The #700 Bookshelf

December 3, 2018

Design

I’ve been fortunate to have some spare time in the past year to be able to raise my rudimentary carpentry skills to a level where I can make some rudimentary furniture. And, as you might have guessed, I have an obsession with unfashionable Arts and Crafts furniture and art. The #700 bookcase as seen in the 1909 catalog. My latest project was making a copy of Gustav Stickley’s #700 bookshelf, originally manufactured in 1904. The $30 price in the 1...

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What You Can Do to Make Our Streets Safer

Mr. Homegrown

April 13, 2018

Transportation

13 Comments

...isis seriously enough. Rather than make our streets safer they spend their time pondering presidential runs and virtue signaling on issues they have no legislative authority over. When my own councilman Mitch O’Farrell’s hypocrisy was pointed out to him (he halted a road diet on Temple street where 5 people have died and 34 have been seriously injured between 2009 and 2017), he responded with this terse and arrogant Tweet: Between Frazier’s death...

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Do I Need Books?

Mr. Homegrown

May 30, 2018

Domesticus, Tidying up

24 Comments

...as well as some new ebooks that the library makes available for free. Sometimes one’s personal library can devolve into a kind of virtue signaling, a way to seem smart when visitors drop by. In my case it’s definitely time for a book winnowing and, yes, I will still have a bookshelf populated with books I use for reference. Kelly has her own books and shelf. Of course books have a tendency to accumulate and I have no doubt that I will have to go...

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The Return of the Apron?

Mr. Homegrown

August 28, 2018

Cleaning, Domesticus

12 Comments

...s and pencils. A quick perusal of the interwebs will show you that, at one time, all of the trades had their own aprons. In addition to safety and tool holstering, aprons are from a time before the cheap, disposable clothes we now wear. The decline of the apron could also be about our modern world’s distaste for visible signs of physical labor. We’re all supposed to be spending our days in front of glowing screens. Speaking of which, I’ve got to g...

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Saturday Tweets: Vive la Revolution!

Mr. Homegrown

August 11, 2018

Saturday Linkages

...ized, and how it causes damage at the highest policy levels. (For shame @nytimes) https://t.co/ccwSDLyHdj — Peter Kalmus (@ClimateHuman) August 9, 2018 A siege. A bomb. 48 dogs. And the black commune that would not surrender https://t.co/v2JAS9X1Sk — Root Simple (@rootsimple) August 6, 2018 I’ve been sounding this alarm for a while: horticulture is in decline worldwide because young people are not filling positions of previous generations. This co...

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