Trying to get an unprotected wifi signal for my laptop has made me do strange things. Here I am right now in my parents' cramped kitchen in Toronto, sitting on a cold step ladder, near the water cooler with the laptop bent at a 45 degree angle, which gives me, at the very best, 2 bars. In front of me, my Mom is slicing cantaloupe.

Oh, Dad needs the ladder.

Now, I'm sitting on the cold kitchen floor.

Although I revere Jane Jacobs greatly, it is tempting to point out the idiosyncrasies and inconsistencies of her new book, "Dark Age Ahead." Her premise- that North American culture is slowly spiralling down into a castastrophic Dark Age- is fascinating at first. However, the text is riddled with anecdotes and prescriptive statements that often break up her argument into awkwardly disparate ideas. For example, while expounding on the spectacular growth of Vaughn, an industrial suburb of Toronto, she makes fairly reasonable observations of the economic and social details of its transformation. Then, for some reason, she tacks on a paragraph about a great diner that she visited while she was there. As well, there are often weird but refreshing flashbacks of the old Jane Jacobs- a self-trained urban critic that observes the city from her porch and reinterates the destructive impact of the car, the elevated expressway, urban planners and traffic engineers. Her fascination with walkable and lively neighbourhoods, mixed use, and the intimate relationship between economics and architecture is still apparent, albeit softened.

The book does have its moments. I do like the fact that she does speculate on the future of sprawl: that, maybe, people will naturally see the benefits of densification and of complexifying their neighbourhoods with new building types and mixed use. I also like the observation that there is really little that architecture can do to change a social condition: that poverty and crime can somehow be solved by an architectural sleight-of-hand.

BBC's comedy "The Office" is perhaps the most ingenious thing I've seen this year. It's a playful critique on the banality of office life that seems to pervade white-collar management. It's certain that anybody who works in these environments will recognize a bit of themselves in the characters that exaggerate common stereotypes- the regular paper pusher, the legalistic viceroy, the clairvoyant newbie, the love-struck boy in cubicle 3. What is so interesting about the show isn't so much the comedy, but how everyday moments get played up to the point of either silly ridiculousness, or pure melodrama. I am often disappointed with much of the American sitcoms with the same laugh tracks and the same punchlines. It is so refreshing to see something entirely different for a change.

The other moment of brilliance this year for me is "Napoleon Dynamite". The Jared Hess' dead-pan comedy of an awkward teenager living in some hicktown stuck in the 80s has some extremely funny scenes- the li-ger, the dance, Pedro's election campaigning. I am happy that, finally, MTV can produce comedy without resorting to toilet jokes, animal costumes, and profanity.