The Ugliest Building in Town is Doomed

It's at the bottom, just to build the suspense. Meanwhile, the video of the day. It makes you think, man. It really does:

I have no idea where that's from, but it made me laugh.

NO NO NO NO NO No. This . . . no.

They've tried it before, you know. There was this:

(via.)

A GIS brought up this:

No idea. Is that from the John Waters excursion into the realm of olifactory horrors? Looks more like Sid & Marty Kroft.

HISTORY Dig anywhere in European cities, it seems, and this happens.

The inevitable cheap movie: the ghosts of medieval doctors take over the Geniuses who offer on-the-spot tech support, and their solution for every malfunction is to drill a hole in the iPhone and let the bad humours out. Leeches on stuck iPads. That's about all they had. Well, they had aspirin, of a sort; even in Roman times, they prescribed willow water for headaches. I always wondered how they figured that out; possibly the ancient doctors just tried everything and took notes on what worked. Here, rub this dandelion under your nose. Did it stop your fits? No? Well, scratch that one off.

ARCHITECTURE Two small stories in the paper today: one on the closing of the company that provided the Kasota stone that's a Minnesota trademark. Surely this can't be the end of that. Then there's the redevelopment of the Snelling / Selby corner, which includes this monstrosity:

I'm pretty sure this was a 70s rehab of a fine old commercial structure. It has the proportions of an old brick structure from the streetcar era, and was probably covered in ugly wood as a "natural" look that was "modern" for a few years. It gives you splinters just to look at it.