Complex Numbers

Those silly Brits.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/6747807.stm

The rolling hills around Charlottesville are the sophisticated cradle of the Commonwealth of Virginia.

Oh, I live in a cradle now. A sophisticated one.

This is where Thomas Jefferson, that most famous of American Renaissance men, kept his ebony toothbrush, surrounded by his inventions, his fine French wines and, of course, his slaves.

Will people get off the slave thing already? Slavery was an established social institution for thousands of years. Tom was just going with the flow. He was a wealthy colonial landowner; of course he had slaves. I don't want to get shit from the establishment 250 years from now because I owned a computer.

The town of Charlottesville itself is a gracious home to one of America's oldest and most venerable colleges, the University of Virginia.

Don't tell that to the Virginia Tech people.

The town centre is more lively and funky than perhaps any other in the state.

Sadly, it is also the home of two abominations: the Pavilion (which I call the Great White Suck) and the Transit Center, which is ironic because almost no one uses public transportation here.

For the first, even the Pavilion's website only shows a photo of a small portion of this execrable construction, failing to show its complete lack of integration into the surrounding architecture: http://www.charlottesvillepavilion.com/

For the second, I don't know how they managed to get money for this thing, but some architect had a field day. Fortunately, it's right next to the Great White Suck, so all the ugly is concentrated in one spot. To see it, though, you'll have to download a pdf from this site: http://www.charlottesville.org/Index.aspx?page=1556 (go to the Transit Center slideshow thingie).

Okay, so much for local color. Snarkiness about this guy's take on Charlottesville aside, that case occupied local newspapers for far too long. I don't know how far the news spread, but as the writer said, it almost got to the Supreme Court.

Now, I don't know if Matt Frei there is a Briton working in the US - it's more likely he's an American correspondent to BBC, and I'm too lazy to check. Clearly, he's writing for a British audience, which gives the article some tone of outsider's perspective - which we certainly need as a reality check sometimes.

The "selective puritanism" of the US that he describes is very much alive and well, and influences public policy in a way all out of proportion to its social importance.

But why is there puritanism here? Well, because England got rid of its Puritans a few hundred years ago, shipping them off to Boston and Jamestown.

So, Britain, it's all your bloody damn fault. Take your puritans back. Now.