If bar trivia offered a question, “What American city has the single largest grocery store?”, would any team get the answer right? One might expect the answer to be a sizable metro area like New York City or Los Angeles, with their high population density and proximity to major shipping ports. Good guess but no
The religious landscape in America is changing. This isn’t a revelation (pun intended), nor is it particularly novel; it’s always been changing. The media and think tank buzz about the nation’s growing secularization is so abundant these days that it’s impossible to ignore. It takes no great deal of detective work to find evidence that
Many years ago, on this blog, I postulated that, in vibrant downtown areas with lots of small, family-run businesses, an aging, outdated exterior sign might actually be a selling point. Even if the paint is a little chipped or the letters a bit rusty—a tiny bit (not too much!)—a visibly old sign is a tacit
At first blush, it’s strange and disarming that a well-kept little retailer with tourist cachet wouldn’t even have a restroom available to customers. But that’s exactly what this sign in the front door of the Ulu Factory in Anchorage is telling us. It really couldn’t be more explicit. The winsome little chalet on the outskirts
Verdant and breathtaking as much of Alaska might be, the Last Frontier is no great shakes when it comes to biodiversity. Such is the nature of boreal forests in general: they typically host few varieties of tree species, although the ones that thrive are as abundant as one might expect in a mostly uninhabited, vast
Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party, but I only heard of the neologism glamping about five years ago. The spellcheck service I use for writing my articles does not seem to recognize it. But Merriam-Webster does, and it claims that glamping came into currency around the year 2005. So it seems I’m a
Of all the keywords used to organize my blog posts by topic, the number one by far is “signage”. The keyword (under my menu bar “Topics”) yields 193 separate articles. Given the aspirations of this blog, it’s a hard subject to avoid: one of the key elements of a human-conceived, built environment is that critical,
If bar trivia offered a question, “What American city has the single largest grocery store?”, would any team get the answer right? One might expect the answer to be a sizable metro area
The religious landscape in America is changing. This isn’t a revelation (pun intended), nor is it particularly novel; it’s always been changing. The media and think tank buzz about the nation’s growing secularization
Many years ago, on this blog, I postulated that, in vibrant downtown areas with lots of small, family-run businesses, an aging, outdated exterior sign might actually be a selling point. Even if the
At first blush, it’s strange and disarming that a well-kept little retailer with tourist cachet wouldn’t even have a restroom available to customers. But that’s exactly what this sign in the front door
Verdant and breathtaking as much of Alaska might be, the Last Frontier is no great shakes when it comes to biodiversity. Such is the nature of boreal forests in general: they typically host
Perhaps I’m a bit late to the party, but I only heard of the neologism glamping about five years ago. The spellcheck service I use for writing my articles does not seem to
Of all the keywords used to organize my blog posts by topic, the number one by far is “signage”. The keyword (under my menu bar “Topics”) yields 193 separate articles. Given the aspirations