Benjamin Harrison » Europe http://www.badcharacter.com Loitering with Inte(r)n(e)t. Fri, 09 Jan 2009 06:19:57 +0000 http://wordpress.org/?v=2.8 en hourly 1 Waning Days http://www.badcharacter.com/waning-days-2/ http://www.badcharacter.com/waning-days-2/#comments Fri, 05 May 2006 14:55:21 +0000 Benjamin http://www.badcharacter.com/waning-days-2/ I’m bout to hop on an aeroplaine back to the United States of America where I’ll be apartment hunting the second I get my feet on the ground. Good luck to me.

In the meantime, I’ve finished the first draft of my hotly anticipated sci-fi/noir movie script. It weighs in at an astonishing 118 pages, and is probably going to serve as the game plan for a novelization I am sort of in the process of writing. Should that materialize in a more tangible way than the 30 pages I currently have written I’ll keep your ass up to date, but I ain’t promising anything. I’m making a movie and running a magazine next semester. Motherfuckers is busy.

]]> http://www.badcharacter.com/waning-days-2/feed/ 0 Dublin Thoughts 1(?) – Walking Around http://www.badcharacter.com/dublin-thoughts-1-walking-around/ http://www.badcharacter.com/dublin-thoughts-1-walking-around/#comments Thu, 19 Jan 2006 14:49:25 +0000 Benjamin http://www.badcharacter.com/dublin-thoughts-1-walking-around/ One of my favorite things about Dublin is how walkable it is. I’d say it’s even more walkable than New York for the fact that its less crowded, and while stuff might not be as closely packed, the walks tend to be very pleasant. I’m still getting used to which way I have to look before crossing the street. The Irish drive on the opposite side of the road than I’m used to. And it would seem that the city government made some decisions with people like me in mind, because at many crosswalks they’ve painted instructions on which direction to check for cars right on the road. I guess that was cheaper than all the ambulance/hospital costs.

Despite the fact that people drive on the left side of the street, as far as I can tell, it’s just the opposite when it comes to sidewalks. I thought I was pretty clever when I extrapolated that driving on the left meant walking on the left, but then when I put the theory through it’s paces I found that I was causing a lot of undue turbulence, and now that I’ve had some more time to observe people, it seems that I was dead wrong. I wonder what can account for this discrepancy? I shall investigate.

Of course, if you go to the right places in Dublin, you don’t even have to worry about this, because there are several major streets off limits to non-government automobile traffic. This is one of my favorite things about Europe. The United States seems to be extremely reluctant to make anything inaccessible to cars. A few years ago near my Bay Area home a major shopping development went up including half a dozen restaurants, two or three dozen shops and a movie theater. This development, called Bay Street, isn’t a mall or a strip mall, but a proprietary street, lined on two sides by shops. A perfect opportunity for a nice little promenade with no automobiles to dodge, but instead they opened the street to cars, making it really obnoxious to try to get from one side to the other, or even see over the behemoth SUVs that always seem to nab the parking spaces along that street. Dublin has many shopping streets without car traffic, and they are markedly easier to traverse. Not that I’ve been doing any shopping.

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