Wednesday, August 4, 2010

Aruna Seth diseña y fabrica unos zapatos que tienen ese toque de distinción y esa impronta personal que los distingue del resto de zapatos que podamos encontrar en el mercado.

Con una amplia tradición familiar en el mundo del calzado, esta joven diseñadora, decidió dar un enfoque diferente a todos sus modelos.

"Mi deseo, desde que puedo recordar, era hacer los zapatos más bonitos y lujosos del mundo"

Integró en todos sus zapatos cristales de Swarovski, intrincados detalles y sensuales materiales que hacen que sus modelos sean reconocidos al instante.

No es de extreñar, que sus diseños triunfen en las alfombras rojas de todo el mundo.

Sin ir más lejos, este mismo año se han dejado seducir por la magia de sus zapatos Sofia Bush en la Gala de los Globos de Oro o Goldie Hawn en la Premiere de Nine en Nueva York.













Los complementos florales no solo adornan, sino que también dejan un suave aroma y alegran la vista. Además, si la decoración floral es bonita y la adecuada el día de tu Boda las fotos mejorarán en calidad.
El consejo general es que elijas flores de temporada, pero en este caso yo tengo mis propias preferencias y gustos. Y es que creo que para adornar una Boda nada mejor que los lirios y las rosas.

A la entrada de la Iglesia, en los bordes de los bancos que dan al pasillo central, pondría adornos florales con lirios blancos y lazos, también blancos, en tul. Queda un marco impresionante de la Iglesia desde el exterior.

En el altar los adornos florales dependerán también un poco de las dimensiones de la Iglesia. Independientemente del tamaño, continuaría usando lirios en este caso también, pero combinados ya con rosas. Que pueden ser también blancas o del mismo tono que el ramo de la novia.

Evidentemente, esos son mis gustos personales. Pero como consejo general te diría que uses siempre flores de tonos claros y alegres ya que las iglesias suelen ser ya de por sí bastante oscuras.

Si hay varias Bodas el mismo día, podéis optar por pagar a medias los adornos florales y os saldrá más barato. Pero os tendréis que poner de acuerdo al elegir las flores, los colores, el tipo de adorno, etc...

Si vais a una floristería especializada os aconsejarán en cuanto a tipo de flores, colores, tamaños, etc...Y os sacarán álbumes con un montón de muestras.

Por último, piensa que tanto el ramo de novia como los adornos florales de la iglesia son los más importantes.

Kirill Kuletski


What you're seeing in these photographs isn't an underground refugee camp for people escaping from some surface fracas nor is it a commune for those made homeless by the Great Foreclosure. These people are not card carrying members of the Freegan Establishment nor are they the many-times great-grandparents of a future race of mole people. While the reason for them slumbering amid an ambient symphony of fluorescent flickers is medical in nature, they are not volunteers in a scientific experiment inspired by the research of Maurizio Montalbini, the Italian sociologist who lived in caves for long periods of time to study the effects of total isolation on the body's natural cycles.

Kirill Kuletski


Rather, these are people suffering from asthma or other respiratory diseases undergoing speleotherapy in a salt mine near the village of Solotvyno in Ukraine.

The photographs were taken by the London-based Russian artist Kirill Kuletski, and he writes of this underground clinic and alternative therapy:

This therapy was discovered in Poland in the 1950s when it was noticed that salt mine workers rarely suffered from tuberculosis. Scientists found that the salt-permeated air of the working salt mine helped to dissolve phlegm in the bronchial tubes and also killed the micro-organisms which caused infections — and that this greatly helped patients who were undertaking treatment for asthma.

The clinic at Solotvyno salt mine is unique because its tunnels, which are 300 metres below ground level and remain at a steady 22°C (72°F) all year round, are the deepest in the world to be used for such purposes. Around three to five thousand people are treated here every year and there is often a waiting list — in fact, at any one time up to 200 people, a third of whom are usually children, can be receiving therapy. Patients spend an average of 24 days at the facility, using a lift to travel underground for afternoon or overnight sessions. During this time they talk, read or sleep on beds, grouped together in alcoves which are carved out of the rock and lit by fluorescent tubes.


It's nice to hear of subterranean landscapes not in the context of nuclear and biological apocalypses or as the domiciles of the subhuman. Pure geology not as a devour of the self but as an antidote to the aberrant.


Greatest Female Tennis PlayerStefanie Maria Graf (born June 14, 1969, in Mannheim, Baden-Württemberg, West Germany) known as Steffi Graf is a former World No. 1 female tennis player.

Graf is the only player to have won all four Grand Slam singles tournaments (Wimbledon, the US Open, the French Open and the Australian Open) at least four times each. In total, she won 22 Grand Slam singles titles, second among male and female players only to Margaret Court's 24. In 1988, Graf became the first and only tennis player (male or female) to achieve the Calendar Year Golden Slam by winning all four Grand Slam singles titles and the Olympic gold medal in the same calendar year.

Greatest Female Tennis PlayerGraf was ranked World No. 1 by the Women's Tennis Association (WTA) for a record 377 total weeks—the longest period for which any player, male or female, has held the number one ranking since the WTA and the Association of Tennis Professionals began issuing rankings. She also holds the open era record for finishing as the year-end World No. 1 the most times, having done so on eight occasions. She won 107 singles titles, which ranks her third on the WTA's all-time list after Martina Navratilova (167 titles) and Chris Evert (154 titles).

Greatest Female Tennis PlayerA notable feature of Graf's game was her versatility across all playing surfaces. She won six French Open singles titles (second to Evert) and seven Wimbledon singles titles (third behind Navratilova and Helen Wills Moody). She is the only singles player to have achieved a Calendar Year Grand Slam while playing on all three major types of tennis courts (grass courts, clay courts and hard courts), as the Calendar Year Grand Slams won by other players before her occurred when the Australian and US Opens were still played on grass. Graf reached thirteen consecutive Grand Slam singles finals, from the 1987 French Open through to the 1990 French Open, winning nine of them. She played in 36 Grand Slam singles tournaments from the 1987 French Open, her first Grand Slam win, through the 1999 French Open, her last Grand Slam win, reaching the finals 29 times and winning 22 titles. She reached a total of 31 Grand Slam singles finals, third overall behind Evert (34 finals) and Navratilova (32 finals).
Greatest Female Tennis Player
Graf is considered by some to be the greatest female player. Billie Jean King said in 1999, "Steffi is definitely the greatest women's tennis player of all time." Martina Navratilova has included Graf on her list of great players. In December 1999, Graf was named the greatest female tennis player of the 20th century by a panel of experts assembled by the Associated Press. Tennis writer Steve Flink, in his book The Greatest Tennis Matches of the Twentieth Century, named her as the best female player of the 20th century.

Greatest Female Tennis PlayerGraf retired in 1999 while she was ranked World No. 3. She married former World No. 1 men's tennis player Andre Agassi in October 2001 and they have two children, Jaden Gil and Jaz Elle.

Greatest Female Tennis Player
Golden Girl Steffi GrafGraf won seven singles titles at Wimbledon, six singles titles at the French Open, five singles titles at the US Open, and four singles titles at the Australian Open. Her overall record in 56 Grand Slam events was 282-34 (89 percent) (87-10 at the French Open, 75-8 at Wimbledon, 73-10 at the US Open, and 47-6 at the Australian Open). Her career prize-money earnings totalled US$21,895,277 (a record until Lindsay Davenport surpassed this amount in January 2008). Her singles win-loss record was 900-115 (88.7 percent). She was ranked World No. 1 for 186 consecutive weeks (from August 1987 to March 1991, still the record in the women's game) and a record total 377 weeks overall. Graf also won 11 doubles titles.


Data Source : Wikipedia.org

Tuesday, August 3, 2010

We really like the idea of the 72 Hour Urban Action, a rapid, real-time architecture competition at the 2010 Bat-Yam International Biennale of Landscape Urbanism in Israel.

72 Hour Urban Action

For this DIY pow-wow, organizers invite ten teams of architects, students, designers, artists and craftspeople who will be tasked “to respond to community needs and wants in relations to its public spaces.” Each team will be given up to $2,500 for materials, room and board, a central work space and a truck for transport. Engineers will also be on hand for construction and safety consultations. Starting on September 25, 2010, the launch date of the biennale, the teams will have three days and three nights to design and build their projects, some of which will be chosen to remain on site permanently. There's also a money prize worth $3,800 for the top project.

The deadline for registration is August 8, 2010. That's only a few days away, so if you're interested, you'll have to hustle.

Meanwhile, perhaps the entire Venice Architecture Biennale in 2012 could be turned into a massive 72 Hour Urban Action festival. Instead of installing also-rans from the previous year's Art Biennale or taking the pickings from an august atelier's dusty model museums or asking Zaha Hadid to make another sofa, the architecture world's elite and bright young tykes are flown in, given a slightly plumper budget and then let loose in Venice and the surrounding salt marshes, with some perhaps venturing inland to the industrial landscapes of Veneto.

Just as at Bat-Yam, they have 3 days (could be longer) to design and build a project that meets a local social need or improves the urban experience. Biennale groupies can watch the teams while they work and then play around in/with the completed spatial interventions. They might even be asked to lend an extra pair of helping hands to hammer a few nails, to the horrors of biennale lawyers and insurance people. And in case you're wondering, the teams will be housed, fed and given working spaces at the Arsenale or in their country's pavilion.

Also like at Bat-Yam, some of the projects will be allowed to remain permanently. Every couple of years, new projects are plugged-in to the built environment, perhaps even to an earlier intervention. In this way, Venice and its environs are continually reshaped and renewed.

After countless biennales, we might have two Venices. There's La Serenissima, flooded and crumbling. Above it is the newer Venice built out of all the accumulated projects. This encrustation of ad hoc interventions is where the indigenous Venetians live and work, where the tourists buy their souvenirs after venturing down to the ancient city below.

Monday, August 2, 2010

Sitka, Alaska


Last month, Circle of Blue reported the rather astonishing news that “within 6 to 8 months” Texas-based S2C Global Systems will begin exporting pure Alaskan mountain water all the way to India.

Sitka, a small town located on Baranof Island off Alaska’s southeast coast, will sell the water to Alaska Resource Management for one penny per gallon. S2C and True Alaska Bottling, which has a contract for the rights to export 2.9 billion gallons (10.9 billion liters) per year from Sitka’s Blue Lake Reservoir, formed Alaska Resource Management LLC to facilitate bulk exportation.

The city will earn $US26 million per year if ARM exports its entire allocation, and more than $US90 million annually if the city can export its maximum water right of 9 billion gallons. That amount of water is enough to meet the annual domestic needs of a city of 500,000 using 50 gallons per person per day.


Sitka's “excess water” will be distributed throughout India from the company's first “World Water Hub,” the exact location of which on the country's west coast will not be disclosed for “security reasons.” From this central hub, the water will also be shipped to other markets in the Middle East and west Asia.

S2C will sell the water in “20-foot containers with flexi-tanks, which can hold up to 4,623 gallons, for pharmaceuticals and high-tech manufacturing, and 10 liter bottles for consumers” in an emerging middle class.

That the water will be diverted from some northern, water-saturated climes to distant, parched and heavily populated locales, one wonders if this future riverine system meandering through two oceans might actually be one of the tributary channels of the supposedly unrealizable megahydroproject known as the North American Water and Power Alliance (NAWAPA). Of course, instead of via concrete rivers, the water will be channeled via tanker ships.

NAWAPA


Those who peddle in hydro-conspiracies might even reasonably believe that it's part of a wedge strategy whose aim is to realize NAWAPA in part, if not in whole. $26 million in annual revenue is a lot, especially if the Great Recession has left you cash-starved. And if Sitka does end up earning more than $90 million a year from this water trade, other towns and cities not using all their alloted freshwater quota might start getting some ideas. We could be reading about copycat schemes in no time.

In any case, we're reminded of Frederic Tudor's profitable frozen-water trade during the 19th century. As documented in Gavin Weightman's The Frozen-Water Trade, blocks of ice were harvested from frozen New England lakes during the winter, stored in ice houses and then imported to tropical markets, among them being the chief Indian ports of Bombay, Madras and Culcutta.

The first ice ship to sail to India, in 1833, started with roughly 170 tons of the frozen commodity and arrived four months later with about 100 tons left. “Frederic's ice was a sensation in Culcutta,” we read. In fact, it became a status symbol among the British colonial elite. Perhaps Sitka's bottled Alaskan water might attain a certain level of prestige among the monied and celebrity class, just as any other well-marketed bottled water.

The water trade with India peaked in 1870 when 17,000 tons of American ice were shipped over. A few years later, the first artificial ice manufacturer opened for business, and by 1882, the trade ended.

Might we optimistically expect that the new bulk water export business will similarly be undercut by a technological innovation offering a cheaper and thus more far-reaching solution to local freshwater shortages?


A New River in the Mediterranean Sea
Another New River in the Mediterranean Sea
“What if Greenland was Africa's water fountain?”

Estas fotos de vestidos de novia 2011 de White Day, les parecerán sencillamente fantásticas, porque estos vestidos son muy elegantes, ¡ultraelegantes! con hermosos detalles en el cuello algunos diseños, con cortes que se ciñen al cuerpo y hermosas faldas que tienen mucha sofisticación estos son vestidos para esa boda que tanto has soñado.

Los escotes strapless son muy elegantes y están coronados con bonitos detalles, que hacen aún más elegantes los bellos vestidos de novia 2011 de White Day. Cualquiera de estos vestidos es la elección perfecta para la boda elegante que toda novia sueña y se merece.





El sexo es parte primordial de una relación de pareja, aunque ya hace tiempo descubrimos que no es el todo, igual debemos haber descubierto que una estupenda relación de pareja con una mala química sexual, está condenada en alguna medida al fracaso. Las zonas más eróticas del cuerpo, son esas partes de nuestra anatomía y la de él, a las que debemos prestar especial atención a manera de lograr el disfrute personal y el de tu pareja. El sexo es como todo en una relación, hay que ocuparse de ello, porque aunque el sexo más divertido es el que brota espontáneamente, también es cierto que hasta ese puede resultar monótono o poco gratificante sino logra todo ese placer que alguien espera de ese rato de intimidad.

Las zonas más eróticas del cuerpo, casi que vienen siendo totalmente distintas en uno y el otro, y la importancia de explorar las sensaciones que el contacto con ellas provoca, y que ayuda y mucho en la relación sexual, es tan importante como satisfacer a tu pareja, como conocerte a ti misma y estar consciente de qué es lo que te agrada y te causa más satisfacción, para que ambos puedan complacerse el uno al otro con el conocimiento de esas zonas especiales a donde el placer anida.

Zonas más eróticas de la mujer: Clítoris, labios y lengua, cara, orejas, dedos de los pies, cráneo, nuca, pezones, los puntos G y U. Para algunos explorar el punto U viene siendo como descubrir la pérdida Atlántida, y no es más que la zona que se extiende frente a la vagina y se estimula frotando el interior de la pared vaginal, es una zona como el punto G cargada de terminaciones nerviosas que pueden provocar prolongado placer.

Zonas más eróticas en el hombre: ojos (a ellos les excita lo que ven), el pene, pezones, labios y lengua, plantas de los pies, parte de atrás de las rodillas, axilas, palma de las manos, las manos, el ano y el punto G masculino. Y si algunos de ellos ignoran el punto U femenino muchas de ellas están totalmente ignorantes del punto G masculino que viene siendo el área conocida como la próstata, algunas se mostrarán evasivas de explorar el asunto pero igual que el Punto G femenino puede convertirse en una descarga de sensaciones incontrolables sucede con el Punto G masculino.

Sunday, August 1, 2010




Kristi Leskinen (born February 10, 1981 in Uniontown, Pennsylvania) is an American freestyle skier. She appeared on the cover of Powder magazine's Photo Annual in 2004.




She grew up in Uniontown, PA, near Seven Springs Mountain Resort and Hidden Valley ski resorts. She was ranked #90 on the FHM 100 Sexiest Women of 2005. At Winter X Games IX, Leskinen won a bronze medal in the Women's Superpipe.



Kristi was the first woman ever to pull a rodeo 720—two rotations, head pointed to the earth. She had a choice to become a pro wakeboarder but she decided to become professional at freestyle skiing.



She began to receive sponsors for skiing and instantly knew that skiing was what she wanted to do. Leskinen is a devout fan of the ABC soap opera General Hospital.



Data Source : Wikipedia.org

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder


We noticed that the new layout isn't a fan of our quickie, non-titled posts, so we've taken them offline and collated their tidbits into this single, titled post.

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We like storm drain stenciling. They usually read: No Dumping / Drains To River. But how about: Dump Here / Your Kids Get Cancer. Or: You'll Be Drinking That Soon.

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“A new type of 'lunar concrete,' made by mixing moondust and carbon nanotubes, could be used to construct buildings, solar power arrays, and monolithic telescopes on the moon,” National Geographic reports.

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Watch the films of Rudolph Valentino and Cecil B. DeMille beside their remains at Hollywood Forever Cemetery. Necropolises as occupiable urban open spaces.

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Watch David Barrie explain how to spatialize an edible landscape [watch here] in Middlesbrough, England — one that can actually have an impact on the physical grid and economic infrastructure of a city. But if you prefer to read text, The Guardian has a report on the project.

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The People's Liberation Army against hydrology — watch it [watch here].

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder

Charles Holland, of Fantastic Journal, writes:

In his book Looking at the Overlooked Norman Bryson describes the strange impossibility of the scenes depicted in Dutch still life painting. Vases teeming with exotic flowers would be painted in lavish detail despite the fact that the flowers themselves could never have existed together in that state. Coming from different continents and time zones they would flower at different times of the year and their representation together in full bloom is a perverse distortion of nature. The flowers represent both a temporal and spatial collapsing of distinctions and difference. The pictures instead celebrate a new found knowledge and power within the world, they are the product of empire.


In our post-humanist era, the direct descendants of Dutch still life painting — and also this sort of Northern Renaissance genre painting — must be our cloned sheep and GM rice fields and auricular mice and Martian designer plants and transgenic zoos, especially when visually composed for mass consumption via CNN, press releases and blogs.

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder

A 26-ton miniature earth core filled with boiling metal will spin at about 90 miles per hour in a laboratory to generate “the world's first artificial, spherical and self-sustaining magnetic field.” It will help scientists better understand our planet's magnetic climate, which “acts like a protective shield, blocking harmful particles from the sun, which fry the electronics on board orbiting satellites and mess with the electrical grids powering homes and offices.” It will also birth a new industry in magnetic weather modification.

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Polar Inertia visits some abandoned swimming pools.

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New York's Central Park has turned into a battleground, New York Magazine tells us — joggers vs. bikers vs. dog walkers vs. drivers. “It’s about the politics of public space. Who gets that space? And how is it apportioned?”

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We ♥ P-REX.

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Is Mother Nature a bulldyke?

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder

According to National Geographic, anthropologists have mapped a “latticework” of “dozens of densely packed, pre-Columbian towns, villages, and hamlets.” Combining local knowledge with GIS and satellite imagery, Michael Heckenberger and his colleagues have identified two major settlement clusters, each with “a central seat of ritualistic power with wide roads radiating out to other communities.” Furthermore, “between the settlements, which today are almost completely overgrown, was a patchwork of agricultural fields for crops such as manioc along with dams and ponds likely used for fish farms.” The organization has similarities to Ebenezer Howard's garden cities, says Heckenberger. This is the mythological city of Z, says another.

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So there's this reality show, plainly titled Architecture School, on the Sundance Channel. For six episodes, we get to see students from Tulane University's School of Architecture design and build a house for a low income family in New Orleans. You can catch the first episode on Hulu. Hopefully, it will become a massive success, as it may make television producers more receptive to our own reality series, The Surreal Life: Bungalow Edition.

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CTLab/Review [Current Intelligence] / elseplace / Gardenvisit.com Blog / Le territoire des sens / Tiny House Blog / _urb_

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In Parks and Recreation, Amy Poehler stars as Leslie Knope, the head of the Parks and Recreation department in Pawnee, Indiana. “Knope takes on a project from a nurse named Ann to turn a construction pit into a park, while trying to mentor a bored college-aged intern.” It will be a mockumentary style series like The Office.

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Archinect and InfraNet Lab are previewing the first issue of [bracket], On Farming. Coming out Winter 2009, [I]t's gonna be awesome. Go see.

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder

“The people of the Carterets Islands, off the coast of Papua New Guinea, are the first entire people to officially be evacuated because of climate change.” And this blog chronicles their plight.

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Freshkills Park has a blog.

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Atlas Obscura is a growing compendium of “out-of-the-way places that are singular, eccentric, bizarre, fantastical, and strange” from Dylan Thuras, of Curious Expedition, and Joshua Foer, of the long-dormant Athanasius Kircher Society.

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“The Dutch Dialogues workshops are the outgrowth of extended interactions between Dutch engineers, urban designers, landscape architects, city planners, soils/hydrology experts and, primarily, their Louisiana counterparts.”

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Most likely it was because spring has arrived, but we like to think the recent passage of the health care reform bill and the fact that municipal budgets everywhere are being crippled by the recession (and perhaps even the growing popularity of urban farming and street fruit foraging) may have also instigated The New York Times to commission Thomas Leo Ogren, author of Allergy-Free Gardening, to write an op-ed piece on cultivating an allergy-free urban forest. “Many arborists and landscapers like to plant male trees and shrubs because they’re 'litter-free' — that is, they produce no seeds or seedpods.” No fruits messing and stinking up the streets also mean cities don't have to spend much on clean up. “But male trees shed lots of pollen; that’s their job. And once it’s released, it can be blown around for months,” inducing severe allergic reactions and asthma attacks.

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder

SHIFT, a new print and web publication of the Student Chapter of the American Society of Landscape Architects (SASLA) at North Carolina State University College of Design, is seeking submissions for its inaugural issue, SHIFT: Infrastructure. The deadline is June 1, 2010.

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Walton Ford's Bestiarium is marvelous!

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Urban Omnibus has posted some of the entries to Minds in the Gutter, a recent ideas competition organized to gather alternative designs for stormwater management systems in New York City.

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In an e-mail alerting us to the upcoming broadcast on public television of Children of the Amazon, a documentary which “follows Brazilian filmmaker Denise Zmekhol as she travels a modern highway deep into the Amazon in search of the Indigenous Surui and Negarote children she photographed fifteen years ago,” this brief blurb about one of those tribes particularly stood out for us, considering our longstanding interest in participatory GIS and the synergy between high-tech geospatial technologies and human rights activism:

Through a groundbreaking relationship with Google, the Surui tribe is using GPS, Google Earth, Android phones, and other digital media to document the devastation and connect with activists worldwide.


Learn more about this partnership in this nearly 3-year-old article from the San Francisco Chronicle. The Smithsonian magazine has a longer piece here, while BBC News has a video report.

Martian rocks around the Pathfinder

One of the recipients of the 2009-10 Branner Traveling Fellowship is Eleanor Pries. During her yearlong globetrotting, she will research “buildings and systems that catch, convey, store, and filter water through basic hydrological principles.” These include stepwells, reservoirs, foggaras, qanat and Andalucian gutter-scapes, all of which she'll awesomely catalogue in her blog, drip | dry. Already she's explored some irrigation channels in the Peruvian Andes and geothermal pools in Iceland.

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The Los Angeles Urban Rangers had planned to wrap up their 3-year Malibu Public Beach project with 3 mini-safaris last February before canceling them due to rain. They have since rescheduled these “last-hurrah” safaris for Sunday, May 23.

Are you tired of Zuma and Surfrider? Want to find and use the 20 miles of public beaches that are lined with private development? Our safaris will equip you with the advanced skills necessary to find and use the Malibu public beaches legally and safely. Activities include signwatching, trailblazing the public-private boundary, and a public easement potluck.


The safaris are free, and no sign-up is required. Just don't plan to join mid-safari.

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We recommend booking a passage on Agnes Meyer-Brandis's Research Raft for Subterranean Reefology.

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When Robert De Niro flushes his toilet in Tribeca, Harlem has to deal with it.”

 

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