The rules a record is made under, printed so a reader can hold them

A field book is worth something only if the next person can stand where the writer stood and see the same thing. These are the rules that make that possible, including the ones that lose records.

Every rule below has cost at least one record. That is how you know they are rules and not decoration.

Choosing a block

A block goes in the diary when two things on it should not be able to coexist and plainly do. That is the whole test. Not a neighbourhood having a moment, not a phrase that people search for, not a business that would like a mention.

The second test is that it can be seen from a public pavement without asking anybody for anything.

Walking it

One block, one day, one walker, on foot, all four sides.

Distance is measured on the ground and rounded to the nearest tenth of a mile. A block is small; the walking around and back is not.
Time is at an ordinary pace with ordinary stops, including the stop where you write things down.
Air is the temperature at the start, taken from a thermometer rather than from a forecast.
Sky is what the sky was doing, in plain words, because in this climate the difference between hazy sun and a thunderhead is the difference between two cities.
Surface gets named: pavement, no pavement, gravel verge, ditch, culvert, crushed shell.

What gets counted

Buildings, uses, entrances, trees on the verge, and the number of separate parcels visible along each side. Parcel count is the number that carries the most information in a city with no zoning, because it tells you how many separate decisions produced the block.

Nothing is counted from a satellite picture. If a record says nine parcels, somebody stood on the pavement and counted nine.

Conditions, and why they sit at the top

Because a record without them is a claim about a block for all time, which no honest walker can make. Houston in February and Houston in August are not the same place, and a record that hides which one it was is worthless in the other season.

The strip at the top of every record is not decoration. It is the scope of what the record is allowed to claim.

Corrections

Printed inside the record, with the date the correction was made, and the original wording left legible enough that a reader can see what changed. Nothing is quietly patched.

The fastest way to get one made is to write to [email protected] with the record and the sentence. Notes like that are answered before anything else in the post.

What is never done here

1. Take payment for a record, a mention, a link or a photograph.
2. Publish a block that has not been walked on all four sides.
3. Accept anything free in exchange for coverage.
4. Rate, rank or score a place, a business or a neighbourhood.
5. Load a counter, an advertising script or a tracker of any kind. None exists here and none is planned.
6. Borrow a photograph from anybody. Borrow a sentence without quotation marks and a name attached to it.
7. Let the look up touch the writing. No record mentions it, benefits from it, or exists because of it.