why wy?

I have just emerged from a 24-hour harry potter session (including sleep and meals), and I now know who the half-blood prince is. The book is even darker than the last (someone else expires), and even more disappointing is the message that while it is good to see the best in people, some people can be complete shits. I guess thematically the death makes sense, but I'm still reeling. Sigh.

For those of us who are thinking of moving, or have moved, here's a quote pinched from a friend's blog:
"A person in a rented apartment must be able to lean out of his window and scrape off the masonry within arm's reach. And he must be allowed to take a long brush and paint everything outside within arm's reach. So that it will be visible from afar to everyone in the street that someone lives there who is different from the imprisoned, enslaved, standardised man who lives next door." - Window Dictatorship and Window Rights, 1990, Friedensreich Hundertwasser

We saw a few places he designed in vienna, and they were amazing.
Wiki has this to say about him: Although Hundertwasser first achieved notoriety for his boldly-coloured paintings, he is more widely renowned today for his revolutionary architectural designs, which incorporate natural features of the landscape, and use of irregular forms in his building design. Hundertwasserhaus, a low-income apartment block in Vienna, features undulating floors ("an uneven floor is a melody to the feet"), a roof covered with earth and grass, and large trees growing from inside the rooms, with limbs extending from windows. He took no payment for the design of Hundertwasserhaus, declaring that it was worth it, to "prevent something ugly from going up in its place".

In a strange twist, the hostel room I stayed in Daylesford had a poster by him on the wall...