A thoughtful piece on why Snoopy ruined "Peanuts." It must be news to some that the original strip was rather bleak. It's not that it wasn't funny. It was really depressing. Take these concluding panels from a '55 Sunday strip:

It's just cruel. It's funny only if you want side with the girls' cruelty. Perhaps it was funny at the time because nothing on the comics page revealed human nastiness with such stark frankness As the author notes: "And then there were other strips that were just pitch black, with no happy resolution or redemption. Because sometimes, life isn't fair." Then came Snoopy, and when he started standing up and playing characters it was all warm & fuzzy huggyfests.

And now we get Snoopy in platforming games running from nightmare pumpkins.

The movie, to be fair, looks as if it'll surprise people who are expecting something trite. Whether it wil find an audience with modern kids, who seem completely uninterested in "Peanuts," is another matter. The strip doesn't run in the paper for kids. It runs to reassure the demographic that grew up with the strip.

URBAN DESIGN Here's an article that admits something critics have long maintained: Streetcars aren't about transit. They're for development.

Mind you, it's a pro-streetcar piece. If that's the case, then no streetcar line should go into a well-developed area. Right?

CURRENT EVENTS A Chinese journalist writes about his attempt to cover the explosion and fire at Tianjin. It's not a question of whether he'll be arrested, but how much he'll see before he is. Worth it for the pictures - give it a look.