The week that was 2/14-20/2010

“The form works with the function,” Amale Andros, a principal with the architectural design firm WORKac, told the New York Times last week when explaining a whimsical schematic envisioning the Guggenheim Museum as a water park. The drawing is part of "Contemplating the Void: Interventions in the Guggenheim Museum," a publicity stunt celebrating the 50th anniversary of the museum. Click on the water tower to read the short interview with Andros and her WORKac partner Dan Wood.

“America’s biggest drinking problem isn’t alcohol: It’s lawn watering.” — Amy Vickers quoted in “Turf Wars,” Peter Gleick’s City Brights, San Francisco Chronicle, February 20, 2010

“I don’t believe the economic recovery of the state of Washington relies on cigarettes, candy, gum, bottled water and pop.” — Washington Governor Chris Gregoire on suggested tax increases that, among other things, would levy a penny an ounce on bottled water, “Gregoire proposes

The Dry Garden: Landmark book for California

Until now, there was always one sure way to tell whether or not you had hired the right landscape designer or architect for a job in California. The right one had a copy of Bob Perry’s 1992 book “Landscape Plants for Western Regions,” which was used so often that it occupied the passenger seat of his or her truck. That criterion changed this week. After eighteen years, Perry has finally produced a successor volume: “Landscape Plants for California Gardens.” For those of you worried about how to comply with the water budgets prescribed in last year’s Assembly Bill 1881, Perry gives the evapotranspiration rates not just for thousands of plants, but also correlates them for every California climate zone. He looks at water efficiency of irrigation systems. And, the reason landscapers loved him, after grouping plants by palette, he conclusively links those palette groups back to their water budgets.

“Landscape

West coast House call for salmon

UPDATED 2/20/2010 Eleven Pacific-region congressmen and women have joined Los Angeles Representative Grace Napolitano in writing California Senator Dianne Feinstein asking her to withdraw her proposed rider to a pending jobs bill that could quadruple Bay-Delta water deliveries to powerful farm interests on the west side of the San Joaquin Valley. The House group, several of them members of the Subcommittee on Water and Power chaired by Napolitano, wrote on the grounds that the Delta water exports demanded by Feinstein risk annihilation of the Pacific salmon fishery and at the same time could up-end years of hard-fought negotiations to produce pending water reform legislation in California.

To read the text from Reps. George Miller (D-CA), Peter DeFazio (D-OR), Mike Thompson (D-CA), Zoe Lofgren (D-CA), David Wu (D-OR), Norm Dicks (D-WA), Earl Blumenauer (D-OR), Lynn Woolsey (D-CA), Kurt Schrader (D-OR), Doris Matsui (D-CA), and John Garamendi (D-CA), click here.

Feinstein

Irritable noun syndrome

Long ago and far away, people who possessed a valuable skill were called artisans. They formed craft guilds that set standards. We owe French bread and English furniture to their traditions. However, the term has gained a new meaning in American English, one that should serve as a cue to hide your cash, put away your checkbook and forget where you put the credit cards. It does not mean that the vendor using it has emerged from a long apprenticeship to become a butcher, baker or candlestick maker. It means that he or she is a pretentious boob. If it’s a cheese they’re selling, read Drop Out Who Bought a Few Goats. If it’s a restaurant name, read Chef Does Coke. If it’s a garden design service, read Socialite Service Charging $50 an Hour to Deadhead Lavender and Paying the Labor a Fraction of That.

The one thing that “artisan”

Fleck check on Feinstein minnow “precedent”

THIS just in from John Fleck, science writer of the Albuquerque Journal: “California Sen. Dianne Feinstein is moving to intervene via Congress in a fight very much like the one that raged here in New Mexico back in the summer of 2003 over the endangered Rio Grande Silvery Minnow. And she’s citing our fish-v-farmers legal and political fight as precedent for the action she is proposing. But is she misrepresenting the history?”

Click here to keep reading.

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