I Made an Enzo Mari Table and So Can You

...hile a Medievalist arts and crafts fantasy plays out in the furniture I’ve build for the inside of the house. Such is the fate of attempts at revolutionary design within our post-modern age. Everything gets subsumed within a vast parade of styles and one can easily imagine this table on sale at Urban Outfitters at your local mall. Mari, who we lost to COVID in 2020, had the genius and grace to acknowledge the contradictions in his own work while n...

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Lost from the cradle of connection: the high price of driving

...ate change, air pollution, noise pollution, light pollution, habitat loss, urban sprawl, songbird harassment–all of the rest of indicators of the unspeakably high cost of the personal automobile. So, okay, this is all depressing. What’s my point? The point is: What are we thinking? I mean, seriously, what are we thinking? Can we step back from this? I doubt it. We can’t talk about giving up the personal automobile. We can’t even think about altern...

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Weekend Linkages: Smoking Chickens

...piece Cosmic House (Thanks for the link Nic!) One Work: Gelatin’s The B-Thing Meet Thatcher Wine: the ‘celebrity bibliophile’ you didn’t know you needed The Last Glimpses of California’s Vanishing Hippie Utopias (Thanks Daniel for the link!) How To Build Your Own Trippy Meditation Pod Insects are vanishing from our planet at an alarming rate. But there are ways to help them Improving tiny urban greenspaces causes huge boosts in insect life If Holl...

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What is a Swarm of Bees and What Should I Do About It?

...y a swarm that has landed in a tree can’t find a home and decides to start building comb right where they are (here’s what this looks like). This is a warm climate issue. Honeybees in the tropics build colonies like this. In our Mediterranean climate the odds are they won’t survive this strategy as it’s a little too cold here in the winter, and the rain can cause the comb to break and fall to the ground. When you have one of these freak exterior b...

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Homegrown Revolution at the Alt-Car Expo

...s a bit hilly in Homegrown Revolution’s neck of the woods, but these hills build character. We’re what you might call “car-light”. Between Mr. and Mrs. Homegrown Revolution we still have a battered 1994 Nissan Sentra which spends the overwhelming majority of its time sitting in the garage collecting dust. Around the time we got rid of our second car we put together an Xtracycle. While it’s hard to improve on the basic design of the bicycle, the Xt...

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