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It’s been raining for a few days here, and I noticed some strange fungus growing on a stump along the Minuteman Bike Path.   Little did I know that two days later it would be erupting into a giant orange patch of alien shrooms!   Yikes.   I don’t remember seeing stuff like this before…

June 10th

June 11th

June 12th

When I am able to blank out the last thirty five years, during which I have continuously despised and fought against the automobile (even when I owned one myself…yes, I’m talking about that rattling death-trap of a 1967 Ford Falcon!), when I can forget all that, it does my heart good to hear people talking about Ecocities.   Richard Register has a decent column in Foreign Policy in Focus this week, advocating for more sustainable cities built around better transit systems and less automobile traffic.  His points are well taken and straightforward, building upon his books on the subject (from 2001 and 2006):

• Switch to a pedestrian and transit-oriented infrastructure, built around compact centers designed for pedestrians and transit;
• Roll back sprawl development while vigorously restoring nature and agriculture;
• Integrate renewable energy systems while using non-toxic materials and technologies and promoting recycling.

Which he follows immediately by pointing out the major obstacles to achieving this dream:

A major difficulty in moving toward ecocities is that cars have influenced urban design for 100 years. Many of us caught in this infrastructure find it extremely difficult to get around in anything but the car. The distances are just too great for bicycles, the densities just too low to allow efficient, affordable transit.

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From a series of socially provocative cartoons by Tom Gauld, it was really hard to choose one to represent the lot.  They remind me vaguely of Ron Cobb (who was incidentally the author of the very first poltical cartoon book that I bought, Raw Sewage), except that Gauld’s cartoons  have a more distant, metaphorical humor.   I found the image above,  “evolution of the poetry receptacle,” to be irresistable.   With a few simple lines, Gauld has captured our trajectory perfectly:  tablet > scroll > bound volume > chapbook > laptop > potato viewer > potato mutant > wireframe.   Presumably when we get beyond the wireframe of the poem, we can just zap consciousness around by telepathy… either that or we will be eating termites out of dust-heaps, or both probably.