distracted, so posting anything that pops into mind

- 'is you is, or is you ain't, my baby'.. who sang this song? i mean the slow, kinda black folky version? it's been spinning around in my head all week and i need to download it. point me someone; better still, send it to me!

- There's a new cutie at the sandwich place. turned out to be the owner - looked much too young i tell ya.

- work is in a mess. can't concentrate on anything since the possibility of leaving london for an indefinite period happened to me. mind keeps changing track from work permit websites to hsmp consultants to job applications to airline bookings to weather websites. just.
room is in a mess. can't bring myself to clean up.

- 2 ideas for PhDs fell into my brain yesterday. one had been stewing awhile, to be fair - finding a normative multidisciplinary framework for creating cities. it would be about the urban designer's role, splitting it and re consolidating it.. 'gardening community consultant' may be an acceptable job title in future, after i publish the phd that is. this would be a useful study, and would have lots do with designers' egos, designers' roles and the morality of design at an urban scale. pooh.. booooooorrrring. so thence came the other idea - how to spend 4-5 years reading books and watching movies that i like and talking about them wisely? the plan is to do a study of how the cities of delhi and london look at each other, and the implications of their respective images of each other, in the contemporary world with it's increasingly fuzzy boundaries and moving populations. it would have to be done in 3 parts. first a semiotic and possibly anthropological study of the existence of either city in the other, physically, in literature, in popular media, in the people, in the policy, in the governments. this part would have to end with a set of rules, or 2 sets of rules (which would be a hypothesis for the next part) saying delhi thinks such such and such of london, and london thinks such such and such of delhi. second, an analysis of a built project, testing it to see if the hypothesis is true. now i have no clue if this built project would be in delhi or in london, or anywhere else, built by londoners or delhiites, or anyone else. all i know is that it'll be of urban scale, it'll be contemporary and will have some major relevance to both cities. maybe it'll be 2 projects? hey! what about comparing delhi's commonwealth games strategy with london's 2012 olympics strategy? third, a final set of rules which say how to prevent the bad things about this 2 way looking and how to keep the good things about it. whoaaaaa stop. this sounds like 6 phds now.

- to get back to the point - delhi exists in london in champa trees on gloucester road. but also in the latest immigration rackets. london exists in delhi in chanakyapuri's DI / DII bungalow flats. but also in nightclubs which play britney spears songs.

- i have to make something of this.