Book Review: The Urban Bestiary

...no-kill polemic. I’ve perhaps put too much emphasis on the aspects of the book which focus on management and co-existence. The great majority of the book is about the animals themselves. Imagine you had a friend who was a naturalist who could explain the mysteries of the familiar yet unfamiliar wildlife which flit and shuffle through your backyard over a nice cup of coffee. Someone who could offer you an introduction to their world, and a chance...

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A Homemade Mattress?

...the wool. It took her about 6 hours to fill the mattress. 3) Here is a webpage, in French, showing the mattress making process. Lots of useful pictures. I have to run it through Google Translate for more clues. 4) Do not fall for the eHow result if you search for how to make a wool mattress. It gets off to a great start by recommending you use glue, rather than stitching, to construct your mattress tick . (They call the tick a “fabric sheet pouch...

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My Morning Routine: Tarrying With the Negative

...lar culture touchstones to explain thorny concepts. He writes both popular books and academic tomes and this difficult to read 1993 book is in the latter category, written before his fame and at a time when he was still a thing in academia. The book begins with the question of who is the Subject , the “I or He or It (the Thing) which thinks?” Žižek illustrates this conundrum with a contrast between classic film noir and the neo-noir of the 1980s....

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The Root Simple 2016 Holiday Gift Guide

...ted landscapes. Along with Taleb and Kat Anderson’s Tending the Wild, this book should be on the bookshelf of all gardeners and permaculturalists. A New History of Western Philosophy If, like me, you managed to get through school without a shred of philosophical training, do yourself a favor and take a stab at this book. Kenny writes clearly, though I won’t say that the whole book is easy going. But just grasp a fraction of the content of this boo...

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More Thoughts on Thinning the Library

...m wrong about that). Bookcrossing.com I had to resort to Wikipedia to grok Bookcrossing: Bookcrossing . . . is defined as “the practice of leaving a book in a public place to be picked up and read by others, who then do likewise.” The term is derived from bookcrossing.com, a free online book club which was founded to encourage the practice, aiming to “make the whole world a library.” The ‘crossing’ or exchanging of books may take any of a number o...

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