Copyright 2010. Ivan Corsa Photo. All rights reserved.

As Scotland’s political, financial and cultural capital, Edinburgh is a city whose prominence is not in doubt, but it is a most unusual city with a fascinating cultural history. Its urban geography and topography are dramatic and unusual.

The city feels relatively small and pastoral, filled with parks and bounded and intersected by green corridors. It’s near the sea, with a busy port and beach communities nearby, but it’s not a city of the sea, not a seaside town per se, as opposed to well-known beach-fronted cities like Brighton or Blackpool.

The Rankin article is a personal four-hour journey through the author’s favorite haunts, side streets and neighborhoods. It’s a must read for anyone who has a claim on the city, resident and visitor alike.

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For some reason, we’ve been watching A LOT of the Food Network, the wonderful cable channel filled with celebrity chefs, Iron Chef, cooking shows and all manner of programming that is in essence the equivalent of anthropological food-exploration.

Case in point is “Diners, Drive-Ins and Dives,” hosted by the bleached-blond, spiky-haired and aptly named Guy Fieri. We’ve been watching a lot this show and we’re loving it. Especially this episode — see video below — where Guy visits a Fab Hot Dogs, a wiener joint in Reseda, in Los Angeles, California, that makes a deep-fried hotdog wrapped in bacon and a double-hot-dog burrito! Hells to the fuckin’ yeah!!!’

Here’s a quote from Van der Leun that Kottke posted:

So I would conclude that with the LAPL material we are getting a rare chance to look at photographs a great photographer chose not to show the world. Obviously none of these images even touches upon the vast and central work that establish Adams as one of the greatest American photographers, but they do provide an interesting footnote to what Ansel Adams saw and thought worthy of photographing while ambling about Los Angeles during the opening months of World War II.

In what the company dubbed “The REAL GOOD Experiment,” the Blu Dot team worked with an agency called Mono to strategically place several of its beautifully designed “Real Good” chairs (see pic below) on the streets of selected New York City neighborhoods, like Tribeca, Park Slope and the Upper West Side.

They hoped that people who noticed the chairs would assume the items were discarded — “garbage” for taking — and bring the chairs home. (As the article points out, many a New Yorker is wont to do a little “curb-mining” from time to time; they eye furniture left as trash and take anything in half-way decent condition home as their own.)

Each of the chairs was fitted with a GPS tracking device so that Blu Dot could locate the people who took the chairs and interview them. The project would be documented for short film to be screened at Blu Dot parties. Ideally, right buzz would be generated, as well as some business, in the process.

Check out the locations where the chairs were placed and how Blu Dot tracked them.