So… even for an election season, the politics of the moment are coming unhinged; just read the last ten or twelve posts at TPM, a supposedly moderate newsy site, and you’ll see how covering the right is becoming a circus of crazy. Conventional thinking is gelling around the notions that

a) the Republican Party is the Tea Party

and b) whatever it’s called the GOP Confederate Party needs to disappear, and/or be replaced by something other than either one of those, for the good of the country.

But that’s… a bit of crazy in its own right, and we could definitely be being governed by majorities of those freaks (think endless investigations of trivial scandals and government shutdowns) after this fall. Nonetheless… Green. What do it mean? How about your crappy internet service? Don’t think its so crappy?

Is there a connection? Sorry. Expect more. Before it becomes a corporate logo. Damn.

Even with a moderate amount of walking, sometimes you come across evenings like this. Tragic, really.

I say “Tui,” you say, “lleries!”

I’m working on a long lecture about the importance of vast public spaces in an urban landscape. It’s just not ready yet. More study needed.

Friday Reading Slideshow. Found by Mrs. Green.

The photo shows a former Pep Boys store in Columbus, Ohio, photographed in August 2009. Ulrich had spent a long day shooting at a mall down the street; it was 3 a.m. when he stopped here. Inside the lobby, he could see a dead bird. He went in for a close-up, not realizing a motion sensor was still active. “I started to step in, and this alarm went screaming,” Ulrich recalls. “It probably went off for half an hour.” This being a ghost store, though, no one came.

Oh, the Greening of modular construction. Why not? Champion presents the “Go House”:

The GO House will be unveiled at the 2010 International Builders’ Show in Las Vegas on January 19th – 22nd in the IBS Outdoor Village near the Main Entrance, #P2. It is Genesis first-ever, nationally produced modular home built to green standards and it is available to customers via the GO House website. It is sold through approved local builders. The Go House website, www.thegohouse.com, lets customers configure their home online by selecting a base floor plan, then customizing their plan by choosing first floor additions, second-story options, and garage designs to create a truly customized home.

Truly. But as the Times greenblog notes, all four of the models on display at the builders’ show, sponsored by the National Association of Home Builders, were “greener” prefab structures. Greener than thou, maybe; but I guess their point is, you can do it. Or, they can do it – ‘they’ being the prefab mass producers. Maybe this means green is at the beginning of showing effects upon the bell curve of home building and the impact will not just be from the high-end but, with incentives, it begins simultaneously at the low(er) end as well. And they meet somewhere and thus forms the fat part of the bell.

I had been thinking that it would be architecture like this which would the operational idea for green building going forward:

But I’m an elitist, of course. And really, if green building is going to catch on and work, we’re going to have start seeing it everywhere, which means it will have to go modular, and probably mobile. And though they might not have the LEEDiest materials or be outfit with solar panels, it sounds like it’s already happening. See you in O-town at next year’s convention.