Skyglow Raises Awareness of Light Pollution

...an, just surpassed their Kickstarter goal to fund a very worthy project: a book, using the duo’s stunning timelapse photography to raise awareness of the problem of light pollution. For us humans, if we can’t see the night sky we lose our sense of wonder. But light pollution also harms many of the earth’s organisms, from migrating birds to insects. This is one of those problems that would be relatively easy to fix simply by making sure that lighti...

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Is it Cake?

...In the penultimate show, you’ll find out that the final bake-off involves making a cake that is a simulation of cake, which leads the contestants in the show to question if everything is, in fact, made of cake, that we’re living in a vast cake simulation. In the the last episode the losing contestants, angry at missing out on the $10,000 prize and driven mad with their epistemological cake crisis, set out to slice the meta-obnoxious host in half...

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Busting open a Durian

...felder over on BoingBoing, a trailer for Adam Leith Gollner’s entertaining book, The Fruit Hunters: Is their something about being an older white man of a certain age and exotic fruit? Mrs. Homegrown has become concerned about Mr. Homegrown dropping talk of durian into conversations at inappropriate moments of late. And look out Mrs. HG, because Mr. HG just heard about the Mimosa Nursery (thanks beer making Scott!), purveyors of exotic fruit trees...

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Physalis pruinosa a.k.a. “Ground Cherry”

...orted on with enthusiasm by the late Dr. David Fairchild in his well-loved book, The World Was My Garden. He there tells of its fruiting “enormously” in the garden of his home, “In The Woods”, in Maryland, and of the cook’s putting up over a hundred jars of what he called “Inca Conserve” which “met with universal favor.” Our package of Physalis pruinosa was priced at a staggering $3.99–a lot considering the package only contained 12 seeds. You can...

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Fence Appeal

...n one of the many rainy day breaks during the fence build, I glanced at my bookshelf to discover that I have two books by Michael Crow, Mackintosh Furniture: Techniques & Shop Drawings and Building Classic Arts & Crafts Furniture. I actually built a Limbert settle out of the latter book. One of these days I hope to build a room of very strange Mackintosh furniture. In the meantime I like looking out the back door at the new fence which I completed...

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