Have the balconies fallen off yet?
The balconies are fine. The breezeway is being renovated and has some temporary bracing.
My first encounter with Falling Water was in a science fiction novel in which one of the characters builds a house deliberately modelled on Falling Water, with a wee river running through the middle of the living room, and this turns out not to be a good idea because about eight chapters later he is frantically turning his house into an improvised fortress to defend against the hordes of alien predators that are all simultaneously (for good ecological reasons) metamorphosing from their aquatic infant form into their amphibious frog/crocodile adult form and swarming up the hill towards him, and he realises that the little blighters are actually swimming all the way up the river into his living room and completing metamorphosis there, so now his living room is full of ravenous frogocroc aliens.
By means of a grating he could have stopped their ating, as the Sailor of infinite-resource-and-sagacity would have pointed out.
There's a door between the stream and the living room. The stream isn't in the living room, just the stairs to the stream.
That seems like a really obvious feature to put in, even in an environment like Pennsylvania where ravenous frogocroc aliens are not really a consideration, and so it's ironic that it's present in the real Falling Water and absent in the fictional frogocroc-menaced one.
It's kind of a hatch/door combo. Very striking. But glass, so maybe not alien proof.
maybe not alien proof.
We may never know.
I discovered in my Barcelona research that in moving contactless smart cards, the Barcelona transit system creditably made sure there would still be cheap disposable (even anonymous) versions, called "targetas de cartró" / "tarjetas de cartón". Unfortunately they don't seem to have come up with a less clumsy official English translation than "cardboard card".
I never really got over "next train" on the Barcelona metro being "proper tren." Also "bittlet" is an exceptionally good word for "ticket."
"bitllet," rather. That was either my phone being stupid or me.
8: Yes. It's a kind of box that people have used to serve drinkable fluids in for longer than I've been alive. Calling it a box and saying it's an innovation isn't justifiable. Especially when you charge $4 for it.
Are they actually made of cardboard? Train tickets in the UK are plastic now...
Speaking of ravenous little aliens, we listened to Project Hail Mary on the drive up here, and enjoyed it! Given how much science is made up, there were few enough overlaps with my own knowledge to allow me to enjoy the fiction.
4: Because he was a Hibernian.
I thought Falling Water was fantastic when I visited, although probably full of mosquitoes in the summer and and freezing in the winter, and structurally unsound as designed. That is, I can't remember where I read this, but I believe the builders sneaked a lot of extra reinforcement into the cantilevered bits in contravention of FLW's express direction.
But it's beautiful. High modernism but cozy and humane.
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I'm sitting in a hotel lounge at 12:45 am Seoul time trying to make telephonic contact with a surgical center in California, where it's now morning, because over the past year of scheduling and rescheduling I've never actually spoken to the surgeon who's supposed to do something severe to a delicate part of my anatomy on Friday and suddenly it turns out that she'd like to talk to me beforehand, which would be fine except that medical centers in the US still insist on doing absolutely everything by phone rather than email, or whatever secure messaging system they've set up as an alternative to email, maybe because of equity issues around access or something; which would also be fine if they ever actually picked up the phone when you called them or returned voicemails when you left them. Thank you and sorry, I know this has nothing to do with the semantics of cartons.
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The tour guide got a little offended when asked about the rebar.
16: it's good, isn't it? I thought "Artemis" was a bit of a flop, but "Project Hail Mary" is well up there with "The Martian".
If you aren't comfortable with concrete how can you even be a modernist tour guide
Anyway, the extra rebar was snuck into the breezeway, not the balcony.
It would be like a Disney employee being uncomfortable with alligators.
What's a breezeway? The mosquitoes' entrance?
Mossy! I know why I'm stupidly awake in east Asia (18 was me) but shouldn't you be sleeping?
Normally yes, but we're having a typhoon tomorrow, so I can stay up late.
16: I didn't like it nearly as much as I did The Martian. Here are some bits from my review that go into why:
* The amnesia is a gimmick. Grace says he wept bitterly when he remembered his crewmates, but if Weir had told the story chronologically all the way through, readers would have known them well and could have wept with Grace when he woke up to find them dead. For that matter, Grace's amnesia would have been more compelling if readers had known him whole from the start. Readers would know the stakes even during the time that Grace didn't, and could have been beside themselves with urgency as he tried to cope with his diminished self.
* The political aspects of things on earth -- willingness of all of humanity to work together, the amount of resources committed, the authority given to one person to make things happen -- struck me as highly improbable, not to say daft.
* That the one human to remain on the scene is a middle-aged white American man is just par for the course. Grace's crewmates were a Chinese man and a Russian woman. Wouldn't it have been interesting for Weir to try to write one of them as the sole survivor, if Project Hail Mary had to be a one-person show? Not interesting enough for him to try, apparently. (And of course the story didn't have to be a one-person show. Nor did the name of the project have to be a sports cum religious reference that's both American and Christian. For a global effort, that's just another piece of unlikeliness.)
This breezeway? That roof is just concrete? I'm uncozy just looking at it. And it doesn't have guttering.
I'm not even sure if there's rain in Pennsylvania. But yes, that one.
That's not part of the original house. It's the connection to the guest house.
I liked the interior proportions of Fallingwater. Good fit for my 5'9" frame. Wright himself was 5'7".
metamorphosing from their aquatic infant form into their amphibious frog/crocodile adult form and swarming up the hill towards him, and he realises that the little blighters are actually swimming all the way up the river into his living room and completing metamorphosis there, so now his living room is full of ravenous frogocroc aliens.
The Legacy Of Heorot? https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Legacy_of_Heorot
(I am amused by the quoted line from a review, "Despite the resulting thrill of tens of thousands of superpowered flesh-hungry newts interminably assaulting Mr Macho's survivalist stronghold, I was tormented by the nagging thought that this would have read better at one-third the length. So it goes.")
I looked it up and apparently it does rain in Pennsylvania. Also, they also added extra rebar in the balconies without telling Wright. But those were fixed earlier this century.
"Grace's crewmates were a Chinese man and a Russian woman. Wouldn't it have been interesting for Weir to try to write one of them as the sole survivor, if Project Hail Mary had to be a one-person show?"
I think this would have been an incredibly bad idea that would have led to a great deal of (partly justified) criticism. "Artemis" had a POC female narrator and Weir got grief for not writing her right.
For about ten years I walked past FLW's Hollyhock House a couple times a week, but I never went inside. I guess because I was there so often, it never seemed like the right moment to actually go in. A couple blocks away is the Sowden House, built by FLW's son and previously owned by the Black Dahlia murderer. It -- like the Hollyhock House -- is supposedly in the Mayan Revival style, but actually it looks like your kid made a house shaped like the Jaws shark in Minecraft.
My kid always played Minecraft in some kind of speed-survival mode, so there wasn't much design work.
36: I guess maybe points to Weir for recognizing his artistic limitations. Although it's kinda bad to be able to write convincing aliens but not convincing women or non-white Americans or non-Americans. That's getting close to the quip that Asimov could imagine robots doing a man's job, but not women doing a man's job.
I did like the ending, though. (And said so in the review.)
I totally agree with the amnesia being a gimmick, but I enjoyed it as a device to pay out information at a reader-based pace. Plus it was suitably justified by the end for my tastes. I want to say more, but it involves spoilers. Maybe this should get its own thread!
Every review of a place to visit should include information about nearby Poké sites. Well done.
I wouldn't have agreed to go if I knew I wasn't going to have a shot at getting on a gym.
Fallingwater is also an excellent Lego build for a kid of the appropriate age. My daughter built the Lego version, and then demanded we take her to see the real thing. This is literally the only time I can recall that she ever took any interest in anything "educational" outside of school. She got bored when we got there, though.
When people spell it right in the comments, it makes me feel sad that I spelled it wrong in the post.
32: Good fit for my 5'9" frame.
6'2" and uncomfortable in most of it.
The grounds and trails along the creek are quite nice as well as the WPA conservancy area across the highway (a lot of it was part of the original estate. Lots of rhodies (I think they tend to bloom late June up there.)
41-42: Sure! And we can combine it with this year's Hugos, or just general sf geekery if not enough people have read Project Hail Mary.
When you get there, you'll find there are three PokéStop and one gym.
Encyclopedia Brown descriptions of small towns have really changed.
That's getting close to the quip that Asimov could imagine robots doing a man's job, but not women doing a man's job.
Asimov's robot stories were of course famously completely devoid of prominent female characters doing men's jobs and struggling with the disdain of their male colleagues while doing so.
This over 20k sq ft Olympia Fields, IL home is currently owned by the late Rudolph Isley of The Isley Brothers and now can be yours for only $2,499,000.
The 7 bed, 16 bath home has an iconic indoor two-story pool hall with a waterfall, hot tub, grotto, club house, and two story tree house.
7 bedrooms... but 16 bathrooms?
"This residence would be ideal for a large family of germophobic or incontinent insomniacs".
55: The house was R. Kelly's before it was Rudolph Isley's, so ...
currently owned by the late Rudolph Isley of The Isley Brothers
also, how does that work? It's currently owned by someone who doesn't exist?
