2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...ump is a random assortment of things, places events that made up our 2022. CATS CATS CATS and other critters One of the happier moments was helping trap the cat pictured above that had escaped her owners and had been missing for almost a month. After baiting the trap for a week she finally showed up in one of the traps I was monitoring. Her owner, who was expected a baby soon had become distraught. When I found her cat in the trap I cried. I also...

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A Lecture on the Connection Between Cats and Grain

...Grand Central Market I’m going to deliver a talk on the connection between cats and grain. The connection is a basic one: store grain and you get vermin. Then you need cats. But, in the course of preparing for this lecture, I discovered that the commonly held narrative of cat domestication is an unsubstantiated fiction. That narrative goes something like this: in a golden, ancient time Egyptians revered cats, Medieval folks persecuted them and enl...

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086 The Connection Between Cats and Grain

...ncient history, famous cats and take a detour into the world of distillery cats and ship’s cats. Special thanks to Paul Koudounaris, whose lecture inspired this podcast, and the website Purr-n-Fur for information on ship’s and distillery cats. Many thanks to our Patreon subscribers for making this podcast and blog possible. If you’d like to leave a question for the Root Simple Podcast please call (213) 537-2591 or send an email to rootsimple@gmail...

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A Brief History of Cat Art

...Those who are acquainted with the work of Burbank, the English painter of cats, Gottfried Mind, called the Raphael of cats, Hokusai, the Japanese genius, the Dutch artist Cornelius Wisscher, Delacroix, whose sketch-books were full of studies of cats, and J. J. Grandville, will understand how completely Mr. Tomson’s work justifies the position it takes amongst the work of these artists. Would that the latest edition of Art Forum dedicated a few pa...

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Making It

...ctions for a wide range of projects, from building a 99-cent solar oven to making your own laundry soap to instructions for brewing beer. Making It is the go-to source for post-consumer living activities that are fun, inexpensive and eminently doable. Our goal in this book was to provide really stripped down, simple projects that use only inexpensive, easy to source materials. We also tried to use the same materials and ingredients over and over a...

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