q. i. f?

It seems that streams have a magnetic pull on tires. Even new tires on display inside auto dealerships, I imagine, secretly dream of being embedded in the bottom of a stream, longing to be in the company of crayfish and trout. . . . No one knows how many tires line our waters, but estimates for the stockpiled waste tires around the U.S. range from 500 million to 3 billion.

A good reminder (for those of us not already involved in cleanup in some fashion or other) of the effects of the terribly wasteful way of living we’ve learned, broadly speaking, as a society, from an op-ed by a college student conservationist run in today’s Sun.

Wells Fargo:

Please cancel my credit card account, Visa # ****, immediately.

I can hardly believe your company billed me for not using this account. I’ve been penalized for paying off one of my credit cards and not closing the account before I had reason to use it again. Brilliant.

I have no doubt that the inactivity fee is listed in a schedule of fees that I have read at some time. I accept responsibility, and I’ve paid the bill. You have my money and you have your fine print. What you won’t have from now on is this customer.

Sincerely,

Paul Bowman

Middlebrow is th’ new lowbrow!

Yesterday General Motors announced it will go solar at a plant it maintains here in Baltimore County. The rooftop installation by SunEdison (a Maryland company to the south, in Washington D.C. suburbs) will be one of the largest on this side of the country. This was noteworthy enough to be local radio news yesterday afternoon. The Sun’s report is here — oddly buried a bit in back pages today.

“‘I can tell all our new customers by all the questions they asked,’ [Harford County farmers’ market seller Cindi] Umbarger said. ‘They asked about how our animals are housed. They asked about hormones and antibiotics. They asked about where our feed comes from.’”

The Sun offers a Baltimore-region picture of the surge this season in consumer interest in locally grown produce.

Oh boy. Speaking of hot dog stands, novelty architecture, and ‘the ambition to transform all of life into a playground’ — have a glance at ‘Worship Centers Create Town Center Atmosphere’ in today’s edition of AIArchitect This Week.

Both Waldon Studios and Visioneering Studios have collaborated on several church projects around organized themes. The design is set in the context of the overall site plan, says Waldon. While Northeast Christian Church in Louisville, Ky., has a main street design, Heritage Christian Church in Fayetteville, Ga., is designed with the idea of the Georgia State Parks and includes a lake, Georgia Pines, and campground. The Northside Church in Texas actually suggests the wildness of Western towns in casual forms, almost like an old cowboy town, and is based on a crescent of trees.