New Book!

I am still in the introduction of this book: Suburban Nation: The Rise of Sprawl and the Decline of the American Dream, and already I am excited. I am going to be reading this book on my bus ride to and from work everyday, and so reading it straight through is not the goal. I am hoping to digest the whole thing at a casual, thoughtful, pace.
I have already been given two new acronyms that will be fun to use. One, I know I have heard before, but had forgotten about. That is NIMBY, not in my back-yard. And the new one is BANANA, build absolutely nothing near anything! I like that second one because it is clearly not being reasonable, and yet I totally understand it.
I just finished a paragraph that prompted me to get out the laptop and type. The final sentence of the paragraph was, "A higher standard of living has somehow failed to result in a better quality of life." Now in a lot of ways this sounds sort of like a hippyish, back to the earth way of thinking, and it just may be so. I find though that it is so clearly stated that it's a little bit scary. I am resisting the urge to talk about "how people should live," and I will just say this: We all have too much shit to keep track of and think about.

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I think I want to work on a new term. The first version is "Sociophysical Conservative." Basically it would mean that the physical structure of older cities is better for society.

So what is the opposite of ego-centric? It would be "ego-_____." That's the format I want to see it in anyway.

Books that I think are cool:
Cradle to Cradle, I read it this summer. Great!
Suburban Nation..., Just started it. Essential.
The Regional City, read part of it last Spring, and just ordered it on-line. Very interesting.