smoking Gun:
So what kind of guy parades around in the middle of the day with red and black paint on his face a la Darth Maul? The kind who waves a fake gun around outside a school and then escapes on his waiting skateboard.
Hacked. Someone soon to be whacked.
Fine, hack my site. Change my immortal prose; anything you could do would be inferior. It wouldn't bother me, and might be good for a laugh.
But do not take the post below this and change "Stephen Harper" into "Paul Martin" while I am out at dinner.
Not if you value the only testicle you possess.
I will take my born-and-raised-on-military-bases fist and I will put my father's medals in it and I will go proctological and evisceratory on your sad, sorry and pox-ridden ass.
And I will hunt you down and post your name, address, phone number, tween-baiting Myspace site, LavaLife profile, and dick size to this website (it can measure down to electron microscope levels), and then I will go down to the police station and I will hook this up to the cyberstalker of several years ago, and they will hunt you down and they will spay and neuter what's left of you once I'm done, and we will ship it to your mother in eight separate Tupperware containers.
In the meantime, sodium fluoroacetate solution brings weight loss & penis growth. Try it!!
Save me some time, Loserboy.
FYI:
Coffin for one, Prime Minister?
As part of his ongoing mission to pretend the bad stuff isn't happening, Stephen Harper has banned the media from filming the coffins of fallen Canadian soldiers or, indeed, being anywhere near them.
From the CBC, although Metro called it first, and with perfect accuracy, on this very website several days ago. Please note that these pictures are several years old, from the Canadian deaths in Afghanistan resulting from the American bombing.
Reporters were not allowed into the military airbase at Trenton, Ont., to cover the Tuesday evening arrival of the remains of four soldiers who died in a weekend bombing.
Harper said the policy has been implemented to respect the privacy of the families.
*
"It should be up to the families to decide whether they want reporters present at such ceremonies," said Richard Leger, whose son Marc was killed in Afghanistan four years ago.
"I know, in 2002, it was a great thing for us to have the media there… We wanted to show all Canadians what the cost of their liberty is," he told CBC Newsworld.
"People saying, 'Thank you for the life of Marc' – as a parent that's hard to hear, but knowing what's the reason behind it helps us to move on."
Maureen Burrowes, who is a cousin of Payne, said the government is depriving her of her chance to be part of Tuesday night's ceremony.
"I honestly believed I would see my cousin's return on CBC as I could not be present today," she wrote in an e-mail. "I really feel that our current government has made a very bad decision and voters will remember this in the next election."
"The timing is absolutely horrendous and I would love to know how to get this reversed."
