[TAG] State of the antispam regime (was: Closed account question)

[Thomas Adam]

--- Rick Moen <rick at linuxmafia.com> wrote:

> I'll prevail upon Deirdre to borrow her digital camera, and take photos
> of both the current place and the new one.  Both are quite charming

Thank you.

> little spots, and West Menlo Park (an almost-rural unincorporated county 
> area adjoining the suburban city of Menlo Park) is fairly lush for
> northern California.

Yes, I have heard it said that the area there is "very nice".

> The current house has a vast blackberry patch, a hyperactive lemon tree,
> and a supposedly ornamental plum tree, all of which yield absolutely
> delicious fruit for jams/marmalades, and which will be sorely missed.

Good heavens!  That is quite a varied and eclectic mix of fruit-bearing trees
and bushes you have there.  Lemon trees are uncommon here, as they require
quite mild climates all year round; purportedly not liking the diurnal
temperatures the climate has here.  They do OK in greenhouses though, but
growing such a tree in a greenhouse is both limiting and pointless.

Blackberries are common, though.  I like blackberry jam, and find blackberry
and apple crumble a delicious pudding.  :)

> The newer house is well known to me, being the house I grew up in, to
> the age of eight (when I was whisked off to attend Third and Fourth
> Forms in Peak School, Hong Kong RCC), and has among other things an
> enormously tall Coast Redwood tree planted by my parents when I was
> born.

Wow.  I know they grow very tall.

> You might be misinterpreting my use of the term "block" in this context:
> I mean only the portion of a street between two intersections.  

I know that.  I was referring to the "block" layout that America seems to
adopt in general.

> You're right that Menlo Park (and its unincorporated western addendum)
> doesn't follow the Burgess (concentric) Model:  It has a main downtown
> section of about five blocks' length along the several main streets
> (close to the interurban railroad station for the system now dubbed
> "CalTrain") and a few other small retail strips including one close to
> our two houses' shared neighbourhood.  This is controlled by municipal
> and county real-estate zoning laws.  

My knowledge of such things only stems from the fact I studied Geography
during school.  I reacted bitterly to needing to learn so-called Urban
Geography as I considered it much like 'pseudo scienece' (that is, a
pointless and waste of time concept with nothing going for it other than a
namesake).   I don't share that view as much, but I retain a lot of the
knowledge taught during that time.

Some of America hence follows the 'leap-frog' effect model, a pattern of
urban growth that only really works from the ground up.  It's quite difficult
to achieve the same effect using an exisiting or established system such as
the concentric one.

There are other urban settlement patterns in use, but I've rambled on enough.

> Oddly enough, the Burgess Model was developed for use in USA (not UK or
> continental European) cities, but fell out of favour around 1950,
> because it was deemed no longer practical given the amount of land
> reconversion it tended to require.

Quite.

-- Thomas Adam

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