Courteous Reader,
I am tempted to win your favor by declaring I wrote this Almanac for Planners solely for the public good. However, this is insincere and you are too wise for the deception of this pretense. The fact is I am excessively poor and, unfortunately, excessively wifeless. To address both problems, I must begin to make some profit since every potential wife always asks, “What kind of car do you drive?” I always have to reply, “I walk”, and the potential wife thinks I am a deviant.
Indeed, this motive would have been enough to write this Almanac many years ago except for the overwhelming desire of the public and professionals to only hear what they want to hear and my overwhelming desire to secure a salary. I am now of sufficient age to no longer care about telling people what they want to hear but only about what they need to know. This has freed me to write this Almanac for Planners in increments of ten cause it worked for Moses and the Almighty. Hopefully, my Almanac gains your likes and retweets as a means of demonstrating the usefulness of my efforts but also your charity to this poor Friend and Servant,
Richard
On Planners
61. A sucker is born every minute with the credentials to be a bad urban planner.
62. An urban planner whose only priority is to save their job isn’t a very good one.
63. Too often, planners default to saying nothing when they should be saying plenty with meaning.
64. Planners often talk the talk and rarely walk the walk but should always talk the walk and walk the talk. Repeat and rise.
65. If you don’t want to pay the piper, then don’t pretend to dance to his tune.
66. An urban planner whose priority is to save their job is a bad planner but often an excellent bureaucrat and politician. Be wary.
67. Too often, planners make the mistake of being quiet when they should speak up and talking when they should listen. Resolve to learn the difference and do better.
On Urban Decay
68. Entropy increases. (Second Law of Thermodynamics)
69. Wall Street’s philosophy is ‘the shit rolls downhill.’ The planner’s philosophy should be ‘clean up the shit before it accumulates.’
70. The more you put things back together, the more they fall apart and sometimes it’s best to let things fall apart completely so you can start over fresh.
The Issue 8 cometh soon!
It can only be found in exurban locations, i.e. near to an urban location but not too close. Somehow, it reconciles an inherently contradictory nature into its very function. In short, this magnificent green building is all things to all people.
In the follow-up film, Moonraker (1979), the villain Hugo Drax explicitly engages in large-scale eco-terrorism by hatching a scheme to release a viral toxin on the Earth, which will destroy all human life but leave unharmed all other plant and animal life. Drax takes the position of environmentalists to their logical – and inevitable – conclusion, which is the Earth would be better off without any human beings. Drax attempts to implement his dastardly plan while safely secluded in his moon base lair (also Michael Myers’ satirical inspiration for Dr. Evil’s moon base lair in Austin Powers: The Spy Who Shagged Me). Finally, the Bond villain in The Man with the Golden Gun (1974), Francisco Scaramanga, uses solar power for energy at his small-scale lair (in comparison to the Blofeld, Stromberg, and Drax hideouts) on an island in the South China Sea.
