Brought to you by Caltrans, the UCLA Institute of Transportation Studies and Juan Matute.
Juan was tasked with supporting UCLA’s work on Caltrans Statewide Transit Strategic Plan by talking to transit providers to learn cost-effective ways to run buses, trains and whatnot. Ultimately, Caltrans and UCLA agreed that they needed to put all of this good information somewhere other than in a binder to collect dust. And luckily for all of us transportation researchers / planners/ scholars /geeks, Caltrans supported the creation of TransitWiki, which currently contains primarily best practices research from California agencies BUT has the funding, infrastructure and oversight to solicit and manage content from other contributors (what I call the one-percenters of social media, the folks who find it extremely gratifying to contribute to a particular social media site or page or community).
Other people I respect think this is cool too, like the librarian for the ITS based at Berkeley, Kendra Levine, and Jarrett Walker of The Human Transit blog. Danielle Salomon, a librarian at UCLA, and the good people behind @UCLACommute also thought this was cool and tweeted it out awhile back.
I so wish I were in Northampton right now.
Ann Martin is a 1977 grad of Smith College and is known by women of my generation as the author of the Baby-Sitters Club series and off its various spin-offs. Say what you want about the books, but I read them voraciously. I grew up in Los Angeles, far away from Smith College, but put it on my list of colleges to research when I was 12 after reading Ann’s descriptions of her life in Gardiner House in her biography. So, I like to say that I’m at Smith thanks in part to Ann Martin.
The panel is timed in part to align with Ann Martin’s plans to donate her literary papers to the Smith College Archives. Generations of women ahead of me will be able to draw on primary resources to research topics like, how did Ann Martin’s descriptions of tweenhood circa 1987-1994 informed expectations of modern life amongst older millennials and Gen Yers in their courses in Women’s Studies and Anthropology. Or, in my case, try to codify and rectify Martin’s halcyonic descriptions of small-New England city/suburban life in Stoneybrook in reality circa 1992. I actually sought out a copy of this Baby-Sitters Club bible that Scholastic produced in order to show Nina Antonetti, the professor who taught a class I took on suburban landscape design, this hand-drawn map of Ann Martin’s Stoneybrook, with its heavy foliage and its curvilinear streets.
Virginia Euwer Wolff ‘59 is also a Smith alumna. Ms. Wolff wrote young adult fiction, including one book that I enjoyed a lot as a tween called The Mozart Season. The Mozart Season follows 12-year-old Allegra Shapiro (what a name!) during the summer before she enters 8th grade, which includes practicing for a violin competition, turning pages at a series of outdoor concerts on the behalf of her parents’ orchestra-member friends, and calling into radio shows to dedicate songs to a 14-year-old boy with whom she engages in a mild flirtation. All tame, given that the book was published in 1992. But, it should be pointed out, the book was SET IN PORTLAND. In 1992. Which, really, just means that The Mozart Season was more of a instructional guide on how to live the Dream of the 90s in Portland. Yes, indeed.
But because library paperback editions I read of Ms. Wolff’s books made no mention of her attending Smith, I did not know after I finished at Smith that Ms. Wolff and I could be kindred spirits. So sad! But I do owe much to Ms. Wolff’s books, for her descriptions of Portland informed my great interest in visiting that city, which I did, in 2002. And Portland in the summer was glorious. Naturally, I went visited every place described by name in the book.
I joined the Orange Empire Railway Museum as a sustaining member. I present our donor courtesy cards.
Renee laughed at me when I confessed to buying a magazine on organizing impulsively. This is aspirational living, folks.
Sesame Street’s social media presence inspires me.
Waiting for the First Lady in a room with a view!
Ooh snap.
Thankfully, the LA Bureau of Street Services actually a) has its own Tumblr where b) it shows photographs of the streets and sidewalks they are repairing. I actually posit that anyone who creates a blog like this for LA would have to be much ballsier. It’s easy to do these things in the absence of a social media presence by the city in question.
3050 block of Upas Street in the city of San Diego. Photo by Liam Dillon
Liam adds: “We first posted a picture of this sidewalk on Feb. 7. It’s gotten much worse since then.”
