2022 in Review: Cats, Mushrooms and Politics

...our streets safer and helping tenants and unhoused people. Tech I put up a 10 meter and 2 meter radio and did a little bit of amateur radio stuff. I’m not great at it but did manage to make digital contacts as far away as Indonesia with ancient Radio Shack equipment. I also figured out how to decode airline data transmissions but did not figure out why I would want to decode airline data transmissions. I did far more woodworking, including buildi...

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Worst of NextDoor

...od thing about NextDoor it is that it has disabused me of the idea that my community is somehow more “open minded” than other parts of the country or that urban people are more progressive than rural people. These are stereotypes that I’ve been guilty of harboring in the past. We are all, myself included, easily sucked into the sort of hateful trolling that Silicon Valley has found a way to monetize on social media. How do you keep people glued to...

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Saturday Tweets: Rats, DIY Plastic Recycling and Old Flatbread

...unity gardens. https://t.co/ODWFffKZ8v pic.twitter.com/7Q54UUYa8y — UC IPM Urban Program (@ucipmurban) July 19, 2018 This sums up my problems with Steven Pinker: https://t.co/IGYey5ks2i — Root Simple (@rootsimple) July 18, 2018 Found: 14,400-Year-Old Flatbread Remains That Predate Agriculture. #carbup #carbsovercars #gathererdiet via @atlasobscura https://t.co/PVA8Z4zW7K — Matt Ruscigno (@MattRuscigno) July 17, 2018 Philip K. Dick and the fake hum...

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Satan’s Easter Basket is Filled with Plastic Easter Grass

...round this morning, especially because Echo Park surrounds a lovely little urban lake full of birds. Read on to find out why. 4 Excellent Reasons to Avoid Plastic Easter Grass and use all of your influence to make sure other people avoid it, too: Domestic cats and dogs eat Easter grass and it can cause intestinal obstruction. Cats are particularly attracted to its stringy texture, but dogs might also gobble it up when they raid a kid’s Easter stas...

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Root Simple: 2015 in Review

...not optimistic about this but I hope to be proved wrong. Honesty in Urban Homesteading We don’t do nearly enough blogging about the many hair brained notions and failed projects that transpire here at the Root Simple Compound and Labs. We did mange to chronicle a few of our shortcomings, such as our lack of a clothes line (Busted: Drying Racks, Clothes Lines and Cheese Puffs), the train wreck that was our summer garden (Our Disasterous Summer Gar...

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