Because they're ugly and stupid:

• 30 St Mary Axe, London (aka Swiss Re, aka the Erotic Gherkin). Many British people pretend to love this obnoxious faberge nightmare, but they fool themselves, like with their Queen. To me it looks like a 2-liter bottle of Pepsi. Where's the giant pizza?
• Leaning Tower of Pisa: Ah! Why is everybody so impressed by a classic example of bad engineering? If it weren't for herculean efforts to keep it standing, that thing would have toppled over centuries ago and nobody would have any reason to ever visit that stink-farm Pisa.
• Petronas Towers, Malaysia: A steampunk brassiere for a giantess. Or Madonna. Imagine if our habitations consisted of the discarded clothes and food containers of a race of giants....
• Sagrada Familia, Barcelona (or pretty much anything by Gaudi): Sometimes too much is way too frigging much. I feel nauseous just looking at this thing. The closest thing I can compare it to is dried vomit.
• Guggenheim Museum Bilbao: Another montrosity that everybody pretends to love. It reminds me of the pile of metal shavings and iron scrap in the corner bin in a metal shop classroom.
• CNA Plaza, Chicago: This is that annoying red building that's always a big distraction when you're trying to look at the Chicago skyline. It stands out like a swollen goiter on a pretty girl's neck. I hate that red building! And if it weren't so damned red it would probably be the most boring building ever made (instead of the reddest). Oh man, I could strangle that red building!
• Seattle Space Needle: Just because those pompous Seattle people love it so much. If it had been built in Chicago it would been blown over by now. In New York it would have been torn down.

Because they're way cool looking and not stupid at all:

• Neuschwanstein Castle: I've always wanted to move in here, lock the doors, wait for the plague outside to end. I'd throw elaborate parties for my dozens of zombie-eyed guests, instruct the in-house orchestra to play lots of Wagner, and build experimental rockets to launch in the direction of my chief rival, Mont-Saint-Michel. Ah, daydreams!
• 40 Wall Street (aka The Bank of the Manhattan Company building, The Trump Building): I have a personal fondness for this building despite its Trumpification (Trump actually supplied a lot of badly needed renovation). Along with the Empire State Building, the Chrysler Building, and the GE Building, it sort of typifies what Manhattan architecture should be.
• Citigroup Center, New York (aka Citicorp Center): It stands on stilts!
• Chateau de Chenonceau If I were rich like Godzilla I would buy this place and send out invitations to every girl who ever rejected me. (Yes, I keep a list.) They would be unable to resist the allure of the world's "most feminine" of buildings. Then I would lock them inside, assure them escape is impossible, and-- um, yeah... anyway.
• Notre Dame de Paris: the archetypal Gothic Cathedral. Damn French, always making such cool buildings, I can't stand them!
• Mont-Saint-Michel: Not a building, okay, but it's so much cooler than wherever you live.
• Jin Mao Building, Shanghai, China: one of the few modern towers that doesn't annoy me. This one looks like a giant weapon, maybe for whatever giantess wears the Petronas Towers bra.

Here they are, fresh from Worldcon in Nippon. Best novel was tossed to Vernor Vinge for Rainbows End, beating out Peter Watts' Blindsight. Meanwhile, Charlie Stross won the Prometheus Award for best Libertarian SF for his novel Glasshouse.

In order to help consume my abundant free time (otherwise claimed by idle hours on the porch with book, cigar, and mug of happy-fluid; or by Star Trek and Stargate reruns accompanied by Turkey sandwich, lettuce, tomato on toasted wheat bread; or by persistent conversations with headhunters about the various jobs I'm unwilling to perform for their cheesy little clients; or by reading the dread never-ending Google Reader sheet which will -- I'm convinced -- one day consume me; or by playing Doomsday, a Doom II source port I've finally gotten to behave in Linux, thus finally severing my last tie to Windows) I've been playing with Freemarker, which is a template engine for Java. Indeed! this website is now composed via Freemarker. It's both easy to use and fairly powerful, doesn't require any sort of JEE or servlet container but gets along with one just fine, and it integrates well with Spring. Also, it knows where the beat is at.

Holy crap, the Saturnians have constructed a Death Star! It won't be long now before we all go the way of Alderan, and I for one am eager.

I find it amusing that on the same day the Russians boast heartily that they've built the world's biggest conventional bomb, "much bigger than yours, Uncle Samovar", waving about their yellow-stained bottles of vodka, calling each other tovarisch again, the US quietly mentions, "Um, well, you see...", they're well on the way to building gamma-ray annihilation lasers. Which is sort of like Caveman A showing off his fancy new wheel of granite while Caveman B pieces together an internal combustion engine. Welcome to the new Cold War, cavepeople!

Damn.

I'm not typically the annoying and slightly smelly dude who wants government regulations; I mostly want businesses free to do business and compete with one another in a free market. The trouble starts up when you're dealing with natural resources or public utilities, and then everything gets all gray and scary, and I want to go home and look at pretty pictures instead of thinking about it. So maybe that's why this Internet tiered-pricing mock-up made me feel so ill, just a single nudge from spilling my breakfast all over my keyboard. But now I have to sit up straight and "you there sir!" for a minute, wondering whether it's just FUD being thrown around, a scare tactic. Should the Internet be treated as a public utility? Eeeegh. I feel more comfortable agreeing with comment #2. Preeeety!

World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War by Max Brooks has been my porch-book for the last several weeks (the book I read while lazing on the porch. You know, I also have a stack of chair-books: various graphic novels, Vollman's Rising Up Rising Down, Gibson's new one, Ted Chiang's story collection, Vol. 1 of Fuller's A Military History of the Western World, Robert Murphy's The Politically Incorrect Guide to Capitalism, and about a dozen genre novels, mostly Science Fiction. Also I have a a bed-book-stack: Harry Potter 3 is in there, more graphic novels, one of Stephen King's story collections, a book of Nabokov's essays on literature, some of Pournelle's military SF collections, as well as all the genre novels finished in there then tossed to the side of the room into a careless pile I've been meaning to clean up. There's no bathroom-book-stack, in case you're wondering; I don't read in the bathroom. I like to think in there, Rodin-style, emperor of porcelain). WWZ is a sequel of sorts to Brooks' Zombie Survival Guide, which was sort of a gag book from a few years ago, a handbook for what to do in the event of a Zombie Apocalypse. WWZ describes that apocalypse.

The most immediately notable thing about WWZ, aside from it being about zombies, is the book's narrative structure; more like a short story collection with a unifying theme than like a novel, it's a set of mock non-fictional interviews with survivors of the eponymous war with the zombies. Most novelistic conventions are missing: there's no single story arc with a beginning, middle, and end; there's no collection of protagonists or the conceit that all the interesting things in the story somehow happen to them; but there's a novelistic thematic effect as all these parallel stories and characters combine. This structure is a bit off-putting at first, since it's sometimes annoying to start off with a new narrator and a new setting every chapter, but this makes it a perfect occasional book; I found one or two chapters per sitting was about perfect.

The next notable thing about WWZ is that Brooks, while adhering in most ways to the zombie genre as it was more or less defined by George Romero, takes the subject matter very seriously, and the result is not too difficult to believe in. It's a realistic zombie fiction, and if you can't grok on that concept you shouldn't get anywhere near this book. So then, if the world actually were to be afflicted by a plague of the walking dead, WWZ is what might happen. And it uses those circumstances -- a world-wide plague of people dying then reanimating to spread their infection -- to explore human nature: heroism, sacrifice, hard necessity, stupidity, vanity, and so on with all that sort of stuff.

What's most interesting is how varied the stories are. We learn not just how America deals with the crisis but what the Russians do, the Japanese, Chinese, South Africans, Cubans. We see where the dispossessed hoards of refugees go, the boat cities, island invaders, mountain campers, northern wanderers (zombies freeze, see, no talent for heating). We find out what happens when a billion zombies chase a billion refugees into the ocean. We learn how the survivors struggle to take their land (and sea) back. And for the most part it's all very convincing: Brooks does a spectacular job of extrapolating the concept through its many ramifications.

Highly recommended -- 8 of 10.